Cynthia Ozick is keenly alert to the sometimes uneasy tension in literature between reality and fiction, history and imagination, and she doesn’t shy away in the least from bringing moral judgments to bear in discussing this tension. Politics alone do not account for her fervid interest in these subjects. In her “Forethoughts,” Ozick lays out her view of the essay’s purpose, a discussion she further elaborates in “She: Portrait of the Essay as a Young Body.”  

If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion in it, you need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use.

It is difficult to imagine an essay without information or opinions, and certainly Ozick avoids neither. Why insist opinions don’t matter in the long run when in the long run it is generally opinions we remember best? But she wishes to transcend mere topicality through rigorous moral inquiry. In “The Rights of History and the Rights of the Imagination,” Ozick challenges William Styron on moral grounds for choosing a Catholic Auschwitz survivor as his central character in Sophie’s Choice. She grants that there is some justification for the work being referred to as a “Holocaust novel,” at least in its “well-researched historical sections dealing with the final solution in Poland.” But Ozick finds Styron’s information about Polish Christians in Auschwitz far less substantive, “in fact, nearly absent.” Styron places Sophie at the novel’s center, but doesn’t surround her with the documentation that he provides for the “deportation of Jews—exact dates of arrival in Auschwitz,” or any other crucial facts. Given the historical thrust of the novel, Ozick finds it troubling that Styron chose to make his protagonist a Polish Catholic inmate. Exactly who or what does Sophie represent? Here Ozick makes a distinction between “historical reality,” which the character of Sophie in no way contradicts, and “the whole,” or “representative truth.” This is an explicit moral challenge. But it raises the question of why Styron, or any other writer, should feel obliged to create a character who represents “a statistical norm?”

If there is any answer at all to this argument (and the argument has force), it must lie in the novelist’s intention. It would seem, though, that when a novel comes to us with the claim that is directed consciously toward history, that the divide between history and the imagination is being purposefully bridged, that the bridging is the very point—and that the design of the novel is to put human flesh on historical notation, then the argument for fictional autonomy collapses, and the rights of history can begin to urge their own force.

Sophie, Ozick believes, is a dodge. Her character emerges as a symbolic figure, she argues, “perhaps intended to displace a more commonly perceived symbolic figure —Anne Frank, let us say.”

The essay “Who Owns Anne Frank?” continues along these lines, with its emphasis on the “bowdlerization” of Anne’s diary. After making a few of his own minor excisions, Otto Frank turned the diary over to Meyer Levin, a novelist of the socialist realist school, and a bitterly protracted battle of interpretive ownership ensued. The play and movie versions that resulted (not written by Levin), not to mention many of the diary’s translations, transformed the acutely perceptive and terrified Anne Frank into—in the words of a critic for New York’s Daily News—“a little Orphan Annie brought into vibrant life.” The same critic applauded the fact that the play seemed “not in any sense a Jewish play.” Ozick believes that some, like Lillian Hellman who was heavily involved with the dramatization, had political motivations for their acts, but more broadly she holds postwar European and American moral squeamishness to blame. If Anne’s plight was not so very bad, then no one was so very responsible. Likewise, if Anne was not an exclusively designated victim, than anyone could have been in the same boat. No matter what the motives, Ozick finds that this blurring of truth amounts to an enfeebling moral relativism.

In these essays, and in such others as “The Posthumous Sublime” and “The Impossibility of Being Kafka,” Ozick constructs substantive arguments to support her opinions. But in others, most notably “The Selfishness of Art” and “Dostoyevsky’s Unabomber,” her essential trail becomes obscured by contentious wanderings. In “Dostoyevsky’s Unabomber,” Ozick makes much of “the mammoth irony of Dostoyevsky’s life”: that “the writer who excoriated the radical theorists, who despised the nihilist revolutionaries,” once belonged to their company. Yet how surprising are such transformations in literature or in life? Nor is murder for philosophic or ideological reasons throughout history as striking as the essay’s title might imply. Ozick points out that horrific as Raskolnikov’s motives are, they cannot be ascribed merely to the politics of his creator. She insists that Crime and Punishment “is not, after all, a singlemindedly polemical tract fulminating against every nineteenth-century radical movement in sight.” Nor is it a detective thriller, nor the “psychological” novel that it has so often been praised as. The novel gathers many threads, suspending some without full resolution, resulting in “something beyond what Dostoyevsky may have plotted and what scholars have habitually attended to”:

This irresistible deformation of commonly predictable experience is what fires Dostoyevsky’s genius. Nabokov dislikes that genius (I dislike it too) because its language is a wilderness and there are woeful pockets of obscurantist venom at its center.

In the end, Ozick asserts, “it is not the radicals Dostoyevsky rebukes, but the Devil himself, the master of sin, an unconquerable principality pitted against God.” So much for Crime and Punishment. But the most provocative of the essay’s opinions—that “obscurantist venom” that Ozick dislikes— has been left without the necessary girding to hold it up.

In one of her collection’s most original readings, “The Impious Impatience of Job,” Ozick summarizes scholarly response to the Book of Job, seen as a work about “innocence and power; virtue and injustice; the Creator and His Creation; or what philosophy has long designated as theodicy, the Problem of Evil.” But Ozick sees Job’s later reward for his patience as a greater moral conundrum than is often acknowledged:

And if we are to take the close of the tale as a given, it is not only Job’s protests that are stilled: it is also his inmost moral urge. What has become of his raging conscience? Cushioned again by good fortune, Job remembers nothing beyond his own renewed honor. Is Job’s lesson from the whirlwind finally no more than the learning of indifference?

Ozick suggests that the work’s most radical assertion is that to grasp God might mean to lose all reverence. Her discussion of Job shifts from issues of fiction and reality, homing in instead on the puzzlesome morality of the tale itself, and on the eagerness of scholars, critics, and readers alike, to paste a smile on the face of unimaginable suffering.

Despite the fact that her claims for the essay end up seeming misleading, if not a bit defensive, the essays of Quarrel and Quandary pose many important questions, which lend themselves to Ozick’s complex, meditative ponderings. They are most satisfying when she rigorously reasons her way along the sometimes venturesome paths to her answers.

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