The Pleasures of Reading by Robert Alter

A distinguished critic rescues literature from the ivory tower and reestablishes reading as a personal source of complex pleasure and insight.

A good many of the most influential currents in criticism and literary theory today can be traced back to the late 1960s. That was a time which seemed to many full of promise and intellectual excitement. In France, where most of the new trends began, the stodginess of academic criticism was dramatically displaced by a bold enterprise of systematic analysis, drawing on linguistics and anthropology, that sought to situate literary studies among the sciences humaines; by a radical questioning of Western philosophic premises undertaken through the combined investigation of literary and and philosophic texts; by scrutinizing literature through the lens of a drastically revised Freudianism or Marxism or a “discourse”-based historicism that at once incorporated and transcended both.

The discussion of literature would no longer be the province of the proverbial English professor with a comfortable tweed jacket and pipe luxuriating in his chatty complacent learning. Literature at last would be studied with intellectual vigor, against a background of philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics; and the most urgent issues of politics, history, personal and gender identity, would be boldly exposed through the analysis of literary texts. . .

In fact, for many of the new trends in literary studies, the object of the preposition “about” is often no longer literature. The great prefix of the day is meta - : metalanguage, metatext, metadiscourse. To be sure, a discussion of the premises of discussion, talk about how we talk about literature, is necessary for the maintenance of methodological scrupulosity. What is distressing is that such discussion to the second degree should in many instances displace the discussion of literature itself. One can read article after article, hear lecture after lecture, in which no literary work is ever quoted and no real reading experience is registered. I strongly suspect that many young people now earning undergraduate degrees in English or French at our most prestigious institutions have read two or three pages of Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and Kristeva for every page of George Eliot or Stendhal.

Analysis of this sort may have its own compelling character, but it is disquieting to contemplate the prospect of literature programs in which such analysis is proffered not as a complementary alternative but as the predominant, or even the “correct” approach. The neo-Marxist Terry Eagleton shows admirable candor and consistency in proposing that a curricular move be made from literature to “discourse studies”, so that instructors would be free to teach Shakespeare, television scripts, government memoranda, comic books, and advertising copy in a single program as instances of the language of power. What is regrettable, though also characteristic of a certain prevalent ideological coerciveness, is that Eagleton also proposes the abolition of departments of literature, having demonstrated, at least to his own satisfaction, that there is no coherent phenomena that can be called literature.

I am not suggesting that students should be turned back to some imagined idyllic age when literature and only literature was read. By this point in time, the value of large intellectual overviews and interdisciplinary perspectives should be self-evident. What is at issue is a matter of proportion: with finite time granted to anyone for reading, whether or not in or out of the university, should a person drawn to literature be encouraged to devote more attention to Lacan than Poe, to Barthes than to Balzac? One might further question whether the best guidance is provided by this particular cluster of speculative thinkers who as Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut have shrewdly argued, represent a reductive French rhetorical radicalization of German thought - - Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Heidegger – that may lead to an intellectual dead end ( La pensee 68 , Paris, 1985).

The burden of this whole book, however, is that there is a great deal in the intrinsic operations of literature vitally calling our attention, however much we may also want to look beyond the literary text to its multifarious contexts. Attention of this sort, moreover, by no means implies a commitment either to “monumentalize” the texts under consideration or to regard them as pure aesthetic objects. On the contrary, many - perhaps even most – original works of literature are themselves powerful vehicles of subversion, variously directed against prevalent beliefs and ideologies, received social and moral attitudes, literary tradition, against the very conception of what literature is.

The minute attention to how literature speaks through its own complex and distinctive language is an indispensable step in fully realizing the subversive power of the text, and one could scarcely find a better example than Moby-Dick, with its extraordinary deployment of imagery, symbol, allusion, scene and even rhythmic movement to effect a radical redefinition of nature, historical time, meaning and value.

As readers, we live in a constant unfathomable intercourse with the written word – that mere artifice which ensconces itself in the inner sanctum of our imagination, delights us in odd and unpredictable ways , even effects our perceptions of the world. The capacity of literary texts, as intricately structured vehicles of communication - to stimulate some readings and interpretations while excluding others – is essential to what I call the high fun of literature. It is “high” because, unlike, say, the fun of coming down a water slide or watching a clown get splattered in the face with a cream pie, it engages a good many of our most complicated faculties of perception – our nuanced knowledge of language, people, social institutions, politics, history, morality; our ability to grasp analogies, parallelisms, antithesis, significant repetitions, ellipses, ironies, double meanings, even cryptograms.

