| Cynthia Ozick is the contemporary American Jewish writer. Unlike the otherAmerica Jewish writers, such as Soul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Rothwhose works have always been characterized by the tension of assimilation andretention, Ozick’s work, as a whole, is not only concerned with ethics, but isspecifically engaged in the effort to integrate the western aesthetics and Jewish ethics.Ozick was the second child of a Jewish immigrant parents. Her families’insistence on Jewish tradition has greatly imposed on her enthusiasm of Jewish ethics.Later in her writing not only are most of her protagonists Jews or Jewish descendants,but also the plots of the stories are always concerned with Jewish history and morality.However, growing up and being educated in America, Ozick also feels perfectly athome with Enlightenment thought and aesthetics. She assumes it is an inevitabilitythat cultures will eventually commingle.This dissertation will explore the integration of Jewish ethics and westernaesthetics in Ozick’s fiction from three different perspectives: the dual identities; theEthical Imagination; and the integration of ethics and aesthetics; words as cure ofpersecution and pain.The first chapter discusses the dual identities in Ozick’s Fiction. Ozick claimsthat she belongs to the third generation of America Jewish writers who views WesternChristian society as the landscape. Being part of America’s Jewish minority, Ozickseeks to explore the interaction between Judaism and the larger Christian and pagancultures her people are situated within. In her autobiographical work ThePuttermesser Papers, in response to her barren life and the corrupt New York City,Ozick fashions a golem to establish her dual, interlocked identities: those of defenderand redeemer. Lars Ademening in The Messiah of Stockholm pretends that he is theson of the murdered Polish writer Bruno Schulz, and his quest to explore Scholz’s lastmanuscripts, The Messiah, is his own way of expressing his sense of a world in need.By creating golems, both Puttermesser and Lars become themselves golems and doubles in the pursuit of redemption.The second chapter explores the ethical imagination in Ozick’s works. As thetypical spokesman of postmodernism, Ozick proclaims that “literature must call onimagination”(Ozick,1983:247). Furthermore, she maintains that literature shouldhave a moral basis. In her more than ten collected works of fiction, she draws on thetraditions and lore of Judaism, conjures the Jewish magic to illuminate the moraldimensions of both fiction and contemporary reality, thus creates her unique work ofmoral/ethical imagination. The golem Puttermesser molded helps her to found ajustice and peaceful New York City and become the mayor. However, the golem’sdesire keeps growing with her physical size. According to the Jewish lore,Puttermesser dismantles the golem. In Ozick’s another novella: Levitation, only theauthentic Jews who listen to telling of the holocaust experience with intensity canlevitate with the room, like “an ark on waters”(Ozick,1982:15). Both the undoing ofthe golem and the levitation of the room reflects Ozick’s insistence on the reciprocalmoral imagination rather than the isolated lyrical imagination or wild imagination.The third chapter analyzes the language and words in Ozick’s fiction. Jews havea long tradition of writing and passing on tales of lamentation and consolation. Theyknow themselves through language, through the narrative of their existence beginningwith Genesis, through the establishment of a covenantal nationalhood at Sinai, and onthrough the Shoah and its coda, the creation of the modern state of Israel. While the“talking cure” has been labeled part of the curious “Jewish science” of psychoanalysis,from the Babylonian “Epic of Gilgamesh,” to the confession booth of the CatholicChurch, and the contemporary fashion of memoir writing, the need to tell and beheard is fundamentally human, an attribute of cultures throughout time, the worldover. For some of Ozick’s characters, like Rosa in The Shawl and the refugee inLevitation, this telling is direct. They speak about the brutality of their experienceduring World War Two and of those who did not survive. In their telling or recitationof the history, they validate life. As Ozick claims in her essay that she is a “pinchedperfectionist”, the language her protagonists use is of creative aesthetics. The wordsthey telling or writing rescue them from the calamity of the past Shoah and fabricate them a bright future.Ozick’s work is read as the reconstruction of Western/Jewish culture, a body ofwork inspirited by the “high muse of fusion” which “adds Jewish moral seriousness tothe aesthetic sensibility of western fiction”.(Kauvar,1993:176）... |
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