And yet for a moment he opens a chink into a possibly different notion of what high literacy might command: “An authentic culture,” he tells us, focuses
on the understanding, the enjoyment, the transmission forward, of the best that reason and imagination have brought forth in the past and are producing now. An authentic culture is one which makes of this order of response a primary moral and political function. It makes “response” “responsibility,” it makes echo “answerable to” the high occasions of the mind.
This second glimpse, which for an instant demotes despair, offers a view of authentic high culture commensurate with, and even giving rise to, ideas of “moral function,” of “responsibility,” of “answerability”—in short, all those signposts of the kind of liberal society we usually call “democratic humanism.”
It is the second glimpse that makes me wonder about Steiner’s conclusion—his Kierkegaardian Either/Or. The choice of democratic humanism, he grants, is “thoroughly justifiable.” But it is “puerile hypocrisy” to want it both ways. Either the democratic society or the Periclean: one or the other. Still, Steiner’s second glimpse suggests that at least for the space of that glimpse, he too sees a hope for having it both ways: visualizes it as possible, in fact, to have an “authentic culture” with a “fabric of high literacy” not only flourishing in a context of morality, responsibility, and answerability, but actually determining and stimulating these. When Steiner ascends, however fleetingly, to this vision (or maybe, in his view, is distracted by it), the meliorist American in me wants to cheer.
He does not allow a meliorist American (which anyhow is not what I usually think I am) to cheer for long. It would indeed be puerile to imagine that Steiner supposes the interest of the KGB to be a validation of the worth of culture. He leads us into the profoundest thickets of irony when he writes: “They order these matters better in the world of the gulag. . . . The KGB and the serious writer are in total accord when both know, when both act on the knowledge that a sonnet. . . ., a novel, a scene from a play can be the power-house of human affairs.” And earlier, Steiner aptly quotes Borges: “Censorship is the mother of metaphor.” That is a maxim to gasp at; but Aesopian responses to oppression, however brilliant, can have only a limited life. Finally oppression destroys literature because it eats away at words, so that eventually an abused language will be of no use to an artist, no matter how metaphorical and Aesopian his devices. These are lessons that, following Orwell, Steiner was among the first to teach us. In “The Hollow Miracle,” an essay on post-Holocaust Germany, he warned: “Something will happen to the words.”* Namely: when the public language is hanged in the public square, it will ultimately put the noose around the interior language. The sublime Mandelstam, to take one of Steiner’s own examples, was martyred and perished because of a poem in which he compared Stalin’s mustache to an insect. Of course Steiner doesn’t mean us to think that tyranny, in its acknowledgment of the power in the poem—in its ceding importance to the poem—is “good for” culture. All the same, he reminds us that even when the barbarians were upon him, Archimedes did not flee; he stuck to his meditations and kept working on his theorem. Here is Plutarch’s account:
Archimedes was then, as fate would have it, intent upon working out some problem by a diagram, and having fixed his mind alike and his eyes upon the subject of speculation, he never noticed the incursion of the Romans, nor that the city was taken. In this transport of study and contemplation, a soldier unexpectedly coming up to him, commanded him to follow; which he declined to do before he had worked out his problem to a demonstration; the soldier, enraged, drew his sword and ran him through.
Yet elsewhere in his own demonstration Steiner counts up all those mathematical thinkers of foreign birth who flourished in America precisely because they did flee the barbarians.
But leaving all that aside, doesn’t history grant us at least one miraculous age when the munificence of “high literacy” came to pass in a vigorously open society, sans barbarians or storm troopers? Steiner himself urges us to remember that “the passionate outpouring of popular interest in the often competitive, agonistic achievements of Renaissance artists and men of learning, of the complex manifold of adherence which made possible the Elizabethan theater audience, is not nostalgic fiction.” Would it then be futuristic fiction—and not an instance of “puerile hypocrisy”—to imagine that absolute thought and absolute art might one day happen in America, despite the absence of popular interest and adherence? Despite all the horrendously recognizable descriptions Steiner has given us of America as a busy, vulgarized, well-stocked, but sterile warehouse for the fossils of European civilization?
I want to make a small quick—perhaps comical—case for such a futuristic fiction, based not on any idea of my own, but on Steiner’s own portrait of the “matrix of creation”—of the genius. Here, culled at random, are some phrases and fragments that represent Steiner’s depiction of genius:
“Privacy in extremis”
“A leprosy which seeks apartness”
“The inebriate of thought”
“The cordon sanitaire which a Wittgenstein could draw around himself
in order to secure minimal physical survival and autonomy of spirit”
“Obsession”
“Contagion”
“Craziness”
“Ecstatic lives”
“Calling”
“Talisman of true clerisy”
“Transcendence”
“Ontological astonishment”
“Artistic absolutes of possession and self-possession”
“The pursuit of art characterized as ‘pathological’”
“The use of the word ‘espouse’ with its accompanying gloss: ‘a justly
sacramental verb’”
Obsession “that overrides the claims of social justice”
“A cultivation of solitude verging on the pathological”
“Absolute thought” as “antisocial, resistant to gregariousness, perhaps
autistic”
“Personal apartness, self-exile”
It would be diminishing, and not to Steiner, to characterize these particles of portraiture as “romantic.” He may seem momentarily romantic in that special sense when he speaks of “Montaigne’s tower, Kierkegaard’s room, Nietzsche’s clandestine peregrinations.” But Steiner himself warns us not to mistake his meaning for mere romanticism: “one need not mouth romantic platitudes on art and infirmity, on genius and madness, on creativity and suffering, in order to suppose that absolute thought, the commitment of one’s life to a gamble on transcendence, the destruction of domestic and social relations in the name of art and ‘useless’ speculation, are part of the phenomenology which is, in respect of the utilitarian, social norm, pathological.”