It is “fun” because of our response as readers to the beauty, the wit, the profuse inventiveness of the text's language (style) and of its constructed world (character). To translate this aesthetic response in cognitive terms, the high fun of reading is also the pleasure we take in the exercise of all those faculties of perception, our enlistment by the text as players in one of the most elaborate and various games that human culture has devised; a kind of communication that, unlike graffiti or bumper stickers or telegrams, offer a rich, open-ended multiplicity of messages that put the mind in a restless pleasing motion that is a constant source experiential knowledge and delight.

Dien Bien Phu by Ted Morgan

Valley of Death; The Tragedy At Dien Bien Phu That Led America Into The Vietnam War by Ted Morgan; Random House, 2010


In Paris the news of the defeat arrived at noon 7 May, 1954. At The National Assembly, so bitterly divided over the war, the deputies discussed the disaster in hushed tones as they filed into the main chamber. Premier Laniel asked for a minute of silence, the entire six-hundred-odd assembly, except for the Communists, rose in a collective gesture of regard for the garrison.

“... The enemy wanted to obtain the fall of Dien Bien Phu before the [Indochina part of the ] Geneva Convention opened. He thought that this would be as decisive blow to French morale. . . The enemy has sacrificed thousands of men to defeat the heroes who in fifty-five days have won the admiration of the world and covered themselves in glory. . . “

A front-page editorial in Le Figaro the next day, signed by its editor in chief, Pierre Brisson, judged the conduct of the war severely: “The men of Dien Bien Phu died because we lied to ourselves. They died because we did not know how to fight this war and because we were incapable of not fighting it. During these nine years of war, opportunities to win, as well as opportunities to negotiate, were lost because of our weakness. By giving in to Communist blackmail, we fought this war shamefully. The conduct of operations was a series of excuses.”

This harsh though credible appraisal was the exception, however, for in their collective self-regard, the French were compelled to turn defeat into an act of heroism. Dien Bien Phu was a perfect failure that had to be converted into an admirable feat of arms. The feel-good outlets in the media sounded the trumpet. The popular weekly Paris Match said : “ A clearing in the Indochina jungle has become the capital of heroism." Dien Bien Phu was compared to Verdun, the most celebrated victory of World War I, an absurd comparison. It was forgotten that a poll of the French public in February showed only 8 percent in favor of the war. Heroism at Dien Bien Phu became a bumper to absorb the shock of defeat, and the “honor of the soldiers” was a way of hiding political cowardice.

But were the thousands of men who died there heroes? Victims, rather, ignored by a government of bunglers in Paris and a high command in Saigon too divided to do its job. On May 9, General Navarre adopted the requisite tone of heroism in a message to the troops: “The glorious conduct of our army gives us new reason to fight. The war will continue.” He expounded on the aid the Vietminh had received from China, which had changed the nature of the war, for which Narvarre had made no adjustments in strategy or tactics.

The previous day, Ho Chi Minh had congratulated his troops by asking for the avoidance of hubris: “Our victory is brilliant but it is not decisive. We must not be too proud of our success. We must not underestimate the enemy.”

Back in the defeated valley, the Vietminh were facing the dilemma of victory, which mainly had to do with numbers: a total of 10,261 prisoners – 2,257 French, the rest Moroccans, Algerians, Africans, Legionnaires ( mostly German veterans of W.W. II) Vietnamese and Thais. Roughly half of whom were wounded.

The Vietnimh were unprepared to deal with these numbers. The victory had come more suddenly than General Giap had imagined. Never before had the Vietnimh anywhere near that many prisoners and the number of wounded was far in excess of anything Giap had imagined, even though he had prevented their evacuation as a way of breaking down morale. He proceeded to remove the wounded from their filthy trenches and place them under tents made from parachutes in groups of twenty. The emerged from their burrows blinded by the light of day. Giap's plan was to disperse his divisions quickly, leaving only a regiment of the 308th to take care of the seriously wounded. The 316th Division would take the POWS on foot to Vietminh camps hundreds of miles away.


In their haste to get moving, the Vietnimh conducted a triage of captured French forces that was far too simplistic. Those wounded below the waist who couldn't walk would be kept in the tents. Those wounded above the waist were presumed to be capable of walking. In the process, many who were near death with chest or abdominal wounds compounded with gangrene and dysentery were forced to join the long march. It was a form of cruelty based on haste and indifference to suffering.

Even while air evacuation of the severely wounded proceeded at Dien Bien Phu, Vietminh combat divisions dispersed to the north delta and the POW columns wound their way to camps near Giap's main bases of supply along the northern border with China, French forces continued to bombard critical junctures of their routes. Faced with the belligerent intransigence of John Foster Dulles, at Geneva, and the instability of the French government the fate of the POWs did not prove to be much of a bargaining chip.

For weeks after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the trails leading to the highlands were crowded with a pitiful procession of prisoners, who reached the camps with fatalities of up to 30 percent. These were not the camps of World War II movies, with tidy barracks, barbed-wire enclosures, watchtowers and searchlights. They were ramshackle bamboo huts in the jungle. “Nature and the population are our guard,” the can bos said. There was no need for walls – the jungle did the job.


