Collected Lectures: The debt owed to George Steiner by readers cannot be acknowledged too often. So on with the show, writes John Banville
Is it possible to teach? Is it possible to be taught? Is the mind a Lockeian tabula rasa upon which the teacher inscribes the lessons and the laws, or are we born with an innate knowledge of things which the person at the blackboard merely calls forth? Is the object of teaching the imparting of knowledge or the conferring of wisdom? From what or where does the teacher derive his authority, indeed, his power, over the pupil? If Socrates himself could admit that the more he learned the more he realised how little he knew, how does anyone dare presume to tell others how and what to think? As George Steiner parenthetically asks: "Is the teacher, finally, a showman?"
Whatever about the rest of those large questions, the last one can confidently be answered in the affirmative, as anyone will agree who has heard Steiner deliver a public lecture. He has devoted his professional life to the instruction of others, not only in the classroom but through the pages of his books. The debt owed to him by his readers, especially his English-speaking readers who were young in the 1960s, has been acknowledged before, but cannot be acknowledged too often. He introduced to us, and introduced us to, a gallery of great European thinkers and writers whose names, never mind their works, we might not have heard of were it not for him. In books such as Language and Silence and After Babel he was as urgent, as authoritative and as galvanising as he is at the podium. If this is showmanship, then on with the show.
Lessons of the Masters is the text of the six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard in 2001-2, with an introduction and an afterword. Steiner begins, somewhat uncharacteristically, with an expression of doubt: despite having taught for half a century, he tells us, he is prey to an increasing uncertainty as to the legitimacy of his profession. The teacher, he writes, immersed in the task at hand, too rarely steps back to consider "what I would call, pending more precise and material definition, the mystery of the thing", and at once poses the essential question: "What empowers a man or a woman to teach another human being, where lies the wellspring of authority?" The lectures that follow are an attempt to tease out an answer.
If he does not entirely succeed in that attempt, the modes by which he addresses the question are in themselves illuminating enough. He is fascinated, or perhaps a better word is awed, by what, in a reference to Shakespeare's sonnets, he calls the "pas-de-deux of instruction and desire, of bestowal and reception" that is the relation between teacher and pupil, master and disciple. Throughout, he acknowledges the undertow of the erotic that is always there in that relation, washing now in this direction, now in that.
"Even consummate bodily possession is a small thing compared with the fearsome laying of hands on the quick of another human being, on its unfolding, implicit in teaching. The Master is the jealous lover of what might be," he writes. And elsewhere: "Eroticism, covert or declared, fantasized or enacted, is inwoven in teaching, in the phenomenology of mastery and discipleship."
The rewards and privileges of teaching, as well as the fearsome weight of responsibility that the teacher takes on, is another of the themes that recur repeatedly in these pages. Good teachers, he speculates, may be rarer than artists or sages. The passion, seriousness and powers of empathy called for are prodigious, the fruits of success "touches of grace and of hope like no others". His retirement from teaching, he tells us with frank pathos, has left him feeling orphaned. He exclaims at the oddness, as he sees it, of having been paid all those years to perform what was for him a labour of love. How, he asks, can a vocation be put on a payroll? "The question has haunted me and left me uneasy during my whole life as a teacher" - so much so, indeed, that he wonders if it would not have been more appropriate for him to pay those who invited him to teach. Hardly a practical proposition, but one takes the point.
Contempt is not a strong enough term for what he feels toward the so many "more or less amiable gravediggers" to whom we entrust our children in secondary school or the academy.
Bad teaching is, almost literally, murderous and, metaphorically, a sin. It diminishes the student, it reduces to gray inanity the subject being presented. It drips into the child's or the adult's sensibility that most corrosive of acids, boredom, the marsh gas of ennui. Millions have had mathematics, poetry, logical thinking, killed for them by dead teaching, by the perhaps subconsciously vengeful mediocrity of frustrated pedagogues.
(And, we in Ireland might add, by that peculiarly deadening conjunction of nationalist ideology and general disregard for the rights and needs of the child which in our and the State's youth doomed the attempt to revive the Irish language through education.)
