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Tuesday 2 December 2008

My Unwritten Books

Sins of omission

Alberto Manguel on George Steiner's new book

‘Philosophy,’ Steiner says in his aphoristic introduction, ‘teaches that negation can be determinant.’ This, other than providing a coy justification for the present volume, intimates something else, profound and essential, addressed, however incompletely, in the seventh unwritten opus, ‘Begging the Question.’ ‘What I have argued from my very first books onwards,’ Steiner tells us,

is this: it has been the ‘God-question’, that of God’s existence or non-existence, and the attempts to give to this existence ‘a habitation and a name’, which until very recently have fuelled much of great art, literature and speculative constructs. They have provided consciousness with its centre of gravity.

To imagine that he, George Steiner, has ‘anything original, let alone authoritative to offer in reply,’ strikes him ‘as an impertinence.’

And yet, and yet ... While eschewing a ‘negative mystique’, Steiner nevertheless claims the right intensely to feel (despairing of what he calls ‘the fragility of reason’) the divine absence.

It relates, and again words fail me, to the sadness, to the abyss at the heart of love. Perhaps it is something like the animate dark in which a blind man taps his way through the world’s illusory noon. Meditation on a ‘non-God’ can be as concentrated, as humble or exultant, as any in approved theology and worship. It does not, I believe, trigger folly and hatred. Awesome is the God who is not.

In this mental, spiritual space, Steiner says, we must be alone. Faith (or lack of) must be private. ‘Publication,’ the master tells us, ‘cheapens and falsifies belief irremediably.’

Reserve, incompleteness, fragmentation, the gift of providing notes towards the definition of something destined to remain unsaid, make up (if only partially) the literature we call great, explicitly in Heraclitus, in Pascal, in Kafka, in Borges, implicitly in others. ‘I will do such things,’ promises Lear. ‘What they are yet I know not — but they shall be/ The terrors of the earth.’ The threat suffices.

The jacket of Steiner’s book depicts, standing in a row, the seven non-existent volumes, the colourful spines proudly bearing their prenatal titles. The design reflects exactly how we feel after reaching the last page: these books exist, they have been read, they continue their labours on the shelves of our memories. The fact that they have not been written is an unimportant oversight, a pardonable excess of modesty in such a joyful literary enterprise.

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