George Steiner's prose is a remarkable substance; it is the sweat of a statue that wishes to be a monument. Readers of his essays in The New Yorker will be familiar with that prose's laborious imprecisions and melodramas; the platoon-like massing of its adjectives, its cathedral hush around the great works. Nabokov once complained that one of Steiner's essays was "built on solid abstractions and opaque generalisations"; but things are worse than that, as this new book of essays shows.
George Steiner has a fear of exhibiting even rhetorical ignorance, and this is accompanied by a superstitious worship of "greatness." The essay "The Uncommon Reader," in this book, provides two amusing examples on successive pages. Steiner is discoursing on the decline of "classic codes of literacy." ("Do not even ask a relatively well prepared student to respond to the title of Lycidas.") Every true reader, he avers, "carries within him a nagging weight of omission": the books that he has not read. Apparently there are books that even George Steiner has not read. And yet he knows that they are great: "The eight volumes, unread, of Sorel's great diplomatic history of Europe and the French revolution haunt me." Or a page earlier: "I have, a dozen times, slunk by Sarpi's leviathan history of the Council of Trent (one of the pivotal works in the development of western religious-political argument)... There is so little time in 'the library that is the universe'(Borges's Mallarm?en phrase)." David's lament for Jonathan, he tells us, is "unsurpassed in any poetry."
All this greatness is memorialised in rippling and indiscriminate lists, whose tic is a consumer's indefinite article. Just as one asks for a coffee, a piece of pie and a Coke, Steiner asks for "a Socrates, a Mozart, a Gauss or a Galileo who, in some degree, compensate for man"; or "a Mantegna, a Turner or a C?zanne... a Racine, a Dostoevsky, a Kafka." This is not a trivial habit of style. There is "a coffee," but there is no such thing as "a Mozart." There is Mozart, singular and non-transferable, a concretion, not a vapour. Steiner's use of lists, and of the indefinite article, suggests that the meal of greatness can be had in any order and in any combination; the important thing is to fill oneself up and be bloatedly grateful.
It may be that Steiner, detecting his own vulgarity in these matters, compensates by wrapping great works in veils. Since greatness is a magic, one must be wary of offending it, in particular by unthinking worldliness. "If we choose, we can put on Opus 131 while eating breakfast," he quivers in his book, In Bluebeard's Castle. This is not a good thing. Steiner is here denouncing the coarsening freedoms of modernity, specifically American modernity. One of his persistent sensations, doubtless accurate, is that reading as it was pursued 100 years ago in bourgeois families has been superseded by listening to music. This technological proximity to great music is all very well, but one should not be too intimate with holiness.
Steiner's melodrama of transcendence accounts for his air of excited gravity. He approaches each work as if leading a coup to restore a monarch to the throne. First he must synchronise his beating heart with the reader's: "We are entering on large, difficult ground"; "Here extreme precision is needed"; "Again, this is a most complex topic." Generally, the coup fails. The less precise his prose is, the more it speaks of the importance of precision. An emblematic moment occurs in his essay "Absolute Tragedy." Steiner urges on us the blackness of our times ("this century has witnessed a carnival of bestiality"), and suggests that pure tragedy's lack of mercy may be our most appropriate literary form. "If this perception can, must be dwelt on, if it must be 'thought' (in Heidegger's active sense of that word), do there not attach to it the potential, the likelihood of a renascence of tragic drama?" "Heidegger's active sense of that word": here is the essence of Steiner. The operatic flounce, the sentimental wrestle ("if this perception can, must be dwelt on"); the allusion, quite irrelevant, to Heidegger, followed by the ascription of the importance of thinking to the word itself rather than a demonstration of its activity.
The prose is a servant of the thought, and the thought is... a servant. Great work is to be worshipped and protected, and great work requires great questions. His commonest sentence is a question: "Is it possible that..." "Could it be that..." Could it be that anti-Semitism is the gentile's guilty revenge on the impossible demands of mosaic monotheism, Christianity and messianic socialism, all Jewish "inventions?" Could it be that great art thrives best in elitist structures, in totalitarian societies? Is it possible that great art does not merely co-exist with barbarism and evil, but in some way encourages it? These are some of the questions of Steiner's work. He seems to relish their unanswerability, as if that made them better questions, and as if the fact that nobody has ever answered them means that nobody has ever asked them. Steiner is in love with the glamour of the unsayable. He has sensations rather than arguments. In his essay "Real Presences," he notes that all value judgements about works of art are unprovable and arbitrary. "Anything can be said about anything," he italicises. Indeed. And nothing can be said about nothing.
