The Departed: Broken and unbroken symbols

George Steiner (1929-2020) was a polyglot and polymath; indeed, he was the eminent scholar of almost everything to transform the modern world of humanities into the universe of learning from history. Born in a Viennese-Jewish family living in exile in Paris, the Steiner family had to emigrate again to the United States just before the Nazi-occupation of France in 1940. Studying at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, George Steiner was a student of literature to become the intellectually off-scale scholar of translation studies. He returned to Europe to do his doctoral work at Balliol College of the University of Oxford.

In the article "Humane literacy" published by The Times Literary Supplement (1963) and reprinted in The Critical Moment: Essays on the Nature of Literature (1964), Steiner struck, as a young French-American critic, a polemical blow to all post-war literature, since for him the insufficiency of evidence cannot reach the stage of intellectual and emotional conclusions. The negative position had secret roots, with his critiques of modern literature Steiner, as a Jewish survivor, attacked the extreme "silence" of post-war language, where the cultural mood was basically oriented towards the technological future. Steiner wanted to re-educate the cultural decay of humanity into real historical research.

Steiner's work started as literary journalist to review modern literature. Then, with the professorship of English language and comparative literature at the University of Geneva, Steiner progressed to the full voice of academic criticism. In his academic career, Steiner sought to find a remedy for his cultural skepsis. As an eminent scholar, he travelled around the world, working as Distinguished Fellow at the Universities of Princeton University, New York University, Yale University, and other teaching institutions. After his retirement, he became an Extraordinary Fellow at Churchill College of the University of Cambridge, where he died in 2020.

Steiner was an emigré thinker inspiring with exciting ideas and passionate thoughts by shifting intellectual readers between literary, historical, scientific, and cultural areas. He hunted after literary (that is, fictional) facts to explore the deeply felt irreality of cultural history and civilization, arts and science, language and politics, but the dignity of his torment was based on his Jewish faith against the secular world. The problematic but self-conscious character of Steiner's indefatigable writing-and-reading supersedes the scientific frontiers of academic departments to create one major universe for all students, taking part in art and sciences. Steiner's ultimate goal was to make from the fragmented culture divided in separate sciences—what he predicted as the future "postculture," which was learning the episodes of recent history of Europe's literature—to transform the critical thoughts into a new world. Steiner's first memory was inextricably bound up with the horror stories of cultural unhousedness and hospitability, racial inflation, and political history together with his family's struggles to survive the Nazi Holocaust. His research as a "second-hand" critic of literature was enriched by his infinite information to resolve the ignorance of the audience into his encouraging message to "the knowledge and governance of human possibility" for all readers. His skeptical concept crisscrossed the troublesome years of the Holocaust to reconstruct the art of future criticism.

Steiner's self-referentiality was affected by the subliminal traumas of his malformed right hand. He suffered this disability as a tentative sign of warning or perhaps alarm. Steiner's secret disability seemed to allow him to function without difficulties and uncertainties, but still seemed to make him spiritually unable to function as an equal in a social group. Instead, his mood radiated his aloof and arrogant superiority in scholarly talent. I recollect that, in early 1970, Steiner was invited to speak at a small gathering of translation theorists at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Translation studies had just emerged from the marginal footnotes of the experiences of the literary translator to operate as "free" translation of images, similes, and metaphors. Translation had built a "fresh" language, but the mixed branch of translation studies was still an illusion for the academic community. As I recall, Steiner's performance...