PARTISAN REVIEW
75
aspiring to be poetry or something better suited to deal with the ulti–
mate disaster of Nazi Germany - a disaster to which the human imagi–
nation is not equal. This is Steiner's mythology. It cares very little for
the details of historical movements because it is really a record of a
sensibility reading modem experience as if it were literature - though
maybe bad literature. Not being an historian myself, I confess to en–
joying such history, even to finding
in
it some of my own less sophis–
ticated mythology (though I do protest against a later Steinerian his–
tory
which sees the Nazi murder of J ews as the final revenge of the
West for the introduction of the moral rigors of monotheism). The
problem really is tha t Steiner is concerned with problems far too im–
portant to have them dismissed on the grounds of his historical vague–
ness and unspecificity. One may finally be angry that such matters
had
to find expression in this form, to carry the weight of Steiner's
personal vision. But we can allow ourselves that anger only after con–
sidering the form itself, the terms on which Steiner offers his apocalytic
mythology.
In effect, he is only stating a peculiarly sophisticated and occasion–
ally irritating version of a widely shared attitude - a perhaps illiberal
and unhistorical sense that we are living
in
the center of a unique
catastrophe. The crisis of conscience I have been discussing is surely,
in
part, a reflection of the widespread sense that literature and crit–
icism are mere fiddling while the world is burning. Whether these are
really special times or not, they feel special: the old values have been
challenged and found wanting; social structures, political alignments
have been permanently shattered. The profession feels the threat. So
does Steiner. He has never (and perhaps rightly) allowed himself to
get over his knowledge of the experience of Nazi Germany. The apoc–
alypse is there for him, though for a younger generation it has come
elsewhere. In the face of this, he asks: "How is one to address oneself,
without a persistent feeling of fatuity, even of indecency, to the theme
of ultimate inhumanity?" He risks both fatuity and indecency, and for
this
at least he deserves respect. It is something no good Englishman or
academic would do.
As a member of the profession, he has had to ask himself, there–
fore, what relation literature, the humanities, the whole liberal humane
tradition has had to this inhumanity. He decides that "the barbarism
which we have undergone reflects, at numerous and precise points, the
culture which it sprang from and set out to desecrate. Art, intellectual
pursuits, the development of the natural sciences, many branches of
scholarship flourished in close spatial, temporal proximity to massacre
