The Ritual of New Creation (32 page)

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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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Page 107
ironizes into eloquence, the underlying nihilistic findings of literacy, of understanding or rather in-comprehension, as these
must
be stated in the time of the epilogue.
30
To be sure, Steiner's theological assertion of "real presences" is totally irreconcilable with deconstructive celebrations of linguistic deferral and the absence of the sign. What we can say, however (and Steiner appears only partially conscious of this fact), is that these positions are complementary as well as antagonistic; in effect they represent the positive and negative moments in the contemporary history of messianic thought. Derrida, speaking in the spirit of apocalypse, announces the dissolution of "ontotheology" and the passage beyond humanism "in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity."
31
Steiner, the utopian humanist, asserts that there is no word less deconstructible than
hope
.
But in Steiner's vision, hope is continually assailed. Bound up in the idea of culture, and more specifically in what Steiner names in an early essay
humane literacy,
hope shudders and fades whenever the humanities prove incapable of resisting the inhuman. Humane literacy means total engagement with the work:
In that great discourse with the living dead which we call reading, our role is not a passive one. A great poem, a classic novel, press in upon us; they assail and occupy the strong places in our consciousness. They exercise upon our imagination and desires, upon our ambitions and most covert dreams, a strange, bruising mastery.
32
This "bruising mastery" (and once again we encounter the rhetoric of power), however painful, is the guarantor of hope, the promise of handing down, of tradition, and therefore of futurity. But if traditions are passed down in the presence of horror, of utter spiritual and moral degradation, how then can hope avoid its deconstruction?
"To have heard Gieseking play the
Waldstein
in Munich, almost at the end. Despite brave efforts at ventilation smoke hung in the concert hall and an odor of fire and burst mains blew in through the gilt-and-stucco foyer."
33
This is the voice of Dr. Gervinus Rothling, the distinguished jurist and unrepentant ex-Nazi in
The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.
A rigorously disciplined and orderly mind, learned in philosophy, history, and political science, and keenly
 
Page 108
appreciative of the nuanced world of music, Rothling is the fictional embodiment of the type which Steiner has invoked again and again: the man of culture and intelligence, steeped in the traditions of European humanism, who gave himself wholeheartedly to the Hitlerian vision. "He was true to his word," thinks Rothling, as he quietly listens to his daughter play Schumann. "A thousand-year Reich inside each of us, a millennium of remembered life." The appalling poetry of Rothling's reminiscences ("The sound and the fallen leaves came toward me down the dusky water. A moment out of time. Two bodies swinging high on the unbleached gallows by the roadside"), his majestic but somehow perverse meditation on music ("It sets itself across the general flow of time in which we conduct our regimented lives with a specific assertion of freedom so absolute as to dwarf other pretenses of liberty be they political, private, orgiastic") almost seduce us. We recall Steiner's speculation that certain types of cultural and intellectual achievement do not merely fail against the temptation of barbarism, but may actually incline the individual toward such a fall. "Is it reasonable to suppose that every high civilization will develop implosive stresses and impulses toward self-destruction? Is the phenomenology of
ennui
and of a longing for violent dissolution a constant in the history of social and intellectual forms once they have passed a certain threshold of complication?''
34
These are the questions Steiner asks in his measured expository prose. "I Gervinus Rothling have emptied life not from a glass but from a magnum." So answers the author's creation.
The descent of European humanism into what Steiner calls "Hell made immanent" cannot be understood except in relation to the concomitant phenomenon of Western anti-Semitism. Steiner's thought on these matters is controversial in itself; as Alvin Rosenfeld notes, "Steiner challenged earlier arguments of both historical positivists and psychohistorians in an effort to get at what he believed to be some of the deeper cultural and religious strains of Nazism. There are those who have criticized this aspect of the author's thought as being too conjectural and others who have found it unusually bold and perceptive."
35
Complicating the issue immensely, however, is the fact that Steiner later incorporates his cultural criticism into his novel, especially in Hitler's monologue, which comprises its final chapter. But before we can evaluate this "translation," we must consider Steiner's theory in its expository form.
Like his more recent analysis of aesthetic experience, Steiner's examination of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust is based without
 
Page 109
apology upon the psychology of religion. As with the highest of human achievements, so with the most profound of human failures: civilization is best understood in terms of religious thought, regardless of whether the language of religion is regarded as metaphoric or as the human expression of transcendent truth. As far as I can see, Steiner is rather ambiguous on this issue. There are moments in
Real Presences
and
In Bluebeard's Castle
in which it seems that he employs religious discourse because its particular rhetorical qualities (its reservoir of archetypal symbols, its protean metaphors, its supple expression of subjectivity) make it the best instrument of cultural analysis. Steiner's insistence on the religious dimension of culture may be understood therefore as a means of achieving a particularly authoritative style, the expression of what I have already called his theological aestheticism.
But seen as either elaborate metaphor or flash of prophetic insight, there is no denying the vigor and invention of the analysis. However important we consider the economic, political, sociological, and psychological explanations of the Holocaust (and Steiner sees them as invaluable contributions), only the religious imagination and its unique vision of history can comprehend Western civilization's "season in Hell." In the course of Steiner's career, this imaginative force has shaped his work variously; a continuum of discourse, increasingly laden with risk, gradually unfolds.
"Postscript" (1966), one of the Holocaust essays in
Language and Silence,
offers a severe but nonetheless fairly safe position:
What the Nazis did in the camps and torture chambers is wholly unforgivable, it is a brand on the image of man and will last; each of us has been diminished by the enactment of a potential sub-humanity latent in all of us. But if one did not undergo the thing, hate and forgiveness are spiritual gamesserious games no doubtbut games none the less. The best
now,
after so much has been set forth, is, perhaps, to be silent, not to add the trivia of literary, sociological debate to the unspeakable. So argues Elie Wiesel, so argued a number of witnesses at the Eichmann trial. The next best is, I believe, to try and understand, to keep faith with what may well be the utopian commitment to reason and historical analysis
36
Here, the individual who has not personally experienced Nazi atrocity can decently confront the Holocaust only with a kind of religious

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