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Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman
"When Steiner deals with transactions between languages . . . as in discussion of various English versions of the Bible or Robert Lowell`s translation of Racine, we see a keenly discriminating literary mind at work on what it loves."-Robert Gorham Davis, New York Times Book Review "An extraordinarily sharp, brilliant, and thoughtful discussion of the strange conditions into which modern writing has worked itself. . . . Few, very few writers today have as much that is worthwhile to say on today`s writing as does the author."-Joseph G. Harrison, Christian Science Monitor "Whoever has valued and needed this book for its insights into some one particular matter . . . will upon rereading discover the astounding breadth of attention in [it]: from Homer to Thomas Mann, from Marshall McLuhan to The Warsaw Diary of Chaim Kaplan. In each of these essays, a single sentence, and often more than one, can endlessly provoke and illuminate thought."-John Felstiner How do we evaluate the power and utility of language when it has been made to articulate falsehoods in certain totalitarian regimes or has been charged with vulgarity and imprecision in a mass-consumer democracy? How will language react to the increasingly urgent claims of more exact speech such as mathematics and symbolic notation? These are some of the questions Steiner addresses in this elegantly written book, first published in 1967 to international acclaim.
440 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
124 people are currently reading
1436 people want to read
About the author
George Steiner
186 books566 followersSee also: George A. Steiner, author on Management and Planning.
Dr. Francis George Steiner was an essayist, novelist, philosopher, literary critic, and educator. He wrote 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 lived in Cambridge, England, with his wife, historian Zara Shakow Steiner.
In 1950 he earned an M.A. from Harvard University, where he won the Bell Prize in American Literature, and received his Ph.D. from Oxford University (Balliol College) on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1955. He was then a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for two years. He became a founding fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge in 1961, and has been an Extraordinary Fellow there since 1969. Additionally, Steiner accepted the post of Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva in 1974, which he held for 20 years, teaching in four languages. He became Professor Emeritus at Geneva University on his retirement in 1994, and an Honorary Fellow at Balliol College at Oxford University in 1995. He later held the positions of the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow of St. Anne's College at Oxford University from 1994 to 1995, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002.
Dr. Francis George Steiner was an essayist, novelist, philosopher, literary critic, and educator. He wrote 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 lived in Cambridge, England, with his wife, historian Zara Shakow Steiner.
In 1950 he earned an M.A. from Harvard University, where he won the Bell Prize in American Literature, and received his Ph.D. from Oxford University (Balliol College) on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1955. He was then a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for two years. He became a founding fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge in 1961, and has been an Extraordinary Fellow there since 1969. Additionally, Steiner accepted the post of Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva in 1974, which he held for 20 years, teaching in four languages. He became Professor Emeritus at Geneva University on his retirement in 1994, and an Honorary Fellow at Balliol College at Oxford University in 1995. He later held the positions of the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow of St. Anne's College at Oxford University from 1994 to 1995, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
February 5, 2020
RIP to a great thinker. Reading this aged 19 or 20 had a transformative effect on me:
We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanising force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?
We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanising force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?
March 30, 2022
George Steiner is a genius. I stumbled on him by chance, and I'm so grateful for it. He delves calmly and incisively into massive topics that mean a lot to anyone with any interest in the life of the mind, the workings of language, and the state of humanity. (I feel like that should be everyone.) His erudition is humbling and honestly insane. Practically every sentence gave me something new to think about, even if I disagreed. I am a puddle of awe.
July 6, 2019
Writer and teacher George Steiner gives us some new perspectives on how we think about silence. His view transcends the simple absence of physical sound. Rather, he shows us silence as both a raw wound, and a tool in communication. The 'author's voice' of literary criticism will never sound quite the same after reading Steiner's essays. The edition I read is the one published in 1967.
While musicians Simon and Garfunkle enchanted crowds with their song, The Sound of Silence, the ecology of their "silence" was personal and introspective. Steiner's Silence is an academic and moral approach to the subject; his silence is framed in the world of literature and relates to a society-wide audience, not just the individual. His body of work is heavily weighted with the premature silence of the six million: the men women and children murdered in the death camps of Nazi Germany. He gives us reason to broaden our first interpretation of the topic of the sounds of silence.
He writes of a question raised by a fellow faculty member, and adds his answer:
Recently one of my colleagues, an eminent scholar, inquired of me, with genuine
bafflement, why someone trying to establish himself in an English Literature
faculty should refer so often to concentration camps; why they were in any way relevant.
[Steiner replied:] They are profoundly relevant, and before we can go on teaching we must
surely ask ourselves: are the humanities humane and, if so why did they fail before the
night?
His several essays probe and evaluate the intellectual structures of the humanities to provide the deep background to his answer. He returns to key points about silence throughout these essays. Here I use four of his 1960 essays, and one from 1959 to provide a look at three of his interpretations of literary silence. Readers will find that there are many more essays and interpretations in this rich volume.
