Wresting Life from the Void
APPLE, MAX
Wresting Life from the Void The Cannibal Galaxy By Cynthia Ozick Knopf. 216 pp. $11.95. Reviewed by Max Apple Author, "The Oranging of America," "Zap" In one of his most often quoted...
...From the Fleg School Beulah Lilt...
...For Cynthia Ozick never forgets that education is formation...
...The Cannibal Galaxy is almost like a William Blake poem in the way it clearly and fearlessly attempts to look at the central mysteries of creation...
...Tohu vavohu, emptiness and desolation...
...Perhaps she does cannibalize Beulah, but the cannibalization is only the beginning...
...From the void the cosmos...
...Hester Lilt consumes the novel...
...He talks to her on the phone, he alights upon her ideas...
...Still, he is the only person in the milieu of the Fleg School who can discern the raw brilliance, the cannibalizing and life giving of Hester Lilt...
...Reviewed by Max Apple Author, "The Oranging of America," "Zap" In one of his most often quoted statements, Einstein said he wanted to understand how God made the universe...
...From the mummified prose surrounding us these glorious words of Cynthia Ozick...
...The void is the world, it is also the main character of The Cannibal Galaxy, Joseph Brill...
...Cynthia Ozick has never bothered with details...
...There is no safe middle way to do this...
...Secure in his limited understanding, Brill marries his Iris and produces out ofthevoid another creature of the middle, Naphtali, a brilliant son who will study business administration...
...He is in his 60s before he is able to pursue the true dual curriculum, himself and another, marriage...
...It survives the Holocaust, it survives the teeming middle, it survives all efforts to domesticate and label it...
...In a conventional novel Brill's story would be more than enough...
...Both Hesters by their understanding of emptiness transcend the mediocrity, the mere details by which they are judged...
...The heavens have their true language, the earth labors in tongues...
...The mother and her odd daughter remind me in their names and their functions of Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, the wearer of the scarlet letter, and her mysterious child, Pearl...
...Empty and desolate is the condition of the uncreated universe, empty and desolate is the condition of post-Holocaust Europe, empty and desolate is the condition of suburban American life and education, empty and desolate is the life of an aging man who has no offspring, no hope for the future...
...Brill, the astronomer, does not understand...
...Indeed, Hester Lilt is one of the cannibal galaxies, "those megalosaurian colonies of primordial gases that devour smaller brother galaxies, and when the meal is made, the victim continues to rotate like a Jonah-dervish inside the cannibal, while the sated ogre galaxy, its gaseous belly stretched, soporific, never spins at all-motionless as digesting death...
...Hester Lilt, for her refusal to live in the "middle" is an outsider in Principal Brill's world of false achievements...
...He keeps looking for the dynamic intellect of the mother in the dreamy child...
...When he seeks life, he does so tentatively, in the anonymity of the middle...
...You make things fit what she is...
...For eight years he courts Hester Lilt, not a courtship of the body but of their gravitational spheres...
...All yourconvictions...
...As Brill in his old age turns to the safety of the middle, a cozy apartment and a saucy young wife, Hester Lilt and Beulah return to Paris, to the old world...
...When Principal Brill becomes engaged to a young woman who carries the name of a flower, he thinks he has finally understood Hester Lilt...
...In The Cannibal Galaxy she approaches, through her fictional characters, the grandeur of understanding, the understanding that is locked in the second sentence of Genesis: "And the earth was astonishingly empty...
...quiet, uninspired, the "tail" of her class...
...Hester is the philosopher of emptiness, the outsider in the suburban world full of people getting ahead...
...Beulah emerges, herself a nimbus...
...You surround her...
...From the cannibalization comes the flame...
...Alloutof Beulah...
...We water down the dual curriculum, we misread Rabbi Akiva, we raise our children to get good grades...
...All your metaphysics," he tells her in their last phone conversation...
...All your philosophy...
...Brill has seen the terrestrial monster up close, the Nazi machinery, devouring his brothers and sisters...
...From the eaten gaseous material the universe radiates...
...Fiction, of course, cannot aspire toward such understanding, but the distinctions between central matters and the rest are sometimes as apparent in art as in science...
...Hester Prynne, for what the Puritans label a sin, lives outside her society...
...For eight years Brill follows the quiet, uninspired daughter...
...Look how you use, you eat, you cannibalize your own child...
...the rest, he declared, "is details...
...You justify her...
...From the destruction of the European Jews, from the emptiness of Brill's life, from the failures of the dual curriculum a wonder emerges: an artist...
...That artist, Beulah Lilt, was once a mediocre student in the Edmund Fleg School...
...His survival, his memories, his struggle to achieve a "dual curriculum" are all couched in a brilliantly satirical narrative whose targets are the aggressive mothers, the doctor-fathers with their ubiquitous cameras, the ambitious students, the lazy and narrow-minded teachers, the entire cast of that enshrined idol we call education...
...The Hebrew words tohu vavohu, "empty and desolate," seem to me the center of this wonderful novel...
...Now the principal of a middle school in Middle America, Brill is a survivor of the Holocaust, a onetime astronomer who has let himself be reduced to his meaningless motto, "ad astra...
...Yet true creation survives all canni-balizations...
...The heavens are gaseous," Hester Lilt says, "and their language is physics...
...The Cannibal Galaxy moves with great subtlety through these various meanings of empty and desolate, the cosmic, the social and the personal meanings...
...Principal Brill admitted her to the school only because he recognized the intellectual vitality of her mother, Hester Lilt...
...out of the void something, out of tohu vavohu somehow another generation...
...You invent around her...
...He forgets creation, he forgets primordial power, he forgets that everything comes from emptiness and desolation...
...But even this inspired satire of the Edmund Fleg Middle School is simply a detail...
...If Beulah doesn't open her mouth then you analyze silence...
...We miss the creation that is before our eyes...
...You need her, you need her to be nothing so you can be something...
...Cynthia Ozick has created Joseph Brill so that we can see Hester Lilt reflected through him...
...We forget that these are details, we forget to aspire to the language of the heavens...
...There, in the contemplation of forms, Hester Lilt cannibalizes and creates...
...Time to Joseph Brill is geologic time...
...She's Genesis Chapter One, verse two-tohu vavohu, unformed and void, darkness over the deep, so you can spin out your creation from her...
...Terrified and dulled by the world, Brill forgets the language of the heavens...
...Brill, a survivor who has seen Europe eaten, can see emptiness and desolation but not the Spirit hovering over the void...
...She "forms" her child by understanding thesilence, thedreaminess...
Vol. 66 • December 1983 • No. 23
