Passion And Pedantry

Steiner occupies a territory normally colonised by cultural historians and philosophers. Yet it is impossible to dissociate him from literature, as it is the experience of the vision of so many writers Kafka, Celan and Mandelstam are among his favourites that remains central to how he understands, and to how he asks us to understand, the world.

Steiner is an elitist, an upholder of the meaning and transcendence in great literature. Hence his lament in the Introduction: The great majority of us can no longer identify, let alone quote, even the central or biblical passages which are not only the underlying script of western literature, but have been the alphabet of our laws and public institutions. The most elementary allusions to Greek mythology, to the Old and New Testament, to the classics, to ancient and European history have become hermetic. Short bits of texts now lead to precarious lives on the great stilts of footnotes. The identification of flora and fauna, the principal constellations... is now specialised knowledge. We no longer learn by heart. The inner spaces are mute or jammed with trivia.

 

Steiner constantly returns to the mysteries of complex thought and feeling, and reminds us of what remains important in a civilisation under siege.

Which civilisation? In one of the longest essays, The Archives of Eden, Steiner posits the primacy of Europes traditions over the artifices and superficiality of America. Because nothing is ever simple, Steiner is not saying that American civilisation is without value; on the contrary, without Americas equalitarian responsibility towards European creativity above all preserving it in museums Europe would have lost sight of its identity.

Steiner is not straightforward and rarely optimistic. He is an elucidator of paradox and revels in the difficulty of things, in contradictions. For instance, when he gets into Shakespeare, it is not to speak of his universality, but how he can be criticised. Steiner digs beneath the traditional reverence and takes Wittgensteins problem with the Bard as axiomatic: I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare. I could never make anything of, do anything with him.

This position is symptomatic of Steiner: he is determined to see things afresh and take us along with him. In the essay, The Historicity of Dreams, he sums up something fundamental about the difference of observations: A culture of afternoon siestas differs significantly from one whose economy of repose is almost exclusively nocturnal. (Stein is the master of paradox as some of the titles of his earlier classics, Language and Silence, After Babel, The Death of Tragedy et al tell us).

No Passion Spent is full of gems, often in parenthesis (many books are antibodies to other books) on a range of preoccupations. These essays will give you enormous pleasure and it would be well worth your while to go out of your way to get the book.