INSPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCERS (True Influencers, not the social media talentless attention seekers)
George Steiner
If you have ever wondered why there has been no Sophocles or Euripides in the modern age, or why American culture is so bad, then this month’s influencer George Steiner can give you an answer.
George Steiner was a French-American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, and novelist known as a "polymath" who explored the relationship between language, literature, and society, particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust. He was a leading European man of letters who believed in the transformative moral power of art, while grappling with the fact that high culture failed to prevent, and sometimes existed alongside, barbarism.
Frances George Steiner was born on April 23, 1929, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near the capital of France, Paris, and unlike previous influencers, his formative years play a much more crucial part in his life’s work as Steiner was the son of Viennese Jewish parents, his father was a senior lawyer at Austria's central bank, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, his older sister was born in Vienna, but the family had subsequently moved to Paris before George’s birth to avoid the growing anti semitism in Austria.
Steiner said that his father had thought "Jews were endangered guests wherever they went” and wanted to equip his children with languages to allow greater mobility, so young George was raised with three mother tongues: German, English, and French. His father believed in the importance of classical education, and taught him to read the Iliad in the original Greek when he was five years old, and Steiner recalled being tutored in Latin by German Jewish refugees who had fled to Paris.
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In 1940, during early part of World War II, Steiner's father moved the family to New York shortly before Paris was occupied by the Germans, and of the many Jewish children in Steiner's class at school, he was one of only two who survived the war, something which profoundly influenced his later writings, stating that "My whole life has been about death, remembering and the Holocaust."
Steiner became a "grateful wanderer", saying that "Trees have roots and I have legs; I owe my life to that." He wrote extensively on language, literature, and the Holocaust, examining how high culture failed to prevent, and sometimes accompanied, barbarism. He argued that the humanities express the best of humanity, but are incapable of hindering the worst. He observed the paradox that high culture—such as a deep appreciation for Bach and Mozart—could coexist with extreme cruelty, with some Nazi bureaucrats being connoisseurs of classical music. He argued that culture cannot exist as a "neutral zone" and criticized the "high seriousness" of European intellectuals who saw culture as a supreme value, ignoring the "guilt of civilization"
Upon arriving in New York in 1940 the then eleven year old George was met at dock by his father whose first words to his son were “remember we’re going back!”, and although Steiner gratefully acknowledged that the USA had saved his life by sheltering him from the Nazis, he was never at home in that country. He couldn’t accept the lack of irony or the daily pledge of allegiance which he found very alien. His father briefly sent him to an American school, but his disdain for American educational standards saw him removed to the French Lycee of New York where he would complete his schooling and where he was taught by Jewish academics who had fled the Nazis including the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss who was there teaching geography.
Steiner’s most notorious work was "The Archives of Eden" (1980), which claims that American culture is a "custodian" of European high culture rather than a creator of its own, and argues that American society is intellectually provincial and acts as a pawnbroker that collects, archives, and commodifies European artistry and ideas. He challenges American artistic achievement, arguing American music and philosophy are secondary to European achievements. Specifically on the subject of music Stenier wrote:
“Up to this point in its history, however, American music has been of an essentially provincial character. The great symphony of ‘the new world’ is by Dvorak. It is Varese’s Amériques which comes nearest to a musical transposition of its spacious subject. Again, limiting oneself to the twentieth century - a limitation inherently weighted in America’s favour - it is obvious that there are in American music no names to set beside those of Stravinsky, of Schoenberg, of Bartók, of Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, that the oeuvre of a Prokofiev, of a Shostakovich, perhaps even of a Benjamin Britten represents an executive ‘density’ and imaginative continuity strikingly absent from the work of American composers. And even if the Stockhausen- Boulez era is now passing, its role, its formal and substantive logic in the history of western music, are on a level which, until now, American composers have rarely challenged, let alone matched. “
After Stenier finished his schooling at the Lycee he spent a year at the University of Chicago where he became enamoured of science, he had previously studied literature and philosophy at the Lycee, and set about studying mathematics and physics with one of his teachers being Enrico Fermi, however Steiner’s hopes of a scientific career were dashed by his advisor of studies who told him that despite his ability to memorise countless scientific formulas he was told that “there is not a spark of mathematical creativity”, and strongly urged him not to go into science, something Stenier called “utterly heartbreaking”, but he took his advice and after spending a bleak year at Harvard he returned to Europe to study as a Rhodes scholar at Balliol College, Oxford.
The subject of Stenier’s Oxford Doctorate in Philosophy was the foundation of his book “The Death of Tragedy” (1961) which argues that true tragic drama, which peaked with the Greeks (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides) and Shakespeare, died in the modern era due to secularism, the rise of scientific rationality, and the optimistic, egalitarian nature of modern society. This is along the same lines that previous influencer Max Weber had argued regarding the disenchantment of the world. Stenier argues that “tragedy is tied to a metaphysics of divine intervention in human affairs, and divine enmity to man, notions which had rapidly lost their strength after the middle of the eighteenth century”. Steiner asserts that modern, optimistic worldviews (Marxism, bourgeois liberalism) cannot sustain the existential despair and necessary fatalism of "absolute tragedy". The shift away from myth toward scientific, rational explanation destroyed the necessary metaphysical framework. Christian "optimism", Stenier regarded Christianity as “anti tragic” and modern political ideologies argue that human suffering can be remedied by political means, destroying the premise of fatalistic suffering necessary to tragedy.
Steiner lived in Cambridge from the 1950s until his death there in 2020, he was a founding fellow of Churchill College, but his denial of a permanent academic position led him to become Professor of English and Comparative literature at the University of Geneva, where he lived in Geneva for 7 months of the year and Cambridge for the other five, and Stenier held this position until he retired. He found English academic life provincial, and as a continental European he felt more at home in Switzerland and at Geneva where he could teach in all the languages that he knew, and had the opportunity to “live Europe” due to its centrality.
Apart from the two works referred to above, Steiner wrote many other works, a couple of examples are Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967), essays exploring the role of literature in a post-Holocaust world; and In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (1971), which explores the impact of the Holocaust on Western civilization and anti-semitism.
George Steiner can properly be regarded as the last of the great generation of European comparatists scholars – Erich Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer, René Wellek – who did so much to establish the discipline of comparative literature. In an era in which World Literature has emerged as the dominant methodology, their almost exclusively European focus is now counter to the dominant trends of the age, but Steiner’s work was characterized by a deep concern for the survival of humanism and high European culture, particularly after the atrocities of the 20th century. Ultimately, Steiner's work represents a profound defense of literacy and the word ("Logos"), even while acknowledging the terrifying silence or destruction that can follow them. He remained a believer in the power of the teacher to pass on the "responsibility" of high culture.