The men arrived in a state of exhaustion. Subsisting on a ration of one pound of rice daily and perhaps an occasional banana if they were lucky, all had suffered severe weight loss. Among the diseases incurred on the march or then in the camps themselves, where rats as big as rabbits carried typhus in their urine, were amoebic dysentery, which led to dehydration and dead; beriberi, where the extremities swelled, the lungs filled with fluid, and people died looking like a fairground doll; nematode worms that came up from the intestines into the larynx, bring death by suffocation; and the skin disease called yaws. There was no medical care to speak of – the infirmary was known as 'the morgue'”. Men went there to die, with their foul smelling bandages that were never changed and their abdominal wounds that burst open.

The diet was rice and more rice. A soldier needs twenty-five hundred calories a day, and their rice rations delivered a thousand, so the men's bodies fed on themselves. And, in any case, for a Frenchman, a day without bread was a calamity. The men spent hours each day delousing themselves. The mornings were taken up by rice and wood details, for the rice depots were miles away. In the afternoons the prisoners attended brainwashing sessions, called reeducation. One of the reasons the men had been separated from their officers was to end all hierarchical influence and make them more amenable. They soon learned to go along to get along, and obediently recited the catechism:

“What do you think of this war?”

“It is an unjust and criminal war.”

“Why is this a criminal war?”

“ Because it is an armed aggression against the Vietnamese people.”

They said in unison, “We are all murderers,” and sang “The Internationale”

From the start of the war until the armistice, the French lost 45,013 captured or missing. In the final prisoner exchange, 10,752 were turned over. That left 34,261 unaccounted for. Of the surviving 10,752, 3,290 were from Dien Bien Phu, out of the 10,863 taken prisoner there.

The French military came to believe that the towering mortality rate among the POWs was due to a deliberate policy that amounted to a refinement of the Nazi death camps. Comparisons were made: at camps like Dachau or Buchenwald, 80% had died; among the Dien Bien Phu prisoners, 70 percent perished. Instead of the gas chamber, the men died of malnutrition, disease, and their neglected wounds. Colonel Bonafous, however, who wrote the authoritative study on the prisoners, concluded: “ It cannot be established that this was a deliberate plan.” It was Bonafous who obtained the documents showing that nine thousand Vietnimh prisoners of the French – handed over to their Vietnamese allies-were killed the camps with no nutritional or medical problems. Most were simply executed.

{ But who cares about “authoritative studies”? Too inconvenient for the high opinion we must necessarily maintain about ourselves]

We Are Truly Sleepwalking Through History

"We stand passively mute... and are truly sleepwalking through history.”


Senate Remarks by Robert C. Byrd

February 12, 2003


To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences. On this February day, as this nation stands at the brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors of war.


Yet, this Chamber is, for the most part, silent -- ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.


We stand passively mute in the United States Senate, paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events. Only on the editorial pages of our newspapers is there much substantive discussion of the prudence or imprudence of engaging in this particular war. And this is no small conflagration we contemplate. This is no simple attempt to defang a villain. No. This coming battle, if it materializes, represents a turning point in U.S. foreign policy and possibly a turning point in the recent history of the world.


This nation is about to embark upon the first test of a revolutionary doctrine applied in an extraordinary way at an unfortunate time. The doctrine of preemption -- the idea that the United States or any other nation can legitimately attack a nation that is not imminently threatening but may be threatening in the future -- is a radical new twist on the traditional idea of self defense. It appears to be in contravention of international law and the UN Charter. And it is being tested at a time of world-wide terrorism, making many countries around the globe wonder if they will soon be on our -- or some other nation's -- hit list. 


High level Administration figures recently refused to take nuclear weapons off of the table when discussing a possible attack against Iraq. What could be more destabilizing and unwise than this type of uncertainty, particularly in a world where globalism has tied the vital economic and security interests of many nations so closely together? There are huge cracks emerging in our time-honored alliances, and U.S. intentions are suddenly subject to damaging worldwide speculation. Anti-Americanism based on mistrust, misinformation, suspicion, and alarming rhetoric from U.S. leaders is fracturing the once solid alliance against global terrorism which existed after September 11.


Here at home, people are warned of imminent terrorist attacks with little guidance as to when or where such attacks might occur. Family members are being called to active military duty, with no idea of the duration of their stay or what horrors they may face. Communities are being left with less than adequate police and fire protection.  Other essential services are also short-staffed. The mood of the nation is grim. The economy is stumbling. Fuel prices are rising and may soon spike higher.


This Administration, now in power for a little over two years, must be judged on its record. I believe that that record is dismal.


