George Steiner: A Prophet of Abstraction

On the Breakdown of Traditional Myths

George Steiner's contributions to the humanities are numerous and varied, consisting of offerings in a number of different fields including linguistics, philosophy, and literary criticism and a variety of writings in different literary genres. Though Steiner repeatedly presents himself as a critic of culture, he often functions more as a philosopher of culture. Certainly critical elements are central in his entire oeuvre, the most blatant being his criticism of European Christian culture for containing elements that served as the religious background for the Holocaust and his analysis of the crisis of modern culture or what he describes as "postculture." He is also known for his harsh criticism of Zionism and the State of Israel as a movement and nation-state carrying all the dangers inherent in such entities. Less pronounced is his critique of Jewish orthodoxy. Last but not least is his occasional sharp criticism of communism. However, Steiner has no confidence in any given national state, even in the democratic West, as is implicit in his explicit recommendation to keep more than one passport.

However, the critical aspects of Steiner's works, notwithstanding their originality, are of less importance to us here, though I shall have something to say about them later in this article. I would first like to consider a philosophical aspect of his approach to culture and try, by thinking in Steiner's terms, to apply it to issues to which he has not applied it. Finally, again by resorting to his own concepts, I shall ask some questions about the implications of his cultural vision of the role of the Jews in Europe, as part of his understanding of his own role. I would say that the most interesting test of one's cultural categories is how one's own thinking responds to an interrogation conducted according to one's own arguments.¹

In a seminal passage written early in his career in The Death of Tragedy, Steiner describes the plight of the modern artist who no longer has the advantage of the classical education that enriched both the creation and the reception of the premoderns. This is the reason for the crisis of tragedy in modern times:

But where the artist must be the architect of his own mythology, time is against him. He cannot live long enough to impose his special vision and the symbols he has devised for it on the habits of language and the feelings of his society. The Christian mythology in Dante had behind it centuries of elaboration and precedent to which the reader could naturally refer when placing the particular approach of the poet. The cabalistic system invoked by Blake and the moon-magic of Yeats have only private or occult tradition....The idiosyncratic world image, without an orthodox or public frame to support it, is kept in focus only by virtue of the poet's present talent. It does not take root in the common soil....A mythology crystallizes sediment accumulated over great stretches of time, and gathers into conventional form the primal memories and the historical experiences of the race. Being the speech of the mind when it is in a state of wonder or perception, the great myths are elaborated as slowly as language itself.²

Steiner surmises cultural rhythms that are not easily put into context in a specific geographical area or in a limited period of time but, rather, follow much more the logic of long duree. The archaeological mind-set of this approach is crucial, and it presupposes an understanding of the manner in which historical accumulation takes place and is articulated or crystallized. However, in addition to this vertical attitude toward culture as accumulation, the horizontal vector is also conspicuous: without the breadth of the critical mass, the public, the common soil, vertical accumulation can hardly become meaningful on a large scale. The depth and complexity of a work of art depend on the vertical vector, the richness of its various strata and the forms of their crystallization; its wide reception depends, however, more on the horizontal one. Or, to formulate the...