'Someone Who Could Never Be a Peasant'

I first encountered Robert Alter in 1970 in the issue of TriQuarterly devoted to Vladimir Nabokov, already one of my favorite writers. Alter’s contribution was “Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov and the Art of Politics” which Nabokov described as “practically flawless.” A year or so later, while taking a class in “The 18^th-Century English Novel” I read Alter’s Fielding and the Nature of the Novel (1968) and was delighted to discover his return to Nabokov in the final chapter. 

The world knows Alter as the translator of the Hebrew Bible, much of which I have read. I think of him as a critic and scholar but also as something even more essential, a celebrator of literature. Alter is never dry or desultory. Always implicit is his love of literature. I periodically reread his 1995 demolition of William H. Gass’ monstrous novel The Tunnel.

 

In the Autumn 2013 issue of Christianity and Literature, Alter published “A Life of Learning: Wandering Among Fields,” a lecture/review of his eclectic career in literature. While teaching Hebrew and its literature, ancient and modern, Alter says he continued teaching “comparative literature courses concentrated on the European and American novel, generally after the eighteenth century, with special attention to Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dickens, Joyce, Melville, Faulkner, and, of course, Nabokov.”

 

A frequent criticism of the academy today is its over-specialization. Polymaths seem to represent an endangered species. I’ve known two – Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner. Nabokov and Alter, along with Jacquez Barzun, also qualify. How did Alter excel in such divergent disciplines? His answer is commonsensical:

 

“Perhaps the most straightforward answer to this question is that these were simply two different topics that interested me, reflecting my incurable condition as someone who could never be a peasant and was not attached to the ancestral soil of one field. There may be, however, more substantive connections between my engagement in modern literature and my engagement in the Bible. I would begin explaining this in a rather general way by confessing that as a critic I have always been an inveterate literary enthusiast.”

 

There it is. Alter confesses to being what every literary critic, teacher, scholar and reader ought to be – an enthusiast. Perhaps only Alter could liken the scriptural story of Jacob to the story of Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black. As a student of literature, he represents a healthy mingling of qualities typical of scholars and common readers:

 

“A good many readers will have noticed my extravagant fondness for making critical arguments by close readings of extended passages from the texts I have considered. It may also have occurred at least to some that the ultimate inspiration for this procedure is Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, which seems to me the most seminal and enduring work of criticism written in the twentieth century.”