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Metaphor & Memory
From the author of The Messiah of Stockholm and Art and Ardor comes a new collection of supple, provocative, and intellectually dazzling essays. In Metaphor & Memory, Cynthia Ozick writes about Saul Bellow and Henry James, William Gaddis and Primo Levi. She observes the tug-of-war between written and spoken language and the complex relation between art's contrivances and its moral truths. She has given us an exceptional book that demonstrates the possibilities of literature even as it explores them.
300 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
14 people are currently reading
562 people want to read
About the author
Cynthia Ozick
108 books427 followersRecipient of the first Rea Award for the Short Story (in 1976; other winners Rea honorees include Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Alice Munro), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, and the PEN/Malamud award in 2008.
Upon publication of her 1983 The Shawl, Edmund White wrote in the New York Times, "Miss Ozick strikes me as the best American writer to have emerged in recent years...Judaism has given to her what Catholicism gave to Flannery O'Connor."
Upon publication of her 1983 The Shawl, Edmund White wrote in the New York Times, "Miss Ozick strikes me as the best American writer to have emerged in recent years...Judaism has given to her what Catholicism gave to Flannery O'Connor."
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
March 16, 2025
Years ago, I turned the last page of Primo Levi's If This Is a Man • The Truce, rated it five stars on goodreads, and sat with a heavy heart. I could not write a review. I could not shake the fear. As a war survivor, I wish I hadn't found out what happened to the author. Knowing that someone could survive horror, live for years with the memories, and meet an end like Primo Levi did, was frightening. I wondered so many things, but had no clarity until I read Cynthia Ozick's "Primo Levi's Suicide Note." I'm so grateful this essay is included in this collection, so grateful for Ozick's expert illumination.
Published in The New Republic in 1988, the essay is a review of the last book Levi wrote, The Drowned and the Saved. Ozick writes that Levi, in his previous works, wrote from a distance, with a method of describing "meticulously, analytically, clarifyingly." Yet, The Drowned "is the record of a man returning blows with all the might of human fury..." after forty years of restraint. The world disappointed Levi. The inaction and blindness of others frustrated him. By now he had learned a lot about what truly happened, and he started to "scorn the apologists, the liars, the 'falsely penitent.'" He reminded people of the elections that made it possible for Hitler to get into office. He calls out the "great majority of Germans who accepted in the beginning, out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride," whatever Hitler said. The book certainly piques my interest for its transparency and how it eerily seems to forecast how we relive historic events because of the "mental laziness" of others.
Cynthia Ozick believes in "the muscular sentence" and she is an "exacting perfectionist" as relates to writing. She has written numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. Her dedication to the craft and the writing life is moving. I especially admire her dedication to the literary essay form and her explanation of how one approaches reading a fiction writer's essay, which should not be a "frame into which to squeeze the writer's stories" (she uses Tolstoy as an example). I recall that her thoughts on the essay form also appealed to me when I read her edition of The Best American Essays 1998 in 2021. Some essays I found appealing in this collection were "On Permission to Write,"The Sister Melons of J. M. Coetzee," "The Seam of the Snail," and "The Function of the Small Press."
When she writes "A Short Note on 'Chekhovian'" and how Chekhov sees into the "immaculate fragility" of his characters, her writing style shifts. This is what I found most appealing. It is intriguing when her writing shifts from the academic to the creative flair, becomes poetic, and appeals to the senses, as she writes about
Published in The New Republic in 1988, the essay is a review of the last book Levi wrote, The Drowned and the Saved. Ozick writes that Levi, in his previous works, wrote from a distance, with a method of describing "meticulously, analytically, clarifyingly." Yet, The Drowned "is the record of a man returning blows with all the might of human fury..." after forty years of restraint. The world disappointed Levi. The inaction and blindness of others frustrated him. By now he had learned a lot about what truly happened, and he started to "scorn the apologists, the liars, the 'falsely penitent.'" He reminded people of the elections that made it possible for Hitler to get into office. He calls out the "great majority of Germans who accepted in the beginning, out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride," whatever Hitler said. The book certainly piques my interest for its transparency and how it eerily seems to forecast how we relive historic events because of the "mental laziness" of others.
Cynthia Ozick believes in "the muscular sentence" and she is an "exacting perfectionist" as relates to writing. She has written numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. Her dedication to the craft and the writing life is moving. I especially admire her dedication to the literary essay form and her explanation of how one approaches reading a fiction writer's essay, which should not be a "frame into which to squeeze the writer's stories" (she uses Tolstoy as an example). I recall that her thoughts on the essay form also appealed to me when I read her edition of The Best American Essays 1998 in 2021. Some essays I found appealing in this collection were "On Permission to Write,"The Sister Melons of J. M. Coetzee," "The Seam of the Snail," and "The Function of the Small Press."
When she writes "A Short Note on 'Chekhovian'" and how Chekhov sees into the "immaculate fragility" of his characters, her writing style shifts. This is what I found most appealing. It is intriguing when her writing shifts from the academic to the creative flair, becomes poetic, and appeals to the senses, as she writes about
an adjective that had to be invented for the new voice Chekhov's genius breathed into the world—elusive, inconclusive, flickering; nuanced, through an underlying disquiet, though never morbid or disgruntled; unerringly intuitive, catching out of the air mute inferences, glittering motes, faint turnings of the heart, tendrils thinner than hairs, drift. But Chekhov's art is more than merely Chekhovian.
