The G.K.Chesterton experiment continues – and I am enjoying it – but I became aware not that long after my first steps into Lake Chesterton, that I would want something else to complement its cool, lapping and soothing waters: that “something” has turned out to be George Steiner.
Steiner is a long-term hero of mine, ever since I came across “The Death of Tragedy” whilst at school and (predictably for a teenager) was obsessed with the misery, woe, self-centredness and formality of the genre. Steiner’s book wasn’t (isn’t) a simple education in precedent, form and structure – but it was (is) magnificent, ambitious, wide-ranging and (most importantly) of high seriousness. I have read everything he’s published ever since, being particularly fond of “Real Presences”, “After Babel” and “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky” – or I thought I had, until I came across “George Steiner at The New Yorker”, a collection of his essays for that great magazine.
It was in the excellent introduction (by Robert Boyers) that I came across the following passage, wherein Boyers makes the point that so many of Steiner’s colleagues and peers (from so many diverse fields) view him as “exemplary”: ” “He thinks, ” Sontag noted in 1980, “that there are great works of art that are clearly superior to anything else in their various forms, that there is such a thing as profound seriousness. And works created out of profound seriousness have in his view a claim on our attention and our loyalty that surpasses qualitatively and quantitatively any claim made by any other form of art or entertainment.” While there were those, in the American academy especially, who were all too ready to reach for “the dismissive adjective ‘elitist’ to describe such a stance, Sontag was more than willing to associate herself with Steiner’s commitment to “seriousness”… His efforts to discriminate better from best continue to draw the epithet ‘elitist’,”
Now: I am neither so arrogant, nor so stupid as to even begin to draw a comparison between myself and the truly great Steiner – but I am also struggling under the “epithet ‘elitist’.” Needless to say, his metier is that of the true polymath, his consideration of greatness (in literature alone) spans Dante, Shakespeare, Homer, Sophocles, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky – whereas mine is the very shallow world of advertising. But still: the JOB is to discard the better and reach for, and build, the best. I am unshakeable in this, but it’s getting me into a lot of trouble – there is a prevailing current of “no such thing as a bad idea” (palpably untrue, as scanning the theatre listings, bookshelves, cinema showings and television schedule should make it more than apparent) and “everyone’s voice is equal”. Well: RUBBISH.
What are inarguable rights of humanity (equality, representation, self-actualisation etc.) are simply not transferable to the realm of ideas: and I don’t see why that’s problematic. Indeed, it seems to me to be incredibly dangerous to assert that all ideas have equal weighting, all voices have equal resonance, all thoughts have equal brilliance: if you can’t say “That idea is poor in quality”, “that idea can be improved upon”, “that idea can be liberated by cutting away the dead wood that’s shadowing it” then what hope is there for great ideas? However, my enthusiasm for the great (and I will be honest: my dismissive treatment of the palpably sub-standard) is getting me a reputation of “only wanting to work with people he thinks are good” and the classic “he doesn’t suffer fools gladly” (show me someone who does, and I’ll show you a fool).
In the words of an infuriated Hanif Kureishi, during a Radio 4 interview at which he was surrounded by preening, specious, post-modern egalitarian pussies: “I’m sorry, but opera IS better than “Just Seventeen”. It just IS.” This captures my attitude precisely – but I am astonished at the number of people who are prepared to take the opposing side as they finger the toenails that protrude from their Birkenstocks, and adjust their bejewelled beanies, purchased at Womad or the fucking Innocent Village Fete or some such hell-hole of wilful ignorance.
I really don’t know what the antidote to this is, but my first act of defiance has been to put a poster above my desk with “Elitist at Work” written on it – and in quite an inaccessible font, too. I think we all know that Steiner would see this and think “mon semblable, mon frere.”.
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Eiljert Gabbles On 