It would also be diminishing to make a joke about the extremely American tone of Steiner’s ultimately anti-American, if I may use that term, essay. How would one buttress such a joke? As follows, with still more fragments on the necessary isolation and antisocial pathology of genius:
. . . truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others! . . . Your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. . . . Be it known unto you that henceforward I will obey no law less than the eternal law. . . . I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints.
Here again is Archimedes in concentration the moment before the barbarian sword runs him through. But you have already recognized the joke. These words are almost paraphrases of Steiner’s “cultivation of solitude verging on the pathological,” his “absolute thought” as “antisocial, resistant to gregariousness, perha
ps autistic.” You know that they are from Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” The joke, if one were looking for a joke, would be to point out that Steiner’s chord, with all its antipathy for the American culture-warehouse, carries nearly breath-for-breath the heartbeat of the quintessentially American essay.
But the reason I cannot accept Steiner’s delineation of the absolute thinker and artist has nothing to do with any specious accusation of romanticism, and still less to do with Emersonian ironies and echoes. I cannot accept his portrait of the artist because I am willing to take his portrait as seriously as he himself takes it: the artist as a kind of shaman or holy figure, set apart from the tribe by special powers and magickings. Steiner alludes, at one point, to the sacramental valuation set on epileptics, who in some societies are automatically regarded as shamans. “There is a strategy of chosen illness in Archimedes’ decision to die rather than relinquish a geometric deduction (this gesture being the talisman of a true clerisy).” These last three words— “talisman,” “true,” “clerisy”—are a trinity testifying to the priestly position Steiner accords the absolute artist, the absolute thinker. He endows his genius with godlike concentration; he agrees that “common sense, civics, and political humanity” can make no such espousal.
But consider another path. Believing as thoroughly and as passionately as he does in the artist as thaumaturge, in the nearly autistic, obsessive, privacy-seeking autonomy of the creative genius, perhaps Steiner may be genuinely led not to decry American philistinism, but to see it as a wry opportunity. Unlike the KGB, Steiner notes, American culture is totally indifferent to the claims of high art. “What text,” Steiner asks, “what painting, what symphony, could shake the edifice of American politics? What act of abstract thought really matters at all? Who cares?”
If it is true that the answer is nobody cares—and nobody cares is the answer Steiner certainly gives us—then American society ought to be the ideal seedbed, the perfect fertilization dish, for the genius for whom isolation is the sine qua non. What is more isolating than our philistinism? What offers a deeper privacy? I am afraid that what I am saying now will come to you with a touch of the sardonic: a joke, you may think, like Emerson. But it is not a joke and I am not aiming for the merely sardonic. If high culture is really a matter, as Steiner has it, of nascitur non fit, born-not-made (the philosopher, say, in whom complex and arduous thought is latent, and who cannot be trained into his idiosyncratic calling); if high culture is really a matter of obsessive privacy, originality, autonomy, then the surrounding indifference makes everything possible. What is missing, of course, is that “competitive, agonistic” Elizabethan responsiveness; but does a shaman need that? Isn’t a shaman complete in himself, a circle of fire, torch and conflagration both, the dancer and the dance? Isn’t the theorem its own reward, the living note of music its own delight, the line of a poem its own rapture? Everything Steiner reports to us about his conception of the requirements of absolute (and absolutely elitist) art would have us believe this. Why then should he deplore the absence of an animate and responsive culture as a context for his godlike creator?* Isn’t it more than enough for the thinker to say, Let there be light, and to see for himself that the light is good?
But if Steiner asserts—and he has magnificently asserted it—that a society must be more than a storehouse for the culture of another continent, that a society must answer back the claims of art and science with appropriate understanding and joy, gratitude and gratification—then should he not require for this responsiveness, this seizing and answering, a different definition of the artist, the thinker, the “matrix of creation,” the genius? A definition less dependent on holy pathology?
Originally a talk at a conference, “Art and Intellect in America,” at Skidmore College, April 1980. Published (in somewhat different form) in Salmagundi, Fall 1980–Winter 1981
*In response to this allusion, Steiner comments: “I was entirely mistaken, more than twenty years ago, when I conjectured that the German language and its literatures (there are, of course, several) would not recover from Nazi evisceration. Poetry, fiction, drama and philosophic argument are intensely alive in both Germanies.” Among “writers of the first rank” he cites “Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf, Giinter Grass.” But if German culture has indeed wholly recovered, and is now to be judged by the usual standards of civilization, and if Steiner requires American writing to be measured against “Thomas Mann, Kafka, Joyce and Proust” (two of whom emerge from two of the German “literatures”), then why will he not demand the same measure of grandeur for a recovered Germany? And if the vitality of the new German democracy contributes to this lack—just as American democracy is seen to be responsible for American high-cultural barrenness—why should Steiner find himself so easily satisfied by a Bernhard, a Bachmann, a Wolf, a Grass, when he is not at all satisfied by their American equivalents?
