Necessary Fictions, Real Presences

Abstract

George Steiner in his subtle and richly suggestive essay, Real Presences, sees in the origins of modernism a breaking of the covenant between word and world which he regards as the significant characteristic of the decades following 1870. For Steiner, this sundering of continuities constitutes ‘one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history’. Mallarmé and Rimbaud represent the beginnings of a genuinely new aesthetic, ‘a parting of the semantic ways’. Before this time, he argues, we could have presumed upon a logocentric order, a Logos-aesthetic, which included the assumption of correspondence, understood as something ‘strictly inseparable from the postulate of theological-metaphysical transcendence’. Such a world presupposes ‘real presence’.While there is much to appeal in this argument, I wonder whether the Christian tradition has always had a more healthy suspicion of the innocent collusion of word and world than Steiner allows. The monist ontology at which Steiner hints does not allow for the rich sense of mystery that confronts us in the world of which we are a part: things as things stand over against us, ultimately unfathomable. There are aspects of the Nominalist agenda deeply rooted in the Christian tradition and rightly so. We come to what is real by way of the particular. Steiner, of course, is far from unmindful of this and comments with some force:The arts are most,wonderfully rooted in substance, in the human body, in stone, in pigment, in the twanging of gut or weight of wind on reeds. All good art and literature begin in immanence.