Grammars of Creation. By George Steiner. Faber & Faber. 288pp, £16.99 in UK
For more than four decades, George Steiner, critic, teacher, fiction writer, and Extraordinary Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, has been a thorn in the side of English intellectual life. This statement is, as Steiner himself might say, problematic on a number of levels.
For a start, does England have an intellectual life, as Steiner would define it? One of the dubious strengths, and one of the certain weaknesses, of English society is its profound scepticism of, not to say animosity towards, anyone who would insist on the primacy of thought over action, which is a very rough way of defining an intellectual.
This scepticism, this animosity, is not confined to the so-called Man in the Street, but is to be encountered at the loftiest levels of the social, political and cultural Establishments. Even the great universities are not immune, as Steiner discovered when, in the 1960s, Cambridge itself turned on him a distinctly cold shoulder; an Extraordinary Fellow is extraordinary mainly in the sense of being outside the magic circle of power.
Steiner has always been pugnacious in the struggle against complacencies of thought. His pugnaciousness has often been taken for arrogance, and sometimes justly so. He does not gladly suffer fools, nor, indeed, many a so-called wise man. The outspokenness to which he is prone has not endeared him to many of those who might be expected to champion him.
In a notorious dispute in the 1970s in the pages of Iain Hamilton's New Review, now defunct, Steiner was placed by an editorial article among the "roly-poly critics" of whom England had no need, which shows the level of the debate at which the controversy was conducted. Having dispatched a withering letter to the editor of the Review, Steiner took himself off to Switzerland, where his brand of polyglot comparative criticism was more acceptable among the snowy peaks of academe.
For him, Steiner has declared, one of life's most intense pleasures is to find himself in a room with a handful of willing students and a great and difficult text to unravel. He must be a wonderful teacher, as anyone who has attended one of his mesmeric public lectures will attest. His teaching reaches far beyond the tutorial room. It has been said before, but bears repeating, that for many of us growing up in the 1950s and 1960s he was a key figure. This was true especially in Ireland, as we sought for ways to break free from the parochialism and pervasive pastoralism of Irish art and letters. In books such as Lan- guage and Silence, Steiner opened a window for us into the house of European culture.
He is an unapologetic champion of the highest of high art. Not for nothing is one of his books entitled On Difficulty. He invokes like talismans the names of the great; there is not a page of his criticism that is not littered with illustrious corpses. At times, it must be said, his method of free-ranging reference leads him into the danger not only of prolixity but also of bathos, as when, for instance, in Grammars of Creation, he makes an analogy between surrealist and modernist experiments in narrative and those in particle physics. Despite occasional lapses, however, his work is never less than exciting. He is, as Gadamer said of Nietzsche, an "ecstatic witness".
Steiner will have no truck with present-day fatuous pieties promoted by the artfor-all brigade - it cannot be said too often: art for all is really art for none - and would firmly dismiss the pseudo-liberal notion that "we are all artists" and that all manifestations of "creativity" are of equal value. He can speak plainly when plain speaking is required, as when he declares that "a readiness to make discriminations, to experience and to state that A is superior to B, is essential. It makes possible a vital economy and, as it were, hygiene of attention and response". He sees with admirable clarity that the cultural levellers of our day, those who consider "discrimination" a pejorative term, and complain of the "elitism" of art - when was the last time you heard an athlete being branded elitist for a superb performance at the Olympic Games? - are not the champions of the common man they present themselves as being, but are merely boiling with what Nietzsche, employing the French for added contempt, identified as the ressentiment of limited minds against the demonstration of human excellence that is the true work of art.
Grammars of Creation, which originated in the Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow in 1990, ranges wide and deals with a number of large issues, but returns again and again to the fine distinction to be made between creation and invention, a distinction that is vital not only in art but, indeed, also in life in general, especially at a time when we seem on the brink of being able ourselves to "make" life in the laboratory. What does it mean when the artist claims to have created something? In literature, for instance, can creation be said to take place in a medium - language - the terms of which have been abraded by millennia of usage? How does the artist "make it new", in Ezra Pound's injunction, when, as we sensibly know, there is nothing new under the sun? Can a recombination of ancient elements result in a wholly original work? Is the artist a creator, or merely a type of bricoleur?
Pondering the central question posed by Leibnitz - why is there something rather than nothing? - Steiner arrives at a "preliminary definition" of creation:
The creative act and that which it engenders is characterized by two primary attributes. It is an enactment of freedom. It is integrally at liberty. Its existence comports implicitly and explicitly the alternative of non-existence. It could not have been.
The "always attendant possibility of the uncreated (the `unborn')" is manifest in the fact that "even the most accomplished of aesthetic realizations" necessarily contains imperfections. Paradoxical as it might appear, it is the presence of the fine grit of error in the work of art that makes its success possible. And not only in the work of art: physicists have conjectured that the universe itself had its initio in some form of asymmetrical tension in space. The stuff of life must have impurities. "Perfection," Steiner observes, "even if it could be achieved, carries death."
The poets, painters and mathematicians whose guidance Steiner elicits in his attempt to conjugate the verb "to create" include, among many others, Dante and Paul Celan, Giorgione and Cezanne, Kepler and Poincare - a heterodox gathering. He also calls on the philosophers for assistance. Both Plato and Heidegger recognised the ambiguity in the term techne, which the Greeks applied to the making of art but which is also the root of "technology", that key word of the modern age. In the end, Steiner insists on the authenticity of the metaphysical, of the "real presence" - that beautiful formulation which he employed as the title for another of his books - for, as he puts it, "The God-hypothesis will not be mocked without cost."
Steiner has always been an exciting and provocative writer, but he is also a master of English prose. Meditating here on the "unstated ambience of extended tonality" in music, the way in which notes and instruments vibrate against each other, he remarks how "Seas, heard only liminally or subliminally, sound in even the smallest of musical `shells'." Observing that art has "ways of making ostensible the undeclared", he writes, beautifully, that "Vermeer, Chardin paint silence. Their silences tide through the lit or shadowed air as does the translucent wash in Chinese paintings, themselves virtuoso presentments of silence." In passages such as these, criticism spills over into the heady realm of art.
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times