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aimed accurately. These large concerns center upon the ominous fate of
literature, and especially language in modern society, shrouded as it is
by the catastrophe of twentieth century history. One aspect of the prob–
lem is stated this way:
If
the relationship of literary studies and literary awareness to the
ensemble of knowledge and expressive means in our society has
radically altered, so surely has the confident link between literature
and civilized values. This, I think, is the key point. The simple yet
appalling fact is that we have very little solid evidence that literary
studies do very much to enrich or stabilize moral perception, that
they
humanize.
We have little proof that a tradition of literature
studies in fact makes a man more humane.
But although Steiner is at pains to repeat that he is interested in examin–
ing the injurious effects of political inhumanity upon language, the book
is more properly viewed as the effects of that inhumanity upon a modem
literary sensibility, especially one with a central European background.
For whatever material Steiner attends to - book, poem, novels, nonfic–
tion, education, science - what lurks perennially in his mind is the
holocaust of Nazism, the application of scientific technology for purposes
of collective murder. Haunted by this nightmare, Steiner presents to us
most memorably the portrait of the critic maimed, the critic whose dis–
covery is less a blessing than curse, which presses relentlessly upon the
consciousness and seems often to paralyze the act of criticism itself. Thus
the paradox of Steiner the critic persistently breaking in upon his own
criticism, with soliloquies that question the reason - and even the moral
right - of the task before him.
As critic Steiner is provocative and wide-ranging, and he performs
useful tasks. We live in a culture that is characterized by quantity and
excess, by that which is
kitsch
and that which parades as avant-garde,
and any criticism that is antibiotic is necessary and welcome. Steiner's
remarks throughout on the overall irrelevance of academic literary criti–
cism, on the devaluation of the word and the ascendance of the image
or picture, on the general debasement of the idea of culture in America,
are a sober corrective to those paeans of praise sung by the many eager
celebrators of our culture. "To Civilize Our Gentlemen," though dis–
persed and abortive, is a literate attack on the stifling narrowness of
assumptions that all too frequently govern departments of English litera–
ture in Britain and America (although, it might be added, the unseen
enemy is the idea of mass education). In "Marxism and Literature,"
a group of seven essays that focus mainly on the achievement of Georg
Lukacs, Steiner rescues from oblivion, for many Anglo-American scholars,
