{"id":5459,"date":"2009-11-11T20:39:47","date_gmt":"2009-11-12T00:39:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=5459"},"modified":"2009-11-11T20:39:47","modified_gmt":"2009-11-12T00:39:47","slug":"robert-alter-and-the-bible-a-response-to-joseph-adamson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/11\/11\/robert-alter-and-the-bible-a-response-to-joseph-adamson\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Alter and the Bible: A Response to Joseph Adamson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"torah8hu\"\u00a0<\/p>\n

Following Joe\u2019s critique of Alter<\/a>, I too went back to Alter\u2019s essay \u201cNorthrop Frye between Archetype and Typology.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019ll begin with the conclusion to Joe\u2019s post, where he writes that \u201cAlter simply wants nothing to do with the imaginative element, with metaphor or myth in the Bible, or if it must be admitted, since it is everywhere, only as a kind of rhetorical ornamentation that is easily hedged in by a crabbed and mean-spirited descriptivism.\u201d\u00a0 I agree that Alter wants to distance himself from Frye\u2019s way of reading the Bible \u2013 for reasons that I will get to later \u2013 but I find in his work a powerful response to the imaginative element in the Bible.\u00a0 It\u2019s just that for Alter this element exhibits itself in difference rather than identity, and in particulars rather than typological categories.\u00a0 Alter ends his essay by saying that \u201cThe revelatory power of the literary imagination manifests itself in the intricate weave of details of each individual text.\u201d\u00a0 Going back to Joe\u2019s conclusion, I would also dispute the adjectives \u201ccrabbed and mean-spirited\u201d; Alter reads the Bible as a work of great literature, a revelation of what it means to be human, and an exploration of the way that human lives are embedded in history.\u00a0 I regard Alter as a major humanist critic, not someone I would put on the same level as Frye, but certainly a literary scholar and critic whom I find in many ways exemplary.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To reiterate a point I made in an earlier post, when teaching the Bible and literature I set up a dialectic between the approaches of Alter and Frye.\u00a0 For me, both are necessary.\u00a0 In looking at Milton, or aspects of Shakespeare, Frye\u2019s visionary-typological approach is a powerful way of seeing what these poets have done imaginatively with the Bible.\u00a0 On the other hand, in discussing the novel, which in the English tradition at least is profoundly grounded in the Bible, Alter\u2019s commentaries on the Hebrew Bible are an invaluable resource, as of course they are in considering the literary qualities of the Hebrew Bible itself.\u00a0 Not only do the two critics have divergent ways of reading, but for pedagogical purposes it is useful that one of them writes out of a Christian tradition and the other from a Jewish tradition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I have a vivid memory of Alter\u2019s paper at the Frye and the Word conference: for me it had the kind of lucid authority that makes you feel you are in the presence of an exceptional scholar.\u00a0 (You can see him lecturing for yourself here<\/a>.)\u00a0 That conference took place as I was getting ready to teach my course on the Bible and Literature for the first time, and I was therefore especially attentive when Alan Mendelsohn, in his introduction to Alter\u2019s lecture, praised Alter\u2019s translation of the book of Genesis for opening up dramatically new perspectives on that text.\u00a0 In teaching the course, I have found Mendelsohn\u2019s recommendation to be exactly right: Alter\u2019s commentary reveals countless complexities and subtleties in the text of the Hebrew Bible, which with his knowledge of the European literary tradition he is often able to relate to later literary developments.\u00a0 (He has since translated the two books of Samuel, the whole of the Torah, and the Psalms.)\u00a0 I was even inspired by reading these commentaries to start learning Hebrew, in spite of the fact that I am not very adept with foreign languages.\u00a0 Thus through the long hot summer of 2006, I spent several hours a week sitting down with a handful of undergraduates less than half my age, under the guidance of Wendell Eisener, a religious studies professor at Saint Mary\u2019s who most kindly let me sit in on his class.\u00a0 I would not claim to be a Hebrew scholar as a result, but I learned enough to start to see how the language works and to be able to use reference tools.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Joe points out some of Alter\u2019s negative language towards Frye, and I think that this language indicates a certain degree of anxiety.\u00a0 At least twice, Alter uses the word \u201cbeguiling\u201d to characterize Frye\u2019s method of reading the Bible.\u00a0 This word now has the primary meaning of \u201ccharming,\u201d or \u201cdiverting attention in a pleasant way,\u201d but it also retains the sense embodied in the root guile<\/em> of \u201cdeluding, entangling with guile.\u201d\u00a0 Alter is clearly aware of, and wary of, the seductive power of Frye\u2019s way of reading the Bible, which he notes is not merely a practice of worldly criticism but something that includes \u201ca certain homiletic touch.\u201d And Alter does acknowledge that the mythological way of reading exemplified by The Great Code<\/em> is an appropriate description of the way that many poets in the Christian tradition have read the Bible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So what is Robert Alter\u2019s problem with Northrop Frye?\u00a0 Put simply, I would guess that it is the fact that The Great Code<\/em> is addressed to a diverse community of readers and critics, not to a specifically Christian audience, yet it makes assumptions about the Bible that are those of an evangelical Christian, even if it does not make the dogmatic assumptions that an evangelical would.\u00a0 It is interesting to note how similar some of the study notes in the fundamentalist favourite, The Old Scofield Study Bible<\/em> (1917), are to points that Frye makes in The Great Code<\/em>, e.g. (from Scofield), \u201cThe revelation of Deity in the N.T. so illuminates that of the O.T. that the latter is seen to be, from Genesis to Malachi, the foreshadowing of the coming incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.\u201d\u00a0 For the evangelical Christian the Bible is a unity, an inspired text in which each verse is the expression of the word of God.\u00a0 Frye\u2019s Bible similarly is that large bound book of the Protestant evangelical tradition.\u00a0 But in earlier Catholic tradition the Bible was not quite such a coherent text: for one thing before the invention of printing it wasn\u2019t always bound together in one book, and there was ambiguity about the status of the deuterocanonical books, or apocrypha, while in the Jewish tradition the Bible is historically a collection of scrolls, rather than a codex, so that even as a material artifact it is not a unity in the same way as the Christian Bible, and it is divided into parts, from among which the Torah has the greatest authority.\u00a0 Hence Alter\u2019s comment that \u201cthe beastly sea god Yamm is confined within the cage of imagery of Psalms, Isaiah, and Job, but, given the monotheistic scruples of the Hebrew writers, he is not allowed to become a part of the real plot of the biblical books.\u201d\u00a0 Responding to Joe\u2019s point, these are books from the Prophets and the Writings, and not the Torah, while the word \u201ccaged\u201d I think is simply a joke turning the \u201cbeastly\u201d Yamm into a zoo animal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the end of Alter\u2019s essay he reveals what may be his most fundamental objection to The Great Code<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The Bible, as a set of foundational texts for Western literature, is an exemplary case for the fate of reading.\u00a0 Through centuries of Christian supersessionism, Hebrew scripture was systematically detached from the shifting complications of its densely particular realizations so that it could be seen as a flickering adumbration of the Gospels that were understood to fulfil it.\u00a0 This is hardly a reading practice we want to revive, either for the Bible or for secular literature.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Typology was the dominant way that Christians read the Bible for much of the Christian era, and there is certainly nothing wrong with explicating this as a means of understanding the Bible\u2019s relationship to the literature of that era.\u00a0 And in discourse addressed to a specifically Christian audience, the resources of typology seem to me still a valid approach to the Bible.\u00a0 The problem with The Great Code<\/em> is that it is addressed to a much broader audience.<\/p>\n

