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Feb. 22nd, 2007 08:54 amThe Steiner Revelations, Contrinued
It occurs to me that I ought to mention what George Steiner had to say in his Kenyon Review article (text of a 2005 lecture, actually).
But first, I should note that Arts and Letters Daily yesterday directed us to a New York magazine story about the first real generation gap in half a century. The hypothesis being that not since the birth of rock and roll in the just-past-mid-1950s has there been as fundamental a shift in youth perceptions versus parental expectations as there has been with the generation habituated to posting every detail of their lives on various sites, exposing their flaws as well as flaunting their strengths, and of course exposing and flaunting a good deal else, to the general distress of their parents, all the while acquiring a species of cybersavvy that makes the previous generation of geeks seem all gee-whizzy about the marvels of the electronic medium that has now come of age.
Which reminds me that George Steiner did not have to introduce me to the then newly published Understanding Media. (Though if I had been reading the Times Literary Supplement regularly when his Marshall McLuhan essay was originally published, he would have done so.) Talk about gee-whizzy; and yet McLuhan got and expressed, however incoherently, the idea that the revolution that began with radio was about to blow the tight confines of historical literacy wide open, in unpredictable directions.
And it is the question of literacy to which Steiner addresses himself in the 2005 lecture. He acknowledges, gratifyingly, that the computer has changed everything; no one who does not have an ever more thorough familiarity with its ways and its possibilities will henceforward be admitted to the ranks of the genuinely literate.
The era of gentlemen (men) retiring to common rooms to close-read Horace is indeed gone forever, not just under threat as it was for so many years. It was always an elitist notion, not shared by huge numbers of perfectly interesting and capable human beings: and now that we realize that the humanities do not humanize, it is a hard vision to justify. (This is only a slight expansion on Steiner, who rehearses briefly his realization that reading great books about human suffering more often displaces and anesthetizes instead of making us more sensitive, when it comes to understanding the suffering of the much less literarily compelling lives around us.)
That raises the marvelous counter-example of folks of my generation like utopyr who are capable of perusing Greek texts and computer languages with equal pleasure (while listening to the Drive-By Truckers), and whose comprehension of the real suffering of the insulted and injured is as kick-ass as one might wish. But we are a transitional generation, even more so than Steiner’s.
Steiner, in fact, may have inadvertently helped pioneer the self-absorbed intellectual essay that birthed the New Journalism and led, by slow, slow stages, to 55 million blogs.
By which I mean, and I shall doubtless be shot down quickly by numerous counter-examples from the most archaic Greeks onward, if not from the epic of Gilgamesh…by which I mean, I say, that back in the day, folks setting out to write the odd intellectual treatise universalized their very particular experience. (“All men by nature desire to know.”)
There was, yes, the personal treatise with philosophizing in it, and there was the philosophical treatise with smoothed-over autobiographical examples, and there were journals in which both forms appeared side by side, by turns.
But Steiner was among the first I can think of who begin an essay like “A Kind of Survivor” with an up-front account of his formative experience of being shipped out of continental Europe to England just in time to avoid the Holocaust, and thus to be trained in the traditional humanities instead of being brutalized and vaporized courtesy of National Socialism.
Thereafter in that essay, we have the most delectably bizarre shifts between I-was-the-man,-I-was-there references and vast historical syntheses.
When, much later, he discusses language acquisition and internal speech versus the written word (unaware that Jacques Derrida was doing the same thing at almost the same moment), he cites his trilingual upbringing and says that when he was involved in an auto accident, what he blurted out spontaneously would have shown which language was most deeply embedded in his psyche. But neither he nor his wife could remember whether the exclamation had been French, English, or German.
Those of us who were already hooked ate this kind of stuff up, and we were prepared to forgive him crustily erroneous opinions, such as the assertion that one could not imagine building a systematic library out of paperback books. (“Sure, George,” I said, as I looked at my doctoral-candidate-bedroom’s ranked rows of paperback volumes.)
It is good to see Steiner agreeing that “We come after” (another one of his lapidary opening sentences) in ways other than coming after systematic mass extermination in the heart of the Enlightenment’s territory.
In fact, he overcompensates when he devotes his talk to the need for better and livelier education in mathematics, not the functional stuff, but the well-nigh mystical mental peregrinations of Riemann and his successors. (He gives, tellingly, no more than the perfunctory nod to the Greeks en route to his encomium on mathematics as a fundamentally creative human endeavor, one of the ones that most distinguishes our species. It is, he observes, one of the mental exploits least grounded in the insistent demands of our biology.)
So Steiner has acknowledged that we are in the twenty-first century to stay, and that even if things get worse instead of better, there is no going back to where we were only a couple of generations ago. Not even a little bit.
That’s a pretty cool trajectory for someone who spent his youth grousing about the fatal decay of humane literacy. Now he’ll settle for literacy of any sort, as he remarks on the state of British education (and it comes as a shock to read him praising the nature of fundraising in American universities as a financial underpinning of their greater intellectual potency).
In fact, though Steiner has been tending in this direction from “The Retreat from the Word” onward, I suspect he gives up too easily on the fresh sophistication of our interstitial literary forms. The best of the blogs I encounter, as I’ve noted, seem headed towards a synthesis of the image and the written word that has parallels in the historical avant-garde but is nevertheless being invented anew. (I accidentally first typed “invested,” which may have been more appropriate in the non-monetary sense of the term.)
Whether the well-written blogs have anything insightful to say is, as always, as disconnected as ever from how it is said. But when they do have something to say, they say it in newly adventurous styles of expression.
