Real Presences

The reader should see, in the comments of this book’s reviewers, that their task has been a difficult one. The material is recondite and the argument perforce elusive. The basic outline is clear enough. Steiner’s thesis is that all genuine art and human communication is grounded in a transcendent reality. God’s presence serves as the underwriter, the guarantor of human communication, particularly at its most subtle levels and even in its most exotic form. Music (in which, as he writes, “form is content, content form”) is his most prized example.He is arguing against a set of alternatives (in psychology and linguistics, e.g.), but principally against the nihilism of deconstruction. He believes that communication, particularly aesthetic communication, is grounded in transcendence, while prevailing orthodoxies argue just the opposite, viz. the absence of transcendence and the triumph of an often reductive materialism. Since he contrasts the example of music (especially) to a set of arguments that are often rigorously verbal, we can see the implicit rhetorical challenge which he has created for himself.He will argue for ‘real presences’ in the face of postmodern challenges, while fully cognizant of the force of those challenges. Inevitably, being Steiner, he will make a powerful argument but ultimately he will be thrown back on the towering examples of those who share his vision. He quotes, e.g., Yeats: “No man can create as did Shakespeare, Homer, Sophocles, who does not believe with all his blood and nerve, that man’s soul is immortal.”The nub of the problem, in part, is that the ‘real presence’, by its very nature, is ineffable, but, in its existence and importance, palpable. He quotes Sir Thomas Browne to the effect that “we are men and we know not how; there is something in us that can be without us, nor cannot tell how it entered into us.”In preparing creative work we are recapitulating the work of the Creator. He quotes Picasso to this effect, cites Joyce’s fingernail-paring creator and, interestingly, suggests that the famous ‘rival poet’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets might well, in effect, be God. In a very gutsy move he argues that the preeminence of male creators might be attributable to the fact that women, in giving birth, participate in an act of creation so grand and miraculous that writing plays or creating sonatas will always be, for them, a secondary activity.As always with George Steiner, the book is dazzling in its learning and in its insights. This is, however, a rough go for those who are not already immersed in the book’s issues. It is very sophisticated and very densely argued. In contrasting the agony of a post-holocaust humanity with the possibilities for hope that remain, one might begin with his book, In Bluebeard’s Castle, which consists of a series of (more accessible) lectures.

On rare occasions does one truly *encounter* a book whose graceful eloquence both witnesses to the beauty of the human mind and to the beauty of human communication. To affirm both is to affirm the possibility - or, perhaps better, the probability - of a transcendent point of reference beyond our own humanity. Real Presences "proposes that any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that nay coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the fainal analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God's presence" (3).To read this book by Steiner really is something of an event. It tours metaphysics, particularly through in its Catholic incarnation (and the title of the book is very much along these very Catholic lines - although whether or not Steiner is Catholic I do not know), as well as art. As he affirms early on, asking what music is can also be understood as a way of asking what humanity is. The book begins with the essay "A Secondary City" (which certainly evokes St. Augustine), moves on to "The Broken Contract" (with its intimations of Enlightenment political philosophy), and ends with "Presences" (an affirmation of the wager for God's existence as the ground in which we walk).This is a polemic against nihilism, particularly in its guise of deconstruction, which has nothing to say about death and is incapable of affirming the possibility of determinative meaning. Thus "art for art's sake" is pure narcissism and pure suicide - and it seems to me that the target of such "art for art's sake" are those theorists who write for the sake of writing, rather than for the sake of communicating. In calling poetry, sculpture, painting as witnesses for his case, Steiner deems art a "leap out of nothingness" (202) where the artist, as in Joyce, imitates God. Questions of art are fundmentally theological.However, Steiner is by no means willing to affirm that presence is given or seen in full (citing St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians). Borrowing imagery again from the Catholic tradition, he writes that we all live in journey of Saturday, even as we are on our way to Sunday, the lineaments of which "carry the name hope (there is no word less deconstructible)" (232). In the meantime, it is the arts - with their doxologies of the messianic - which give us to patience.Dense and highly rewarding, you will likely ponder these things for some time to come.

If you love language, you will love this book. It will open so many more authors and ideas to you that you will give up reading fluff and inelegant "stuff," just not enough time for the good stuff.Please read the book through without so much stopping to analyze each word. Get the gist the first time through or the first and second times, and then go through word for word. You need to get the overall picture, concept, "vibe," and then you can drill deep. It isn't as daunting as you fear. Read, read, read, and then you will find you do get the idea, you get it. If you go word by word FIRST, you will stop short of the end.

I was introduced to this book 3 years ago whilst reading Richard Holmes' 2 volume biography of Coleridge. I had been particularly interested in Coleridge, because I found out that even in the grips of an Opium addiction he had travelled to Germany in 1789-90 (at first with Wordsworth) in order to learn German so that he could read Immanuel Kant on Metaphysics in the original language. As yet there was no English translation, only hearsay. Having myself struggled immensely to get to grips with reading Kant in English, I was under no illusion about the sheer genius of Coleridge actually to undersdtand what Kant had to say. Kant argues for the reality of the transcendent, and in reading him Coleridge himself took on a similar position in opposition to the scepticism of Hartley and Hume.In a footnote in Holmes' Biography (Vol 1 p 320) he recommends the essay - our present book - by George Steiner, who had been his mentor, in these words. "Beyond the problem of 'personal authenticity' seems to be the question whether life - or literature - can have meaning without some form of Divine continuity or assurance within the structure of reality. These difficult issues have been most recently raised by Geoge Steiner in 'Real Presences'".This is a very difficult read - Class 5 in mountain climbing terms - and after reading it 3 times I think I begin to understand what is being said and why it is so important in our current cultural and religious climate.By looking at our 'poietics' - literature, art and music - he makes a case that all significant art forms are underwritten or guaranteed by the presence of Word or Logos, and Divine Logos at that. Attacking the prevalence of secondary literature over creative art, and similarly arguing against deconstruction, which denies any ultimate meaning behind our words, Steiner's case becomes a wager (in the manner of Pascal). "This essay argues a wager on transcendence. It argues that there is in the art-act and its reception, that there is in the experience of meaningful form , a presumption of presence." (p 214). Steiner is well aware that his position is an unfashionable one. But as he insists:- "It is I believe poetry, art and music which relate us most directly to that in being which is not ours." (p 226).Immensely difficult; richly rewarding.

Hard to follow at times, but Steiner is worth the effort

no disrespect to the Author but i had to get the dictionary out after the first paragraph. I think it could be very inspiring but not for a person who didn't listen to his English teacher in secondary school :(