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At one level, observes Steiner, this nullity, this feeling of
being swamped by catatonic events, is the spur to artistic
creation. Rembrandt’s paintings have an underpinning of sorrow
which permeates even the more public of his presentations, just
as Giotto’es 14th century fresco, Lamentation, creates cosmic
pain out of what is a domestic scene of the holy Virgin cradling
her dead son. We cannot miss the analogy with Gandhari surveying
her dead progeny on Kurukshetra’s battlefield, presented by
the epic poet of the Mahabharata with utmost fidelity to human
emotion.
The art world
is not immune to horror, argues Steiner after Aristotle. Horror
is just one of the givens to which a painter, a poet, a musician
responds. What is of novel interest in Steiner’s argument is
his belief that philosophy, metaphysics, mathematics and poetics
respond in similar measure and with similar intensity, even
though in the case of metaphysical and mathematical speculation,
the givens are less human and more abstract. The
"grammars" of creation, of the powers that give shape
and imaginative form to an artist’s world as well as to a
mathematician’s projects, are manifold and far-reaching. The
present book, based on Gifford lectures of 1990, is a sustained
meditation on the mystery and wonder of art in the face of what
negates it.
Steiner puts
the case in his inimitable style: "Yet what matters most in
poetry is... the sinews of this striving for liberation from
imposed, borrowed, eroded reference. It is the effort to pierce
the unsayable, to proceed at exceeding risk through its circle
to fire, as does the pilgrim, eloquently speechless, at the
close of the Paradiso." What is true of poetry is true of
all other creative ventures. Hence the wide inclusive meaning of
"grammers" as "the articulate organisation of
perception, reflection and experience, the nerve structure of
consciousness when it communicates with itself and with
others."
George Steiner’s
is, perhaps, the lone humanist voice in the bedlam of
contemporary aesthetic and cultural discourses. He has taken on
the entire conspiracy of academic pretenders masquerading under
the trendy labels of post-modernism, deconstruction, and
post-structuralism. Often under attack from the rednecks of
theory, he has resisted their mission of abolishing heirarchies
in aesthetic judgements. His whole structure of thought is
antithetical to the modish forums of academic debate that
provide sustenance, even tenure, to shallow acolytes of Derrida
and Foucault on Anglo-American campuses.
At a time when
deconstructionists declare the human subject dead and all
critical criteria simply mirror and smoke, Steiner’s unabashed
advocacy of hermeneutical hierarchies has seemed romantic to
some and obscurantist to others. His intransigent scepticism
about what he calls the "carnival and saturnalia of
post-structuralism", and his equally intransigent loyalty
to the great humanist tradition of literature and art, mark him
out as both a maverick and a fanatic. He is a fanatic possessor
of the European cultural heritage from the Greek tragedians to
Walter Benjamin; at the same time he is a perennial wanderer,
restless in any fixed category or school of aesthetics or
criticism. A passionate believer in the transcendent power of
art and literature, he yet finds them implicated in the violence
of our crisis-ridden century.
In his
"Bluebeard’s castle" he looks up to humanist values
in spite of their incapacity to explain the Holocaust. In
"Real presences", he protests against the uproar of
contemporary cultural discourses and offers a utopia of cultural
harmony (much like the Marxian utopia of socio-political
harmony) in which the arts would find their place at the apex of
the cultural pyramid. He recognises what Wittgenstein called the
"loss of innocence" in discourse, faces the conflict
in Lacan and Freud between authority and spontaneity, and
deplores the sheer instrumentality of everyday language,
wavering between cliche and lies.
For Steiner, an
aesthetic experience is an attempt to "bring to bear on the
joyous, libertarian scandal of resurrection the concept of
rational and historical form". Though he does not refer to
"To the Lighthouse", Steiner echoes Virginia Woolf’s
conviction, dramatised in that novel, that art is a form imposed
on the undulating terrors of quotidian experience. Hence its
historicity, its rootedness in this-worldly experience, in spite
of the transcendent nature of its provenance. A seeming paradox
is no paradox for Steiner. Neither is it escapist in the sense
in which Nietzsche said, "we have art in order not to die
of truth".
