A door flung open on our European Heritage

THE first thing to be remarked about George Steiner's fiction is how much of it there is. Given his enthusiasm for the abstruse the hermetic and the condensed one would have expected his stories to be difficult, closed and very, very short. Anyone who had browsed through his criticism (or even his titles: Language and Silence, On Difficulty, Extraterritorial, Antigones) could be forgiven for assuming that his fiction (again, the titles: Anno Domini Proofs and Three Parables) would fall into the category of "European", a term which conjures up a text in which an unnamed man in an unnamed city in an unnamed country in Mitteleuropa paces the floor of a hotel bedroom in search of his identity, while below his window ignorant armies clash by night. But not a bit of it. This work - a novel, three novellas, a goodly handful of stories is vigorous, precisely located, broad in reference, accommodating in style and, to re-employ an outmoded designation, engage.

We first encountered George Steiner in Language and Silence (1967). This collection of essays, which, if any volume ever did, deserves to be called seminal, was not his first book; there had already been Tolstoy or Dostoevsky

(an "Essay in the Old Criticism") (1959) and The Death of Tragedy" (1961), both of which, as Steiner has acknowledged, not without a certain justified pride, have been "made use of in schools and universities" and have "had influence". However, it was Language and Silence that introduced us to

Steiner's essential, multifarious concerns. That book, and the critical works that followed, "take their substance", the author says, and much of their "voice", from the legacy of Ernst Bloc, of Adorno, of Walter Benjamin and from the inheritance of Jewish poetic-philosophic investigations of the word as it is evident in Roman Jakobson, in Karl Kraus, in Fritz Mauthner and Noam Chomsky."

The mapping of my identity," he continues, "the inward orientations, remain those circumscribed by Leningrad, Odessa, Prague and Vienna on the one side, and by Frankfurt, Milan and Paris on the other" In 1967, many of us had never even heard most of these names, much less read their work, and our "inward orientations" were circumscribed indeed, confined as they were to the anglophone world, with its twin poles at London and New York. Suddenly, in Language and Silence, a door was flung open for us on what had been there all the time, at our backs, namely, our European heritage. It was an electrifying moment, say we, because l think of Steiner's readers as a community an inclusive, not an exclusive, community. Few critics demand of their readers a commitment to a point of view or, one might better say, to a vantage point as Steiner does. He insists on the central significance, historical, political and aesthetic, of the European experience, and specifically, in this most terrible century, the experience of the Jewish people. In his own introduction to George Steiner A Reader (itself a suggestive title, in which the pun is surely intentional), from which I have quoted above, he speaks of several of the pieces in that collection constituting "an act of remembrance (a kaddish)". He will yield to none in his conviction that the Holocaust (not a term he favours) is the defining event of our time, although he gives full acknowledgement to the century's other great horrors, from the Turkish massacre of the Armenians through the unimaginable enormities of the Stalinist era, and the many postwar atrocities that have been committed in the name of this or that tribe or ideology. These texts," he writes, endeavour to wrest from forgetting one of the very great periods in the history of human thought, of language and of dreams, and to recall the crimes committed upon millions."

NOT everyone thanks him for this endeavour. There are those who will declare that such an act of remembrance, such an effort of recuperation of a history and a culture, is not the business of literary criticism, which should, they hold, confine itself to the elucidation of texts. Steiner is a devotee of the text he has spoken of the intense pleasure and satisfaction to be derived from sitting with a few students and working down through the onion-skin layering of a poem by Celan, a story by Kafka or a canticle by the Psalmist -but he is also that increasingly rare phenomenon, a humanist critic, certain of the centrality of humankind's place in the world, and of the writer's moral task to inform man's mind and, in however modest a way, to seek to direct his actions.

It is this moral dimension that is the most striking characteristic of his fiction. Anno Domini, first published in 1964, and dedicated to Storm Jameson, comprises three novellas, all of which deal with the aftermath of the second World War. If the adjective had not been exhausted long ago as a mark of literary praise, these narratives could be called powerful. All three deal with the moral crises precipitated by the inhuman circumstances in which humans find themselves in time of war and its aftermath. In the first tale, Return No More, Falk, a former German officer who comes back in peacetime to the French village and the family there whose eldest son he had executed, states the predicament of all the book's survivors and walking wounded: "I am like a sleepwalker looking for that which kept me alive in the daytime. Looking for the one door that opens on the night. Probably shan't be allowed anywhere near it.

