Criticism and love of literature

Many years ago, I attended a night-time lecture at Cambridge given by George Steiner. It was on the problematics of literary creativity and cross-writing with particular reference to works of Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov (who both write in two languages with equal distinction). Some of the ideas Steiner articulated that night were later incorporated into an essay included in his book "Extra-territorial."

This lecture was one of the most memorable I had attended. Steiner was in total command of his topic and he cast a magical spell over his audience by the sheer breadth of his erudition, plural learning and the compelling power of his unparalleled linguistic exuberance. More recently, I was watching a long interview that he had given on the YouTube, and the memories of my first encounter with him came streaming back.

George Steiner is one of the most formidable cultural critics in the world today. At eighty, he still pursues his interests in language, classical texts, modern literature, religion, with an undimmed passionate intensity that is truly remarkable.

He is a major critical presence in the way Edmund Wilson was, and many regard him as the obvious successor to Wilson. I myself feel that there is a stronger intellectual edge to Steiner's writings than in Edmund Wilson's.

George Steiner's latest book, "George Steiner at the New Yorker" has just been released. During the period between 1967 and 1997, Steiner wrote more than one hundred and thirty stimulating pieces for the magazine the New Yorker. Twenty-eight of these essays have been collected in this book, not fifty three as the blurb says. These bear the signature traits of Steiner" intellectual audacity, verbal brilliance, the incredibly wide circle of reference and citation, and the steadfast attempt to avoid provincialisms in the affairs of the mind.

George Steiner is a literary critic, cultural commentator, public intellectual, educator, novelist who has attracted vast numbers of admirers. His books such as the "Death of Tragedy", "After Babel", "Language and Silence," "In Bluebeard's Castle, "Extra-territorial", "Real Presences, which have been translated into many languages, continue to inform, educate and challenge us in productive ways. In many of his books, it seems to me, that Steiner is unafraid to ask the larger and more complex questions, knowing full well the risks such an endeavour carries. As he himself remarked, "to ask lager questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding to fragments of reciprocal irony or isolation."

His book Language and Silence, which has had an enormous impact, deals with the problematic of language; it is a willed meditation on multifarious aspects of language - language and the future trajectories of literature, language and politics, language and cultural decay and mass media, language and other codes of meaning such as translation, music and mathematics. Interestingly, he also discusses the aching interplay between language and silence. On "Difficulty and Other Essays explores", in eight interconnected essays, unmapped spaces of literature, language, verbal communication, psychology and so on. In "Real Presences", which is among other things, a critique of Derridean deconstruction, Steiner makes a powerful case for the view that transcendental and religious reality ground all serious works of literature- a perspective that finds a ready resonance in the work of some of the leading Sinhala writers.

I have read all the published books of Steiner, sometimes more than once, with additive profit. In 'Bluebeard's Castle", which is also a memoration of T.S. Eliot's work Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, is an insightful work that takes a second look at contemporary western culture, and arrives at the assessment that classical humanism, as we knew it, may be at the end, but we can rest assured, according to him, that the intellectual vitality associated with the wellsprings of European thought will continue to fecundate the world of arts and letters.

George Steiner has stirred the interests of some of our finest writers. Martin Wickremasinghe has invoked him many times in his analyses of fiction while Gunadasa Amarasekera critiqued him in his book Nosevana Kapapatha. Sarchchandra recommended to me Steiner's book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky when I was a student at Peradeniya. I myself, in my Sinhala essays, have cited him and interrogated him, when dealing with problems of translation and comparative literature.

There are many reasons why we as practitioners of Sinhala literature could draw valuable lessons from the prescient critical writings of Steiner that give contexts of literary understanding a new precision. In the interests of space, let me cite three. First, his literary criticism grows out of a deep love of literature. The opening line of his book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky is, "Literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love." This is indeed a proposition well worth remembering. At a juncture when high theory has usurped the place of creative texts, and when they have become mere excuses for the display of fine-spun theories of literary scholars, it becomes more and more important that we give pride of place to texts. Even such a powerful deconstructive critic as Gayatri Spivak has said that we deconstruct best what we love most.

Second, George Steiner is able locate his critical delineations in a wider discursive context. He has such a well-stocked mind that he can make amazing connections between disparate fields of study and approaches with convincing ease. Literature, in his hands, becomes a supreme human engagement presenting the leading edge of intellectual discourse. Steiner is a marvellous writer because, through his writing, he pays splendid homage to the power of words. We as readers find reading his texts a transformative experience because he can summon up ideas and pathways from such a broad range of disciplines and contexts; in his texts, ideas leap out of the page with mounting intensity.

Third, Steiner focuses on a topic that some of us, including Gunadasa Amarasekera, have been fore grounding for sometime, namely, the importance of paying attention to the phonological peculiarities of a language when discussing poetry. Steiner raises the pertinent question "What are the relations between metrical systems, between the elements of stress, recurrence, rhyme in a given prosody and the structure of the language as a whole?"

These are issues that are of utmost importance for us in Sri Lanka. The fact that literary criticism emerges from deep-laid love of literature needs constant reiteration. Similarly, we need to regard criticism as an intellectual activity of the highest import. It is because of the absence of these desiderata, that Sinhala literary criticism, for the most part, has degenerated into petty mud-slinging.

George Steiner, to be sure, has his share of critics and adversaries. Some say that he has a tendency to spread himself too thin by venturing into areas that he is not licensed to assess. Others say that he is often ostentatiously ponderous; there are still others who complain that Steiner displays a judgmental certitude and a predilection for soaring rhetoric that are not supported by his analyses.

He has also been accused of being an elitist focusing on the works of Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky etc.; this, in point of fact, is not true. Some of the critical arrows dispatched in his direction have fallen far short of the mark. However that may be, even his staunchest opponent will concede that he is an inescapably formidable presence in the modern world of letters.