Pen of Iron
AMERICAN PROSE AND THE KING JAMES BIBLE
By Robert Alter PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Robert Alter
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-691-12881-8
Contents
Acknowledgments............................................................ixPrelude America as a Scriptural Culture...................................1Chapter 1 Style in America and the King James Version.....................9Chapter 2 Moby-Dick Polyphony............................................42Chapter 3 Absalom, Absalom! Lexicon......................................78Chapter 4 Seize the Day American Amalgam.................................114Chapter 5 The World through Parataxis.....................................146Index......................................................................185
Chapter One
Style in America and the King James Version
As I assemble these reflections on the presence of the King James Version in American writing, the fourth centennial of the 1611 translation stands on the horizon. A great deal has changed in American culture since the third centennial was celebrated in 1911. At that juncture, the King James Version was extolled by leading public figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as America's national book and as the text that more than any other had affected the life of English-speaking peoples. My guess is that the 2011 milestone will be marked more in academic circles than in the public domain. In the century since the previous centennial was celebrated, two major shifts have taken place: the practice of reading the Bible aloud, of reading the Bible at all, and of memorizing passages from the Bible has drastically diminished; and the King James Bible has ceased to be the almost universally used translation as readers have been encouraged to use more "accessible" versions, which also happen to be stylistically inferior in virtually all respects.
The decline of the role of the King James Version in American culture has taken place more or less simultaneously with a general erosion of a sense of literary language, although I am not suggesting a causal link. The reasons for this latter development have often been noted, and hence the briefest summary will suffice for the purpose of the present argument: Americans read less, and read with less comprehension; hours once devoted to books from childhood on are more likely to be spent in front of a television set or a computer screen; epistolary English, once a proving ground for style, has been widely displaced by the high-speed short-cut language of e-mail and text-messaging. The disappearance of a sense of style even makes itself felt in popular book reviewing. Most contemporary reviewers clearly have no tools to discuss style, or much interest in doing so. One unsettling symptom of the general problem is that in the country's most influential reviewing platform, the New York Times Book Review, when a critic singles out a writer for stylistic brilliance, it is far more often than not the case that the proffered illustrative quotation turns out to be either flat and banal writing or prose of the most purple hue. Obviously, there are still people in the culture, including young people, who have a rich and subtle sense of language, but they are an embattled minority in a society where tone-deafness to style is increasingly prevalent. That tone-deafness has also affected the academic study of literature, but there are other issues involved in the university setting, and to those I shall turn in due course.
In sharp contrast to our current condition, American culture in the mid-nineteenth century, where my considerations of the biblical strand in the novel begin, cultivated the adept use of language in a variety of ways. The relish for language was by no means restricted to high culture: the vigor and wit of the American vernacular were prized qualities that were widely exercised, and one can see their literary transmutation in the prose of Mark Twain and the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. The thorough familiarity in this period with the strong and eloquent language of the King James Bible provided an important resource, beyond the vital inventiveness of spoken American English, that nourished the general sense of style.
A case in point is the prose of one of the finest stylists of nineteenth-century America, Abraham Lincoln. He was, we recall, a man who had virtually no formal schooling. Just as he taught himself law through his own studious efforts, he developed a powerful and nuanced sense of English through his own reading. It is not easy to imagine comparable instances in our own time in which such mastery of language could be acquired through the sheer dedication of an autodidact. The force of Lincoln's speeches derives from a number of different sources, one of which was biblical. He had a wonderful native sense for the expressive use of cadence, repetition, antithesis, and for the cinching effectiveness of a periodic sentence. Especially in the formal architecture of his speeches, he also registered the influence of oratory inspired by the American Greek Revival. At times the persuasive force of his public rhetoric was altogether lawyerly, which is hardly surprising. His First Inaugural Address, for example, deploys lawyerly language from one end to the other because it is an argument to the nation on the question of whether there is a right of secession and whether the Union can continue without civil war. "If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract only, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it?" Here, as throughout the Address, one hears the voice of Lincoln the Illinois lawyer, sorting out in plain and precise language issues of contract and constitution and consent as the Republic faced a fateful juncture. This language, too, is a kind of rhetoric. The stylistic plainness, as Gary Wills, looking at Lincoln's revisions, has shown, is a quality that Lincoln labored to perfect over time, especially against a background of American oratory that favored highly wrought ornamentation.