I think it is a valid criticism of The Great Code<\/em>, though I wouldn\u2019t make it as vehemently as some have done, that Frye does not sufficiently acknowledge the alternative perspective of Judaism.\u00a0 Even on the occasions when he does do this, his references can be problematic.\u00a0 For example, \u201cIn the Hebrew arrangement the Old Testament canon ends with II Chronicles, where the last words are an exhortation to the Jews in Babylon by Cyrus of Persia to return to their homeland.\u00a0 As a type of the future renovation of Israel, this makes a logical and effective conclusion to the Bible from the point of view of Judaism\u201d (207)\u00a0 This is a standard example for teachers of biblical studies to contrast the bibles of the two religions; what strikes me about the way that Frye uses it is that he ignores the fact that the Jewish Bible ends in within history, in contrast to the Christian Bible\u2019s ending with apocalypse.\u00a0 Furthermore, Frye\u2019s phrasing subtly suggests that it is the Old Testament canon that is primary, and that the Hebrew Bible has rearranged it.\u00a0 A more even-handed approach would suggest that in the period following the destruction of the temple, Judaism and Christianity arranged the Hebrew scriptures differently for their own theological purposes.\u00a0 (Some scholars regard Luke 11:51 as evidence that in the time of Jesus the Jewish canon of scripture already had a fixed order that ended with II Chronicles, but as far as I know this is a point of controversy).<\/p>\n