Steiner's new book lets us see that his work since Language and Silence (1967) has been impressively repetitive. The first essay in this new collection, "The Uncommon Reader," from 1978, expands a sensation central to both In Bluebeard's Castle (1971) and Real Presences (1988). Steiner has felt, since the 1960s, that our age is "in retreat from the word." The word, for Steiner, signifies a certain authority of meaning and a body of assumed knowledge. This retreat is partly, and trivially, a matter of fashion. Education is no longer rooted in the Greek and Latin classics. We listen to music but we do not read aloud to one another. Culture is now democratically accessible. Most people own paperbacks, and few people have libraries of hardback volumes. In place of "cortesia" there is now "informality." Culture was once kept alive by stern schooling and by the cultivation of memory, especially through learning poetry by heart. (This was the education that Steiner received in the lyc?e system in Paris.) "Memory is, of course, the pivot," but in most students there has been an "atrophy of memory." Quite forgivably, Steiner's thought bears the characteristic impress of a university teacher who has not recovered from the shock that he received in the 1960s when the counterculture (a phrase Steiner spits, when he can) ambled into his cortesia, and who has refuelled his shock at the pump of post-modernism, whose excesses seem to repeat philosophically what the 1960s attempted politically.
The retreat has deeper lineaments. Never mind the counterculture. Writers no longer write for the glory beyond death: "The very notion of fama, of literary glory achieved in defiance of and as rebuttal to death, embarrasses." This is, above all, a crisis of meaning. Modernism snapped the idea of a natural link between a word and its meaning, and Freudianism has undermined our sense of control over that meaning. Meanwhile the belief in God, which guarantees a telos, has fallen away. The greatest danger, as Steiner sees it, comes from the philosophical scepticism that travels under the name of deconstruction, post-modernism or post-structuralism. The modernists strove against the decay of meaning, but deconstruction embraces it, embraces the free play of meaning. The text is a bubble of signifiers constantly revealing its own contradictions and wistful ambitions, and the contemporary critic's only job seems to be to prick it. Where modernism was unafraid to make hierarchies, deconstruction erodes them and post-modernism ignores them. Truth is radically unstable. Auctoritas is gone.
There are too many professors of literature who see around them only collapsing vertebrae for Steiner's complaint to be other than conventional; and an argument on behalf of distinction-Steiner's argument-is surely cheapened by not itself having much distinction. In fairness, though, it should be noted that Steiner departs from these other complainers in three ways. He is philosophically more literate than most, competently dragging the heavy iron of the Germanic tradition into his corner whenever he can. And he is much more open to new work, in various languages, than is usual among English language critics. There are people who speak happily of their years at Cambridge in the 1960s, when the young Steiner filled lecture rooms, burrowing into his cellular erudition and prompting students to discover writers who were hardly known to them: Borges, Barthes, Garcia Marquez, Beckett. An essay on translation shows Steiner passionate and not too imprecise, arguing the merits of the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard and pleading for his translation into English. In 1982, when this essay was written, only one of Bernhard's novels had travelled out of German. Now most of them are available in English, and Steiner had something to do with this.
But Steiner differs from other Jeremiahs most spectacularly in his response to the malaise. The solution is Steiner's doctrine of the Real Presence. He proffered this in his 1985 lecture, "Real Presences," which he expanded into a book of the same title. He thinks that the solution is theological: deconstruction is a nihilism, and "the summons of nihilism demand answer." The answer is faith. In the face of a deconstructionist who claims that Madame Bovary is just a set of signifiers, or Mahler's Fourth Symphony just complex notations on staves, Steiner demands that we read and listen "as if"-as if these great works have a transcendent meaning which is irreducible. This, suggests Steiner, is what Flaubert meant when, dying, he complained that "that whore Emma Bovary" would outlive him.
