Lionel Abel
SO WHO IS TO HAVE THE LAST WORD?
(On Some of the Positions Taken by
George Steiner)
I doubt if there is a single contemporary European writer
who would today want to be considered a "good European ," taking
that term in the affirmative sense which Nietzsche originally gave it.
He used the term to designate - and of course , praise - those Euro–
pean critics and moralists who were able to look beyond national
boundaries and connect what was being achieved in their own with
the great things in other countries. Since what they sought - and
often enough, found - could be described as a "harmony," they were
entitled-if just for seeking it-to be called "good." It is to be noted
that most of those we continue to call "good Europeans" were able to
find something positive in American literature. What I want to sin–
gle out here especially is Nietzsche's own discovery of the force in
Emerson's essays.
If
European writers today become restive when their "Euro–
peanness" is stressed, this does not mean they no longer want to be
thought of as "good." But the term "European ," if used in commen–
dation, may tend to call up the nineteenth century's ethnocentrism,
and with this hardly anyone around now wants to be identified. Who
would want to be thought of as probably reactionary and most cer–
tainly out of date? What is more, the national cultures of Europe ,
once sure of their value, nowadays are stricken with self-doubt. It is
hard to imagine a modern European poet, however proud of the
West, expressing this with anything like the ringing unequivocation
of Tennyson's "Locksley Hall":
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay!
1
All this is by way of bringing into view the European critic and
author George Steiner who, from his post at a university in Geneva,
helps rule over the book section of
The New Yorker
and writes some of
1.
Ezra Pound, a poet of this, the twentieth century, proudly entitled his translations
of poems from the Chinese,
Cathay.
