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Cassandra's
Prophecies Since Language and Silence fell into my hands thirty years ago,
I've
considered Professor George Steiner one of the most stimulating
critical minds
of our day. I've continued to read what he writes, and book after book
my high
opinion is confirmed, even when I disagree with his conclusions. But
for a
while now, I've suspected he was beginning to succumb to the temptation
to
which great talents often fall prey, that of frivolous facility, or the
propensity to prove anything, even some mistaken views, with elegant
prose and
what appears to be solid learning. Professor
Steiner has just
announced both the death of literature and the existence of a secret
book he
has written, to be published posthumously, on languages and the act of
love:
"One makes love very differently in German than in English or
Italian," he has explained, with a certainty that Don Juan de Manara
would
envy. Very well. This announcement is at least more original and,
insofar as
readers are concerned, more optimistic than the first. The
culture of the near
future, according to Steiner, will do away with literature because of
two
factors that already exert a decisive influence on contemporary life.
The.
first is technology. The novel
as a genre is in no
shape to compete with the so-called virtual reality produced by
computers, a
universe of fantasy and creativity that, though still in its infancy,
already
surpasses what lies between the covers of the best works of fiction.
The First
World War was the death knell of the novel, and its swan song was James
Joyce's
Finnegans Wake. Poetry will survive, but at a distance from the
evanescent
book, as an oral art subordinate to music and the pastimes that have
replaced
literature as magnets for the best modern intelligence: television,
film,
dance, and advertising. According
to the statistical
artillery Steiner deploys in support of his thesis, the humanities now
only
attract mediocrities and the dregs of the university, while talented
young
people flock to study the sciences. And the proof of this is that the
entrance
requirements for humanities departments in the best academic centers of
Professor
Steiner explains in
detail, with his usual intellectual flair, a supposed historical law
according
to which every age's limited quota of creative talent is concentrated,
for
mysterious reasons, in a specific area of human activity, which as a
result
enjoys a period of extraordinary flowering and achievement. So just as
painting
flourished in the Florentine Quattrocento and the novel stepped into
the breach
in nineteenth-century Europe, now the creative genius of the species
has
abandoned arts and letters and nourishes and enriches science and
technology
and the genres that most benefit from their accomplishments and
inventions: in
other words, the audiovisual. Not without a certain cheek, Steiner
assures us
that in our day "the difference between poetry and advertising jingles
is
very difficult to distinguish" and that it isn't uncommon to find
"one-liners of which Restoration comedy would have been proud" in
radio or television advertisements for commercial products. To
speak of beauty in a world
where ad agency copywriters are our Dantes and Petrarchs, and where
soap operas
and reality shows take the place of Don Quixote and War and Peace, will
always
be possible, but clearly the meaning of the word will have been
essentially
altered. Although we may have trouble comprehending it, the children
around us
have already understood it and act accordingly. Steiner explains what
scientists have explained to him: that any child who has mastered the
use of
the computer chooses among three or four possible solutions to all the
problems
posed by the holographic screen, not on the basis of their truth since
all are
true-but on the basis of their "beauty," or their form, coherence,
and the perfectness of their technical configuration, which corresponds
to what
is classically considered artistic value. The child establishes this
hierarchy
with the certainty with which previous generations distinguished
between a
beautiful and an ugly painting. This development seems to Steiner the
inevitable consequence of the evolution of art after the genre has hit
bottom,
as supposedly happened to the novel after Joyce. Now there is nothing
left but
the Hegelian qualitative leap: How could the traditional idea of beauty
in the
visual arts have survived the productions of Marcel Duchamp, who could
sign a
urinal, or the self-destructing and ephemeral machines of Jean
Tinguely? It's
been a while since an
essay irritated me as much as the one I'm discussing here. What annoys
me (I
promise) is not that, given my job, its thesis turns me into a modern
counterpart
of the dinosaurs and pterodactyls when they were on the verge of
extinction.
Rather, it's the superior and mocking air with which Professor Steiner
assumes
the role of a cultural Cassandra, announcing, with cheerful
masochism-and, for
full sarcastic effect, in a public lecture before the Publishers
Association of
Great Britain, which, upon the occasion of its centenary, had invited
him to
give a talk about the book-the end of one civilization and the dawning
of
another, ontologically different and purged of the printed page. As far
as the thesis itself
is concerned, it is probably true in its broader strokes, though
doubtless
exaggerated and presented with unnecessary dramatics. There is no
question that
in fields like electronics and computer science, technology has made
astounding
strides, or that the audiovisual media siphon off more and more
potential
readers of literature. Coming from someone more qualified than anyone
else to
know better, however, the claim that advertising and the small screen
are
already producing masterpieces on the same level as literary ones seems
a wild
provocation. In any event, that is not yet the case, and those of us
who try to
combine our love for books with more or less regular exposure to
television and
film are made aware on a daily basis that it will be a long time before
that
fantasy comes true, if it ever does. And
besides, the prospect
that the book may be relegated to a minority activity and nearly driven
underground in the society of the future is not something that should
demoralize lovers of literature. On the contrary, many good things may
come of
that marginalization. This, in my opinion, is the Achilles' heel of
Steiner's
argument: to have forgotten that fiction and poetry were enjoyed by a
majority
and truly popular only when they were oral, spoken and sung in squares
and on
the road. Since these arts were put into writing, their public has been
reduced
to a negligible minority, an educated elite, which, of course, grew
somewhat
with the invention of the printing press. But literature has never been
a genre
for "the masses," not even today, when the artistic and creative book
reaches an important sector of the population (though never a majority
in the
strict sense) in a very few modern and prosperous countries. I highly
doubt,
for example, that the readers of novels and poems in On the
other hand, the most
notorious consequence of the great expansion of the audience for
literary
books-the forging of those large minorities in countries like By way
of illustration I'd
like to mention two examples that have just come to me out of the blue.
I read
in the Times this morning that since President Bill Clinton invited her
to read
a poem at his inauguration, Maya Angelou, an American poet of the
second or
even the third rank, is the most widely read poet of all time in the
English
language. Just this year, Angelou, who often addresses the theme of
poverty in
her poetry, earned royalties of four and a half million dollars. How
much must
the beautiful long-legged model Naomi Campbell have earned when, some
time ago,
she published a novel launched with a barrage of radio and television
ads?
Naturally, I'm not against models writing novels. But therein lies the
problem.
Miss Campbell didn't write the book: she only appears as its author. Why
should we shed tears for
the disappearance of this circus of posing, confusion, and vanity? If
this is
what will vanish under the steamrolling onslaught of audiovisual
culture, so be
it. The book won't die, of course. It will return to its former
position, kept
alive by a minority enclave who will demand the rigor, good prose,
inventiveness, ideas, persuasive illusions, freedom, and audacities
that are
notable for their absence in the great majority of the books that now
usurp the
title of literature. In that future fraternity of catechists of the
book,
Professor Steiner will be read and discussed, without his needing to
play-at
his age-the enfant terrible. Mario
Vargas Llosa |