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that a Trotskyis t regime "might well have been no less authoritarian
and, at need, no less ruthless" than the Stalinist horror is the kind of
cant one expects from the Hoover Institute, not [rom an intellectual
who knows anything about the history of the Russian Revolution or the
history of Trotsky's thinking. Finally, the overpraise of Durrell as an
important man of letters ( the main hope for the "renascence of the
word") - despite Steiner's later attempt to mitigate this view - is a
good indication of his gullibility as a critic of contemporary fiction.
The informative essays on Marxist literary critics are not without
their problems. He correctly distinguishes between the aridity of the
Leninist-Zhdanovite orthodox school and the more fruitful production of
the "para-Marxist" critics, who look back to Engels for their legacy.
But his groupings here are surprisingly indiscriminate. Certainly, in this
latter group, the early Edmund Wilson is a far cry from Lucien Gold–
mann, and, in the first group, Arnold Kettle's work is surely not to be
cOllsiciered on the same level with that of Fast or Aragon. To be sure,
Steiner's dichotomy is oversimple, or, to put it differently. his concep tion
of para-Marxis ts is narrow and misleading. H e doesn't seem to be sensi–
tive to a whole group of li terary critics who, while not often referring
overtly to Marxian doctrine, nevertheless certainly proceed with under–
I>ing historical assumptions regarding the connections between literature
and society which are drawn from Marxian ideology. I refer to writers
who have appeared in PRover the past years (early Trilling, Phillips,
R ahv, Erich Auerbach, Howe ) . Steiner remarks upon the particular dif–
ficulty that Dostoevsky has presented for Marxist critics, ye t if we read,
say, Rahv's essays on Dostoevsky, we are surely watching the kind of
flexible and rewarding literary analysis that comes from a tacit but un–
mistakable familiarity with Marxian categories. It is curious that Steiner
should spend so much time educating provincial Anglo-Ame rirans on the
possibilities of Marxist criticism, and that his own essays on specific
writers, except for passing remarks, are so fundamentally devoid of these
fruitful possibilities. Despite surface connections
Language and Silence
is
a book of unrelated, contradictory tendencies.
For ultimately it is only with some vision, some commitment that
transcends purely literary criteria, that the criticism can have real scope
and relevance. Ironically, Steiner seems curiously oblivious to the true
needs, so to speak, of his criticism.
Language and Silence
is scarred by
political and historical memories - Hitler, the Nazi catastrophe, the
charnel houses of Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka. Again and again we hear
about the injury done to language by political bestiality, about the debil–
itating eifects of Fascism upon the German language of the thirties. An