THE door that opens on the night: there is a peculiar and fitting ambiguity to the phrase. The night that fell over Europe between 1939 and 1945 will not be lifted, no matter what guilt is acknowledged or reparation made; but here and there, through this or that chink dragged open with the greatest pain and difficulty, a little light may fall into the darkness. Art is one such aperture. Even in the work of Paul Celan, one of Steiner's most admired poets, who lost his parents in a Nazi labour camp and whose suicide in 1970 was due in large part to his experiences in the war, there is illumination, as in the tiny, freestanding phrase in what is perhaps Celan's darkest poem, Tenehrae: "Es glanzte" ("It gleaned"). It is this small flicker of that for which hope is too strong a word that Steiner seeks to locate in these fictions.

His most daring venture in the medium is the novel, The Portage to San Cristobal of AH, a sort of politico-philosophical adventure story which tells of the capture by a group of Israeli Nazi-hunters of "the one out of hell", Adolf Hitler, who in Steiner's version has not died in the bunker but escaped to the jungles of South America. In the long, crazed tirade by Hitler that closes the book, Steiner expands on one of his abiding themes, which is that the persecution of the Jews throughout history is the result of gentile rage, at a race which invented the doctrine of "an omnipotent, all seeing, yet invisible, impalpable, inconceivable God". "The Jews," declares

A.H., "emptied the world by setting this God apart, immeasurably apart from man's senses," and thereby made of himself "a long cancer of unrest". More blasphemous still, from the point of view of secular Zionism, is the question Steiner puts into Hitler's mouth: "Perhaps I am the Messiah, the true Messiah, the new Sabbatai whose infamous deeds were allowed by God in order to bring His people home." This is fiction at its most risky.

BUT Steiner has always been a taker of risks. It is what makes his work, the criticism as well as the fiction, exciting, infuriating, omnivorous, and impossibly ambitious. Few writers working now, at the fag-end of this theory-tormented century, are as sure of having something to say. Nothing daunts him. Proofs, the novella, or long short story, published in 1992, is an extraordinarily daring meditation on the fall of Communism, executed with brio and a kind of muscular relish. The central character is a master proof-reader, known as "professore", renowned for his exactitude and obsessive attention to detail, who as the story opens discovers that he is going blind. He is also a doctrinaire Communist. At the centre off "the tale is a long discussion between the professore and Father,

Carlo, another, less rigidly ideologically convinced party-member, after the fall of the Soviet Union. "At the heart of Communism is the lie," says the priest. "The central, axiomatic lie: a kingdom of justice, a classless brotherhood, a release from servitude here and now. In this world, That's the great lie." To which the professore replies:

"Marxism did man supreme honour. The Moses and Jesus and Marx vision of the just earth, of a neighbour's love, of human universality, the abolition of barriers between lands, classes, races, the abolition of tribal hatreds: that vision was. . . a huge impatience. But it was more. It was an overestimate of man. A possibly, fatal, possibly deranged but none the less magnificent, jubilant overestimate of man. The highest compliment ever paid him. The Church has held man in doleful contempt. He is a fallen creature, doomed to sweat out his life-sentence. Dust to dust. Marxism has taken him to be almost boundless in his capacities, limitless in his horizons, in the leaps of his spirit. A reacher to the stars. Not mired in original sin, but himself original. Our history is nothing but a savage prologue.

The dialectic in Proofs takes us to the heart of Steiner's work and of his thought. He recognises that, as in all intellectuals, there is in him an ineradicable duality: on one side the liberal humanist, on the other the ideologue, with all the fierce vision and vaulting impatience that term implies. But what we also see in Proofs and in the three beautiful little Parables that accompany it - indeed, in all his books - is the surprising and yet simple truth that George Steiner is, at a fundamental level, and in the broadest sense, a religious writer. The numinous gleam is there throughout the work, from his first published story, that Jamesian tale out of Melville, The Deeps of the Sea, to his most recent critical excursus, the title of which is, and not by accident, Real Presences. "God did seem much about in the city these days," thinks the professore, the seeker alter proofs. So be it. The real battle with him lay ahead.