Epstein on Steiner

Epstein on Steiner February 9, 2004

Joseph Epstein goes to town pricking the inflated reputation of George Steiner in the Feb 16 issue of the Weekly Standard . Among his jibes: “I once, in print, referred to Harold Bloom as George Steiner without the sense of humor, which was, as Senator Claghorn used to say, ‘A joke, I say, that’s a joke, son,’ because more humorless than Steiner human beings do not come.” And, “Steiner’s pretensions are to polymathy. He claims just about all knowledge as his province. His reading is three stages beyond omnivorous ?Ealthough he might admit, on the rare occasion, to a bad conscience over not reading an eight-volume history of the French Revolution (by Georges Sorel) that you had not hitherto known existed.” And, “At one point in his text Steiner refers to ‘mandarin ostentation’ and at another remarks upon usin an ‘orotund flourish’ deliberately. But without mandarin ostentation and orotund flourishes, Steiner’s prose would not exist and he himself would be out of business.” And, Epstein remarks that in Steiner’s work “Things that are not iconic tend to canonic, and a vast number of things are ‘seminal.’ Steiner, one begins to feel after reading him for many years, greatly underrates the power of semen.” And, “My friend Edward Shils once gave me a most useful clue to the best way to read Steiner. He claimed that many years ago he read a splendid parody of Steiner’s of the way a Soviet apparatchik thought. Steiner, he felt, was a marvelous mimic. And so, I have come to see, he is. What George Steiner has been doing, over the past forty or so years, is an incomparable impression of the world’s most learned man.” Ba-rump-bump.

Speaking as one who has read Steiner with awe, enjoyment and profit, Epstein’s pricks hit their target. In my mind, Steiner is not wholly deflated, but as I read Epstein’s review I was sure I could hear the hissing sound of escaping air.

I can’t resist adding Epstein’s reflections on his own teaching career: “I recently closed down a university teaching career of thirty years, and I would like to go on record as saying that I wouldn’t have done it for a penny less. Teaching is arduous work, entailing much grinding detail and boring repetition — a teacher, it has been said, never says anything once ?Einterrupted only occasionally by moments of always surprising exultation. And I should like to add that I don’t think I learned a thing from my students, except that, as one student evaluation informed me, I tend to jingle the change in my pocket.”


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