The recent preoccupation of all thoughtful practitioners of the humanities with language is [Steiner's] preoccupation. Semantics, semiotics, psycho-linguistics, structuralist literary criticism: these are his concerns. These he orchestrates in his continuing effort to explain how human beings communicate and what their manner of communication does to the content and style of their minds. Always well informed about the latest turns of Western discourse, he gives us astute extrapolations, so that we may contemplate many consequences (or at least implications) of the ideas and words that color intellectual life today.

[On Difficulty and Other Essays] is apparently the residue of After Babel (1975). Most, if not all, of the eight chapters have appeared as articles; and they take up issues already addressed or hinted at in his earlier treatise. All communication, including "internal speech," is translation in some sense; and the human calamity symbolized by Babel is that we translate and communicate imperfectly. The specific lines of argument from After Babel that he elaborates here include: (1) Dante can be made accessible in our time; (2) explicit descriptions of sex (including deviant sex) in literature may damage fiction; (3) "relativist" (Whorfian) linguistics is necessarily superior to "universalist" (Chomskyan) linguistics especially in dealing with literature; and (4) not only the book but reading itself (as educated people have practiced it for centuries) may perish. (p. 356)

Steiner's handling of the split between words and things is revealing. He dismisses the slogan "Great literature is about LIFE" as a "Lawrentian chiché." Then he spends paragraphs defending those writers who, like himself, do not "stumble on experience raw." He prefers writers and thinkers who "live most intensely, most vulnerably, in the act of reading, in the shock of encounter with other poems, philosophic arguments, religious tracts…. It makes no sense in such cases to divide 'brute experience' from experience already 'booked'."

What Steiner does not want to recognize is that great literature appears when direct and vicarious experience become reciprocal. Men who spend their entire lives fighting wars or tilling fields or tending machines do not write books. Men and women who spend their entire lives reading in libraries may write many books but few classics. Great writing requires balance between direct and vicarious experience, and Steiner too readily tips the balance toward the latter, which magnifies the "bookishness" of literature and thus removes it from the marketplace, makes it the property of a privileged class of literati.

As he says, "In very large measure, most books are about previous books." This could not be truer of anyone than of Dante, Shakespeare, or Cervantes; yet what person (except a pedant) knows and loves these authors because of their sources?

Steiner is honest about his predicament. He seems convinced that reading is a dying art—his kind of reading. We no longer have the inclination or the leisure to give ourselves to books as he believes Dante did, in the "sense of utter self-bestowal and re-vision." The "anti-language" of Dadaism, the attenuations of logical positivism and Wittgenstein, the explosion of scientific jargon, and the debasement of language by politicians and ideologists: all cast doubt on the validity of language. This doubt spills into literature, undercutting its claim to be instructive and turning it into parody or verbal play. This in turn trivializes the act of reading. Who needs verbal onanism or records of aphasia?

The central plea in the book is that "we shall have to teach reading. We shall have to teach it from the humblest level of rectitude, the parsing of a sentence, the grammatical diagnosis of a proposition, the scanning of a line of verse, through its many layers of performative means and referential assumption, all the way to that ideal of complete collaboration between writer and reader as set out by Péguy…. We will, simply, have to create universities or schools for reading."

The trouble with Steiner's plea is that it is not persuasive. Why should we read Joyce, Eliot or Pound? If the reason is that they help civilize us by providing vital resonances from our cultural past, then yes that is valuable. But Steiner tells us they do not do this: "the many-layered structures of allusion which characterize their work are a ceremony of mourning for resources once naturally accessible to writer and reader in the contract of culture." Now all is twilight, decline and fall, nostalgia for a time when men of letters and aesthetes arbitrated culture for everyone. (pp. 357-58)

His concern for the "general reader" notwithstanding, he writes like an ultra-specialist, not to say a mandarin. Not only has his style grown convoluted in the Jamesian manner, his attitude toward efforts to improve education in democratic societies has gone negative….

To be sure, the prodigious subtleties that contemporary reading theory demands are alien to most citizens. To be sure, the decline in reading skills has crippled a generation of Americans by making great literature inaccessible.

But let us consider the (heretical) possibility that to some degree modern literature itself, not bad schools or too much TV, caused this. What if modern literature is like modern technology or modern ideology? What if it is filled with pollutants that may be harmful to our health? What if Beckett and DDT and KGB disinformation are somehow equivalent? Like Russians who do not believe a single word printed in the Soviet press; like Spaniards who proscribe all insecticides and herbicides; perhaps many people have closed their ears to the negations of Nerval, Rimbaud, Plath, Célan, and Berryman who Steiner believes deserve attention. Perhaps survival depends on eschewing the narcotic and profane that have become central qualities of modern literature. The "brutalization and profanation of the word" that Steiner deplores in the mass media and in modern politics may be enhanced not alleviated by modern letters.

As a "thinker of the unthinkable," Steiner ought to confront this possibility.

We must, however, respect Steiner's claim that this book contains "working papers" or "position papers" intended to be suggestive, not definitive. He wants to invite or provoke continued dialogue about issues that must be resolved for the sake of cultural sanity. He succeeds. Few things are as important as the future of reading, and Steiner's book can serve as an "armature" (to use his own favorite image) in discussions about literacy. Even when he seems silly (he alleges some link between Dante's Christian sense of Hell and "Nazi-Stalinist blood-sports"), he provokes thought. Thus he continues to perform the traditional role of Man of Letters. (p. 359)