We more typically remember Lincoln's speeches for their eloquence. Much of this, as I have suggested, is achieved through his intuitive feel for appropriate diction and rhythmic emphasis, manifested, most famously, in every phrase of the Gettysburg Address, as in the grand concluding sweep of "we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain," moving on to the climactic anaphora, "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Only a single phrase in the Address is explicitly biblical, though one might argue that the very use of a language that is both plain and dignified, resonant in its very ordinariness, is in part inspired by the diction of the King James Version. Many people, I suspect, assume that the opening phrase, "Four score and seven years ago," is explicitly biblical, though in fact it is merely modeled on the "three score and ten" of the King James Version, a phrase that, given the sacred status of the formulaic number seventy, appears 111 times in the 1611 translation. The Hebrew actually has no equivalent expression and simply says "seventy," as does Tyndale's translation, which was a principal source for the King James translators. Their decision to use this compound form would seem to reflect a desire to give their version a heightened and deliberately archaic flourish (it seems unlikely that this is the way ordinary Englishmen said "seventy" in the seventeenth century), and Lincoln clearly responded to this aim in adopting the form. The difference between "eighty-seven" and "four score and seven" is that the former is a mere numerical indication whereas the latter gives the passage of time since the founding of the Republic weight and solemnity. This effect in part is a consequence of breaking the number into two pieces, forcing us to slow down as we take it in and compute it. But it also has something to do with the archaic character of the phrase, and in this regard the background of the King James Version has a direct relevance. The 1611 translation, as has often been observed, was in general a little archaic even in its own time. By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, much of its language was surely felt to be archaic (and even then, perhaps not always perfectly understood), and yet the text was, paradoxically, part of everyday life, a familiar fixture of hearth and home. In this way, the sheer dissemination of the King James Version created a stylistic precedent for the American ear in which a language that was elaborately old-fashioned, that stood at a distance from contemporary usage, was assumed to be the vehicle for expressing matters of high import and grand spiritual scope. Thus, "four score and seven years ago," a biblicizing phrase that is not an actual quotation, sounds a strong note of biblical authority at the beginning of the Gettysburg Address.
The concluding flourish, by contrast, "shall not perish from the earth," is a direct citation from the Bible. It appears three times, always without the "not," and only in the Hebrew Bible: "His remembrance shall perish from the earth" (Job 18:17); "The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth" (Jeremiah 10:11); "The good man is perished out of the earth" (Micah 7:2). (Although the 1611 translation uses a different preposition for the verse from Micah, the original uses the same preposition, min, "from," in all three cases.) The borrowing of the biblical phrase is not really an allusion to a particular scriptural intertext but rather the use, in the perorational final gesture of the Address, of a familiar biblical idiom that gives the speaker's own language the breadth and moral gravity of the Bible. The Bible begins with God's creation of heaven and earth. It includes repeated grim intimations, both in this particular phrasing and related ones, of individuals, nations, humankind perishing from the earth, wiped out from the face of the earth. The idea of persisting in or desisting from existence is given, one could say, a cosmic perspective and a certain precariousness in the biblical language. Imagine the different effect if Lincoln had concluded his speech with a phrase like "shall not come to an end" or "shall not cease to exist." The meaning would have been approximately the same, but the sense of magnitude, the idea of the nation realizing a new and hopeful destiny "under God," as Lincoln wrote, would have been diminished. The sternly grand language of the King James Bible, as Melville had already demonstrated more than a decade earlier and as Faulkner and others would demonstrate in different ways later, was a way of giving American English a reach and resonance it would otherwise not have had.
