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"And was I surprised. Was I very surprised. Was I surprised. I was surprised and in that patient, are you patient when you find bees. Bees in a garden make a specialty of honey and so does honey. Honey and prayer. Honey and there. There where the grass can grow nearly four times yearly,"—Gertrude Stein, from "Cezanne."

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Dustin Kidd

Sociology 847

7^th December 1998

George Steiner approaches works of genius with great humility. He is, therefore, both the subject of this essay and the model of its methodology. Studies in the humanities can never be purely empirical; they do not take place in the lab, and ofte n not in the office, but in the privacy and quiet of home. This essay is the product of a close reading of many of George Steiner’s works, though not all of them. There are, I understand, well over two hundred essays, articles, and speeches, each of whi ch deserves considerable attention. This study focuses on his published books and a selection of his essays and speeches.

I said I read Steiner’s works closely, but I also kept some distance from them. Steiner does not lend himself to readings of deconstruction. He demands courtesy from his reader. Steiner’s ideology of language and culture is offensive to late twe ntieth century sensibilities. But a concentrated study has left me with a sense of surprise, rather than anger. I did not enjoy reading Steiner’s almost apocalyptic prophecies of the future of culture, but I could not deny the genius of his words. Wha t follows is an attempt to "unpack" that genius carefully, respectfully, not to belittle that genius, but to affirm it.

George Steiner’s youth offers a wealth of interesting stories—from his families’ flight from Paris to escape Hitler’s armies to Allen Tate’s request that Steiner help resolve an argument with Karl Shapiro—Steiner seems always to be surrounded b y history. But this is an intellectual analysis, not a biography. I do believe that there is a significant relationship between the events of Steiner’s life and the development of his ideology. Steiner explicates this relationship in Errata: An Exam ined Life. However, I am not seeking to identify the origins of Steiner’s thoughts, but to understand their end.

The issue that Steiner comes back to again and again is ‘The Retreat from the Word’. This concern dominates early works such as The Death of Tragedy or Language and Silence. He later turns his attentions to linguistics, translation, Classical myths, and his own fiction, but the retreat from the word is always present in his analyses of the arts. His recent writings, Real Presences and No Passion Spent, mark a return of the retreat from the word as Steiner’s primary in terest.

To understand what Steiner means by the retreat from the word, we might pause to define this term and another that arises repeatedly in Steiner’s works. Steiner claims that a covenant exists between language and reality. We will look later at the evolutionary and mythic origins of this ‘Word-World Covenant’, but to understand the retreat from the word we should understand that this covenant is revealed in the assumption by man that language carries authority, that man can say with confidence, &qu ot;this word carries this meaning." This covenant was formed in the defining moments of the emergence of language. Throughout history, each lie, each act of propaganda have created a crack in the word-world covenant.

The modern move away from structures of authority has finally shattered the word-world covenant. The retreat from the word can be understood, then, as the impetus behind the destruction of the covenant. The divide between humanity and language ha s reached a point of crisis. Steiner’s work has been to identify the origins of the retreat from the word and to consider important developments in the history of language that elucidate on that retreat. He isolates important stages in the present crisi s and then offers fascinating possibilities for the future, possibilities colored at once by both hope and doom.

Language is not unique to man, nor do the origins of language lie with man. In the Genesis narrative, language is the tool with which God creates the heavens and the earth; and after God creates man, language is shared between creator and creation . By its very nature of being a gift from God, the first language spoken by man contained the presence of the divine. Steiner borrows the term Real Presences from Catholic Eucharistic dogma to distinguish those points of intersection between pure divine language and the corrupt falling, or fallen, languages of man. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden marks the first division of languages. After the Fall, humanity no longer speaks the language of God, nor do man and woman share a comm on language. The authority of language, which is tied to its origins in God, begins to falter, and the retreat from the word has begun.

But the myth of Adam and Eve is not the crucial myth for understanding the retreat from the word. Steiner’s works are replete with references to Babel. We must understand that Steiner’s interpretation of Babel is quite different from that of traditio nal Jewish or Christian theologians. Steiner views the construction of the tower of Babel as an act of immense worship. God rewards this worship by giving man the gift of many languages. If the splintering of languages after Eden is the beginning of th e retreat from the word, why, we might ask, is the phenomenal splintering of languages at Babel such a blessing? We must consider the crucial differences between Eden and Babel. In Eden, man’s transgression transforms the languages given by God. At Bab el, the new languages are devised not by man, but by God. At Babel, God creates a complex matrix of language, each with its own authority and each pointing to God’s authority.

