Indiana University Press

When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch’s shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? . . . Who would choose to be a literary critic if he could set verse to sing, or compose, out of his own mortal being, a vital fiction, a character that will endure?

—George Steiner, “Humane Literacy”

There is something singularly paradoxical about George Steiner. An avowed elitist, he is also a tireless popularizer whose literary journalism, in both Great Britain and the United States, includes hundreds of uncollected pieces in the New Yorker, TLS, and London Sunday Times. 1 Steiner, the doyen of ineffability and seeker after “Real Presences,” beyond the word, never stops speaking or writing. From his essay “Postscript” (1966) onward he tells us not to “add the trivia of literary, sociological debate, to the unspeakable” and yet he endlessly invokes that which cannot be articulated. In a recent essay he notes, “It is by no means clear that there can be or that there ought to be, any form, style, or code of articulate, intelligible expression somehow adequate to the facts of the Shoah.” Unsurprisingly, he has increased periodically his own attempts to formulate, stylize, and codify an intelligible approach to the Holocaust. 2 [End Page 67]

Steiner, the literary journalist, routinely dismisses “book-chat” journalism. While he upholds the virtues of scholarly “autism,” he also condemns the over-specialization of university research. His cultural criticism continues to be haunted by the opening lines of his essay “Humane Literacy” (1963), “When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch’s shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer?” 3 But Steiner goes on writing criticism and adds painfully slowly, at fifteen-year intervals, to his fiction, which he then belittles as “scripts for thought” or “allegories of argument.” 4 Such contradictions are so blatant and so brazen that—though they may be infuriating—they are, I believe, symptomatic of a more general fissure.

The George Steiner that I wish to explore is split asunder. Part Rabbi manqué—culminating in his Real Presences: Is There Anything “in” What We Say? (1989) and part Marxist manqué, he has always been janus-faced, both authoritarian and open. In his spiritualized materialism and his overwrought negative dialectics, his mandarin conservatism, and his avowed distrust of mass culture (along with his location of barbarism at the heart of Western humanism), he has turned himself into an accessible version of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Born in Paris to Viennese parents in 1929, his trilingual background—German, French, and English—has enabled him to act as an early and welcome “courier” between the lost world of Central European humanism (Prague, Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin) and the parochialism of Great Britain and the United States. In this early role there was always an extraordinary range to Steiner’s thought. After three decades, we now take for granted his popularization of the work of Adorno, Benjamin, and Max Horkheimer, of George Lukács and Franz Kafka, of Arnold Schoenberg, Martin Heidegger, and Paul Celan.

In one account of the two competing versions of Steiner, Guido Almansi refers, partly tongue in cheek, to Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Fox and the Hedgehog” (1979). In this essay Berlin characteristically divides artists, musicians, and thinkers into two categories. He cites a fragment from Archilocus as his starting point: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” 5 This distinction enables Berlin to create two versions of the intellectual: on the one hand, the centrifugal fox who chases many unrelated chickens, so to speak; and, on the other, the centripetal hedgehog who subordinates each thought to a central, inexorable, vision. Steiner uniquely, in these terms, is both a fox and a hedgehog; the fox-like range of his interests has been subordinated increasingly to his lifelong obsessions.

An unmistakably bifurcated Steiner became most apparent with the co-publication of his latest volume of essays, No Passion Spent: Essays [End Page 68] 1978–1996 (1996), along with his complete fiction, The Deeps of the Sea and Other Fiction (1996; this latter book, I suppose, enabled Steiner to step out from beneath the “eunuch’s shadow”). Reading his recent essays and lectures, there is a sense of them being rather tired, if not exhausted, primarily because of the sheer cussed repetition of familiar themes. Steiner’s hedgehog has finally run its course. With his memoir, Errata: An Examined Life (1997), Steiner’s world of words and his personal history—“our homeland the text”—have finally become interchangeable. 6 At its most generous, one can view this uneasy shift from the inner life to the life of words as a refusal to write in a too easy confessional mode. After all, Steiner was among the first to point out the dangers of the erosion of privacy in the modern world. Perhaps he is rightly resisting what has been called the “Oprah-fication” of contemporary life. But the problem for Steiner as a memoirist is that his emotional history is over-shadowed by his many textual homelands. In the end, Errata, a non-confessional autobiography, is a perfect embodiment of Steiner’s psychic division. It refuses to make explicit his inner being by confusing an “examined life” with the unexamined language of feeling.

