74
GEORGE
LEVINE
words, to live with difficulties in understanding and coping with 'con–
temporary culture, and to seek understanding not
in
systematic dis–
cussions of culture, but
in
art itself. The critic's function is to study
literature in the context and as an expression of its culture, to read
it scrupulously in its own terms because those terms are at once its
special quality and the fullest articulation of the experience of a
culture. Thus literature still bears the cultural burden, if not mytho–
logically - as for Frye - then mimetically. Though he sees that funda–
mental questions about the nature of literature are being asked, Brad–
bury's only answer to them is to modify critical approaches to take
in
sociology. The writer is to struggle to provide for his art not only
"form and insight into modern experience," but "meaningful existence."
Sensibly enough, Bradbury leaves the writer to the struggle. Holding to
Arnoldian values, Bradbury yet leaves the critic to examine what the
artist has done with his struggle.
If
Frye works to transcendental Arnoldianism and Bradbury only
to a more gently modified version of it, Steiner seems for a while
determined to destroy it or prove that it has been destroyed. In the
course of their arguments - as would any defenders of essentially liberal
ideology - Frye and Bradbury have to construct histories. Frye's is the
history of conflicting mythologies, Bradbury's of more specific changes
within a more historically confined period. But both see history as es–
sential, survival depending on our awareness of the past either to ex–
plain or protect us from the present; and the critic is responsible for
making the past available. But for Steiner history is apocalypse, and
the past is dead to most of us - we cannot even read "Lycidas." The
present is, in a critically inhuman way, altogether new. The past is a
myth which we use as a crutch. But Steiner's history itself turns out
to
be
a kind of poetic fiction, though not thoroughly unconvincing. It
leaps about among symbolic crises. The Napoleonic Wars mark a trans–
formation in Western sensibility: they "brought on an overwhelming
immanence, a deep emotionally stressed change in the quality of hope,"
a new sense of time and possibility. The political reaction which fol–
lowed, amidst great industrial and urban development, produced a new
kind of feeling, "ennui," and a new yearning, "the nostalgia for disaster"
which climaxed in the Nazi death camps.
The audacity (if not the high seriousness) of this kind of writing
is disguised by the certainty of tone, the breadth of allusion, the per–
sonal command of Steiner's prose, which almost survives its own worst
lapses into pseudoscientific jargon and vast abstractions. It is prose