In Steiner’s ideology, each language offers a unique worldview, a unique code for understanding reality. Only in the matrix of languages created at Babel is the fullness of reality coded for man’s understanding. "Our language is our window on li fe. It determines for its speaker the dimensions, perspective, and horizon of a part of the total landscape of the world." The retreat from the word continues after Babel, but the process of retreat is drastically slowed by man’s inability to commu nicate in a common language. God had blessed man’s worship at Babel by impeding the retreat from the word.

The religious motifs by which Steiner defines the origins of language are not divorced from the scientific narratives of the origins of man. "When we ask when or how language began, we are in fact asking ‘What are the origins of man’s hum anity?’" According to Steiner, language is the defining characteristic of man. In the process of evolution, man becomes man only when he begins to use language. Language is the form of communication that distinguishes man from animal. Other forms of communication exist prior to man’s existence, but language, as the summit of communication, is solely in the possession of humanity. Only man can combine vocabulary and grammar to generate strings of words, sentences he has never heard before.

Steiner looks to the work of Noam Chomsky as the source of his understandings of language’s development. Chomsky despised the theories of B. F. Skinner who claimed that human language shares its structure with the communication of animals. Chomsk y sought to identify universal "deep structures" in language, structures that unite the many languages of man. Some animals can be trained to mimic man’s language, but Chomsky claims that no animal can master even the most basic principa ls of language. Steiner does feel that the identification of "deep structures" is a vague over-simplification of the complexity of language, but he sides with Chomsky in the insistence that language is unique to man.

If language is part and parcel to the evolutionary development of man, why is there not one single human language? To answer this question, we must remember the presence of theology in Steiner’s views. Even in the evolutionary origins of man, lan guage is not simply a matter of natural selection. God creates man by giving the gift of language to a developing species. The myths of man’s origins offer a means of understanding the otherwise unrecorded events that lead to the retreat from the word.< /P>

Temporal Developments

The growth of language into a textual communication, in addition to speech, allows the language historian to trace the crucial moments in the retreat from word throughout history. Steiner looks first at the Greek epics, the significance of whi ch is that their texts preserve much earlier narratives of humanity. "What little evidence we have suggests that the Mycenaean inheritance of the Iliad came down to the eighth century by word of mouth." We are not surprised, then, to di scover Steiner’s love for the Greek epic. He claims in Errata that his study of Homer has been the most "pleasurable" of his endeavors. The oral histories preserved in the works of Homer offer us the earliest glimpses of the retreat fro m the word. It is not only the language of the Iliad that illustrates the retreat, but also the content. The destruction of Troy is an allegory of the destruction of centers of authority. The men who survive this destruction become wanderers of the decentralized world.

Steiner’s love for Greek texts is a love divided between epic and tragedy, and the greatest of Greek tragedies is Sophocles’ Antigone. Only Antigone successfully depicts what Steiner calls the five "principal constants in the co ndition of man." These constants are, in fact, conflicts—the conflicts between men and women, young and old, society and the individual, living and dead, man and God. To Steiner, the absence of any of these constants is the mark of the retreat from the word; the constants are married to the hierarchies of culture and the removal of any one constant reveals the gradual flattening of those hierarchies.

While Steiner recognizes genius in vast numbers of literary works throughout time, nothing resembles the greatness of the Greeks. Shakespeare’s tragedies are superb, but Steiner reminds us that Shakespeare is not imitated near as often as Sophocle s. Seventeenth century French dramatists come nearer than Shakespeare to the Classical ideal, but their achievements are diminished a century later when the French Revolution brings the bourgeoisie into the theater. Steiner has great respect for many of the novels of the eighteenth century, but novels are a purely secular work. They are indifferent to man’s relationship with God and so lack one the crucial constants that Steiner identifies in Greek tragedy.

Steiner distinguishes two important workers in the attempt to halt the retreat from the word, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Both of these men restore the presence of God to their works. Working in the form of the novel, like most other writers of the n ineteenth century, Tolstoy concentrates his efforts on the tropes of the epic while Dostoevsky reinvents tragic motifs. The Russian writers are not only attempting to define themselves outside of the governing presence of Europe, but also to halt a frigh tening decline in culture. They seek to reestablish codes of meaning and return authority to culture. They seek to prevent the growing crisis.

God’s gift of the diversity of languages seemed to dampen the harsh effects of the retreat from the word on human culture. It seemed man could continue unscathed in the face of the retreat, but something changes in the nineteenth century. A crisi s begins that continues today. Steiner refers to the nineteenth century as the ‘Hundred Years Peace’. "These are the one hundred years of progress, of liberal bourgeois flowering, with their (relative) safety in the streets, with their (relative) f reedom of belief, speech, and inquiry on which we now look back with unnerved nostalgia." The nineteenth century is a period of increasing democratization of the west, a time of the growth of mass media and mass education, both of which contribute t o the development of a mass culture. In the arts, this is the time of Romanticism. Suddenly the common man is the intriguing subject of literature, painting and the new art of photography.

