George Steiner: Yeah, He's the Man

The master and his dashing red jacket, courtesy of CiênciaHoje.

How can one possibly sum up George Steiner? Neither I nor the collection of essays, originally published in 1967, known as Language and Silence, has the intention of doing so. What this book does make clear, though, is the breadth and depth of this guy's knowledge and insight. And even though the essays are approaching the half-century point in age, it's remarkable how relevant his thoughts about media and the printed word continue to be.

As only one example, take his assertion about the effects of language used in advertising and mass media-- that political speech (in this case, Eisenhower's) "was intended neither to communicate the critical truths of national life nor to quicken the mind of the hearer," but "to evade or gloss over the demands of meaning."(1) It not only nails contemporary (U.S.) political discourse; it also fits in well with a mental consortium of media critics such as Noam Chomsky, especially in his Manufacturing Consent. But Steiner goes further than Chomsky, or at least makes more explicit the almost spiritual effects technological changes do and will have on human beings. Foreseeing upcoming advances in mass communication-- although not visualizing, of course, the particulars of our current constantly connected world-- he comes right out with "behind the technical change [in literature and its form/s] lies the metaphysical shift" involved in closer identification with and formation by collective understandings and assumptions. (2)

Steiner knows and admits that much of his criticisms, at least about literature, are subjectively based, and that there's no way to prove, as opposed to those who buy into social scientism, that one work is better than another. And he's also not willing to sing the joys of art for art's sake, or to add his voice to a sort of "save the humanities" campaign based on the argument that good art/literature makes one a better person. His examination of cultivated Nazis and the artistically civilized milieux from which they came is too insightful to wave such a simplistic literature-boosting banner.

There's just too much in this collection of essays to address in any sort of satisfactory fashion.* But two little parts stood out for me, which somehow represent 1) what Steiner's about and 2) what his role may, fortunately or un-, be. First: in his discussion of nationalism ("the venom of our age") and the general situation of Jews, he declares that "The earth grows too crowded, too harassed by the shadow of famine, to waste soil on barbed wire." (3) Somehow, I feel as if Steiner's entire critical undertaking is devoted to some better, more truly humane world, a utopia to which we might be able to find our way through the Word.

But then, how many people really listen to highbrow essayists and literary critics, or care, other than the choir already set to sing their praises? When he describes Kafka's place in life, via a quote from Kierkegaard-- "An individual cannot assist or save a time, he can only express that it is lost"-- it seems that Steiner's describing his own efforts. (4) There's absolute value in such expression; among other things, that includes making 20th-century hold-outs like me feel a little less alone. Maybe that's why I feel so strongly drawn to this principled and intimidating (I'd be too terrified to meet the guy) giant of letters. He's one of a dying breed, and I can only hope the connection-addled world he foresaw in the 1960s doesn't become so distracted that it forgets the spirit of what Steiner represents.



*Because there really was no place to put this comment, I thought I'd include separately Steiner's claim that "The American writer... has found it difficult to achieve continuity, to make individual acts of invention part of a natural growth and completion... The history of the writer who produces a stunning first novel, whose second book is either a nervous pastiche of his own success or a botched fling at something new, and whose later work moves erratically between quality and routine, is almost an American cliché." (5) What I heard loud and clear in those couple of phrases was "Mark Z. Danielewski." House of Leaves: absolute brilliance, and among my top three favorite novels. His later stuff? Heartbreakingly unreadable, probably because it seemed to this humble reader that the guy thought he'd found a gimmick, and would just go with it.

(1) "The Retreat from the Word," 27.
(2) "Literature and Post-History," 387.
(3) "A Kind of Survivor," 152, 153.
(4) "K," 123.
(5) "Building a Monument," 288.

More Márai

After rounding up one more bag of book-loot yesterday (two worthwhile sales in two days!), I headed back to my lair to finish The Rebels. Things didn't, as I'd hoped, take any sort of sincerely sinister turn. Rather, what seemed initially to bear the beautiful-yet-horrific possibilities of a Young Törless turned out in the end to have settled for a somewhat vaguely-explained, not-truly-scandalous-or-memorable climax. As I noted in my brief Goodreads and LibraryThing reviews, Márai just didn't take things far enough or do them clearly enough. Not an unpleasant read, though; just an indication that the author could have been much bolder.