The first facet is that literary silence results from writers not writing. Under the repressive governments of wartime Germany and Russia, on which he focuses, the publication of dissenting opinions could be lethal. Beyond this obvious concern with self-preservation, Steiner explores the constructive use of silence in communication. He writes, "In much modern poetry silence represents the claims of the ideal, to speak is to say less." Adding later, "When the words in the city are full of savagery and lies, nothing speaks louder than the unwritten poem. He also elaborates on the general decline in cultural literacy in which fewer readers recognize the allusions, even the references, an author makes. Classic mythology and historical figures ring fewer bells in our time. This effectively renders many literary messages silent from the reader's lack of knowing.
Steiner raises as a second cause of literary silence the death of the German language. Here, he addressed the failure of many German writers to produce new literature after the war. This essay, he notes, remained controversial in Germany for more than a decade after it was published. He wrote, "The thing that has gone dead is the German language ... Something immensely destructive has happened to it. It makes noise. It even communicates, but it creates no sense of communion." The cause, he reasons, is that the language was so mangled by wartime jargon and propaganda that it degraded "human speech to the level of baying wolves." Thus, many German writers felt bereft of their native tongue.
A third interpretation of literary silence may be best understood through the old adage, "Action speaks louder than words." (My phrase, not Steiner's.) By that reckoning, inaction is equivalent to silence. Steiner writes, "We do not know; and surely there is something rather terrible in our doubt whether the study and delight a man finds in Shakespeare make him any less capable of organizing a concentration camp." He reminds that inhuman acts can occur in democratic nations that pride themselves on their high culture: "Ten years after the Gestapo quit Paris, the countrymen of Voltaire were torturing Algerians and each other in some of the same police cellars." Such disconnects between the ideal and the action, that is, between the humane and the human, returns us to Steiner's opening question, "are the humanities humane?"
Steiner posits a saddening response: "I find myself unable to assert confidently that the humanities humanize. Indeed, I would go further; it is a least conceivable that the focusing of consciousness on a written text ... diminishes the sharpness and readiness of our actual moral response."
Might Steiner be delivering a message he heard in that great silence of the six million?
The literary style of his writing is captivating, but that style is enriched with thoughtful commentary and compelling ideas. His array of topics is broad enough that the book does not call for straight through reading. It does call for sampling, however.
While musicians Simon and Garfunkle enchanted crowds with their song, The Sound of Silence, the ecology of their "silence" was personal and introspective. Steiner's Silence is an academic and moral approach to the subject; his silence is framed in the world of literature and relates to a society-wide audience, not just the individual. His body of work is heavily weighted with the premature silence of the six million: the men women and children murdered in the death camps of Nazi Germany. He gives us reason to broaden our first interpretation of the topic of the sounds of silence.
He writes of a question raised by a fellow faculty member, and adds his answer:
Recently one of my colleagues, an eminent scholar, inquired of me, with genuine
bafflement, why someone trying to establish himself in an English Literature
faculty should refer so often to concentration camps; why they were in any way relevant.
[Steiner replied:] They are profoundly relevant, and before we can go on teaching we must
surely ask ourselves: are the humanities humane and, if so why did they fail before the
night?
His several essays probe and evaluate the intellectual structures of the humanities to provide the deep background to his answer. He returns to key points about silence throughout these essays. Here I use four of his 1960 essays, and one from 1959 to provide a look at three of his interpretations of literary silence. Readers will find that there are many more essays and interpretations in this rich volume.
The first facet is that literary silence results from writers not writing. Under the repressive governments of wartime Germany and Russia, on which he focuses, the publication of dissenting opinions could be lethal. Beyond this obvious concern with self-preservation, Steiner explores the constructive use of silence in communication. He writes, "In much modern poetry silence represents the claims of the ideal, to speak is to say less." Adding later, "When the words in the city are full of savagery and lies, nothing speaks louder than the unwritten poem. He also elaborates on the general decline in cultural literacy in which fewer readers recognize the allusions, even the references, an author makes. Classic mythology and historical figures ring fewer bells in our time. This effectively renders many literary messages silent from the reader's lack of knowing.
Steiner raises as a second cause of literary silence the death of the German language. Here, he addressed the failure of many German writers to produce new literature after the war. This essay, he notes, remained controversial in Germany for more than a decade after it was published. He wrote, "The thing that has gone dead is the German language ... Something immensely destructive has happened to it. It makes noise. It even communicates, but it creates no sense of communion." The cause, he reasons, is that the language was so mangled by wartime jargon and propaganda that it degraded "human speech to the level of baying wolves." Thus, many German writers felt bereft of their native tongue.
A third interpretation of literary silence may be best understood through the old adage, "Action speaks louder than words." (My phrase, not Steiner's.) By that reckoning, inaction is equivalent to silence. Steiner writes, "We do not know; and surely there is something rather terrible in our doubt whether the study and delight a man finds in Shakespeare make him any less capable of organizing a concentration camp." He reminds that inhuman acts can occur in democratic nations that pride themselves on their high culture: "Ten years after the Gestapo quit Paris, the countrymen of Voltaire were torturing Algerians and each other in some of the same police cellars." Such disconnects between the ideal and the action, that is, between the humane and the human, returns us to Steiner's opening question, "are the humanities humane?"
Steiner posits a saddening response: "I find myself unable to assert confidently that the humanities humanize. Indeed, I would go further; it is a least conceivable that the focusing of consciousness on a written text ... diminishes the sharpness and readiness of our actual moral response."
