Cynthia Ozick has a din in her head, but it doesn’t mean she is crazy. She’s just feeling “that relentless inward hum of fragility and hope and transcendence and dread.” She finds its source chiefly in “the art of the novel; in the novel’s infinity of plasticity and elasticity.” (162)
Is God a character in a novel? In God: A Biography, by Jack Miles, God (per Ozick)
has an indelible, even a familiar, human personality, not unlike the mercurial protagonist of an epic, or an opera, or a labyrinth of motives by Henry James. (234)
Ozick isn’t happy with this view:
[I]f the God of the Bible is not “real,” then—in creative-writing-course argot—the Bible’s stories won’t and don’t work. For the faithless skeptic or rationalist confronting Scripture (a category of modernity that includes, I suppose, most of us), there is nothing more robust to lean on than suspension of disbelief, the selfsame device one brings to Jane Austin. Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightly, salvational creations both, are not real; we believe in them anyway. Causality deserves better. Causality escapes the mere “comes to life” of character. (
And in the Bible, she says,
[T]he antique words, on their own power, and even in a latter-day language, draw us elsewhere, to that indeterminate place where God is not a literary premise but a persuasive certainty—whether or not we are willing to go there.
It is (I mean this without disrespect) a decidedly odd conclusion, or non-conclusion. God in the Bible is a success because he "doesn't work?" The point invites, to put it mildly, more development. Ozick says that “most of us” read Scripture as faithless skeptics or rationalists. Does she, I wonder, include herself?
All quotations from Cynthia Ozick, The Din in the Head: Essays (2006).
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