Ozick vs. Sontag

The great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, in “What Mr. Cogito Thinks About Hell,” left us a satirical fable on the pretensions of self-proclaimed anti-bourgeois artists:

“The lowest circle of hell. Contrary to prevailing opinion it is inhabited neither by despots nor matricides, not even by those who go after the bodies of others. It is the refuge of artists, full of mirrors, musical instruments, and pictures. At first glance this is the most luxurious infernal department, without tar, fire, or physical tortures.

“Throughout the year competitions, festivals, and concerts are held here. There is no climax to the season. The climax is permanent and almost absolute. Every few months new trends come into being and nothing, it appears, is capable of stopping the triumphant march of the avant-garde.

“Beelzebub loves art. He boasts that already his choruses, his poets, and his painters are nearly superior to those of heaven. He who has better art has better government – that’s clear. Soon they will be able to measure their strength against one another at the Festival of the Two Worlds. And then we will see what remains of Dante, Fra Angelico, and Bach.

“Beelzebub supports the arts. He provides his artists with calm, good board, and absolute isolation from hellish life.”

Artists playing at revolution, like toddlers playing Dress-Up-Like-Mommy, would be an amusing spectacle if not for the sway they hold over so many arbiters of culture – critics, teachers and the people holding the purse strings, in and out of government. These “unacknowledged legislators of the world” endorse the slogan handed down by the fascist and anti-Semite, Ezra Pound -- “Make it new,” while the only slogan worthy of art is “Make it excellent.”

I got into this snit while reading a brief essay by Cynthia Ozick in the March issue of The New Criterion. “Susan Sontag: Discord & Desire” places the inordinately admired and influential novelist and essayist, who died last year, in an evolving and ultimately triumphant cultural context. It’s an interesting pairing of author and subject, the sort favored by pundits: Sontag, a celebrity for 40 years, beautiful, brainy, provocative, modish, arid; Ozick, even brainier, religious, heir of George Eliot, Henry James and Saul Bellow, our nearest embodiment of the all-around “man of letters.”

Ozick admits she was initially seduced by Sontag, like so many of us, in the 1960s: “Perhaps I was too easily swayed, or too readily impressed, or simply too timidly willing to accept what seemed at the time to be an enduring cultural authoritativeness. Or else a prior eternity, what until then had always been seen to be eternity, was now being crushed and thrown all over the horizon in irrelevant shards. That eternity was the belief, now grown useless, in the impermeability of high art; it was whatever principles of discrimination had been esteemed before. And what had been esteemed before was surely not `pop.’”

Zbigniew Herbert was a veteran of the century that raised anti-humanity to a systematic art and art to the “the aridness of a stringent metaphysics,” in Ozick’s words. He was an excellent student, and Hitler and Stalin were his tutors. Others chose not to learn their lessons. Politics has destroyed more writers than vodka. Bravely, Ozick reminds us these lessons include remembering “it is still possible to separate high from low, the enduring from the ephemeral; even to aver that intellect itself (and the ethical life as well) requires the making of distinctions – sorting out, acknowledging that one thing is not another thing, facing down blur and fusion and the moral and aesthetic confusion of false equivalence, and, in the name of appetite for life, false worth.”