But if No Passion Spent and Errata are rather too comfortable textual homelands, then his complete fiction seems to me to be of a completely different order (and a number of reviewers, such as Antonia Byatt, have explicitly made this point). 7 Being of equal weight as his latest volume of essays (in all senses; the essays and the fiction are around 400 pages long), their joint publication highlighted the humility and openness of his fiction when compared to his increasingly closed and orthodox prose. Above all, these two volumes crystallized the two Steiners—the wily unbounded fox and the one-track hedgehog—who continually and creatively struggle with each other. The Steiner of No Passion Spent is predominantly a monovocal imperial surveyor of the Western canon (more Bloomian than Harold Bloom) from the Bible and Homer onward. The other Steiner is predominantly the multivocal fictionist who writes stories against his most sacredly held beliefs and, at his best, turns his own preoccupations on their head to explore their unspoken assumptions.

Steiner’s fiction, I want to argue, enacts playfully many different versions of himself, usually from the perspective of the outsider or enemy. To this extent, it has been an internal commentary on his more familiar critical writings and has helped Steiner to think against himself. Put briefly, his first and probably best volume of stories, Anno Domini (1964), was published at the same time as Steiner was writing Language and Silence (1967) and imaginatively prefigured his life-long fascination with the slaughter he managed to escape. The primacy of translation, [End Page 69] fathomed at length in After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975), is, crucially, a structuring metaphor in The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1981). In this latter novella, with an ambiguity that has always been present in his fiction, Steiner put into the mouth of an aged Hitler (“A.H.”) words that he himself had used a decade earlier in his In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (1971). His more recent novella and stories, Proofs and Three Parables (1992), continues this pattern of creative self-sustenance. Written at about the same time as his Real Presences, these fictions make human the “wager on transcendence” that Steiner has long since called for as an antidote to our current “post-cultural” nihilism. 8

Although his fiction and essays are intimately allied in terms of their composition, it is hard to gauge what exactly the relationship is between these two modes. With pointed ambivalence, as we have seen, Steiner has routinely deprecated his stories as “allegories of argument” or ‘“stagings’ of ideas” as if they were merely straightforward dramatizations of his intellectual concerns. He has often restated, with relish, the traditional Jewish disdain for the merely imaginary, which is, after all, as Steiner sees it, a form of lying or fabulation; it is the very opposite of genuine learning or of contributing to a sacred knowledge. 9 In a recent interview, Steiner notes interestingly “the instrumental collusion between the genres” in his writing, and to this extent it might perhaps be a mistake to highlight Steiner’s fiction, which he regards merely as an imaginative after-thought mainly contingent on his more familiar critical writings. Most explicitly he has stated that “I do not possess the inventive innocence, the somnambular immediacy, of the poet and the novelist.” Yet he has spoken of the “threads that unify and make continuous the external diversity of my publications” and the “interplay be-tween philosophical-critical discourse” and his fiction. 10 In these terms, Steiner, always the self-translator, writes philosophical essays as if they were a species of poetry and writes fiction as if it were philosophy.

On this level, Steiner’s fiction might be said simply to reinforce the strand of cultural pessimism that has always pervaded his work. If language is increasingly diffuse and muddled, and if culture remains complicit with mass murder, then history becomes a form of catastrophe (from the crucifixion to the death camps). Robert Alter has argued persuasively that this lethal teleology gives us a simple reading of Steiner’s fiction as a form of “negative transcendence” (a term first applied by Erich Heller to the fiction of Franz Kafka). 11 As Norman Finkelstein has shown, Steiner’s sense of himself as a “courier carrying urgent letters and signals to the few who might respond” implicitly refers to Kafka’s brief parable “Couriers”: [End Page 70]

They were offered the choice between becoming kings or couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other—since there are no kings—messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service. 12

