The European
George Steiner has been
writing his incandescent essays on high culture for nearly four decades now,
steadily deepening his insights and widening his topical reach, but carrying on
the same essential errand. In earlier times, he would have been one of
Enlightenment's missionaries; in our own, he has come to be seen more as a
guardian, a defender of embattled humanism. While Steiner has hewed to
traditions and verities, the world around him has been mutating.
Post-structuralism has come and gone; multiculturalism is exercising its
liberations and tyrannies; the computer has become the dominant tool of
discourse. And Steiner has been quietly gathering the authority of his
intransigence.
No Passion Spent ,
the latest of the critic's many studies and collections, sends its root threads
back to nearly every phase of his complex endeavor. There are essays on all the
familiar Steiner subjects--translation, tragedy, the eclipse of humane culture,
the connection between language and ethics, and Judaism and the Holocaust. New,
if not unexpected, subjects include Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, dreams, the
deaths of Socrates and Jesus, and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.
Steiner
opens the collection with "The Uncommon Reader," a tour-de-force meditation on
Jean-Siméon Chardin's painting Le Philosophe lisant , which becomes,
through attentive reading of details--"his folio, his hourglass, his incised
medallions, his ready quill"--an emblem for the vanishing culture of book and
reader. Reading has always been, for Steiner, a quasi-priestly activity. As he
writes in "Real Presences," the second essay: "Where we read truly, where the
experience is to be that of meaning, we do so as if the text ...
incarnates ... a real presence of significant being ." Chardin's
reader, in his solitary bearing, his grave demeanor, honors this most freighted
obligation, which can be construed as an obligation to being itself. But "the
revolution ... brought on by computers, by planetary electronic exchanges, by
'cyber-space' and (soon) 'virtual reality,' " as Steiner puts it in his
introduction, has all but brought this particular sense of presence to
extinction. He lets himself dream that there might arise "schools of creative
reading," but he also knows that his dreams will remain just that.
For all his elegiac rumination, though, Steiner does not
lack a polemicist's instinct for the intellectual or ideological "hot spot." He
begins his attack with smaller provocations: In "A Reading Against
Shakespeare," for instance, he uses Wittgenstein's stated reservations about
the Bard to test some of our dearest assumptions about this mythic figure.
Without ever calling Shakespeare's linguistic greatness into question, Steiner
suggests an alternative requirement for true greatness, that comprehended in
the German term Dichter , which carries certain lofty notions of witness
and moral responsibility. Steiner knows his Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is no
Dichter . The work is too teeming, too multiform; it lacks the felt force
of either the presence or absence of God. Shakespeare gives us plenitude at the
expense of ethics or higher spiritual aspiration. The conclusion, cagey,
teasing, is one of Steiner's typically pregnant equivocations. Plato, he
proclaims, "was wrong when he banished the poets. Wittgentstein misreads
Shakespeare. Surely this must be so.
And yet."
The
essay called "Archives of Eden" seeks to provoke on a larger scale. Advancing
example after example, measuring reputations--those of composers Roger Sessions
and Elliott Carter, say, against those of Stravinsky and Schoenberg--Steiner
insists that America has produced very little that can stand up to the
intellectual or artistic achievements of Europe. The "dominant apparatus of
American high culture," he writes, "is that of custody"; they make the
art, we build the museums. If there is truth to the contention--Steiner is
persuasive when he compares various fields and finds that only architecture and
modern dance, those uniquely American triumphs, exhibit signs of life--his
argument still feels more like animadversion than rigorous reflection.
If, as Steiner claims, the greatness of a culture rests
upon traditions, upon history, then America must be found wanting. In a
dangerously cantilevered sentence of the kind that Steiner does at times resort
to, he asserts: "[I]t may well be that the ethnic-demographic elements in the
successive waves of American settlement are 'Darwinian negative,' that they
embody the brilliant survival of an anti-historical species, where
'anti-historianism' would entail an abdication from those adaptive mechanisms
of tragic intellectuality, of ideological 'caring' (Kierkegaard's, Heidegger's
word Sorge ) which are indispensable to cultural creation of the first
rank." For the rest of us, a translation: What those tired and huddled masses
that wash up on America's shores are tired of, specifically, is history.
The
argument continues. Steiner rears up to make his well-known linkage between
elite culture and eruptions of barbarism. He notes that "the correlations
between extreme creativity ... and political justice are, to a significant
degree at least, negative." In this regard, he argues, the American choice for
a leveling democracy "makes abundant sense."
He ends by questioning whether the threat to thought and
creation of the first rank lies in the "apparatus of political repression" or
in "a consensus of spiritual-social values in which the television showing of
'Holocaust' is interrupted every fourteen minutes by commercials, in which
gas-oven sequences are interspersed and financed by ads for pantihose and
deodorants?" His own answer, maddeningly brief, invokes Archimedes' garden in
Syracuse, where the philosopher worked defiantly on his theorem even as
barbarians clamored at the gates. "That garden may have been a 'counter-Eden,'
" writes Steiner. "But it happens to be the one in which you and I must
continue our labor. My hunch is that it lies in Syracuse still--Sicily, that
is, rather than New York State."
This is all pure Steiner:
high-toned and irritating, vibrating with barely curtailed snobbism, but also
venturing hard queries and unpopular responses. His views are calculatedly
divisive. Indeed, it is hard to square one's indignation at being patronized
with the nettlesome suspicion that he may be right. Ours is not now, nor is it
ever likely to become, a "civilized" culture in the European sense of the word.
Most of us--God bless America--couldn't care less. This is Steiner's point
precisely. We long ago decided to ignore the poet's counsel and took the road
more traveled. We narrowed our intellectual horizons and flattened our
discourse, and more than ever, we need a critic like Steiner to remind us of
what a difference that choice has made. Those who feel no sense of crisis about
late-modern life will nibble and scowl and drop the book with an impatient
thump. The rest of us will be piqued, shamed, outraged, instructed, and maybe
perversely fortified.