In his book Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible<\/em>, Stephen Prickett discusses what he calls the \u201cnovelization of the Bible,\u201d arguing that the Bible ceased in the eighteenth century to be read typologically, and was instead read like a realistic novel, in a manner which stressed human character and plot.\u00a0 He further connects this with the rise of the realistic novel, illustrating his argument with effective readings of George Eliot and \u00a0Thomas Mann.\u00a0 There are places in George Eliot where the use of biblical archetypes can be illustrated by Frye\u2019s method, for example the important scenes that take place in a garden and on the top of a hill in Adam Bede<\/em>.\u00a0 But her use of typology is highly self-conscious, and she frequently psychologizes it.\u00a0 Her allusive use of the Bible is sometimes ironic, and often related to characterization and historical contexts, and is thus part of a novelistic strategy that can be best explicated by the kind of analysis at which Alter excels.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In The <\/em>David<\/em> Story<\/em>, Robert Alter provides a wonderful translation of the biblical books that tell the story of Saul and David, up to the settlement of the throne on Solomon in the early chapters of the first book of Kings, presenting that story as an epic narrative of a human life.\u00a0 As he puts it in the essay in Frye and the Word<\/em>, \u201cThe story of David offers us the greatest representation of an individual life evolving through time in all of ancient literature.\u201d\u00a0 This reminds me of D. H. Lawrence\u2019s characterization of the Bible: \u201cThe novel is the book of life.\u00a0 In this sense, the Bible is a great confused novel.\u00a0 You may say, it is about God.\u00a0 But it is really about man alive.\u00a0 Adam, Eve, Sarai, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Samuel, David, Bath-sheba, Ruth, Esther, Solomon, Job, Isaiah, Jesus, Mark, Judas, Paul, Peter: what is it but man alive, from start to finish?\u201d (\u201cWhy the Novel Matters\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Turning from Alter\u2019s general approach, and its difference from Frye, to one or two of his specific examples in the essay in Frye and the Word<\/em>, I think what he is trying to illustrate is something that frustrates all of those readers of The Great Code<\/em> who have a significant investment in mimetic criticism, namely Frye\u2019s freewheeling chains of association linking various images from throughout the Bible.\u00a0 Sometimes these are vividly illuminating, for example in discussing the water and storm imagery in the Bible, which informs Shakespeare\u2019s plays or \u201cLycidas\u201d in very significant ways.\u00a0 At other times they may seem, to the more skeptically minded, somewhat arbitrary.\u00a0 The Bible has certainly, in the Christian tradition, been read as a unity, a point Frye makes at the beginning of The Great Code<\/em>, but that is because it was seen as the Word of God, and because it was bound into a single book.\u00a0 From a literary point of view, it is in many ways more rewarding to see the Bible as a collection of books, of very different genres.\u00a0 (I know that Frye rejects this approach in the introduction to The Great Code<\/em>, but I still think it is a fruitful one.\u00a0 To use another favourite chestnut from teaching the Bible and Literature, the Bible may be the Book of Books in a superlative sense, but it is also a book of books in a more literal sense: it is both a book and a library).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thus I find some of Alter\u2019s specific objections quite valid, especially in view of his own very different hermeneutic principles.\u00a0 To take one of his examples, I\u2019m not sure why Joseph\u2019s \u201ccoat of many colours\u201d should suggest fertility-god imagery (GC<\/em> 176); in any case, as Alter notes, the exact meaning of the Hebrew here is uncertain, and he himself translates the phrase \u201cornamented tunic.\u201d\u00a0 (The New Revised Standard Version has \u201ca long robe with sleeves\u201d).\u00a0 What is interesting in terms of biblical intertextuality is the series of allusions to the Joseph story in the story of the rape of Tamar in II Samuel 13, which contains the only other biblical occurrence of the Hebrew ketonet pasim<\/em> (II Sam. 13:18), this time a garment worn by Tamar, and Alter\u2019s commentary on both of these passages elucidates the connections.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Going back to Joe\u2019s post, the example of hevel<\/em> is perhaps not Alter\u2019s strongest point, but Frye does say that \u201cdense fog \u2026 is one of the roots of the word \u2018vanity\u2019\u201d and that \u201cThe metaphor of fog or mist present in \u2018vanity\u2019 suggests that life is something to find a way through.\u201d\u00a0 Certainly Frye, who I am sure knew more Hebrew than I do, was aware of the meaning of \u05d4\u05d1\u05dc, which my lexicon glosses as \u201cvapour, breath; fig. vanity\u201d and \u201cfig. of what is evanescent, unsubstantial, worthless, vanity, as of idols.\u201d\u00a0 The metaphorical extension to fog is Frye\u2019s, and Alter\u2019s point is simply that he is extending the meaning of the word in an unwarranted manner.\u00a0 Alter thinks, and I tend to agree with him, that sometimes Frye\u2019s enthusiasm for metaphorical connections takes him beyond the meaning permitted by the original text.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I should note that Alter is seen at his best in his translations, with accompanying commentary, of parts of the Hebrew Bible.\u00a0 For example, Genesis 7:11 in the King James Bible reads as follows:<\/p>\n