This parable captures much of Steiner’s sensibility: the bellowing rhetoric in which he delivers news from nowhere to the parochial English-speaking world; his abiding sense of pessimism that his message might be unheard and that we live in a world without kings; the suicidal despair of Kafka’s meaningless couriers who persist nonetheless. Alter has rightly noted that, of Steiner’s nine stories published since 1956, “two end in suicide, one in the gas chamber, one in deportation to the death camps, one in a trampling to death, and one, an animal fable, in the pet’s dream of lunging at the master’s throat.” 13 For a writer who has discounted the possibility of modern tragedy (precisely because we live in a world without kings), there is at least an echo in Steiner’s fiction of a tragic vision. But I do not believe that his stories are quite as one-dimensional as Alter suggests. To this extent, I take seriously Steiner’s description of himself as a Hegelian who, as a writer of fiction, must “learn to think and feel against [himself].” 14 In a meaningless world Steiner seems to be saying that what defines us is not culture but the horrors which continue to overwhelm the century. The significance of his fiction is that one need go no further than this sense of futility and masochistic attraction in order to find that which lies beyond culture. In Steiner’s imaginative world, the desire to experience the worst excesses of war and destruction make the received culture seem feeble by comparison.

This sense of being caught between the aesthetic and the barbaric can be found in Steiner’s curiously contradictory response to Sylvia Plath’s so-called Holocaust poems, “Mary’s Song,” “Daddy,” and “Lady Lazarus” (written between September and December 1962, a few months before her suicide). In his subsequent essay on Plath, “Dying Is an Art” (1965), Steiner reveals the fraught dimensions of his own imaginative dilemma. For example, we have an overly censorious voice that has later been used to police other representations of the Holocaust: “Are these poems entirely legitimate? In what sense does anyone, themselves uninvolved and long after the event, commit a subtle larceny when they evoke the echoes and trappings of Auschwitz and appropriate an enormity of ready emotion to their own private design?” 15

A few lines before this trenchant dismissal, however, he describes Plath’s “Daddy” as the “Guernica” of modern poetry; a “classic” act of [End Page 71] translating personal pain into the public realm. The main reason, I believe, for Steiner’s ambivalence toward Plath’s poetry is that her ultimacies were not unlike his own post-Holocaust stories in Anno Domini, which were written at about the same time as Plath’s Ariel (1965). This kinship is revealed immediately after his needless reference to Plath’s “subtle larceny” when he asks tellingly: “Was there latent in Sylvia Plath’s sensibility, as in that of many of us who remember only by fiat of the imagination, a fearful envy, a dim resentment at not having been there, of having missed the rendezvous with hell?” 16

Steiner has always described himself as “a kind of survivor,” the title of his autobiographical 1965 essay, and he is understandably obsessed by his first 11 years in Paris before he was whisked off to the United States by his father in 1940. Of the Jewish boys and girls in his school class and circle of friends, he has often stated, only two survived including himself. Steiner’s need to surround himself with words, however distrusted, or his seemingly self-destructive personality, which constantly seems to expose itself to ridicule, cannot be separated from this history. With characteristic bombast he has written of the “unmerited scandal of his survival” and goes on to note what he calls his “pathological bent toward some immediate sharing of his school friend’s fate—how would I have behaved, how abject would my fears have been,” and states that this feeling is “with me always.” 17 This perversely envious sense of missing the “rendezvous with hell” is the subject of much of Steiner’s fiction.

All of the stories in Anno Domini are about individuals, or groups of individuals (whether German, American, French, or British), who, like Steiner, are both attracted and repulsed by the horrors they have escaped. All of his protagonists finally make their “rendezvous with hell” and fatally embrace the terrors that, after the war, continue to obsess them. Many of the representative figures of this fatal attraction are non-Jewish, which places their “fearful envy” at the heart of their particular national culture. The life of the mind, in these stories, has been supplanted by the life of the body, and the humanizing imperative of post-war culture has been replaced by the lure of death. This Plath-like masochism reveals what has been called the “psychic engendering of history” that underpins Plath’s own use of Holocaust metaphors. Steiner’s version of Kafka, not unlike his reading of Plath, also stresses the “obscene collaboration between torturer and victim,” of one who was not there, and its relation to the Holocaust. As he puts it in Errata, “victimisation, ostracism, and torture are dialectic.” 18

