To the Editor:

. . . In “Biblical Narrative” [May], Robert Alter falls into the same traps he had so carefully cited in his previous article, “A Literary Approach to the Bible” [December 1975], where true literary scholars Northrop Frye and Erich Auerbach are cast into the same pit as “excavators” and non-Hebraicists. Not only does Mr. Alter fail to answer any of the questions he so justifiably raised in his first article, but—like the others in the “pit”—he lacks “minutely discriminating attention” and a holistic view of the Bible which fuses literary, moral, and historical subject matter while perceiving their interrelationship.

In the very first paragraph of “Biblical Narrative” Mr. Alter states that his goal in this essay is to analyze biblical repetition, “one aspect of the literary art of the Bible.” But is not this “one aspect” still too vast and in great need of narrowing down? . . . Given the hodgepodge of fragments Mr. Alter takes up but never really develops, the reader is bound to become frustrated: instead of turning the reader back to the Bible itself as source—what real literary criticism should compel us to do—Mr. Alter’s articles confuse the reader and turn him away from rereading the Bible. If the author wishes his “critical application of literary scholarship” to “result in a deeper appreciation of the Bible not only as a work of literature but as a religious document as well,” he might first define the terms “literature” and “religious document,” then explain their relationship within a prescribed context. For any reader who wants to enhance his appreciation of the Bible, Mr. Alter’s context of “repetition” is hopelessly gargantuan.

On the other hand, some of the ideas he bandies about are inherently intriguing; had any one of them been pursued diligently, a much tighter and more interesting article might have resulted. . . .

Maybe Mr. Alter finds it impossible to see a common purpose (or, as he says, an “artful design”) behind “all the contradictions” and “different sources,” because he never connects what is “literature” in the Bible with what is “religious document”—ironically, what he had assigned himself to do at the outset. Or perhaps his confusing the various “causes” of biblical narration with its effect (and, I might add, its “affect”) is responsible for the author’s myopia; in fact, it may even prove central to the major conceptual flaw of this article.

Any work of art—be it a Gothic cathedral, a musical composition, a poem, or, in this case, the great “mythopoem” that is the Bible—is created in particular conditions, circumstances, and environment or milieu. What distinguishes kitsch from art—and what such literary giants as Frye and Auerbach have seriously probed and studied all their lives—is that mysterious and often paradoxical quality or force which enables the product of finite origin to transcend its “clay bonds” and become universal. With care, measure, and discipline, the critic does not have to wax sentimental and impressionistic in studying this highly evocative and affective component of art. To the contrary, as soon as the Bible scholar accepts the significance of such a component for reading “the Bible as literature,” he achieves a kind of liberation: he is free to analyze why and how the fascinating metamorphosis from particular, hybrid form to universal, unified one takes place.

It is not enough for Mr. Alter to complain about the “paucity of serious literary analysis of the Bible” or about “what happens when literary scholars do not know Hebrew.” Neither will the reader be sufficiently convinced or impressed by an ill-assorted peepshow of ideas on biblical narrative or by the author’s knowledge of Hebrew—unless, of course, his conception of the Bible as literary art and his method of carrying it out develop both more precision and substance.

Trudy G. Ettelson
Chicago, Illinois

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Robert Alter writes:

Perhaps one might forgive Trudy G. Ettelson’s bad manners but not the conceptual mushiness that lies behind her smoke screen of vituperation. To speak of “the great ‘mythopoem’ that is the Bible” and to compare it with a Gothic cathedral is self-evident nonsense because the Bible, whatever its lines of unity, is after all an anthology of highly disparate literary works written in different settings and genres for different purposes. Precisely what I argued for in the first of my articles was the need to discriminate discrete literary forms and their distinctive modes of operation within the biblical corpus. Such a commonsensical requirement, however, runs directly counter to Miss Ettelson’s need to bury the Bible in meaningless mystagogic effusions about transcending clay bonds and achieving universal form. By the wavering lights of such ineffably “holistic” notions of the Bible, the straightforward critical readings I offered, for example, of two different biblical narratives, the story of Judah and Tamar and that of Balaam’s prophecies, were bound to seem fragmentary and insubstantial. That, I think, is Miss Ettelson’s problem, not mine.

One final comment on “literary giants.” I fear that Miss Ettelson has gleaned her hazy idea of the Bible as a “mythopoem” from Northrop Frye’s poetic but debatable vision of literary discourse as a great system of interlocking archetypes. Her bracketing of Frye and Auerbach, however, is rather misleading, and the assertion that I denigrated Auerbach is altogether wrong. I in fact spoke of Auerbach in my first article with the clearest admiration—Mimesis remains in my view one of the great critical works of our age—while suggesting only that his extraordinary insight into biblical narrative needed to be refined and qualified as it was applied to other biblical texts. But then the construction of clear statements, whether in a critical piece or in the Bible itself, would not appear to be one of Miss Ettelson’s strong points.