- Title
- Silenus' wisdom and the 'crime of being': the problem of hope in George Steiner's tragic vision.
- Creator
- McDowell, John
- Relation
- The Wounds of Possibility: Essays on George Steiner p. 248-264
- Relation
- http://www.cambridgescholars.com/the-wounds-of-possibility-14
- Publisher
- Cambridge Scholars Publishing
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- On the question of hope within a tragic world George Steiner's reflections present interesting reading, especially so for anyone attempting to construct hope from Christian resources. Here is one whose reading of tragic drama is profoundly, and somewhat old-fashionedly, realistic, thereby encouraging certain crossings of the relatively fluid borders between his reading of this literary genre and his more philosophical engagement in cultural and historical criticism. Indeed, the climax comes in the strong connection between Steiner's darkened Jewish consciousness and his bleak picture of existence, mediated through high Attic tragic drama, and to a great extent echoing the general philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Hence, pervading his oeuvre is a vision of the 'tragic', an understanding of existence's destructive potentialities informing the events of 'tragic drama' that raises complex issues of living in a hostile environment; the very legitimacy of hope itself; and of theology's place in lighting our way through this darkness. For it is in this tragic sensibility that Steiner leaves his reader gasping for some form of hope - one that is not provided, and whose potential shape he explicitly denies to Christian theology. As will be narrated later, when hope does lighten the mood it arrives in the form of a faint echo of the early Nietzschean account - artistic creativity and the act of reception of the aesthetic, particularly that of the act of reading. Herein is suggested certain possible ways of presenting a hope capable of facing the tragic vision. Hence he does not follow the nihilistic advocating of aesthetic silence in Adorno's stark admission of "No poetry after Auschwitz". Where Nietzsche's reflection particularly significantly recedes is in the fact that Steiner portrays this aesthetic and hermeneutic transcendence in theological colours. This sits uneasily alongside his presentation of the tragic vision, perhaps being an example of Steiner's own refusal of simple conceptual resolution. However, without providing any resolution to the problem of the tragic, it may be argued that in one sense this discontinuity need not be quite so pronounced since more careful attention to the complexity of the tragic dramas themselves could render this antithesis, along with a more modest claim concerning the incompatibility between the tragic vision and Christian hope, too simple.
- Subject
- George Steiner; tragedy; theology; hope
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1053591
- Identifier
- uon:15628
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781443841061
- Language
- eng
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