In that scant two years, this Administration has squandered a large projected surplus of some $5.6 trillion over the next decade and taken us to projected deficits as far as the eye can see. This Administration's domestic policy has put many of our states in dire financial condition, under funding scores of essential programs for our people. This Administration has fostered policies which have slowed economic growth. This Administration has ignored urgent matters such as the crisis in health care for our elderly. This Administration has been slow to provide adequate funding for homeland security. This Administration has been reluctant to better protect our long and porous borders.


In foreign policy, this Administration has failed to find Osama bin Laden. In fact, just yesterday we heard from him again marshaling his forces and urging them to kill. This Administration has split traditional alliances, possibly crippling, for all time, International order-keeping entities like the United Nations and NATO. This Administration has called into question the traditional worldwide perception of the United States as well-intentioned, peacekeeper. This Administration has turned the patient art of diplomacy into threats, labeling, and name calling of the sort that reflects quite poorly on the intelligence and sensitivity of our leaders, and which will have consequences for years to come.


Calling heads of state pygmies, labeling whole countries as evil, denigrating powerful European allies as irrelevant -- these types of crude insensitivities can do our great nation no good. We may have massive military might, but we cannot fight a global war on terrorism alone. We need the cooperation and friendship of our time-honored allies as well as the newer found friends whom we can attract with our wealth. Our awesome military machine will do us little good if we suffer another devastating attack on our homeland which severely damages our economy. Our military manpower is already stretched thin and we will need the augmenting support of those nations who can supply troop strength, not just sign letters cheering us on.


The war in Afghanistan has cost us $37 billion so far, yet there is evidence that terrorism may already be starting to regain its hold in that region. We have not found bin Laden, and unless we secure the peace in Afghanistan, the dark dens of terrorism may yet again flourish in that remote and devastated land.


Pakistan as well is at risk of destabilizing forces. This Administration has not finished the first war against terrorism and yet it is eager to embark on another conflict with perils much greater than those in Afghanistan. Is our attention span that short? Have we not learned that after winning the war one must always secure the peace?

And yet we hear little about the aftermath of war in Iraq. In the absence of plans, speculation abroad is rife. Will we seize Iraq's oil fields, becoming an occupying power which controls the price and supply of that nation's oil for the foreseeable future? To whom do we propose to hand the reins of power after Saddam Hussein?

Will our war inflame the Muslim world resulting in devastating attacks on Israel? Will Israel retaliate with its own nuclear arsenal? Will the Jordanian and Saudi Arabian governments be toppled by radicals, bolstered by Iran which has much closer ties to terrorism than Iraq?

Could a disruption of the world's oil supply lead to a world-wide recession? Has our senselessly bellicose language and our callous disregard of the interests and opinions of other nations increased the global race to join the nuclear club and made proliferation an even more lucrative practice for nations which need the income?

In only the space of two short years this reckless and arrogant Administration has initiated policies which may reap disastrous consequences for years.

One can understand the anger and shock of any President after the savage attacks of September 11. One can appreciate the frustration of having only a shadow to chase and an amorphous, fleeting enemy on which it is nearly impossible to exact retribution.

But to turn one's frustration and anger into the kind of extremely destabilizing and dangerous foreign policy debacle that the world is currently witnessing is inexcusable from any Administration charged with the awesome power and responsibility of guiding the destiny of the greatest superpower on the planet. Frankly many of the pronouncements made by this Administration are outrageous. There is no other word.

Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq -- a population, I might add, of which over 50% is under age 15 -- this chamber is silent. On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological warfare -- this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is business as usual in the United States Senate.

We are truly "sleepwalking through history." In my heart of hearts I pray that this great nation and its good and trusting citizens are not in for a rudest of awakenings.

To engage in war is always to pick a wild card. And war must always be a last resort, not a first choice. I truly must question the judgment of any President who can say that a massive unprovoked military attack on a nation which is over 50% children is "in the highest moral traditions of our country". This war is not necessary at this time. Pressure appears to be having a good result in Iraq. Our mistake was to put ourselves in a corner so quickly. Our challenge is to now find a graceful way out of a box of our own making. Perhaps there is still a way if we allow more time.

Intro to Sartor Resartus by Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor

While Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus has little in common with the realistic tradition of verisimilar representation of human situations in their social and moral contexts, it does have affinities with another fictional tradition, one that is well described by Robert Alter. This tradition includes the kind of prose fiction that 'expresses its seriousness through playfulness, that is acutely aware of itself as a mere structure of words even as it tries to discover ways of going beyond words to the experiences which words seem to indicate'. The fully conscious novel is 'one in which from beginning to end, through the style, the handling of the narrative viewpoint, the names and words imposed on the characters, the patterning of the narration, the nature of the characters and what befalls them, there is a consistent effort to convey to us a sense of a fictional world as an authorial construct set up against a background of literary tradition and convention'. ( Partial Magic, Berkeley, 1975) For Alter, prime examples of fully achieve self-conscious novels include Cervantes' Don Quixote, Fielding's “Tom Jones”, Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist, Sterne's Tristam Shandy, and Nabokov's Pale Fire; and others would want to add works like Melville's Moby-Dick. . .