June 10, 2010
Her best work. The prose in "The Seam of a Snail" is unprecedented.
December 13, 2021
Ozick writes like language was made for her and only her. Incredible also that - at 93 now - she shared a lifetime with most of those she writes about in this volume, greats who, for someone of my generation marked by our distinct sense of cultural myopia, might as well have lived two hundred years ago: Cyril Connoly, William Gaddis, George Steiner, Shai Agnon, Saul Bellow, C.P. Snow, Primo Levi, etc. Even those who predate her (Henry James, Sholem Aleichem, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Theodore Dreiser), she casts a critical eye on in the most illuminating prose.
At every turn, she challenges the reader that there's more to be gained from looking closely. Remarkably still, she never falls into the psychological traps typical of the casual deconstructivist; never reads more than is there. She wrings the texts dry of meaning, shines her torch into their deepest of crevices, but she never adds what is not there. It never feels like she's stretching. Though, as with every collection of essays, more so one containing nearly thirty essays, not all of them can be truly outstanding, Ozick is, quite simply, the best reviewer of books, the finest cultural critic, I have ever come across. For that, I am willing to forgive her all her bad moments.
None of the takes on the masters were my favorite. The best essay in the book is the short foreword - "Forewarning"- where Ozick considers good essayists vis good story writers in the light of that nebulous quality of "authenticity". This essay is very similar to "The Apprentice's Pillar", another essay in the book where she compares novels and biographies. But while there is little doubt that "The Apprentice's Pillar" is a better-realized work, the unique personal tone of simultaneous authority and self-doubt that pervades "Forewarning" - perhaps the fact that it came first, also - just blew me away.
At every turn, she challenges the reader that there's more to be gained from looking closely. Remarkably still, she never falls into the psychological traps typical of the casual deconstructivist; never reads more than is there. She wrings the texts dry of meaning, shines her torch into their deepest of crevices, but she never adds what is not there. It never feels like she's stretching. Though, as with every collection of essays, more so one containing nearly thirty essays, not all of them can be truly outstanding, Ozick is, quite simply, the best reviewer of books, the finest cultural critic, I have ever come across. For that, I am willing to forgive her all her bad moments.
None of the takes on the masters were my favorite. The best essay in the book is the short foreword - "Forewarning"- where Ozick considers good essayists vis good story writers in the light of that nebulous quality of "authenticity". This essay is very similar to "The Apprentice's Pillar", another essay in the book where she compares novels and biographies. But while there is little doubt that "The Apprentice's Pillar" is a better-realized work, the unique personal tone of simultaneous authority and self-doubt that pervades "Forewarning" - perhaps the fact that it came first, also - just blew me away.
July 1, 2016
Publicado en http://lecturaylocura.com/metafora-y-...
Metáfora y Memoria. Ensayos reunidos de Cynthia Ozick. La relevancia del ensayo
Mi primer acercamiento a la norteamericana Cynthia Ozick ha sido directamente una confirmación; había pensado en ir a sus famosos cuentos, pero la editorial Mar Dulce ha publicado Metáfora y Memoria. Ensayos reunidos en este mismo año y me parecía una buena solución, ya que no es tan extenso para empezar con la autora. Como podéis suponer me ha convencido y mucho; esta antología contiene ensayos que se dividen en dos grandes grupos: aquellos relativos a los temas (cualquier tema en particular asociado a la literatura principalmente) y los que se refieren a los autores (con reflexiones sobre diferentes escritores).
Sentía la necesidad de poner algo sobre ellos y en el horizonte se me planteaban dos posibilidades: por un lado adoro todo lo relativo a Henry James que aparece en sus segunda parte; por el otro un metaensayo con el que se inicia la antología llamado Ella: retrato del ensayo como cuerpo tibio donde encontramos una reflexión tremendamente lúcida sobre el carácter y la forma del propio género. Me he decidido por este último desde que leí la primera página:
“Un ensayo es un producto de la imaginación. Si en un ensayo hay información, es solo circunstancia, y si hay una opinión, es necesario desconfiar de ella a largo plazo. Un ensayo genuino no tiene aplicación educativa, polémica, ni sociopolítica; es el movimiento de una mente libre que juega. Si bien está escrito en prosa, se halla más cerca en esencia de la poesía que de cualquier forma literaria. Al igual que un poema, un ensayo genuino está hecho de lenguaje, de personalidad, de un estado de ánimo, de temperamento, de agallas, de azar.
Y si hablo de un ensayo genuino es porque los falsos abundan. Podemos recurrir aquí al anticuado término poetastro, aunque indirectamente. Lo que el poetastro es al poeta –u aspirante menor-, el artículo es al ensayo: una imitación consumada destinada a envejecer pronto. Un artículo es chisme. Un ensayo es reflexión y visión interior.”
