Celan formula

Real Presences - or Leer Pleasances?

Here is a free PDF of Commonweal for May 18. Not only does The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan, the latest work by Serious George Steiner (1929-), get a bit of comic roughing up* in the books section from Denis Donoghue (1928-),



distinguished Irish-raised critic, Henry James Professor in English and American Letters at NYU, and fellow occupier of the Steinerian cultural space,

 

Book Description

Publication Date: December 27, 2003

Impressive in scope and erudition, Christopher Knight's Uncommon Readers focuses on three critics whose voices - mixing eloquence with pugnacity - stand out as among the most notable independent critics working during the last half-century. The critics are Denis Donoghue, Frank Kermode, and George Steiner, and their independence - a striking characteristic in a time of corporate criticism - is reflective of both their backgrounds (Donoghue's Catholic upbringing in Protestant-ruled Northern Ireland; Kermode's Manx beginnings; and Steiner's Jewish upbringing in pre-Holocaust Europe) and their temperaments. Each represents a party of one, a fact that has, on the one hand, made them the object of the occasional vituperative dismissal and, on the other, contributed to their influence and remarkable longevity.

Since the 1950s, Steiner, Donoghue, and Kermode have each maintained a highly public profile, regularly contributing to such influential publications as Encounter, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books. This aspect of their work receives particular attention in Uncommon Readers, for it illustrates a renewed interest in the role of the public critic, especially in relation to the genre of the literary-review essay, and signals a sustained conversation with an educated public - namely the common reader.

Knight makes the argument for the review essay as a serious and still viable genre, and he examines the three critics in light of this assumption. He expounds upon the critics' separate interests - Kermode's identification with discussions of canonicity, Steiner's with cultural politics, and Donoghue's with the persistent claims of the imagination - while also revealing the ways in which their work often reflects theological interests. Lastly, he attempts to adjudicate some of the conflicts that have arisen between these critics and other literary theorists (especially the post-structuralists), and to discuss the question of whether it is still possible for critics to work independently. Original and deliberative, Uncommon Readers presents a renewed defense of the tradition of the common reader.

*Donoghue on Steiner: "The chapter on Plato minds its business and is superb ... These pages [on Freud and Marx] are remarkably eloquent, as one would expect from Steiner, but they aspire to altitudos and superlatives too often to be convincing ... He is the most acclaimed apocalyptist in contemporary criticism ... Chapter 9, the last one, is only four pages. Steiner tries to cram in reference to all the books he has not mentioned, among the hundreds he has indeed mentioned ... I doubt that Steiner believes any of this [that science will one day reduce all mental/imaginative activity to purely neurochemical explanations]. If he did, he would not have written his many books or propounded his favorite superlatives."

but fellow reviewer from three pages before, Bernard Bergonzi (1929-), another veteran of both UK literary academe and mid-Atlantic book reviewing these last fifty years, here assaying the memoir by Pico Iyer of both his father and his literary muse Graham Greene, had himself taken on George Steiner way back in the day, reviewing among other books in a roundup in the NYRoB in late 1964, Steiner's early story collection Anno Domini:*

The effective literary treatment of violence is never easy; and it is particularly difficult for those who are obsessed with a violence of which they themselves have had no direct experience. Such an obsession can be rationalized in a number of ways: we live in a violent age, goes the argument, so the writer must, if he is to be honest, be aware of public and private cruelty and do his best to portray it. Both the justifying argument and the literary practice tend to get confused at this point; we are given a faithful reproduction of stark acts rather than a transmutation of feeling, for it is simpler to aim directly at the reader’s nervous system than at his moral sensibility. (A related phenomenon: why has “disturbing” become a term of unqualified approbation in recent criticism?) The results are familiar: for instance, the use of the name “Auschwitz” as a quick-response literary term in a way that is deeply insulting both to the victims and the survivors. One can understand the pressure of guilt—combined with an imaginative fascination—that feeds this obsession in those who have never undergone terror themselves. But it often leads to a kind of prurience as unpleasant as the obsession with sex of those who have never had sexual experience. It might be more modest, if harder, to conclude that there can be no adequate literary response, at the moment, to some of the enormities of recent history.

Most of these reflections apply with some force to the three stories about the Second World War and its aftermath that comprise George Steiner’s Anno Domini. Mr. Steiner was, I presume, too young to have been through the war himself, but he has read about it and has let his imagination dwell on its beastliest details: he insists, in calm, sophisticated tones, on pointing out how the Gestapo would crush a prisoner’s fingers in the jamb of a door, or how the S. S. repeatedly immersed a man’s head in a vat of urine. He is particularly interested in showing us what it is like to be burnt alive (such incinerations occur in each of the three stories). I can take it, Mr. Steiner seems to be implying, in his worldly manner; how about you?

The first of the three stories is about a decent, guilt-ridden German officer who returns after the war to the Norman farm house where he had been billeted in 1944. The officer had had one of the sons of the family shot as a spy, and he is received with sullen hatred, but by degrees they come to tolerate him, and eventually he even courts and marries one of the daughters. Speeches are made at the marriage feast about reconciliation between former enemies. Finally the German is invited to join in a ritualistic dance to round off the procedings; he protests that he is unable to dance—he is badly crippled from a war wound—but he …

*Among the other authors Bergonzi reviewed in his just over four years, 1964-1969, writing for the NYRoB (he appeared in the London monthly Encounter for almost twenty years more, through 1987): Philip Larkin, John Fowles, Kingsley Amis,  Mario Vargas Llosa, John Updike, Paul Bowles, Iris Murdoch, Frederic Raphael, and Lawrence Durrell.

