Persuasions We Have Known: George Steiner’s Grammars of Creation

Yale University Press calls Grammars of Creation George Steiner’s “most radical” book
to date. In at least two senses of the word, it is not the least bit “radical.” It would be more
accurate to say that this new book is the most topical of the fourteen books Steiner has written
since 1959, when his first, Tolstoy or Dostoevski, was published. In Language and Silence, in
1965, Steiner said provocative and consequential things about thinkers then only beginning to be
known in the United States (Walter Benjamin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall McLuhan); about
controversial subjects (pornography; the Germans, the German language, and the Holocaust);
and about unpromising subjects (the study of literature). Now, it seems, he is at pains to skirmish
with atheists, deconstructionists, positivists, post-modernists, Americans, democrats, and
popularizers. Now, it seems, Steiner is convinced that we must engage in serious theological
questioning of art, music, philosophy, and literature—or lose “the life-transforming strengths of
persuasion we have known.”
The main question Steiner addresses in Grammars of Creation occurred to him in 1983,
while writing the “Introduction” to himself for George Steiner: A Reader. “Can we get much
further in our poetics of understanding, in our common pursuit of the identification,
interpretation and transmission of that which is indispensable in literature and the arts without an
acknowledged transcendence?” Grammars of Creation begins and ends with this answered
question; but in 2001, the term is no longer “an acknowledged transcendence”: it is now “the
God-hypothesis.” The bland, abstract ecumenicism in these two phrases clouds every page of
Steiner’s new book. Is it “radical” to ask a largely secular, agnostic, and atheist readership to use
the “God-hypothesis” on literature and the arts, on poetics? Kierkegaard and Pascal must be
turning in their graves.
To his credit, Steiner admits that the questions he is asking in Grammars of Creation may
not be worth taking seriously; they may “merely invite vacuous high gossip.” This is not a new
worry for Steiner. In 1983, he confessed to feeling haunted by thoughts that his work might be
“divorced from the crisis of the humane.” Now, in a massive failure of perspective, in a severe
attack of category confusion, Steiner gets to the pedantic heart of his matter: “What I want to
consider briefly is something of the impact of this darkened condition on grammar.” By
“grammar,” Steiner means neither more nor less than “language.” But in this book—as was not
the case in After Babel, dense as the lexicon in that study is—whatever Steiner can make
academic, by shunning popular usage, he does, as in the egregious plural of the title, and in this
meretricious gloss: “‘holocaust’ is a noble, technical Greek designation for religious sacrifice,
not a name proper for controlled insanity and the ‘wind out blackness.’”
Clearly, Yale University Press will not be subsidizing other books from the sales of
Grammars of Creation. Few undergraduates could read it; few graduate students will get past
page 50; common readers may not make it past page 20. The first 80 pages will be hard going for
anyone. That said, Grammars of Creation has three strengths: it is un-American; it has no single
argument; it is unfashionable. And its weaknesses inhere in its strengths.

Polyglot, staunchly European, and unashamedly elitist, George Steiner is perhaps the
most thoroughgoing man of letters of his generation. Born in Paris in 1929, he emigrated with his
family in 1940 to the United States, where he seems to have learned first-hand, at the University
of Chicago and then at Harvard, that “populist democracies are not necessarily inclined to
excellence.” One of the charms of his new book is its relentless anti-Americanism, its aristocratic
and unpopular mood. The chorus of “egalitarianism, populism, [and] the utopias of fraternity”
cannot sing the “jubilations against despair.” Steiner registers the basso profundo of a “darker,
more selective view of man.” The last thing he wants to be taken for is a pragmatist, an
“interested” or “useful” party. This book will therefore seem belated and reactionary to the US
professoriate; the laity, unless steeped like Steiner in German and French literature, will be
stumped by it. Steiner knows this; he is unapologetic. “The icon of our age,” he announces, “is
the preservation of a grove dear to Goethe within a concentration camp.” It sometimes seems as
if “modernity” chiefly preoccupies Steiner because Kafka wrote Metamorphosis, “the key-fable
of modernity,” and because it “renders plausible Camus’ famous saying: ‘The only serious
philosophical question is that of suicide.’” The aesthete and the moralist could not wish for
blacker touchstones.
