In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture

Rating:
Summary: Compelling conjecture.
Review: A bold reflection about why the West lost her innocence by organizing the Holocaust.
For the author, the motives for the Holocaust lie in the subconscious and more particularly in the psychology of religion.
First, Moses gave us monotheism with an abstract, ruthless, almighty but absent God. Secondly, his son Christ, required in his Sermon of the Mount total self abandonment. Thirdly, there was the Messianic socialism of Marx, Trotski and Bloch.
The West took revenge by exterminating the people who saddled its subconscious with these inhuman utopian dreams.
The West lost her innocence; but how can it react against the committed barbarism: by the stoicism of a Freud, or by the cheerfulness of Nietzsche for the fact that we are only a few moments here on this gruesome planet.
This powerful text forces the reader to a serious reflection. I don't have any clinical psychoanalytical material at my disposal that confirms or denies the author's conjectures. So suggestions for other work in this field are very wellcome.
For me, this book is certainly not the whole truth, as there were among others, resentment for success, the search for a scapegoat for the economic depression or the more than ambivalent attitude of the Catholic Church.

Rating:
Summary: Opens the Last Door...
Review: One can not easily sum up the fragile, the terrible, the remarkable insights that dwell within this marvelous long essay. Those who have searched in vain for a vivid yet concise account of post modernity ought look no further. Although he transcends the dreary and ponderous language of continental philosophers like Derrida and Foucault, Steiner is no less subtle or astute. By comparison with them, I find Steiner satisfyingly unpompous.

Steiner's choice of material is wide but sufficiently comfortable for most educated persons for follow. He begins with a discussion of the ennui embodied by late-romantic (Beethoven, Schopenhauer) and early modern (Wagner, Baudelaire) art and literature. He attributes this roundly agreed-upon loss of feeling partly to novel means of keeping time and partly to the regimentation and conformism hastened by the Enlightenment. To much surprise, Rousseau ushered in Napoleon. Utilitarian hopes could not stem the violence of secular and supposedly rational states.

Which leads us to Steiner's next idee fixe, the impact of the two World Wars on our cultures and psyches. He talks of the massive loss, not merely of life, but of intellect and culture, within the trenches of the Ypres salient and Verdun. He next moves with considerable care over the theological "causes" and repercussions of the Holocaust.

This is dangerous territory. Others who have tried this line of reasoning have reached rather unsatisfying conclusions on the matter. But one can't resist feeling that Jews, agnostics, Protestants, and Catholics would all find Steiner's account authentic despite its obligatory departure from factual sources -- after all, one can not measure religious intensities. He speaks of "the ambiguous afterlife of religious feeling in Western culture" as a product of the aesthetic and finally, through Hitler, the literal confrontation between the Pagan and the Judaic experiences of divinity that were uneasily combined in earlier manifestations of Western culture - i.e. High Church Christianity.

He confesses that his is a minority perspective, since he favors a view of the holocaust that is "set in the framework of the psychology of religion." According to Steiner, the holocaust can not be explained by the usual reliance on sociology or economics. It was not the result of mere "individual pathology or the neuroses of one nation-state." Nor is it analagous to other instances of so-called ethnic cleansing. Even among instances of evil, it is unique; and therefore unexplainable by normative generalities.

Steiner, himself Jewish by up-bringing, forces us to examine anew "the singularity, the brain-hammering strangeness of the monotheistic idea," its profound genesis in the Jewish experience, and its uneasy re-definition in the Christianized Europe that followed Rome's collapse. From the time of Paul, through medieval Europe, and in to the modern period, Christianity resisted the starkness of the God of Moses. "The God of the Torah," writes Steiner, "not only prohibits the making of images to represent Him. He does not allow images." That God should be so uncanny, so unapproachable is something Christianity challenged from its very beginning. The supposed incarnation of God in Christ acted as a bulwark against this strange, unknowable God. All the trappings of traditional Christianity proceed from this original claim by Christ to have bridged the divide between human and divine. Hence, the sacraments. Hence, the devotion to the saints. Hence, an emphasis on narrative art that is not simply decorative, but with which one actively participates and from which one gains meanings relevant to day-to-day life.

