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In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture

George Steiner

4.07 · Rating details · 358 ratings · 31 reviews

“Four impressive lectures about the culture of recent times (from the French Revolution) and the conceivable culture of times to come. Mr. Steiner’s discussion of the break with the traditional literary past (Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Latin) is illuminating and attractively undogmatic. He writes as a man sharing ideas, and his original notions, though scarcely ...more

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Paperback, 154 pages

Published September 10th 1974 by Yale University Press (first published 1971)

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Jul 31, 2012 Szplug rated it really liked it · review of another edition

It's quite remarkable to wend through this one hundred-plus page essay by Steiner—a brilliantly erudite and precisely expressive man whose prose both demands close attention and rewards such with epistemic and aesthetic wonders—and discover that back in 1971 he was exploring, in fittingly bidirectional fashion, many aspects of what he labeled Western Post-culture—its societal and psychological roots, forms, and functions, its evolutionary tendencies and cicatricial remnants, its immanence in ...more

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Sep 19, 2013 Jeremy marked it as to-read

Shelves: culture, non-fiction, philosophy

Available online:
Part 1 ("The Great Ennui")
Part 2 ("A Season in Hell")
Part 3 ("In a Post-Culture")
Part 4 ("Tomorrow")

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Jul 13, 2007 Jim Coughenour rated it really liked it

Shelves: essaysforautodidacts

George Steiner, the polysyllabic polymath, is easy to make fun of — and I have to confess, I can hardly read him any more. But for at least 20 years I bought everything he wrote, immersed myself in his Deep Thoughts (always expressed in his over-determined, comically qualified, trademark apocalyptic syntax) — and he gave me many hours of learned pleasure. At bottom he's an entertainer, a dramatist, a great teacher — someone who even as he overwhelms you with his obvious erudition, makes you feel ...more

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Nov 08, 2014 John Pistelli rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: essays, literary-criticism-theory, philosophy, politics-history, twentieth-century, nonfiction

Steiner is a wonderful writer; his prose is rich with allusion, concisely learned, grave in its movements. It does sometimes approach a self-serving melodrama, as James Wood once famously noted; it could stand to be aerated by some humor--even, in keeping with its classical bearings, if only of high wit. This lapse indicates a flaw in Steiner's argument: the fault in much culturally conservative discourse is in construing tradition as a kind of monolith, titanic and marmoreal. Steiner is too Steiner is a wonderful writer; his prose is rich with allusion, concisely learned, grave in its movements. It does sometimes approach a self-serving melodrama, as James Wood once famously noted; it could stand to be aerated by some humor--even, in keeping with its classical bearings, if only of high wit. This lapse indicates a flaw in Steiner's argument: the fault in much culturally conservative discourse is in construing tradition as a kind of monolith, titanic and marmoreal. Steiner is too familiar with the classics to do this deliberately, but the whole style of his thought leads him into it, into a reverence that seems to be more for some retrospectively-constructed image of the past itself than for any particular literary work.

Steiner tries to make a somewhat difficult case: 1.) that the western canon really is as great as its conservative champions say it is, which means that it is genuinely superior to the products of other cultures and ways of life (Steiner makes some invidious remarks about "drum-taps and Javanese bells" as a metonymy for non-western art that will startle the contemporary reader); and 2.) that the western canon is as irredeemably and unavoidably built on oppression and authority as its radical detractors claim it is, from beginning to end--that you cannot have Mozart without absolutism, Mandelstam without totalitarianism, etc. So the transition to democracy in politics and culture is both a genuine relief from the hierarchical violence of the past and a genuine loss in cultural and intellectual power.

