Quotessence
Home / Authors / Robert Alter Biography

Robert Alter Biography

Author

Related Quotes

“A good many proverbs prove to be narrative vignettes in which ... the moral calculus of reward for the good and retribution for the wicked is turned into a seesaw of miniature narrative: “The righteous is rescued from straits, / and the wicked man comes in his stead” (11:8).... The two sequenced images, then, that the line evokes are of the good man, first seemingly pinned down and then popped out of the tight squeeze into which he has fallen, and the wicked man slipped into his place. This is very neat, but, we may ask, is that the way the world is? Obviously not—obvious, I think, not only to us but also to the poet in Proverbs, who has chosen these emblematic images to represent an underlying principle of moral causation that he believes to be present in reality but that he knows would never be so perspicuous in the untidiness of experience outside literature. This for him is precisely the advantage of literary expression, the possibility of understanding made available through “proverb and adage.”

PoetryBibleProverbsRobert Alter
Book:The Art of Biblical Poetry
Create image

“What is it like, the biblical writers seek to know through their art, to be a human being with a divided consciousness—intermittently loving your brother but hating him even more; resentful or perhaps contemptuous of your father but also capable of the deepest filial regard; stumbling between disastrous ignorance and imperfect knowledge; fiercely asserting your own independence but caught in a tissue of events divinely contrived; outwardly a definite character and inwardly an unstable vortex of greed, ambition, jealousy, lust, piety, courage, compassion, and much more?”

GodBibleRobert AlterBiblical Narrative
Book:The Art of Biblical Narrative
Create image

“There is no point, to be sure, in pretending that all the contradictions among different sources in biblical texts can be happily harmonized by the perception of some artful design. It seems reasonable enough, however, to suggest that 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.”

BibleRobert Alter
Book:The Art of Biblical Narrative
Create image

“The prevailing emphasis of the [Biblical] narratives, in any case, does move away from mythology. What is crucial for the literary understanding of the Bible is that this impulse to shape a different kind of narrative in prose had powerfully constructive consequences in the new medium that the ancient Hebrew writers fashioned for their monotheistic purposes. Prose narration, affording writers a remarkable range and flexibility in the means of presentation, could be utilized to liberate fictional personages from the fixed choreography of timeless events and thus could transform storytelling from ritual rehearsal to the delineation of the wayward paths of human freedom, the quirks and contradictions of men and women seen as moral agents and complex centers of motive and feeling….Because it is a literature that breaks away from the old cosmic hierarchies, the Bible switches from a reliance on metaphor … toward the indeterminacy, the shifting causal concatenations, the ambiguities of fiction made to resemble the uncertainties of life in history. And for that movement, I would add, the suppleness of prose as a narrative medium was indispensable.”

BibleRobert AlterBiblical Narrative
Book:The Art of Biblical Narrative
Create image

“Since art does not develop in a vacuum, these literary techniques must be associated with the conception of human nature implicit in biblical monotheism ....: every person is created by an all-seeing God but abandoned to his or her own unfathomable freedom, made in God’s likeness as a matter of cosmogonic principle but almost never as a matter of accomplished ethical fact; and each individual instance of this bundle of paradoxes, encompassing the zenith and the nadir of the created world, requires a special cunning attentiveness in literary representation.”

BibleRobert AlterBiblical Narrative
Book:The Art of Biblical Narrative
Create image

“The monotheistic revolution of biblical Israel was a continuing and disquieting one. It left little margin for neat and confident views about God, the created world, history, and man as political animal or moral agent, for it repeatedly had to make sense of the intersection of incompatibles—the relative and the absolute, human imperfection and divine perfection, the brawling chaos of historical experience and God’s promise to fulfill a design in history. The biblical outlook is informed, I think, by a sense of stubborn contradiction, of a profound and ineradicable untidiness in the nature of things, and it is toward the compression of such a sense of moral and historical reality that the composite artistry of the Bible is directed.”

GodBibleRobert AlterBiblical Narrative
Book:The Art of Biblical Narrative
Create image

“For as soon as the idea of one flesh has been put forth ... the narration proceeds as follows: “And the two of them were naked, the human and his woman, and they were not ashamed.” After being invoked as the timeless model of conjugal oneness, they are immediately seen as two, a condition stressed by the deliberately awkward and uncharacteristic doubling back of the syntax in the appositional phrase, “the man and his woman” – a small illustration of how the flexibility of the prose medium enables the writer to introduce psychological distinctions, dialectical reversals of thematic direction, that would not have been feasible in the verse narratives of the ancient Near East.”

BibleGenesisRobert Alter
Book:The Art of Biblical Narrative
Create image

“It is only by imposing a naïve and unexamined aesthetic of their own, [Tzvetan] Todorov proposes, that modern scholars are able to declare so confidently that certain parts of the ancient text could not belong with others: the supposedly primitive narrative is subjected by scholars to tacit laws like the law of stylistic unity, of noncontradiction, of nondigression, of nonrepetition, and by these dim but purportedly universal lights is found to be composite, deficient, or incoherent. If just these four laws were applied respectively to Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, Tristram Shandy, and Jealousy, each of these novels would have to be relegated to the dustbin of shoddily “redacted” literary scraps.”

