Has Western Culture Forgotten How to Read? / Critic George Steiner worries that we're losing our cultural reference points
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, August 18, 1996
NO PASSION SPENTEssays 1978-1995 By George Steiner Yale University Press; 430 pages; $30
George Steiner is a world figure in criticism, a distinction he shares with few others, among them Octavio Paz, Jacques Derrida, J.M. Coetzee, Julia Kristeva and perhaps Edward Said.
Steiner is a fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge and held the chair of comparative literature at the University of Geneva. His essays, collected in "No Passion Spent," tend to be top-heavy with erudition, even when they appear in middlebrow venues such as the New Yorker. He enjoys dropping references that he knows few readers, even among fellow scholars, will recognize, let alone be prepared to question.
For example, when he claims that the epithet "Kafkaesque" has wormed its way into "more than one hundred languages," who is in a position to dispute it? When he praises the dramas of Paul Claudel, how many American readers will be able to respond with their own opinion?
Yet Steiner also forcefully articulates concerns every committed reader must feel at a moment when computer zealots proclaim the demise of the book, when illiteracy in America is on the rise again and when even academic theorists seem bent on dissipating the values of literature and its reception.
"The atrophy of memory is the commanding trait in mid and later twentieth- century education and culture," Steiner complains, adding that in America especially "Schooling today . . . is planned amnesia."
The problem goes beyond failures of institutional education to broad, possibly irreversible changes in society and culture. "The modern apartment," Steiner notes, "notably for the young, simply has no space, no wall-surfaces for rows of books." Further, "to read fully is to be silent and within silence. This order of silence is, at this point in western society, tending to become a luxury."
But what undermines "the classic act of reading," as Steiner calls it, is even more pervasive than the degradation of private life. "The picture and the caption dominate ever expanding spheres of information and communication," Steiner observes. "The methodical devaluation of speech in political propaganda and in the Esperanto of the mass-market is too powerful and diffuse to be readily defined. At decisive points, ours is today a civilization 'after the word.' "
Steiner is beyond -- or above -- the American academic dust-ups about what the Western literary canon should or does encompass. No such issue matters when the activity of reading itself loses inner definition and the resonances of allusion and cultural memory.
"When we read truly . . . we do so as if the text (the piece of music, the work of art) incarnates . . . a real presence of significant being," Steiner argues, acknowledging that this notion "is grounded in the sacramental." Only someone who feels how works of art manifest "real presences" -- an unforgettable fictional character's intrusion into the realm of being, for example -- will understand what is at risk in the erosion of Western literature's longstanding foundation in classical and biblical allusion.
And only a reader who experiences artworks as "incarnations" will recognize the artist's challenge to God as sole creator, at least until the advent of modernism. "Indeed it may well be that modernism can best be defined as that form of music, literature and art which no longer experiences God as a competitor, a predecessor, an antagonist in the long night," Steiner suggests.
All of Steiner's commentary is energized by his fascination with the ancient belief that there are words, texts or images that speak directly the nature of existence, in prophecy. He sees this idea resurfacing, disguised, in the Freudian interpretation of dreams, in the prophetic fiction -- as we now see it -- of Franz Kafka, in the early philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, even in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. These are among the topics of essays in the new collection.
But what makes the power of the word a grave matter are the historical links Steiner observes between violence and Western culture's founding texts, culminating in the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "It is two deaths which preside over our metaphysical and civic sense of self," Steiner writes, "that of Socrates and that of Jesus."
The moral immensity of Plato's dialogues and the Gospels, Steiner argues, is anchored in their respective scenes of capital punishment, which Western civilization has periodically re-enacted, symbolically and literally, since. "The blinding light of exemplary perfection" shining from the "real presences" of Socrates and Jesus has caused people again and again to choose darkness, out of resentment at their own weakness.
Steiner's view of Western literature as the record of this failed moral struggle makes him a unique, powerful and necessary voice.