1 The Last Reader in the Whole World All things come to an end. The history of reading begins in the shadows: clay tablets in Mesopotamia; finger-marks on cave walls. How this history ends is more obscure. But it will end. Consult any literary periodical, and you’ll see that the demise of reading is prophesied daily. I can’t live without reading, and perhaps neither can you. Humanity, however, can survive without it. After all, we’ve lived with less.

Let us imagine, then, that in ten thousand years, or sooner, an anointed person will be born: The Last Reader in the Whole World.

Picture her in a red blanket with golden braid, cooing in a crib, straining against her swaddling, sulking in her mother’s arms. She is a demanding infant. Day and night she bucks and writhes, venting anguish at her condition. Her cries are deep, guttural, rising from the earth.

Her exhausted parents find that only one thing will pacify her: stories, words; words woven like a blanket to protect and hold her; words woven artfully, like the red blanket with golden braid, to beautify her precarious existence. So her parents, themselves among the last readers to exist, submit to her need. They haul books to the cradle and let her teethe on the spines. They read to her the stories of their people, replacing her sad howl of inarticulacy with a stream of words.

As she grows up, the girl comes to understand that she is the last of her kind ever to be, the last to know literature and its enlargements. Possibly she lives in a high-tech world of glistening virtuality in which the written word has fallen into disuse. Maybe she lives in a world of cataclysm and devastation, of bombed-out classrooms and libraries toppled into the ocean. Whatever the cause, she is The Last, the endpoint of a vast tradition.

Her predicament, while strange, is strangely familiar. It recapitulates, in extreme form, the problems of modernism: artists severed from their audiences, doubtful about the future of their art, unsure of their way forward, obliged to reckon with a tradition they cannot imitate or return to.

In considering how she should act, The Last Reader will do what she always does: she’ll read. With time, she’ll come to the modernists. With luck, she’ll find an unusual writer whose voice on the page is that of a modernist out of time: an American writer named Cynthia Ozick. I say “luck,” because if I could send The Last Reader a single emissary, someone who could help her interpret and make sense of her position, I would send Ozick.

Cynthia Ozick? The writer who describes herself in interviews as “unknown, totally obscure” and judges that her work will “quickly fall into posthumous eclipse”? Who predicts, in a fantastical meditation on literary ambition, that she will “not survive even as ‘minor’”? Cynthia Ozick as our ambassador for the lonely reader of the future? Yes, the one and only. In Ozick’s body of work, the dilemmas The Last Reader faces are handled with disarming frankness and intensity. The immensity of the literary past, the vanishing of the literary future, the pleasure and anguish of a mind cultivated in isolation: all these problems are explored in a corpus of astonishing style and vision.

In her pugilistic essay “The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel’s Ghostly Twin,” Ozick issues an italicized warning: “the readers are going away.” Going, going, gone: the audience for “the serious literary novel has gone the way of the typewriter and the telephone booth and fedoras and stockings with seams.” (Even an observer as discerning as Ozick couldn’t have predicted he ephemeral above the major. And it risks diminishing literary criticism into a niche province of cultural history. Criticism is about insight and interpretation, not fact-finding. An author’s archive turns up details, anecdotes, the stuff of biography. But its real value for the critic, as opposed to the historian or biographer, lies in the mind-meld it can intensify between writer and reader.

In Ozick’s case, the letters are most interesting when least biographical, most memorable when they approach the status of fiction-in-miniature or essay-in-embryo. Nearly every page offers surprising turns of phrase (as when she comforts a dejected writer by saying that most editors think “books are potatoes”). And there are bursts of imaginative whimsy, experimental in the manner of, say, Emily Dickinson. In a 1973 letter, she muses, “It would be nice to be a Stone … To talk Stone-talk about Stone-things!” (Dickinson: “How happy is the little Stone / That rambles in the Road alone / And doesn’t care about Careers…”) Elsewhere, turning down an offered editorial position, Ozick writes:

I would not be good for your masthead because you would have a Nobody on it, and your masthead would not be good for me because it would make me look like a Somebody, and if anybody wants to go on making up stories they’d better not go around pretending to be a Somebody, because one of the things you need to make up stories with is your pristine Nobodyhood…

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

These flourishes are among the most distinctive moments in the letters. But they don’t point us back to the life. They point us toward her published writings, and especially to her essays, where her experimental tendencies — the voice-play, the metaphysical elasticity, the Nabokovian lilt and spin of language — achieve their fullest expression.