I'm not sure whether George Steiner has said anything about Márai (cursory investigations aren't turning anything up), but it would be interesting to hear his thoughts on the man and/or his work. I'm nearing the end of Steiner's Language and Silence, and although I can only take so much of literary criticism (an attitudinal stance I feel Steiner himself might oddly enough share or have shared at some point), his sometimes-curmudgeonly analysis of pretty much anything never fails to be engaging.

A Book Haul Aids in Rediscovery

Well, I got up early today and headed down to one of the city's convention spaces, where I queued dutifully with the other committed book dorks eager to get into a clearance event that actually required all the room set aside for it. Admittedly, it was mostly junk-- but I'm always willing to spend a couple of hours poring through supermarket pulp if I know there'll be gems tucked away between the latest teen vampire schlock and the mommy porn that acts as a follow-up to it.

I did score some excellent finds, and was glad to have them along when it was time for me to hand over my part of this give-and-take day. After my sport of a dad spent most of his time sitting off to the side, waiting for me to scrutinize every offering, I was well-armed with literature to get me through my own bench-dwelling at his natural gardening mecca. Finding a niche for myself among exuberant greenery, I opened up my $2 Flannery O'Connor collection, and was greeted, appropriately enough, by "The Geranium." OK, so the plot really had nothing much to do with plants at all, but I'll take neat coincidences when they come.

Source: Cmacauley

It's only been semi-recently that I've revisited O'Connor's stuff. Up until my early thirties, I just couldn't handle her characters and the situations they got into; even though I didn't grow up in her Southern gothic world, it felt all too familiar, in a very unwelcome way. Even an adored grad school prof's theological rapture at all these weird and disheartening goings-on-- which were most assuredly foreign to this Welshman-- did nothing to change my mind. But then a few years ago, a creative writing friend had me read "Good Country People"-- and the way O'Connor crafted that thing blew a mental gasket for me. It was almost as if the characters were simultaneously central and incidental, and I could almost see how the author had been laying out a brilliant step-by-step map for us the entire time.

Since then, I've approached her with ever less hesitation. An excerpt from her journals, featured in The New Yorker in September, more or less cured my case of the willies, even if I don't share her metaphysical viewpoint/s. And so, it was superb to have time today to let myself fall into "The Geranium" and "The Barber," the latter of which I found remarkable in its ability to convey the insecurities and not-quite disinterested liberal self-perception of the main character.

The strangely appropriate, though differently dated, feature of this whole situation was the fact that I was surrounded by rich neo-hippies out digging the floral vibes and doing what happens all too often in my hometown: namely, being assertively laid-back and super demonstrative about the fact that one is really digging the music being played, and hence, being true to the area's pride in valuing tunage, all the time, everywhere. (The book sale, for example, featured a band who kept trying to get the noses-in-spines crowd to get into the music.) The oddly apropos atmosphere made the blaring selection of Supertramp being piped through the tastefully hidden speakers a little easier to bear, able as I was to place at least a few inhabitants of real life in the barber's chair in lieu of Rayber.

All in all a good day, even if it brought out some of that snark that I wish could be more easily overcome with grace and understanding. I'm sure if I keep reading O'Connor, though, and read her truly, she'll be able to target my flare-ups of self-satisfaction with a nice dose of comeuppance.

A Hungarian Turn

After my adventures in Beckett, I've moved on to Sándor Márai's The Rebels, which I grabbed at a library sale a few years back. As happens with a lot of such purchases, at best, I'll skim the back or inside cover, but don't pay all that much attention to it, lest any surprises be ruined by a publisher's teaser and/or summary. And so, I'm not sure whether or not having dutifully imbibed the rundown before cracking this thing open would have made any difference to my expectations-- but after tooling through the first chapter with a three-star (out of five) rating in my mind, I was pleasantly intrigued to find in chapter two that this little story has moved in an unexpected, and possibly disconcerting, direction. Unfortunately, the page-turning marathon of the night before left me too tired to keep going last night, so I'll have to put my curiosity on hold for another few hours.

