Limning The Cannibal Galaxy: Cynthia Ozick's Moral Imagination

Criticism, Fall, 1998 by Arlene Fish Wilner

But the tragedy of his great mistake, because it is the basis of his educational philosophy, is not his alone. The pupils in the Edmond Fleg Elementary School also suffer from Brill's failure of vision. Ironically, Brill accuses Hester Lilt of "cannibalizing" her own child by spinning out brilliant theoretical arguments that appear to make a virtue of what Brill believes is the child's "dullness." It is Brill, however, who continues to be self-deceived, in fact developing his own theory of Beulah's needs and motives to avoid confronting his own neediness, hypocrisy, and failure to persevere. It is Brill, not Beulah, who uses others for his own purposes. The narrator is clearly in sympathy with Hester's portrayal of Brill's pedagogy as an analogue to the phenomenon of 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" (69). The last phrase describes both Brill and the Edmond Fleg School. Brill survives parasitically--slothfully--on the dream of a double culture while generating its "atmosphere," but not its substance: "by now everything was memory... he no longer seriously read.... he dozed away nights in the shifting rays of lampless television, stupefied by Lucy, by the tiny raspy voiced figures of the Flintstones; by the panic-struck void" (40-41). Moreover, this emptiness and inauthenticity inevitably inform the philosophy and practice of his school, where the teachers "cannibalize" their students--repressing emerging personalities by identifying "potential" early and inflexibly, forcing them into rigid patterns of conformity, and rewarding predictable behaviors while disparaging those who are not immediate "successes" within the system.

The emptiness of Brill's pedagogy attracts parents who seek style and status rather than substance. Nouveau-riche professionals, mostly physicians, the fathers too are conspicuous consumers who cultivate lives of luxurious ease, dedicating disposable income to expensive recreational pursuits while paying only lip service to culture, tradition, and education. The school needs microscopes, but the parents buy sailboats. Failing to recognize how they reflect each other, Brill and the parents are engaged in an ongoing antagonism: he sees them as greedy, stingy, and lacking in culture; they see him as at best "brilliance gone to seed," at worst a failure both as scholar and pedagogue. Nothing changes because each side has cynically cast its lot with the status quo. The fathers will continue to pay their children's tuition at the Edmund Fleg school to maintain the illusion that their overindulged scions are being taught to aspire to great intellectual heights. Thus each side agrees to use, or cannibalize, the other in order to mask failed aspirations or hollow, parochial values.