The key feature of Carlyle's 'modus operandi' is that the text is about both itself and the experience of reading it. Sartor its own commentary and has within itself a fully developed model of a reader grappling with a difficult text. . . On behalf of the reader, the Editor attempts to find useful meanings in materials that fascinate him and compel his attention even while he suspects their authenticity, doubts the intentions and sincerity of their author, and comes to realize that none of his doubts can ever be settled with certainty.

In her English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA, 1980), Anne Mellor presents Sartor as a 'self- consuming artifact' that does not preach the truth, but asks that its readers discover the truth for themselves'. Sartor Resartus is a fictional work 'designed to consume itself by revealing the limitations of both its symbolic language and of language as such. It is not intended as a monument of truth but as a goad to action.'

Janice L Hanley has argued that the last three chapters of Sartor show a turning away from an outmoded Romantic vision towards a Victorian social actuality, 'an emerging Victorian mode of making meaning which pits 'an empirical self' against a metaphysical and aesthetic self; together they compose a book about the quest for meaning.” ( Shadow Hunting, Studies in Romanticism, xvii (1978).

In Sartus Resartus it is important to realize that Teufelsdrockh's philosophical belief's are essentially a simplified version of the leading themes of eighteenth-century German Idealist philosophy, especially as it contrasts with an equally simplified version of eighteenth-century British empirical philosophy, the nineteenth-century name for which was Utilitarianism. The fundamental premise of Teufelsdrockh's thought is the epistomological distinction between the understanding (Verstand) and Reason ( Vernunft). The former mental faculty is essentially passive, containing impressions ultimately derived from sense experience. Such empirical knowledge is strictly bounded by the containers of time and space, by WHERE, with its brother, WHEN, as Teufelsdrockh ( aka 'The Devil's Shit') puts it, and can supply knowledge only of the appearance of things, never of things in themselves. Such knowledge can be objective and accurate, even scientific; and it can certainly be useful; but can never tell anyone about the noumenal ( as opposed to phenomenal) objects of thought. The existence of God, an after-life, or the soul can never be established by the empirical understanding.

Noumenal knowledge is supplied by the intuitive faculty of Reason ( or the Fantasy, as Teufelsdrockh sometimes calls it). Reason, the organ of spiritual and imaginative insight, can reveal to man supersensible realities undetectable by the understanding. 'To the eye of vulgar Logic', Teufelsdruckh asks, 'what is man? An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and a Divine Apparition... Reason can pierce through the Where and When to the celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER, to the universal HERE and the everlasting NOW'.

According to Teufelsdrockh [ sounding remarkably like Kierkegaard-J.S.] the progress of science, that is, the increasing power and dominance of the faculty of understanding, has led to the destruction of wonder and its replacement by mensuration and numeration. The more this power waxes, the more the intuitive power of Reason wanes. In the wintry light of understanding, the soul has become synonymous with the stomach, and happiness has become the aim of man, who, in the hedonistic calculus of the Utilitarians ( the Motive-Millwrights), has become 'a dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on.' What is needed is a restoration to its rightful kingly place in the human personality of Reason, Fantasy, Intuition, and Wonder. Love, Duty, and a sense of the sacred nature of social bonds can only flourish in the light of Reason, which can give a saving sense of the infinite within the finite, of the religious nature of human life, and of the miraculous potential of any aspect of creation.

There are certain features of Teufelsdruckh's thought, however, which are bound to give careful readers pause. One of them concerns the extraordinary number of Christian and biblical allusions embedded in his utterances. This suggests a deliberate attempt to blur the differences between traditional Christian beliefs and the subjectivity of Romantic regeneration. A second trouble spot is Teufelsdruckh's insistence on the moral imperative of duty: 'Do the Duty which lies nearest thee', which he says cannot be grounded in Speculation, only 'felt' in experience. But in the highly schematized and rhetorical account of Teufelsdruckh's conversion experience in Book II, one is only told about, never convincingly shown, his inner transformation. As a result the reader cannot feel with Teufelsdrockh. At best he can give only a notional assent to the professor's moral injunctions, at worse he may come to find them factitious.

An overemphasis on moral conduct, triggered by the breakdown of traditional religious beliefs, was a leading feature of the Victorian temper. The syndrome was memorably encapsulated in George Eliot's solemn observation that while God was inconceivable and immortality unbelievable, Duty was 'peremptory and absolute'. What Nietzsche said apropos of George Eliot in Twilight of the Idols could be well applied to Teufelsdruckh: 'They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all he more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality...We other hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident... it stands and falls with faith in God.”