Might Steiner be delivering a message he heard in that great silence of the six million?
The literary style of his writing is captivating, but that style is enriched with thoughtful commentary and compelling ideas. His array of topics is broad enough that the book does not call for straight through reading. It does call for sampling, however.
May 30, 2015
Lenguaje y silencio
de George Steiner es un libro que, a pesar de haber sido escrito en la década de 1960, mantiene una vigencia extraordinaria en sus planteamientos. Steiner gira en torno de la decadencia del lenguaje cuando este es manipulado por quienes detentan el poder, y para ello se afinca no en su vivencia de la Shoá, puesto que él logró huir con su familia poco antes de ser alcanzados por la invasión nazi a Francia, sino en su interpretación de la misma como judío que la piensa en la distancia. Pese a ello, las reflexiones no son ni distantes ni desentendidas. Por el contrario, la contundencia de sus afirmaciones recuerda a Primo Levi, por ejemplo.
De entre los ensayos del libro, «Posdata» tiene la peculiaridad de ser aquel en el que su autor expone su intimidad sin la reserva que apreciamos en el resto del libro. Allí también se hacen ciertas afirmaciones que dan cuenta de la extraordinaria ética de Steiner como filósofo, tanto que pueden considerarse como interpelaciones a quienes también se han dedicado a pensar sobre el horror perpetrado por los nazis. Para muestra valgan este breve extracto:
Solo le puedo reclamar al autor el ritmo lento y tedioso de algunos ensayos, pocos, la verdad, que contrastan con el carácter brillante de buena parte de la obra. Mi otra queja tiene que ver más con el aspecto editorial. Lenguaje y silencio , a mi juicio, es un libro que se halla entre la crítica cultural, la filosofía del lenguaje y la crítica literaria comparativa, que abunda en referencias cultas y reflexiones a veces casi barrocas, que no son asistidas para su más cómoda lectura por el diseño de esta edición de Gedisa en lo que respecta al tamaño de fuente y al interlineado, ambos deficientes. Por el contrario, la traducción de Miguel Ultorio se hace muy fluida de leer, lo cual se agradece dadas las condiciones del diseño de la mancha.
Aun así, recomiendo ampliamente la lectura de este libro de George Steiner, que merecería ya una revisión a la luz de los acontecimientos dramáticos que sacuden actualmente a la humanidad, y que nos hace preguntarnos por el valor, vigencia y futuro del lenguaje en una sociedad que lo manipula no solo hasta vaciarlo de su significado, sino que incluso es capaz de hacer, en algunos contextos, que significantes que hasta ayer eran innegociables hoy se carguen de significados opuestos.
De entre los ensayos del libro, «Posdata» tiene la peculiaridad de ser aquel en el que su autor expone su intimidad sin la reserva que apreciamos en el resto del libro. Allí también se hacen ciertas afirmaciones que dan cuenta de la extraordinaria ética de Steiner como filósofo, tanto que pueden considerarse como interpelaciones a quienes también se han dedicado a pensar sobre el horror perpetrado por los nazis. Para muestra valgan este breve extracto:
Treblinka [alude a la obra de Jean-Françoise Steiner] ha sido objeto de amragas críticas por parte de otros autores (entre ellos, David Rousset y León Poliakov) debido a sus supuestas inexactitudes, a su racismo, y al respaldo que su tesis general sobre la pasividad judía puede brindar a la señorita Hannah Arendt. Han sido feas recriminaciones, como también lo fueron las del caso Arendt. Y esto, aunque humillante y subversivo para la inteligencia, es oportuno. Y ello porque en modo alguno es seguro que el discurso racional pueda abordar estas cuestiones, que se encuentran fuera de la sintaxis normativa de la comunicación humana, en el ámbito explícito de lo bestial. Y tampoco está claro que quienes no se hayan visto personal y plenamente involucrados puedan aludir a estos padecimientos y salir indemnes. Quines lo vivieron desde dentro –Elie Wiesels en La noche, Les Portes de la fôret, Le Chant des morts, Koppel Holzmann en Die Höhlen der Hölle– logran hallar el discurso adecuado, a menudo alegórico y con frecuencia muy próximo al silencio, para lo que deciden relatar. Todos los que llegamos después hablamos unos de otros con estridencia y malestar, realizando afirmaciones con enojo o con una percepción imparcial. El señor Poliakov habla de los «escándalos» sucesivos que acompañan a todos los libros que abordan la cuestión del asesinato de los judíos, desde el de Schwarz-Bart, The Last of the Just, hasta el de Hochhuth, El vicario, y últimamente el Treblinka. Silencio durante el asesinato, pero escándalo por los libros.
Solo le puedo reclamar al autor el ritmo lento y tedioso de algunos ensayos, pocos, la verdad, que contrastan con el carácter brillante de buena parte de la obra. Mi otra queja tiene que ver más con el aspecto editorial. Lenguaje y silencio , a mi juicio, es un libro que se halla entre la crítica cultural, la filosofía del lenguaje y la crítica literaria comparativa, que abunda en referencias cultas y reflexiones a veces casi barrocas, que no son asistidas para su más cómoda lectura por el diseño de esta edición de Gedisa en lo que respecta al tamaño de fuente y al interlineado, ambos deficientes. Por el contrario, la traducción de Miguel Ultorio se hace muy fluida de leer, lo cual se agradece dadas las condiciones del diseño de la mancha.
