On Difficulty

And Other Essays

George Steiner

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781480411906
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

A distinguished collection of essays on language, literature, and philosophy from acclaimed scholar and critic George Steiner On Difficulty is as provocative and relevant today as when its essays were first published. Ranging from critical topics such as the understanding of language to the meaning of meaning, inward speech to the relationship between erotic sensibility and linguistic convention, these eight essays posit myriad topics for exploration and dialogue. George Steiner deals with considerations that are simultaneously literary and philosophical, exploring themes of linguistic privacy and the changing technical, physiological, and social statuses of the act of reading.

1

Text and Context

1976

If there is currently a debate on ‘culture’ — as distinct from a merely formal academic-journalistic rhetoric or rhetorical gossip — it involves, it must, where it is honestly pursued, involve the nature of ‘texts’. It must bear, at crucial points of definition and dissent, on the question of the status of the ‘text’ and of our relations to it. One of the obvious difficulties is that this question entails the sort of understanding of the underlying realities of culture, of the conditions of co-existence between ‘culture’ and other, competing models of social cohesion or ideals, which an analysis of our relations to ‘texts’ is meant to elucidate. In other words: the argument runs a constant risk of circularity. Determine your ‘reading’ of culture in order to locate, to ascertain in what measure there persists, a ‘culture of reading’. But hermeneutics — the disciplined understanding of understanding — instructs us that such circularity, albeit by no means comfortable or immune from logical attack, is an inevitable, perhaps necessary attribute of any discourse, of any articulate commentary whose object is itself ‘textual’.

The problem is not only one of circularity. To ‘think through’ the question, the situation (penser la situation) of ‘the text’ in our contemporary culture, is to engage in a whole number of theoretic and pragmatic fields whose own limits or methodological integrity, whose own implication of textual authority or repudiation of the canonic, are unclear. A consideration of the convention of reading in this or that locale and section of the community, of the techniques of conservation, reproduction, diffusion, deletion or, indeed, suppression which determine the literal availability of texts — these topics are, broadly speaking, sociological. That the process of comprehension, the act of understanding and response — which crude formula presumably covers an immensely complex dynamic or dialectic of impulse and ordering — is also social, that there is a social-economic-political matrix of reading as there is of the book as a material fact, is a recognition which emerges with Dilthey and is then refined by Walter Benjamin. If there is a sociology of the text and of our relations to the text, there is also, of course, a psychology. The structures of attention, of memoration, of verbalization in and through which the act of reading takes place, are neither uniform nor stable. Modern art-historians have taught us a good deal about the developing history of visual, tactile perception, about the essential ‘historicity’ of the eye in regard to perspective, volume, distortion and codes of chromatic or gestural meaning. The psychological configurations of reading, the reflexes of awareness which organize our ‘ingestion’ (Ben Jonson’s term) of the text are, certainly, no less temporal, no less the product of the intricate congruence of innate and environmental options. Here, as in the history of art or of musical form, the ‘simplest’ cognitive moment involves processes, interactive and in constant motion, which extend from the neuro-physiological at one end to the most unstable, difficult to document elements of fashion, social contingence, local accident at the other. St. Augustine’s often-cited observation that his teacher was the first man he knew capable of reading without moving his lips, Erasmus’s occasional testimony as to the effect of print on the very immediacies of thought, the work of Robert Escarpit in France on the current conditions of reading at different points and age-levels in a mass-consumer society, are among the few markers we have. The sociology, the psychology (or, at a fundamental remove, neuro-physiology), the social-psychology — the awkwardness, the overlap in our rubrics being themselves symptomatic — of reading, of our relations to texts, remain rudimentary. Thus we have histories of books, of paper, of inks and typography, but none of reading.

I have been using the words ‘reading’ and ‘text’ as if the concordance between them were almost tautological. We know that it is nothing of the kind. The overwhelming proportion of reading — statistically, demographically, over any given stretch of time — has little to do with ‘texts’ as the argument I am pursuing defines them, a definition present to, functional in our sensibility (given an academic locale) even before it is formally phrased. Most acts of reading, shall we say ninety-five per cent simply to exemplify the grossness of evidence, occur in a context (note the opaque yet vital contiguities of ‘text’ and ‘context’), are objectivized with regard to ends, which can only be called ephemeral, utilitarian, mechanical, nearly somnambular. Forests pass into pulp in an enactment, at once palpable and allegoric, of programmatic oblivion. Millions of tons of paper, print, ink pass through a daily cycle of instant obsolescence. This construct of insignificance, with its paradoxically contrastive technical virtuosity and economic-political consequence, reaches far or, to allow the vertical presumption, ‘high’ into the enterprise of letters. Many books which had aspired to the ‘textual’ are, in fact, pulp, the categorization being either immediate (in the United States in particular, many novels are remaindered within weeks of their first publication) or following on a certain lapse of time and revaluation. The serious newspaper or magazine article knows a problematic ‘half-life’. Like ‘happenings’ of which it is often a generative element, it carries within it mechanisms of auto-destruction whose force is often proportionate to the urgency, to the honesty of the statement. And the article, editorial, reportage may become ‘textual’, via a subtle modulation of setting, when the historian returns to it as a primary source.