*To this Steiner has replied: “There is a great difference between an isolation which remains so because the surrounding community could not care less and one which is instrumental toward work which the community waits for and regards as central (the isolation of a Webern, of a Heidegger, of a Wittgenstein, of a Borges).” But if this is so, then Steiner must surrender his admiration for the death of Archimedes; or at least surrender it as an emblem of the original thinker’s isolated obsessiveness. Archimedes keeps up his concentration, sticks to his work, even when the “surrounding community” is no more welcoming than a single murderous barbarian soldier. The point of the story for Steiner, if I properly understand his use of it, is precisely the absolute thinker’s consummate indifference to the idea of a community that waits for his work and regards it as central. Who will care less for Archimedes’ demonstration than that barbarian?
O Spilling Rapture! O Happy Stoup!
Jonathan Cott’s subject in Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature is early reading and lore—the mind poised at the source of all discovery. In a way this is the only subject there is. It seizes the transcendent secret that lies within the innermost folds of science, philosophy, religion, poetry, art, and laughter. Its themes are not only magic, myth, tale, origins and causes, fates and subversions, psychological and animal nature (i.e., what is the world like, and how, and why, and why not), but the beating urgency that wells and spurts below even these: imagination itself. Or, more exactly, the shudder of bliss-tinged awe we feel when we come close enough to imagination to smell its absolute strangeness.
This strangeness, endlessly inquired after, is so endlessly protean that it is not at all surprising to find it take even the humdrum form Cott assigns it: a series of interviews with six makers of contemporary children’s literature and two collectors of children’s oral transmittance, accompanied by what amounts to a scattered anthology of pertinent quotations. Cott, quoting one Gaston Bachelard, defines the strangeness: “There are moments in childhood when every child is the astonishing being, the being who realizes the astonishment of being. . . . In every dreamer there lives a child, a child whom reverie magnifies and stabilizes. Reverie tears it away from history, sets it outside time, makes it foreign to time. One more reverie and this permanent, magnified child is a god.”
It is the gods, after all, who lure children, as they lure us: the sensible god-out-of-the-machine that is science and diurnal miracle, and is also Mary Poppins descending by umbrella; the whimsical god (an insouciant Cat wearing a Hat) who first brings mess and destruction and then proffers the dazzling olive branch of magical cleanup. But also, according to Cott, it is gods—permanent, magnified children—who invent these reveries, who turn mundane families and figures into receptacles for the astonishment of being. And it appears to be the point of Jonathan Cott’s interviews to learn from these god-making dreamers—fashioners of celebrated adventures everyone recognizes and children claim and reclaim—whether they know themselves to be a species of god.
The disconcerting answer is: mainly yes. Sometimes the answer is the s
toryteller’s; more often it is Cott’s own assertion imposed on the storyteller. The answer becomes even more disconcerting when the range of writers Cott has questioned is spread before us—Dr. Seuss (who is really Theodor Geisel), Maurice Sendak, William Steig, Astrid Lindgren, Chinua Achebe, P. L. Travers; and, finally, a pair of bracingly sane scholars who, nevertheless, hang around playgrounds to eavesdrop on rope-skippers and stuff their house with staggering quantities of old toys. The two last are the redoubtable Opies, Iona and the late Peter. Of the half-dozen storytellers, Dr. Seuss begins and ends, entirely properly, as a clown, sans any divine or vatic voice; from him Cott can draw nothing more cosmically seductive than “When I was young. . . . I used to go to the zoo a lot, and when I returned home I would try to draw animals. . . . You see, my father, among other things, ran a zoo in Springfield, Massachusetts.”
These words, one would think, resist conversion to lambent mythmaking; yet Cott persists in giving us Seuss as seer. His intoxicated assessment of “The Glunk That Got Thunk,” from Dr. Seuss’s I Can Lick 30 Tigers! and Other Stories, derives, with a straight face, from Wordsworth’s description of imagination as “but another name for absolute power / And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, / And Reason in her most exalted mood. . . . [an] awful Power [that] rose from the mind’s abyss.” This flight is quickly followed, in the same paragraph, by a lofty sentence from Italo Calvino: “Our true element extends without shores, without boundaries,” applied by Cott to Dr. Seuss’s On Beyond Zero and, more darkly, to the tragic gunk that rains down in Bartholomew and the Oobleck. But if Wordsworth and Calvino are not enough to suggest Dr. Seuss’s mind’s abyss’s awful Power, Cott, still in the same breath, tops them both with: “As Brian Sutton-Smith remarked in a conversation with me: ‘I think that Dr. Seuss is packaging flexibility and possibility.’”
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