After Babel  

"The Modernist movement which dominated art, music, letters during the first half of the century was, at critical points, a strategy of conservation, of custodianship. Stravinsky's genius developed through phases of recapitulation. He took from Machaut, Gesualdo, Monteverdi. He mimed Tchaikovsky and Gounod, the Beethoven piano sonatas, the symphonies of Haydn, the operas of Pergolesi and Glinka. He incorporated Debussy and Webern into his own idiom. In each instance the listener was meant to recognize the source, to grasp the intent of a transformation which left salient aspects of the original intact. The history of Picasso is marked by retrospection. The explicit variations on classical pastoral themes, the citations from and pastiches of Rembrandt, Goya, Velázquez, Manet, are external products of a constant revision, a 'seeing again' in the light of technical and cultural shifts. Had we only Picasso's sculptures, graphics, and paintings, we could reconstruct a fair portion of the development of the arts from the Minoan to Cézanne. In 20th-century literature, the elements of reprise have been obsessive, and they have organized precisely those texts which at first seemed most revolutionary. The Waste Land, Ulysses, Pound's Cantos are deliberate assemblages, in-gatherings of a cultural past felt to be in danger of dissolution. The long sequence of imitations, translations, masked quotations, and explicit historical paintings in Robert Lowell's History has carried the same technique into the 1970s. [...] In Modernism collage has been the representative device. The new, even at its most scandalous, has been set against an informing background and framework of tradition. Stravinsky, Picasso, Braque, Eliot, Joyce, Pound—the 'makers of the new'—have been neo-classics, often as observant of canonic precedent as their 17th-century forebears." --After Babel by George Steiner (1998), (pp. 489–490)

"Is there any set of circumstances, outside nuclear catastrophe, which could bring Hamlet or Othello into partial oblivion, which could reduce Shakespeare's work to the concern of a few specialists?

What is involved here is the retreat from the primacy of the word, of linguistic authority. It is by no means evident that civilization will produce in future those constructs of verbal, syntactic representation, or mimesis, which we find in Dante, Shakespeare, and Joyce. Simenon may be among the last to have taken an entire culture for his verbal canvas. If language, as we use it, were to lose part of its function and universality, the works of Shakespeare would become comprehensible only to a specialized caste of "interpreters." They would preserve their secret radiance; but the ordinary man might find them as difficult to decipher, as mute, as are the cavern paintings of Altamira." --After Babel by George Steiner