The Ritual of New Creation (33 page)

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silence and a clerical devotion to the witnessing work of those who were there. Even Steiner himself, "a kind of survivor," can only produce acts of remembrance, a
kaddish
(this is how he will come to regard "Lieber's Lament" from
The Portage
as well). But
In Bluebeard's Castle
(1971) represents a shift in perspective. Brooding once again upon the Holocaust, Steiner declares that "I am not sure whether anyone, however scrupulous, who spends time and imaginative resources on these dark places can or, indeed, ought to leave them personally intact. Yet the dark places are at the center. Pass them by and there can be no serious discussion of the human potential."
³⁷He then launches into his controversial psychotheological hypothesis, parts of which are then woven into the fiction of
The Portage
some years later. The continuum from silence and remembrance through exposition and speculation to literary representation is thus shot through with reversals and revisionsbut this is in no way meant as criticism. If we are indeed fascinated, perhaps even corrupted by what constitutes for Steiner ''a second Fall," then we must struggle against the existential burden of post-Holocaust life with every means at our disposal.

Steiner's pervasive sense that the Holocaust is both the culmination of a historical dialectic and the hellish entrance into our contemporary time of the "after-Word" is best explained in
In Bluebeard's Castle
. He hypothesizes that the original "invention" of monotheism and its adoption by the Jews proved to be an intolerable affront and challenge to Western civilization, secure in the natural immanence of polytheism and animism. Totally abstract, absolutely without image, and utterly dedicated to the Sinaic concept of justice, the God of Moses, once revealed, refused to be denied:

To all but a very few the Mosaic God has been from the outset, even when passionately invoked, an immeasurable Absence, or a metaphor modulating downward to the natural sphere of poetic imagistic approximation. But the exaction stays in forceimmense, relentless. It hammers at human consciousness, demanding that it transcend itself, that it reach out into a light of understanding so pure that it is itself blinding. We turn back into grossness, and what is more important, into self-reproach.
³⁸

As history takes its course, this Jewish ideal is revised twice, each time with no less sense of the absolute: in primitive Christianity,

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with its insistence on "sacrificial self-denial," and in messianic socialism, with its "magnetic" dream of utopian plenitude. In each case, abstract, implacable justice serves as the guiding principle. As Steiner says, ''Unceasingly, the blackmail of perfection has hammered at the confused, mundane, egotistical fabric of common, instinctual behavior."
³⁹And when the essentially Jewish demand for perfection upon the consciousness of the West grew unbearable,

Deep loathing built up in the social subconscious, murderous resentments. The mechanism is simple but primordial.
We hate most those who hold out to us a goal, an ideal, a visionary promise which, even though we have stretched our muscles to the utmost, we cannot reach, which slips, again and again, just out of range of our racked fingersyet, and this is crucial, which remains profoundly desirable, which we cannot reject because we fully acknowledge its supreme value
. In his exasperating "strangeness," in his acceptance of suffering as part of a covenant with the absolute, the Jew became, as it were, the "bad conscience of Western history."
⁴⁰

The result is not merely the death of God, but the attempted annihilation of His people"an attempt to level the futureor, more precisely, to make history commensurate with the natural savageries, intellectual torpor, and material instincts of unextended man."
⁴¹Hell, long envisioned in graphic detail by the Western imagination, is made manifest in the camps.

This awful, elegant theory demonstrates Steiner's messianism to the fullest extent. Steiner chooses to label the Holocaust a second Fall, but the aura that surrounds his meditation is surely apocalyptic. For the earlier generation of Jewish messianists, apocalypse, with its "complete destruction and negation of the old order," produces "a quantum leap from present to future, from exile to freedom."
⁴²But Steiner, following after and attempting to explain the Holocaust, perceives an apocalypse that has gone terribly awry: destruction and negation have not cleansed civilization (as would be the case in an idealized Marxist revolution) but have besmirched it. Apocalyptic violence does not usher in utopia but signifies an atavistic return of primal brutality, what in theological terms could only be considered total corruption and sin. Instead of a rupture with profane history, a clean break with the past, humanity fails the test of transcendence, and history, a long passage of spiritual suppuration interspersed with unbearable ethical

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demands, discharges its vile load. And because we can now accept the catastrophic fact that human nature is capable of
anything
(a concept which has horrified and outraged Steiner throughout his career), we cannot build a New Jerusalem, but must face, rather, the interminable banality, the permanent decline, of life in a "post-culture."

We are now in a position to consider
The Portage
as the most recent stage (I hesitate to say the last) of Steiner's long engagement with the inhuman. A great deal has already been written about the novel, and I do not propose to offer here a complete interpretation of the text. Rather, my concern is with the terms of the debate which have arisen over the work and their significance to my reading of Steiner's vision of Judaism and Western culture.

The argument must be carefully framed. Those who have attacked
The Portage
complain that Steiner's manipulation of ideas in key passages (including those from his own essays), culminating in Hitler's speech, produces moral ambiguity if not actual excuses for Nazi anti-Semitism. The fact that Hitler has "the last word" in the text especially frustrates these critics. As Alvin Rosenfeld says, "To close the novel on this note is to succumb, rhetorically, to the seductive eloquence of negation, a closure that appeals to the very same instincts courted with such devastating effect by Hitler himself."
⁴³On the other hand, Robert Boyers contends that most critics read
The Portage
as an expository presentation of ideas and fail to comprehend it as a work of fiction. According to Boyers, we must remember

to consider the structure of the narrative, the way in which certain characters are so placed as to challenge, or at least implicitly compromise, the assertions of others, the way in which the irony worksto frame and set a limit to the dizzier philosophical ruminations that otherwise dominate the novel. The ideas expressed in
The Portage
are not, after all, what they would be, what indeed they are, in the pages of various critical and philosophical works. They are not espoused but presented as a part of the material the novelist wishes to bring before us. Nowhere does the novel forget that it is a novel, and nowhere does it instruct us to read as if the ideas were themselves both object and motive of the narrative.
⁴⁴

Boyers's sensitivity to matters of form serves as an important corrective to those readers who, when confronted with a novel of ideas, immediately transfer moral and political attitudes from the aesthetic

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