Steiner says that the move away from high culture is both justified by the Holocaust and a betrayal of the Jews. As I understand the book, Steiner is a Holocaust exceptionalist: the Shoah is not to be compared to any other genocide or mass murder. The reason is that, in the Holocaust, western civilization attacked the basis of its moral energy--the invention by the ancient Hebrews of monotheism and conscience--in the persons of the Jewish people. The impatience with conscience and morality that led to the Holocaust were incubated deep within the western tradition, were a part of culture itself, as the first chapter of this book shows. High culture, then, is complicit in the destruction of European Jewry. But the shift to democracy that undoes culture also vitiates the moral demand, the messianic promise, with which Jewish culture was associated. One sign of this is the loss of language, which is itself a form of hierarchical thinking, its grammars an ordered structure on which a society may be modeled. Late modern culture, though, is image-based and music-soaked; the word is drowned in moving pictures and throbbing drums. Our world has closed in on us, in a coerced immanence of sensation: we have lost the belief in transcendence on which any high culture would have to be based. It is telling that Steiner sees modern America as a true break with the western past, a genuine post-culture, whereas he regards the Soviet Union as essentially in continuity with tradition--Stalin, perhaps, just another dangerous monarch for the court poets to warily negotiate with, but one who at least kept the culture free of slackening influences (Steiner also sees Marxism as an episode in the moral adventure of the west that began with the invention of monotheism, an extension of the tradition rather than its repudiation--a view with which Marx himself may have agreed). I would call the general politics implied by Steiner's position neo-conservative, though in a very abstract register, one with little in the way of policy implication. Still, there is the ambivalence about America, the desire to preserve tradition, the continuing conviction of western superiority. The book ends with a hymn to science as the truest continuation of the west's Faustian spirit--the spirit to open every door in Bluebeard's castle, no matter the risk.

This is a diagnostic and predictive text. How does it hold up after 45 years? Fairly well. The processes he describes have advanced, though I gather there is a stagnation in the pace of scientific innovation that Steiner, with a belief in linear scientific progress, does not predict. High culture is about where it was, though the Internet, which is verbal to a remarkable degree, has complicated the prediction that language is finished as the center of culture--this, even as the originality and inventiveness of pop music have been stalled for almost two decades. There is, oddly, no prediction of a need for the west to confront in some way China and Japan, civilizations with their own long traditions of a high and hierarchical culture that may influence the course of things. I suppose Japan had not yet come to the global prominence at which it would arrive in the '80s and China seemed another case of a simply communist culture at the time of Steiner's writing.

There is much to quarrel with here. Steiner's interpretation of the Holocaust is probably not defensible, is perhaps even offensively allegorical. There is an answer to the charge of the absolute complicity between high culture and oppression; even from within Steiner's own paradigm, he makes no distinction between artists who flourished because they supported oppressive regimes and those who merely made great art within oppressive regimes, even in opposition to them. But Steiner is brilliant, eloquent, and always worth reading; even where he is wrong, he is intelligent, and he sharpens one's own intelligence by provoking counter-argument. ...more

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Oct 13, 2015 Daniela S. rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I took too much time reading this, but I have a reason for that: I have to write an essay (5 pages) about this book, so I really had to take some time. BUt, overall, what a fantastic book! I usually am "afraid" of reading non-fictional books, but I really liked this one! I just hope I write a good essay for college :p

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Jun 02, 2018 Ulas rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Bu incecik kitap bir günde bitti. George Steiner'i ilk kez okudum, bazı fikirleri gerçekten çok ilginçti, özellikle Avrupa'daki antisemitizmin nedenine dair yaklaşımı. İş Kültür'de hep gördüğüm Tragedyanın Ölümü kitabını da almayı düşünüyorum artık. Karşılaştırmalı edebiyatçıların çalışma tarzını seviyorum.

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Mar 10, 2017 Samuel Weitekamp rated it did not like it

I found this book to be similar in content to Two Cultures by C.P. Snow except for it was published later. Perhaps I'm missing a good deal of Steiner's point but it seems to me to be merely a slightly revised version of of Snow's text except it deals with a wider (Western European rather than only British/American) cultural context.

Most of what I can derive from the writing is a sort of harumphy negativity toward the then-present. Perhaps I'm wrong and somewhere in this is a valid theoretical ...more

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Apr 06, 2017 elenirou added it · review of another edition

Τροφή για σκέψη. Και τι τροφή. Θαυμαστικό.

