Anne Strauss, a rabbinic student at Hebrew Union College, has posted some interesting thoughts on Robert Alter's new book, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. Here is a part of her post:
The colonists relied on the King James Version [KJV] in their commitment to biblical literacy and their commitment to religious ideals in building their new nation. The effects of those commitments are obvious in American literature, and that is something that makes American literature particularly American.
Alter looks at several quintessentially American novelists – Melville, Faulkner, and Bellow – as well as some of the speeches of Lincoln, to demonstrate his points. In each author’s work he points out a different facet of the King James style. With Melville, it is the King James’ revolutionary juxtaposition of two different traditions – that of Latin and of the Anglo-Saxon. If Latin is ostensibly “higher” and more melodious than the “lower” and more blunt-sounding Anglo Saxon, then Alter sees the same sort of mixing in Melville’s juxtapositions of American street witticisms with more eloquent homilies.
In Faulkner, Alter does not show an overt stylistic similarity but instead Faulkner’s assumption that all his readers would readily see the thematic connections in Faulkner’s novels and biblical narratives. … Lincoln’s original audience would not have had to research the amount of “a score.” The King James Version uses the phrase “three score and ten” 111 times. Bellow himself wrote an essay about how certain words and phrases from the Bible touch something profound within us: “A small clue will suffice to remind us that when we hear certain words – ‘all is but toys,’ ‘absent thee from felicity,’ ‘a wilderness of monkeys,’ ‘green pastures,’ ‘still waters,’ or even the single word ‘relume’ – they revive for us moments of emotional completeness and overflowing comprehension, they unearth buried essences.”
Bellow’s simple, declarative, descriptive sentences evoke the simple declaratives of the Bible … Alter’s book does a double service by inspiring readers not only to start using the KJV but also to read at least some Melville and Bellow. … I'm hoping to have some conversations with profs about the KJV and biblical literacy, and how Alter's points (or his book – it's very short) could be used or encouraged in HUC and the rabbinic world at large.
Adam Kirsch’s review in Tablet Magazine is also worth reading:
The English settlers were Christians, of course, but it was the Old Testament, much more than the New, that spoke to them and their experience. In the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and conquest of the Promised Land, the Puritans found an obvious parallel to their own journey across the Atlantic and their struggle in the New World. (As Alter notes, Israelite place names are everywhere in the American landscape, from Salem to Shiloh.) The King James Bible, then, was not just the matrix of the American language, but the means of transmitting Jewish history, and the morality of the Hebrew Bible, to the American people.
. . . In a sense, the English Bible has ceased to be a translation and become a second original. If you were more mystically inclined than Alter, you could consider it an example of Walter Benjamin’s theory of translation, which holds that every true translation completes the meaning of a text as it appears in the mind of God.
. . . Why, Alter asks, did Lincoln begin by saying “Four score and seven years ago,” rather than just “eighty-seven years ago?” The answer is that he was drawing, perhaps unconsciously, on the phrase “three score and ten,” which appears 111 times in the King James Bible. By measuring time in this formal, archaic fashion, Lincoln raises American history to the same level as sacred history. At the end of the Address, Lincoln again turns to the Bible: When he promises that American democracy “shall not perish from the earth,” he is echoing a phrase from Job and Jeremiah.
Pen of Iron makes a convincing case that it is impossible to fully appreciate American literature without knowing the King James Bible—indeed, without knowing it almost instinctively, the way generations of Americans used to know it. The problem is that, over the course of the last century, biblical literacy has plummeted, even as translations and editions of the Bible have proliferated. . . . “The essential point for the history of our literature,” Alter writes at the end of Pen of Iron, “is that the resonant language and the arresting vision of the canonical text, however oldentime they may be, continue to ring in cultural memory.” I wonder how faint the ring can grow before we stop hearing it completely.
One of the comments to Kirsch’s review repeats his last sentence and responds: “Come to The South or Mid-West or many other parts of the United States. The ringing of language and vision are not only not significantly more faint, they are not actually oldentime.”
Stephen Miller’s review in the Wall Street Journal includes this paragraph, which puts Saul Bellow’s language in “Seize the Day” (1956) into a beautiful Biblical perspective:
Bellow, who confessed to reading the King James Bible all his life, drew on its "stylistic spareness" as a counterweight to "the exuberant side of his writing." At one point the novel's hapless protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm, remembers a time in his life when he was at peace with himself. The language is strongly indebted to Psalms: "He breathed in the sugar of the pure morning. He heard the long phrases of the birds. No enemy wanted his life."