One of the more bizarre things about the book is that it sounds like it was written in 1925. His definition of art would lead directly to Gertrude Stein's "poetry"; his explication of the need to destroy the meanings of words to free the artist is a paraphrase of William Carlos Williams. He mentions Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Diderot, and Derrida, but only in passing (so far). His beliefs about language resembles TS Eliot's; his defense of it amounts to citing 19th-century French poets and early Wittgenstein. He never mentions that his definition of art and his theory of meaning are the same ones that led to post-modern art, which he never brings up even though the entire book seems to be aimed at discrediting post-modern art. He seems to be backing up to 1925 and trying to give neo-modernist theory a second go, only with Catholic mysticism this time, without citing the neo-modernists or admitting that post-modernism happened. Neither "modernism" nor "post-modernism" appear in the index. (Nothing at all appears in the index except for the names of artists, works of art, and critics, which tells you a lot about how Steiner thinks.)
His section on [modernism] begins, "We are, I believe, at present within a transformative, metamorphic process which began, rather abruptly, in Western Europe and Russia during the 1870s," and on p. 93 summarizes his discovery by saying, "It is my belief that this contract [that words can describe reality] is broken for the first time, in any thorough and consequent sense, in European, Central European and Russian culture and speculative consciousness during the decades from the 1870s to the 1930s. It is this break of the covenant between word and world which constitutes one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself" [emphasis his]. It is a textbook definition of modernism, yet he seems to be claiming it as his own discovery. Elsewhere he vomits references to prior works uncontrollably, yet in this section, while he continues citing at least one pre-1925 source per sentence, he cites no one past that date and gives no hint that anybody else has ever noticed this phenomenon.
His take on modernism is that it is the death of logocentrism. This is a common thing to say nowadays, and a concise interpretation of modernism. I don't think he originated that idea, either. It looks from Google like it was used this way by Tillich in 1926, Bergson in 1941, Maurelos in 1964, and Derrida in the 1970s, though I'm only looking at references to their works. Wikipedia says Ludwig Klages invented the term "logocentrism" in the 1920s.
If somebody had written it in 1925, it'd be in the public domain now, and could be legally ripped off.
But that couldn't actually be relevant, could it? I haven't read Klages. But if Klages or Tillich aren't being referenced, maybe their writing could be worth a comparison.
I'm reading George Steiner's 1989 book on literary theory, Real Presences. Steiner is a literary theorist who achieved the trifecta of having appointments at Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard. His book demonstrates an important Dark Arts method of argument.
So far, Steiner's argument appears to be:
The critics quoted on the back of the book, and its reviews on Amazon, praise Steiner's rigor and learning. It is impressive. Within a single paragraph he may show the relationship between Homer, 12th-century theological works, Racine, Shakespeare, and Schoenberg. And his care and precision with words is exemplary; I have the impression, even when he speaks of meaning in music or other qualia-laden subjects, that I know exactly what he means.
He was intelligent enough to trace the problems he was grappling with out past the edges of his domain of expertise. The key points of his argument lie not in literary theory, but in information theory, physics, artificial intelligence, computability theory, linguistics, and transfinite math.
Unfortunately, he knows almost nothing about any of those fields, and his language is precise enough to be wrong, which he is when he speaks on any of those subjects. How did he get away with it?
Answer: He took a two-page argument about things he knew little about, spread it across 200 pages, and filled the gaps with tangential statements of impressive rigor and thoroughness on things he was expert in.
For example, the first chapter discusses, with perhaps a hundred references, his opinion that the best art criticism is art made in response to art, his theory that good art is always derived from earlier art, and observations on the etymology of words; but most especially his consternation at the hundreds of thousands of articles, books, and talks on literature produced yearly by people who are not professors at Cambridge, Oxford, or Harvard. Then on page 36, he says,
I think this is the only sentence in the chapter that is a crucial part of his argument. But instead of engaging with the body of literature on what falsifiable means, whether human language is falsifiable in general (is "Ben is tall" falsifiable?), and what falsifiability has to do with the communication of information, Steiner lowlights this sentence with its syntactic simplicity, and nearly buries it in complex, learned sentences about Dante, Mozart, and hermeneutics. We dive back into litspeak, to emerge again into his argument on page 61:
Here one should ask: If human language is recursively enumerable, why don't people understand sentences generated by context-free grammars for English when they go past one level of recursion ("The mouse the cat the dog chased chased squeaked")? And doesn't "undecidable" mean "there exists at least one undecidable sentence" rather than "all sentences are undecidable"?
But one does not; one goes on to Steiner's opinions of Tolstoy's opinions of King Lear. It will be nearly another 20 pages before we hit the next key point in his argument, which relies on his not knowing that one can compute the sum of some infinite series. The bulk of the first 90 pages [1] is impressive displays of learning which fill in the vast spaces between the points (almost literally) of his argument.
Unless a reader pays close enough attention to catch these brief ventures outside Steiner's areas of expertise, he will come to the end of the book with (A) a summary of Steiner's argument, and (B) the strong impression that the statements in the book were learned and rigorous. And thus, the argument carries.
ADDED: After looking at the long section on the impossibility of meaning that begins around page 90, it seems Steiner is not trying to argue points 1 and 2 at all when he refers to them in chapters 1 and 2. He is merely foreshadowing. On p. 102-103 we reach the heart of his defense of points 1 and 2, which is to say "Wittgenstein said so." I'm afraid that, if I finish the book, I might find a better summary of the method here to be that the key points of his argument are defended only by appeals to authority.
[1] This pattern breaks down around page 90, where Steiner begins a long spiral into his central thesis.