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PARTISAN REVIEW
the losers: Casaubon is, or thinks he is, doomed by The Plan .
In
its miniature manner,
The Shawl
is as much a museum as Eco's
hypertrophied catalogue. Ozick's central icon is the shawl itself, but sur–
rounding this fetish are various kinds of writing: letters from the
inimitable James W. Tree, Ph.D., of the Department of Clinical-Social
Pathology, University of Kansas-Iowa; and finally Rosa's letters
to
Magda. Writing to her dead daughter is a daily ceremony for Rosa; it
can be no accident that some of Ozick's most beautiful and penetrating
prose is devoted to the uncanny power of writing.
What a curiosity it was to hold a pen - nothing but a small pointed
stick, after all, oozing its hieroglyphic puddles: a pen that speaks,
miraculously, Polish. A lock removed from the tongue. Otherwise
the tongue is chained to the teeth and the palate. An immersion into
the living language: all at once this cleanliness, this ca pacity , this
power to make a history, to tell, to explain. To retrieve, to reprieve
1
To lie.
Eco too is eloquent on the mysterious luminosity of "the secret ci–
pher [where] everything was the hieroglyph of something else." But be–
cause in
Foucault's Pendulum
he lacks or spurns the novelist's gift for
grounding ideas in a human context, his weary
aper(us
remain disembod–
ied and detachable as aphorisms. Ozick's tributes to the power of the
word are etched by the force of her own artistry. Even so, we may pay
for the distilled poetic force of
The Shawl
in the coin of human sympa–
thy. Except for Persky, all the characters are tinged with a glow of hell–
fire: the "sodomists" on the night beach, the red-wigged hotel manager,
"the black Cuban receptionist" who sits "maneuvering clayey sweat balls
up from the naked place between her breasts with two fingers." Rosa,
herself grotesque, sees grotesquerie everywhere, and nowhere more than
in the ineffable epistles of James W. Tree, Ph.D., of the Department of
Clinical-Social Pathology, University of Kansas-Iowa. Studying survivors,
Dr. Tree hopes
... that you would not object to joining our study by means of an
in-depth interview to be conducted by me at, if it is not inconvenient,
your home. I should like to observe survivor syndroming within the
natura] setting.
One wants to cheer Rosa's ritual response.