This dialectic is given its most complete portrayal in “Cake,” where an American graduate student from Harvard, the son of an elite family, decides to stay behind in Nazi-occupied France. 19 He acts as a “courier” [End Page 72] for the underground and, after witnessing the torture of a young woman and her father, begins to fantasize about being captured by the Gestapo. Only under torture can he really know himself; otherwise, he fears, he will live “as spinsters do, in the brittle familiarity of mere acquaintance” (202). Although his romantic masochism is soon quashed when Steiner’s narrator nervously escapes capture, it also becomes the driving force of the story. From the beginning the American is “gripped” by the image of the girl’s abduction, which “brought a queer warmth and drew my skin tight” (200). After this he woke at nights “shivering with an unclean sweetness,” and his perverse jealousy of the old man and the girl “grew like a cancer” (201). As he walked along the deserted banks of the Loire, his overpowering envy “became the thing worth living for. At any cost. So I spent my days between fear and desire, between hysterical imaginings of pain, and a secret longing” (203). More than anything else, the American becomes a true “courier,” like Steiner himself, who has “won remission from hell” (203). Evading torture by the Gestapo, he is smuggled to a sanatorium where he is entrusted with the family history of Rahel Jakobsen, with whom he falls in love and whom he commemorates after the war.

His abiding role as a “courier” opens him up in general to experience in extremis and, in Steiner’s terms, makes him an allegorical or Kafkaesque Jew who eventually internalizes Jewish history. The universalization of Steiner’s extraterritorial Judaism is, however, fraught with difficulties. In the story the American is also an antisemite who expresses his loathing for a Steiner-like Jewish student in his Renaissance seminar: “He had been educated in half a dozen countries (‘Herr Hitler, you know’) and spoke English with flair; but he retained a sugary intonation, part-French, part-German. I detested the fluent acrobatics of his mind” (219). He goes on to argue that: “by their unending misery, the Jews have put mankind in the wrong. Their presence is a reproach” (219), which is, in short, Steiner’s philosophy of antisemitism elaborated in his In Bluebeard’s Castle. “Cake,” then, elides the distinction between Jew and non-Jew, or even between Jews and antisemites. But this is the imaginative “dialectic” of one enraptured by the violence inflicted on the victims of Nazism.

Steiner’s other two stories in Anno Domini, “Return No More” and “Sweet Mars,” are also written from the viewpoint of mainstream European culture, in this case post-war France, England, and Germany. As with “Cake,” the protagonists of these two stories are suicidely entranced and defined utterly by their war-time experiences. In “Return No More,” the symbolically named Falk, a former German officer, returns in peacetime to the French village he once occupied. He seeks out the family [End Page 73] whose eldest son was publicly hanged by his unit and explains to the sister: “I know it doesn’t make sense. I am like a sleepwalker looking for that which kept me alive in the daytime. Looking for the one door that opens out of night” (167). Later on he talks about coming back to “hear the silence” (171), and he compares this with the “stench of forgetting” (176) in post-war Germany. Contemporary Germany wears an “iron collar so it doesn’t look back” (176), and this national amnesia is contrasted with those in France who have an unrelenting memory: “Steep yourself in the remembered horrors. Build them around you like a high safe wall. Is that any less dishonest?” (176). Instead of turning the “night” into a safe wall of words, Falk is compelled to return once again to the scene of the crime and let the horror engulf him. His death makes one question both an excess of forgetting and an excess of memory.

“Sweet Mars” also concerns figures who are unable to leave the past alone, to their own suicidal cost. This story is situated in a distinctly British context (his volume is, after all, dedicated to Storm Jameson). Steiner writes surprisingly well on Britishness, as can be seen in his fine essay on Anthony Blunt, “The Cleric of Treason” (1980). 20 He has referred astutely to the general sense of the British “abstention from public and private encounter” with the Holocaust, with the exception of a few notable individuals such as Jameson. According to Steiner, there is “a continuum of sanity, of liberal imagining, in British politics” that makes it well nigh impossible for the implications of the Holocaust to resonate in British culture. This too-comfortable “liberal imagining” is addressed specifically in “Sweet Mars.” 21

In a pastiche of much British clubland fiction, this story concerns the homoerotic friendship of two army officers, Gerald Maune and Duncan Reeve, whose lives are irrevocably shaped by their war-time experiences. Maune’s decision to undergo Freudian analysis, so as to come to terms with the continuing aftermath of the war, is seen by Reeve as an unEnglish (or Jewish) intervention into the murky depths of the national psyche. Maune’s description of his analysis with his therapist, Goldman, sounds not unlike Anthony Blunt’s treasonous pyschology: “At best, you will learn to swim with the cold and treasons of the current, rather than against, and you will dive into the deep not for oblivion, but for its secret, nocturnal roots which, when we touch them with salutation and reserve, yield us what power we have to endure on the mutinous waves” (289). Falk, similarly, in “Return No More” drowns in a sea of memories: “The sea was close upon him. He clambered towards the shore. But the tide was quicker” (167). These treacherous “nocturnal roots” of existence are, in fact, first accounted for in Steiner’s defining story, “The Deeps of the Sea” (1956), published when he was in his late twenties. [End Page 74]