Even explicit trivia, moreover, press powerfully on the general and complex shapes of reading, in one’s personal inventory of time and feeling and in that of the society as a whole. The temptation of universality, of echo prolonged to the outmost reaches of ‘the public’, exercises all but the most arcane, the most deliberately minoritaires among writers. The examples or exemplary myths of writers at once ‘great’ by any criteria of seriousness, of imaginative nerve, of stylistic autonomy and immensely popular — a Dickens, a Balzac, a Tolstoy — haunt literature and the critical argument on the status of literature. We apprehend vaguely, there having been so little substantive work in the field since Q.D.Leavis’s pioneering Fiction and the Reading Public, that the history of the ephemeral, that the question of reading as mass-entertainment, cannot be divorced from that of ‘texts’, that the ‘lower’, being statistically and in terms of social attitudes so much the more ubiquitous, presses on, penetrates into the ‘higher’ and is, in turn, influenced by it. Trash will often mirror excellence, setting up ‘resonance’ effects, reciprocal redefinitions which are genuinely dialectical, and in certain genres — narrative verse, melodrama, the Gothic novel, prose fiction almost in its entirety — the line between the two is always unstable. Our definition of the class of texts and of the location of this class in the overall structure of literacy will, therefore, be in some degree an abstraction, a hypostatization inherently suspect and defensible only if it is, at every point, kept vulnerable to the inroads of altering fact.

And yet, at some level of provisional trust, we do know, we must know what we mean by discriminating between ‘print’ and ‘text’, between ‘books’ as a pragmatic counter and ‘the book’ as the executive medium of ‘the textual’. Such knowledge, such rational intuition, draws on key correlatives of disinterestedness, of semantic level, of the contract of expectation and response as negotiated, usually unconsciously, between writer and reader (or reader yet to be because the writing is there). The precise determination of these correlatives would be both a history of culture and of serious reading. It might lead to a short-hand recognition or working hypothesis: a ‘text’ is generated where the reader is one who rationally conceives of himself as writing a ‘text’ comparable in stature, in degree of demand, to that which he is reading. To read essentially is to entertain with the writer’s text a relationship at once recreative and rival. It is a supremely active, collaborative yet also agonistic affinity whose logical, if not actual, fulfillment is an ‘answering text’.

Does such reading have any natural place in our present psychological and social modes? How does it relate to the notion of culture (where is ‘text’ in context?)?

One answer, at least, is obvious, though the political climate in which we have conducted our lives over the past thirty years has obscured it. Marxism-Leninism and the ideological idiom professed in communist societies are ‘bookish’ to the root. The scheme of origins, authority and continuum in force in the Marxist world derives its sense of identity and its daily practices of validation or exclusion from a canon of texts. It is the reading of these texts — exegetic, Talmudic, disputative to an almost pathological degree of semantic scruple and interpretative nicety — which constitutes the presiding dynamic in Marxist education and in the attempts, inherently ambiguous as are all attempts to ‘move forward’ from sacred texts, to make of Marxism an unfolding, predictive reality-principle. The critique, ‘textual’ in the deepest sense, of the ancient empiricists, of Hegel and of Feuerbach, impels Marx’s own writings. The critique of alternative texts — Proudhon, Dühring, Ernst Mach, Bogdanov — is the fundamental occasion and performative genre of the great body of theoretical writing from Marx and Engels down to Lenin’s Empirio-Criticism and Philosophical Notebooks. The primary reflex in Marxist feeling and political-social application is that of citation, of re-reading. The ideology is made ongoing and applicable to novel circumstance by virtue of textual re-interpretation, a process which, itself, engenders a new corpus of texts (‘new’ yet teleologically latent in the canon). It is incumbent in the function of supreme power, or was until very lately, that the holder contribute substantial theoretic work. Stalin’s writings on party principles or during the polemics on linguistics in the 1950s are, in this respect, less contemptible than one’s knowledge of the man would have led one to hope. He also was a collator, close reader and ‘textualist’ whose odium philologicum inspired a massive body of written work.