Steiner considers a range of examples of the teacher-pupil and master-disciple nexus, from Socrates and Plato through Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler to Knute Rockne . . . Knute who, you ask? Chemistry teacher, actor and flautist, Rockne was also the legendary coach of the virtually unbeatable Notre Dame football team in the 1920s. Who would have taken Prof Steiner for a sporting man? Always the enthusiast, he knows greatness when he sees it, and pays homage. Rockne was in his way as great as any of the great magi of culture whom Steiner chooses for his examples, and as influential: "A local, in many ways almost esoteric pastime - American football . . . - became a national passion owing, largely, to the genius of a Master."
Central, literally, to this series of lectures is the Faustian figure of Martin Heidegger, both as disciple, to his mentor Edmund Husserl, and master, to the young Hannah Arendt, his pupil and, for a fraught time, his mistress. Husserl, the father, it might be said, of phenomenology, took on Heidegger as his assistant at Freiburg University in 1919. There was a 30-year age gap between them. The older man, thinking to "establish an unassailable foundation for man's perception and comprehension of the world" through what Steiner emphasises was his "phenomenological method", assumed Heidegger would complete the great task which he had initiated. Behind the master's back, however, the disciple was hatching his own dark programme. "Rejoicing in Heidegger's seeming intimacy, Husserl . . . could not have guessed at the crude derision of himself and his works which, as early as 1923, dirty Heidegger's private letters to [his fellow philosopher] Karl Jaspers." Later, in the 1930s, when Heidegger had embraced Nazism, he committed one of the most infamous betrayals in the annals of philosophy by suppressing from Being and Time the original dedication to Husserl, not least because of the old man's Jewish connections. Husserl was driven into isolation by the Nazis, and Heidegger took over as rector of the university. Faust had transformed himself into Mephistopheles.
And then there was Hannah Arendt. She came to study under him - figural language revels in the vulgarest double entendres - in 1925, when she was 19. He was 36, already a famous teacher, and irrecoverably married. She fell at once for the "secret king of thought", as she called him, and he for her. Steiner does not doubt that Heidegger was fully aware of the precedent of Abelard and Heloïse for this doomed love between master and pupil, but was the philosopher also perhaps echoing Mann's Death in Venice when he wrote to Arendt: "I have been struck by the daemonic"? The affair was brief but intense - "What tutorials these must have been!" Steiner exclaims - and although Arendt, the Jew, broke with her secret king, a member of the Nazi Party, she renewed contact with him after the war, andentered on a correspondence with him that lasted until Heidegger's death. As Steiner puts it, "the overwhelming impact of Heidegger's teaching, his capacity 'to read as no man else has ever done,' kept their hold".
In his consideration of the Jewish people's devotion to teaching and learning - "Judaism is uncompromisingly pedagogic" - Steiner remarks on the tenacity of scholars after the destruction of the Temple and the triumph of Roman rule and on through the diaspora. "The unbroken lineage of talmudic explicators, of teachers and exegetes springs out of, flourishes within exile and persecution. Rabbinic classes were held in the death camps." (In this context he might have mentioned the phenomenon of the Irish hedge schools of the 18th and 19th centuries, which figure in a play by one of Steiner's most enthusiastic admirers among modern writers, Brian Friel's Translations.)
Steiner is, inevitably, fearful for the immediate future of the academy:
Parallels have been drawn between the witch hunts at Salem and the enforcement of political correctness. Elementary statements regarding the origins and ubiquity of slavery inside Africa, recalling the exponential genius of Greek thought, observing the global resonance of certain western languages and canonic texts, have been gagged. Teachers and scholars have been hounded, spurious "revisionists" richly rewarded. The sciences know no such folly.
Yet he is not despairing. In his afterword he makes a passionate declaration of faith in his calling. There is, he says, no craft more privileged, or more vital to society's health. This is a book which every person interested in culture should read, but it should act especially as a tonic for teachers in these grey times. "Even at a humble level - that of schoolmaster - to teach, to teach well, is to be accomplice to transcendent possibility. Woken, that exasperating child in the back row may write the lines, may conjecture the theorem that will busy centuries."
John Banville's most recent book, Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City, was published earlier this year by Bloomsbury
Lessons of the Masters. By George Steiner, Harvard University Press, 198pp. €18.30