Ozick reflexiona sobre la esencia del ensayo y lo equipara con la poesía distinguiendo entre ensayos genuinos y ensayos falsos, abundando desgraciadamente estos últimos. Es imposible no rendirse ante la elocuencia de la escritora, sobre todo cuando compara el ensayo genuino con el artículo y define su sentido ontológico en base a su perdurabilidad y su capacidad de reflexión. De estas características es capaz de dilucidar sobre una casualidad que no había pensado anteriormente, el poder:
“De modo que el ensayo es antiguo y variado, pero esto es un lugar común. Hay algo más y es algo todavía más sorprendente: el poder del ensayo. Por “poder” me refiero precisamente a la capacidad de lograr lo que la fuerza siempre logra: obligarnos a asentir. No importa que la forma y la inclinación de un ensayo se opongan a la coerción o la persuasión ni que el ensayo tampoco se proponga ni busque hacernos pensar como su autor, al menos no abiertamente. Si un ensayo tiene una “motivación”, esta se vincula más con la casualidad y la oportunidad que con la voluntad aplicada. Un ensayo genuino no es un tratado doctrinario, un esfuerzo propagandístico ni una jeremiada.”
En efecto, según lo leía me ocurría exactamente lo que comentaba la autora, sentía la necesidad de asentir; y este asentimiento estaba en contra de lo que yo pensaba sobre el género:
“A fin de cuentas, en ensayo es una fuerza destinada a obtener un consentimiento. Se apropia del consentimiento, lo corteja, lo seduce. Porque durante la breve hora que nos entregamos a él es seguro que nos rendiremos, convencidos. Todo esto ocurrirá aunque estemos intrínsecamente decididos a resistirnos.”
El ensayo, según Ozick, no debería convertirse en un tratado doctrinario o propagandístico, más bien, debería ser esa fuerza destinada a obtener el consentimiento de sus lectores que sentirán cómo sus ideas preestablecidas cambian ante los argumentos que nos está mostrando. Para entender aún mejor sus cualidades, lo contrapone con la novela:
“La novela tiene la capacidad para someternos. Suspende nuestra participación en la sociedad en la que vivimos cada día, de modo tal que mientras leemos, la olvidamos por completo. Pero el ensayo no nos permite olvidar nuestras sensaciones y opiniones habituales; hace algo aún más potente: nos hace negarlas. La autoridad de un ensayista magistral –la autoridad del lenguaje sublime y de la observación íntima- es absoluta. Cuando estoy con Hazlitt, no conozco mayor compañía que la naturaleza. Cuando estoy con Emerson no conozco mayor soledad que la naturaleza.”
Mientras la novela nos aliena, nos aísla de la sociedad, nos somete al dictado de la ficción; el ensayo actúa sobre nuestras opiniones y sensaciones habituales, siempre y cuando el ensayista sea tan magistral que sea capaz de convencernos de sus argumentos; sí está claro que el ensayo no nos sustrae de la realidad que vivimos, más bien nos integra con ella y nos ilumina sobre temas de los que no éramos conscientes. Una vez establecidas estas bases, da un paso más allá entrando en la aparente arbitrariedad de los argumentos, o la dispersión de la que a veces se le puede culpar y define varias de sus cualidades:
“Lo maravilloso de todo esto es que de esta Parente arbitrariedad, de esta caprichosa dispersión del ver y del contar, nace un mundo coherente. Es coherente porque un ensayista debe ser, después de todo, un artista y todo artista, cualquier que sea el medio que utilice, llega a un marco imaginativo singular y sólido, o llamémoslo, en menor escala, una cosmogonía.
Y es dentro de este marco, de esta obra de arte, donde quedamos atrapados como peces en una red. ¿Qué nos mantiene atrapados allí? La autoridad de una voz, el placer -a veces la ansiedad- de una nueva idea, de un ángulo insólito, de un trocito de reminiscencia, de una dicha revelada o de un susto transmitido. Un ensayo puede ser el fruto del intelecto o de la memoria, de la liviandad o del abatimiento, del bienestar o de la irritación. Pero siempre hay en él una cierta quietud, a veces una suerte de distanciamiento. La furia y la venganza, creo, pertenecen a la ficción. El ensayo es más apacible.”
Posiblemente la que más me gusta es su cualidad de ser apacible, alejado de la furia y la venganza. Es la autoridad del narrador la que nos engancha a un ensayo pero no lo hace de manera violenta, muy al contrario, hay una calma inherente a todo ensayo genuino. El giro final de la autora, simplemente excepcional, es atribuir el género femenino (el del título) al ensayo, toda una subversión del valor tradicional asociado a lo masculino, de esta manera le atribuye características insospechadas y nos prepara ante la posibilidad de que el poder se desplace, nada malo hay en que “ella” sea el ensayo, importa más que esto que este ahí, que esté viva, que nos invite a entrar para sumergirnos en su autoridad magistral:
“Digamos que no tiene sentido decir (como lo he hecho repetidamente, aborreciéndolo cada vez) “el ensayo”, “un ensayo”. El ensayo –un ensayo- no es una abstracción; puede ser una forma femenina de contornos reconocibles, pero también muy colorida y con una identidad individual; no es un tipo. Es demasiado fluida, demasiado esquiva para ser una categoría. Puede ser osada, puede ser tímida, puede confiar en su belleza, en su inteligencia, en su erotismo o en su exotismo. Sea cual fuere su historia, es la protagonista, la personificación del yo secreto. Cuando llamamos a su puerta, nos abre, es una presencia en el umbral, nos guía de una sala a la otra; entonces ¿por qué no deberíamos llamarla “ella? Puede que en privado se muestre indiferente a nosotros, pero no puede ser más hospitalaria. Por encima de todo, no es un principio oculto ni una tesis ni una construcción: ella está allí, es una voz viva. Y nos invita a entrar.”