BibleUlyssesRobert AlterJames JoyceFaulknerThe Sound And The Fury
Book:The Art of Biblical Narrative
Create image

“If we could actually hear God talking, making His will manifest in words of the Hebrew language, what would He sound like? Since poetry is our best human model of intricately rich communication, not only solemn, weighty, and forceful but also densely woven with complex internal connections, meanings, and implications, it makes sense that divine speech should be represented as poetry. Such speech is directed to the concrete situation of a historical audience, but the form of the speech exhibits the historical indeterminacy of the language of poetry, which helps explain why these discourses have touched the lives of millions of readers far removed in time, space, and political predicament from the small groups of ancient Hebrews against whom Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and their confreres originally inveighed.”

PoetryBibleRobert Alter
Book:The Art of Biblical Poetry
Create image

“The logic of the language of poetry brings Amos to glimpse for a moment a new order of reality. Strictly speaking, this is not yet eschatology as it would be developed seven or eight centuries after Amos, but the imagination in prophetic poetry of restored national existence without want or pain or danger is an important way station to explicit doctrines of a radically new era that will replace earthly life as we know it.”

PoetryBibleRobert Alter
Book:The Art of Biblical Poetry
Create image

“A good many proverbs prove to be narrative vignettes in which ... the moral calculus of reward for the good and retribution for the wicked is turned into a seesaw of miniature narrative: “The righteous is rescued from straits, / and the wicked man comes in his stead” (11:8).... The two sequenced images, then, that the line evokes are of the good man, first seemingly pinned down and then popped out of the tight squeeze into which he has fallen, and the wicked man slipped into his place. This is very neat, but, we may ask, is that the world is? Obviously not—obvious, I think, not only to us but also to the poet in Proverbs, who has chosen these emblematic images to represent an underlying principle of moral causation that he believes to be present in reality but that he knows would never be so perspicuous in the untidiness of experience outside literature. This for him is precisely the advantage of literary expression, the possibility of understanding made available through “proverb and adage.”

BibleProverbsRobert Alter
Book:The Art of Biblical Poetry
Create image

“In several ways the most profound development of the structure of intensification occurs in what is arguably the greatest achievement of all biblical poetry, the Book of Job. When we move from the prose frame story in Chapters 1 and 2 to the beginning of the poetic argument in Chapter 3, we are plunged precipitously into a world of what must be called abysmal intensities. It is only through the most brilliant use of a system of poetic intensifications that the poet is able to take the full emotional measure and to intimate the full moral implications of Job’s outrageous fate. The extraordinary poem that constitutes Chapter 3 is not merely a dramatically forceful way of beginning Job’s complaint. More significantly, it establishes the terms, literally and figuratively, for the poetry Job will speak throughout; and, as I shall try to show in my next chapter, when God finally answers Job out of the whirlwind, the force of His response will be closely bound with a shift introduced by His speech in the terms of the poetic argument and the defining lines of poetic structure. What I am suggesting is that the exploration of the problem of theodicy in the Book of Job and the “answer” it proposes cannot be separated from the poetic vehicle of the book, and that one misses the real intent by reading the text, as has too often been done, as a paraphrasable philosophic argument merely embellished or made more arresting by poetic devices.”

PoetryBibleRobert AlterTheodicyBook Of Job
Book:The Art of Biblical Poetry
Create image

“At the very beginning of the poetic argument, we entered the world of Job’s inner torment through the great death wish poem that takes up all of Chapter 3. These first thirty seven lines of God’s response to Job constitute a brilliantly pointed reversal, in structure, image, and theme, of that initial poem of Job’s. Perhaps the best way to sense the special weight of disputation over theodicy is to observe that it is cast in the form of a clash between two modes of poetry, one kind spoken by man and, however memorable, appropriate to the limitations of his creaturely condition, the other kind of verse a poet of genius could persuasively imagine God speaking…. Perhaps the finest illustration of this nice match of meaning and imagery between the two poems is the beautiful counterbalance between the most haunting of Job’s lines wishing for darkness and the most exquisite of God’s lines affirming light. Job, one recalls, tried to conjure up an eternal starless night: “Let its twilight stars go dark, / let it hope for light in vain, / and let it not see the eyelids of the dawn” (3:9). God, near the beginning of His first discourse, evokes the moment when creation was completed in an image that has become justly famous in its own right but that is also, it should be observed, a counterimage to 3:9: “When the morning stars sang together, / and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (verse 7). That is, instead of a night with no twilight stars, with no glimmer of dawn, the morning stars of creation exult. The emphasis in this line on song and shouts of joy also takes us back to the poem of Chapter 3, which began with a triumphant cry on the night of conception—a cry Job wanted to wish away—and proceeded to a prayer that no joyous exclamation come into that night (3:7).”

PoetryBibleRobert AlterTheodicyBook Of Job
Book:The Art of Biblical Poetry
Create image