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Tuesday 2 December 2008

My Unwritten Books

Sins of omission

Alberto Manguel on George Steiner's new book

Invidia is the title of the second phantom volume. ‘Not many today, I presume, read the works of Francesco Stabili, better known as Cecco d’Ascoli.’ (The ‘better known’ stands uneasily by ‘I presume’; poor Cecco has long been absent from the best-seller lists.) A professor of astrology in Bologna, dismissed for heresy in 1324, said later to have dared draw the horoscope of Christ Himself, Cecco’s evanescent fame lies mainly in his antipathy towards Dante, against whom he wrote a long didactic epic poem, the Acerba. Envy (his contemporaries agreed) was Cecco’s guiding passion, born perhaps from knowing himself incapable (the sentiment is far more complex than that) of Dante’s achievements. From this observation, Steiner leads us to the greater question of invidia whose duality, as he points out, is reflected in the French envie signifying both ‘envy’ and ‘desire’. It is this competitive tension between creator and creature that may explain something of Cecco’s feelings when reading the Commedia. Here Steiner must be quoted in full:

Man cannot match, let alone excel, the power, the fantastication, the awesome loveliness out of God’s workshop. What are our sublimest paintings when compared with dawn? Our music when set beside that of the celestial spheres? The Paradiso is the classical statement of these incomparabilities. Man’s only, but indestructible, counter-statement is that of words, of the grammar, in which Job is set down. A language which God must speak if He is to be heard.

‘Invidia,’ like several other of these skeleton texts, remained unfleshed because, as Steiner disarmingly confesses, ‘it came too near the bone’. ‘The Tongues of Eros’, on the sexual life of language; ‘Zion,’ on the endemic nature of exile in the Jew and on the illuminating suggestion that ‘the Jew is hated not because he killed God but because he has invented and created Him;’ ‘School Terms,’ on the multifaceted concept of public education with a central curriculum in mathematics, music, architecture and the life sciences, taught, wherever possible, historically; ‘Of Man and Beast,’ on his ‘confused and irrational’ persuasions regarding the relationship between human beings and animals — all may owe their dreamlike state to this compunction. But there is more.

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