Cynthia Ozick Quarrel and Quandary.(Review)

Cynthia Ozick Quarrel and Quandary. Alfred A. Knopf, 247 pages, $25

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 nm. 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 ...