Cassandra’s Prophecies

语言与沉默
9.3
乔治·斯坦纳 / 2013 / 上海人民出版社
Since Language and Silence fell into my hands thirty years ago, I’ve considered Professor George Steiner one of the most stimulating critical minds of our day. I’ve continued to read what he writes, and book after book my high opinion is confirmed, even when I disagree with his conclusions. But for a while now, I’ve suspected he was beginning to succumb to the temptation to which great talents often fall prey, that of frivolous facility, or the propensity to prove anything, even some mistaken views with elegant prose and what appears to be solid learning.
Professor Steiner has just announced both the death of literature and the existence of a secret book he has written, to he published posthumously, on languages and the act of love: “One makes love very differently in German than in English or Italian,” he has explained, with a certainty that Don Juan de Mañara would envy. Very well. This announcement is at least more original and, insofar as readers are concerned, more optimistic than the first.
The culture of the near future, according to Steiner, will do away with literature because of two factors that already exert a decisive influence on contemporary life. The first is technology. The novel as a genre is in no shape to compete with the so-called virtual reality produced by computers, a universe of fantasy and creativity that, though still in its infancy, already surpasses what lies between the covers of the best works of fiction. The First World War was the death knell of the novel, and its swan song was James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Poetry will survive, but at a distance from the evanescent book, as an oral art subordinate to music and the pastimes that have replaced literature as magnets for the best modern intelligence: television, film, dance, and advertising.
芬尼根的守灵夜（第一卷）
8.5
[爱尔兰] 詹姆斯·乔伊斯 / 2012 / 上海人民出版社
The First World War was the death knell of the novel, and its swan song was James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. 
According to the statistical artillery Steiner deploys in support of his thesis, the humanities now only attract mediocrities and the dregs of the university, while talented young people flock to study the sciences. And the proof of this is that the entrance requirements for humanities departments in the best academic centers of England and the United States have dropped to unseemly levels. Meanwhile, at Cambridge, Princeton, and MIT, the requirements for the first year of mathematics or physics are “what, less than fifteen years ago, would have been postdoctoral research.” While humanistic studies stagnate, slip backward, or are degraded, scientific and technological studies reach the speed of light.
Professor Steiner explains in detail, with his usual intellectual flair, a supposed historical law according to which every age’s limited quota of creative talent is concentrated, for mysterious reasons, in a specific area of human activity, which as a result enjoys a period of extraordinary flowering and achievement. So just as painting flourished in the Florentine Quattrocento and the novel stepped into the breach in nineteenth-century Europe, now the creative genius of the species has abandoned arts and letters and nourishes and enriches science and technology and the genres that most benefit from their accomplishments and inventions: in other words, the audiovisual. Not without a certain cheek, Steiner assures us that in our day “the difference between poetry and advertising jingles is very difficult to distinguish” and that it isn’t uncommon to find “one-liners of which Restoration comedy would have been proud” in radio or television advertisements for commercial products.
To speak of beauty in a world where ad agency copywriters are our Dantes and Petrarchs, and where soap operas and reality shows take the place of Don Quixote and War and Peace, will always be possible, but clearly the meaning of the word will have been essentially altered. Although we may have trouble comprehending it, the children around us have already understood it and act accordingly. Steiner explains what scientists have explained to him: that any child who has mastered the use of the computer chooses among three or four possible solutions to all the problems posed by the holographic screen, not on the basis of their truth—since all are true—but on the basis of their “beauty,” or their form, coherence, and the perfectness of their technical configuration, which corresponds to what is classically considered artistic value. The child establishes this hierarchy with the certainty with which previous generations distinguished between a beautiful and an ugly painting. This development seems to Steiner the inevitable consequence of the evolution of art after the genre has hit bottom, as supposedly happened to the novel after Joyce. Now there is nothing left but the Hegelian qualitative leap: How could the traditional idea of beauty in the visual arts have survived the productions of Marcel Duchamp, who could sign a urinal, or the self-destructing and ephemeral machines of Jean Tinguely?