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Oct 20, 2018 Amy rated it really liked it

Wow if culture is dying because of moving images and music in 1970, I can’t wait to have Steiner show off how many authors, philosophers, scientists and artists he can name drop now. Although I’d be surprised if he is still alive.

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Dec 08, 2007 Jenni rated it really liked it

A TKO of a cultural probe. I feel like I need to read this at least two more times to really understand what is so captivating/unsettling about this investigation of the decomposition of contemporary Western culture. I don't know if I concur with certain aspects of the argument (can we reduce the 20th century to a "nightmarish joke"?), but it's hard not to be swept away by Steiner's eloquent dissection of that "archival pseudo-vitality surrounding what was once felt life." His discussions of ...more

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Jan 21, 2018 Matthew Humberstone added it

Exploring this one of Steiner's 'Rarities and B-sides', you get a genealogy of conservatism, a critique of secularism, a defence of Western exceptionalism and a review of the 1971 moment that could have been written in our own present. The timeliness of the argument suggests that current conditions are built on a structures of thought and feeling that could be discerned some 50 years ago. We remain knock, knock, knockin' on Bluebeard's doors.

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Aug 20, 2012 Smith Abbott rated it it was amazing

George Steiner identified in 1970 as “a dominant cliché of the contemporary mood” — the age-old (biblical, no less) belief in a “squandered utopia”: “Our experience of the present, the judgments, so often negative, that we make of our place in history, play continually against what I want to call the ‘myth of the nineteenth century’ or the ‘imagined garden of liberal culture’”....

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Aug 02, 2019 Joshua Johnson rated it really liked it

A bit inscrutable, at least for me. Steiner's literary grasp is far more sure than my own and that makes his allusions difficult to follow. Which seems ironic, given this is the gyst of much of his argumentation. An intriguing read.

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Aug 02, 2012 Patty rated it liked it · review of another edition

Wow, I had forgotten all about this book! I remember liking it a lot, but the fact that I'd forgotten all about it sort of knocks it down a bit in stars.

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Apr 02, 2019 Existential Investigator rated it did not like it

The blind spot which motivates the argument in this book is so extreme that one might suspect the author of dishonesty.

I was actually with him at the beginning as he described how a disillusionment swept Europe after the French Revolution. Great hopes were placed in a total reorganization of society into something expected to be revelational. The powerful spirit of Napoleon swept the people along as much of Europe was reorganized. Then it all came to a halt and a new status quo reigned. The The blind spot which motivates the argument in this book is so extreme that one might suspect the author of dishonesty.

I was actually with him at the beginning as he described how a disillusionment swept Europe after the French Revolution. Great hopes were placed in a total reorganization of society into something expected to be revelational. The powerful spirit of Napoleon swept the people along as much of Europe was reorganized. Then it all came to a halt and a new status quo reigned. The untapped energies of the people no longer had a clear outlet in a monumental cause. Boredom and disillusionment reigned. That disillusionment was understood as crushed hopes and betrayed dreams. Yet the memory of near apocalyptic changes remained and in the hearts of those who were disillusioned to the point of borderlining desperation, apocalyptic visions became a new obsession as nihilistic energies wished to set themselves free upon the world with no clear goal.

Where this book really starts to go wrong is in the transition towards discussing the holocaust. Steiner discusses the entrance of the monotheistic god into Europe and makes much of the fact that this god is withdrawn from the world and inaccessible. This put a pressure on Europeans which they were unable to deal with, according to Steiner. For that reason, they needed to kill the god (symbolically) which left a spiritual gulf in Europe and opened the path for the entrance of a new kind of nihilism. They targeted the Jews for being the creators of this god and killing the Jews was the final most concrete act to complete the murder of the god.

There are some big problems with this interpretation on a few levels. First, just to get it out of the way, it is the interpretation of a believer imposing his god on others who cannot handle his awesome might. But there are more concrete problems in the text. Steiner discusses how culture did not stop the Germans from committing the atrocities of the holocaust, because many Nazis were highly cultured. He then takes this as a sign that culture does not have a connection to moral behaviour.

