The reader should see, in the comments of this book’s reviewers, that their task has been a difficult one. The material is recondite and the argument perforce elusive. The basic outline is clear enough. Steiner’s thesis is that all genuine art and human communication is grounded in a transcendent reality. God’s presence serves as the underwriter, the guarantor of human communication, particularly at its most subtle levels and even in its most exotic form. Music (in which, as he writes, “form is content, content form”) is his most prized example.
He is arguing against a set of alternatives (in psychology and linguistics, e.g.), but principally against the nihilism of deconstruction. He believes that communication, particularly aesthetic communication, is grounded in transcendence, while prevailing orthodoxies argue just the opposite, viz. the absence of transcendence and the triumph of an often reductive materialism. Since he contrasts the example of music (especially) to a set of arguments that are often rigorously verbal, we can see the implicit rhetorical challenge which he has created for himself.
He will argue for ‘real presences’ in the face of postmodern challenges, while fully cognizant of the force of those challenges. Inevitably, being Steiner, he will make a powerful argument but ultimately he will be thrown back on the towering examples of those who share his vision. He quotes, e.g., Yeats: “No man can create as did Shakespeare, Homer, Sophocles, who does not believe with all his blood and nerve, that man’s soul is immortal.”
The nub of the problem, in part, is that the ‘real presence’, by its very nature, is ineffable, but, in its existence and importance, palpable. He quotes Sir Thomas Browne to the effect that “we are men and we know not how; there is something in us that can be without us, nor cannot tell how it entered into us.”
In preparing creative work we are recapitulating the work of the Creator. He quotes Picasso to this effect, cites Joyce’s fingernail-paring creator and, interestingly, suggests that the famous ‘rival poet’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets might well, in effect, be God. In a very gutsy move he argues that the preeminence of male creators might be attributable to the fact that women, in giving birth, participate in an act of creation so grand and miraculous that writing plays or creating sonatas will always be, for them, a secondary activity.
As always with George Steiner, the book is dazzling in its learning and in its insights. This is, however, a rough go for those who are not already immersed in the book’s issues. It is very sophisticated and very densely argued. In contrasting the agony of a post-holocaust humanity with the possibilities for hope that remain, one might begin with his book, In Bluebeard’s Castle, which consists of a series of (more accessible) lectures.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2014
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J. Newth
A rewarding, if difficult read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 18, 2011Verified Purchase
Geoffrey
A masterpiece
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need a broader than normal vocabulary range in English i think
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