Cynthia Ozick and the Transgressions of Art

Abstract

W HETHER she is lecturing the literary establishment on its parochialism at the MLA convention, or pointing out to George Steiner the defects of his universalism, Cynthia Ozick's is the most provocative of contemporary Jewish-American voices. Also one of the most disquieting, for she lifts up again and again the vexed and intricate tangle of Jewish attitudes toward art that many readers would rather see so clearly. Embedded in a nonJewish cultural tradition, schooled in techniques that help interpret that tradition, and accustomed to value art and artists as the finest achievements of our civilization, we listen to Ozick's misgivings with more than a little discomfort. Despite her own writing, for all her admiration of Henry James and George Eliot, Ozick's conviction that art is idolatrous for Jews announces itself in essay after essay; works of art can be redeemed, turned toward the service of God, only when they reveal purpose.1 In asking whether art impedes the making of moral choices Ozick, of course, takes her place in a distinguished line of American artists from Hawthorne and James to Pound and Cather. All ideologies, the Calvinist as well as the Judaic, civil religion as well as aestheticism, limit choice. For the Jewish writer, however, the status of cultural outsider affects the context in which such choices are made. And for the traditionalist Jewish writer, who takes seriously the God who, in George Steiner's words, not only prohibits the making of images to represent Him but also does allow imagining, the problem of art, obedience, and moral