There are two huge problems with that conclusion. The first is that the Germans were not all of Europe. The disillusionment that he spoke about in the earlier part of the book took place transnationally, yet it did not result everywhere in the same conclusions as it did in Germany. This brings us to the second huge problem with this conclusion. Steiner nowhere discusses cultural developments in Germany around the time of the rise of the Nazis and in particular those cultural products which heralded National Socialistic and anti-Semitic ideas. This is the first enormous blind spot in the book. Perhaps he did not want to 'justify those works by giving them recognition', but the fact remains that he has constructed a theory which completely ignores the subject which his theory is intended to explain. Anyone with intellectual honesty should raise their eyebrows at such a fact.

The next problem in this book comes when Steiner transitions towards a prospect of the future. He no doubt already feels that he has justified himself by criticizing the causal link (to my mind, as explained above, poorly) between culture and behaviour. He talks about how traditional culture is disappearing and being forgotten (an example he gives is how poetry had an internal symbolic and reference system which connected diverse poets across time and created a kind of dialogue). In its place is the dominion of music as well as the sciences. The ultimate suggestion is that one not worry about the withering of earlier culture and embrace these new emanations and whatever flowers they might produce.

There is a very serious flaw here, as I see it. Both music and science are not meaning-making, they don't transmit values, and they don't deal with the everyday cares of people. Steiner had earlier criticized the fact that the 20th century view of the 19th century is in a large part skewed by the depictions of novels which do not adequately express how harsh and disillusioning life was in that time.

There are a few problems with this. First is that he had already gone on at length describing the ennui and disillusionment expressed in earlier forms, but he ignores depictions of lower class conditions in writers such as Dickens but also later proletarian writers, and so on. The second problem with this is that the arts are not always a direct mirroring of the world but a sort of transmutation of the cares of people into frequently idealistic forms. For example, the poetry which he does reference which describes so intricately the facets of the countryside are not meant as scientific guides to the countryside but to teach people a greater appreciation of the countryside. To take another example not in the book, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard would contribute to contemplation upon our mortality in the same way that memento moris were in earlier eras.

So, Steiner's ultimate suggestion is that people be left bereft of their capacity to create and share meaning in an age which is already afflicted by nihilism. One star. ...more

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Jul 27, 2012 John rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Solid work here from Steiner, especially on an incredibly difficult topic. Though it was written forty years ago, it still retains value, even in the end as he looks forward to tomorrow. Steiner's begins with the 19th century, arguing that a malaise (or to use his word, ennui) fell upon the West after the divisive career of Napoleon. In this newly created world of peace--Steiner is speaking broadly here, recognizing smaller conflicts and exceptions--people found that something was lacking. Solid work here from Steiner, especially on an incredibly difficult topic. Though it was written forty years ago, it still retains value, even in the end as he looks forward to tomorrow. Steiner's begins with the 19th century, arguing that a malaise (or to use his word, ennui) fell upon the West after the divisive career of Napoleon. In this newly created world of peace--Steiner is speaking broadly here, recognizing smaller conflicts and exceptions--people found that something was lacking. Though the sciences were progressing at a rapid rate, people still didn't have enough. Steiner's fascinating chapter 2 involves the absence of religion (he focuses on Judaism), the absence of transcendence that stood beyond and was ultimately incomprehensible to humanity. This absence left people to themselves. They discarded the "useless myths" of Christianity, things like heaven and hell. And yet, it was clear they still worked off of that narrative. People like Marx, like those Christians looking forward to a Millennial kingdom, sought a vision of heaven for the people of earth. However, building a heaven on earth is difficult, and so, with the onset of WWI and then the Holocaust, these same people went ahead and created Hell on earth. Steiner's work on this period really adds to my understanding of our arrival in the contemporary cultural moment, where people having cast aside the myths and suffered through Hell on earth now have a confused and/or multi-faceted perspective on the world. Sources of authority come from all over. In the final chapter, Steiner laments the passing away of the culture of the word, while highlighting that the way forward probably involves a culture of mathematics and science. Rather than see these two cultures as mutually exclusive, Steiner suggests that they both have value, and that therefore they both need to be retained. I'm not sure I completely agree with the conclusion (it seems to me any culture of math/science is fundamentally built on the word), but I appreciate his finding value in both, as well as writing something on culture forty years ago that still holds its value today. ...more

