Heir Snares Eyre’s Mähr: Murderous Idea vs. Thieving Interpretation: Cynthia Ozick’s Literary Theory in Heir to the Glimmering World

Cynthia Ozick’s novel Heir to the Glimmering World caps the revision of her concept of art. In her early novels and essays, Ozick’s views resembled the Romantics who considered art both sublimely uplifting and utterly destructive. Ozick associated art with idolatry and its destructive power with Moloch’s penchant for destroying his worshippers. Since the early 1980s Ozick has been rethinking these views. In Heir to the Glimmering World she completes her revision. She now associates art with the civilizing discipline of Jewish laws that surround and constrain the Divine. Art is interpretation, not representation, of the Absolute. Heir to the Glimmering World is a novel of ideas that condemns the search for absolute authenticity and self-actualization, for pure art, as suicidally misguided.