“The Deeps of the Sea” concerns an oceanographer who is precisely concerned with the “cold and treasons of the current” in relation to the depths of the ocean. In an image that reverberates throughout Steiner’s fiction, Aaron Tefft, the protagonist of this early story, is obsessed with what he thinks of as the “inverted everests” that lie below the “silence of the sea” (1). Like all of Steiner’s protagonists, Tefft has a “brief but terrible vision of the deep” (4)—“the dark is so absolute that it illuminates, the cold is so intense that it burns” (4)—a vision of an unconquered “green world,” with “mountain summits reversed” (17), which eventually “consumed his soul” (12). In “Sweet Mars”—where the deeps are associated with repressed memory—it is Reeve’s fear that Maune’s pyschotherapy will make explicit their uncharted emotional life. In pained retribution at Maune for succumbing to such continental tomfoolery, Reeve insists on writing a series of imagined dreams to see if Maune’s therapist will falsely interpret them. Reeve has a wager with his friend that Goldman will not be able to tell the real thing from his ersatz versions. The duping of Goldman, and Maune’s reluctant acknowledgment of his homoerotic relationships in Egypt and Poland—“[He] felt as if he had taken a hammer to his skull” (289)—finally throws the aptly named Maune into irredeemable despair.

By the time of his next fictional work, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., Steiner recreates the preoccupations of his earlier volume—concerning an unconquered “night world” that consumes the inner being of his protagonists—and gives them a specifically Judaic context. In The Portage it is “A.H.” (or Hitler) who is the “mountain summits reversed” of the contemporary world, who represents a “dark . . . so absolute that it illuminates, [a] cold so intense that it burns.” The “green world” of the ocean bed is here replaced by the South American jungle. The Portage differs from Steiner’s earlier fiction in being explicitly Judaized. But by the late 1970s, when Steiner first published this work in the Kenyon Review, the Holocaust had become an explicit subject for literary fiction that was a radically different cultural context from the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike the universalized “deeps of the sea,” the search for ultimate meaning in The Portage is made manifest by a journey to San Cristobal with, quite literally, Steiner’s protagonists carrying the baggage of history on their backs.

As with Anno Domini, Steiner in The Portage deliberately makes sense of the past in the language of a “babel” of national cultures—here Israel, Russia, the United States, Britain, Germany, and France. This is a text, in other words, not about the Holocaust itself but about the effect that this history has produced on the contemprary world. Ronald Sharp has rightly argued that the issue of translation, as formulated at length in After Babel, is at the heart of the novella—after all, a “portage,” like a [End Page 75] translation, is a form of transportation, a carrying over from one place to another. In this spirit, the structure of Steiner’s novella is a series of “congruent or discordant translations” of Hitler in the contemporary world by a chaotic variety of national interpreters. 22 The fact that the journey to San Cristobal is unfinished indicates Steiner’s refusal to make his story conform to a reality principle or an ultimate translation (the name “San Cristobal” seems to point toward a Christian transcendence of Jewish suffering). Instead, Steiner offers a range of possible commentaries for the reader to engage with. The helicopters hovering at the end, as Joseph Lowin has argued, indicates the open-endedness of the text, in desperate need of the reader’s counter-interpretation; we are asked to see which national narrative is about to be imposed on history. In his essay “Postscript,” Steiner stated that after the death camps “everything is possible.” The Portage attempts to represent this “everything” and, by doing so, asks the reader (or the theatrical audience) to reject any one version of the past. 23

The outrageously disturbing voice of “A.H.” represents the ultimate negative transcendence. Just as “A.H.” is a master orator, After Babel is similarly concerned to show how “grammar and vocabulary” have become a “barrier to new feeling”—not unlike the American student in “Cake” who asks (like his author) whether the humanities have made us less human. Such is the “night” language of Steiner’s “A.H.” which threatens, once again, to overwhelm Steiner’s readers. At the same time, Steiner in After Babel questions whether “material reality” can have a history outside of “language, outside of interpretative belief in essentially linguistic records” as “silence knows no history.” 24 The divide between a Steinerian Judaic textual homeland—history as, above all else, a function of language and memory—and the theological need to translate language into a higher ineffable realm (whatever that may be) is most obviously figured in The Portage. Above all, the contrast between memory and negative transcendence is signified in Leiber, the Judaic remembrancer, and “A.H.,” the failed messiah par excellence.

