624
A LAN LELCHUK
THE SOUND OF SILENCE
LAUGUAGE AND SILENCE.
By
Georg e Steiner. Athen eum. $8.00.
George Steiner's
Language and Silence
is a collection of essays
and reviews culled from work written over the past nine years. The
fashion, it seems, is for critics to present, like painters and writers, one–
man shows of their work. Since our age is dominated by the magazine
and the paperback, both of which encourage composing for the moment
or the occasion, such exhibitions are inevitable, for what man could resist
the opportunity to collect his own footprints from a vanished terrain?
H appily, in some cases, such collections, when they emerge in book form,
disprove the myth that literary journalism cannot be serious and re–
warding. On the other hand the writer runs the risk - if he is neither
an Edmund Wilson nor a V. S. Pritchett, or if he is not prudent enough
to realize the special burdens of a book, and revise and rethink accord–
ingly - of displaying a certain glib shrewdness in place of considered
judgment. Partly because Steiner is not an especially accomplished essay–
ist, and partly because the burdens of a book have not been generally
accepted, Steiner rises only at times above the former category, and only
rarely manages the latter.
These thirty-one essays, which range from K afka to McLuhan, from
Shakespeare to Schoenberg, from Marxism to pornography, are of a
much more autobiographical and personal nature than, say, Steiner's
study on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. In their abiding concern with the
fate of Humanity and the Humanities, these essays quite clearly set out
the author's own personal history. Thus to an unusual extent we are
invited to judge the man as separate from the critic. Indeed, the book
is at its best when the voice is purely autobiographical, as in the essay,
"A Kind of Survivor."
Language and Silence
also contains the author's
premises for his general approach to literature, as well as many samples
of specific analyses of works. (It is unfortunate in this respect that
Steiner the critic is so often a professor in his writings, that the strain
of didacticism runs so deeply throughout the work.)
Let it be said immediately that Steiner's main concerns are im–
portant ones, and that many of his marginal comments or attacks are