We will have to believe, Steiner teaches, that these and other great works "incarnate" a meaning in the same way that in the Christian communion the bread and wine incarnate the flesh and blood of Christ. (That is what the doctrine of the Real Presence refers to.) Meaning is guaranteed by a belief in the transcendent, in the divine. Speaking strictly, we cannot know that this is so, but just as Pascal made his wager, we must make ours: "Where we read truly, where the experience is to be that of meaning, we do so as if the text (the piece of music, the work of art) incarnates (the notion is grounded in the sacramental) a real presence of significant being. This real Presence, as in an icon, as in the enacted metaphor of the sacramental bread and wine, is finally irreducible to any other formal articulate..." A little earlier, Steiner refers to Descartes's "sine qua non that God will not systematically confuse or falsify our perception and understanding of the world" and adds that "without some such fundamental presupposition" in regard to sense and value, we cannot understand great work. He calls this "our Cartesian-Kantian wager, our leap into sense..." It is this theological underpinning that funds not only true reading, but also the art of translation and the blasphemy of nihilistic or "absolute" tragedy.
This is no more than the milk of optimism. Even a philosophical amateur knows that Kant and Descartes did not construct a wager like Pascal's. They constructed proofs for the existence of a God in which they believed and trusted. Those proofs are expressions not of will, but of mind: they are true or false; they may be verified or refuted. The Pascalian wager, by contrast, is an unhappily wary manner in which to win God. And it is a nonsensical manner in which to win meaning. Pascal could, he supposed, lose heaven. How can one lose meaning? Who wins the meaning that the gambler might lose? Moreover, and unlike Pascal's, Steiner's wager is pithless: his language is a religious skin only. He takes the language of hard religious belief, softens it into mere metaphor, then convinces himself that what he has is a hard metaphor that is the equivalent of religious belief. But it is not an equivalent, nor should it be. Attend to Steiner's evasions: he writes that where we read truly, we do so not because the text incarnates meaning but as if it incarnates meaning. Again, he writes that we must follow Descartes's "wager"-but we must follow it only vaguely: "some such fundamental presupposition." Any similar fundamental presupposition will do, as long as it is fundamental. And while on the one hand the text is taken to "incarnate" meaning, a word with a specific (Christian) gravity of embodiment, in the next sentence this incarnation is no more than an "enacted metaphor." This is intellectually feeble. The doctrine of the Real Presence, in Christian practice, is guaranteed by belief in the greater incarnation of Christ, who is believed to be God made into man. There are, broadly, three kinds of belief in the Real Presence. Catholicism believes that in the communion service, which repeats Jesus's last supper, the bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Christ while remaining outwardly unchanged ("transubstantiation"); Protestantism believes that Jesus's body is present in the bread and wine ("consubstantiation"); and there are Christians, like the Zwinglians of old, who believe that neither happens, but that the communion service memorialises Christ's last supper. Is George Steiner a Zwinglian? It is only this last belief that comes close to the idea of an enacted metaphor. Most orthodox belief takes incarnation to mean what it says, since Christ's incarnation is taken to mean what it says. The Real Presence is founded on God-given truth; and even the Zwinglian doctrine is founded on the possibility of memorialising God-given truth. None of these positions is a wager. And none is an enacted metaphor, unless Christ is an enacted metaphor. "Incarnation" is not a word that should be used lightly, as Steiner does here. Not because to do so is blasphemous, but because to do so is meaningless. Incarnation promises the presence and guarantee of God. Nowhere does Steiner appear to believe in this final presence.
Steiner is like a patient who reinfects himself by putting dirty bandages on his wounds. His own religiose language infects his doctrine of meaning for it forces the very question that is necessary for this doctrine but entirely unnecessary outside it: Does Steiner believe in God? Or does he not? Either he is wagering meaning on God, or he is merely wagering meaning by gambling with language. But the latter is not far from what we do every day, without a theological language. A "leap into sense" is not the same as a leap into God.
It is not obvious that great criticism or great art needs Steiner's theological postulate to live in the stability of truth and the transcendence of beauty. Steiner ignores the many great post-Renaissance artists who have got along without a theology or a language of theology, and have radiantly made do with a theology of art. This is what Proust hints in his essay on Ruskin, when he separates his own non-theological aestheticism from the Christian aestheticism of Ruskin, whose principal religion "was religion," as Proust puts it, and whose "wholly religious life was spent wholly aesthetically." Proust, who uses language exactly, calls Ruskin's aesthetic a "supernatural aesthetic." Steiner wants to enjoy a supernatural aesthetic without the obligation of supernatural belief.
