Framing Questions: Cynthia Ozick's 'Shots'

Abstract

The philosophical (and stern) divide between the Hellenic and Hebraic, especially in relation to aesthetics and ethics, is what critics of Cynthia Ozick's fiction so often focus on. Yet I will argue that in her short story, 'Shots', Cynthia Ozick's passion for the Judaic collective memory and moral consciousness has created a character whose principal life's work, the production of visual images, rejects such a facile exiling of beauty and visual aesthetics to the realm of the pagan. For this protagonist, a photographer, sees herself as a creator who is not only not a mere maker of idols, a trafficker in vanity, but is rather a seeker, a critical eye, a woman attempt ing to understand the world both ethically and aesthetically through the interpretation of what she finds in her viewfinder. In the Second Commandment of the ten received by Moses, God wams Israel: do not make or worship graven images resembling anything in heaven or the natural world. This prohibition is a familiar one. It is the reason synagogues are devoid of stained glass scenes of Adam and Eve. It is why there are few frescoes of Abraham and his family. It explains the absence of triptychs documenting the exodus from Egypt, of'Jewish' sculptures honoring the great kings, David and Solomon. All these potentially dramatic images are rendered exclusively in words. The Second Commandment raises the question of what constitutes a Jewish visual aesthetics: does it exist; can it, given these restrictive prohibitions, and if so, what is its programme, its parameters; what actually constitutes transgression? Cynthia Ozick's work, as a whole, is not only concerned with aesthetics, but is specifically engaged in the struggle to define the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. How does an artist, some of her narratives ask, manage to create objects of beauty, inclusive of literature, in the shadow of the Second Commandment? How does one counter the numbing, or dehumanising, effect, she claims, idol worship inspires in adherents, 'crushing] the capacity for pity'? In her short story, 'Shots', Ozick has created a character who, by dint of being a photographer, has animated these questions and captured in © Oxford University Press 2002 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.23 on Tue, 19 Apr 2016 06:32:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 52 CYNTHIA OZICK'S 'SHOTS' her lens what can be construed as a Jewish interpretation on the creation of'graven images'. This portrait of the artist counters the putative dangers of