The Price Tag on Our Dreams : PROOFS And Three Parables, <i> By George Steiner (Penguin: $10, paper; 112 pp.)</i>

Readers of the Times Literary Supplement and the New Yorker know George Steiner from his memorable reviews and articles, but his international reputation derives from his brilliant essays and monographs, which began to appear in the late 1950s and then came, with breathtaking regularity, over the next three decades. The collections “Language and Silence,” “Extraterritorial,” and “On Difficulty and Other Essays” contain the major essays and serve as the best introduction to this appealing author. The monographs represent one of this century’s major contributions to literary criticism and, more broadly, to the study of culture. “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky,” “The Death of Tragedy,” and “After Babel” are classics, but my favorite is Steiner’s tour de force, “In Bluebeard’s Castle,” an impassioned plea to consider the consequences of a spreading cultural amnesia.

If, however, one were in search of a more accessible entree into the mind of this complex writer, his most recent offering might satisfy. The title story in “Proofs and Three Parables,” this year’s recipient of Britain’s MacMillan Silver Pen Award for Fiction, functions above all as a marvelous precis of Steiner’s intellectual preoccupations.

“Proofs” begins as a brooding meditation on the part of a proof-reader who suffers from having been ostracized by the Italian Communist Party for disloyalty following the Soviet intervention in Prague (“The loneliness of that hour branded him irreparably”). The story develops, however, into a sustained and often hilarious debate between himself and his old friend, Father Carlo Tessone, on the meaning of life in a post-communist world.

What sustains the argument, besides Steiner’s elegantly wrought prose, is their shared view that this is not the sort of life either one of them had hoped for. “Not for this!” the proof-reader hears himself saying, only to have Father Carlo point out the irony of the proof-reader’s discomfort:

“Careful, professore . That’s been (the church’s) line. Not for this world. Not for the filth and lucre and beatings of this life. There must be something better. Since that day when they drove the nails into his hands and feet. There just had to be something beyond bread and circuses.”

Although the proof-reader and Father Carlo agree that a profound impatience lies at the heart of both Socialism and early Christianity (“Impatience ran wild in Jesus”), the good Father denounces what he calls “the central, axiomatic lie” of communism--that is, the promise of “a release from servitude here and now.” He rants at the Soviet commissars for their willingness to cram their values down mankind’s throat:

“For 70 measureless years that perversion made human beings tremble in their rooms like trapped animals, rewrote history according to the lunatic whims of the despot, rubbed out the names of the executed and the banished as that memory itself--memory, professore --would be emptied of truth, like a garbage-bin.”

It is a familiar recitation, to be sure, but what makes Father Carlo’s words fly is the force of the professore ‘s rebuttal. Steiner has given to the proof-reader more than rhetorical gifts; he has created a tormented individual who calls for a re-evaluation of the underpinnings of our consumer-oriented society:

“That is the very genius of capitalism: to package, to put a price-tag on men’s dreams. Never to value us beyond our mediocrity. Ladies and gentlemen, the escalator awaits you. We are moving upward together. Towards better sun-tan lotions, towards a faster lawn-mower, to the deep-freeze of your wild dreams and the stereo and white telephone next to the toilet seat. Hold on: The Holy Grail of cable-pornography for all is in sight. Look: There is the promised land, Disney-world for all.”

The words Steiner gives to Father Carlo cannot match more ardent critics of the Soviet regime such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, nor do the proof-reader’s insights carry us beyond the past few decades of social commentary on the deficiencies of capitalism, but as their debate grows more heated, along with the verbal fireworks emerges an argument which deepens our understanding of the promise of materialism which, surprisingly, may have a transcendent dimension after all. Father Carlo looks beneath the shallowness of our little comforts and finds something worth celebrating:

“The tidal wave across the Berlin Wall and all the way to Prague and the Pacific is screaming with life. It is the insurrection of the young, even when they are 80 years old. Your dogma, your tyranny of the ideal, pumped youth out of human lives. Under despotism children are born old. Just look at their eyes and mouths in those pictures from Romania. And if America is childish, as it may be, what a lucky failing that is! Fountain of Youth? What he found may be Coca-Cola. But it does bubble!”

Some readers, no doubt, will take comfort in the Father’s eccentric defense of the good life. The author’s allegiance, however, belongs elsewhere--not, certainly, with the promise of the hammer and sickle; but neither is it with those who worship at the shrine of the golden arches. The author speaks instead through the proof-reader when he delivers his impassioned defense of the utopian impulse, of tradition, standards of perfection, and of the belief that human beings are ennobled by the effort to improve themselves:

“Every little step forward is made of sweat and mutiny until the insight is won, until the craft is mastered. No one has ever learned or achieved anything worth having without being stretched beyond themselves, till their bones crack. ‘Easy does it,’ says America to mankind. But easy has never done it. Never. I don’t want to know how long it takes to produce a bottle of Coca-Cola or an instant hamburger or a tranquilizer.”

While Father Carlo delights in the promises of the new age, “Proofs” resonates because Steiner has succeeded in creating a character who is able to articulate what many of us only vaguely sense: namely, the superfluousness of the individual in our time and one’s increasing belief that this world no longer cares for the distinction between things done well and those merely completed. Although the proof-reader finally decides how to escape his dilemma, the reader is left to wonder how the rest of us will fare.

In the remaining pages of this slim volume, the author has chosen to include three parables, which playfully capture the essence of his deeper concerns: “Desert Island Discs” touches on Steiner’s preoccupation with the notion of cultural artifacts and his fascination with and love for music. “Noel, Noel,” too, is rich in references to sound, to listening, and to the magic of human memory, while “A Conversation Piece” invites the reader to consider the moral implications of God’s request that Abraham sacrifice his own son Isaac.

Each tale is a celebration of the human gift of speech, of music, hearing, and of the burden of listening. While reading this book, one may feel, at times, like a child visiting grandma’s house--there is a bit of the old-world about Steiner--but one will also feel rewarded by the pleasure of good company. Steiner reminds us how much and yet how very little of our fragile civilization remains. He goes a long way toward showing, should anyone be in doubt, why what remains is worth preserving. While few contemporary authors could persuade us of that, Steiner provides the proof.