One feels that Steiner is asking us to believe not in the presence of the divine, but in the easier presence of undefined greatness. The test is easy to apply. Were Steiner proposing a doctrine of meaning, it would have to be a universal doctrine, just as Christianity is a universal doctrine. If great work incarnates a Real Presence, then minor or even bad work must do so also, for meaning, divine or otherwise, cannot be present only in masterpieces. Schubert's C major quintet, which Steiner mentions ritualistically again and again, must incarnate meaning as, say, must a novel by Danielle Steele. The quality of the meaning is another matter; but vulgar meaning is not without any meaning at all. Ruskin worshipped and wrote about not only the stones of Venice, but also the stones and trees on simple hillsides, since both were incarnations of God's creativity. Nothing in the whole body of Steiner's work suggests that he could bring himself to apply his Real Presence democratically.
Steiner is dismissive of those who would hold him to theological accountability. At the end of his "A Preface to the Hebrew Bible," he wonders aloud if the Bible is merely literature or the bearer of divine witness and revelation. Those who believe the latter, he says, are "fundamentalists." Those who believe the former, he thinks, are secularists. Having vandalised each side of this binarism, he decides that we need a third position-that nice and useful Real Presence. In fact, all that Steiner does here is bloat the Bible with mystery, but a mystery arrived at by the most vulgar route.What finally convinces him that the Bible is quasi-divine ("as if divine"), is that he cannot imagine someone writing the Psalms or the Book of Job and then going to lunch.
That really is his argument, accompanied by swirls and swoons. He can just about imagine "Shakespeare remarking to some intimate on whether or not work on Hamlet or Othello had, that day, gone well or poorly, as the case might be," and "then enquiring as to the price of cabbages," although this boggles his mind. But what he cannot do-or will not do?-is imagine the same about the writers of the Bible. "The picture of some man or woman, lunching, dining, after he or she had 'invented' and set down these and certain other biblical texts, leaves me, as it were, blinded and off balance." He forgets that the worldliness of these texts-the psalmist crying to God in one breath and calling to his sheep in the next-is one of their highest beauties.
The scriptures make him feel somewhat religious; therefore they are somewhat religious. That is Steiner's thrust, his Real Presence. He leaps into sublimity by deciding that the sublime cannot be vulgar. But he exaggerates vulgarity in order to exaggerate sublimity's lack of it; and in the end all he offers is a hedged secularism written up religiously.
The retreat from the word has one other determinant: the Holocaust. In the Holocaust, art blithely coexisted with utmost evil. "We know of personnel in the bureaucracy of the torturers and the ovens who cultivated a knowledge of Goethe, a love of Rilke... Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich." Heidegger wrote great philosophy almost within earshot of a concentration camp. In In Bluebeard's Castle, and in several essays in the new book, Steiner lays out the impotences that flow from this terrible knowledge. We can no longer believe in a necessary connection between high art and high behaviour. "Voltaire and Arnold regarded as established the crucial lemma that the humanities humanise." But we have lost this certainty.
Perhaps, Steiner speculates, art encourages barbarism, for it wraps its audience in falsities that bloom larger for them than the dilemmas of reality. The obsessiveness of great art and great thought promotes a mandarinism careless of the world. A recurrent figure in Steiner's work is Archimedes, who would not relinquish his work on the algebra of conic sections even as the Romans came to kill him in his garden in Syracuse. Anthony Blunt, the British art historian and Soviet spy, inspired one of Steiner's best pieces for The New Yorker, and in it he orates on the scandalous disjunction of civilised activity and treason: "I would like to think for a moment about a man who in the morning teaches his students that a false attribution of a Watteau drawing... is a sin against the spirit and in the afternoon or evening transmits to the agents of Soviet intelligence classified, perhaps vital information given to him in sworn trust by his countrymen and intimate colleagues. What are the sources of scission?"
As in much of Steiner's work, this is offered to us with first night flamboyance, as if we were his virgins in knowledge. As in his discussion of religious faith, he erects melodramatic binarisms and does vulgar damage to precise thinking. The binarism is always at a hysterical pitch: philosophy or the death-camps; Watteau or treason; breakfast or Opus 131; a Real Presence or nihilism. Steiner's ruminations are not novel and they cloud thought. More calmly, and with deeper understanding, writers and philosophers have long considered the irresponsible power of art; it is a commonplace of theories of tragedy and of the sublime. Hazlitt, in his celebrated essay on Coriolanus and elsewhere, pointed out that poetry "delights in power, in strong excitement, as well as in truth," and that this "gives a bias to the imagination often inconsistent with the greatest good," that "in poetry it [the imagination] triumphs over principle, and bribes the passions to make a sacrifice of common humanity."
