A story is a hypothesis, a tryout of human nature under the impingement of certain given materials; so is an essay. . . . Nearly every essay, like every story, is an experiment, not a credo.
Or, to put it more stringently: an essay, like a story or a novel, is a fiction . . . . What I am repudiating . . . is the inference that . . . an essay is generally anything more than simply another fiction—a short story told in the form of an argument, or a history, or even (once in a very great while) an illumination. But never a tenet.
—Cynthia Ozick, in the “Forewarning” to Metaphor & Memory: Essays
Her performance of the part she had undertaken to play was certainly complete, and everything lay before him but the reason she might have for playing it.
—Henry James, in The Princess Casamassima
In a season remarkably devoid of literary events capable of causing a stir, the ferocious attack on T. S. Eliot mounted in the pages of The New Yorker by Cynthia Ozick has come as something of a shock.1 Its effect has been that of an act of intellectual violence, an act intended to annihilate its object, and it was no doubt for that reason that it so swiftly succeeded in causing the great stir that it has. Here was a polemic of a kind not seen in the literary world for many years—a lengthy and