No sé si he convencido a alguien para leer a esta escritora, espero que alguno lo tenga ya claro; de todos modos me permito terminar con su idea de lo que debe ser la meta de la literatura; nos presenta la dicotomía universal-particular; siendo la segunda, la verdadera definición de lo que busca el arte literario en la actualidad: mostrar, reconocer aquello que es particular:
“Así llegamos, al fin, al pulso y a la meta de la literatura: rechazar el borrón de lo “universal”; distinguir una vida de otra; iluminar la diversidad; encender la menor partícula de un ser para mostrar que es concretamente individual, diferente de cualquier otro; narrar, en toda la maravilla de su singularidad, la santidad intrínseca de la partícula más pequeña.
La literatura es el reconocimiento de lo particular.”
Los textos vienen de la traducción de Ernesto Montequin de Metáfora y Memoria. Ensayos reunidos de Cynthia Ozick para la editorial Mar Dulce
Metáfora y Memoria. Ensayos reunidos de Cynthia Ozick. La relevancia del ensayo
Mi primer acercamiento a la norteamericana Cynthia Ozick ha sido directamente una confirmación; había pensado en ir a sus famosos cuentos, pero la editorial Mar Dulce ha publicado Metáfora y Memoria. Ensayos reunidos en este mismo año y me parecía una buena solución, ya que no es tan extenso para empezar con la autora. Como podéis suponer me ha convencido y mucho; esta antología contiene ensayos que se dividen en dos grandes grupos: aquellos relativos a los temas (cualquier tema en particular asociado a la literatura principalmente) y los que se refieren a los autores (con reflexiones sobre diferentes escritores).
Sentía la necesidad de poner algo sobre ellos y en el horizonte se me planteaban dos posibilidades: por un lado adoro todo lo relativo a Henry James que aparece en sus segunda parte; por el otro un metaensayo con el que se inicia la antología llamado Ella: retrato del ensayo como cuerpo tibio donde encontramos una reflexión tremendamente lúcida sobre el carácter y la forma del propio género. Me he decidido por este último desde que leí la primera página:
“Un ensayo es un producto de la imaginación. Si en un ensayo hay información, es solo circunstancia, y si hay una opinión, es necesario desconfiar de ella a largo plazo. Un ensayo genuino no tiene aplicación educativa, polémica, ni sociopolítica; es el movimiento de una mente libre que juega. Si bien está escrito en prosa, se halla más cerca en esencia de la poesía que de cualquier forma literaria. Al igual que un poema, un ensayo genuino está hecho de lenguaje, de personalidad, de un estado de ánimo, de temperamento, de agallas, de azar.
Y si hablo de un ensayo genuino es porque los falsos abundan. Podemos recurrir aquí al anticuado término poetastro, aunque indirectamente. Lo que el poetastro es al poeta –u aspirante menor-, el artículo es al ensayo: una imitación consumada destinada a envejecer pronto. Un artículo es chisme. Un ensayo es reflexión y visión interior.”
Ozick reflexiona sobre la esencia del ensayo y lo equipara con la poesía distinguiendo entre ensayos genuinos y ensayos falsos, abundando desgraciadamente estos últimos. Es imposible no rendirse ante la elocuencia de la escritora, sobre todo cuando compara el ensayo genuino con el artículo y define su sentido ontológico en base a su perdurabilidad y su capacidad de reflexión. De estas características es capaz de dilucidar sobre una casualidad que no había pensado anteriormente, el poder:
“De modo que el ensayo es antiguo y variado, pero esto es un lugar común. Hay algo más y es algo todavía más sorprendente: el poder del ensayo. Por “poder” me refiero precisamente a la capacidad de lograr lo que la fuerza siempre logra: obligarnos a asentir. No importa que la forma y la inclinación de un ensayo se opongan a la coerción o la persuasión ni que el ensayo tampoco se proponga ni busque hacernos pensar como su autor, al menos no abiertamente. Si un ensayo tiene una “motivación”, esta se vincula más con la casualidad y la oportunidad que con la voluntad aplicada. Un ensayo genuino no es un tratado doctrinario, un esfuerzo propagandístico ni una jeremiada.”
En efecto, según lo leía me ocurría exactamente lo que comentaba la autora, sentía la necesidad de asentir; y este asentimiento estaba en contra de lo que yo pensaba sobre el género:
“A fin de cuentas, en ensayo es una fuerza destinada a obtener un consentimiento. Se apropia del consentimiento, lo corteja, lo seduce. Porque durante la breve hora que nos entregamos a él es seguro que nos rendiremos, convencidos. Todo esto ocurrirá aunque estemos intrínsecamente decididos a resistirnos.”