3 The Marrow of a Mind

Scholars have written many histories and taxonomies of the essay as a literary form, conventionally beginning with Montaigne’s discovery of metaphysical insight in such subjects as smells and thumbs and sleep, alighting thereafter on the great eighteenth-century English periodicals, and culminating with the essay’s strange status in our century — a literary period in which some of our most acclaimed fiction has virtually dispensed with plot and character to become perplexingly, sometimes irritatingly, essayistic.

Ozick, tasked with contemplating the essay, does something else. She imagines her — the essay — as a woman glimpsed in a doorway, “moody, fickle, given on a whim to changing her clothes, or the subject.” The difference between the scholarly taxonomies and Ozick’s “portrait of the essay as a warm body” exemplifies what the literary essay can do. An essay is not a tract or polemic or dictate or work of scholarship. It is, as in Ozick’s “portrait,” a reverie, a chance, “a stroll through someone’s mazy mind.” The essay’s strength resides in its capacity to meander. “No one is freer than the essayist,” Ozick judges, “free to leap out in any direction, to hop from thought to thought.”

This imaginative liberty, however, is less vivid than it once was, because the literary essay “has left the common culture.” It is increasingly displaced by the “article,” by quick blasts of text designed to be inhaled rather than pondered. For Ozick, the essay embodies thought, while the article offers a cheap, hurried simulacrum of it: “The essay reflects on its predecessors, and spirals organically out of a context, like a green twig from a living branch. The article rushes on, amnesiac, despising the meditative, reveling in gossip and polemics, a courtier of the moment.” The article’s speed may seem like an advantage, but it comes at a price. “Articles swindle almost by nature,” she warns, “because superficiality is a swindle.”

The essay’s diminution is, of course, part of a larger story: a retreat from reading so sweeping that Ozick deems it a return to an “aural culture.” In the age of Dickens, as Ozick tells it, people of all walks of life would regularly undertake a stupendous cognitive act: “the silent physiological translation of letters into sounds, the leaping eye encoding.” Mass reading had the enormous virtue of conferring “the greatest complexity on the greatest number.” Now, she says, reading is once again “the province of an elite class,” while the culture at large has returned to “the pre-literate status of face-to-face speech”:

In 1930 the so-called shopgirl, with her pulp romance, is habitually engaged in this electrifying webwork of eye and mind. In 1980 she reverts, via electronics, to the simple speaking face.

The problem with an aural culture, in Ozick’s verdict, is that it is a “culture of theater.” Aesthetic objects designed to be seen and heard, rather than read, tend to be “broader, brighter, larger, louder, simpler, less intimate, more insistent — moretheatrical— than any page of any book.” In other words, the Times Square-ification of culture. Behind this suspicion of theatricality there lingers the famous scene, invoked in several of Ozick’s essays, of Henry James’s “descent into failure and public humiliation,” when after the opening of his 1895 playGuy Domvillethe august author was boorishly booed offstage.

And yet: Ozick’s essays are, in their quiet eye-encoding way, flagrantly, deliciously, exhilaratingly, maddeningly theatrical. The experience of reading may be cognitively and phenomenologically distinct from watching a movie or going to a play. But between the covers of a book, an author performs as a theater troupe of one. Ozick knows this. The writer, she says, “acts all the roles, wears all the costumes, and dreams all the scenery.”

Across her essays Ozick assumes a proliferation of personae, flitting among masks, costumes, identities. Here she is a snail with “tiny twin horns,” there a conjoined twin demanding a severance from her double. Best Actress goes to Ozick as a heartsick lover who, at a friend’s wedding, falls so intensely in love with the bridegroom that when she receives a postcard from the happy honeymooning couple, she painstakingly traces over his handwriting in lustrous pencil until “each of the letters bore on the its back the graphite coat I had slowly, slowly laid over it.” But she is also Best Actor, for her performance, in another essay, as Henry James: “Even without close examination, you could see the light glancing off my pate; you could see my heavy chin, my watch chain, my walking stick, my tender paunch.”