It occurs to me that I ought to mention what George Steiner had to say in his Kenyon Review article (text of a 2005 lecture, actually).
But first, I should note that Arts and Letters Daily yesterday directed us to a New York magazine story about the first real generation gap in half a century. The hypothesis being that not since the birth of rock and roll in the just-past-mid-1950s has there been as fundamental a shift in youth perceptions versus parental expectations as there has been with the generation habituated to posting every detail of their lives on various sites, exposing their flaws as well as flaunting their strengths, and of course exposing and flaunting a good deal else, to the general distress of their parents, all the while acquiring a species of cybersavvy that makes the previous generation of geeks seem all gee-whizzy about the marvels of the electronic medium that has now come of age.
Which reminds me that George Steiner did not have to introduce me to the then newly published Understanding Media. (Though if I had been reading the Times Literary Supplement regularly when his Marshall McLuhan essay was originally published, he would have done so.) Talk about gee-whizzy; and yet McLuhan got and expressed, however incoherently, the idea that the revolution that began with radio was about to blow the tight confines of historical literacy wide open, in unpredictable directions.
And it is the question of literacy to which Steiner addresses himself in the 2005 lecture. He acknowledges, gratifyingly, that the computer has changed everything; no one who does not have an ever more thorough familiarity with its ways and its possibilities will henceforward be admitted to the ranks of the genuinely literate.
The era of gentlemen (men) retiring to common rooms to close-read Horace is indeed gone forever, not just under threat as it was for so many years. It was always an elitist notion, not shared by huge numbers of perfectly interesting and capable human beings: and now that we realize that the humanities do not humanize, it is a hard vision to justify. (This is only a slight expansion on Steiner, who rehearses briefly his realization that reading great books about human suffering more often displaces and anesthetizes instead of making us more sensitive, when it comes to understanding the suffering of the much less literarily compelling lives around us.)
That raises the marvelous counter-example of folks of my generation like utopyr who are capable of perusing Greek texts and computer languages with equal pleasure (while listening to the Drive-By Truckers), and whose comprehension of the real suffering of the insulted and injured is as kick-ass as one might wish. But we are a transitional generation, even more so than Steiner’s.
Steiner, in fact, may have inadvertently helped pioneer the self-absorbed intellectual essay that birthed the New Journalism and led, by slow, slow stages, to 55 million blogs.
By which I mean, and I shall doubtless be shot down quickly by numerous counter-examples from the most archaic Greeks onward, if not from the epic of Gilgamesh…by which I mean, I say, that back in the day, folks setting out to write the odd intellectual treatise universalized their very particular experience. (“All men by nature desire to know.”)
There was, yes, the personal treatise with philosophizing in it, and there was the philosophical treatise with smoothed-over autobiographical examples, and there were journals in which both forms appeared side by side, by turns.
But Steiner was among the first I can think of who begin an essay like “A Kind of Survivor” with an up-front account of his formative experience of being shipped out of continental Europe to England just in time to avoid the Holocaust, and thus to be trained in the traditional humanities instead of being brutalized and vaporized courtesy of National Socialism.
Thereafter in that essay, we have the most delectably bizarre shifts between I-was-the-man,-I-was-there references and vast historical syntheses.
When, much later, he discusses language acquisition and internal speech versus the written word (unaware that Jacques Derrida was doing the same thing at almost the same moment), he cites his trilingual upbringing and says that when he was involved in an auto accident, what he blurted out spontaneously would have shown which language was most deeply embedded in his psyche. But neither he nor his wife could remember whether the exclamation had been French, English, or German.
Those of us who were already hooked ate this kind of stuff up, and we were prepared to forgive him crustily erroneous opinions, such as the assertion that one could not imagine building a systematic library out of paperback books. (“Sure, George,” I said, as I looked at my doctoral-candidate-bedroom’s ranked rows of paperback volumes.)
It is good to see Steiner agreeing that “We come after” (another one of his lapidary opening sentences) in ways other than coming after systematic mass extermination in the heart of the Enlightenment’s territory.
In fact, he overcompensates when he devotes his talk to the need for better and livelier education in mathematics, not the functional stuff, but the well-nigh mystical mental peregrinations of Riemann and his successors. (He gives, tellingly, no more than the perfunctory nod to the Greeks en route to his encomium on mathematics as a fundamentally creative human endeavor, one of the ones that most distinguishes our species. It is, he observes, one of the mental exploits least grounded in the insistent demands of our biology.)
So Steiner has acknowledged that we are in the twenty-first century to stay, and that even if things get worse instead of better, there is no going back to where we were only a couple of generations ago. Not even a little bit.
That’s a pretty cool trajectory for someone who spent his youth grousing about the fatal decay of humane literacy. Now he’ll settle for literacy of any sort, as he remarks on the state of British education (and it comes as a shock to read him praising the nature of fundraising in American universities as a financial underpinning of their greater intellectual potency).
In fact, though Steiner has been tending in this direction from “The Retreat from the Word” onward, I suspect he gives up too easily on the fresh sophistication of our interstitial literary forms. The best of the blogs I encounter, as I’ve noted, seem headed towards a synthesis of the image and the written word that has parallels in the historical avant-garde but is nevertheless being invented anew. (I accidentally first typed “invested,” which may have been more appropriate in the non-monetary sense of the term.)
Whether the well-written blogs have anything insightful to say is, as always, as disconnected as ever from how it is said. But when they do have something to say, they say it in newly adventurous styles of expression.
