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conflict of Hebraism and Hellenism, in degraded form, had come down
to us .
All this was compounded by a second paradox. This neo-classicist
had identified her golden age as the nineteenth century. For the "novel
at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel." In a genre that
had not-from Joycean epiphany
to
Proustian "essence"-as yet gone
sacramental, George Eliot and Dickens were interested in conduct and
its consequences and as such were tendentially Judaic. So the breath–
taking stylist polemicizing against the allurements of style was also the
anti-Romantic nostalgic for the nineteenth century.
It
was as original a
configuration as the 1980s brought us, and one could only wonder how
long those unstable contradictions could be productively sustained. Or
rather, the overriding question became how long could Ozick entertain
the drama of her own awakening from, say, James-induced illusions she
would, after all, be at the same time obliged, at the risk of a certain bad
faith, to nourish, if only in order the better to emerge from them.
An answer of sorts is provided in the prefatory essay to
Quarrel
&
Quandary
where Ozick, after voicing her almost temperamental resis–
tance to "the political," presents the "central question" of her new vol–
ume in these terms: "is politics a distraction from art, or is it how we
pay attention to the life that gives rise to art?"
It
is the premise of the
question that intrigues. For "art," which in
Art
&
Ardor
had seemed an
all but irresistible distraction from what alone loomed central, the ethi–
cal mandate of Judaism, Baeck's "classical religion"
par excellence,
is
here identified as what is most deserving of protection from what may
or may not be the "distraction" of politics. And if, at some level, the
"political" and the "ethical," in their this-worldliness, mesh, it will be
seen that Ozick, within the apparent continuity of her contrapuntal
titles, behind the seamless splendors of her unflaggingly alluring prose,
has enacted a full-blown chiasmus or crisscross.
The four volumes of essays,
to
my knowledge, never address the shift,
but it is discussed in a
Paris Review
interview of 1987, where Ozick, fol–
lowing "a conversation with a good thinker," reached the conclusion
that "you simply cannot be a good Jew if you repudiate the imagina–
tion." In sum, she "no longer [thought] of the imagination as a thing
to
be dreaded . ... " This was, of course, a major shift-if not a quiet repu–
diation-in relation to much that had preceded the fateful conversation.
And it may be wondered whether the splendors of her prose have not
blinded many to the question raised by that discontinuity or implicit
palinode. And yet there is an odd continuity, beyond the reversal, that
joins the earlier and the later volumes. For whereas "romantic reli-