El ensayo, según Ozick, no debería convertirse en un tratado doctrinario o propagandístico, más bien, debería ser esa fuerza destinada a obtener el consentimiento de sus lectores que sentirán cómo sus ideas preestablecidas cambian ante los argumentos que nos está mostrando. Para entender aún mejor sus cualidades, lo contrapone con la novela:
“La novela tiene la capacidad para someternos. Suspende nuestra participación en la sociedad en la que vivimos cada día, de modo tal que mientras leemos, la olvidamos por completo. Pero el ensayo no nos permite olvidar nuestras sensaciones y opiniones habituales; hace algo aún más potente: nos hace negarlas. La autoridad de un ensayista magistral –la autoridad del lenguaje sublime y de la observación íntima- es absoluta. Cuando estoy con Hazlitt, no conozco mayor compañía que la naturaleza. Cuando estoy con Emerson no conozco mayor soledad que la naturaleza.”
Mientras la novela nos aliena, nos aísla de la sociedad, nos somete al dictado de la ficción; el ensayo actúa sobre nuestras opiniones y sensaciones habituales, siempre y cuando el ensayista sea tan magistral que sea capaz de convencernos de sus argumentos; sí está claro que el ensayo no nos sustrae de la realidad que vivimos, más bien nos integra con ella y nos ilumina sobre temas de los que no éramos conscientes. Una vez establecidas estas bases, da un paso más allá entrando en la aparente arbitrariedad de los argumentos, o la dispersión de la que a veces se le puede culpar y define varias de sus cualidades:
“Lo maravilloso de todo esto es que de esta Parente arbitrariedad, de esta caprichosa dispersión del ver y del contar, nace un mundo coherente. Es coherente porque un ensayista debe ser, después de todo, un artista y todo artista, cualquier que sea el medio que utilice, llega a un marco imaginativo singular y sólido, o llamémoslo, en menor escala, una cosmogonía.
Y es dentro de este marco, de esta obra de arte, donde quedamos atrapados como peces en una red. ¿Qué nos mantiene atrapados allí? La autoridad de una voz, el placer -a veces la ansiedad- de una nueva idea, de un ángulo insólito, de un trocito de reminiscencia, de una dicha revelada o de un susto transmitido. Un ensayo puede ser el fruto del intelecto o de la memoria, de la liviandad o del abatimiento, del bienestar o de la irritación. Pero siempre hay en él una cierta quietud, a veces una suerte de distanciamiento. La furia y la venganza, creo, pertenecen a la ficción. El ensayo es más apacible.”
Posiblemente la que más me gusta es su cualidad de ser apacible, alejado de la furia y la venganza. Es la autoridad del narrador la que nos engancha a un ensayo pero no lo hace de manera violenta, muy al contrario, hay una calma inherente a todo ensayo genuino. El giro final de la autora, simplemente excepcional, es atribuir el género femenino (el del título) al ensayo, toda una subversión del valor tradicional asociado a lo masculino, de esta manera le atribuye características insospechadas y nos prepara ante la posibilidad de que el poder se desplace, nada malo hay en que “ella” sea el ensayo, importa más que esto que este ahí, que esté viva, que nos invite a entrar para sumergirnos en su autoridad magistral:
“Digamos que no tiene sentido decir (como lo he hecho repetidamente, aborreciéndolo cada vez) “el ensayo”, “un ensayo”. El ensayo –un ensayo- no es una abstracción; puede ser una forma femenina de contornos reconocibles, pero también muy colorida y con una identidad individual; no es un tipo. Es demasiado fluida, demasiado esquiva para ser una categoría. Puede ser osada, puede ser tímida, puede confiar en su belleza, en su inteligencia, en su erotismo o en su exotismo. Sea cual fuere su historia, es la protagonista, la personificación del yo secreto. Cuando llamamos a su puerta, nos abre, es una presencia en el umbral, nos guía de una sala a la otra; entonces ¿por qué no deberíamos llamarla “ella? Puede que en privado se muestre indiferente a nosotros, pero no puede ser más hospitalaria. Por encima de todo, no es un principio oculto ni una tesis ni una construcción: ella está allí, es una voz viva. Y nos invita a entrar.”
No sé si he convencido a alguien para leer a esta escritora, espero que alguno lo tenga ya claro; de todos modos me permito terminar con su idea de lo que debe ser la meta de la literatura; nos presenta la dicotomía universal-particular; siendo la segunda, la verdadera definición de lo que busca el arte literario en la actualidad: mostrar, reconocer aquello que es particular:
“Así llegamos, al fin, al pulso y a la meta de la literatura: rechazar el borrón de lo “universal”; distinguir una vida de otra; iluminar la diversidad; encender la menor partícula de un ser para mostrar que es concretamente individual, diferente de cualquier otro; narrar, en toda la maravilla de su singularidad, la santidad intrínseca de la partícula más pequeña.
La literatura es el reconocimiento de lo particular.”
Los textos vienen de la traducción de Ernesto Montequin de Metáfora y Memoria. Ensayos reunidos de Cynthia Ozick para la editorial Mar Dulce
August 20, 2021
The best of these essays are spellbinding, memorable and thought-provoking. Yet, I almost gave up on the book after the first six essays; I thought Ozick was trying too hard to show how serious a literary critic she is. This first impression is shattered once I got to Henry james' Unborn Child in which she presents, reflects, muses and speculates on why James did not (was unable to?) finish Hugh Morrow a short story "...written in the densely reverberating style of James's 'late manner'". This first essay is followed by Emerging Dreiser, a wonderful review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, the first part of Richard Lingeman's two-part biography, reaching just beyond the initial reception of Dreiser's first published novel Sister Carrie. Ozick deftly weaves strands from her critical viewpoints on Lingeman's work and her own appreciation of Sister Carrie, sparking intense interest in reading the novel.