Grammars of Creation “originated,” as the title page has it, in the Gifford Lectures for
1990. In the eleven years since he delivered the lectures, Steiner has managed to take almost all
of the spokenness out of them. The book has neither the tone of a lecture nor of a conversation.
One need only pick up another book that “originated” in the Gifford lectures to make the
comparison. William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) may keep too many
ligatures from the lecture hall, but it is legible and audible—and persuasive—in a way that
Steiner’s is not. The first serial from Grammars of Creation, printed in Harper’s, struck me as
abstract, obscure, unhelpful, pedantic, obnoxious. My reading of the book has only deepened that
impression.
What has happened to George Steiner? While he has never been as surprising and helpful
a writer as Guy Davenport, whose reading and range of reference are equally prodigious, or
Isaiah Berlin, or Hannah Arendt, or even Arthur Koestler (his Act of Creation is a useful essay
on many of the same topics Steiner takes up), Steiner has, until now, been true to his saying, in
1983, “that we write about books or about music or about art because ‘some primary instinct of
communion’ would have us share with and communicate to others an overwhelming
enrichment.” Now, Steiner seems willfully idiotic—or, to use the other Greek word he himself
prefers, “autistic.” On the evidence of Grammars of Creation, the “overwhelming enrichment”
that Steiner wishes to express is a burden, even a retard. His “instinct of communion,” fixed on a
strain of his own devising between “the grammars of creation” and the “grammars of nihilism,”
has become static.
On the other hand, perhaps nothing has happened to George Steiner. He is still chanting
the credo he has held for 40 years: that divine Creation must “underwrite” human creations. He
is still re-writing Deism and aestheticism—post-Dada, post-Heidegger, post-Shoah. Against
Laplace, the 18th-century mathematician who said he had no need of the hypothesis of God,
Steiner insists throughout that we need it—not because we are Christians, or Jews, or Muslims,
but because “Dante’s creativity is self-enclosed in Christian doctrine”; because “the ‘other’ in
whose presence the writer and composer works is, time and again, a more or less imagined God”;
because “in the begetting by writers and artists of fictive creatures . . . aesthetic theory and
practice have found a close analogue to the divine creation of organic forms”; because “without
the arts, the human psyche would stand naked in the face of personal extinction”; because we can
survive death only by “authentic religious beliefs” or by way of “the aesthetic”; because
“authorship . . . has served as the principle analogue for creation itself . . . of the coming into
being of being.” And in faith as in art, there are no certainties, such as those known by scientists,
engineers, and mathematicians. Theological and aesthetic credos both “are inherently fallible
assertions from the unplumbed depths of the spirit. They are jubilations against despair, neither
refutable nor irrefutable.”
Steiner seems really to have suffered from the fact that assertions in his chosen discourse
cannot be proven. He has never ducked the issue or pretended otherwise. “My argument,
throughout,” he says at the outset, “is vulnerable and open to what Kierkegaard called ‘the
wounds of negativity.’” In a 1960 essay on “Georg Lukacs and his Devil’s Pact,” included in
Language and Silence, Steiner wrote: “By its very nature, criticism is personal. It is susceptible
neither of demonstration nor of coherent proof.” From Gautier to Wilde to T.S. Eliot, the
erection into laws of one’s personal impressions has been the rule of criticism. Steiner abides by
the rule. In this sense, Grammars of Creation, holding hard to the idiom of critical argument,
may be his most personal book. Though he offers no “personal recollection,” such as he did in
the “Epilogue” to The Death of Tragedy (1961)—many years before that genre became a
hallmark of new historicist and queer criticism—Steiner is coming as close he can, given his
manners and station, to baring his soul before scientists who will find him “ludicrous” and
intellectuals who will find him “obsolete.”