Is it wrong to keep my fingers crossed for sinister developments? I don't really think they'll ensue from this group of pretty average, restless boys-- but Márai's creepy-crawly signature, featured here on a statue dedicated to him in Košice, gives me the (unfounded) hope that such things will unfold:

A Captivating Confusion

So: Beckett. Based solely on his work, you can't deny he gives the impression of being a curious creature. (And, based on a story I've heard about him, namely, giving a paper at a conference about a completely made-up poet and the movement surrounding said figure, and eliciting scholarly confirmations of his "findings," makes me appreciate what was an apparently bold sense of mischief aimed, in this instance, at uncovering academic bullshit.)

Last night, I finished the man's Stories and Texts for Nothing, and I'm still wondering how the whole thing came about in his head. What sort of person puts such addictively strange stuff out there, and believes it'll find public acceptance? While devouring the book, I wasn't entirely sure I really got it, or whether there was an "it" to get-- but I do know that I couldn't put the thing down. And the fact that the style of these stories and vignettes pushes the reader through these fictional worlds at at least a fast walking pace, and that I just surrendered and let myself be whisked through street scenes and bare rooms without stopping to pause, probably meant I lost any larger meaning that might have been hiding behind all the characters' (not the author's!) paralyzed and paralytic bluster.

With the exception of Endgame (which I adore), this sense of "huh?" is more or less representative of everything I've read by Beckett, even if that feeling of being, not rushed, exactly, but kept moving, is new to me. And I'm wondering if I love Endgame so much, and so much more than any of the author's other works, because it's the only one of his pieces I've seen staged. Would Waiting for Godot have had more of a personally positive impact had I seen it performed, instead of reading the play on my own?

In college, a friend and I had a way of rating cultural products about which we weren't all that excited, but that also weren't terrible enough to waste our time criticizing: "It's better than Beckett." The phrase, in addition to being generally underinformed about the guy's work, was more than anything else, really, a reaction against the nineteen-year-olds who'd chosen to undertake their journey of self-discovery via the path of literary imperiousness. Sick early on of affected boys and their haughty airs used to hide a mess of insecurity and late adolescent gangliness, we decided it was acceptable to sacrifice our own potential appreciation of their idols if it would just make these dateless nerds shut up.

Well-- knowing a little bit better these days how to deal with pomposity when it crosses my path (and having abandoned academia has meant said encounters occur much less frequently), I'm more willing to deal with this particular man of letters on his own terms, whatever the hell that might mean. If it includes more nights of staying up too late because I can't stop reading his creations, that may just be enough for me.

Neurotic Naturalists

I've been meaning to write about the following quote-- or about anything, really-- for a while. Behold: "You cannot walk among palm trees with impunity."*

Source: Ahmed Rabea

That little gem comes from Goethe's Elective Affinities, a classic I'd been searching for in used bookstores for at least a year until it finally popped up a couple of months ago in a bargain bin in Jerusalem. It was perfect timing, perfectly packaged; after wandering through municipal mazes that seemed constructed with the purposeful intent to confuse, I landed unexpectedly at a friendly purveyor of literature. And with a couple of hours to kill before friends were to arrive in town, I didn't want to lug around the fat tome that had made a lot of sense on the epic plane ride(s) over-- but still needed some reading for a long bout of café lingering ahead of me. What luck! There was good old Goethe in an almost-pocked-sized version, so I happily shelled out a few shekels and went on my way to wait things out with tea and early-19th-century domestic foibles.