Teufelsdrockh also tries to finesse the question that was to become of pre-eminent concern to many Victorian writers: the question of immortality, of life after death. His answer is that only the 'Time-shadows' have perished and that 'the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and for ever. . . believe thou must; understand it thou canst not.' It is hard not to regard this passage as rhetoric in the pejorative sense of the term, as an attempt to substitute the wish for the deed. Why must we believe? Not because one is assured of a life after death; but precisely because one is not. One must believe because it is to demoralizing not to. “Better an ignis fatuus/ Than no illume at all' as Emily Dickinson wryly remarked in her little poem on the breakdown of traditional Christian beliefs. In this passage, as in other utterances of Teufelsdrockh, one is once again reminded of Twilight of the Idols, this time what Nietzsche said about Teufelsdruck's creator:

"Carlyle: a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetor from need, constantly lured by the craving for a strong faith and the feeling of his incapacity for it (in this respect, a typical romantic!). The craving for a strong faith is no proof of a strong faith, but quite the contrary. If one has such a faith, then one can afford the beautiful luxury of scepticism: one is sure enough, firm enough, has ties enough for that. . . (Carlyle) requires noise. A constant passionate dishonesty against himself – that is his proprium; in this respect he is and remains interesting. Of course, in England he is admired precisely for his honesty. Well, that is English. . . at bottom, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes a point of honor not to be one.”

Recent critical reorientation to Sartor Resartus is a welcome reminder that when he wrote it Carlyle had not yet become Carlylean, had not yet successfully substituted biography, history, and social prophesy for imaginative fiction. It was perhaps for this reason that John Stuart Mill always regarded Sartor Resartus as Carlyle's 'best and greatest work'. It's distinction, however, was not immediately apparent to Mill any more than to most first-time readers, who may take heart from Mill's experience. When first shown the manuscript by Carlyle, he 'made little of it'; but by the time it appeared in Fraser's Magazine two years later he had grown sufficiently advanced in 'new modes of thought' to read Sartor Resartus 'with enthusiastic admiration and the keenest delight'.

Robert Alter on Style by Stephen Miller

Beginning With the Word
How the cadences and diction of the King James Bible affected the prose style of American writers.
By STEPHEN MILLER; WSJ, MARCH 7, 2010

Once upon a time critics spoke of the pleasure they derived from reading a work of literature. They talked of an author's descriptive gifts or insight into human nature—even about a distinctive literary voice or prose style. But a generation ago many scholars, besotted by French theorists, concluded that this way of discussing literature was naïve, if not wrong. They argued that one should instead scrutinize novels—now called "texts"—for the self-subversive qualities of language itself or for hidden authorial bias.

Robert Alter would like us to return to the earlier view. These days, he says, teachers "look right through" literary style in their effort to ground texts "in one ideology or another." But style is valuable in itself. It is not only a source of "deep pleasure"; it is, he says, "the vehicle of a particular vision of reality." In "Pen of Iron," Mr. Alter—best known for his translations and close readings of the Hebrew Bible—looks in particular at how the King James Bible has influenced the prose style and literary voice of several American writers.

The first work he discusses, as it happens, is not a novel; it is the Gettysburg Address. Why does Lincoln say "four score and seven years ago" rather than 87? The locution alludes to "three score and ten," a phrase that appears in the King James Bible more than 100 times. Like other Bible-derived phrases from Lincoln's public speaking—"a house divided against itself cannot stand" is perhaps the most famous—the biblical cadences of the Gettysburg Address confer "weight and solemnity."


The King James Bible, Mr. Alter observes, has two major stylistic traits. It generally uses words of Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin origin, and its sentences often have a paratactic structure—that is, they juxtapose a series of short elements, sometimes joining them with a simple conjunction (usually "and"). Mr. Alter hears biblical diction and rhythms in several 20th-century novels, including Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead" (2004) and Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (2007). Not that biblical echoes, by themselves, make for great literature. "After the passage of eight decades," Mr. Alter writes of Hemingway's book, "much of the novel looks rather flat—its characters sketchy, lacking psychological or moral complexity." Mr. McCarthy's "mesmerizing power as a stylist," he says, "often seems to exceed his range and insights as a novelist."

Mr. Alter prefers novels that offer a range of styles, like Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick." The Bible is a "strong thread" in that novel's prose and themes. There is the thundering sermon to the whalers in New Bedford, for instance, before the voyage begins. Ahab's name (like Ishmael's) comes from the Bible, and Ahab's war with the whale has an apocalyptic quality to it, as if aimed at vanquishing evil itself. The grog onboard the Pequod, Ahab says to his men, is "hot as Satan's hoof" and "forks out at the serpent-snapping eye." Ishmael, serving as Melville's narrator, can be paratactic, too: "Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft dived deep in the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes were heard."

