Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers

Cynthia Ozick’s erudition is formidable, though it is not the claustral cerebration of Umberto Eco. It seems appropriate, however, to mention erudition up front, because The Puttermesser Papers is an awfully smart book but also an awfully humane one, though its humanity really becomes apparent only in its final section. The word awful, as admixture of fear and reverence, carries weighty metaphysical connotations (viz. Fear and Trembling); consider the verse from which Kierkegaard took his title: ‘as you have always obeyed – not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence – continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling’ (Philippians 2. 12). For salvation, we always look up to something bigger than we are, something beyond our capacity for expression; this invokes not fear of the unknown but fear of the cannot-be-known: something absent and ineffable that still holds us in thrall. No wonder we tremble.

            Ozick’s collection of short stories explores, variously, female desire, the perils of art mediating life, and the nature of language. There are riffs on origins and purity, George Eliot, and John Milton. The scope is intimidating but is leavened by witty, stylish prose; this description of an Upper West Side apartment’s bathroom is a gem:

The bathroom sink, if you should happen to locate it in the dark (the light switch will be permanently hidden), is embroidered with the brown grime of its ancient cracks, like the lines of an astrological map; the base of the toilet, when you flush it, will trickle out a niggardly rusty stream (195).

Ruth Puttermesser, the stories’ eponymous heroine, is probably the sharpest knife in the drawer, though ironically her name means ‘butter knife.’ She dreams of becoming mayor of New York and transforming it into a city of aesthetic ideals: not just any ideals but Platonic ideals. Though a devotee of Socrates (she starts a political party called the ‘Independents for Socratic and Prophetic Idealism’), Ruth best identifies with his most famous student; her deference to Plato is worthy of her biblical namesake. Plato’s theory of the Forms holds that abstract ideals must lie behind our perceptions, but these ideals will be perpetually out of reach, their ‘completion deferred’ (66). But while in some sort of theosophic trance, Ruth intuits a possible solution to uniting the ideal with tangible: she creates a golem. Definitionally down-to-earth, the golem, we are informed, ‘is above all a realist’, though its Platonic link is nominally maintained when it christens itself Xanthippe (70). (Somewhat nonplussed by her creation, Ruth initially tries to name it Leah after Jacob’s less-favoured wife.)

This allows Ozick to dramatize a particular post-structuralist preoccupation: do we wield language or vice versa? Ruth imprints her golem’s forehead with ‘three letters that are the Hebrew word for truth’ (46), but as Xanthippe, animated but not alive, becomes language’s manifestation, Ruth quickly loses control over her. She is Ruth’s ‘amanuensis’, but her tone is ‘erratic’ and an ‘awful pastiche’ (51). Ruth’s own language often fails to impress: when ordered to make Ruth’s bed, Xanthippe interprets ‘make’ as ‘makeover’ and buys a Statue of Liberty lamp and a ‘blue bedspread [covered] with pictures of baseball mitts’ (52). Xanthippe’s defence, ‘all the stores around here are closed on Sunday’, does little to placate Ruth: ‘When I said to make the bed I just meant to straighten the blankets, that’s all.’ An early caution: if one cannot control language, one cannot control a golem.

This odd couple kvetching is fun and keeps the story’s high-conceptual concerns from weighing too heavily; but more fun, and more ambitious, is the way in which Ozick mixes linguistic play with an examination of female desire.

In Timaeus, Plato adduces an idiosyncratic contribution to the science of sexuality: the titular character portentously attributes ‘all varieties of disease’ to a malevolent womb ‘wandering in every direction through the body, clos[ing] up the passages of breath’. (2607-2609) Ruth has internalised this ancient fear of unchecked female sexuality, and has effectively sublimated desire to idealism.  She irks her lover by reading aloud from Plato’s Theaetetus, though in the passage she reads, Socrates warns of ‘the Thracian maidservant who exercised her wit at the expense of Thales, when he was looking up to study the stars and tumbled down a well (23).’ Ruth is both maidservant and Thales, but though chaste, her creation Xanthippe is gravid with sexual yearning.

Ozick cleverly alloys ideas of linguistic uncertainty with gender. Male desire inevitably trumps female desire: after all, foundational to Freudian theory is the notion that a girl envies her father’s phallus. Xanthippe, however, upends this binary: her libido and her waistline grow, and her ‘despairing will’ to procreate terrorizes New York City, which ‘sweats and coughs in her terrifying embrace (86-87).’ Libidinal language has run amok, and no one is prepared for incarnate female desire. New York politics may be used to sex scandals, but not on this scale.

The golem tale is an obvious centrepiece, but Puttermesser Papers’ last story is the most affecting.  Ruth perpetually substitutes art for life, to the extent she imagines herself to be George Eliot; when she dies she attains the paradisiacal ideal she craves, but at a cost. Paradise is necessarily timeless, and ‘where there is no time, there is no endurance.’ (234) Ruth may be ‘perfectly fulfilled! – in her sexual parts, in the golden beauty of her child, in the gold of Plato’s eyes, and in the newest heat of her mind,’ but her joys are evanescent. The final pages are gorgeously, unbearably sad: ‘everyone who is supernally happy in Paradise, happier than ever before, will soon become preternaturally unhappy, unhappier than ever before.  A dream that flowers only to be undone will bring more misery than a dream that has never come true at all (234).’ It may be a variation on the ‘better to have loved’ cliché, but Ruth has loved knowledge, and her knowledge inheres her Fall. She aspired to the Platonic ideal, and the world seemed all before her, but through Eden she must take her solitary way.

Works Referenced

Cynthia Ozick, The Puttermesser Papers (London: Vintage, 2000)

Plato, Timaeus <http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rac101/concord/texts/timaeus/files/timaeus1.html#2605>