As Loren R. Graham has shown in his seminal study of Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, the result is a subtlety and self-sustaining intensity of debate which permeates Soviet intellectual life and which, to an extent largely unregistered in the West, has survived the recurrent terrors. But this essential bookishness goes much beyond ideology and schooling. If it is the medium of power and official discourse, it is, no less, that of opposition. The antecedents here are plainly pre-Bolshevik; they lie in the very fabric of suppression which defines Russian history as a whole. But whatever the source, the effect is clear: the subversive poem, novel, satirical comedy, underground ballad has always been, is, will continue to be, the primary act of insurgence. Even where it has reached the public surface, through the censor’s oversight, from abroad, or in brief spells of bureaucratic condescension, Russian literature, from Pushkin and Turgenev to Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, has always been samizdat. The cost in personal suffering, in the eradication of personal talent, has been vast; nothing can make up for the psychological hounding to destruction of a Gogol, for the liquidation of a Mandelstam. But the paradoxical gain has also been eminent. No society reads more vehemently, to none is the writer a more indispensable presence. No oppression has ever felt more threatened by the poet’s image, none has ever paid to the written word, to the text, the tribute of a more savage vigilance. Czarism and Stalinism are incommensurable structures of obscurantism and chastisement, yet structures proportionately vulnerable to, shaken by, the adverse text. The cases of Tolstoy, of Pasternak, of Solzhenitsyn show that the balance of power between the state and the writer’s single voice (between context and text) is, at some level, very nearly equal. What Western regime flinches at a poem?

Below the plane of political terror and challenge, Russian existence, together with that of much of eastern Europe, is ‘bookish’, is penetrated by literate values. The classics are printed in mountainous editions, snapped up and read. A very considerable body of poetry, and of new poetry, is known by heart, is passed from mouth to mouth (oral traditions mesh at this point with political necessity). Arguments on literature, on the condition of the novel, on drama, are not academic or at the specialized margin of the life of feeling. They are conducted and felt to be at the core. The consequences are far too pervasive and ambiguous to be summed up readily. But in respect of humane necessity, of philosophic stature, of sheer dimension, the comparison between Western literatures after, say, Thomas Mann, with that produced in, underneath the Soviet Union from Blok and Mandelstam to the present is, to say the least, unsettling.

The resort to the ‘canonic’ via quotation, commentary, knowledge by heart and mimesis, was, of course, the backbone of Western literacy, of the cultures of civility which were in effective control in the West from the late Middle Ages until the recent crises of the old order. The scriptural-patristic canon on the one hand, the Greek-Latin on the other, and the perpetual interplay, critical and conjunctive, between the Hebraic and the Hellenic lineage of texts, very largely generated and organized the shapes of western public speech and personal identity among the educated. Ovid’s or Horace’s tags on the immortality of the major text, tags themselves reproductive of high commonplaces in Homer and Pindar, became the talismanic cliché of Christian-classical education and self-fulfillment. They culminate, with perfect logic, in Napoleon’s claim that he would rather have written Werther than won his battles and in Mallarmé’s proposition that the aim of the universe is the creation of le Livre (the ‘text of texts’ so integral, so comprehensive of truth and ontological form, that it subsumes, negates all ‘context’).

That this hierarchy of values is now eroded, that the shared habits of biblical-classical reference, of articulate formality, of ‘order and degree’ both emblematic and expressly rhetorical on which the intellectual-social-political architecture of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century were built, is now largely in ruins, that the very invocation of such values is a piece of élitist nostalgia — these are banalities of current debate. Knowledge by heart of the ‘texts’ has been done away with by the organised amnesia which now pervades schooling. The familiarity with scripture, the Book of Common Prayer, with the great current of liturgical allusion and ritual routine, which is presumptive in the speech and inference of English literature from Chaucer to Auden, is largely dissipated. Like the fabric of classical reference, citation, pastiche, parody, imitation, within which English poetry developed from Caxton’s Ovid to T.S.Eliot’s Sweeney Among the Nightingales, biblical literacy is passing quickly into the deep-freeze of academicism. The ‘text’ is receding from immediacy, from vital personal recognition on stilts of foot-notes, ever more rudimentary, ever more unashamed in their conveyance of information which was once the alphabet of reading. Greek and Latin are, finally, becoming ‘dead tongues’. Less visible but equally significant is the death within our language, within our ready apprehension of the language, of that central historicity, density of cross-reference, felt syntactic and semantic elaboration which were, to be sure, related to atticism and latinity, but which also had their own prodigal life. The archival energies of Joyce, of Eliot, of Pound, the many-layered structures of allusion which characterize their work, are a ceremony of mourning for resources once naturally accessible to writer and reader in the contract of culture.