In this period of peace, cultural hierarchies begin to diminish. The guardians of culture, the well-educated elite, begin to release their grasp on cultural authority. For artists, the peace of the nineteenth century leads to ennui, roughly tr anslated as ‘boredom’. The gradual removal of cultural authorities leaves the artist skeptical, weary of his use of the codes of meaning by which he seeks to explain reality. By the 1870’s, the crisis of the meaning of meaning has begun. Steiner points to the structuralists, Mallarme and Saussure, as the first to experience the crisis because of their refusal to obey traditional rules of language, their abandonment of language as authority. "Until the crisis of the meaning of meaning which began in the late nineteenth century, even the most astringent skepticism, even the most subversive of anti-rhetorics, remained committed to language…It is this break of the covenant between word and world which constitutes one of the very few genuine revolu tions of spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself," (italics by Steiner). We will look at the long term implications of this revolution later, but for now I want to emphasize that despite the on-going retreat from the word si nce the emergence of language, it is the historical developments of the nineteenth century, and the response to those developments by the arts, that finally breaks the covenant between language and reality. Steiner’s declaration has phenomenal implicatio ns for the world in which we live today, but crucial events have occurred since the close of the nineteenth century that we must consider before we determine our present condition.

The crisis of the meaning of meaning produces countless visions of an apocalyptic end to the hundred years peace, visions finally realized in the period Steiner refers to as ‘The Thirty Years War’. The thirty years war begins in 1914 and compr ises both world wars and the turbulent years between them. The thirty years war is a period of remarkable barbarism. This barbarism is not merely defined by violence, but by the coexistence of violence and high culture. The violence of the early twenti eth century is not unique in the history of man, but never before have men so well indoctrinated in aesthetic culture been so instrumental in malicious acts against humanity. A man might listen to the works of Mozart and read from Homer at night, and the n go to work in the Death Camp the next day. It is not only the torturers who are guilty; the geniuses of culture were themselves influential in the barbarism. The anti-Semitism of Celine is not unlike the anti-Semitism of T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, to whom culture looked for leadership during the war. Walter Benjamin put it best, in his 1940 essay "Theses ‘On the Concept of History’", when he said, "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbari sm." It is the marriage of culture and violence, the barbarism of the early twentieth century, that leads Steiner to declare the period following the Thirty Years War to be the era of the ‘Post-Culture’.

Muriel Rukeyser proclaims in her poem "Letter to the Front" that, "to be a Jew in the twentieth century/ Is to be offered a gift…The gift is torment." I would be remiss if I did not pause, before discussing the Post-Culture , to reflect on Steiner’s views on the role of the Jew in the barbarism of the thirty years war. The Jewish contribution to Western culture has been "disproportionately radiant," yet it is the Jews who become the most significant victims of the barbarism created by that culture. Does this not suggest a culture turning on itself, biting the proverbial hand that has fed it? Of course it does, says Steiner. In In Bluebeard’s Castle Steiner isolates three contributions from Jewish culture that have outraged the West. "Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed ‘the claims of the ideal.’" Monotheism offered no t only the presence of God, but also His painful absence; Christianity delivered a moral code the West could not live up to; messianic socialism denounced the materialism of the capitalistic West. Steiner equates the Holocaust with an act of suicide, ins pired by hatred of the condemning best that is in man. The Holocaust signifies a second Fall of Man, one that is chosen in full awareness of the consequences; and we have burned the garden behind us.

The revolt of language began when humanity broke the word-world covenant in the 1870’s, reached the fullness of fury with the Thirty Years War, and now fires its last arrows in this season of the Post-Culture. William Carlos Williams expressed a vision of this revolt when he publish Book One of Patterson in 1946:

—the language

is divorced from their minds,

the language . . the language!

Indeed, the Modernist poets were consumed by this revolt. Eliot complains of the "imprecision" of language; Pound tries in vain to reestablish the lost codes of understanding. But the complex hierarchy of languages has been flattened.

In the Post-Culture authority has been lost. The number of languages that have become extinct during this century is staggering. American English has become the lingua franca of the New World order. Each lost language is the loss of a wor ldview, of a code of understanding reality. Man moves swiftly towards a single tongue. But the global language is not the glorious tongue of the builders of Babel, so replete with the real presences. It is a corrupt, broken language that does little to guide man in his attempts to define the world before him. In the Post-Culture, the absence of culture, those who remain in the occupations of language have turned from the primary creation of literature, to the secondary production of criticism and theo ry. The critical act has always been imperative to the continuance of literature, but in the Post-Culture it is only the criticism that continues. "Perhaps our age will come to be known as that of the marginalists, of the clerics in the market.&quo t; The future of culture, foreseen by Steiner, is one of revolutionary change.

