A Long Saturday by George Steiner & Laure Adler

Author:George Steiner & Laure Adler [Steiner, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-35041-7
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

“God Is Kafka’s Uncle”

FROM THE BOOK TO BOOKS

L.A. There’s an obsession, almost an affliction, an incantation in all of your work: the book, the importance of the book, the importance of the continuity of the book in culture; the importance of the book to sustain us, for our existence—mundane, spiritual, and metaphysical. For you, I think. there is only one book.

G.S. That was also true of Mallarmé among others. In Anglo-Saxon culture, the Bible is obviously the primary point of reference. I began reading the Bible in the great King James Version. That said, I realize that over the years I’ve greatly overestimated the presence of the book in human life.

Consider this. We know of no society on Earth that doesn’t have music. Not one. Even the most unsophisticated societies, economically or politically, even societies starving in the Gobi desert, have music, and often very complex music. But no written literature.

Written literature is very rare in this world. What is spoken, told, far surpasses all of what is written down. Homer is very close to Flaubert and Joyce. Twenty thousand years before him, stories were told that would become the foundations of the Homeric epic.

Writing is much closer to us. It means belonging to one of various high civilizations, mainly European, Slavic, and Anglo-Saxon, with important contributions, of course, from China and Japan; but everywhere in the world the spoken word has always been the natural form for teaching religion, the narration of memory. We speak, we tell: memory is the greatest library.

Writing is fairly new, historically speaking; literary writing goes back to Gilgamesh—the great epic poem from ancient Babylon—and continues more or less up to today. It’s not at all clear, what with modern electronics, information technology, electronic archives with memories that go a million times beyond human literary memory or grammars and lexicons, that we will continue to read.

L.A. In your opinion, what constitutes a great work, a great piece of writing? How do certain works survive over time?

G.S. A great piece of writing can wait centuries before being recognized. I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin’s comment: “A book can wait a thousand years unread until the right reader happens to come along. Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.” The book will come, the poem isn’t in danger; readers are. A great literary text incarnates the possibility of a renewal, a constant questioning, but it doesn’t exist to be the object of a university seminar or an act of deconstruction; it exists to upend natural relationships. Shakespeare isn’t just a pretext for little Mr. Steiner to spend his life trying to read him, passionately explaining him, constantly going back to him. What is inexhaustible in great literature, and the same goes for great music or pictorial art, is that at every moment in your personal life the work changes in you. That’s why I have a passion, an obsession—to the point of really annoying people—for learning things by heart.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.