Steiner has at times usefully reminded us of art's complicities with the inhumane. But Steiner is himself in love with the inhumane. This is gravely said. The despotic negligence, the God-like separateness, the vicious mysteries, the sickness or the madness of Kierkegaard or Kafka or Weil-these are the qualities that Steiner cherishes. He wants to be the voice out of the whirlwind; and if this cannot be, he will spend his life chasing the whirlwind. The political system that seems best to protect the life of great art, he thinks, is elitist, anti-democratic, unjust and possibly even totalitarian. This is where he would rather live, the better for whirlwind-chasing. In "The Uncommon Reader," written in 1978, he notes that one country where the old codes of "classic literacy" survive-remembrance, learning by heart, fiercely held private libraries, ideas to live and die for-is the (then) Soviet Union. Were Steiner to have to choose, he would choose, for art's sake, something closer to the Soviet dispensation than to the American, democratic, meliorist dispensation.
The very idea of speculating about choosing between these systems-as if such momentousness were up for grabs, as if this were all a kind of ghastly, mutilated consumerism-is not only null but offensive. Since we are fortunate enough not to have to choose between tyranny and freedom, we should not choose rhetorically between them. But this is just what Steiner does in "The Archives of Eden," his notorious essay of 1981, reprinted here. Steiner is like someone who, seeing a blind man in the street, says: "I would rather be deaf than blind." He begins by charging America with having produced very little of great artistic or intellectual achievement. Its classical music is eccentric; its philosophy is limited, with no great work done in the areas of metaphysics or ethics; its mathematics, where there has been real achievement, has been largely by imported Europeans; its fine art of any quality is simply an epilogue to European modernism and surrealism; its theology lacks anyone of Karl Barth's stature. Only America's literature has what he calls "claims to classic occasion." But in this century, "the summits are not American: they are: Thomas Mann, Kafka, Joyce, Proust." There is not, in America, (to be Steinerish for a moment) a Stravinsky or a Sch?nberg, a Kandinsky or a Picasso, a Heidegger, a Wittgenstein, a Sartre.
Steiner proceeds characteristically, eating his way through great works as a bat in flight blindly gobbles insects, a thousand a minute. America, he decides, is a culture devoted to the custody of European work. It has the best museums and galleries, the greatest research centres; but it is not a place where great creation is going on. Also, America in this century has become the richest and freest land on earth, while Europe has twice erupted into warfare and barbarism. This correlation between creativity and catastrophe suggests much about the relative qualities of these two societies, and the place that art is accorded in them. Steiner speculates that since art is always the preserve of the few, a society devoted to the liberation of the many, such as America, will not be the cradle for art's prospering. The American ideal is that of "material progress and recompense. Fortuna is fortune."
Liberal democratic meliorism is no home for the greatness that is always made by the few for the few. Such a society may actually conspire against the production of great work. Meanwhile, it seems that great art is either produced in conditions of elitism (Pericles's Athens, Racine's France) or, in the modern age, in the nearest equivalent, which are the totalitarian regimes of Latin America or the Soviet Union. He quotes Borges, who once said "Censorship is the mother of metaphor," and Joyce, who said: "We artists are olives; squeeze us." He points out that the Russian novel in this century has an urgency and a desperation that American fiction cannot rival.
One of the many slynesses of Steiner's sensations is that he affects the motions of argument while actually standing completely still. One is never in any doubt as to which side Steiner is on in this grotesque fight, but he must pretend to see things from the American side. To be sure, he simpers, there will be prices to pay on both sides. You can have torture, injustice and restricted access in Europe; or you can have wealth, health and the mindless pursuit of happiness in America. And to be sure, he pretends, only a monster would choose Europe. "No play by Racine is worth a Bastille, no Mandelstam poem an hour of Stalinism." America has done the decent thing: "If a choice must be made, let humane mediocrity prevail." Steiner is merely being honest in laying out the costs. What he cannot stand are those-"and they have been legion in American academe or the media"-who "want it both ways." For those who espouse the highest standards while preaching the liberal democracy that undermines those very standards, Steiner has only contempt.