Thomas S. Kuhn declared in 1962 that, "Probably the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they can solve the problems that have led the old one to a crisis." Will the end of culture spell the do om of man? If we follow the chords of hope with which Steiner concludes each of his works we must answer in the negative. Despite the current spite for authority, mankind continues to be "hunters after reality, wherever it may lead." As the a uthority of language has flattened, new authorities have arisen, and the geniuses of society have followed. Steiner cites a statistic that ninety percent of scientists are currently living. The geniuses have turned away from aesthetic culture and formed the culture of science. We are experiencing a ‘Cultural Revolution’; culture has turned from the paradigm of the arts to the paradigm of science. "The new hub is that of the life sciences, of the lines of inquiry that lead outward from biology, mo lecular chemistry, biochemistry, biogenetics, and ethology in its largest sense. These lines now seem to radiate and spiral toward every quarter of scientific and philosophic pursuit." I said we are experiencing a Cultural Revolution; we are , in fact, experiencing the first Cultural Revolution of this magnitude. Since the emergence of language, aesthetics, in a relationship with theology, have authored and maintained the limits of ‘Truth’. Under the new paradigm, the sciences have taken ho ld of truth. Shifts in paradigm have historically been quite slow. A shift on the scale of a Cultural Revolution will be the slowest of all revolutions to disseminate to general society. In the meantime, we remain in the Post-Culture, a culture waiting for the messianic re-construction of authority.

In looking at the evolutionary origins of man I cited Steiner’s claim that language is the defining characteristic of man. This claim will remain true in the new Scientific Culture. We are experiencing a second Babel. As man unites under a globa l language he is building a new tower to the heavens, a tower rooted in the sciences. The consequence of this construction, which is already appearing, is the development of a new diversity of languages—the meta-languages of the sciences. The mathematic ians and the geneticists do not communicate in the same language, nor can either of them successfully communicate their work to society. Steiner says of mathematics, "it becomes a fantastically rich, complex, and dynamic language." As the scie nces continue to sprout new disciplines, as each of those disciplines develops full codes of understanding, a new complex matrix of languages is growing. The question that may go unanswered is ‘are these new languages gifts from God or provisional remedi es, devised by man, against the continuing retreat from the word’?

And the future of aesthetics? The answer will be determined by the carefulness and dedication of those who insist with Steiner that, "Because the realness of his inward lies back, the man of words, the singer, will turn back, to the necessary beloved shadows."

In his short story "The Deeps of the Sea", George Steiner tells us of Aaron Tefft, an aging sea merchant married to the beautiful young Katherine. Aware of Tefft’s impending death, Katherine befriends and falls in love with young Joh n Talford. Having chosen her future second husband, Katherine waits patiently for the death of Tefft. Each day that passes seems to lift her spirits as she plans for the future when she and her new love may live off of the rich estate left behind. How like the ambiguous relationship of aesthetics, society, and the sciences are the circumstances of "The Deeps of the Sea". Aesthetic culture has enjoyed a faithful marriage to society since its very origins. But aesthetics is an aging husband, and society has already selected a new suitor—science. In Steiner’s narrative, Aaron Tefft chooses suicide, but only after making arrangements to ensure that Katherine and John will receive none of his estate. Aesthetic culture must consider other optio ns, such as a polygamous arrangement with society and the sciences. It seems trite; it seems like a sad compromise, but besides the death of aesthetics, we have no alternative.

What follows is a bibliography of Steiner’s published books, including collections of essays and published speeches. Steiner has published massive numbers of essays that remain uncollected, over two hundred. The works below offer a significan t understanding of Steiner’s ideology as it is described in this essay, but as an act of professional honesty, I must stress that this list is incomplete.

Steiner, George. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky; An Essay in the Old Criticism. New York: Knopf, 1959.

Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. London: Faber and Faber, 1961.

Steiner, George. In Bluebeard’s Castle; Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971.

Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Steiner, George. Antigones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989.

Steiner, George. Heidegger. London: Fontana, 1992.

Steiner, George. Errata: An Examined Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Steiner, George. Language and Silence; Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

Steiner, George. Extraterritorial; Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution. New York: Atheneum, 1971.

Steiner, George. On Difficulty; And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Steiner, George. George Steiner: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984 (collection of essays and book excerpts).

Steiner, George. No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1996. London: Faber, 1996.

Homer; A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. George Steiner and Robert Fagles. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962.

Poem into Poem: World Poetry in Modern Verse Translation. Ed. George Steiner. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970.

Homer. Homer in English. Ed. George Steiner. London: Penguin Books, 1996.

Steiner, George. "Why English?" Presidential Address 1975, The English Association. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Steiner, George. "What is Comparative Literature?" Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 11^th October 1994. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Steiner, George. The Deeps of the Sea. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.