214
PARTISAN REVIEW
otherwise disappointed. Satire, thus, becomes a way of tonguing a sore
tooth, just as it temporarily relieves that suffering in the sheer joy of
crafting sentences crackling with revenge.
Too often, Ozick's solemn (rather than serious) critics miss this cru–
cial point. instead, they look at
The Cannibal Galaxy
as if it were a Jew–
ish self-help manual rather than a novel. Granted, it would be a good
thing if Ozick's readers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, were better able
navigate their way through her demanding textures, but
I
would argue
that Ozick's fiction stands on its own feet; all one really needs to read
The Cannibal Galaxy
with both pleasure and profit is
to
pay attention
as her characters announce themselves as candidates for our approval or
condemnation. In its original form, "The Laughter of Akiva" was closer
to caricature than to fully rounded characterization, but when Ozick
(who had by that time fallen in love with the twin stories of Joseph Brill
and Hester Lilt-despite the legal grief these characters had caused her )
widened the canvas, the result was an astonishingly complex novel.
I do not intend to do its sub-themes and side-plots full justice here.
Let me concentrate, instead, on what I regard as the novel's central
metaphor, and the implications it has for my sense of Ozick's art. Not
surprisingly, I have in mind the scene in which Hester retells the story of
Rabbi Akiva's reaction to the destruction of the Temple. When other
rabbis see a little fox running in and out of the ruined temple, they are
reduced to tears. The response is appropriate, and surely understand–
able. But it is not necessarily the view that a more aesthetically minded
temperament would take. And, indeed, Akiva's laughter is a striking
instance of an artistic sensibility in action. Because he was able
to
move
past the prophecy of Uriah ("Zion shall be ploughed as a field and
Jerusalem shall become heaps") to the more uplifting one of Zechariah
("Yet again shall the streets of Jerusalem be filled with boys and girls
playing"), Akiva's laughter is at once a recognition of the hope that
always lies hidden in the folds of despair and an expression of joy as he
thinks about the children who will one day be in his classroom. Like
Akiva, Hester Lilt regards pedagogy as a form of salvation, especially if
one is able to look past (or beneath) the obvious and to see potential
where others see only ruin. As her midrash would have it, pedagogy
must learn to predict not from the first text, but from the second. Not
from the earliest evidence, but from the latest. To laugh out loud in that
very interval which to every reasonable judgment looks to be the most
inappropria teo
Granted, Hester is talking as much about her unfairly beleaguered
daughter, Beulah, as she is about Rabbi Akiva. Moreover, the novel
