[Steiner's themes in Language and Silence] are established in the first two sections, which fill nearly 200 pages and might really have been used, with a select sprinkling of the other items, to make a more tightly argued book. The problems set out there are important, often disturbing and largely neglected ones, and it is part of the author's unique merits as a critic that he keeps them always in the forefront of his mind. His concern is with language as the richest and closest expression of the human community at any given time or place—hence his interest in Lévi-Strauss, who treats human activities as analogous to language—and particularly with those instances where he feels that language has been pressed to its utter limits. The writers who are most congenial to him are those who have struggled, whether with an unfamiliar or previously inaccessible culture or with the devaluation of language and the "suicidal rhetoric of silence". This is a matter both of intellectual sympathy and of inheritance: the tradition to which he adheres is the tragically vanished one of the central European thinkers, writers and composers of the hundred years which ended in 1933.

One way and another, in his view, the word has been pushed into a corner; non-verbal forms of discourse have taken over so many fields where writing once reigned supreme. The same with the novel, thanks to the ending of the old middle-class way of life, the decline of reading aloud and the predominance of new forms of entertainment. There are areas of thought and feeling beyond language's reach, as Wittgenstein suggested at the end of the Tractatus. There is also the terrible cloud that has been cast over language and literature by the actions of a thoroughly literate and cultured people between 1933 and 1945. This bears doubly on the critic: first there is the need to expose all such dehumanization of the word—which is put forward as the book's underlying theme—and secondly the changed sense of proportion and perspective that it must give to any concern with literature, however ancient or academic. The proof of this bitter but quite unstodgy pudding is in the essays on the classics; repeatedly Dr. Steiner illuminates them and brings them to life.

The title of the book comes to represent the rival temptations, the rival pulls which he feels. On the one hand he is fascinated by the mechanics of language, while he likes that language rich, a predilection which leads at times to a certain rhetoric in his own prose. On the other he not only knows that there are situations where the writer would do better to shut up; he is also well enough versed in music, mathematics and the sciences to know that there are great, in many ways more satisfying, worlds of non-verbal expression. The tension which this inner conflict brings to his general argument can be observed in his ambiguous attitude to the prospect of a literature falling silent; he hates it, and yet when he comes on the possibility in McLuhan he finds the idea "Blakeian". Again, it takes a very strong counter-emotion to make so deeply literary a writer produce an essay like "Night Words". In this meditation on M. Girodias's Olympia Reader,… he condemns pornography and the "advocates of total frankness" not just because writing of this sort is so often bad and boring but for its infringement of private feeling and its contempt for language and humanity; two features which relate it to the black cloud of the concentration camps.

Dr. Steiner thus has a passion and a courage unusual in a critic; he has also an exceptionally wide range of knowledge and a familiarity with other literatures, languages and bodies of ideas that must be unique in university teachers of English. At his own university he can see in Dr. Leavis what he himself certainly aims at too, the exercising of criticism as "an act of pivotal social intelligence", but that does not stop him from remarking Leavis's "resolute provincialism" and failure to deal with the writing of today, and the Leavis idea of Eng. Lit. as a "central humanity" is one that he questions in the light of the German experience. His attitude to the Marxists is likewise a mixed one; they too use criticism as a pivot for trying to lever us into a better posture, they take literature desperately seriously, they aim to be polymathic and they spring from the tradition to which he himself feels closest. He is obviously interested by them, and yet what he has to say about them is not very subtle, partly because there is too much that he ignores—the background to Lenin's remarks on "party literature", for instance, or the use made by the Stalinists of the liberal limitations—and partly because he draws too clean-cut a line between the "para-Marxists" (such as Lukács, Goldmann, Adorno) and those apparently still in the fold. He speaks of Marxist orthodoxy as if it were rigid and unchanging, and so close-fitting that when men like Aragon or Becher disappear inside it nothing is left sticking out.

Altogether we are lucky to have him here and he could almost become a counterpart to McLuhan, with whom he shares a publication date and whom he was one of the first critics in England to understand. It is not just that they have certain common virtues: the confidence of their convictions, a delight in words, a certain mistrust (surely reciprocated) of the Eng. Lit. establishment, an unusual awareness of the sciences and of society. They also seem in their different ways to be observing overlapping aspects of the same situation. For Steiner is extremely conscious of what he calls "the retreat from the word", of the reality that lies outside verbal language and of the "naive logic and linear conception of time implicit in syntax". Like McLuhan he feels that identity may in future merge in collectivity; he sees too a hope of something like the "global village", though without anything like the same steam-rolling optimism; one of his sudden brilliant clarifications—for he too may provide them at any point and on any topic—is that the Jews can contribute to this by reminding us all that "whereas trees have roots, men have legs and are each other's guests".

But where McLuhan is a renegade Eng. Lit. man, using his (more or less monoglot) learning for ventures far outside his academic field, Steiner wants literature, with a full sense of the pressures on it, to be at the centre of his argument; moreover, his view of literature itself is a wider one, spreading evenly over the French and American traditions as well as those of England and central Europe. Undoubtedly this has put him so far in an isolated position, as he himself feels. Lacking McLuhan's jazzy angularity, his love of a joke and his inquisitive concern with the lowbrow, he also seems to share nothing of his infectious utopianism. "We come after", he insists, with a look upwards at the clouds that he still sees in the air. Perfectly true, and he does a necessary if not always popular job by reminding this island of the fact. All the same, it is perhaps a pity that so splendidly equipped a writer should not be using the same understanding and the same concern with the recent past to make readers look more often at what comes with and after us. It could well be different if he develops the comprehensive philosophy of language towards which a good part of his book moves. But as it stands, much the least interesting section of it is that which deals with imaginative writing now.