"Grammars
of Creation", like "Real Presences" is a plea for
the primacy of artistic creativity, challenged as it is by
contemporary philosophies of relativism and contingency. Calling
deconstructionist critics "masters of emptiness",
Steiner seeks meaning primarily in the core myths of the
Judeo-Christian tradition. It is in the imaginative freedom
practised by man that creativity flourishes to the highest
degree, as it does in myth. At his most creative, Steiner
believes, man matches God, the prime guarantor of meaning.
Language
acquires and archetypal significance in Steiners entire work.
Predominantly a human faculty, it gives meaning and purpose to a
Babel of tongues (one of his earlier collections is
appropriately called "After Babel". In the
heterogeneity of language, affirms Steiner, we structure our
cognition.
What he calls
the "polyglot matrix" becomes an emblem of man’s
refusal to be cast in one particular linguistic or cultural
mould. Indeed his single grand theme (I can see the
post-modernists getting frothy) is the status of language and
the humanities in the wake of the political bestiality of our
times. Whether it is the sack of Troy or the destruction of the
World Trade Center ,Steiner apprehends their consequences for
the humanities. Not surprisingly, he champions Claude Lanzmann’s
great film "Shoah" about the perversion of language
during the Holocaust.
The present
book carries this preoccupation with language and its
multi-layered complexity to a higher level of debate where it
includes the languages of poetry, metaphysics and mathematics.
It also takes the struggle for the defence of the humanities
into the camp of deconstructionists and other purveyors of
discord.
Steiner’s
observations on metaphysics, theology and other disciplines,
erudite as they are, do not add up to a distinct doctrinal
position. It is in his response to the mystery of literary and
artistic creation, however, that Steiner makes some very acute
and occasionally brilliant points. He reminds us here, as he
does in almost all of his works, that we as readers do not
dismember a poem for inspection or in any way reduce it to a
facile statement. What we do is to grant it entry "into the
narrows of the heart".
"The
reader", as opposed to the critic, "does not
objectivise it...because for him its otherness is not that of an
object but of a real presence". By itself it is not a novel
insight. But considering that he is answering the contemporary
sponsors of warfare on the upholders of humanist values, this
statement is not late in coming. One can do no better than quote
Steiner himself: "The creator seeks to make reparation by
virtue of a poetic life, a life lived at high risk in
uncompromising commitment to the ideals of his calling...At this
point Holderlin’s account of the generative and
transformational kinetics of the poetic is almost uncannily
consonant with the notions in Keats’s letters."
By reiterating
the high status of the poetic calling, Steiner is conferring
dignity on the artist’s apartness, his
"extraterritoriality". He would no doubt have endorsed
his favourite poet Paul Celan’s evocation of the poet’s
mission: "Deep/in time’s crevasse/by the alveolate
ice/waits, a crystal of breath/your irreversible witness."
Steiner engages
the deconstructionists by appropriating their idea of language
as already tainted with the trace of earlier langauges. Much of
the present book tackles the dilemma of the poet combining what
already exists into new modes of apprehension. But whereas the
deconstructionists, in their acceptance of language as a tainted
medium, end up in ontological void, Steiner strengthens his
humanist credentials by suggesting that poets combine whatever
early traces their are in language into new formations. In this
lies their originality.
Here is Steiner
again: "Language is its own past...The meaning of a word is
its history, recorded and unrecorded...the means of all
meaning... are a prescriptive legacy... A language generated by
a word processor would be meaningless (and how can there be
language without meaning)". This is an assertion of
langauge’s power to combine in unexpected ways in creating
unique works, not a counsel of deconsttructionist despair. In
our current scepticism this point needs to be emphatically
stressed.
Ultimately it
is the uniqueness of an artistic text that Steiner equates with
a transcendent quality. Such an assertion is to be expected from
one appalled by the "fishbowl exhibitionism of the modern
ways." Essentially a solitary Steiner’s artist finds
himself in contest with God, the other solitary (remember
Flaubert’s comparison), beyond the feckless democracy of
post-modernist critics. By this manoeuvre, Steiner himself
enlists in the enemy camp, a position he has steadfastly held
over the years.
I would have
liked to say, "all power to his pen", but my inbred
agnosticism makes me unhappy with Steiner’s view, its
proximity to our own ancient poetics notwithstanding. At the
opposite end of Derridean usage, it holds the danger of cutting
the poet off from quintessentially human attributes. Yet, in his
combat with contemporary nihilism, some exaggeration of his
position is to be expected, if not wholly condoned.
Steiner’s vivacity in pursuit
of his moral commitments is its own reward.
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