Skip three essays, including one of the shorter two-page essays, and you arrive at Crocodiled Moats in the Kingdom of Letters, a delightful revisitation of C. P. Snow's 1959 ideas on the the yawning and, to him, growing abyss between "the two cultures", i.e. Science and Humanities, and F. R. Leavis withering criticism of C. P. Snow's hypothesis. In spite of Ozick's bizarre understanding of science as :
The Apprentice's Pillar is a marvellous, lumininous and utterly knock-out blow of intuition and inspiration in which she deftly and entrancingly compares biographies to novels, and wonders:
In Sholem Aleichem's Revolution Cynthia Ozick has written a little gem on Yiddish and Yiddish literature, and particularly on the importance and trascendence of Sholem Aleichem.
A Translator's Monologue is not nearly as successful although it will probably be of interest to anyone who has wrestled with the problem of translation, even if it is not quite Ozick's daunting experience in attempting to translate a Yiddish poem into English. However, at the (formal) heart of the essay are three ideas about translations, which I found weak and unconvincing, thus spoiling most of the essay for me.
Some of the essays go far deeper into Jewish thought and Jewishness than I am capable of going and to be honest, lose me. This happens in essays such as S. Y. Agon and the First Religion and Bialik's hint This is stark contrast with another of the masterpieces in this book, Ozick's essay Ruth, an outstanding, close, kind-hearted, and wonderful reading of the biblical story of Ruth and its transcendent meaning.
Finally in the closing essay, Metaphor and Memory, the author takes a daring imaginative leap to distinguish between Greek thought and Hebrew thought, between a culture she claims is based on inspiration, pythonic inspiration and a culture based on empathy. But the leap, though daring is largely unsuccessful, in my opinion. When she claims:
This book includes 30 essays, and even if only less than ten are truly outstanding, I stand by a four star evaluation.
Skip three essays, including one of the shorter two-page essays, and you arrive at Crocodiled Moats in the Kingdom of Letters, a delightful revisitation of C. P. Snow's 1959 ideas on the the yawning and, to him, growing abyss between "the two cultures", i.e. Science and Humanities, and F. R. Leavis withering criticism of C. P. Snow's hypothesis. In spite of Ozick's bizarre understanding of science as :
...a species of polytheism, or rather, animism: every grain of matter, every path of conception, has its own ruling spirit, its differentiated lawgiver and traffic director.that it is to say, as splinters or shards of meaning, it is fortunate that she moves on to wonder at how the Humanities, the "Belles Lettres, the literary culture has splintered and lost:
...a concordant language of sensibility, an embracing impulse towards integration, above all the conviction of human connectedness [...a] feeling for literary culture as a glowing wholeness.. What is worse, Ozick laments, is that
In the ex-community of letters, factions are in fashion, and the function of factions is to despise [...] English departments have set off theory after theory, and use culture as an instrument to illustrate doctrinal principles, whether Marxist or "French Freud."Some of the most successful essays, like On Permission to Write or the achingly outstanding The Seam of a Snail, simultaneously an eulogy on her larger than life and generous to a fault mother and a terrifying, almost grotesque self-portrait:
I am a kind of human snail, locked in and condemned by my own nature. The ancients believed that the moist track left by the snail as it crept was the snail's own essence, depleting its body little by little; the farther the snail toiled, the smaller it became, until it finally rubbed itself out.This personal glimpse into the author, doesn't always work as well, in Washington Square, 1946, she recalls her awe-struck first (well actually day before first) visit to where she would go to college, and marvels at the wonder of how the world opened up to her as she blossomed intellectually since then -but somehow the essay does not quite jell, perhaps the reader is left outside the college or even misses Washington Square.
The Apprentice's Pillar is a marvellous, lumininous and utterly knock-out blow of intuition and inspiration in which she deftly and entrancingly compares biographies to novels, and wonders:
...whether biography vis-á-vis the novel is vitally intact or fractured -is in short, master or apprentice...A must read.
In Sholem Aleichem's Revolution Cynthia Ozick has written a little gem on Yiddish and Yiddish literature, and particularly on the importance and trascendence of Sholem Aleichem.
A Translator's Monologue is not nearly as successful although it will probably be of interest to anyone who has wrestled with the problem of translation, even if it is not quite Ozick's daunting experience in attempting to translate a Yiddish poem into English. However, at the (formal) heart of the essay are three ideas about translations, which I found weak and unconvincing, thus spoiling most of the essay for me.
Some of the essays go far deeper into Jewish thought and Jewishness than I am capable of going and to be honest, lose me. This happens in essays such as S. Y. Agon and the First Religion and Bialik's hint This is stark contrast with another of the masterpieces in this book, Ozick's essay Ruth, an outstanding, close, kind-hearted, and wonderful reading of the biblical story of Ruth and its transcendent meaning.