But there are other threads in "Moby-Dick," Mr. Alter says: "Shakespeare, Milton, the English Baroque prose writers of the seventeenth century, sailors' argot . . . and the colloquial Yankee speech of antebellum New England." He argues that "extravagant stylistic hybridity" in "Moby-Dick" is an appropriate vehicle for what Melville wants to convey—"the unfathomability of human nature" and "the inscrutability and blind power of the natural world."

Mr. Alter sees admirable stylistic variety of Saul Bellow's "Seize the Day" (1956), too. 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."

Mr. Alter discusses Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" (1936), but his argument centers less on style than on theme, since Faulkner's prose is not especially biblical. Rather, Mr. Alter writes, the King James Bible serves as a "thematic lexicon" for Faulkner. Certain key words give "Absalom, Absalom!" a scriptural quality even beyond its retelling of the King David story. Faulkner pulls together into "a catastrophic climax" a cluster of terms that are "drawn from the Bible—land, curse, son, birthright, inheritance, house." As for Faulkner's style, it is not entirely to Mr. Alter's liking. He speaks disapprovingly of Faulkner's "often bewildering abstractions," his "fondness for arcane and flamboyant terms" and his "convoluted syntax." These qualities, it should be said, have attracted readers as much as repelled them over the years.

Will 21st-century American novelists be influenced by the King James Bible—or any other version? Mr. Alter notes that "the Pilgrims, and their descendants for many generations, were Bible-steeped, Bible-quoting folk," but the popularity of the Bible waned by the end of the nineteenth century. Though of course it looms large in the lives of church-going Americans, "we no longer have a culture pervaded by Scripture, where . . . the active memories of ordinary people are stocked with many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of phrases and verses from the canonical texts." It looks as if, to keep this classic work of English prose alive, it will have to be read in school.

The Hearings of Robert Bork

I spent a lot of time watching the hearing. Bork approached the Committee in his role as a Professor of the Law and was not unwilling to engage in a highly theoretical discussion and provided very candid views of where he stood on the various issues like original intent, which, since it is based on historical interpretation and all the complexity involved in the relative weight of the evidences that history itself provides, turns out to be a sort of quicksand. A quicksand- a moving target subject to the vagaries of time and circumstance- that the authors of the Constitution themselves had to deal with and were not able to resolve in an entirely satisfactory manner. So how could Bork presume to do so himself?


There is rarely an "absolute" answer to any of the really difficult questions which, especially in the atmosphere generated by party politics ( as the 'Founding Fathers' clearly recognized) and special- interest pressure groups using the instruments of mass media, quickly take on the aspect of " a can of worms". An additional difficulty was that Bork himself was not a particularly attractive person. Today, nominees try not to "lecture" Senators on Constitutional Law but every decision they end up making involves taking a stand on the questions raised by Bork in those hearings and many have views very similar to those he expressed at the time.

The above being the reason I would prefer a Judge ( and a President for that matter) who is broadly educated in the Humanities- History, Literature, Art- in which the formal study of the Law is a part- but not perhaps not the whole parcel. A Justice who has a personal sense of the pain, human misery- perpetrator and victim alike- of those who find themselves exposed to the necessity of bringing their problems and frustrations before a Court and the great difficulty of obtaining justice- blind and impartial- in such circumstances these or on any of the days in our brief lives on this planet. It ought to be remembered more often that, at the end, regardless of any degree of guilt or innocence, the final verdict for each and everyone of us is a capital one, and, at least as far as anyone really knows with scientific certainty, of the exact same character and duration.

All Souls College Election by Hugh Trevor-Roper

6 July, 1951

Of the election in University College there is little to say. This was partly, of course, because no one is much interested in what goes on there, so the usual system of espionage has not been developed. The University College is a sort of Oxford Tibet, with primitive inhabitants, strange superstitions, and few economic attractions for colonizing powers. Consequently the election was enveloped in that secrecy which customarily shrouds ( it is said) the election in Lhasa of the Dalai Lama. Quite the opposite, of course, was the election of a warden of All Souls. That should rather be compared with a Presidential Election in America....

You must understand that there is in this university, as in all institutions (see the Bible, passim) a Party of Light (to which the writer belongs) and a Party of Darkness (consisting of those who hold different views). Our party of Light regards a University as a place of Learning and Pleasure, to be controlled by us; their party of Darkness regards it as a place of administrative efficiency and Dullness to be controlled by them. These two parties are nearly always locked in apparently insoluble deadlock; which, however, is ultimately solved by the existence, at a far lower level, of a third party, conveniently described as the Jellies, or party of compromise.