“Coiled in the bottom-most pit of every driven writer,” Ozick affirms, “is an impersonator — protean, volatile, restless and relentless.” The writer, invisible yet omnipresent, is more chameleonic than any actor, capable of entering “a sex not her own” or “the leg of a mosquito.”

This adventurous self-plasticity is just one of the essays’ boundary-collapsing features. Her literary criticism presses on the genre’s conventions, drawing on fictive techniques to depict the private lives of the authors under discussion. Ozick escorts us, for example, into Edith Wharton’s bed, where she claims Wharton’s “real life” took place. “Visualize the bed,” Ozick instructs: “she used a writing board.” In bed, free from her corset, Wharton wrote her novels, dropping page after page on the floor for her secretary to pick up. Ozick’s reconstruction of Virginia Woolf is more intimate and more shocking. She imagines Woolf in the throes of madness, howling and clawing her attendants. Leonard Woolf, she notes, was a Jew who married into “the finest stratum in England,” and this was “a birthright he paid for by spooning porridge between Virginia Woolf’s resisting lips.” Elsewhere we find bold literary-historical counterfactuals, such as the suggestion that had Anne Frank lived, she would have become a famous writer nonetheless, perhaps in the vein of Nadine Gordimer.

Ozick’s handling of holy texts claims similar imaginative license. Ozick has long been aware of a tension between religious duty and aesthetic pleasure. In her early short story “The Pagan Rabbi,” a rabbi falls in love with a dryad, and the dryad reveals to him the nature of his soul. His soul, we learn, takes the shape of an old man trudging along a dusty road, bent under a bag stuffed with books: “He reads the Law and breathes the dust and doesn’t see the flowers.” The story takes as its epigraph a prohibition on distracted delight from the Mishnah:

Rabbi Jacob said: “He who is walking along and studying, but then breaks off to remark, ‘How lovely is that tree!” or ‘How beautiful is that fallow field!’ — Scripture regards such a one as having hurt his own being.”

But when Ozick plays the rabbi, as she does in her essay “Ruth,” she fills her text with flowers. There are no flowers in the Book of Ruth, only sheaves of barley. But Ozick insists: “The flowers are there all the same, even if the text doesn’t show them.” She rapturously catalogues the flowers of her childhood, “violets, lilacs, roses, daisies, dandelions, black-eyed Susans, tiger lilies, pansies.” She invokes Tolstoy’s descriptions of ox-eye daisies and bright blue cornflowers to fill in the flora that the Bible’s tale of grain-gleaning supposedly leaves out. Revising Scripture, she arrives at a rapprochement between the lessons of the Torah and the demands of a luxuriant aestheticism. This is not ordinary biblical criticism.

Indeed, in Ozick’s essays, there’s little that’s ordinary. Even the category of “the ordinary” becomes, for her, a “riddle.” Subjecting everyday experience to scrutiny has been a special concern of the literary essay ever since Montaigne trained his attention on thumbs and noses and “the custom of wearing clothing.” But for Ozick, the ordinary is something that’s “extraordinarily dangerous to notice,” dangerous because when we notice the ordinary, we tend to sanctify it, “making the Ordinary into the Extraordinary.” Rejoicing in ordinariness, Ozick warns, promotes a slide into idolatry, directing reverence toward “the tree instead of God, the rapture-bringing horizon instead of God.”

We are so warned: and yet a signature feature of her essays is the exaltation of the ordinary via juxtaposition to the cosmic. Thus in “Existing Things” the mica glistening in the pavement invites wonder about everything in existence, until we are led from the humble glinting flakes in the sidewalk to Micah the prophet. In “The Shock of Teapots,” a stone glimpsed in Stockholm conjures an image of the entire planet, “girdled” and “stone-speckled,” a whirling celestial body that is, in turn, compressed into “the marvelous globe of the human eye.” And in “The Ladle” a kitchen utensil “made of commonplace stainless steel” becomes the Little Dipper of the night sky. Ozick’s ladle dips deeper, deeper, until it morphs into a “cosmic receptacle” that “dips down, down, down into memory and imagination, into the bottomlessness of the word,” scooping up everything that art and science and philosophy and poetry have ever known.

