Robert Alter - Art of Biblical Narrative - 2011

See MS Collection of Sheets - Robert Alter

Robert Alter The Art of Biblical Narrative 2011(copyrighted material)

Chapter 1 - A Literary Approach to the Bible

Chapter 2 - Sacred History and the Beginnings of Prose Fiction

Chapter 3 - Biblical Type-Scenes and the Uses of Convention

Chapter 4 - Between Narration and Dialogue

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Chapter 1 - A Literary Approach to the Bible, pp1-24 [MS added formatting and excerpting]

...

p.17 The one obvious reason for the absence of scholarly literary interest in the Bible for so long is that, in contrast to Greek and Latin literature, the Bible was regarded for so many centuries by both Christians and Jews as the primary, unitary source of divinely revealed truth. ... The momentum of this enterprise [of finding fragments or sources] continues unabated, so that it still seems to most scholars in the field much more urgent to inquire, say, how a particular psalm might have been used in a hypothetically reconstructed temple ritual than how it works as an achieved piece of poetry.



p.17 At the same time, the potent residue of the older belief in the Bible as the revelation of ultimate truth is perceptible in the tendency of scholars to ask questions about the biblical view of man, the biblical notion of the soul, the biblical vision of eschatology, while for the most part neglecting phenomena like character, motive, and narrative design as unbefitting for the study of an essentially religious document.



p.19 The one celebrated instance is the immensely suggestive first chapter of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, in which the antithetical modes of representing reality in Genesis and the Odyssey are compared at length. Auerbach must be credited with showing more clearly than anyone before him how the cryptic conciseness of biblical narrative is a reflection of profound art, not primitiveness ...



p.19 The most recurrent theme of the article’s critics was that the biblical story was, after all, religious, moral, and didactic in intention, and so would hardly indulge in all this fancy footwork of multiple ironies that we moderns so love. (Implicit in such a contention is a rather limiting notion of what a “religious” narrative is, or of how the insight of art might relate to a religious vision. This is a central question to which we shall return.) [MS: See pp 12-19, 23-27, 37, 47 and 54 in Chapter 2 -Sacred History and the Beginnings of Prose Fiction]



p.20 The notion of “the Bible as literature,” though particularly contaminated in English by its use as a rubric for superficial college courses and for dubious publishers’ packages, is needlessly concessive and condescending toward literature in any language. (It would at the very least be gratuitous to speak of “Dante as literature,” given the assured literary status of Dante’s great poem, though the Divine Comedy is more explicitly theological, or “religious,” than most of the Bible.) ...



[MS Alter discusses many articles in the past decades on this theme. See text pp.18-21 and, especially Meir Sternberg in Poetics of Biblical Narrative and articles in the Israeli journal Ha-Sifrut 1973- 1977, footnotes 11, 12. Sternberg won an Israeli Prize in 1996 for contributions to literary theory. Alter notes, p.19:

"More recently, Sternberg, writing alone, has provided a shrewdly perceptive analysis of the story of the rape of Dinah, concluding his discussion with a general description of the spectrum of rhetorical devices, from explicit to (predominantly) oblique, through which biblical narrative conveys moral judgments of its characters. Finally, Sternberg, in still another lengthy article, has catalogued with apt illustrative explications the repertory of repetitive devices used by the biblical writers."]



p. 20 [MS: There is] ... a complete interfusion of literary art with theological, moral, or historiosophical vision, the fullest perception of the latter dependent on the fullest grasp of the former. ... “The Bible’s value as a religious document is intimately and inseparably related to its value as literature. This proposition requires that we develop a different understanding of what literature is, one that might—and should—give us some trouble.” One could add that the proposition also requires, conversely, that we develop a somewhat more troublesome understanding of what a religious document might be. ...



p.21 There is no point, to be sure, in pretending that all the contradictions among different sources in the biblical texts can be happily harmonized by the perception of some artful design. ... we may still not fully understand what would have been perceived as a real contradiction by an intelligent Hebrew writer of the early Iron Age, so that apparently conflicting versions of the same event set side by side, far from troubling their original audience, may have sometimes been perfectly justified in a kind of logic we no longer apprehend.



p.22 ...we have to learn ... to attend more finely to the complex, tersely expressive details of the biblical text. (Traditional exegesis [MS Midrash] in its own way did this, but with far-reaching assumptions about the text as literal revelation that most of us no longer accept.) [MS Alter expands on this, see pp.33-34]



p. 22 Biblical narrative is laconic but by no means in a uniform or mechanical fashion. Why, then, does the narrator ascribe motives to or designate states of feeling in his characters ... in some instances, while elsewhere he chooses to remain silent on these points? ... In a text so sparing in epithets and relational designations, why are particular identifications of characters noted by the narrator at specific points in the story?



p.23 What we need to understand better is that the religious vision of the Bible is given depth and subtlety precisely by being conveyed through the most sophisticated resources of prose fiction. In the example we have considered, Judah and Jacob-Israel ... are individual characters surrounded by multiple ironies, artfully etched in their imperfections ... all such subtly indicated achievements of fictional characterization suggest the endlessly complicated ramifications and contradictions of a principle of divine election intervening in the accepted orders of society and nature.



p. 24 The biblical tale, through the most rigorous economy of means, leads us again and again to ponder complexities of motive and ambiguities of character because these are essential aspects of its vision of man, created by God, enjoying or suffering all the consequences of human freedom.



p.24 Almost the whole range of biblical narrative, however, embodies the basic perception that man must live before God, in the transforming medium of time, incessantly and perplexingly in relation with others; and a literary perspective on the operations of narrative may help us more than any other to see how this perception was translated into stories that have had such a powerful, enduring hold on the imagination.

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For Chapter 3 - Biblical Type-Scenes and the Uses of Convention: see MS Sefaria Sheet on Type Scenes.