In the six hundredth year of Noah\u2019s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Alter\u2019s version is:<\/p>\n

In the six hundredth year of Noah\u2019s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day,<\/p>\n

All the wellsprings of the great deep burst<\/p>\n

and the casements of the heavens were opened.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The word \u201ccasement,\u201d with its poetic resonance from Keats, adds a dimension to the text that is not present in the King James version\u2019s \u201cwindows\u201d and suggests what Alter maintains is an archaic and poetic quality in the word being translated (\u2019arubot<\/em>, windows or lattices; some other English versions translate the word \u201cfloodgates\u201d).\u00a0<\/p>\n

This has become rather long; in fact it has become a short essay that needs to be brought to a conclusion.\u00a0 So, to conclude: in defending Alter, I do not intend to denigrate Frye, but I do mean to suggest that Frye\u2019s way of reading the Bible in relation to literature is a partial one, and one that must, in the context of studying the Bible and literature in a postmodern university, be supplemented by other approaches.\u00a0 Frye himself said that The Great Code<\/em> is only the expression of \u201cmy own personal encounter with the Bible\u201d and a statement that may \u201cstimulate the writing of better books.\u201d\u00a0 But the authoritative nature of Frye\u2019s rhetoric and the compelling power of his examples tends to polarize readers into becoming either defenders of Frye\u2019s approach or denouncers of his errors.\u00a0 I would hope that, nearly three decades after The Great Code<\/em>\u2019s first publication, it can and will continue to be read by those who take a position somewhere in between these poles, appreciating the book\u2019s power and insights while being willing to read the Bible in other ways as well, neither totally beguiled nor full of guile.\u00a0 The fact that my copy of the paperback first edition of The Great Code<\/em> is falling apart is evidence of how often I have read and consulted it; on the other hand, when I teach the book of Genesis, I take Alter\u2019s translation to class with me because his commentary often helps me to answer students\u2019 questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 Following Joe\u2019s critique of Alter, I too went back to Alter\u2019s essay \u201cNorthrop Frye between Archetype and Typology.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019ll begin with the conclusion to Joe\u2019s post, where he writes that \u201cAlter simply wants nothing to do with the imaginative element, with metaphor or myth in the Bible, or if it must be admitted, since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[11,72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible","category-great-code"],"yoast_head":"\nRobert Alter and the Bible: A Response to Joseph Adamson - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/11\/11\/robert-alter-and-the-bible-a-response-to-joseph-adamson\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Robert Alter and the Bible: A Response to Joseph Adamson - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u00a0 Following Joe\u2019s critique of Alter, I too went back to Alter\u2019s essay \u201cNorthrop Frye between Archetype and Typology.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019ll begin with the conclusion to Joe\u2019s post, where he writes that \u201cAlter simply wants nothing to do with the imaginative element, with metaphor or myth in the Bible, or if it must be admitted, since […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/11\/11\/robert-alter-and-the-bible-a-response-to-joseph-adamson\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-11-12T00:39:47+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2009\/11\/torah8hu.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"396\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"576\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Russell Perkin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Russell Perkin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"14 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/11\/11\/robert-alter-and-the-bible-a-response-to-joseph-adamson\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/11\/11\/robert-alter-and-the-bible-a-response-to-joseph-adamson\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Russell Perkin\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/#\/schema\/person\/bd59dd70f81d86a6453cd16ff5c97932\"},\"headline\":\"Robert Alter and the Bible: A Response to Joseph Adamson\",\"datePublished\":\"2009-11-12T00:39:47+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/11\/11\/robert-alter-and-the-bible-a-response-to-joseph-adamson\/\"},\"wordCount\":2888,\"commentCount\":6,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/11\/11\/robert-alter-and-the-bible-a-response-to-joseph-adamson\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2009\/11\/torah8hu.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Bible\",\"Great Code\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/11\/11\/robert-alter-and-the-bible-a-response-to-joseph-adamson\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/11\/11\/robert-alter-and-the-bible-a-response-to-joseph-adamson\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/11\/11\/robert-alter-and-the-bible-a-response-to-joseph-adamson\/\",\"name\":\"Robert Alter and the Bible: A Response to Joseph Adamson - 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