What the crudest readings of The Portage have done is simply to contrast Leiber and “A.H.,” arguing that one is moral and the other is not, and to claim that Steiner has mistakenly given too much credence to the evil figure. Alvin Rosenfeld contends, somewhat over-generously, that Leiber’s fractured and partial testimony is as achieved as a Paul Celan poem, whereas the last speech of Steiner’s Hitler is as kitchy and dangerous as a bad “B” movie (he invokes The Boys from Brazil as an example of the perniciousness of popular culture). 25 But the point is that Steiner is not simply contrasting Leiber and “A.H.” but is portraying them as part of the same dialectic. Far from being easily containable opposites, these figures are, above all, two different aspects of George [End Page 76] Steiner. Just as Leiber tells the story of Steiner’s father’s escape from Paris and the slaughter of his friends and family, “A.H.” has a “withered arm” like Steiner and also repeats verbatim much of his philosophy of antisemitism in In Bluebeard’s Castle. This does not, however, give “A.H.” the authority of Steiner’s criticism—as those who condemned the text have argued—but is, more subtly, Steiner’s most profound means of thinking against himself.

Both Steiner and “A.H.” agree that “Jews are the conscience of the world” (in the guise of monotheism, Christianity, and Marxism) and that this has caused a lethal resentment culminating in the Holocaust. In embodying the redemptive homeland of the text—at its most creative and lasting in an extraterritorial Central Europe—Jews such as Leiber personify an essential life-giving cultural transcendence. But the “blackmail of transcendence” could also take a catastrophic form and become, as “A.H.” argues, a death warrant for the Jews. 26 This unbearable ambiguity—or dialectic between the aesthetic and the barbaric—is, I believe, at the heart of The Portage, which is why “A.H.” primarily explores the night-side of Steiner’s own thinking.

Steiner’s protagonists are all attracted to the terrible beauty of war or an absolute knowledge in extremis that, in a bitter paradox, defines their humanity at the very point at which they destroy themselves. In The Portage, Steiner places his own thinking in this provocative position of negative transcendence. Steiner has long since described our “post-cultural age” as the time of the after-Word. In his latest restatement of this abiding motif, in Real Presences, he characterizes modernity as the “break between word and world which [for him] constitutes one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history.” Once again, he enacts the contradictions of modernism, defending traditions that, as Finkelstein argues, “bear within themselves the potential of their violent unmaking.” 27 Steiner’s messianic gesture toward the mending of the vessels—the restoration of the break between word and world—leads, in one direction, to the grotesquely messianic figure of “A.H.” who claims to have brought about the restoration of the Jewish state. In another direction, it leads to his 1991 novella Proofs, which re-examines the messianic impulse generated by Marxism. What the critics of The Portage especially objected to was Steiner giving his Hitler-figure the last word in the text and, especially, in the guise of Alec McCowan, in Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of the play. But it is precisely Steiner’s faith in his readers and audience—that they will offer a counter-interpretation to the language of “A.H.”—which distinguishes his deliberately unfinished dialogue in this work.

It is in these terms that The Portage can be related to Proofs, which has as its backdrop the rise and fall of Stalinism. Like The Portage, Proofs is an [End Page 77] extended and many-sided exploration of the grammar of messianism, which points both to the Gulag and to Steiner’s utopian textual homeland. The Professore, in this story, is a devoted member of his local Circle for Marxist Revolutionary Theory and Praxis and is also a proofreader. He wishes to create a perfect textual and material homeland but, at the same time, overflows with self-doubt as he witnesses the fall of communism throughout Eastern Europe. As the Berlin Wall begins to crumble, the Professore discovers that his eyesight is deteriorating rapidly. These two events—public and private—are brought together as he remains a Marxist “because otherwise I could not be a proof-reader! . . . Communism means taking the errata out of history. Reading proofs” (350). The messianism, which Steiner has always located within the socialist project, is not unlike his character’s obsessive perfectionism. After all, we learn right at the beginning of the story that the Professore is there to “order the world as only print can” (314).

