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In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture

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While reading this book I constantly had to remind myself that it was written in 1970-71, so prescient and prophetic were Steiner's insights. As a study of Western culture, an investigation into where--and what--we are historically and globally, it remains absolutely critical reading. Steiner read right what continue to be the major issues of our time: the generalized suspicions about the irrelevance of "high" culture when projected against 20th century political atrocities; the role of literacy in a progressively visual culture; the increasingly pervasive roles of various forms of music; the emerging pre-eminence of "facts," of a scientific mind-set and of scientific knowledge in general; the ethical and intellectual risks posed by the scientific unknowns--to name but a few themes in this dense, richly thought-out essay.

This is a thin book, unlike "No Passion Spent"; rigorously and earnestly investigatory, unlike "Errata." Ironically I came to this book last, but it is by far the most satisfying. In the former, only one essay, "Archives of Eden," touches on the large cultural questions examined here, and then more in the form of a rant; in the latter, what had by then become Steiner's familiar terrain seemed only to have been re-rehearsed, with no substantive new insights.

But here is Steiner at his least pretentious (he does have a tendency to flaunt his polylingual capacities), at his most profound and probing. It isn't easy reading and isn't intended to be. It has the earmark of a formidable mind investigating its time and space for its own sake, more out of its own curiosity and impulse to understand as of any desire to impress, or advance its host professionally.

Here is Steiner at the same amplitude as an Elias Canetti or a William Irwin Thompson--an encyclopedic generalist discussing broad cultural questions with command, eloquence and erudition.

An extremely interesting essay by one of the -supposedly- greatest minds of the XXth century, trying to analyze the western world's culture and education system through modern history, with the events of the second world war as a turning
point - with no possible way back - : how the rise of science and the "fall" of God (to briefly summarize it) during the past centuries led to the Shoah, how culture has evolved since then (the book was written in the 70s) compared to what it was before and finally how Steiner think we should proceed forward to avoid repeating mistakes of the past and handle the somewhat scary potential of the future of science. All of it wrapped in exceptional wisdom and culture while very didactic even for neophytes like myself, tainted with a light pessimism, but a pessimism that looks towards the light. Pretty damn good.

Even though this book is 40 years old, it is one of the supreme masterpieces as an attempt to understand the crisis of the contemporary era. Steiner is a literary critic and academic, but he is also a polymath and can evoke, with phenomenal depth, an astonishing array of disciplines, from history and language to mathematics, music, and computer technology. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that the book is barely 100 pages, but it so dense in logic and expression that it is best to read it aloud to oneself. I read this in 1979 and remembered it vividly, as a touchstone in all my intellectual endeavors, sometimes as an inspiration to explore new areas, sometimes as the essential framework to put anything/everything I read in context. It is that good. Upon re-reading, I am again in awe at Steiner's erudition and talent for expression, though I also see some gaps. This is the work of a genius.

There are many levels on which this book can be read. On the historical level, Steiner addresses the period that started with the Enlightenment and its culmination in the French Revolution and then Napoleon's rise and fall. It was a time, Steiner says, when the pace of life, even the perception of the passage of time, was accelerated. To oversimplify, the old order based on both religious certitudes and a monarchical/aristocratic hierarchy was being overthrown by two trends: 1) the installation of democratic institutions that swept away the old structures of privilege and 2) the industrial revolution and its enabling mechanisms, communications and transportation technologies.

However, Steiner notes, with the establishment of the uneven peace that characterized the Belle Epoque, the sense of excitement in unimagined change gave way to an angst-filled boredom amongst the talented intelligensia. Here, Steiner relies on literary sources, such as the ennui of Flaubert in bourgeois convention or the sociopathic ambition of Julien in Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir. The most talented poets, he argues, sensed and even anticipated with excitement, the approach of some kind of grand conflagration, which was eventually produced in WWI and then found its ultimate expression in the Holocaust of WWII, the truest example of a new barbarism in the most civilized and law-bound era that man had ever achieved. These wars - a new 30 years war - were the cataclysm that created the current crisis of values, of the breakdown of traditional culture that is at the heart of what Steiner wants to examine.