Aun así, recomiendo ampliamente la lectura de este libro de George Steiner, que merecería ya una revisión a la luz de los acontecimientos dramáticos que sacuden actualmente a la humanidad, y que nos hace preguntarnos por el valor, vigencia y futuro del lenguaje en una sociedad que lo manipula no solo hasta vaciarlo de su significado, sino que incluso es capaz de hacer, en algunos contextos, que significantes que hasta ayer eran innegociables hoy se carguen de significados opuestos.
December 15, 2023
"We come after, and that is the nerve of our condition. After the unprecedented ruin of humane values and hopes by the political bestiality of our age. That ruin is the starting point of any serious thought about literature and the place of literature in society. Literature deals essentially and continually with the image of man, with the shape and motive of human conduct. We cannot act now, be it as critics or merely as rational beings, as if nothing of vital relevance had happened to our sense of the human possibility, as if the extermination by hunger or violence of some seventy million men, women, and children in Europe and Russia between 1914 and 1945 had not altered, profoundly, the quality of our awareness. What man has inflicted on man, in very recent time, has affected the writer’s primary material—-the sum and potential of human behavior —and it presses on the brain with a new darkness."
"Not only did the general dissemination of literary, cultural values prove no barrier to totalitarianism; but in notable instances the high places of humanistic learning and art actually welcomed and aided the new terror. Barbarism prevailed on the very ground of Christian humanism, of Renaissance culture and classic rationalism. We know that some of the men who devised and administered Auschwitz had been taught to read Shakespeare or Goethe, and continued to do so. This is of obvious and appalling relevance to the study or teaching of literature. It compels us to ask whether knowledge of the best that has been thought and said does, as Matthew Arnold asserted, broaden and refine the resources of the human spirit. "
"Not only did the general dissemination of literary, cultural values prove no barrier to totalitarianism; but in notable instances the high places of humanistic learning and art actually welcomed and aided the new terror. Barbarism prevailed on the very ground of Christian humanism, of Renaissance culture and classic rationalism. We know that some of the men who devised and administered Auschwitz had been taught to read Shakespeare or Goethe, and continued to do so. This is of obvious and appalling relevance to the study or teaching of literature. It compels us to ask whether knowledge of the best that has been thought and said does, as Matthew Arnold asserted, broaden and refine the resources of the human spirit. "
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May 31, 2025«Mientras no podamos devolver a las palabras en nuestros periódicos, en nuestras leyes y en nuestros actos políticos algún grado de claridad y de seriedad en su significado, más irán nuestras vidas acercándose al caos.»
November 16, 2021
This year, when time has permitted, I've been transcribing my disintegrating, voluminous notes from grad-school courses taken many years ago. In the process I noticed a recommendation from a now-dead professor to read Language and Silence. I was too busy at the time, but on seeing that again I decided it was now or never.
It's a hefty book, composed of several essays that originally appeared in publications such as The Kenyon Review. At first glance it looks a little forbidding, but I have to say it's beautifully, elegantly written, and the pieces are provocative exercises in thinking.
As an example, Mr. Steiner's first essay begins with an almost humorous self-deprecating observation about literary critics like himself. Criticism, he says, exists by the grace of other people's genius—those capable of actual creation (poems, novels, plays). And yet, times being what they are, "the bright young man, instead of regarding criticism as defeat, as a gradual, bleak coming to terms with the ash and grit of one's limited talent, thinks of it as a career of high note." Reading this, I immediately thought of Oscar Wilde's contrary argument that commentary about art is of a higher order than art itself, just as art transcends mere life. (I learned here that view was first voiced by Wilde's mentor, Matthew Arnold.)
However, the main point Steiner makes here is that the 20th century's "unprecedented ruin of human values and hopes" (via the world wars, dictatorships, gulags, etc.) is proof that the arts themselves offer no protection against chaos. At worst, they may even desensitize us to the suffering of others. Therefore, criticism may indeed be justified if it can show us "what to read, and how."
I particularly liked the second essay, "The Retreat from the Word," which explores the modern trend away from language as a means of coping with reality. The first sentence sets it up thusly: "The Apostle tells us that in the beginning was the Word. He gives no assurance as to the end." Reliance on words is ingrained in the civilization we've inherited, but words are no longer adequate for understanding the higher math and science that underpin further progress. He cites Wittgenstein, who questioned "whether reality can be spoken of, when speech is merely a kind of infinite regression, words being spoken of other words." At the same time, in colloquial speech and writing, we are using a more limited and simpler vocabulary than did our ancestors. He blames mass media and marketing communications and especially politicians, who use language not to communicate important facts or enhance understanding but rather to divert attention from inconvenient facts and trigger emotional responses.