The book is written in a fast, terse style. Its rush of short, magisterial claims in the
indicative mood suggest that Steiner is in a hurry to have the last word, as if this book might be
his last word. The pace and mood make his asides—that he’s working in “wholly conjectural
domains”—gratuitous. His determination to move forward bears the stamp of a mind made up—
which, in the main, his is. Grammars of Creation is a summa of Steiner’s previous books,
recapitulating their themes, arguments, touchstones, and texts. (“‘Theme and variation’ is not
only a musical device, but the linguistically ordained dynamic of literature in toto,” he legislates)
Here, he seems to have aimed for a lapidary effect. With a few exceptions, though—“We now
remember the futures that were,” for example, or “Re-reading is a minor key of
everlastingness”—his aphoristic phrasing is more hectoring than memorable. Concise
(“Vermeer, Chardin paint silence”) and elliptical (e.g., on the distinction between “a thought
authentically new and a thought whose terms of reference are only materially-historically new”)
on every page, Steiner often indulges, for the sake of a synonym or a summary of a school of
thought, in a preening inclusiveness. The following passage illustrates the effect:

This equality resolves, sublates, the primordial conflict between spirit and matter,
between reality and the conceptual or imaginary appropriations and negations of such
reality, between the absence of existential reality from all linguistic and symbolic
designations and the real presence which must nevertheless ‘inhabit’ the sign (Hölderlin’s
formulation rigorously prefigures the semantics of negation and erasure in theories of
deconstruction).

If it took him years to remove what he calls, in another context, “the encumbrances of material
contingency” from his lectures, Steiner’s prose suffers from that effort. The variousness and
leisure of his syntax in After Babel is gone; the passion and focus of his argument in Language
and Silence and The Death of Tragedy are gone.
Missing here, too, is the Steiner of arresting openings and surprising conclusions. “We
cannot be certain that there is, either in language or in the forms of art, a law of the conservation
of energy” (“Tragedy and Myth,” The Death of Tragedy, 1961). “There are three intellectual
pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major
feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess” (“A Death of Kings,”
Extraterritorial, 1968). “Damn the man” (“The Cleric of Treason,” 1980).
 “The Cleric of Treason,” Steiner’s demolition of the art connoisseur, critic, and double-
agent Anthony Blunt, has stayed with me for twenty years. It is dramatic, thorough, suggestive,
irreproachable. The brilliant opening, in which Steiner introduces his subject as “the twenty-
nine-year old art critic of the London Spectator,” captures Blunt’s historical, social, and
academic milieu. It delivers a consummate critique of Blunt’s literary style, a thorough
description of what his work as a cataloguer was like, and a chronicle of his rising stature as a
scholar—all in ten pages. And then this: “I do not know just when Blunt was recruited into
Soviet espionage.” Re-reading the essay, I realize that much of its force comes from Steiner’s
identification with Blunt: “I, too, have taken the vows of the cleric.” Like Blunt, Steiner is “the
utmost scholar”:

He is, when in the grip of his pursuit, monomaniacally disinterested in the possible
usefulness of his findings, in the good fortune or honor that they may bring him, in
whether or not any but one or two other men or women on earth care for, can even begin
to understand or evaluate, what he is after. This disinterestedness is the dignity of his
mania. . . . To the utmost scholar, sleep is a puzzle of wasted time, and flesh a piece of
torn luggage that the spirit must drag after it.

Though unable to find out exactly when Blunt was recruited, Steiner knew exactly how Blunt
came to possess his formidable credentials, and how such credentials are valued and exchanged
in Cambridge, Oxford, and London. Into this intimacy of understanding, Steiner weaves
untimely meditations on homosexuality, humanism, and intellectual violence (“odium
philologicum”).
The damnation of Blunt with which the essay ends could not be more credible or
dramatic. Few essays convey a deeper sense of the vocation of scholarship and the tensions it
breeds. For Steiner as for Blunt, “the pulse of most vivid presence beats from out of the past.”
That pulse, one of the central themes of Steiner’s career, does not beat vividly in this new book.
Like one of Poe’s obsessives, Steiner seems be boarding up or bricking in his own auctoritas, his
own “wager on everlastingness.” The “new” material in Grammars of Creation, while it will add
to Steiner’s reputation as a polymath, distends the book, which includes both an impressive
survey of current mathematical ideas and a meditation (yet another) on the future of books, the
World Wide Web, and the obsolete vocabularies in which Grammars itself is written. Steiner
seems to have spent two or three years working through primary and secondary texts on
mathematical process (Paul Erdos, Alan Touring, John von Neumann), cyberspace, the Internet,
information theory and technology, and virtual reality. His gleanings on the relations between
“pure mathematics” and “absolute poetry” reduce to the unsurprising finding that “the arts are
more indispensable to men and women than even the best of science and technology.” If the
equation and the axiom have the truth, Steiner says, “it is a lesser truth.”
