LITERARY CRITICISM 

Hear the high priest 

BEN HUTCHINSON
 

George Steiner 

THE POETRY OF THOUGHT 

From Hellenism to Celan 

223pp. New Directions. £15.95 (US $24.95). 

9780811219457

Ever since his first book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An essay in contrast (1959), George Steiner's work has been defined by attempts at comparison. An extravagantly broad body of work stretching over more than fifty years, a famously trilingual upbringing, and a ferocious insistence on the enduring importance of European "high" culture have made Steiner the very embodiment of post-war comparative literature. Such a lofty position is not without its perils: suspicions of presumption and superficiality have sometimes attended his dazzling range of reference. Yet there is a profound intellectual humility in Steiner's respect for the "tradition", discernible in his repeated insistence that the critic is but a postman, delivering letters from the poets. As he asserts in his autobiography, Errata (1997), "no hermeneutic is equivalent to its object".

That such a broad perspective seems increasingly elegiac is not the least of Steiner's concerns. In an age of specialists, the Arnoldian ambition to encompass "the best which has been thought and said" risks seeming outdated, if not naive. Yet, in one important sense, Steiner's new book takes Arnold's definition of culture at its word. For it is arguable that the most important term in this definition is its most innocuous: how much weight does the conjunction "and" carry in bridging the gap between thought and speech? What is the force of this conjunction in the Western tradition? If the relationship between philosophy and poetry underlies much of Steiner's work, The Poetry of Thought tackles the Arnoldian "and" head-on. From Parmenides and Heraclitus to Sartre and Heidegger, Steiner traces a typically ambitious arc through the history of Western thought, arguing that what defines philosophy is its manner as much as its matter.

The question of style is thus at the heart of the argument. Much of Steiner's previous work has circled around this issue without quite addressing it directly: the pioneering theoretical speculations on translation in After Babel (1975), the wager on the metaphysical resonance of art in Real Presences (1989), the distinction between "invention" and "creation" underlying Grammars of Creation (2001). In this sense, The Poetry of Thought represents the culmination of a life-time's work: in both philosophy and literature, asserts Steiner, "style is substance". The title of the book plays on the slippage between the subjective and objective genitive, evoking both the poetry inherent in thought and poetry about thought. Over the course of the book, Steiner identifies a range of stylistic aspects common to both, from rhythm and repetition to dialogue and aphorism, from fragment and setting to counter-factual verb forms such as the subjunctive and the future. While the comparative methodology allows him to juxtapose French pluperfects with German prepositions, the music of language, Steiner argues, is universal: Claude Levi-Strauss's claim that "the invention of melody is the supreme mystery of man" recurs throughout Steiner's oeuvre, itself a kind of musical motif. If this new book opens with the concession that language has neither the performative power of music nor the elegant precision of mathematics, it is language, for Steiner, that defines the human.

The survey accordingly begins from the ancient Greek view of man as the "language- animal". Heraclitus - avatar of the tradition of "difficulty" so prized by Steiner - thinks in paradoxes and oxymorons, while Parmenides is defined by his "rhythm", and Lucretius by what Simone Weil would call his pesanteur (gravity). The interpretation of Plato's dialogues and letters as "performative literary acts" is studiedly provocative, given the philosopher's infamous desire to banish the poets: Steiner's ingenious argument is that Plato may be wrestling with himself, "seeking to keep at bay the supreme dramatist, the mythmaker and narrator of genius within his own powers". The influence of the Germanic tradition in particular can be felt in these early chapters, in Steiner's Nietzschean insistence on the birth of thought from the spirit of tragedy (the subsequent section on Nietzsche is notably brief, since his influence is so palpable throughout).

A short chapter on the genre of the dialogue, juxtaposing Abelard's use of the form with that of Galileo, Hume and Paul Valery, is followed by a more substantial consideration of the respective styles of Descartes, Hegel and Marx. It is here in particular that Steiner most fully develops one of the subplots of his study, namely the extent to which acts of commentary can become acts of art.