Though I recall an early 1980s dust jacket with a slyly-smiling and bereted George Steiner that listed among his regular print venues The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, he has never in the latter's forty-nine years of publication - save for a brief exchange in 1967 prompted by a Noam Chomsky essay on "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" - appeared outright as a contributor. One thing that is interesting about the reception of Steiner by metropolitan critics since his earliest works is the fact that both he and they are thought to occupy a latter-day Johnsonian vantage in criticism, though that takes decidedly different form in their respective cases. Steiner's Johnsonian role comes in his Renaissance-to-Enlightenment refusal of the usual latter-day information-explosion academic demands to specialize by period or genre, and his resulting role as satellite-eye surveyor and peremptory, broad-brush judge of, and assayer of the deeper meaning and course of, the whole of modern culture. His critics, on the other hand, no less generalist in syllabi if seldom quite so Britannica-in-a-bottle in reference, take their Johnsonian brief in a more sober, modestly empiricist, common-sense role of trying to bring him and others of a like histrionic turn back down to earth whenever possible, puncturing through literary pretension and affectation and overheated rhetorical eloquence wherever found, especially once the bubbles of verbal effervescence fizz out and leave less in the way of hang-your-hat substance than first met the eye; Isaiah Berlin's reported phrase for Steiner, "a genuine charlatan", a type Berlin saw as much more common on the Continent than in Britain, comes to mind. D.J. Enright, another prolific Johnsonian generalist and itinerant academic, in the NYR in 1967, reviewing Steiner's first, signature, young-man-in-a-flurry essay collection Language and Silence:

There is so much that is admirable in George Steiner’s attitudes, so much in both his desiderations and his abominations to agree with, that his faults are all the more distressing. Or rather his one fault: a histrionic habit, an overheated tone, a melodramatization of what (God knows) is often dramatic enough, a proclivity to fly to extreme positions. The effect is to antagonize the reader on the brink of assent.

And as Enright may be seen to have implied, it is not as if Steiner, once finding a fertile, pre-seeded disciplinary field to plough rather than donning the cap of the magus, does not bring forth baskets of revelatory work; as with his chapter on Plato, the one, per Donoghue, that "minds its business and is superb", when Steiner has taken on, e.g., the millennial art of translation (After Babel, 1975) or the long shadow of the Antigone myth in world culture from Sophocles to Anouilh (Antigones, 1984), he tends more often than not to garner unqualified praise. The English classicist Hugh Lloyd-Jones in Encounter in 1975, reviewing After Babel: 

George Steiner seems almost too eloquent and well-informed to be real, a sort of literary equivalent of Baron Arnheim in Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eingenschaften. Brought up in Paris and New York by German-speaking parents and speaking from the start French, English and German, but with Czech and Hebrew present in the background, he is a truly international man of letters. He is at home with the literatures of his three main languages; he is familiar with modern philosophy and linguistics, both the Continental and the Anglo-American sort; and he has the power to assimilate the data of sciences seldom accessible to literary men. His English is not that of an Englishman, nor yet that of an American. I find in it little French but much German influence; yet it is not the ordinary Germanic English of the transatlantic Gelehrter. He belongs to what he has called "the German tradition of philosophic amplitude"; the reader must understand the dialectical movement of his thought, in which thesis is followed by antithesis and antithesis by synthesis. His utterance is voluble, polysyllabic, full of quotations from and allusions to a wide range of authors. 

Confronted with so much erudition and so much ebullience, the English reader's first reaction is often one of alarm. He complains of name-dropping; he points to sentences that seem to him pretentious. He shrinks back before such stern determination to classify all phenomena according to philosophic categories; and he protests in the name of common sense and empirical method against what he finds to be a luxuriant indulgence in metaphysical theorising. Yet if he is an intelligent specimen of his kind and if he persists in reading, he will change his mind. Professor Steiner is not only a widely-read and very clever man, but he has a great quantity of solid common sense; the reader who has grasped the peculiar movement of his thinking must recognize that the judgments he arrives at are for the most part singularly sound. It is sad for him that he did not live in the 16th or 17th century. In our time a style such as his way of thinking demands must become discoloured by the technical vocabularies of the various disciplines whose data its owner has assimilated. Three centuries ago it was possible for Robert Burton--of whom Professor Steiner's work has always reminded me--exhaustively to anatomize an interesting mental condition in a poetic prose of high quality. In our time this is much harder; but despite certain infelicities Professor Steiner has an individual and distinguished style, and this contributes to the pleasure of reading him.

His new book [After Babel] is not an account of the Russian short story since the First World War, but is nothing less than an anatomy of translation ...

Small wonder that another reviewer tasked with assaying one of Steiner's essays in "volcanic prodigality" - it might have been After Babel, or perhaps On Difficulty - suggested that "he should probably be reviewed by a committee" - though such a review, however rich in specialist expertise, might not deserve anthologizing, for as Steiner himself once asked, "What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?"