Steiner - Real presences

Real Presences

Is there anything in what we say?

George Steiner

For Jacqueline Werly,

source of music.

Les preuves fatiguent la vrit.

[Proofs weary the truth.]

Georges Braque

When you are philosophizing

you have to descend into primeval chaos

and feel at home there.

Wittgenstein

CONTENTS

I A SECONDARY CITY

We speak still of sunrise and sunset. We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common parlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic.

This is the reason why rational men and women, particularly in the scientific and technological realities of the West, still refer to God. This is why the postulate of the existence of God persists in so many unconsidered turns of phrase and allusion. No plausible reflection or belief underwrites His presence. Nor does any intelligible evidence. Where God clings to our culture, to our routines of discourse, He is a phantom of grammar, a fossil embedded in the childhood of rational speech. So Nietzsche (and many after him).

This essay argues the reverse.

It proposes that any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of Gods presence. I will put forward the argument that the experience of aesthetic meaning in particular, that of literature, of the arts, of musical form, infers the necessary possibility of this real presence. The seeming paradox of a necessary possibility is, very precisely, that which the poem, the painting, the musical composition are at liberty to explore and to enact.

This study will contend that the wager on the meaning of meaning, on the potential of insight and response when one human voice addresses another, when we come face to face with the text and work of art or music, which is to say when we encounter the other in its condition of freedom, is a wager on transcendence.

This wager it is that of Descartes, of Kant and of every poet, artist, composer of whom we have explicit record predicates the presence of a realness, of a substantiation (the theological reach of this word is obvious) within language and form. It supposes a passage, beyond the fictive or the purely pragmatic, from meaning to meaningfulness. The conjecture is that God is, not because our grammar is outworn; but that grammar lives and generates worlds because there is the wager on God.

Such a conjecture may, wherever it has been or is put forward, be wholly erroneous. If it is embarrassed, it will most certainly be so.

One of the radical spirits in current thought has defined the task of this sombre age as learning anew to be human. On a more restricted scale, we must, I think, learn anew what is comprised within a full experience of created sense, of the enigma of creation as it is made sensible in the poem, in the painting, in the musical statement.

To do so, I want to start with a parable or rational fiction.

Imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited. In this society all discourse, oral or written, about serious books or paintings or pieces of music is held to be illicit verbiage.

The sole book reviews in this imaginary community would be those which we find in the philosophical gazettes of the eighteenth and the quarterlies of the nineteenth century: dispassionate summaries of the new publication together with representative extracts and quotations. There would be no journals of literary criticism; no academic seminars, lectures or colloquies on this or that poet, playwright, novelist; no James Joyce quarterlies or Faulkner newsletters; no interpretations of, no essays of opinion on, sensibility in Keats or robustness in Fielding.

Texts would, where necessary, continue to be established and edited in the most rigorous, lucid form. This form is philological, a crucial term and concept which I want to articulate in this essay. What would be banned is the thousandth article or book on the true meanings of Hamlet and the article immediately following in rebuttal, qualification or augment. I am imagining a counter-Platonic republic from which the reviewer and the critic have been banished; a republic for writers and readers.

Correspondingly, there would be catalogues, reasoned and scrupulous, of an artists uvre, of art exhibitions, museums, public and private collections. Reproductions of the best quality would be readily available. But there would be an interdict on art criticism, on journalistic reviews of painters, sculptors and architects. There would be no further tomes on symbolism in Giorgione; no essays on the psyche of Goya or essays on these essays. Again, the order of comment allowed would be philological, which is to say of an explicative and historically contextual kind. The problem arising from the fact that all explication is, in some measure, evaluative and critical is, to be sure, a challenge.

At the heart of these prohibitions would be that on reviews, critiques, discursive interpretations (as opposed to analyses) of musical compositions. I believe the matter of music to be central to that of the meanings of man, of mans access to or abstention from metaphysical experience. Our capacities to compose and to respond to musical form and sense directly implicate the mystery of the human condition. To ask what is music? may well be one way of asking what is man? One must not flinch from such terms and from the fundamental semantic improprieties which they may entail. These elusive but also immediate categories of speech, of questioning, have their own imperative and clarity. The point is that these categories need to be lived before they can be stated.

Thus there would, in our fiction, be a prodigality of musical scores, of guides to performance and audition. There would be no overnight or weekly verdicts on new works, no verbal descriptions of the daemonic in Beethoven or of death wishes in Schubert. Where analysis is required, it would be of a pragmatic, anonymous sort. Once more, the enabling format would be that which I will seek to define and characterize as philological.

In short, I am construing a society, a politics of the primary; of immediacies in respect of texts, works of art and musical compositions. The aim is a mode of education, a definition of values devoid, to the greatest possible extent, of meta-texts: this is to say, of texts about texts (or paintings or music), of academic, journalistic and academic-journalistic today, the dominant format talk about the aesthetic. A city for painters, poets, composers, choreographers, rather than one for art, literary, musical or ballet critics and reviewers, either in the market-place or in academe.

Would literature, music and the arts in this imaginary community exist and evolve unexamined, unevaluated, disbarred from the energies of interpretation and the disciplines of understanding? Does the ostracism of high gossip (the German word Gerede conveys the exact tenor of busy vacancy) cause a blank and passive silence silence can also be of the most active, answering quality around the life of the creative imagination?