But this type of Christianity has been steadily eroding since the Reformation. The rise of literacy invalidated the mythic quality of these rituals, art forms, and sacramental totems. Readings of the Torah by intelligent lay-people made Westerners increasingly aware of their God's weirdeness. The gothic veil over the Judeic God increasingly wore threadbare. By the 19th century, it had been ripped open. One looked through it, as in to a void.

The sensitive Nietszche observed the trauma to western culture that would inevitably proceed from this rent in the ontological fabric. This was, he insisted, a dangerous occurance; no matter how mythical or superstitious it might appear to the merely rational schools of Enlightenment scientism. Nietszche's point was never merely that "God is Dead;" what he actually said was: "Wohin ist Gott? rief er, ich will es euch sagen! Wir haben ihn getotet - ihr und ich! Wir alle sind seine Morder!" In Nietszche's view, God didn't just die. We killed him. Or rather we killed his image - a fate worse than death, since that image was the uneasy Christian compromise between pagan Europe and monotheistic Judeism.

But this is only a small part, really, of a much larger synthesis which I encourage you to read.

One of the special merits of 'In Bluebeard's Castle' will be its appeal to cultural conservatives who experience the ambivalence of post-modernity with shudders of despair. Steiner does not simply rely on reductionist jargon or schoolmarm banter (grammatology, hermeneutics, knowledge/power) to which one might dismissively roll one's eyes. Further, he senses the wide appeal -- frankly, lost on me -- of the idyll nineteenth-century before the wounds of the two Great Wars. He roundly asserts that cultural notions of language and music have indeed depreciated considerably with the rise of literacy since the wars. But unlike Gertrude Himmelfarb and her ilk, he castigates all fantasies of return. Rather, like Jacques Barzun and Harold Bloom, he looks forward to new symbols the future will inevitably forge.

For Steiner as for Nietzsche, decadence returns us to ground zero and prepares us for the vital and the creative. We stand, he concludes, like Bartok's Judith, before the last door; the magic wheels of culture set to turn.

Rating:
Summary: Optimal Steiner
Review: Steiner is certainly absorbed in cultural fracture and decay. For the most part, Steiner is really intent on telling us how bad it really is. Is it really? or Is this Steiner's interpretation of the state of things based on an ontology that demands progress. Steiner takes off from Freud's Civilization and its Discontents (which posits that there is tension between civilization and our natural tendencies), so can Steiner be said to be falling prey to an ontology almost bent on self-destruction. If we are as Freud suggests turning our aggressions inward through the pressure we place on ourselves can Steiner be said to be perpetuating that sense of progress? Steiner although directly telling us we are on the decline, he is not prescriptive. He does not redefine culture as the sub-title suggests. Despite his reacting to Eliot he really, perhaps underhandedly, attempts to redefine the role of culture.

The great question he poses for us to contemplate revolves around the issue of the holocaust. How can such a cultured society - with science, math and art be able to perpetuate such cruelty. When the moral judgment is rendered that the "Other" is inhuman than the machine of "reason" with all its mechanized efficiency is set in motion. Have we really progressed? If progress is really moving "forward" and we should be getting more enlightened - we perpetuate such horrendous atrocities. Which calls to question that once the last door is open and it leads us to the future - are we ready for it? We seem destined to open the door no matter what - ready or not here we come. If Steiner is to prove useful, it will not be in the area of resetting the progress machine in motion but that he stopped us for a few seconds to reconsider the damage we can and are all to willing to perpetuate. Where is our culture now?

In my opinion, Steiner is at his best when he muses over the age of contemporary communication. He reflects on music and science founded on math, which effectively will result in a wordless culture. He examines the widespread deterioration of traditional ideas in literate speech. In "The Great Enuui" he harkens that since the age of Napoleon we do not have meaning, we have slumbered into a death without dying. We are in a state of apathy but we pine for a golden age. I have to admit to reading into Steiner nostalgia for whatever his conception is for a golden age. Reflectively, admittedly and unrepentantly Eurocentric, Steiner falls into the same trap that Nietzsche, Freud and Dostoevsky did by getting stuck in the passion (natural) vs. reason (imposed) dichotomy. Nonetheless, as with all those just mentioned, he is informative in his reflections - almost postmodernist in his deconstruction but unmistakably modernist in his outlook and still naively seeking a sense of progress as if man is on a teleological quest for perfection. In a postmodern world where fissures are exposing the naiveté our most cherished certainties sometimes it is nice to be certain about something. Steiner may want to recall this stuff to presence but fails - nonetheless it is highly informative, very compelling and a necessary read.

