Customer Reviews

George Steiner at The New Yorker (New Directions Paperbook)

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The lavish descriptions bestowed upon Steiner--a polymath, a Renaissance man, the founder of a new school of multidisciplinary criticism, a multi-linguist who is as comfortable speaking in the symbols of mathematics as the signifiers of his reputed mother tongues (German, English and French) not to mention the "dead" languages of ancient Greek and Latin--have more often than not done him a disservice in the decidedly anti-intellectual milieu of our times. Then, too, there's the centrality of the Holocaust to his experience, helping shape a sensibility that is still capable of being not merely appalled but genuinely shocked that the instigators of man's inhumanity to man should be cut out of cloth not all that different from his own.

But Steiner's closeness to the atrocities of his own ethnic past acts paradoxically as a distancing lens affording the rest of us a perspective on the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of our own time. He knows about the dangers of nationalism and aggression, and is never one to sacrifice the life of the mind to the exigencies of what may appear to be in the national interest. Injustice must be met at its source, which is human language. Hence, rather than risk Balkanization in space or time, he rejects Jewish nationalism as well as American isolationism, demonstrating in his writings the unbounded freedom to be found in the cultures, art and literature of the past, all the while bringing these interests into harmony with the projects of modern philosophy and science.

Don't read this collection of essays as the loud, proud effusions of a brilliant mind, or that's all they'll be. Rather, try to read them as a travelogue and guide for the culturally deprived, or merely the curious. Whether the subject is war-time Britain, Hitler, medieval chivalry, Straussian anthropology, Chardin, Kafka, Cardinal Newman, Verdi, Gogol, Borges, Brecht, Wittgenstein, or Chomsky, trust Steiner to be up to the task of sorting it out and making sense of it. As a practitioner of Orwell's tenets in "Politics and the English Language" the last thing he wants to do is to obfuscate and to "show off"--to impress, perhaps, but by providing sufficient difficulty to assure the reader will work hard enough for the impression to run deep, for it to be "earned," in other words. Above all, be wary of the trap of separating the thoughts from the language ("he has a brilliant mind but the language is dense and boring"). Just trust him. Meaning is by necessity a function of form--not something that can be separated from language. Steiner packs as much meaning into a sentence as it can bear out of consideration for the reader, knowing full well that the unpardonable sin is to waste his or her time.

I highly recommend this volume to anyone who enjoys social and literary criticism at its best. George Steiner, who turns eighty this year, is one of the western world's keenest and most eloquent intellectuals and essayists. The New Yorker pieces, mostly book reviews, are a splendid sample of his work.

Mr. Steiner's prose is pyrotechnic, his paragraphs and sentences dense with meaning. His style, rich and erudite, may not appeal to everyone. But his insights and nuanced recreation of our intellectual and aesthetic past is a feast.

His review devoted to Britain's Curator of Art, Anthony Blunt, is a masterpiece of irony. His work is not stodgy. His analysis of the poems of Paul Celan's (born Paul Antschel) and their concise evocation of the Holocaust is both studied and emotional. The subject bears upon Mr. Steiner's most painful aesthetic conflict. From his own telling, nothing has preoccupied him more than how a nation of such hoch kultur, Germany, could exact such evil.

Buy the book, by all means. But I cannot refrain from commenting further.

I find George Steiner's intellectual dilemma painfully authentic. It is a great pity it is unfounded. Germany's bent for militancy and evil is neither mysterious nor contradictory. At the time of World War II and before it, from the time of its unification, German culture was not high at all. Bach, Schubert, and Goethe are not representative; far from it. In every sense of the word, they are exceptional. It is disturbing to me that Mr. Steiner equates the culture of a nation with that of a handful of brilliant musicians and writers.

Centuries prior to the world wars, as liberal thought and democratic politics were rising in much of non-Germanic Europe, Germany, brutalized by the Thirty Years War, remained largely feudal, a society of insulated guilders and farmers. As the German states unified, the German identity emerged: industrious, obedient, and self-absorbed. As, Isaiah Berlin writes, their very literature cues us in on how they felt: aesthetically behind in contrast to the highly visible and recognized mathematicians, scientists, writers, and painters of England, France, Belgium, Holland, and Italy, Germany assumed its own version of national superiority, the perfectly immeasurable Dionysian German soul. If we cannot be that (Classical), then we will be this (Romantic) - which is surpassing. As Thomas Mann wrote in 1914, the German war against Belgium and France would soon demonstrate "the superiority of the German soul over numbers." Indeed, is there a greater example of the illogical and narcissistic than Germany's claim in 1914 that Belgian uprisings - as the German army was raping the country - amounted to war crimes, and that German regiments were within international law to murder civilians by the hundreds in reprisal.

I leave it to other readers to absorb the documentation and history of the German people and their awful self-regard. (Their philosophers after Kant are especially revealing.) I am no scholar, but I find nothing inconsistent about Germans murdering some 11,000,000 people and destroying an entire continent. That Mr. Steiner is tortured by German's marching their prisoners to the gas chambers to the strains of Beethoven, to me, is numbing and disappointing. It taints everything he has produced.

I will waste no words, and you shouldn't waste your money -- this book is a staggering bore. Have to find myself some good James Agee to wash the bad taste of wasted paper and ink out of my mouth. Maybe Steiner is a polyglot, perhaps learned in many disciplines, particularly the domain of literature, but his writing and so-called insights are an absolute bore. DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY.