dngoldman's review
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
This short work is a fine piece of both biblical and literary criticism. The essay made me think about what the term canon really means and provides fresh insides into both he Bible and the modernist works of literature (Most notably Kafka and Joyce) Alter analyses.
Alter notes the dual and conflicting uses of the term canon - both secular (it’s original meaning) to sacred and back to secular. Within both secular and sacred are conflicting meaning - one the authoritative/doctrinal and the other earned for it’s artistic merit originality.
One would assume that the Hebrew bible, and related text fell into the sacred/authoritaive function. And they do. But Alter argues that Bible text are also used in the secular/originality sense. This is not a modern phenomena. the selections that made it into the Bible, displaying diversity of styles and themes, could have been chosen, in part, for their artistic use of Hebrew. And midlevel poets, such as Levi, who were earnest, religious jews, used bible verses for their very secular poetry, which they would not have done if the Bible was thought of as purely theocratic. Alter believes that the modernist writers, so deft at taking tradition and playing with it, were picking up on the jewish tradition in the way that Jews did
Alter’s digs deep into Kafka’s use of the Bible in ways I never thought of. In both Kafka’s direct Bible madrases in “Parabels and Paradoxes” and most notably in Amerika. Quoting, “Kafka's use of the Bible is quirkier, less predictable. The Bible as he reads it abounds in
paradoxes, which he on his part compounds by im- posing an exegesis that is itself often highly paradoxical: the promised land can become the site of Egyptian bondage; the pyramids are touched by the shadow of the Tower of Babel, behind which may loom the distant outline of the Great Wall of China. The paradoxical reading of the Bible, of course, is not at all a modern invention. It flourished especially in the heavily charged climate of Jewish mysticism, and Scholem's argument for an affinity between Kafka and the Kabbalah is pertinent precisely in this regard. 94
Haiman Bialak- This poet, composing in Hebrew, took it one step further thank Kafka. No longer wrestling with the text, Bialak used biblical imagery, scenes, and motifs to create alternate biblical world. Using bible stories with Homeric meter, he fuses the heroic and the stacret One that moves authority from God to man (Nietzsche).
Joyce - Ulysses. Joyce takes a different tact. While Ulysses is stuffed with allusions - the Odessy and the Bible are the novel’s two poles.
“Joyce's invocation of the Greek and Hebrew matrix-texts is thus more than a literary trick because his vision of human existence in part draws deeply on theirs, his aestheticism pantheism answering to their differing theisms. At the same time, he dissolves the linear plot of his two ancient narratives into its episodic components, for he cannot fully embrace the idea of progression in time to grand resolution, and he positively rejects the assertion of will through martial effort on which the ancient dénouements depend. (One notes that his own imaginative purchase on the ancient worldis diametrically opposite to Bialik's.) His Odysseus returns home, sort of; his Moses looks down at last on the Promised Land, in a manner of speaking; for heroic fulfillment is more a teasing dream than a realizable destiny in his world. The great affirmation of his modern epic is the simple embracing of ever-renewed life and beauty, sublimely expressed in Molly's soliloquy, and intimated in a quieter key in the sense of reconciliation Bloom attains in the penultimate episode. That affirmation
in turn is implicitly endorsed by both the Greek and the Hebrew intertexts, the Odyssey with its world of sparkling sunlight in which conjugal love and fatherhood are confirmed, the Hebrew Bible with its beckoning prospect of milk and honey, its urgent injunctions to be fruitful and multiply and to choose life over death.” 174
Alter further suggest that Joyce uses the Bible in ways that are different than he uses the Odessy. In particular, the use of time and reoccurrence of events (see Vico)
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