It’s been a while since an essay irritated me as much as the one I’m discussing here. What annoys me (I promise) is not that, given my job, its thesis turns me into a modern counterpart of the dinosaurs and pterodactyls when they were on the verge of extinction. Rather, it’s the superior and mocking air with which Professor Steiner assumes the role of a cultural Cassandra, announcing, with cheerful masochism—and, for full sarcastic effect, in a public lecture before the Publishers Association of Great Britain, which, upon the occasion of its centenary, had invited him to give a talk about the book—the end of one civilization and the dawning of another, ontologically different and purged of the printed page.
As far as the thesis itself is concerned, it is probably true in its broader strokes, though doubtless exaggerated and presented with unnecessary dramatics. There is no question that in fields like electronics and computer science, technology has made astounding strides, or that the audiovisual media siphon off more and more potential readers of literature. Coming from someone more qualified than anyone else to know better, however, the claim that advertising and the small screen are already producing masterpieces on the same level as literary ones seems a wild provocation. In any event, that is not yet the case, and those of us who try to combine our love for books with more or less regular exposure to television and film are made aware on a daily basis that it will be a long time before that fantasy comes true, if it ever does.
And besides, the prospect that the book may be relegated to a minority activity and nearly driven underground in the society of the future is not something that should demoralize lovers of literature. On the contrary, many good things may come of that marginalization. This, in my opinion, is the Achilles’ heel of Steiner’s argument: to have forgotten that fiction and poetry were enjoyed by a majority and truly popular only when they were oral, spoken and sung in squares and on the road. Since these arts were put into writing, their public has been reduced to a negligible minority, an educated elite, which, of course, grew somewhat with the invention of the printing press. But literature has never been a genre for “the masses,” not even today, when the artistic and creative book reaches an important sector of the population (though never a majority in the strict sense) in a very few modern and prosperous countries. I highly doubt, for example, that the readers of novels and poems in Spain could fill the stands of the Real Madrid soccer stadium. And I’m afraid that in Peru they would fit into a cinema, with room left over.
On the other hand, the most notorious consequence of the great expansion of the audience for literary books—the forging of those large minorities in countries like France, England, and the United States—has been, paradoxically, not the massive dissemination of the best literature but the plummeting of intellectual and artistic standards for literary novels. This expansion has given rise to a subculture—that of the best-seller—which, instead of facilitating the enjoyment and appreciation by a vast public of the greatest literary creations in prose or verse, has caused new readers almost exclusively to read manufactured products that are, in the best of cases, only bad and, in the worst, of a dizzying stupidity that almost certainly corrupts its consumers and vaccinates them definitively against real literature.
By way of illustration I’d like to mention two examples that have just come to me out of the blue. I read in the Times this morning that since President Bill Clinton invited her to read a poem at his inauguration, Maya Angelou, an American poet of the second or even the third rank, is the most widely read poet of all time in the English language. Just this year, Angelou, who often addresses the theme of poverty in her poetry, earned royalties of four and a half million dollars. How much must the beautiful long-legged model Naomi Campbell have earned when, some time ago, she published a novel launched with a barrage of radio and television ads? Naturally, I’m not against models writing novels. But therein lies the problem. Miss Campbell didn’t write the book: she only appears as its author.
Why should we shed tears for the disappearance of this circus of posing, confusion, and vanity? If this is what will vanish under the steamrolling onslaught of audiovisual culture, so be it. The book won’t die, of course. It will return to its former position, kept alive by a minority enclave who will demand the rigor, good prose, inventiveness, ideas, persuasive illusions, freedom, and audacities that are notable for their absence in the great majority of the books that now usurp the title of literature. In that future fraternity of catechists of the book, Professor Steiner will be read and discussed, without his needing to play—at his age—the enfant terrible.
London, May 1996