(2 of 2)
Potential of Silence. Significantly, some of the books Steiner admires most draw on other "grammars of perception"—structures taken from music, philosophy or mathematics. Thus Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil (1945), articulates itself as a string quartet. Elias Canetti's Auto-da-fé (1946) is a mock-heroic piece of analytical logic. Such works—and Steiner might have added Uwe Johnson's Speculations About Jakob and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire to his list—declare their own form. They modify "our sense of how meaning may be communicated." Always they carry "a potential of silence, the recognized possibility that literature may be insufficient."
For Steiner, the ax first fell on language and severed it from meaning during the Walpurgisnacht of Nazism. Hitler turned the tongue of Goethe and Heine into a jargon of horror, the bureaucratese of hell. In a terrifying foretaste of George Orwell's Newspeak, "mass murder" translated as "final solution." Steiner asks: "How should the word spritzen [to gush forth] recover a sane meaning after having signified to millions the spurting of Jewish blood from knife points?" And the Nazis' downfall did not halt the world pollution of language. The most totalitarian state in Europe calls itself the German Democratic Republic. Nor is the free world necessarily immune. In the U.S., Shakespeare and the Bible are abbreviated into comic book balloons, and a study of radioactive fallout is titled Operation Sunshine.
New Gods. Sometimes it seems that Steiner overrates the importance of language; but to him the word is the very essence of humanity. He welds philosophy, politics, economics into the ancient Grecian form of criticism—not literary criticism but man criticism. It makes him both exhilarating and frustrating. Sometimes he has to be read backward, into other books and sources. Still, Steiner must know that language is not really dying. The fact of his book denies it. But like religion, language is in search of new gods, prophets or sorcerers. It must have writers who can make the art as "new and outrageous as the morning sun." It also needs physicians like Steiner to diagnose its ills.
Discovering limits, crimes and silences in language is not new. Sixty years ago, Alfred Korzybski, father of general semantics, was subscripting his imaginary animals "cow1, cow2, cow3" to order reality and demonstrate the abstraction of language. Marshall McLuhan (whom Steiner admires) prophesies an Eden of new nonverbal mes sages for the tube-fed generation. But there is much that is new in George Steiner's work, for he has made himself the devil's advocate in the house of literary intellect—and for this he deserves awesome respect. Perhaps the best defense is still a strong offense.