The causes of this change have been canvassed interminably. They are too manifold, we are too nearly implicated in them, to allow of any single, confident diagnosis. The breakdown of the old frameworks of ‘high culture’ or ‘high literacy’ is quite obviously inseparable from the partial collapse of those hierarchies of aristocratic, mandarin or bourgeois power-principles which a high culture embodies, articulates and transmits. The partial destruction of the old order through world wars and inflation, the transfer of material energies to various modes of populism and ‘mass culture’ (a term which may be inherently self-contradictory) were attended by a concomitant decay in both the systematic and external presence of the ‘transcendent’ — whether theological or aesthetic-philosophical. There are sovereign literacies in the sciences; indeed, these engage the most scrupulous, adventurous of our mental means and have done so, very likely, for at least a century. But such literacies are not language-centred, they are not oriented towards the ‘text’. There are other causes or symptoms of the crisis of ‘textuality’ or ‘logocentrism’ (to use a peculiarly rebarbative but illuminating word) which belong, distinctly, to the sociological and psychological domain. The economics, the physical environment of daily existence, particularly in the most technologically-advanced communities in the West, does not make for the personal acquisition of libraries in the old manner. The pace of being, the surrounding noise-levels, the competitive stimulus of alternative media of information and entertainment (a plurality notably lacking in the Soviet Union), militate against the compacted privacy, the investments of silence, required by serious reading. Self-bestowal on a text, the vertigo of attention which bends the scholar’s back and blears the eye, is a posture simultaneously sacrificial and stringently selfish. It feeds on a stillness, on a sanctuary of egotistical space, which exclude even those closest to one. Today’s ideals of familial co-existence, of generational amity, of neighbourliness are participatory, collective, non-dismissive. Music, performed or listened to, meets these social-emotive needs and aims as reading does not. The new humanistic literacies, where we can fairly make them out, are musical, not textual. Eloquence is suspect, formal speech is palsied with the lies, political, theological, moral, which it articulated and adorned. The honest man sings or mumbles.

Reactions to this metamorphosis of values differ as widely as do the analyses of cause. At one end of the spectrum there is celebration. Away with the malodorous dead. Make all things new. Books have too long done our thinking, our seeing, our very living for us, interposing a secondhand authority between ourselves and the innocence of immediate being. Down with museums, those mortuaries of imposed glory. Let art flower in the street and vanish at the next rain, only to be renewed in a constant simulacrum of Eden. Away with the proscenium arch; let the audience be part of, be inwoven in the play. To the wall with conductors and the tyranny of scores; a man must do, must play his own thing. (That all these slogans and gestures of millenarian bliss begin with Dada, at the exact moment of the most lunatic slaughter on the western front, is, of course, no accident. The sleep of reason does not only release nightmares; it animates the ancient dreams of total renewal, of prelapsarian spontaneity.) At the opposite pole there is desolation, more or less stoic.

Saying this, I have in mind a group of arguments on the instrumentality of reading, on the relations of the act of reading to the possibilities of culture and society, in short: a set of ‘texts on texts’. Though written from differing perspectives and, partly at least, in mutual unawareness, these writings will, with time, be seen to form a significant cluster and will, I believe, assume growing importance. They include the early sections of Charles Péguy’s Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme païenne of 1909; Heidegger’s articles on Hölderlin composed, mainly, during the 1940s and the two essays on Nietzsche’s ‘Death of God’ and on a saying by Anaximander, published in Holzwege in 1950; Philip Rieff’s Fellow Teachers, which first appeared in 1972; and the consideration on the role of the classics in American education and society which Donald Carne-Ross enunciated in Arion in 1973. The discriminations to be made between these texts, and the definition of their profound, underlying concordance would need careful study. But central to each is a conception of literacy, of literacy enacted in regard to a canonic ‘te...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Text and Context (1976)
• 2 On Difficulty (1978)
• 3 Language and Psychoanalysis (1976)
• 4 The Distribution of Discourse (1978)
• 5 Eros and Idiom (1975)
• 6 Whorf, Chomsky, and the Student of Literature (1974)
• 7 Dante Now: The Gossip of Eternity (1976)
• 8 After the Book? (1972)
• Index of proper names
• About the Author
• Copyright Page