F(r)ictions from the critical imaginary: the singular case of George Steiner

• Published in: Prose studies Vol. 39; no. 1; pp. 61 - 69
• Main Author: Sabbagh, Omar
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 02.01.2017; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: auto/biography; Compositional styles; Creative writing; criticism; fiction; Literary criticism; memoir; Modernism; Narratology; poetics; Steiner; Steiner, George (1929-2020)
• ISSN: 0144-0357; 1743-9426
• DOI: 10.1080/01440357.2017.1328802

In a recent work, The Poetry of Thought, the eminent critic and scholar, George Steiner, sets out to trace the style and rhetoric of thought, the music, implicit as otherwise, of discursive moves in the history of the Western tradition and canon. He speaks there, resolute and bold, as ever, of the 'creativity of reason.' He speaks of the "discovery" of 'metaphor,' as that which 'ignited abstract, disinterested thought.' These two (recent) statements may serve to sum-up what I show, reflectively and in concrete detail, in this paper - making use however of far earlier published works; namely, his intellectual memoir, Errata: An Examined Life, and a sample long short story, 'Return No More.' It is a thesis as old as modernism (Wilde, Nietzsche), that all works, including, say, literary-critical and creative writing, are ultimately autobiographical. I try to show this in this paper, parsed however by the more minor premise that critical writing is always a form of imaginative creativity, and that creative writing is informed, at its best, by analytical intelligence. I choose Steiner as a case study in this paper, not only because he does indeed offer a shining and telltale example of the cohabitation of critical and creative motives; the music of the mind: the mind in the music; but also because his now-seemingly-obsolete singularity as a polymathic intellectual, is lived-out in the singularity of his insights into the, or his, equally singular conception of the human condition. Steiner's storytelling, in this view - whether it is a critical, non-fictional narrative or a more-nominally creative one - is seen to epitomize the true texture of historical experience, where temporal reality is a function of unique contingencies, but also susceptible to necessitating induction. As read here, in both form and content, Steiner provides an exceptional occasion for seeing and understanding these truths.