METAPHOR & MEMORY Essays by Cynthia...

METAPHOR & MEMORY Essays by Cynthia Ozick (Alfred A. Knopf: $19.95; 283 pp.) Whether defending the written culture against domination by the aural (“That specks on a paper can turn into tale or philosophy is as deep a marvel as alchemy or wizardry”), illuminating how South African writer J. M. Coetzee discloses, “in the language of the imagination, the lumbering hoaxes and self-deceptions of stupidity,” or meditating on the state of Jewish identity and culture in the modern Diaspora, these 30 previously published essays glow with a bright wit and an incandescent sensitivity to art’s responsibility as a moral force. Occasionally, Ozick’s concept of “moral fiction” seems stiflingly narrow. She criticizes Primo Levi’s Holocaust reflections, for instance, for “muting the question of absolution”: “Levi appears to be the one who least troubles, least wounds, least implicates, the reader.” Levi’s attempt to show how the Holocaust encouraged deep shame in its victims was more original, however, than a simple castigation of the Germans for their lack of shame, the more common and, Ozick seems to think, the only responsible approach. Most of these essays excel, nevertheless, for their deeply reflective exploration of the way culture colors belief and perception. Rather than launching a voguish deconstructionist attack on the way cultural memories distort, Ozick celebrates myths and metaphors for the way they enrich our identity: “Through metaphor, the past has the capacity to imagine us, and we it. The strong can imagine the weak. Illuminated lives can imagine the dark. Poets in their twilight can imagine the borders of stellar fire.”