Steiner, George 1929–: Critical Essay by Theodore Solotaroff

If you are interested in contemporary literature and are looking for intelligent direction, then [Language and Silence, a] collection of George Steiner's essays and reviews, is the book for you. Steiner has been mostly known for his two dazzlingly precocious works of scholarship, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky and The Death of Tragedy, but he now emerges as a cultural journalist who is as pertinent as he is erudite, a kind of latter-day Arthur Koestler. Language and Silence casts a bright and searching light into the murky disarray of current letters and literacy: it looks back to a darkness and disruption of Western culture that continues to plague and challenge the moral purpose of literature, among other fields, and it looks forward to possibilities of art and thought that may carry us beyond our broken heritage. It provides an articulate and comprehensive discussion of the impact of science and mass communications on the ability of language to describe the realities of the earth and the world. It takes up such matters as the wages of pornography, both for letters and for the private life of feeling, the sociological as well as artistic conditions responsible for the crisis of the novel, the efforts of scholars and translators to come to grips with such classics as Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Racine, and the complacent assumptions of literary study that threaten to make it as relevant to modern experience as is coin-collecting or astrology. There is a sound introduction to those two obscure figures of our cultural future—Marshall McLuhan and Claude Lévi-Strauss—and a series of pieces on the relations between Marxism and literature that is free of the usual cant that one finds in most English and American journals. Steiner also manages to say something fresh about Thomas Mann and Kafka and something just about F. R. Leavis, and he places firmly such contemporary figures as Lawrence Durrell, Sylvia Plath, and Gunther Grass. All in all a remarkable coverage of topics and issues…. (p. 21)

But what carries the reader through Language and Silence and makes it cohere is something more than critical intelligence, range, and pertinence. Many of the pieces are written with the edge of feeling suggested by the subtitle—"Essays on language, literature, and the inhuman"—and the book as a whole is permeated with the sense of Steiner's effort—impressive, moving, and irritating—to carry on a cultural tradition that mostly went up in smoke 25 years ago at those terminals of modern culture known as Auschwitz and Dachau. In an essay titled, "A Kind of Survivor," the emotional and in some ways intellectual center of the book, Steiner tells us that his parents left Vienna in 1924, five years before he was born, and Paris in 1940: "So I happened not to be there when the names were called out." But though he has spent most of his life in America and in England, where he teaches at present, Steiner regards his way of being in the world, like his way of being a Jew, as indissolubly tied to "the black mystery of what happened in Europe," just as he derives his sense of vocation from the mighty line of acculturated Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe and from their common practice of what he calls "radical humanism."

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