At that point in my reading I paused, not at all unhappy with the material but conscious of the limited time available and the quantity of other books on my table. However, I had a sense this one could provide insights in areas important to me. Returning after a few days, I read the third essay, which traces the trajectory of the importance of language. First it notes that, since long before Aristotle, speech has been regarded both as the dividing line between man and other living things and as our instrument for challenging the deities. Legend has them striking back, e.g., at the Tower of Babel, but in our own experience too there are points beyond which words fail us. Consider for example music, which is "unique to itself (untranslatable) yet immediately comprehensible." At the outer limits of translating truth into speech, "language loses the authority of rational statement."
Steiner mentions Kafka's anguish over "the impossibility of adequate statement, the hopelessness of the writer's task, which is to find language as yet unsullied, worn to cliché," and Ionesco's observation that "there are no words for the deepest experience." This is not to say great writers—or any of us—should not try to capture that. But Steiner does suggest that maybe we ought to back off a little bit. "We speak far too much, far too easily, making common what was private, arresting into clichés of false certitude that which was provisional, personal, and therefore alive."
This essay was first published in 1966. I cringe at the thought of what Steiner would say about what we're doing in 2021.
These first three essays attack the same problem from slightly different angles. Thereafter, the focus shifts somewhat. Number four is a meditation on the idea of teaching literature in a college setting, and especially the conceit "that a young man or woman in the very early twenties [i.e., a PhD candidate] should have something fresh or profound or decisive to say about Shakespeare or Keats or Dickens. Few people are ever able to say anything new about major literature, and the idea that one can do so when young is almost paradoxical. Literature takes a great deal of living with and living by."
Steiner acknowledges various reasons for teaching great literature, but the one that troubles him most is the "optimistic" assumption that it "would enrich not only taste and style but moral feeling; that it would cultivate human judgment"—that it would be a substitute for religious instruction. Apparently, in this area it has failed. "I find myself unable to assert confidently that the humanities humanize."
That question, incidentally, is one I recall a couple of my college professors raising, in so many words.
Later in the book I recognized another familiar line: that "The King James Bible is the only great thing in this world ever done by a committee."
Clearly, these essays were important to the most serious scholars I ever knew. I think if I'd read them as a grad student, I would have been a better student. I could have had more interesting conversations with my mentors. But for that matter, I would make a better student now than I was then. Alas.
I wonder if English Department faculties still care about this sort of thing. My impression is that they have wholly different priorities. Those priorities appear unwise to me, but on the other hand the only constant is change. In these essays Steiner says the great age of the novel is "obviously over" and that something new is emerging, "a kind of documentary poetic or 'post-fiction.'" (Perhaps the recent popularity of memoirs is evidence.) If the subject is changing, perhaps the study of it must change as well.
Again, the outlook for letters is discouraging. Steiner says "the thinning out of language has condemned much of recent literature to mediocrity." Steeped as we are in an environment of inadequate communication, we may not have the patience for a book like this, which arguably might make its points more concisely. However, as a model for honest and heartfelt communication, coupled with the sheer enjoyment of verbal expression, it's well worth the effort.
It's a hefty book, composed of several essays that originally appeared in publications such as The Kenyon Review. At first glance it looks a little forbidding, but I have to say it's beautifully, elegantly written, and the pieces are provocative exercises in thinking.
As an example, Mr. Steiner's first essay begins with an almost humorous self-deprecating observation about literary critics like himself. Criticism, he says, exists by the grace of other people's genius—those capable of actual creation (poems, novels, plays). And yet, times being what they are, "the bright young man, instead of regarding criticism as defeat, as a gradual, bleak coming to terms with the ash and grit of one's limited talent, thinks of it as a career of high note." Reading this, I immediately thought of Oscar Wilde's contrary argument that commentary about art is of a higher order than art itself, just as art transcends mere life. (I learned here that view was first voiced by Wilde's mentor, Matthew Arnold.)
However, the main point Steiner makes here is that the 20th century's "unprecedented ruin of human values and hopes" (via the world wars, dictatorships, gulags, etc.) is proof that the arts themselves offer no protection against chaos. At worst, they may even desensitize us to the suffering of others. Therefore, criticism may indeed be justified if it can show us "what to read, and how."
I particularly liked the second essay, "The Retreat from the Word," which explores the modern trend away from language as a means of coping with reality. The first sentence sets it up thusly: "The Apostle tells us that in the beginning was the Word. He gives no assurance as to the end." Reliance on words is ingrained in the civilization we've inherited, but words are no longer adequate for understanding the higher math and science that underpin further progress. He cites Wittgenstein, who questioned "whether reality can be spoken of, when speech is merely a kind of infinite regression, words being spoken of other words." At the same time, in colloquial speech and writing, we are using a more limited and simpler vocabulary than did our ancestors. He blames mass media and marketing communications and especially politicians, who use language not to communicate important facts or enhance understanding but rather to divert attention from inconvenient facts and trigger emotional responses.
At that point in my reading I paused, not at all unhappy with the material but conscious of the limited time available and the quantity of other books on my table. However, I had a sense this one could provide insights in areas important to me. Returning after a few days, I read the third essay, which traces the trajectory of the importance of language. First it notes that, since long before Aristotle, speech has been regarded both as the dividing line between man and other living things and as our instrument for challenging the deities. Legend has them striking back, e.g., at the Tower of Babel, but in our own experience too there are points beyond which words fail us. Consider for example music, which is "unique to itself (untranslatable) yet immediately comprehensible." At the outer limits of translating truth into speech, "language loses the authority of rational statement."
