Pen of Iron

I had a chance to read Robert Alter's new book, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. In terms of bookshelf organization, I might place this book at the end of my collection of Alter books on biblical style (yes, this book also includes a chapter titled 'The World Through Parataxis') and right before David Gelernter's Americanism. The review of it in the Wall Street Journal was a good one - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703862704575100020148950134.html

and my own thoughts and a general sum-up are as follows:

In the first section of the book, Alter mentions that the earliest settlers in America usually had a King James Bible with them and knew it intimately. Alter argues that since style encompasses a worldview, and that the influence probably runs in both directions at times – ““…one must remember that style is not merely a constellation of aesthetic properties but is the vehicle of a particular vision of reality” – then the rhythms and the vocabulary of the King James version went hand in hand with the American colonists’ Protestant dedication to Bible-reading. The colonists relied on the King James in their commitment to biblical literacy and their commitment to religious ideals in building their new nation. The effects of those commitments are obvious in American literature, and that it is something that makes American literature particularly American.

Alter notes the problem of the decline of reading today – that “Americans read less, and read with less comprehension…they[ committed readers ] are an embattled minority in a society where tone-deafness to style is increasingly prevalent.” Perhaps this is why his discussion about the King James style may seem initially startling to contemporary readers who associate it with convoluted stuffiness (I have the feeling that most just can’t get past the thee’s/thou’s). In fact, Alter reminds us, the King James Version has a very studied simplicity of diction, relying mainly on active verbs. The King James style should also be seen in contrast to “a trend in English prose from the Renaissance onward that cultivated lexical profusion, figurative ornamentation, and syntactic complication.” Rather, “the King James Version offered a model of spare diction and of a syntactic simplicity that amounted to a kind of studied reticence which generated its own distinctive eloquence.”

Alter looks at several quintessentially American novelists – Melville, Faulkner, and Bellow – as well as some of the speeches of Lincoln, to demonstrate his points. In each author’s work he points out a different facet of the King James style. With Melville, it is the King James’ revolutionary juxtaposition of two different traditions – that of Latin and of the Anglo-Saxon. If Latin is ostensibly “higher” and more melodious than the “lower” and more blunt-sounding Anglo Saxon, then Alter sees the same sort of mixing in Melville’s juxtapositions of American street witticisms with more eloquent homilies. In Faulkner, Alter does not show an overt stylistic similarity but instead Faulkner’s assumption that all his readers would readily see the thematic connections in Faulkner’s novels and biblical narratives. Alter uses both Faulkner and Lincoln to show that even the use of one particular word or phrase can be enough to show the influence. “The borrowing of the biblical phrase is not really an allusion to a particular scriptural intertext,” he writes, “but rather the use, in the perorational final gesture of the [Gettysburg] Address, of a familiar biblical idiom that gives the speaker’s own language the breadth and moral gravity of the Bible.” Lincoln’s original audience would not have had to research the amount of “a score.” The King James Version uses the phrase “three score and ten” 111 times. Bellow himself wrote an essay about how certain words and phrases from the Bible touch something profound within us:

“A small clue will suffice to remind us that when we hear certain words – ‘all is but toys,’ ‘absent thee from felicity,’ a wilderness of monkeys,’ ‘green pastures,’ ‘still waters,’ or even the single word ‘relume’ – they revive for us moments of emotional completeness and overflowing comprehension, they unearth buried essences.”

Bellow’s simple, declarative, descriptive sentences evoke the simple declaratives of the Bible (and as they are reproduced, Alter argues, in the KJV). Bellow’s style is similar to the Bible is that he presents “the narrative data in ways that allow them to speak for themselves, without a sense of elaborate literary mediation, without an obtrusive feeling of language calling attention to itself. I do not mean to claim that he was consciously imitating the Bible in this project but simply that he had internalized something of its dignified, even stark, simplicity of diction.”

Alter’s book does a double service by inspiring readers not only to start using the KJV but also to read at least some Melville and Bellow. Alter acknowledges that the same stylistic “peculiarities” which draw some people to Faulkner also chase them away. I am chased away, not only by his ridiculously long, convoluted sentences but also by his ridiculously pessimistic storylines. I was also strangely gratified to see that Alter is not a big fan of Hemingway, because I’ve never been able to get into him, either. “After the passage of eight decades, much of the novel [The Sun Also Rises] looks rather flat – its characters sketchy, lacking psychological or moral complexity, and its plot a slender vehicle for development or discovery” – well, no worries, I’ve got plenty to read otherwise in the meantime!

I'm hoping to have some conversations with profs about the KJV and biblical literacy, and how Alter's points (or his book - it's very short) could be used or encouraged in HUC and the rabbinic world at large.