Real Presences [Paperback]

George Steiner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 23, 1991 | ISBN-10: 0226772349 | ISBN-13: 978-0226772349 | Edition: Reprint

Can there be major dimensions of a poem, a painting, a musical composition created in the absence of God? Or, is God always a real presence in the arts? Steiner passionately argues that a transcendent reality grounds all genuine art and human communication.

"A real tour de force. . . . All the virtues of the author's astounding intelligence and compelling rhetoric are evident from the first sentence onward."—Anthony C. Yu, Journal of Religion

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Steiner asserts moral and metaphysical issues are the basis of all art and that our experience of meaning in music, painting and literature presupposes the existence of God as a "necessary possibility." "Dense, difficult, rewarding, this passionately argued essay ranges fluently over aesthetics, linguistics, philosophy, post-structuralism, the range of Western culture," said PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this dense, prolix book, critic, linguist, novelist, polymath Steiner holds that in the creation of art (especially music), and in its experiencing, there is a fundamental encounter with a "real presence" and that, in fact, it is this transcendent reality that grounds all genuine art and human communication. He does not so much argue this in the traditional manner as give a "transcendental argument" a la Kant: since so much literature and so many literary figures attest to the thesis, it must be true. Because of its lack of discursive argument, this difficult book will be dissatisfying to philosophers and largely impenetrable to the general reader. But sophisticated readers looking for highly learned literary criticism will find much here to ponder.
- Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Management Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 246 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; Reprint edition (April 23, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226772349
• ISBN-13: 978-0226772349
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #462,880 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 70 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Final Questions August 9, 2001

By George P. Shadroui

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This small but complicated book is an effort to explore the deepest questions confronting human creativity. Steiner begins by seeking to remove artistic expression from the domain of science and scientific impulses that are so evident in post-modern criticism. He concedes that language is under attack -- and from many different directions. The 20th century brought us many intellectual movements that sought to divorce us from the word -- psychology, which sought truth in dreams and fantasies; linguistic theory that sought to isolate signs from meaning; deconstructionism, which suggests that language, being so imprecise a tool of communication, is therefore not useful in an exploration for truth. Authors themselves, so this argument goes, cease to matter. Then there is the deterioration of language, so stock with cliches and predictable usage that rob it of its power and vitality. Of course, all of these claims are interesting, some even contain some truth, but Steiner contends that somewhere between nihilism and the dogmatic notion that texts are sacred and final (not open to disagreement and discussion), there is a common sense middle ground.

Human experience is complex and it can unfold in many ways, at different levels. Music is a common thread in human emotional life -- it is part of artistic expression. Words, while not always well used, still have the power to move us -- enabling us to give directions, buy groceries, build bridges or express feelings of deep love or loss. The masters of language and art shake us at our core, force us to examine more deeply our humanity, and reshape our reality even as we are unaware of their formative power....

Steiner then argues that it is the need to find meaning in existence, to explore the borderland between life and death, that literature and artistic expression are rooted in the transcedant. He is not so much saying that God infuses all art, but rather that the search for God and the need to create as God creates is the powerful moving force in human creation. (It is here that he makes the controversial claim that women, because they bring life into the world, are not as driven as men to express themselves creatively....)

This is not an easy read. Some sections had to be read several times. In this case, I would agree with Steiner that my reading is at best an educated glimpse at his argument. Steiner writes beautifully in places, but his style is thick with nuance and references that are often hard to follow. However, those interested in resisting post-modern forces that threaten to fragment the human could not ask for a more impressive thinker to guide them through the murky lower regions that make up the hell of modern criticism. He will then lead you, if not to the paradiso, at least to a place where art, literature and poetry still move the human heart. Read more ›

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Against the Idols of the Age December 31, 2005

By benjamin

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On rare occasions does one truly *encounter* a book whose graceful eloquence both witnesses to the beauty of the human mind and to the beauty of human communication. To affirm both is to affirm the possibility - or, perhaps better, the probability - of a transcendent point of reference beyond our own humanity. Real Presences "proposes that any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that nay coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the fainal analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God's presence" (3).

To read this book by Steiner really is something of an event. It tours metaphysics, particularly through in its Catholic incarnation (and the title of the book is very much along these very Catholic lines - although whether or not Steiner is Catholic I do not know), as well as art. As he affirms early on, asking what music is can also be understood as a way of asking what humanity is. The book begins with the essay "A Secondary City" (which certainly evokes St. Augustine), moves on to "The Broken Contract" (with its intimations of Enlightenment political philosophy), and ends with "Presences" (an affirmation of the wager for God's existence as the ground in which we walk).

