[Steiner's themes in Language and Silence] are established in the first two sections, which fill nearly 200 pages and might really have been used, with a select sprinkling of the other items, to make a more tightly argued book. The problems set out there are important, often disturbing and largely neglected ones, and it is part of the author's unique merits as a critic that he keeps them always in the forefront of his mind. His concern is with language as the richest and closest expression of the human community at any given time or place—hence his interest in Lévi-Strauss, who treats human activities as analogous to language—and particularly with those instances where he feels that language has been pressed to its utter limits. The writers who are most congenial to him are those who have struggled, whether with an unfamiliar or previously inaccessible culture or with the devaluation of language and the "suicidal rhetoric of silence". This is a matter both of intellectual sympathy and of inheritance: the tradition to which he adheres is the tragically vanished one of the central European thinkers, writers and composers of the hundred years which ended in 1933.
One way and another, in his view, the word has been pushed into a corner; non-verbal forms of discourse have taken over so many fields where writing once reigned supreme. The same with the novel, thanks to the ending of the old middle-class way of life, the decline of reading aloud and the predominance of new forms of entertainment. There are areas of thought and feeling beyond language's reach, as Wittgenstein suggested at the end of the Tractatus. There is also the terrible cloud that has been cast over language and literature by the actions of a thoroughly literate and cultured people between 1933 and 1945. This bears doubly on the critic: first there is the need to expose all such dehumanization of the word—which is put forward as the book's underlying theme—and secondly the changed sense of proportion and perspective that it must give to any concern with literature, however ancient or academic. The proof of this bitter but quite unstodgy pudding is in the essays on the classics; repeatedly Dr. Steiner illuminates them and brings them to life.
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