Finally in the closing essay, Metaphor and Memory, the author takes a daring imaginative leap to distinguish between Greek thought and Hebrew thought, between a culture she claims is based on inspiration, pythonic inspiration and a culture based on empathy. But the leap, though daring is largely unsuccessful, in my opinion. When she claims:
...Greece was a society that paid no attention to the moral life [...] The Greeks were not only not universalists; they scorned the idea. They were proud of scorning despising the stranger [...] As a society they never undertook to imagine what it was to be the Other; the Outsider; the alien,; the slave; the oppressed; the sufferer; the outcast; the opponent; the barbarian who owns feelings and deserves rights.this sweeps away the key role and importance of almost the whole of Greek tragedy as a communal experience, it particularly chooses to ignore the tragedy of Oedipus or Promethus Bound, those alien Outsiders or the astonishing empathetic choruses in Aeschylus' Persians or Suppliants. And as to the supposed lack of universalism and the lack of attention to the moral life, where does this leave, for example, Plato's The Symposium or The Republic or Aristoteles' Nicomachean Ethics? The leap is disquieting and unsatisfactory in another sense; it leads Ozick into what appears to be the flip side of Nietzche's notorious chastisements of what he termed to be the slave moralities of judeo-christian tradition in Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. Talking of Nietzsche, Ozick's characterization of Greek culture as being based on the Delphic Oracle, also appears to collapse the apollinean and dionysian distinction postulated by Nietzsche into the dionysian. I am also chary and skeptical of Ozick's key assertion that "Inspiration has no memory", without memory, metaphor collapses into the absurdity or surrealism of an umbrella on an operating table or a raven as a writing desk.
This book includes 30 essays, and even if only less than ten are truly outstanding, I stand by a four star evaluation.
August 10, 2015
Ozick concentrate. Smarter than you will ever be. Essays on authors are the strongest. On abstract topics are less strong and tend to wander. Ozick is a better thinker than feeler but owe man, what a thinker. Like watching Evil Kneevil of the mind leap over 15 cars.
December 1, 2021
Ozick really is tops with this book of essays. It opens with an essay on the titular metaphor & memory, and ends with another. I disagree with people who think her novels are great...I just ended up not being able to read, somehow too fussy or too long or whatever. BUT MY GOD this book of essays is extraordinary. Not only for the brilliance of her ideas about each subject, her analysis, her vocabulary, but the whole thing, each one. I'm not good at reviews, but for me these essays were so much more revealing of her talents, and got to me deeper than the fiction.
~ Linda Campbell Franklin
~ Linda Campbell Franklin
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March 31, 2025I both wish I were smarter to better understand this book, and kind of wish I had been alive when some of this was written, as I think it would be easier for me to engage with. Some of the authors reviewed and discussed early in the book have maybe fallen out of fashion a bit, and some are greats that I just haven't read. Ozick's writing on Judaism is too profound for me to appreciate, but it was fun to read in parallel with Bee Season, as many of the themes resonated between the books.
June 14, 2024
Incredible. Just incredible. Ozick is the last of a rare breed, the penetrating critic who can assess literature with a scholarly fervor, yet with the swooning ecstasy that only a writer can inherently experience
July 21, 2017
Esta colección de ensayos está dividida en dos partes: la primera, metaliteraria, la puede disfrutar cualquiera que lea o que escriba o incluso que haga las dos cosas. La segunda, más criticoliteraria, se disfruta más conociendo a los autores; pero tiene una vertiente más personal que, incluso si no es así, puedes identificarte con ella, especialmente en los dedicados a Henry James.
Como experiencia es un gusto y como hallazgo, una delicia. Algunos ensayos son tan delicados, están escritos con tanta lucidez, que podrían ser al mismo tiempo ejemplos de lectura, de composición y de estudio.
Como experiencia es un gusto y como hallazgo, una delicia. Algunos ensayos son tan delicados, están escritos con tanta lucidez, que podrían ser al mismo tiempo ejemplos de lectura, de composición y de estudio.
December 25, 2014
After reading Ozick's collection of essays entitled Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character, I wanted to read more of what she had to say about literature and its link to culture. I was disheartened to see that the collection Metaphor & Memory had been plundered to make up a large portion of the first collection I'd read. That collection was filled with an autobiographical element: as a whole it was a personal testament to the art of writing and reading. In this earlier collection of essays, there were clearly a good deal of the more occasional pieces, ie, literary reviews of contemporary works for periodicals.
Nonetheless, I contented myself by re-reading the exceptional essays—The Question of Our Speech, Ruth, and Metaphor and Memory—as well as the reviews, all of which are far more erudite than any that might appear in the Arts & Leisure section of one's local newspaper. Henry James Unborn Child is a thrilling imaginative re-creation of the circumstances surrounding the composition of a short story that James had left unfinished and which was recently unearthed. Why, she wonders, in a field that is crowded with post graduates seeking to make a mark, has no one taken the time to look more closely at this particular story? Her psycho-analytic interpretation itself is a masterstroke of story telling, of truth telling that is at the heart of fiction writing, the fabrication that entertains and enlightens.