Ozick will sometimes speak of literary creation as intrinsically experimental. “Nearly every essay, like every story, is an experiment, not a credo,” she advises in a “Forewarning” to the essay collectionMetaphor & Memory. In her essay “Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means,” she writes: “Every new sentence, every new fragment of imaginative literature born into the world, is a heart-in-the-mouth experiment, and for its writer a profound chanciness.” With equal ardor, however, she professes a disdain for the new, and she compares “experimental” writing unfavorably with work that recognizably extends what has come before. “I have no interest in ‘the new,’” she writes in her short statement of principle “Pear Tree and Polar Bear.” “The secrets that engage me — that sweep me away — are generally secrets of inheritance, how the pear seed becomes a pear tree, for instance, rather than a polar bear.” Against rupture and metamorphosis Ozick consistently elevates continuity and tradition.

This coincidence of experimentalism and fealty to the past poses a riddle for interpreters of Ozick’s work. Critics have generally responded by de-emphasizing her experimental qualities, casting her instead as sage, scholar, guardian of tradition, and Jamesian acolyte. Ozick’s own statements on literary novelty sometimes muddy the matter, as when, in “Innovation and Redemption,” she attempts a shaky distinction between the experimental and the innovative, claiming the experimental derives solely from method, while the innovative “imagines something we have never experienced before.”

A better answer comes from the end of her panoramic essay “T. S. Eliot at 101,” when she reflects on why a poem like “The Waste Land” could not be written today. “The Waste Land,” dense with allusion, is a modernist monument veined like marble with crisscrossing connections to the past. It relies for its power on an awareness of history as both a resource and a problem. That relation to history has been obliterated:

because we seem content to live without contemplation of our formal beginnings, a poem like “The Waste Land,” mourning the loss of an integral tradition, is for us inconceivable. For the modernists, the center notoriously did not hold; for us (whatever we are), there is no recollection of a center, and nothing to miss, let alone mourn … Ironic allusiveness — Eliot’s inspired borrowing — is out of the question: there is nothing in stock to allude to.

Or: without tradition, there is no experiment. To be severed from the past means there is nothing to rupture, nothing to alter, nothing from which to diverge. There is no “new” without the “old.” Championing literary tradition is, on this view, a way of keeping alive the conditions of possibility for authentic experiment. The literature of the future depends on the literature of the past.

****4 “I’ve Been Wondering, Mr. Mailer”

I’m aware that the Cynthia Ozick I’ve been describing may not resemble the author as she is commonly known or depicted. My Cynthia Ozick is not the bespectacled Jewish intellectual who lives in New Rochelle, drinks tea, and turned 97 this year. My Cynthia Ozick exists only on the page, in the twist and vibration of sentences sculpted by the mortal scribe.

There is yet another Cynthia Ozick, one who lives in neither printed type nor mortal flesh but pixels and video clips. And it is this incarnation that has, in recent years, in certain circles, become iconic.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably seen the clip I’m referring to. The 1979 documentaryTown Bloody Hallcaptures a debate on women’s liberation held in 1971, in Manhattan, pitting Norman Mailer against a panel of feminist thinkers. The starriest figures of the 1970s New York literati were in attendance that night; and it’s Ozick, asking a question from the floor, who scores the film’s most perceptible hit against macho Mailer.

Ozick begins by filleting the mythic pretensions of Mailer’s anti-feminist bookPrisoner of Sex, then recently published. “The women here, and particularly Miss Sontag, have been talking in terms of, uh,justice, which is the basis of civilization,” Ozick says. But “a sacerdotal sexual transcendentalist priest like Mr. Mailer,” who preaches a return to the primal religion of the phallus, naturally has other concerns in view.