The poetry of thought is also the poetry of interpretation: exegesis has its own aesthetics. Steiner's approach is essentially hermeneutic, reminiscent of Hans-Georg Gadarner's view that literature "brings its hidden history into every age". Not only do thinkers such as Charles Peguy respond to Descartes's subjunctives and pluperfects, but also poets - such as Durs Grunbein (to whom the book is dedicated); not only do theorists such as Alexandre Kojeve, Georg Lukacs and Theodor Adorno develop Hegel's grammar of self- consciousness, but also playwrights such as Brecht and Beckett. In their exegetes, philosophers need, like Napoleon's generals, to be lucky: if Marx's political thought is informed by his highly literary sensibility, by his irony and epigrammatic anger, it is his commentators who have defined much of modernity.

As Steiner recognizes, however, the danger is that style might overshadow substance, that poetry might inhibit thought. Steiner takes Henri Bergson's philosophy as a test case, suggesting that it is characterized by "an underlying paradox: that of a stylistic gift so eminent and entrancing that the necessary roughage and density of philosophic content suffer". Freud, similarly, is held to endure not as a thinker, but as a writer who emerged from the particular tradition of Austrian philosophical literature: Freud's virtuosity as a "conjuror of myth" marks a kind of modernist Faustianism, where the very magic of linguistic style threatens to occlude metaphysical meaning. That Valery - who, in Cioran's telling formulation, "does not forgive himself for not having been a philosopher" - should write Mon Faust was, as Steiner notes, "virtually preordained".

Perhaps inevitably, Wittgenstein's concept of language games plays a key role in the argument. Steiner sees in Wittgenstein's paratactic, aphoristic style a conscious attempt at "counter-rhetoric", and offers illuminating asides on the "oral" nature of his philosophy and on the importance of dictation in the history of Western thought more broadly. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Steiner suggests a stylistic opposition between clarity and density: where a certain tradition of Cartesian clarity arguably obtains in French (and Anglo-American) thought, Germanic thinkers such as Hegel and Adorno make conceptual density a constituent part of their syntax.

This contrast recalls the diarist Harry Graf Kessler's provocative claim, when visiting Valery, that the external clarity of French intellectuals masks internal confusion, whereas the external confusion of Germanic thinkers belies their internal clarity. If this encounter between conceptual and stylistic difficulty underlies much of the book, it is encounters of a more literal kind that provide its denouement. The relationship between Holderlin and Hegel represents for Steiner a summit of the post-Hellenic history of poetry and thought - and yet it is precisely here that the argument takes a surprising turn. As an "elegy of ontological loss", Hegel's poem "Eleusis", written in the summer of 1796 and addressed to his poet friend, suggests that the quest for metaphysical meaning through language is doomed to failure: "digging for words", as Hegel writes, is in vain.

Pathos accordingly becomes the dominant mood of Steiner's final chapters: where he had confidently planned to conclude with the encounter between Heidegger and Celan, his tone becomes uncharacteristically tentative, wary both of the political volatility of Heidegger's thought and of the forbidding secrecy of Celan's diction. While Steiner is careful to document the influence of the philosopher's neologisms on the poet's style, his conclusion is marked by a striking withdrawal from the apodictic certainties of the earlier chapters: it is as though he has resolved to avoid what he calls the "megalomania" of the climax to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, ending not with a triumphant bang but an elegiac whimper.

If the book concludes, then, on a note of palpable valediction, it is not - one hopes - to Steiner's oeuvre, but to the tradition of Western philosophy in which poetry and thought are united by a common concern with style, a tradition that Steiner sees as terminally undermined by the acceleration of computer culture. Applying Steiner's stylistic analysis to his own style, one might suggest that it is this desire to defend a dying culture that lends his own style; one might suggest that it is this desire to defend a dying culture that lends his prose its urgency and hierophantic cadences: high art needs its high priests. Clearly one could identify notable omissions in this survey (the Metaphysical poets, for instance); yet it would be churlish to dispute the breadth of Steiner's personal canon. If it is notable that this canon is largely that of Continental philosophy (it is hard to imagine Sartre's professed ambition to be "both Spinoza and Stendhal" being taken seriously by Anglo- American analytic philosophers), George Steiner's profoundly European sensibility has rarely been more evident than in this series of meditations on what Maurice Blanchot calls the "exultant antagonism" between poetry and thought.