YOU could see George Steiner's whole oeuvre as an attempt to rationalise the moment when, as a child in Paris in the Thirties, his father opened the shutters and made him look out at the fascist thugs below: "This is called history", said his father. "And you must never be afraid."
Reading this new collection of essays from the master linguist and critic, the frame of the window through which he surveys his famously expansive territories of knowledge is always evident, a frame built by a sense of his own history. Steiner was one of two Jewish children in his class at school who survived Hitler's purges, because his father got the family out early, to the US. It is not surprising that the later work is dominated by a need to build a philosophical system as a defence against the inexplicable, the random, the unreasonable.
What is surprising about this work, however, is Steiner's seemingly adamantine view that his own perspective on history is the only one. His unveiling of the inherent, autonomous dynamics of different languages in Language and Silence (1958) intoxicated this reader as a student, as it did so many others. Now, reading these later essays, one is struck by the arbitrarily drawn boundaries of his extensive knowledge. His vision of culture is wide in the sense that it is polylingual, but it is deeply conservative in terms of form; again and again, he speaks of the painting, the sonata, the poem, the great philosophic text, the theorem.
In "The Archives of Eden" a brilliantly argued deconstruction of American culture - the only society, he says, in which moneymaking is presented as the most interesting thing to do - Steiner lists America's cultural deficiencies, complaining that there are no names in twentieth century American music to set beside those of "Stravinsky, of Schoenberg, of Bartok, or Alban Berg and Anton von Wehern, the ouevre of a Prokofiev, of a Shostakovich, and perhaps even of Beamin Britten. He then nods in the direction of jazz, and leaves the reader gasping - no mention of blues, of blue grass, of the lonely voice of country, of so much popular music.
Rooted between Athens and Jerusalem, between the world of Hellenism and the world of Judaism, he ignores the powerful myth making at the heart of American culture. He discounts the greatness of American literature in this century: "The summits are not American: they are Thomas Mann, Katka, Joyce and Proust". The need to number, to limit, to name, is reminiscent of those books of the Old testament with which he is so familiar; Steiner is not abandoning himself to exploring the unknown, he is hammering chosen texts into a personal inventory.
In his introduction to Steiner's The Deeps of the Sea, a collection of fiction published the same day as this volume, John Banville speaks of Steiner as fundamentally a religious writer, these essays make clear how right he is, and that Steiner's religion, like the great Western religions in which he is well versed, is monotheistic and has clean and beautiful lines to its myth. What Steiner wants from art is religious ecstasy, and the insistence on finding this - famously in Real Presences (1989) - blinkers him, in some respects; It is plain in "A Reading Against Shakespeare" that he cannot incorporate into his system Shakespeare's "anarchic and spendthrift prodigality of life", that he is happier with Racine and Claudel. But his insistence on art's role in the life of the spirit is also probably his most lasting gift to critical discourse; his exposure of the "autistic echo chambers of deconstruction" in "Real Presences" is necessary and exhilarating.
He is unable to ascribe the horror of the Holocaust to a chance collision of evil and opportunity, as a pagan would. He sees in the gas chambers of Auschwitz a mirroring of Christ's death at Golgotha; the Jews questioned the divine in man, and it was the humanity of man which was cancelled out in the Holocaust: "Erasure for erasure. The eclipse of light over Golgotha and the black hole in history of the Shoah" ("Through That Glass Darkly"). His argument does not convince, but it is none the less important and daring for that.
In a volume of essays with a central religious thrust, it is not surprising that there is none of the carnivalesque revelling in the lack of a pre Babel language which contains all meaning, which is perhaps wrongly associated with the writer of Latage and Silence and After Babel. Instead there is a constant wonder at those Biblical texts which Steiner simply cannot imagine being authored in the usual way - they seem to come from beyond the human mind. This is the language, the fundamental "grammar" - the term comes from "Two Cocks"
whose lineaments he endlessly searches for, and which fills him with wonder; wonder which the reader of these infuriating but essential essays is compelled to share.