Her review of Shmuel Yosef Agnon's newly translated novel Edo and Enam (in her essay S.Y. Agnon and the First Religion) is an extended commentary on the parameters of translation and the expulsion of the Greek sybyline "first religion" from the Judaic Law, metaphorically a call for those in exile to return to Jerusalem. Lofty speculative stuff, but entertaining.
What Drives Saul Bellow is a review of his collection of novellas, Him with His Foot in his Mouth, which resolves into a discussion of Bellow's uncanny ability to observe and record, to combine street smarts with the overriding bliss of learning. Ozick's words about Bellow: "And Bellow's quick-witted lives of near-poets, as recklessly confident in the play and intricacy of ideas as those of the grand Russians, are Russian also in the gusts of natural force that sweep through them: unpredictable cadences, instances where the senses fuse ('A hoarse sun rolled up'), single adjectives that stamp whole portraits, portraits that stamp whole lives (hair from which 'the kink of high vigor had gone out'), the knowing hand on the ropes of how-thing-work, the stunning catalogues of worldliness ('commodity brokers, politicians, person-injury lawyers, bagmen and fixers, salesmen and promoters'), the boiling presence of Chicago, with its 'private recess for seduction and skulduggery.'"
Ozick is no less discerning, erudite, and entertaining with reviews of Primo Levi, William Gaddis, J. M. Coetze, et al., and in a series of essays about modernism, post-modernism, and what literature might look like after the muse departs.
All good stuff, made less impressive because so much of what is best here is also the substance of her later collection, for which I had these concluding words in my Goodreads review:
All the essays are worth their reading, and each holds in it the seed of Ozick's essential premise: the ability of literature to edify and even redeem the attentive reader.
Nonetheless, I contented myself by re-reading the exceptional essays—The Question of Our Speech, Ruth, and Metaphor and Memory—as well as the reviews, all of which are far more erudite than any that might appear in the Arts & Leisure section of one's local newspaper. Henry James Unborn Child is a thrilling imaginative re-creation of the circumstances surrounding the composition of a short story that James had left unfinished and which was recently unearthed. Why, she wonders, in a field that is crowded with post graduates seeking to make a mark, has no one taken the time to look more closely at this particular story? Her psycho-analytic interpretation itself is a masterstroke of story telling, of truth telling that is at the heart of fiction writing, the fabrication that entertains and enlightens.
Her review of Shmuel Yosef Agnon's newly translated novel Edo and Enam (in her essay S.Y. Agnon and the First Religion) is an extended commentary on the parameters of translation and the expulsion of the Greek sybyline "first religion" from the Judaic Law, metaphorically a call for those in exile to return to Jerusalem. Lofty speculative stuff, but entertaining.
What Drives Saul Bellow is a review of his collection of novellas, Him with His Foot in his Mouth, which resolves into a discussion of Bellow's uncanny ability to observe and record, to combine street smarts with the overriding bliss of learning. Ozick's words about Bellow: "And Bellow's quick-witted lives of near-poets, as recklessly confident in the play and intricacy of ideas as those of the grand Russians, are Russian also in the gusts of natural force that sweep through them: unpredictable cadences, instances where the senses fuse ('A hoarse sun rolled up'), single adjectives that stamp whole portraits, portraits that stamp whole lives (hair from which 'the kink of high vigor had gone out'), the knowing hand on the ropes of how-thing-work, the stunning catalogues of worldliness ('commodity brokers, politicians, person-injury lawyers, bagmen and fixers, salesmen and promoters'), the boiling presence of Chicago, with its 'private recess for seduction and skulduggery.'"
Ozick is no less discerning, erudite, and entertaining with reviews of Primo Levi, William Gaddis, J. M. Coetze, et al., and in a series of essays about modernism, post-modernism, and what literature might look like after the muse departs.
All good stuff, made less impressive because so much of what is best here is also the substance of her later collection, for which I had these concluding words in my Goodreads review:
All the essays are worth their reading, and each holds in it the seed of Ozick's essential premise: the ability of literature to edify and even redeem the attentive reader.
April 12, 2016
Un libro de ensayo que se disfruta como alta literatura por cómo está escrito. Interesantes reflexiones sobre lenguaje, cultura e historia, en la primera parte, y curiosos análisis de biografías de diversos autores y autoras, donde el biógrafo cae también bajo el escrutinio impasible de Ozick.
La autora que se deja entrever, sin embargo, me ha provocado mucho rechazo. Los ensayos están originalmente publicados entre los años 80 y principios de los 2000, y muestran un rechazo elitista a las por entonces nuevas tecnologías, así como un fuerte desprecio por la cultura popular, sin atender a todos los matices que merece algo consumido por miles de millones de personas en todo el mundo.
La autora que se deja entrever, sin embargo, me ha provocado mucho rechazo. Los ensayos están originalmente publicados entre los años 80 y principios de los 2000, y muestran un rechazo elitista a las por entonces nuevas tecnologías, así como un fuerte desprecio por la cultura popular, sin atender a todos los matices que merece algo consumido por miles de millones de personas en todo el mundo.
July 29, 2016
La manera en que Ozick se expresa y desarrolla sus ideas es genial. Dura, inteligente, antipática, honesta y humilde. Imposible que no simpatizar con ella o su pensamiento después de leer sus ensayos.
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