Steiner mentions Kafka's anguish over "the impossibility of adequate statement, the hopelessness of the writer's task, which is to find language as yet unsullied, worn to cliché," and Ionesco's observation that "there are no words for the deepest experience." This is not to say great writers—or any of us—should not try to capture that. But Steiner does suggest that maybe we ought to back off a little bit. "We speak far too much, far too easily, making common what was private, arresting into clichés of false certitude that which was provisional, personal, and therefore alive."
This essay was first published in 1966. I cringe at the thought of what Steiner would say about what we're doing in 2021.
These first three essays attack the same problem from slightly different angles. Thereafter, the focus shifts somewhat. Number four is a meditation on the idea of teaching literature in a college setting, and especially the conceit "that a young man or woman in the very early twenties [i.e., a PhD candidate] should have something fresh or profound or decisive to say about Shakespeare or Keats or Dickens. Few people are ever able to say anything new about major literature, and the idea that one can do so when young is almost paradoxical. Literature takes a great deal of living with and living by."
Steiner acknowledges various reasons for teaching great literature, but the one that troubles him most is the "optimistic" assumption that it "would enrich not only taste and style but moral feeling; that it would cultivate human judgment"—that it would be a substitute for religious instruction. Apparently, in this area it has failed. "I find myself unable to assert confidently that the humanities humanize."
That question, incidentally, is one I recall a couple of my college professors raising, in so many words.
Later in the book I recognized another familiar line: that "The King James Bible is the only great thing in this world ever done by a committee."
Clearly, these essays were important to the most serious scholars I ever knew. I think if I'd read them as a grad student, I would have been a better student. I could have had more interesting conversations with my mentors. But for that matter, I would make a better student now than I was then. Alas.
I wonder if English Department faculties still care about this sort of thing. My impression is that they have wholly different priorities. Those priorities appear unwise to me, but on the other hand the only constant is change. In these essays Steiner says the great age of the novel is "obviously over" and that something new is emerging, "a kind of documentary poetic or 'post-fiction.'" (Perhaps the recent popularity of memoirs is evidence.) If the subject is changing, perhaps the study of it must change as well.
Again, the outlook for letters is discouraging. Steiner says "the thinning out of language has condemned much of recent literature to mediocrity." Steeped as we are in an environment of inadequate communication, we may not have the patience for a book like this, which arguably might make its points more concisely. However, as a model for honest and heartfelt communication, coupled with the sheer enjoyment of verbal expression, it's well worth the effort.
September 2, 2008
A critic who writes well: who'd a thunk?
George Steiner's essays on Paul Celan, Martin Heidegger, and Franz Kafka are rapturous and illuminating. I wish more critics had his grace and humility!
George Steiner's essays on Paul Celan, Martin Heidegger, and Franz Kafka are rapturous and illuminating. I wish more critics had his grace and humility!
July 22, 2021
Un libro que quisiera haber descubierto hace mucho tiempo (y es que presiento que el autor y su obra pasaran a ocupar un lugar privilegiado entre mis favoritos de todos los tiempos). Preguntas acerca de filosofía del lenguaje, de la literatura y del arte acuciosamente presentadas como temas de conversación que invitan a la reflexión y al debate:
"¿Cómo debemos valorar la función del lenguaje después de que haya servido para expresar falsedades en los regímenes totalitarios, después de que haya sido arrastrado a la vulgaridad y la imprecisión de las democracias de consumo masificado? ¿Cómo responderá el lenguaje futuro a las exigencias científicas de expresiones más exactas, como la matemática o la lógica? Steiner consagra este volumen a la vida del lenguaje a través de los tiempos, desde la Grecia clásica y la Edad Media hasta los logros siempre inalcanzables de Shakespeare, las luces y sombras de Baudelaire, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Broch o Beckett. Sus reflexiones se centran en las posibilidades de los distintos géneros literarios y en las sacudidas que las complejas energías de la palabra provocan y encauzan en nuestro mundo. Pero también evoca los límites del lenguaje. Ante los extremos de lo atroz o lo sublime parece imponerse el silencio. Sin embargo, a los seres hablantes el lenguaje impone el deber de transmitir incluso aquellas experiencias que están en el límite de la imposibilidad de articularlas".
"¿Cómo debemos valorar la función del lenguaje después de que haya servido para expresar falsedades en los regímenes totalitarios, después de que haya sido arrastrado a la vulgaridad y la imprecisión de las democracias de consumo masificado? ¿Cómo responderá el lenguaje futuro a las exigencias científicas de expresiones más exactas, como la matemática o la lógica? Steiner consagra este volumen a la vida del lenguaje a través de los tiempos, desde la Grecia clásica y la Edad Media hasta los logros siempre inalcanzables de Shakespeare, las luces y sombras de Baudelaire, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Broch o Beckett. Sus reflexiones se centran en las posibilidades de los distintos géneros literarios y en las sacudidas que las complejas energías de la palabra provocan y encauzan en nuestro mundo. Pero también evoca los límites del lenguaje. Ante los extremos de lo atroz o lo sublime parece imponerse el silencio. Sin embargo, a los seres hablantes el lenguaje impone el deber de transmitir incluso aquellas experiencias que están en el límite de la imposibilidad de articularlas".
