Steiner - On Difficulty : And Other Essays

On Difficulty

and Other Essays

George Steiner

For

Donald and Lois MacKinnon

Preface

Administrative and bureaucratic practice has disseminated the terms working papers or, notably in American idiom, position papers. These terms could be useful in defining a certain stage and style of intellectual argument. A working or a position paper puts forward a point of view, an analysis, a proposal, in a form which may be comprehensive and assertive. It seeks to clarify the state of the art at some crucial point of difficulty or at a juncture from which alternative directions can be mapped. But its comprehension and assertiveness are explicitly provisional. They aim at an interim status. They solicit correction, modification, and that collaborative disagreement on which the hopes of rational discourse depend. A working paper, a position paper, is one which intends to elicit from those to whom it is addressed a deepening rejoinder and continuation.

The essays in this collection are composed entirely in this vein. Within the general field of the understanding of language, of the more recent philosophic and linguistic ways of approaching the meaning of meaning, they try to set out certain frontier topics. The word frontier has two relevant senses. The topics discussed are at the forward edge of current thought and scholarship. They are not yet clearly or fully understood. And what needs to be done is to formulate questions about them in as sharp and fruitful a way as possible. Thus, there are papers in this book on the relations between erotic sensibility and linguistic conventions as they are reflected or obscured in literature, and on the virtually unexplored subject of the history and formal structure of inward speech, of the language-stream we direct towards ourselves. Frontier also aims to suggest that these essays locate their analyses and examples at those points where different disciplines and areas of study meet. The essay on difficulty deals with considerations which are simultaneously philosophical and literary. The initial comment on the current status of texts touches on political and sociological motifs. In several of these papers, there are attempts to clarify somewhat the intricate overlaps between linguistics, poetics and techniques of decipherment developed in psychoanalysis.

Though these papers have, with one exception, been produced over a rather concentrated period, and though they stem closely from problems examined and models set out in After Babel (1975), it would be idle to claim for them any rigorous unity. But it may well be that two themes give coherence to what are different and particular presentations.

The first theme is that of privacy, of the altering weight of energy and of emphasis as between the inner and the outer, the voiced and the silent, the public and the private sectors of personality and speech. Could it be that vital resources of inwardness, of disciplined remembrance, of meditative clarity, fundamental to a classical culture, are being eroded by new ideals of extrovert and total utterance? The second theme is that of the changing technical, psychological and social status of the act of reading. Are there ways in which current practices of and attitudes towards the written word are making it more difficult for us to read with natural immediacy and pleasure the works, the structures of language, on which our literacy has been founded? The essay on reading Dante now seeks to make this inquiry concrete, and the closing paper is a speculation nothing more on what might be some of the forms of transition towards new media of articulate imagination. Obviously, these two themes and the underlying consideration of a possible dispersal of established values, will touch at many points.

It is my hope that these discussions will interest the general reader as well as the specialist who, necessarily, prefers to work within a single technical domain. To ask larger 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. Such constraint now marks considerable areas of political and intellectual discussion, making dissent sterile instead of productive and humane. Why this should be the case and what, if anything, we can do about it is, I imagine, the central issue of these essays, as it has been of almost everything I have written.

GS

Geneva

January 1978

Text and Context

1976

If there is currently a debate on culture as distinct from a merely formal academic-journalistic rhetoric or rhetorical gossip it involves, it must, where it is honestly pursued, involve the nature of texts. It must bear, at crucial points of definition and dissent, on the question of the status of the text and of our relations to it. One of the obvious difficulties is that this question entails the sort of understanding of the underlying realities of culture, of the conditions of co-existence between culture and other, competing models of social cohesion or ideals, which an analysis of our relations to texts is meant to elucidate. In other words: the argument runs a constant risk of circularity. Determine your reading of culture in order to locate, to ascertain in what measure there persists, a culture of reading. But hermeneutics the disciplined understanding of understanding instructs us that such circularity, albeit by no means comfortable or immune from logical attack, is an inevitable, perhaps necessary attribute of any discourse, of any articulate commentary whose object is itself textual.

The problem is not only one of circularity. To think through the question, the situation (penser la situation) of the text in our contemporary culture, is to engage in a whole number of theoretic and pragmatic fields whose own limits or methodological integrity, whose own implication of textual authority or repudiation of the canonic, are unclear. A consideration of the convention of reading in this or that locale and section of the community, of the techniques of conservation, reproduction, diffusion, deletion or, indeed, suppression which determine the literal availability of texts these topics are, broadly speaking, sociological. That the process of comprehension, the act of understanding and response which crude formula presumably covers an immensely complex dynamic or dialectic of impulse and ordering is also social, that there is a social-economic-political matrix of reading as there is of the book as a material fact, is a recognition which emerges with Dilthey and is then refined by Walter Benjamin. If there is a sociology of the text and of our relations to the text, there is also, of course, a psychology. The structures of attention, of memoration, of verbalization in and through which the act of reading takes place, are neither uniform nor stable. Modern art-historians have taught us a good deal about the developing history of visual, tactile perception, about the essential historicity of the eye in regard to perspective, volume, distortion and codes of chromatic or gestural meaning. The psychological configurations of reading, the reflexes of awareness which organize our ingestion (Ben Jonsons term) of the text are, certainly, no less temporal, no less the product of the intricate congruence of innate and environmental options. Here, as in the history of art or of musical form, the simplest cognitive moment involves processes, interactive and in constant motion, which extend from the neuro-physiological at one end to the most unstable, difficult to document elements of fashion, social contingence, local accident at the other. St. Augustines often-cited observation that his teacher was the first man he knew capable of reading without moving his lips, Erasmuss occasional testimony as to the effect of print on the very immediacies of thought, the work of Robert Escarpit in France on the current conditions of reading at different points and age-levels in a mass-consumer society, are among the few markers we have. The sociology, the psychology (or, at a fundamental remove, neuro-physiology), the social-psychology the awkwardness, the overlap in our rubrics being themselves symptomatic of reading, of our relations to texts, remain rudimentary. Thus we have histories of books, of paper, of inks and typography, but none of reading.