# In Bluebeard's Castle

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{{Short description|1971 book by George Steiner}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}
{{Infobox book 
| name          = In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture
| title_orig    = 
| translator    = 
| image         = File:In Bluebeard's Castle.jpg
| image_size    = 200
| caption       = Cover of the first edition
| author        = [George Steiner](/source/George_Steiner)
| illustrator   = 
| cover_artist  = 
| country       = United Kingdom
| language      = English
| series        = 
| subject       =
| published     = 1971 ([Faber and Faber](/source/Faber_and_Faber))
| media_type    = Print
| pages         = 154
| isbn          = 978-0300017106
| dewey=
| congress=
| oclc=
}}
'''''In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture''''' is a 1971 book by [George Steiner](/source/George_Steiner).

==Content==
''In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture'' is composed of four brief lectures by Steiner with interlocking themes, chiefly the fragmentation and dissolution of Western culture from the [French Revolution](/source/French_Revolution) onwards (particularly from the perspective of a perceived break with tradition, whether Jewish, Christian, Greek or Latin),<ref>{{cite web|title=In Bluebeard's Castle|url=http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300017106|website=Yale University Press|accessdate=12 July 2014}}</ref> with a meditation of what kind of future culture might develop over the course of time. It engages with one of Steiner's perennial concerns: that of the long-term ramifications of the Holocaust on our cultural values and cultural productions, and the questions that arise from it in terms of the growth and development of anti-semitism over time.<ref>{{cite web|last1=Siegel|first1=Lee|title=Our George Steiner Problem -- and Mine|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/books/review/Siegel-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0|website=The New York Times|accessdate=12 July 2014}}</ref> In Steiner's view, the existence of the Holocaust meant that the long trajectory of Western culture with roots in numerous different valuable sources such as [Periclean](/source/Pericles) Athens was effectively finished – a similar line of argument to that navigated in the 1967 work ''[Language and Silence](/source/Language_and_Silence)''.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Makaryk|first1=Irene Rima|title=Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms|date=1993|publisher=University of Toronto Press|isbn=080206860X|page=476|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CTJCiLG9AeoC&dq=Steiner+Bluebeard%27s&pg=PA476|accessdate=12 July 2014}}</ref>

Furthermore, in the work Steiner argues that the Holocaust was a kind of response or product of the Jews having provided Europe with conscience and, in a sense, a 'summons to perfection' which holds up to a vision of perfectibility which cannot be reached but which we cannot let go of either because of its "supreme value".<ref>{{cite book|last1=Kremer|first1=S. Lillian|title=Holocaust Literature: Lerner to Zychlinsky, index|date=2003|publisher=Taylor and Francis|isbn=0415929849|page=1212|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BAQ2VtfH3awC&dq=Steiner+Bluebeard%27s+conscience&pg=PA1212|accessdate=12 July 2014}}</ref>

The work cites a wide multiplicity of authors; chapter 4, "Tomorrow", for instance, begins with an extended analysis of the way in which the poem [Lycidas](/source/Lycidas) by [John Milton](/source/John_Milton) had become imbricated in wider culture.

The four lectures are titled as follows:

# "The Great [Ennui](/source/Ennui)"
# "A Season in Hell" (named after a [poem](/source/A_Season_in_Hell) by [Arthur Rimbaud](/source/Arthur_Rimbaud))
# "In A Post-Culture"
# "Tomorrow"

The work has provided a number of remarkable quotations.<ref>{{cite web|title=In Bluebeard's Castle|url=https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Steiner#In_Bluebeard.27s_Castle_.281971.29|website=Wikiquote|accessdate=12 July 2014}}</ref>

The themes explored by Steiner in this work were developed further in later writing, particularly in his controversial 1981 novella ''[The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.](/source/The_Portage_to_San_Cristobal_of_A.H.)''.

==See also==
*''[Bluebeard's Castle](/source/Bluebeard's_Castle)''

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
*[http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/Steiner71a/ In Bluebeard's Castle]

{{Authority control}}

Category:1971 non-fiction books
Category:Books by George Steiner
Category:British non-fiction books

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