November 12, 2024
Glad I read this one.
I found the first two sections much more useful/interesting than the rest. I always take something away from reading one of Steiner's essays.
I found the first two sections much more useful/interesting than the rest. I always take something away from reading one of Steiner's essays.
March 17, 2024
He doesn't have much to say but he says a lot of it
September 4, 2014
Reading George Steiner, I discovered that discussions about the future of the humanities, and their decline or demise are not limited to the present. This collection of essays, written between 1959 to 1967 give us a window into the conversation in Steiner's generation, particularly concerning the place of literature, as well as the other arts, in our society.
Steiner contends that the thread that holds this collection together is the attempt to articulate a philosophy of language after the Holocaust and the totalitarian regime of Stalin. What is evident in reading these essays is the trauma of this period on literature, as words were twisted in ways that represented black as white, and where people could read Goethe and listen to Schubert and preside over the extermination of the Jewish people and consider it all in a day's work.
The first group of essays in this book particularly explore this theme and whether in fact "Humane Literacy" can have a transformative effect for good. The essay on "To Civilize our Gentlemen" particularly explores this idea and the possibility of reading that fails, in the words of Kafka, "to wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull". In this same collection, we see the despair of some artists and the lapse into wordless silence where words seem inadequate to the human condition. Equally, in "Night Words" Steiner explores the real problem with "high pornography" which is the utter banality of the writing.
In subsequent sections, he gathers essays under the titles of "Language out of Darkness", "Classics" (which includes a fascinating essay on Homer and the differences between The Iliad and The Odyssey), "Masters", "Fiction and the Present", and "Marxism and Literature". I found much of this heavier going not only because I don't live in the world of literary criticism, and even less, am I aware of the critics, and many of the works that were being discussed in the early 60s.
Nevertheless, Steiner draws very fine portraits of critics like F.R. Leavis, and Georg Lukacs, and particularly the literature emerging out of Central Europe in the post-World War II, Stalinist purge era. We have his fresh take on the advent of the media age heralded by Marshall McLuhan and the shifting consciousness of moving from an age of print to an age of the image. Steiner seems dubious of McLuhan's prophecies, yet it cannot be argued, I think, that in the years since Steiner wrote, we have indeed witnessed and are continuing to witness a media revolution that is continuing to shape and change our relationship to the word and verbal discourse.
Equally, Steiner draws fine portraits of other writers and their work. I think particularly of the essay on Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in her early 30s ("The Art of Dying") and his essay on the life of Leon Trotsky, a tragic figure in Marxism. The puzzle for me was how all these fit his proposed theme, and yet the exploration of these figures was worthwhile.
Recommendations? I'm not sure I would recommend starting here in reading Steiner (even though I did!). Bettter places to start are his early works, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky and The Death of Tragedy or the works for which he is most known, In Bluebeard's Castle (in which he explores anti-Semitism) and After Babel, where he devlves more deeply into language. This might be best for those acquainted with Steiner's other work, and the literature of this period.
Steiner contends that the thread that holds this collection together is the attempt to articulate a philosophy of language after the Holocaust and the totalitarian regime of Stalin. What is evident in reading these essays is the trauma of this period on literature, as words were twisted in ways that represented black as white, and where people could read Goethe and listen to Schubert and preside over the extermination of the Jewish people and consider it all in a day's work.
The first group of essays in this book particularly explore this theme and whether in fact "Humane Literacy" can have a transformative effect for good. The essay on "To Civilize our Gentlemen" particularly explores this idea and the possibility of reading that fails, in the words of Kafka, "to wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull". In this same collection, we see the despair of some artists and the lapse into wordless silence where words seem inadequate to the human condition. Equally, in "Night Words" Steiner explores the real problem with "high pornography" which is the utter banality of the writing.
In subsequent sections, he gathers essays under the titles of "Language out of Darkness", "Classics" (which includes a fascinating essay on Homer and the differences between The Iliad and The Odyssey), "Masters", "Fiction and the Present", and "Marxism and Literature". I found much of this heavier going not only because I don't live in the world of literary criticism, and even less, am I aware of the critics, and many of the works that were being discussed in the early 60s.
Nevertheless, Steiner draws very fine portraits of critics like F.R. Leavis, and Georg Lukacs, and particularly the literature emerging out of Central Europe in the post-World War II, Stalinist purge era. We have his fresh take on the advent of the media age heralded by Marshall McLuhan and the shifting consciousness of moving from an age of print to an age of the image. Steiner seems dubious of McLuhan's prophecies, yet it cannot be argued, I think, that in the years since Steiner wrote, we have indeed witnessed and are continuing to witness a media revolution that is continuing to shape and change our relationship to the word and verbal discourse.
Equally, Steiner draws fine portraits of other writers and their work. I think particularly of the essay on Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in her early 30s ("The Art of Dying") and his essay on the life of Leon Trotsky, a tragic figure in Marxism. The puzzle for me was how all these fit his proposed theme, and yet the exploration of these figures was worthwhile.
