Too Clever by Half

In Bluebeard’s Castle. Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture By George Steiner

Yale, 141 pp., $5.95 Mr. Steiner’s “T. S. Eliot Lectures” for 1971 return us, we are told, to issues posed by Eliot in his 1948 Notes towards the Definition of Culture. As far as I can make out, Mr. Steiner’s problems arise from the barbarism of our century, on which Eliot had almost nothing to say. Steiner has a great deal to say about it in a tone of sustained eloquence, while seemingly presenting a causal account of its origin. I say, “as far as I can say,” and “seemingly,” because protracted effort to get past the eloquent fuzz to the warp of the argument was not altogether successful. It is possible that a more perspicuous mind will find a strong thread running through the argument where I found only a number of loose, thin, discontinuous threads.

EV

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Eliseo Vivas

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In Bluebeard’s Castle. Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture By George Steiner

Yale, 141 pp., $5.95 Mr. Steiner’s “T. S. Eliot Lectures” for 1971 return us, we are told, to issues posed by Eliot in his 1948 Notes towards the Definition of Culture. As far as I can make out, Mr. Steiner’s problems arise from the barbarism of our century, on which Eliot had almost nothing to say. Steiner has a great deal to say about it in a tone of sustained eloquence, while seemingly presenting a causal account of its origin. I say, “as far as I can say,” and “seemingly,” because protracted effort to get past the eloquent fuzz to the warp of the argument was not altogether successful. It is possible that a more perspicuous mind will find a strong thread running through the argument where I found only a number of loose, thin, discontinuous threads.