Lessons of the Masters (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) [ペーパーバック]

Let's get some things on the table. George Steiner can infuriate any reader. The sheer depth and scope of his reading can intimidate. He is opinionated, and often blunt about it: "Our heritage in the west is that of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome...Our alphabet of recognition is that developed by "dead white males." He finds inspiration in places that are simply not located on the maps that most of us use: "Today," he notes in passing, "only the classicist and the medievalist know of Stratius." (One wants to add, "yes, both of them.") Here's what you need to do: Completely set all of that aside and delve into Lessons of the Masters. I have never read a book that so accurately managed to explore the complex dynamics involved in the teacher/student relationship. And not just those relationships as maniffested in the standard classroom that readily comes to mind, but in the music conservatory (see the section on Natalie Boulanger) and the football field (see his discussion of Knute Rockne). Even Judas, whose betrayal will once again be under the micro-scope given Mel Gibson's forthcoming film, is explained in the master/disciple context -- a "flawed love for his master, a desire to be singled out..."

Steiner, almost alone as far as I can tell, has dared to account for the impulses toward fidelity, trust, seduction and betrayal in teaching and apprenticeship. "There is," Mr. Steiner maintains, "no craft more privileged than teaching." Mr. Steiner must have been a master teacher, if this book is any indication. Oh, to have been alive at that seminar....

George Steiner's tumultuous life spans several countries and continents. As he notes, "in the life of the mind, the English Channel looks oceanic". If Great Britain and the continent are separated by an ocean, France and the United States are worlds apart. Nowhere is this distance more apparent than in the way these two nations honor and celebrate "Masters of thought", the literal translation of the French "matres à penser". Ingrained in French self-representation is a bias to the monumental, to the hierarchical, to the prescriptive which legitimizes the figure and function of the Matre. To a degree unusual in Europe, French civilitas preserves its commitment to rhetoric, to forensic eloquence, to the cultivation of the oratorical. This "inebriation with the spoken word" links France with ancient Greece, and this direct connection is acted out on a daily basis in the philosophy classes that remain part of compulsory secondary education.

One figure epitomizes the Socratic figure of the French high school professor of philosophy: the philosopher Alain, who served as professor of rhetoric at the Lyce Henri-IV from 1909 until 1933 and who had a profound influence on the thinking of a generation of French intellectuals. As Steiner notes, the very name of Alain is virtually unknown in the Anglo-American world, and hardly any of his writings has been translated. By contrast, they are constantly reedited in France, and generations of lycéens and lycéennes regularly use them in conjunction with Plato's dialogues as their first exposure to philosophy.

Convinced that secondary education matters more than any other, Alain refused both the Sorbonne and the laurels of the French Academy. His last class was so crowded with illustrious officialdom that Alain returned once more to teach "seriously" two days later. In his collection of personal observations, short texts published as Propos but which resonate with the echoes of his teaching voice, he expresses the view that it is the shaping of the young, indeed of the child, which will determine the health of the body politic of a nation. True to his rural Normandy origins, he believed that the supreme moral rule is "ne pas réussir", to abstain from success in a world in which "success" ineluctably entails compromise and an exaggeration of one's own achievements.

By contrast, the idea of a "master in thinking matters" goes against the American grain, where the freedom of the individual stands supreme. The context of formalities, the explicit clerisy and magisterium inherent in European culture, the social prestige of the intellect outside any economic reward are, at best, marginal to the American enterprise. The figure that comes closest to that of the Socratic pedagogue is the sports coach, and in the hall of fame of American football, that discipline which is so dependent on the coach, Knute Rockne, director of athletics at Notre Dame during the first decades of the twentieth century, established a peerless record. Another iconic figure that Steiner adds to his eclectic record is the French music educator Nadia Boulanger, who taught many of the most important composers and conductors of the 20th century and whose imprint on American students was so great that she may be credited with the invention of American classical music as a genre.

In his writings, George Steiner dismisses popular interpretations of Freud, where the son wants to kill his father and sleep with his mother. But he is convinced that the relationship between Master and disciples, between teachers and pupils, is erotic by nature or, to be more precise, homoerotic. This is a theme he revisits constantly in his Lessons of the Masters: "Eroticism, covert or declared, fantasized or enacted, is inwoven in teaching, in the phenomenology of mastery and discipleship...Teaching and learning are informed by an otherwise inexpressible sexuality in the human soul...The erotic sway available for the magister, the sexual temptations exhibited, consciously or not, by the pupil, polarize the pedagogic relation."

The idea of a "pedagogic eros", of a homoerotic bond between Masters and disciples, is a well-known ploy in the intellectual trick bag of philosophy professors. Generations of students have smiled knowingly to the doubles ententes, the allusive references and learned clichés of manipulative professors, who use feelings and emotions as a substitute to reason and argumentation. For the allusion to the homoerotic practices of ancient Greece and classical Rome is, of course, never direct and plays with the connivance that abusive masters try to establish with their complacent public. The aim of sexually-laden references to Socratic pedagogy is not to understand the cultural differences between Plato's time and our own, or to investigate the multiple dimensions of sexual identity, but to unite the speaker and his audience in their shared adoration of common literary tropes.

George Steiner, otherwise independently minded, falls into this trap when he emphasizes the erotic dimension of the teacher/pupil relation. He resorts to emotions and sublimity to characterize the pedagogic relation: "Even consummate bodily possession is a small thing compared with the fearsome laying of hands on the quick of another human being, on its unfolding, implicit in teaching." Instead of explaining what he means by this reference to the most personal and sensitive aspect of our emotions, or how to defuse the charge inherent in such a relationship, he repeats the formula, which manifestly pleases himself: "To teach seriously is to lay hands on what is most vital in a human being. It is to seek access to the quick and the innermost of a child's or an adult's integrity." According to Steiner, the teaching relationship is always threatened by the twin risk of the Master's destruction of his disciple, or of the disciple's betrayal and usurpation of the Master. He dismisses attempts to expurge the classroom from abusive power struggles as "strains of Puritanism, of legalism, endemic in American history". And he uses the reference to Antinous in contemporary poetry as a "cipher" for all but the highly literate.

Alain, for one, would have disagreed. He was convinced that the relation between a Master and his disciple does not always end in betrayal or destruction. He believed that reason, rather than emotions, was to preside over the transmission of knowledge, and that a democratic society was based on pedagogical foundations and that schools were the cornerstone of the republican pact. This lesson from one particular master failed to be heard.

A George Steiner book presents a certain source of excitement for me. This book collects the Norton Lectures Steiner gave on the relations between master and student, master and matter mastered, and masters and their ability to transmit mastery. Steiner's favorite familiar players Plato, Dante, Heidegger, Celan and Pessoa take various turns throughout the excogitations. The first two chapters, one on Plato and the other on Faustus, provided me with the most joy. I felt an odd sense of disenchantment in the chapter on native grounds, in which Steiner dissipates his energy on the American scene by discussing Knute Rockne and American football. This collection is necessarily selective. I imagine many others, though few as capable, would have chosen different masters and other relationships to discuss fruitfully. Steiner proclaims the essential validity of the face to face relations that can occur in a paedagogic setting of any sort and ubiquity of some form of erotics among the involved. Curious in their extended absences from the text are heroes Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound who did much to teach at least one generation writing.