The duality of his messianic impulse, even at the point at which the Professore acknowledges its legacy of mass murder and inhuman oppression, is neatly signified by his growing blindness—which is both the blindness of prophecy as well as his inability to see the suffering wrought in the name of his ideals. Just as the early Christians “panted for the end of time like dogs dying of thirst” (336), it is the biblical “prophecy and promise” (337) of Marx that has struggled to accomplish earthly perfection. For Steiner, the Judaic rejection of Christ led directly to the death camps, just as the “promise” of Marx led to the Gulag. His fiction, I believe, recognizes that this potential for both barbarity and aesthetic perfection continues in his own transcendent philosophy. This is also, most obviously, the imaginative subtext for Steiner’s continued preoccupation with Heidegger and his intense empathy in Errata for other apologists for antisemitism and Nazism. 28

Norman Finkelstein has usefully applied Walter Benjamin’s account of “The Destructive Character” to George Steiner. According to Benjamin, this figure “stands in the front line of the traditionalists. . . . [He] has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong.” For Benjamin, the destructive character is “reliabilty itself.” 29 As Errata makes clear, there is certainly something profoundly self-destructive in Steiner’s refusal to make any one area of expertise his own and his continual questioning of his own reliability in his fiction. On the one hand, Steiner holds up the ideals of pure scholarship or philosophy or poetry, studied in his perfect Platonic University. But, of course, it is this model of scholarship—his father’s model above all—that he has failed. Steiner dismisses Freud, [End Page 78] where the son wishes to kill the father, and evokes instead the unattainable classical and biblical absolute of the Patriarch. And yet, Steiner can only ever punish himself in these terms. No wonder he thinks of the subtext of his fiction, perversely perhaps, as being about a “lamed or powerless God.” 30 Those in his fiction who aim for a God-like perfection inevitably destroy themselves.

Like many classical modernists, Steiner invokes the authority of tradition in relation to an apocalyptic present. He is, in Benjamin’s terms, in the front line of the traditionalists who recognize that, at any time, “everything can go wrong.” 31 At one point in Steiner’s defining essay “Our Homeland the Text” (1985), he speaks of the Jewish cleric “deranged by some autistic, otherworldly addiction to speculative abstractions and the elixir of truth”; more recently he has described this “autistic ubiquity” to be the “very essence of Judaism.” 32 His use of this term, autism—which also includes bewilderingly God, chess-players, deconstructionists, and himself—points not only to the essence of Judaism but also to the essence of George Steiner. The “autistic ubiq-uity” of the Diaspora seems to me to be a terribly ambiguous term. All of Steiner’s suicidal male protagonists (his destructive characters) can be described as autists who reject modernity for a higher aesthetic order. But such autistic transcendence is, as he shows, deranged and redemptive in equal measure.

For this reason Steiner has a stake in the continuation of Western culture while also recognizing that it has completely “gone wrong.” Such is his “wager on transcendence” where “diasporic Jews” are both the “elixir of truth” and embody all of the regimes of thought—Monotheism, Christianity, and messianic socialism—that have supposedly led to their own destruction. In an early uncollected essay, Steiner summed up this “sinister and mendacious dialectic” that has made diasporic Jews both a “stranger among others” and also a “stranger” to themselves. It is, he argues, this “limbo of identity”—in an extraterritorial zone between “gentile acceptance” and “transcendental separateness”—that has led both to a “quantum leap” in Jewish creativity and to the “venom of antisemitism.” 33 For all of his unceasing provocation, Steiner is above all a “stranger to himself” in his fiction. Only in the estranged realm of the imagination does he begin to tenuously question his own self-destructive bombast and to lay bare the “sinister and mendacious dialectic” that characterizes his largely unexamined post-Holocaust sensibility.

Bryan Cheyette

Bryan Cheyette has a Chair in Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Southampton. He has recently edited Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland: An Anthology (1998) and co-edited Modernity, Culture and “the Jew” (1998). His next book is a critical history of British-Jewish literature to be published by Yale University Press.

Footnotes

I would like to thank David Herman for reading and commenting usefully on an earlier draft of this essay.

1. For a recent account of Steiner’s unpublished journalism, see Mark Krupnick, “Steiner’s Literary Journalism: ‘The Heart of the Maze,’” in Reading George Steiner, Nathan A. Scott, Jr. and Ronald A. Sharp, eds. (Baltimore, Md., 1994), 43–57.