The best part of the book is the last thirty pages, where Steiner finally makes good on his
promise, some fifty pages earlier, to consider “the intentionality of literature in reference to the
topos of survival, of ‘immortality.’” Here, Steiner all but “rules” (a verb he frequently uses to
characterize the predicates of his authors) that human creations must be answerable to one divine
Creation. It is a serious ruling, made in behalf of those “masters of form” who have “borne
witness to their wager on lastingness, to the contract they hope to have signed with tomorrow.”
The seriousness is underscored by Steiner’s stipulations: every difference, every qualification,
every “lapidary pride” a poet takes in a line, is “seminal,” “decisive,” “strenuous,” “essential,”
“drastic,” “stark,” “grave.” Why? Because Steiner hears all around him “literary avowals and
exhibitionist indiscretions” that threaten to drown out the echoes of Plato, Shakespeare, and
Dante (the most discussed “masters of form” in Grammars). Because “today, I venture, even the
most charismatic of philosophers, even the most self-dramatizing of writers, painters or
composers, find embarrassing, if not downright ludicrous, the claims to perdurance which have
been the rallying cry since Pindar, Horace, and Ovid.” Silence and privacy are devalued; an
“ancien régime of aloneness and reserve” has collapsed; “populist democracy” dwells in an
“echo-chamber of interminable gossip.” Steiner wants no part of it; he prefers Bacon’s “lumen
siccum.” This book is Steiner’s “dry light,” and he picks his fastidious way among the ruins by
its glow, as “grammars of nihilism flicker” on the horizon.
In his forty years of reading, re-reading, writing, and teaching, Steiner’s obsession with
“creation” has carried with it the feeling that he is being “compelled to question.” Looking back
in 1983 on his first book, Tolstoy or Dostoevski, Steiner writes that “the sheer impact” of Anna
Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, “their mastering seizure of our thoughts, feelings and,
indeed, conduct, compels the question of creation (poesis).” Most readers would not go so far.
Most readers would wonder why Steiner phrases his response in this way, lodging his
impressions in the third person (“What does he mean by ‘the question of creation’?”). After all,
Steiner is feeling what any reader who gets so engrossed in a novel, so fascinated by a character,
so eager to know what happens next, that he or she can’t put the book down, feels. Why is
creation a question? What, or who, “compels” it? But critics differ from readers in feeling
compelled to ask why they have been seized by a book, and how a book makes its mark.
In Grammars of Creation, Steiner speculates that we are compelled by works of literature
because their creation partakes of Creation, “the story out of Genesis,” a story of “a coming into
being which we do not understand.” When Robert Frost was asked where a poem comes from,
his answer was “animus.” Steiner’s is similar: works of literature, art, and philosophy come
from, and provide, “a confidentiality of being, where the etymology of ‘confidential’ encloses a
triplicity: there is trust (‘confiding’), there is hope (‘confidence’), and there is faith (fide). Words
do remind us unnervingly of our losses.”
In that last sentence, the elegiac mood of Steiner’s new book is captured. But Steiner
could not leave it at that. He seems to think that such losses can be restored by retrieving the
discarded “assumptions of faith and of a transcendental metaphysics.” He tries very hard, in the
last few pages, to be a prophet of things to come, as, in the first pages, he tried to be an elegist of
things past (the effects of which, he assures us, we have yet to realize). Instead, he is merely
pompous: “I put forward the intuition, provisional and qualified, that the ‘language-animal’ we
have been since ancient Greece so designated us, is undergoing mutation.” Therefore, he
continues, without provision or qualification, “what we have known of both ‘creation’ and
‘invention’ will have to be re-thought.” That this re-thinking is done every day by people
everywhere is a thought too mundane for Steiner. He hears the echo of Blake’s “Mock on,
Voltaire, Mock on, Rousseau,” and he writes: “The God-hypothesis will not be mocked without
cost.” Steiner has forgotten one of Bacon’s best apothegms: “Hope makes a good breakfast, but
an ill supper.”
As an apologia pro vita sua, published in Steiner’s seventy-second year, Grammars of
Creation is weirdly heroic. As a “literary avowal” and an “exhibitionist indiscretion,” it is
laughable.