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Aug 08, 2011 John Kemp added it

Prof. Steiner describes, from the point of view of one steeped in the Western literary tradition, the condition we have come to recognise as postmodern. This brief, dense book, massively erudite, anatomises a culture burdened with disquieting intimations of fracture and decline. Yet, forty years later, when much that he discusses- the privileged discourse of science over religion, the collapsed domains of high and low culture- seems to have come to pass, the barbarians either remain still at the ...more

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Jul 04, 2013 David rated it it was amazing

An extremely interesting essay by one of the -supposedly- greatest minds of the XXth century, trying to analyze the western world's culture and education system through modern history, with the events of the second world war as a turning
point - with no possible way back - : how the rise of science and the "fall" of God (to briefly summarize it) during the past centuries led to the Shoah, how culture has evolved since then (the book was written in the 70s) compared to what it was before and ...more

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Apr 02, 2013 Danny Byrne rated it really liked it

Lucid, wide-ranging and absorbing discussion of the decline of western humanism and our subsequent state of scientific 'post-culture' - though the bits about the latter are somewhat less impressive/interesting. Brilliant discussion probing the relationship between the holocaust and the history of western humanism, including the provocative notion that it originated in a kind of semi-conscious Freudian backlash against Jewish utopianism (ie monotheism, primitive Christianity, and messianic ...more

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Nov 08, 2016 Ada Shehu rated it it was amazing

E gjeta mes leksioneve të Bachelorit. E kam lexuar 6 vjet më parë për herë të parë, por ktë herë më "hapi sytë". Jua sugjeroj ta lexoni, keni dhe linkun për ta lexuar online.

Në shqip është: "Në kështjellën e mjekërkaltrit" dhe e ka përkthyer Bashkim Shehu. (Jo nuk e kam fis, nuk e njoh fare faktikisht)

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Feb 23, 2015 Lukas rated it it was ok

Den vierten Teil hätte er sich ja mal sparen können. So stark bis dorthin und dann kommt er an mit der bösen Popmusik, die die Kultur zerstört und hört sich mit Anfang vierzig plötzlich an wie jemand, der zu alt und verbittert geworden ist.

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Apr 03, 2015 Ioana added it

The establishment embodied gives the Universe a speech. Decay, decay, decay... Unworthy mortals, you are doomed. Your classic Greek and Latin knowledge is null. As such, you look dumbly at the great works of mankind.

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Nov 21, 2009 Jonathan added it

Shelves: literary, criticism

None

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Apr 13, 2014 Will rated it liked it

Steiner's writing style is very academic so this book is difficult to read. Despite it's jumbled style, I'm glad I read it because of a few important ideas that were new to me.

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Sep 09, 2011 Tom added it

Another one of my favorite stylists. Two sentences suffices to clearly identify Steiner's elegiac, authoritative tone. Even when he's wrong, you hesitate to argue with him.

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Aug 30, 2016 Will Daly rated it really liked it

Good. The part from Essay 4 ("Tomorrow") about the loss of the classic tradition is excellent.

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Jul 30, 2013 Charles Cowherd rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: percy-family

Section: "Season in Hell" was amazing. Other three lectures were hard to grasp.

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Nov 29, 2013 Richard Epstein rated it really liked it

One of my favorite books, the perfect companion to Bate's Burden of the Past, and it's short, too.

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Feb 07, 2008 Josh rated it really liked it

Shelves: joshbooks

Someday I hope to write a book with a subtitle like "Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture."

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Erin rated it really liked it
May 18, 2008

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About George Steiner

George Steiner

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See also: George A. Steiner, author on Management and Planning.

Dr. Francis George Steiner is an essayist, novelist, philosopher, literary critic, and educator. He has written for The New Yorker for over thirty years, contributing over two hundred reviews. Among his many awards, he received The Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award from Stanford University 1998. He lives in Cambridge, England, ...more