Note on Steiner

For some reason today I picked up a tattered copy of George Steiner's Death of Tragedy. It opens with 'We are entering on large, difficult ground'. This opening illustrates what I would call the gestural component of writing. I.e., Statements, as well as their ostensible meaning, are significant for the gestures they perform, gestures of disavowal, repudiation, self-dramatization etc. Let us take Steiner's line as an example. Of course, it has a literal meaning and can be interpreted as a bare statement of what is the case. But there is also the gestural component: it is, firstly, a gesture of 'humbling', the narrator is dramatized as a wrestler with the imponderable. It is a gesture of invitation: some modern day Virgil is offering to guide us through a hellish terrain. There is an implicit challenge: 'are you with me?' 'can you stay the course?'. This is not a book for passengers. It is a gesture of warning and a demand for readerly commitment and solidarity. There will be no easy answers, no short cuts. But of course, reader, we neither expect nor want any. We are courageous as well as suitably meek, and can look at things unflinchingly. Thus, over and above any prepositional content, the statement invites, warns, and positions both the writer and reader.

One of the tasks of the literary critic is to isolate and describe the gestures that are charactersitic of a writer's work. Having identified the gesture, the second task is to interpret it, not simply psychologically, but historically - weighted with historical freight.

The other point (all this spilling out of that one Steiner sentence!) is that, of course, as a reader we are frequently responding to, answering the gestures of the writing as much as its bare content. We respond to Steiner's prose because of how it interpellates us, positions us, because we like the image of ourselves involved in answering the call of his characteristic gestures. The prose, through its gestures, produces, in its reader the weak simulacra of a form of subjectivity which that reader finds appealling. I certainly think this is part of Steiner's appeal - I speak as one greatly drawn by his prose as an adolescent, being beckoned, so it seemed into a that terrain which he alludes with minatory solemnity at the beginning of the Death of Tragedy.