2. George Steiner, “Postscript” (1966), in Language and Silence: Essays 1958–1966 (London, 1967), 199, and “The Long Life of Metaphor: An Approach to the Shoah,” in Writing and the Holocaust, Berel Lang, ed. (New York, 1988), 154–71. For Steiner’s latest account of the Holocaust in these terms, see his No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1996 (London, 1996), 328–89.

3. Steiner, “Humane Literacy” (1963), in Language and Silence, 21.

4. For Steiner’s dismissal of his fiction, see “A Responsion” in Scott and Sharp, eds., Reading George Steiner, 279, and the book cover of Steiner, Proofs and Three Parables (London, 1992).

5. Cited in Guido Almansi, “The Triumph of the Hedgehog” in Scott and Sharp, eds., Reading George Steiner, 58–73.

6. “Our Homeland the Text” (1985), in No Passion Spent, 304–27.

7. A. S. Byatt, “George and His Dragons,” The Independent, Jan. 7, 1996, book section, p. 1.

8. George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything “in” What We Say? (London, 1989), and In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (London, 1971), 49–74.

9. “A Responsion” in Scott and Sharp, eds., Reading George Steiner, 279, and “Literature and the Contemporary Jewish Experience: A Colloquium,” The Jewish Quarterly 31, nos. 3–4 (1984): 6–19.

10. “A Responsion,” 279–80.

11. Robert Alter, “Against Messiness,” Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 12, 1996, pp. 23–24.

12. Norman Finkelstein, The Ritual of New Creation: Jewish Tradition and Contemporary Literature (New York, 1992), 97, and George Steiner, ed., George Steiner: A Reader (Harmondsworth, 1984), 20–21.

13. Alter, “Against Messiness,” 23.

14. Steiner, “The Duellist,” The Guardian Weekend, Jan. 6, 1996, p. 18.

15. Steiner, “Dying Is an Art” (1965), in Language and Silence, 189.

16. Ibid., 189–90.

17. Steiner, “A Responsion,” 276, and his “A Kind of Survivor” (1965), in Language and Silence, 119–35.

18. Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London, 1991), 222. See also Steiner, “K” (1963), in Language and Silence, 160–68, and his Errata: An Unexamined Life (London, 1997), 52.

19. All references to Steiner’s fiction are to his The Deeps of the Sea and Other Fiction (London, 1996), and page numbers will be in parentheses in the body of the text. This volume of collected fiction contains Steiner’s 1956 story “The Deeps of the Sea,” Anno Domini (London, 1964), The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (London, 1981), and Proofs and Three Parables.

20. “The Cleric of Treason,” in George Steiner: A Reader, 178–204.

21. “Book-Keeping of Torture,” London Sunday Times, Apr. 10, 1988, cited in Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford, 1994), 19.

22. Ronald Sharp, “Steiner’s Fiction and the Hermeneutics of Translation,” in Scott and Sharp, eds., Reading George Steiner, 208. This is one of the first essays to treat Steiner’s fiction with the seriousness it deserves. See also, in this regard, Sara R. Horowitz, Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (New York, 1997), 173–80.

23. Steiner, “Postscript,” 193, and Joseph Lowin, “Steiner’s Helicopters,” Jewish Book Annual 41 (1983–84): 48–56.

24. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford, 1975), 21, 29.

25. Alvin Rosenfeld, Imagining Hitler (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), 83–102. See also Hyam Maccoby, “George Steiner’s ‘Hitler,’” Encounter 58, no. 5 (May 1982): 27–34.

26. This argument was first made in detail in In Bluebeard’s Castle, 31–48.

27. Steiner, Real Presences, 93, and Finkelstein, The Ritual of New Creation, 98.

28. Steiner, Errata, 126–28, 137–39, and his Martin Heidegger (London, 1975).

29. Quoted in Finkelstein, The Ritual of New Creation, 99–100.

30. Steiner, Errata, 158.

31. I owe this discussion to Finkelstein, The Ritual of New Creation, 100.

32. Steiner, “A Responsion,” 277, and his “Our Homeland the Text” (1985), in No Passion Spent, 324.

33. George Steiner, “A View from Without,” The Jewish Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1968–69): 4, and vol. 17, no. 1 (1969): 3–9.

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