This is a polemic against nihilism, particularly in its guise of deconstruction, which has nothing to say about death and is incapable of affirming the possibility of determinative meaning. Thus "art for art's sake" is pure narcissism and pure suicide - and it seems to me that the target of such "art for art's sake" are those theorists who write for the sake of writing, rather than for the sake of communicating.... In calling poetry, sculpture, painting as witnesses for his case, Steiner deems art a "leap out of nothingness" (202) where the artist, as in Joyce, imitates God. Questions of art are fundmentally theological.

However, Steiner is by no means willing to affirm that presence is given or seen in full (citing St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians). Borrowing imagery again from the Catholic tradition, he writes that we all live in journey of Saturday, even as we are on our way to Sunday, the lineaments of which "carry the name hope (there is no word less deconstructible)" (232). In the meantime, it is the arts - with their doxologies of the messianic - which give us to patience.

Dense and highly rewarding, you will likely ponder these things for some time to come. Read more ›

45 of 53 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Steiner wishes to touch us with both Words and the Divine. November 29, 1998

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

No where is J. Adler's maxim proved more true than here: "Good books are over your head; they would not be good for you if they were not." George Steiner's articulate thesis is that the assumption of God's presence may well be the the forgotten but necessary ground of all art and human dialogue. If this little volume cannot make you a "believer," it will be hard to find one that can. Get the paperback edition -- than after you have savored it, you may well want the hardback.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Book of George September 11, 2011

By Bernard Michael O'Hanlon

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When a violinist complained that a particular passage taxed his skill, Beethoven is said to have roared back: "do you think I am worried about a lousy fiddle when the Spirit is speaking to me?"

Be it doctrinaire or otherwise, it is quite startling how many of the great composers - those "sages standing in God's holy fire", ascribed to some sort of belief in the Almighty: Mozart, Bruckner, Beethoven, Haydn, Schumann, Wagner(yes), Bax, Liszt, Tchaikovsky and a certain gentleman called Johann Sebastian Bach. Perhaps some ambiguity is to found in the likes of Schubert, Vaughan Williams, Mahler and Brahms. The only composer who was staunchly an atheist belongs to the lower ranks: Delius. Many of them were extremely conscious of their vocation (what a word to use in this context - and the etymology is just as revealing): Leopold Mozart described his son as the "miracle that God had allowed to be born in Salzburg" and his words were later re-echoed by his progeny; when accosted by his legion of critics, Bruckner retorted: "They want me to write differently. Certainly I could but I must not. God has chosen me from thousands and given me, of all people, this talent. It is to Him that I must give account. How then would I stand there before Almighty God if I followed the others and not Him?"

I am always surprised that in discussions as to God's existence, their testimony is not drawn upon more often - not so much for what they might say (which would be incoherent in certain instances) but for their output. What does the Bruckner Eighth say about the cosmos and our place therein ? Surely the beginning of the Beethoven Ninth has more to say on events that occurred some 14.3 billion years ago than any theory by a propeller head?... What troth is evident in the last movement of the Waldstein or its counterpart in Opus 101? And what of the darkness? Surely Sibelius & Brahms in their Fourth Symphonies are authoritative? Can the horror of Auschwitz be encompassed by the Bruckner Ninth? And what deeper reality is evoked - not depicted - by Victoria in the Agnus Dei of his Ave Maris Stella mass?

To paraphrase Dostoevsky: God sets us nothing but riddles - and symphonies. Indeed, at its most profound, musicology looks dangerously like theology.

Which brings us to the thesis of this book: be it music, painting, poetry, sculpture and writing - why do we have an experience of the transcendental in our encounters with great art? Moveover, what actually underwrites the experience? If, as Pythagoras postulated, there is an underlying rationality to the universe - best expressed in the Disocuri of Music and Mathematics - why are we are attuned to it and to what end?

This is an intellectual tour de force. Steiner will make you sweat. Keeping apace with the author is equivalent to running the culture marathon. Quite rightly he allocates much space to the testimony of music, approached allegorically, in addition to the other arts. He cannot avoid using the word 'Real Presence' and all that it denotes to encompass the resultant experience. The metaphor of the Burning Bush is also deployed: to be set alight but not consumed. Therein lies the real game.

Richard Dawkins, if you are reading this review (hah!), the likes of Steiner are your real adversaries - not some yokel from the Deep South who believes in Adam & Eve. Stephen Hawkins is more acute: he is deeply suspicious of 'woolly mysticism' and rightly so. Caravaggio's 'Conversion on the Way to Damascus' in the Santa Maria del Popolo is not easily refuted as an experience. Both gentlemen should avoid Parsifal.

In short, this is a magisterial study by one of the deepest thinkers of our time. It is not an easy read - and nor should it be. In many instances, George 'kicks sand in one's face' with his multi-layered references but this is not done gratuitously: with time running out, one has to delve wider & deeper.

PS - Steiner is not a Catholic, however much 'transubstantiation' might appeal to him aesthetically. He belongs broadly to the faith of his forefathers. It says something about the depth of his syncretism that readers could make this assumption. Read more ›