The Din in the Head An “Unlettered Exhibitionist” takes a stab at this “shoddy procedure”. – Bryan Byrd – Daveport, Iowa
Considering that Cynthia Ozick chose to publish her antipathy toward Amazon’s review process in a public forum – Harper’s Magazine, April 2007 – and to castigate (or masticate, considering the level of vitriol) Amazon’s “non-professional reviewer,” I might have been reflexively inclined to view ‘The Din in the Head’ with prejudice. But I wasn’t reviewing when I first read her bitter remarks, and they didn’t sink in. Since then things have changed, and now that I’ve revisited her diatribe, it’s impossible not to take her comments personally. However, I believe it would be dishonest to use a vehicle meant to assess ‘The Din in the Head’ to respond *solely* to her two cents from a separate discussion. Having said that though, Ms. Ozick and I both believe that criticism based on text alone is incomplete. While examining ‘The Din in the Head’ – a book mostly comprised of critical explication – I think it requisite to take her opinions in Harper’s – an article mostly about critics – into account. Especially when I suspect that the same sentiment begat both the Harper’s rant and the theme of ‘The Din in the Head’.
Ms. Ozick states in her book’s forward that “some matters are, in truth, more urgent, and significant, than others.” Art is what ‘matters’, as opposed to what pleases the crowd – literature over pulp, discernment over pop, and a patrician taste that sends plebeian pap back to the kitchen. There must be standards, with standard-bearers to separate the high from the low, and her article asserts that for a literate culture (and for the future of The Novel), someone needs to get off their butt and provide the distinctions. What the world needs now are critics.
According to Ms. Ozick, critics are the architects of a culture, and I don’t find any fault with that assumption. They bring to bear “horizonless freedoms, multiple histories, multiple libraries, multiple metaphysics, and intuitions” when they consider a text. A *professional* reviewer, on the other hand, because of space requirements and other limits, barely has time to outline the plot before giving it the thumbs-up or thumbs-down. If the critic is the architect, then the reviewer is the mason. But Ms. Ozick reserves special hatred for Amazon’s unprofessionals – a cadre of unwitting saboteurs of the architects and masons both.
Why such venom? “Amazon encourages naïve and unqualified readers who look for easy prose and uplifting endings to expose their insipidities to a mass audience.” Ouch. I’m not sure how she arrives at this conclusion unless she’s responding to comments posted about her own books. She continues – these “typically unlettered exhibitionists signal a new low in public responsibility” as, “uncontested and unedited,” we derail the critic’s work by assigning stars to writers based on insubstantial literacy. That, in turn, leads to the crumbling confidence of readers – a confidence carefully groomed by the critic. “Amazon’s unspoken credo is that anyone, or everyone, is well suited to make literary judgments.” Obviously that is no credo of Cynthia Ozick’s.
I wasn’t aware of her indictments when, rooting through the bargain bins, I found ‘The Din in the Head,’ Ms. Ozick’s collection of essays on literature. Though only three selections are attributed (to the New Yorker), I’m sure that most were published first in magazines such as Harper’s and The American Scholar. Those are demanding venues, and Ms. Ozick’s skills are up to the task, though her prose seems purposefully obtuse at times, as if she wanted to distance herself from anyone having trouble deciphering her meaning. Regardless, the essays were educational, though probably not necessarily meant as criticism. Some are closer to Ms. Ozick’s own definition of reviews, and others are personal reflections – but they all reflect a glimmer of those horizonless freedoms that she posits separate criticism from reviewing.
Without horizons, it’s imperative that the critic at least strike out in interesting directions. In that regard, ‘The Din in the Head’ is a mixed bag. The section on Isaac Babel was captivating, and I appreciate Ms. Ozick’s efforts to bring him to my attention – after her essay, I’m eager to read more. Other profiles were also fascinating, like those of Gershom Scholem and Robert Alter, though it’s likely that my investigation into their output is probably finished at her essay’s conclusion. The rest, other than a short, surprising endorsement of Kipling, were of mixed interest, though Ms. Ozick brought the same academic level of scrutiny to each. To say that I’m satisfied with this collection after paying the bargain price for it would be justified, and the combination of cost and quality easily rates four stars.
So why the need for the explicit commentary on the Harper’s article? Because her need to attack hobby reviewers to make her point about critics suggests that not only art and literature are matters more significant than others – it implies, that to Ms. Ozick, there are *people* more significant than others too.
Books are not written in a vacuum. They come from within an author, and as such, critical studies must includes the context in which she frames her thoughts. Her perspective should be exposed along with the finished work – and in this case, that perspective is elitist and exclusionary. How much of that sifts down onto the printed page I don’t know. My only guidance is the old maxim – consider the source. I have, and I don’t want anyone who believes as she does delineating the cultural landscape for me.
I may never have been her intended audience anyway – it may have only been for the imaginary members of her literary country club. On the other hand, she does have her work published – it’s all right for me to buy it evidently, just as long as I don’t review it. That makes me wonder…Perhaps the din in her head, as the title essay discusses, is not an “innerness” that seeks relief far from the madding crowd after all. It may instead be the persistent echo of Ms. Ozick stamping a petulant foot at the unintended recipients of her book – who then had nerve enough to talk about it.
Cynthia Ozick has long held her reputation as one of the most acclaimed critics working in America. Her essays are, without fail, uncompromisingly optimistic about what literature can do, what literature has done, and the hopes of literature for the future. Unlike other academics or critics, Ozick does not bemoan the novel’s current lack of favour when compared to movies or the internet – her approach is positive, reasoned, passionate and compelling. The essays contained in The Din in the Head, while not explicitly thematically linked, share a common bond in exploring either less well-known but still luminous authors of the twentieth century, or the minor works of acknowledged and remembered masters.
A Jew, Ozick directly addresses the question of what it means to be a ‘Jewish writer’ in her essay, Tradition and (Or Versus) the Jewish Writer. She believes that if a Jewish author is not tackling such massive problems as the Holocaust or the creation and stability of Israel, then ‘All other subject matter in the so-called Jewish-American novel is, well, American, written in the American language, telling American stories.’ She rejects the concept of a Jewish novel unless, as stated, it is forcibly and solely Jewish in origin and intent. Catholic, Protestant, Atheist, etc novels are not usually branded with their religion before being read, and nor should they be – it seems only the Jews and minorities such as colonial literature suffer from this problem. A novel is what it is, the aim of an author is not ‘community service or communal expectation.’ She finishes by saying that writers ‘are responsible only to the comely shape of a sentence, and to the unfettered imagination’.
That being said, a number of her essays do directly deal with leading Jewish authors such as Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Lionel Trilling, Isaac Babel, Gershom Scholem. Other authors include Updike, Tolstoy, Kipling, Plath and Henry James. Roughly half of the book deals with Jewish authors or themes, the other half with novels in general. While the book cannot honestly be claimed as Jewish – witness Ozick’s own attack on the concept, but also consider the inappropriateness of a book on literary criticism not analysing the works of such masters as Saul Bellow – Ozick’s pride in her heritage is plain. But it is not the pride that comes from grandstanding or self-propelling ambition, rather, Ozick discusses these things because they have merit to herself, and by extension, to others.
Her essay, John Updike: Eros and God, is a remarkable piece of sustained admiration for an author who, sad as it is to say, seems to be less appreciated than in his due by today’s younger authors, who value the flash and fire of literary psuedo-pyrotechnics, all the while ignoring Updike’s supreme command of the English language, his ease and skill and, dare it be said, grace in composing sentences that show us the ordinary in a way we couldn’t – wouldn’t? – have looked at it ourselves. ‘Language in all its fecundity is Updike’s native country, and he is its patriot.’ Fecundity is right, Updike language grows and stagnates, flourishes and falls, but it is always abundant and verdant, ripe to read and delicious to see.
One of the primary questions Ozick is attempting to answer throughout this book is the deceptively simple: What is a novel? She baldly states it only once, but every essay dances around the topic before culminating in yet another insightful, illuminating aspect of an answer. Granted, there may never be a complete, coherent response to the question, but beautiful, intelligent and important attempts may be given. The novel is, she writes, ‘A persuasion towards dramatic interiority. A word-hoard that permits its inventor to stand undefined, unprescribed, liberated from direction or coercion.’
Lionel Trilling, a once-famous critic whose star has long since dimmed, is given a twenty-page examination, and is the saddest essay in the novel. Trilling, though respected, even revered in his own time, always chafed against the mantle of ‘critic’. He wanted to be a novelist, and envied Hemingway beyond all others. His own novel, The Middle of the Journey, which is by Ozick’s account a certainly capable novel, was not received well. Trilling, writing in his diary, noted, ‘The attack on my novel, that it is gray, bloodless, intellectual, without passion, is always made with great personal feeling, with anger. -How dared I presume?’ The weight of a man’s sadness, heavy to behold and difficult to read.
There are small pieces scattered throughout the novel. Kipling’s essay is very short, a mere two pages, Plath receives five, miscellaneous topics stay under ten. But even these remain worthwhile and interesting. I am lucky in that I am familiar with most, though not all of the authors, but even those about whom I know little, the encouragement to explore their works is vast. A difficulty in any collected work of criticism is the reader’s potential unfamiliarity with the subject matter – the question of, ‘If I have not read the author, why would I read criticism of them?’ – is firmly answered by the exuberance and enthusiasm of Ozick’s prose. She captures not the essence of the writer, necessarily, but the essence of what it meant to them to write, how important it was to be writing, and how important is it to read their work.
Ozick shows a clear preference for literature above all other forms of entertainment and communication. ‘The din in our heads, that relentless inward hum of fragility and hope and transcendence and dread – where, in an age of machine addressing crowds, and crowds mad for machines, can it be found? In the art of the novel…And nowhere else.’ And she’s right. Literature speaks to the interiority of ourselves, that endless, limitless space in which we define who we are, what we are about, why we are here and what it is that we hold closest to ourselves. Literature, more than any other medium, directly address this interior, it furnishes it with rooms and chairs, carpets and chandeliers, mountains, lakes, rivers and cities. It makes of the blankness of our births a glorious empire, but an empire that we create. Literature is our friend and our confidante, it is our enemy and our attackers. It challenges, harmonizes, repudiates and chastises. It is capable of all this and more – endless reams of purple prose, all for the sake of novels and reading. Ozick may be preaching to the converted with her book of essays, but the enjoyment, exuberance and passion she receives from reading is so beautifully conveyed that I cannot help but suggest it to people who are non-readers, as a way of allowing them into the realm of the written word. Ozick kindles – or rekindles – the love of literature until it is a raging fire alongside which we could warm ourselves forever. :
One of America’s foremost novelists and critics, Cynthia Ozick has won praise and provoked debate for taking on challenging literary, historical, and moral issues. In her spirited essay collection The Din in the Head, she focuses on the essential joys of great literature. With razor-sharp wit and an inspiring joie de vivre, Ozick investigates unexpected byways in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, Helen Keller, Isaac Babel, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, and Henry James, among others. Throughout this bracing collection, she celebrates the curative power of the literary imagination.
The Din in the Head
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