ALTER'S "READING IN AN IDEOLOGICAL AGE" (Pt. 2)

So as I progress through what is an intricate primer of the tools one will need to polish off what we like to think of as Literature, I decide to do some research on Robert Alter because I had never really heard of him before. It's no surprise, Alter is a big shit (teaches at UC Berk)and has written like 17 books on the Bible and Kafka, and the connections between him and Manguel become apparent: their knowledge platform is immense! Both these men have led successful academic and professional lives at the top rungs of the Academy; they have made their fortunes fueling and at the same time explicating Bibliomania.

The main difference between Alter and Manguel is that Manguel seems to draw more erratically from the annals of history. In that way, Alter is more focused and even though he talks a mean Bible studies, he sticks to the text. In Manguel, to prove an idea, you get on this historical hovercraft and jump from sibyls to seders to Salamanca. It's all very bumpy and sometimes reading Manguel is like taking a history lecture at 30,000 through moderate chop. But this critique is petty when you think about all the amazing examples Manguel is able to charm us with. Indeed, Manguel is like a swami of history, or a middle-aged David Blain, hypnotizing us as he explains.

Alter is definitely not a read for the layman, so if you are looking for a new entretemps I suggest you stay away from it.However, if you have had some experience reading criticism then you will easily break into his book. On the other hand, I did have to skip paragraphs and resort to skimming in parts where the exegesis became text stew. I mean, don't get me wrong. Alter's chapter on Style is pretty riveting stuff, especially when he talks about metaphor and Literature's inextricable reliance on metaphor. He speaks at great length about "Moby Dick" and Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" and his main idea in this chapter is that Literature is literature because it is singular and stylish as horse snot. I mean as dappled and newfangled as a pen with a laser. Indeed, he even christens a new textual dialect, that of the commersh paperback author, "A good deal of bestselling American prose, for example, is written in a mode one might call Standard Contemporary Novelistic, representing, I would guess, a homogenization and formulaic reduction of certain features of robus and muscular style introduced in the twenties and thirties by Hemingway, Dos Passos, Farrell, and other" (2001, pg. 107).

Alter makes the case for Literature in a big way, connecting the dots along the way for us, explicatingly, like a professor with elbow protectors on his jacket and a maudlin bowtie. The benefits, though, more than make up for the hard work, dedication, and blah blah that it is integral to the study of letters. Or in Alter's words, "To read this language adequately requires a prehensile activity of the mind on the details of the text as it unfolds, a willingness to entertain multiple and unresolved meanings, an openness to the pleasures in the sound and look and combination of the words." (2001,pg. 48) So, it is no surprise that Alter begins witha frank debate about the nature of character, I guess, both as it relates to the object in a piece of fiction and the quality as it relates to those object of fiction (their "character"?). Regardless, in the first chapter, Alter sets up a working definition of Literature, and then moves in for the kill by speaking of Character as possibly the oldest idea in Literature, "The claim I am making is a modest one...not that there is an immutable human nature but that there are certain lines of persistence that cross over from one era and one culture to another" (2001,pg. 75).

For Alter, Character just might be that strain that hangnails all of the Literatures from around the world, despite regional,religious, historical, or political affiliations, "Much about the way we perceive ourselves and the world manifestly changes as society, language, ideology, and technology change; but we also continue to share much as creatures born of woman, begotten by man, raised with siblings, endowed with certain appetites, conscious of our own mortality." (2001,pg. 75) I think only a person that wrote something so confident and universal could turn around a few sentences later and say, "To say that humanity continues to hold some things in common across the ages is not to imply that what is held in common is confidently known" (2001, pg. 75)

It is comforting to read Alter, a man who has made his fortune on Literature, the word, and Letters; to hear him in my head is comforting because when he gives you a definition, you know he has had to test it out, it has passed a battery of tests and dry runs, it has already shot an animal into the stratosphere to test the diagnostics. Therefore, Alter's chapter on "Allusion" is keen and well written; it's almost as if you want to put on some driving gloves or loafers before reading it because it definitely exercises the clutch. In general, Alter's opinion of the importance of allusion is pretty standard, "In one way or another, then, all writers are forced to enter into a dialogue or debate with their predecessors, recycling bits and pieces of earlier texts, giving them a fresh application, a nuance of redefinition, a radically new meaning, a different fucntion, an unanticipated elaboration"(2001, pg. 115).