Recommendations? I'm not sure I would recommend starting here in reading Steiner (even though I did!). Bettter places to start are his early works, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky and The Death of Tragedy or the works for which he is most known, In Bluebeard's Castle (in which he explores anti-Semitism) and After Babel, where he devlves more deeply into language. This might be best for those acquainted with Steiner's other work, and the literature of this period.
September 17, 2016
Un libro bastante interesante, que planea una posición crítica acerca de la literatura y el lenguaje. Lleno de referencias históricas, que en algunos casos lo hacen bastante pesado.
El ensayo sobre el abandono de la Palabra (con P mayúscula) es de los mejores, si no el mejor, en mi concepto.
Los ensayos sobre las teorías marxistas, consideró que hay que leerlos con algo de recelo y duda, pero son un punto de vista crítico e interesante.
Si estudias Literarura, creo que hay que leer este libro, completo!
El ensayo sobre el abandono de la Palabra (con P mayúscula) es de los mejores, si no el mejor, en mi concepto.
Los ensayos sobre las teorías marxistas, consideró que hay que leerlos con algo de recelo y duda, pero son un punto de vista crítico e interesante.
Si estudias Literarura, creo que hay que leer este libro, completo!
July 6, 2024
This is one of the best books that I have ever read. He has read a hell of a lot. He has insight into the challenges of new media, problems in the novel, problems in language and other expression that makes it harder and harder to communicate with each other. This is a noble, decisive, yet open-minded critic, familar with religion and communism. This book addresses problems that I've had in my mind for decades. Highly recommended. Similar to: Collected Works of George Orwell Volumes Three and Four; Vladimir Nabukov, Essays on Literature and Essays on Russian Literature.
April 19, 2022
Aunque Steiner parece perder la objetividad siempre que toca el tema del Holocausto, y aquí lo hace siempre, esta colección de ensayos es verdaderamente magistral. Entre crítica literaria concreta, reflexión filosófica sobre el lenguaje y la literatura y el puro despliegue de su sensibilidad y erudición, me ha hecho volverme a apasionar por todo lo que ya me apasiona y me ha hecho desear intensamente escribir.
May 29, 2021
A fascinating collection of essays. I particularly liked the first section where the essays focused on linguistics and the last where the focus was on communism/Marxism and literature. I picked through this book over a little more than two years, and the nice thing about essays is that you can do that!
August 14, 2018
Steiner is very generous in the time and thought he pays to Marxism and the writings of leaders of the communist movement.
But like many others, he takes for good coin the Stalinist claims to continuity with Lenin. Whereas Stalinism represented a murderous break with and burial of that continuity.
But like many others, he takes for good coin the Stalinist claims to continuity with Lenin. Whereas Stalinism represented a murderous break with and burial of that continuity.
Want to read
February 3, 2020
December 30, 2021
no entendi todo, pero lo que entendi fue brutal
Want to read
February 10, 2024have fallen in love with steiner's take on "the truth of life" in the iliad and must read his other essays asap
March 14, 2024
Vynikajúce!
December 5, 2024
The essay on Moses und Aron is particularly great.
March 25, 2025
对我而言有太多书名号和作家出现在书中，读得昏昏沉沉，只好「沉默」
April 2, 2025
Elegantly written
August 31, 2025
J’ai adoré ce livre, j’ai appris pleins de choses utiles pour mon mémoire mais également pour ma culture générale
Merci Steiner
Merci Steiner
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November 4, 2024翻过没太懂
November 11, 2014
Vejo que a primeira edição desta obra data de 1.958 e ainda hoje ela é atualíssima. George Steiner é um escritor que não deixa ninguém indiferente. Creio que a maioria se entusiasma com o que ele escreve, eu sou um deles. Ele prevê, naquela data, algo que está ainda em pleno desenvolvimento, isto é, a gradativa desimportância da palavra, a ineficácia da cultura para conter selvagerias e derrocadas. E especula a troca da palavra como meio de expressão eficaz, no campo científico, pela matemática ou pela música. Campos em que a eficácia e clareza são bem maiores quando se quer explicar, descrever, ou utilizar a "verdade". Magnífico o autor e obra. Ele consegue manter um ritmo impressionante sem nenhuma queda, ou elevação, mesmo quando escreve sobre o marxismo. Sempre perto do seu ouvido, desafiando-o, chamando sua atenção e fazendo-o sentir que tudo mais não tem importância.
May 25, 2013
Interesting book, even if sometimes really heavy: the writing of Steiner is particularly convoluted, also some quotes are too educated and the book is dated. Having said that some essays are brilliant.
Libro interessante anche se a tratti veramente pesante: la scrittura di Steiner é particolarmente arzigogolata, inoltre fa citazioni troppo colte ed il libro é datato. Detto questo alcuni saggi sono brillanti.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA FOR THE PREVIEW!
Libro interessante anche se a tratti veramente pesante: la scrittura di Steiner é particolarmente arzigogolata, inoltre fa citazioni troppo colte ed il libro é datato. Detto questo alcuni saggi sono brillanti.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA FOR THE PREVIEW!
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November 9, 2017I really don't like George's writing.
January 20, 2008
Interesting look into the issues and style of literary criticism in the '50s by German-Jew looking at German literature...but only so interesting before it seems out of date.
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