78
GEORGE LEVINE
consider the sacrifice of the culture he loves and which is his burden
(about which this book is an expression of the guilt he tells us it is
useless and dangerous to feel). Why labor to transmit culture? Because,
as he says, "We are hunters after reality." We must endure the risks
of thought. Poetically, Steiner returns to where he began. It is Western
nature to be what it is, and we must therefore be what we are. We
can only hope that by pursuing new lines of culture, understanding
nonverbal culture like music and mathematics, we can bring ourselves
through and out of our present Hell.
This is at least as unsatisfying as Frye's disengagement, and more
infuriating because it pretends to be dealing directly and originally
with real contemporary problems. Steiner is, however, an aesthetic
moralist (with a touch of fatalism), and he has needed to reconcile
his love of art and high culture with his hatred of the scrubbiness and
nastiness of its social context - a context which is for him as a Jew
particularly obvious in its personal threat. Unfortunately, the tone he
adopts is heavy with the overtones of aesthetic and cultural superiority,
cleverness, hipness. Given the solemnity of his subject it is unfortunate,
as well, that he should be so casually triumphant in his massive gen–
eralizations, even where they assert the need for tentativeness. There is,
I suspect, something less than candor in his ultimate fatalism.
If
the
West cannot stop being the West, a professor cannot stop his professing;
that is his nature too. Steiner has a deeply personal stake in high cul–
ture; yet if he can see with the intensity with which he professes to see,
surely he, and all of us other professors, might stop. Minimally, it
seems, he should be doing something other than temporizing with nec–
essity.
Much of the problem with these reconsiderations of the liberal tra–
dition, of the place of literature in society, of the history of our cul–
ture is that they persist - where they provide serious suggestions at
all- in remaining at very high levels of abstraction, in seeing things
whole (as Arnold might say). They struggle for some ultimate coher–
ence against contemporary fragmentation. None of them can sacrifice
for a moment faith in the importance to society of the humane tradi–
tion of literary culture, and none is willing to accept the diminution
of his own role as spokesman for that tradition. Grandiosities of rhetoric
support a sense of importance even where the direct meaning of the
language expresses awareness of the lapse from the cultural center.
All three writers are correct in seeing no easy solutions to the problems
they pose or elude, but none imagines, in the particularities of his