There are a number of responses to this vicious incoherence. The swiftest and most majestic was provided by Joseph Brodsky, who knew first hand the tyrannies that are only pornographic to Steiner. Years ago Brodsky and Steiner appeared on a British television programme. Steiner set out his anti-democratic stall. He spoke for 15 minutes. He emanated a punitive hysteria. He spoke in rolling discourses, hardly pausing for breath, vigorous with triumphalist evasions. He presented the argument of "The Archives of Eden." Then he stopped. And quietly, with thick dignity, Brodsky responded: "Yes, but liberty is the greatest masterpiece."
That is all that needs to be said. By insisting on his own lovely metaphor, Brodsky was reminding Steiner that although censorship may be "the mother of metaphor," censorship is not itself a metaphor. For when torture is discussed speculatively by someone who has known only freedom, it is being discussed metaphorically. This is the real affront of Steiner's essay. It is a rhetoric of choice indulged in by a man who is fortunate enough to have never had to choose; and his choice is for a system in which people have never been allowed to choose. He makes a choice for not being able to choose.
"If a choice must be made," Steiner writes. But a choice must not be made, and has never been made. This rhetoric of choice pushes Steiner toward facile linkages: we want or choose a dispensation (America has apparently "chosen" humane mediocrity) and this dispensation uncomplicatedly "produces" certain works of art and thought. Ironically, this great anti-American here speaks a language of pure consumerism, of choice and product. Culture is a factory floor, and he is the bullying foreman.
But Steiner conflates elitism and totalitarianism. He begins by comparing Europe and America. By the end of the essay he is speaking of the Soviet Union. Most of his examples of European greatness are not Russian, yet the force of his melodrama is toward squaring off totalitarianism against American freedom. This is a binarism he indulges with equal melodrama in his recent novella, Proofs, in which two men discuss the pros and cons of the American and Russian systems. But much of modern European art, while laboured on in the midst of injustice, has been created in conditions that are closer to democracy than to tyranny. And much ordinary art-Britain in the 20th century: not a single one of Steiner's examples of greatness is British-has been produced in elitist, class-sodden cultures.
Steiner is not, in fact, making a political contrast at all, though he thinks he is. He is not setting banal freedom against special illiberality. He is comparing several very ancient societies with one relatively new one. This is not a comparison. Borges actually and politically repressed is very different from Joyce yearning for (if he really did yearn for) intellectual repression. One lived in a police state and one lived in democratic Europe. Steiner thinks, for example, that it is a neat jibe to end his essay by pledging his faith in Archimedes's garden in Syracuse. "My hunch is that it [the labour of greatness] lies in Syracuse still-Sicily, that is, rather than New York." But the two Syracuses have much in common. Both are places of liberal democracy, even if the Italian version is corruptly unstable. What divides them is antiquity, not politics.
Had Steiner, in 1978, fought like with like-posed a newish totalitarian society against a newish liberal one-what would have been America's proper rival? South Africa, perhaps. And to anyone familiar with its literature South Africa gives the lie to the idea that totalitarianism produces, in some uncomplicated causal way, great work. On the contrary, in South Africa totalitarianism has produced an enfeebled, minor literature with occasional peaks. And it is a literature whose constant subject has been, inevitably and limitingly, power and repression and the corruptions of society. JM Coetzee said this about it in his Jerusalem prize speech of 1987: "It is a less than fully human literature, unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power... It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from a prison."
Steiner complains that America is a museum culture. But Steiner is himself a museum of European monuments. In Steiner's museum all the monuments are in conspiracy with each other. One monument leads to another. Without Kafka, says Steiner, "we would not have Beckett's clowns." But those of us who cherish literary greatness see that, contra Steiner, greatness is not always dynastic. The critic's truest wager is made not on an unarguably great God, but on the foundling, the unparented work that no one has yet raised to greatness. America is incomprehensible to George Steiner because it is a country which has produced masterpieces but not dynasties of monuments. It is a country that has often had to cast off European monuments in order to create American masterpieces. It is a country in which passionate languages of art have been spoken without need of theology. George Steiner offers a parody of Europeanness while fighting a parody of Americanness. America eludes him. In America's museums and libraries are the great European works that populate Steiner's family of giants; but its true vitalities fly.