The palm tree thing didn't hit me because of my current location-- but the location-- or rather, its refusal to pander to trends of municipal grids or helpful signage-- had me in a sour mood that felt vaguely familiar to the state of mind from which I had suffered at least 90% of the time in another palm-tree-laden spot. Three years in Southern California were not at all my style-- and somehow representative of the ill-fated outpost I'd landed in were the two huge palm trees right outside my balcony, which was level with and chummily close to the tops of this Seuss-like pair. When the maddening Santa Ana winds would blow, those things would flap their frondy hearts out, casting weird shadows on my walls and making slapping noises that sounded more like the throes of tortured plastic than the rustling of organic material. If I happened to walk into the room at night, there they were, staring evilly in my window. It was a bad scene.

Admittedly, those recollections had nothing to do with young Ottilie's diary thoughts, save for a differently-directed bout of pondering on travel to exotic locales. But the impunity-free sojourn among the beautiful people and their trees is evident in the fact that I still feel an aversion to those creepy genre of flora. It's unjust, I know-- but I take comfort in what I'd like to believe would have been some old-school German support for my plant-based animosity.


*Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, transl. R.J. Hollingdale (Penguin, 1971), 255.

Invisible Cages

Hmm, it's been a while. Frustrating, that.

In the meantime, I've finished Anna Kavan's A Charmed Circle. Lovely title, thanks, I think, to the unexpected way in which "charmed" ends up conveying anything but a lovely reality: this little family group is most definitely trapped in some sort of bubble of low-grade malevolence. Some power seems to be holding them all there, unable to make their respective and definitive breaks for existences less bleak—and also limits them to a pale unlikeability that represses any interesting or empathetic tendencies they may have just below the surface.

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Elles (Alone), Wikimedia

It's a nice change from those quietly victorious mannered romances, where 1) persistent adherence to "true morality" will save our steely heroine, along with the gentle facade that keeps her human; where 2) the tale’s evil or even merely shallow contingent will earn appropriate kicks in the pants from Justice; and where 3) characters are either sympathetic or not—as opposed to generally annoying, with brief periods that make you want to like a given individual, but know it’ll be an attempt doomed sooner or later to failure or willful ignorance of the facts. So although you probably wouldn’t want to hang out with any of this book’s characters (Christofferson may be an exception here), their failure to live up to some ideal standard or to commit themselves fully to the task of saving themselves is more true to life than any governess-makes-good adventure.

Part of this faithful reflection of humanity giving itself only half a shot is the skillful way in which Kavan portrays people’s absolute misapprehension of the impressions they're making on others, or of the thoughts and feelings going through the mind of whoever’s right in front of them. Beryl’s and Olive’s inability to talk to each other; the latter’s and Will’s completely different ideas of what’s going on between them; Will’s and Beryl’s mutual frustrations with each other’s misunderstood reactions; the young men’s apparent cluelessness about their own feelings—and all of the confusion remaining hidden beneath each individual’s ineptly constructed surface: generations have passed since this thing was published in 1929, but stake out a group of “young people” today, and it might seem that only the clothing and the presence of electronic gadgets have changed.

And the “old folks” are just as culpable, fallible, and insufferable as the young souls they’re supposed to be guiding. A mother whom the author gives free reign to wish her kids would go away, and openly to express her disappointment in them; a father who tries to barricade himself into book-bound isolation? You might be hard-pressed even today to find a writer willing to be so honest (as opposed to merely dramatic or hip to the latest requisite display of angst) about the fact that those bonds that are supposed to come so naturally and unconditionally are often out-and-out—and maybe even dangerous—myths.

But here’s the interesting twist: a tenuous, possibly unrealistic note of hope at the end, at least for Olive and Beryl. But it’s just that: a glimmer, and one we’re not sure is deceptive, naïve, hallucinated, or truly justified. The only way that final adjective can be applied is if – and that’s a big if—both girls get off their upper middle class butts and assert the truths they’ve discovered about themselves: their degree, at least, of power over their living conditions, their attitudes, their emotions. 

Oprah probably wouldn’t approve of this story—what amounts to Kavan’s extended reminder that the will often prefers inertia and the unpleasantness of the known to self-fulfillment. I’m guessing that’s one reason I’m so appreciative of its quietly unflinching confrontation with the realities of a species that’s anything but perfect.