Lincoln's greatest speech besides the Gettysburg Address is his Second Inaugural Address. It begins by affirming that the historical moment—the Union in still tense expectation on the verge of successfully concluding four years of bloody conflict—invites brevity. It is in fact a fifth the length of the First Inaugural Address (though still twice as long as the breathtakingly concise Gettysburg Address). The first half of the speech, into the middle of the third of its four paragraphs, is a factual review of the course of the war and its origins in the dispute over slavery. There is nothing biblical in this first section. Instead, Lincoln displays his ability to use plain and precise language—for example, "To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest [of slavery] was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war." His gift for emphatic antithesis in succinct parallel clauses is also in evidence here. The Bible is explicitly mentioned at the midpoint of the Address: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other." (One wonders whether in this wry awareness of the competing uses to which Scripture and deity are put Lincoln may have been remembering the passage from Voltaire's Candide in which both warring armies celebrate a Te Deum to thank God for permitting them to destroy their enemies.) Once the Bible has been introduced in this fashion, biblical quotations and weighted phrases drawn from the language of the Bible are predominant for the rest of the Address. "It may seem strange," Lincoln now goes on to say, "that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we may not be judged." The first clause, of course, gives a vigorous homiletic twist to God's curse of Adam in Genesis 3:19, pointedly and concisely suggesting that slavery is a fundamental perversion of the divine moral order. The second clause, a slightly modified quotation of Luke 6:37, strikes at least a rhetorical balance in a gesture of conciliation to the South (though it is hard to dismiss that telling image of wringing bread from the sweat of other men's faces). The verse from Luke occurs in the midst of the Beatitudes and immediately after the injunction to "love your enemies," so we can see how Lincoln is making the utmost use of his scriptural sources with a kind of preacherly canniness. The only other explicit quotation from the Bible appears at the end of the extraordinary sentence that concludes this long paragraph:
Yet if God wills that it [the war] continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous together."
As we shall have occasion to see, Faulkner, too, will use biblicizing language to represent the full historical gravity of the sin of slavery, linking the bloodshed of slavery to Cain's murder of his brother Abel. "Lash" is a very immediate synecdoche for the violence perpetrated through slavery, whereas "sword"—one again observes the power of Lincoln's antitheses—is a reiterated biblical synecdoche for warfare. The citation of Psalm 19:9 about the judgments of the Lord strongly affirms that the devastation of the slave states is an act of divine retribution. ("Let us judge not, that we may not be judged" is no longer much in evidence here.) Elsewhere, the second half of the Address is punctuated by biblical locutions that are not quite quotations. American slavery is said to have been permitted by God to continue through "His appointed time." "The appointed time" is an often recurring biblical idiom, especially in Hebrew Scripture and particularly in the Prophets, where it indicates the unfolding of a divine plan in human events. A few lines later, Lincoln writes, "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away." The first two clauses vividly illustrate the effectiveness of parallelism in Lincoln's rhetoric. The "scourge" of war is a strongly expressive biblicism: it is a word that occurs in a variety of biblical contexts, almost never in its literal sense of "whip," but, as here, in the metaphorical sense of devastating punishment. The concluding phrase "may speedily pass away" does not occur as a collocation in the Bible, but both "speedily" and "pass away" are biblicisms that, coupled with "this mighty scourge of war," give the whole clause its strength. (Again, had Lincoln written "rapidly" instead of "speedily," much of the effect would have been lost.) Finally, the brief one-sentence paragraph that ends the Address begins with another of Lincoln's splendid parallelisms, "With malice towards none, with charity for all," and then moves into two additional biblical locutions, "to bind up the nation's wounds" and "to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphans." The addition of "up" to "bind" gives the verb a biblical coloration, evoking, without specific allusion, a variety of prophetic promises of healing and restoration. And though it may seem perfectly logical to mention the widow and orphans of the man fallen in battle, this, too, is a collocation that occurs again and again in the Hebrew Bible as exemplary instances of those who are helpless and in need of support.
Lincoln's prose powerfully illustrates the semantic depth and stylistic gravity that American novelists as well would often tap in drawing on the language of the King James Bible. His writing, as we have seen, is by no means pervasively biblical, but at the appropriate junctures it mobilizes biblical diction both to effect a stylistic heightening and to bring into play an element of moral or explicitly theological vision. The grand concluding movement of the Second Inaugural Address aims to engage the audience in a vision of justice and healing and peace after four years of devastating warfare, and the vehicle that makes this possible is the language of the Bible. At a cultural moment when the biblical text, verse and chapter, was a constant presence in American life, the idioms and diction and syntax incised in collective memory through the King James translation became a wellspring of eloquence.
(Continues...)
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