Gustave Courbet, 1849
"Genius loci, the spirit of place, which, like an unbidden bolt of recognition, transforms a landscape, a street corner into 'inscape,' into a reorientation of awareness. Snow was blowing and drifting in a white fog. The rural road simply vanished. My wife, whose sagacity of heart, radiant good sense and unspoken perceptions are incomparable, drove parallel with what we could make out of fence posts. At moments even these blanked out in a white tumult. Suddenly the February blizzard cleared. A cold brilliance washed the air. We edged the car across the fields back to a paved road and into woods. A gently tortuous descent led from the plateau. On either side, like scarred walls, towered the cliffs painted time and time again by Courbet in this corner of the Franche-Comté. A breach opened in the larch, pale birch and black pine. Zara and I stopped breathless. Below us, in the perfectly rounded cusp of the hills, traversed by a stream whose crystal voices reached us even far above, lay a hamlet. Its rust-coloured and snow-blown roofs, squat church-tower and two small chateaux -- the one ramshackled and Second Empire, the other a pure marvel of a seventeenth-eighteenth century logis and circular donjon -- composed a compact, earth-bound yet also mirage-like ensemble. We were struck mute with wonder. The church tower rang its hour as we crossed the low stone bridge, its querulous chime somehow answered by the toss of silver-white and green-ochre (Courbet's palette) of water across lustrous stones. I knew at once that there would be for me no greater perfection anywhere, that I had stumbled on home."
George Steiner, Errata (1997)
Apparently, Errata is not a typical book by Steiner; it's the closest he comes to memoir and autobiography. Within this book, even this chapter doesn't seem typical because here he stops being a critic or professor, and edges toward pure writing, some of which is very beautiful. I recently finished "The Death of Tragedy" -- which came out of his doctoral thesis -- and am now halfway through this one, written quite late in his long and still-continuing life. Steiner can be maddening, as all brilliant people sometimes are, and he is also flamboyant -- a criticism that was penned on one of his first papers at university. But he shares a concern for philosophy, the art and creativity, and the classics -- for humanism in general -- and writes about those things very well indeed.
I've been amused that since writing the title of this post, this morning, I've had Anton Bruckner's "Locus iste" ("This place") stuck in my head. Steiner would probably approve, though that one's a bit of a stretch, even for him!
A lovely passage that feels like transformation. One of my goals for today is to find a snip (swath if I can get it!) of time when I can read. My days are too pieced-out.
Posted by: marly youmans | July 06, 2011 at 08:37 AM
This is a side of Steiner's writing with which I'm quite unfamiliar! And it's as if Steiner came to the same wonderful realization you did in your previous post. I can see why it resonates, both from your own experience in Quebec and from the beauty of Steiner's prose.
Though he's lived in England for decades now, hasn't he? I guess it's not remarkable that he would find home but then not live there: displacement is such a large part of his past and profoundly informs his criticism.
My next Steiner will probably be No Passion Spent, about which I've read good things. It seems like an eclectic set of essays.
I learned yesterday that Virginia Woolf was a literary critic in Steiner's mold in one big respect: she instinctively didn't trust theoretical criticism, and she believed in the reader's autonomy. "The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. She named her first volume of literary criticism The Common Reader, a title that Mark Hussey thinks is indicative of her reading philosophy.
Posted by: Peter | July 06, 2011 at 09:03 AM
Marly, I think pieced-out days are a curse of modern life. You have kids, which must make your time even more fragmented. There seem to be two challenges: to find longer swaths of uninterrupted time, and to make better use of the snips. Not easy!
Posted by: Beth | July 06, 2011 at 09:06 AM
Thanks, Peter, for these insights. I read the Amazon reviews/comments in your link. It's interesting. I suppose that Steiner was an elitist (there are many ways of defining that word) but he also admits his origins and preferences and examines his thought patterns. I respond the same way you did to his dislike of literary theory. In "Errata" one of the essays is about his personal politics, and he is quite hard on himself for championing art and intellectualism during a century which has seen so many people are starve or become the victims of war. He ponders human capacity for nobility and pure achievement, contrasted with our bestiality and cruelty: there are no answers in the end but I come away from the essay feeling he is a lot more honest than many of us, frankly. His is simply a very interesting mind, and one which prompts the reader to think more deeply about his or her own assumptions, beliefs, decisions. I also liked a chapter where he discusses his own teachers. One of the people he describes is someone with whom he disagreed profoundly, but they became good and longtime friends out of mutual respect and the enjoyment they got from their discussions - precisely for the reason I just mentioned. If all we do is surround ourselves with people who share our opinions, life is pretty boring and the mind and spirit can stagnate. I admire him for seeking freshness even when it was uncomfortable.
Posted by: Beth | July 06, 2011 at 09:45 AM
You know--regarding that comment to Peter--that is one of the things I find so difficult about university life theses days, and why I am so glad that I am long out of it. Faculty tends to be rather lockstep. Students are not as varied either--all under the thumb of technology these days, with all the lack of solitude and thoughtfulness that brings.
Yes, what to do with the pieces: make a crazy quilt hour, I suppose.
Posted by: marly youmans | July 06, 2011 at 10:19 AM
Beth, now I really want to read Errata. It's funny how one gravitates to a favorite writer's autobiographical stuff. Who is this man or woman who writes and thinks like this?
As early as the 1950's, Steiner makes the call to reexamine our approach to literature in light of Twentieth Century atrocities. (It's a big theme in his Language and Silence collection of essays. I think he sees that many people were hiding in academics, but his bigger point in Language was that we aren't doing a good enough job of reading. There is a disconnect between our love of culture and our actions, he says. He brings up Nazis who, after a hard day of atrocities, would relax at home with Wagner or Tolstoy or the like. If we read properly, he says, we would take action. In the essay "To Civilize our Gentlemen," Steiner sees the inherent danger in categorizations such as Richards's:
"In I. A. Richards' Practical Criticism, we find the following: 'The question of belief or disbelief, in the intellectual sense, never arises when we are reading well. If unfortunately it does arise, either through the poet's fault or our own, we have for the moment ceased to be reading and have become astronomers, or theologians, or moralists, persons engaged in quite a different type of activity.' To which the answer should be: No, we have become men."
When someone accused John Berger of inserting politics into his art, he responded, "Far from my dragging politics into art, art has dragged me into politics." (Very intriguing quote to me.) Berger's politics are probably the opposite of Steiner's to a large degree, but I love each man. (And they must both plan to live to be a hundred and to work right up to the end. Hey, and they both found their true homes in France, didn't they?) But it's Steiner's and Berger's conceptions of art and reading that forced them to take what action they took. Neither could hide in art and literature -- quite the contrary, in fact.
Posted by: Peter | July 06, 2011 at 11:47 AM
Wonderful passage.
I wholly agree about Steiner being a very interesting mind and I think the fact that he's completely at ease and fluent in several languages is relevant to the ease with which he moves across so many areas. Also agree with having friends who have different opinions!
Posted by: Natalie | July 06, 2011 at 03:19 PM
A fellow Montreal immigrant, I'm an occasional reader of your thoughtful blog. Fellow Steiner admirers may be interested in a nice 2007 interview with him, which I listened to only today. The two parts are available here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bEeAiVnGbM
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPtJeGo0P6w&feature=related
Posted by: Robert | July 07, 2011 at 08:57 PM
Hats off to wheoevr wrote this up and posted it.
Posted by: Brandie | July 22, 2011 at 09:22 AM