All this is prelude to her devastating one-liner. “This question, I have been fantasizing it for many, many years,” she says. “This is my moment to live out a fantasy. Mr. Mailer, inAdvertisements for Myselfyou said, quote, ‘A good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.’”

“For years and years, I’ve been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?”

The auditorium howls with laughter.

It’s a moment worth celebrating, a snapshot of her erudition, daring, and verbal inventiveness. But it’s worth asking: why is this clip what so many envision when they think of her?

Town Bloody Hallis a period piece: everything from the writers’ outfits to the cadences of their speech to the gender politics being debated encapsulates a certain 1970s American literary milieu, very New York, very Jewish, an era in which serious writers could win serious fame.

Ozick’s skewering of Mailer may be a time capsule, but it aligns uncannily well with today’s digital-capitalist logic of virality. It’s short and sweet, just two minutes long. It’s capable of circulating, and being enjoyed, when stripped of its context. The storyline — smart women feuding with a crusty male author — is easy to pick up, whether or not you’ve read any of the writers involved. It offers the emotional engagement that fan culture seeks and rewards (one version of the clip, on YouTube, is titled “I Love Cynthia Ozick”). It’s conflictual, an elevated precursor to the reality TV-style draggings, clapbacks, and takedowns that now saturate our media and politics. In short, it’s good content.

Ozick’s essays celebrate her reading, the many years spent in that yellow-wallpapered room poring over James and Tolstoy and Gibbon and Jewish philosophy. The Town Hall clip celebrates her “reading” — “reading” here in the sense of a witty takedown. She doesn’t just read Mailer; shereadshim.

I am not saying that “my” Ozick — the aesthetic experimentalist, playful and powerful in her writing — is the only true one, or that the Town Hall clip is misleading or false. What I’m saying is that privileging two minutes of video over thousands of pages of prose is a way of taking her less seriously.

For there is another way.

Let us think again of The Last Reader, her embroidered blanket, her rich or ruined world far in the future. Imagine that she is now a woman walking alone at nightfall, passing in and out of the glow cast by the moon’s single pale and frozen eye.

She comes to a heavy door of insulated steel. With a creak and heave and sharp downward push on the handle, she slips inside and, quick as a flash, shuts the door behind her.

In the secret room, books are everywhere. Faint markings on their spines indicate that they once belonged to the library of a university that no longer exists. Our Last Reader drifts among the stacks, searching the climate-controlled cache for — well, for something, something that will speak to her. She does not know in advance what she seeks. She trusts only that the right book will announce itself.

Among Ozick’s papers, in the archive, is an unpublished essay from 1962 entitled “The Born Reader — Why Does He Read?” It is accompanied by a rejection letter from a literary magazine that has long since folded.

“The genuine, the born, reader is divinely driven,” Ozick writes. “He roams libraries with greed and stealth, turning over a hundred volumes … How can he, almost unerringly, know which book is his destiny? Ask, rather, how the beasts know which creatures are allotted to them for prey.”

And so, through destiny or chance, The Last Reader takes in her hands a small volume calledThe Puttermesser Papers, a book with a heroine whose vision of paradise is an eternity of reading (“anthropology, zoology, physical chemistry, philosophy … all of Balzac, all of Dickens, all of Turgenev and Dostoevsky …The Magic Mountainand the wholeFaerie Queeneand every line ofThe Ring and the Book”), and whose vision of love is evening after evening spent reading George Eliot aloud together.

From there, The Last Reader passes on toThe Messiah of Stockholm. Stockholm may, by then, have been engulfed by the water. As for the Messiah, he has not yet (some say) arrived. Nevertheless, she reads. She learns of a vision that appears in the mind like a burnished egg; of a procession of idols; of a living book with “several hundred winglike sails … freckled all over with inky markings,” a book that gives birth to a single small bird that soars from the mass of ink and paper clutching in its beak a strand of dried hay.

Empires rise and fall; languages vanish; monuments crumble into dust. Yet so long as there are readers, there is survival, the communion of minds across the ages.

That is a future for Cynthia Ozick: the future she deserves.