Miguel Llora

Rating:
Summary: Taking over where Freud left off
Review: Steiner is certainly absorbed in cultural fracture and decay. For the most part, Steiner is really intent on telling us how bad it really is. Is it really? or Is this Steiner's interpretation of the state of things based on an ontology that demands progress. Steiner takes off from Freud's Civilization and its Discontents (which posits that there is tension between civilization and our natural tendencies), so can Steiner be said to be falling prey to an ontology almost bent on self-destruction. If we are as Freud suggests turning our aggressions inward through the pressure we place on ourselves can Steiner be said to be perpetuating that sense of progress? Steiner although directly telling us we are on the decline, he is not prescriptive. He does not redefine culture as the sub-title suggests. Despite his reacting to Eliot he really, perhaps underhandedly, attempts to redefine the role of culture.

The great question he poses for us to contemplate revolves around the issue of the holocaust. How can such a cultured society - with science, math and art be able to perpetuate such cruelty. When the moral judgment is rendered that the "Other" is inhuman than the machine of "reason" with all its mechanized efficiency is set in motion. Have we really progressed? If progress is really moving "forward" and we should be getting more enlightened - we perpetuate such horrendous atrocities. Which calls to question that once the last door is open and it leads us to the future - are we ready for it? We seem destined to open the door no matter what - ready or not here we come. If Steiner is to prove useful, it will not be in the area of resetting the progress machine in motion but that he stopped us for a few seconds to reconsider the damage we can and are all to willing to perpetuate. Where is our culture now?

In my opinion, Steiner is at his best when he muses over the age of contemporary communication. He reflects on music and science founded on math, which effectively will result in a wordless culture. He examines the widespread deterioration of traditional ideas in literate speech. In "The Great Enuui" he harkens that since the age of Napoleon we do not have meaning, we have slumbered into a death without dying. We are in a state of apathy but we pine for a golden age. I have to admit to reading into Steiner nostalgia for whatever his conception is for a golden age. Reflectively, admittedly and unrepentantly Eurocentric, Steiner falls into the same trap that Nietzsche, Freud and Dostoevsky did by getting stuck in the passion (natural) vs. reason (imposed) dichotomy. Nonetheless, as with all those just mentioned, he is informative in his reflections - almost postmodernist in his deconstruction but unmistakably modernist in his outlook and still naively seeking a sense of progress as if man is on a teleological quest for perfection. In a postmodern world where fissures are exposing the naiveté our most cherished certainties sometimes it is nice to be certain about something. Steiner may want to recall this stuff to presence but fails - nonetheless it is highly informative, very compelling and a necessary read.

Miguel Llora

Rating:
Summary: Optimal Steiner
Review: While reading this book I constantly had to remind myself that it was written in 1970-71, so prescient and prophetic were Steiner's insights. As a study of Western culture, an investigation into where--and what--we are historically and globally, it remains absolutely critical reading. Steiner read right what continue to be the major issues of our time: the generalized suspicions about the irrelevance of "high" culture when projected against 20th century political atrocities; the role of literacy in a progressively visual culture; the increasingly pervasive roles of various forms of music; the emerging pre-eminence of "facts," of a scientific mind-set and of scientific knowledge in general; the ethical and intellectual risks posed by the scientific unknowns--to name but a few themes in this dense, richly thought-out essay.

This is a thin book, unlike "No Passion Spent"; rigorously and earnestly investigatory, unlike "Errata." Ironically I came to this book last, but it is by far the most satisfying. In the former, only one essay, "Archives of Eden," touches on the large cultural questions examined here, and then more in the form of a rant; in the latter, what had by then become Steiner's familiar terrain seemed only to have been re-rehearsed, with no substantive new insights.

But here is Steiner at his least pretentious (he does have a tendency to flaunt his polylingual capacities), at his most profound and probing. It isn't easy reading and isn't intended to be. It has the earmark of a formidable mind investigating its time and space for its own sake, more out of its own curiosity and impulse to understand as of any desire to impress, or advance its host professionally.

Here is Steiner at the same amplitude as an Elias Canetti or a William Irwin Thompson--an encyclopedic generalist discussing broad cultural questions with command, eloquence and erudition.