At this point, Steiner questions the identity that Western man has constructed for him/herself. While the Enlightenment had posited that reason could replace the static certitudes of the Christian faith with an ideology of progress and rational discourse, the barbarism of the 20C world wars disproved its promise. Rather than a paradise of the rule of law with new guarantees of personal freedom, Europe gave birth to the totalitarian regimes of the USSR and the Nazi Reich - they routinely used torture, deprived individuals of their rights and aspirations with the most horrible tyrannies that mankind had yet known, and threatened to expand into the weak oases of the democracies by war but also by exploiting their political processes. In a way, the totalitarian regimes were stepping into the vacuum created by discredited religions and the failed promises of the Enlightenment intellectuals. Here Steiner offers a fascinating proposition: because the images of religion - of armageddon, of hell and heaven, or righteous suffering and martyrdom - we created hell on Earth, lacking the means to create heaven. While subjective, this interpretation is the most arresting that I have yet found to explain the mass murder and horror of concentration and death camps of whatever regimes we would choose, from Pol Pot's to Stalin's and Hitler's. Steiner highlights that this proves that the "high culture" of Mozart or Heidegger, co-existed easily with the most horrific barbarism.

Since all values and certitudes have collapsed, Steiner asks, what is next? In many ways, this is the most intriguing level of all. Here he offers a dazzling tour of possibilities. In a vivid if extremely recondite analysis, he demonstrates that the old fundaments of cultural expression (in the written word, which reigned for over 2500 years as the embodiment of high culture) have become the stuff of scholarly preservation in museums. This he demonstrates in a fascinating exegesis of the decline of literacy, not in the ability to read, but in the appreciation of the elite, classical tradition. The allusions and understandings of poets up to the mid-20C, he proves, have now become mere flickers on the page (even a single line) when compared to the voluminous footnotes that must explain them to modern readers. One example he uses is the meaning of ivy in poetry (which I have already forgotten). This is an astonishing analysis, the kind of revelation that can decisively determine the course of a life of study for an eager undergraduate. I know it did for me, a classics major who found the scholarly notes on Vergil's Aeneid, an entire book for each chapter, so utterly boring (it simply did not "click" in terms of relevance to what I saw as life) that I recognized I had made a mistake in choosing my major.

If written literature is passing from the scene - and as a writer I know this to be true - Steiner then speculates about what may replace this tradition. A strong candidate is music, an immediate and spontaneous form of communication that is creating a truly global vocabulary for the successive (young) generations. Another is mathematics and, more largely, science. While he did not foresee the internet, Steiner offers an interesting analysis of communications technologies that is still worth the read though in a way, this is the most out of date level of the book.

I have many criticisms of Steiner's approach. Upon re-reading, it seems too abstractly intellectual. For example, I don't find it as disturbing or surprising, I admit, that Nazis were lovers of high culture as Steiner or other aesthetes do. We are, in my view, irrational and inconsistent beings. This is the kind of thing that people with too much leisure worry about as they listen to Mozart and worry about what it all means while drinking great wine. It is very British intellectual - the dear friend who gave me this book had a brother at Cambridge U., and we loved to take him way, way too seriously.

That being said, I find nothing in the book inaccurate today, after over 30 years of reading in the areas that Steiner highlighted as worthy of intellectual pursuit. Even more important, its core question is as valid as ever. Indeed, every sentence is pregnant with inspiration to look further, to attempt to better understand the world by reading about medieval farming techniques or Joseph Needham's work on Chinese science, which Steiner posits is the true inheritor of Proust. (If you understand and want to examine such an assertion in context, you absolutely must read this book. If not, don't worry, it is just an intellectual's cry for meaning in a confusing age.)

This book changed my life. It might not change that of other readers and I don't mean to imply that that would be a judgement on them. But it is one of the most stimulating and provocative that I have ever read.

A bold reflection about why the West lost her innocence by organizing the Holocaust.
For the author, the motives for the Holocaust lie in the subconscious and more particularly in the psychology of religion.
First, Moses gave us monotheism with an abstract, ruthless, almighty but absent God. Secondly, his son Christ, required in his Sermon of the Mount total self abandonment. Thirdly, there was the Messianic socialism of Marx, Trotski and Bloch.
The West took revenge by exterminating the people who saddled its subconscious with these inhuman utopian dreams.
The West lost her innocence; but how can it react against the committed barbarism: by the stoicism of a Freud, or by the cheerfulness of Nietzsche for the fact that we are only a few moments here on this gruesome planet.
This powerful text forces the reader to a serious reflection. I don't have any clinical psychoanalytical material at my disposal that confirms or denies the author's conjectures. So suggestions for other work in this field are very wellcome.
For me, this book is certainly not the whole truth, as there were among others, resentment for success, the search for a scapegoat for the economic depression or the more than ambivalent attitude of the Catholic Church.