Whereas the Parties of Light and Darkness are distinguished by the enlightenment or blackness of their views, the Jellies or perhaps I should say Jellyfish– are distinguished by their complete absence of any views. They float now this way, now that, as the tide ebbs or flows, sucked helplessly into the wake of ships passing this way now that, sometimes stranded on the beach by the advancing tide, and left to dissolve in the sun, sometimes carried away by the receding tide, quavering, into the strange and terrifying currents of the uncomprehended Ocean.

In spite of their general helplessness the Jellies have, however, two important qualities: first, though sometimes submerged, they never sink; second, though unable to control the direction of their movements, some of them can, if touched, sting. In periods of violent storm ( naturalists observe) these Jellies appear in large numbers around our otherwise placid academic coasts; and the results of their intervention in our elections ( I must now return from metaphor to the world of plain fact) is almost always the same: a compromise candidate is discovered who, in the exhaustion of both parties, is found acceptable by all...he appeals to the Party of Light by being thoroughly inefficient at administration; he appeals to the Party of Darkness by showing no interest in either Learning or Pleasure. Thus, although nobody positively wants him, each party prefers him to the candidate of the other, and he is elected.

Of course the late Warden of All Souls had hardly been buried, and the black hatchment had hardly been hung out, like a somewhat tipsy pub-sign, over the college gate, before the preparations and speculations about the succession had begun. There are in All Souls 51 voting Fellows, and a candidate, to be elected Warden, must obtain at least 26 votes at the formal meeting, but before this formal meeting there are preliminary meetings at which those candidates who are thought to be worth running are selected b a straw vote. Our candidate was, of course, Isaiah Berlin. Theirs was, of course, a professional administrator. At the first straw vote they obtained a majority for their candidate, Sir Edward Bridges, head of the civil service; but Bridges declined the offer, and from this moment the battle can be said to have begun.

The most determined advocate of Darkness in All Souls – A.L. Rowse – happened, at this crucial juncture, to be in California, and ever since airplanes were invented he has loudly declared that his neurosis would never allow him to travel in such a vessel; but when the fate of Darkness in Oxford hung thus precariously in the balance, he at once disinterestedly jettisoned his long and carefully sustained neurosis and appeared with a few days in the surprised cloisters of All Souls. For a week every alcove hummed; then at the next meeting 26 Fellows, with apparent unanimity, supported the proposal of Rowse of a hitherto quite unknown figure: Sir Eric Beckett. Such support, if repeated at the official meeting would infallibly bring Beckett in. The question which everybody naturally asked (including some who had already voted for him) was, Who is Sir Eric Beckett?

Deep research has been devoted to this problem. So far the only clear facts that have emerged are that Sir Eric Beckett is (thanks to an airplane crash which killed his superior) legal adviser to the Foreign Office; that he was once struck in the face by Douglas Jay who, though himself a well-behaved Wykehamist, was outraged beyond endurance by his pro-Franco views, and has twice been in a lunatic asylum.

Conceive, if you can, the crescendo of buzzing in the alcoves, the feverish motion from staircase to staircase in these normally somnolent quadrangles, the sudden attentiveness towards younger voters of hitherto aloof elderly peers, the carefully timed indiscretions and skilfully calculated chance meetings by which, in the next fortnight, each party sought desperately to detach from the other its floating voters; and having conceived it, transport yourself in imagination to the official meeting at which whosoever obtained 26 votes would thereby become Warden of the College.

The first proposal was was made by Rowse who, as sub-warden, controlled the machinery of debate. He proposed Sir Eric Beckett; and thereupon the carefully oiled mechanism of election began those calculated revolutions which could slide the candidate effortlessly into place. Began – but did not complete. Suddenly strange creaks issued from parts of the equipment, as if saboteurs had secretly inserted sand in some essential aperture. The great engine groaned to a standstill, and certain small but important cogs, rods or pistons had not moved – with disastrous consequences: the candidate was not in place. In spite of his earlier absolute majority, he had now only got 23 votes; and 23 were not enough.

At once the Party of Light advanced to try their hand at the machine. Their candidate was in turn placed on the springboard: Isaiah Berlin; and the Party foremen wound enthusiastically with recalcitrant handles. But once again essential springs failed to respond, and the candidate could not be carried forth into the Warden's lodgings. He had only obtained 21 votes, and 21 votes was not enough either.

And now began a famous scene which will long be remembered in Oxford history and quoted in the manuals of our constitutional procedure. Each party in despair began to put up candidate after candidate in the hope of breaking the deadlock, and every advocate of Light, and every advocate of Darkness, in turn submitted to the test in the hope of detaching either three votes in one direction or five votes in the other in order to achieve a majority. Scenes of indescribable confusion followed. Twice did Isaiah withdraw his candidature amid applause from his adversaries; twice he was dragged back by his supporters. Now one hand, now another, grasped the handle of the obstinate machine, but it failed to turn. The issue was always the same. Whoever stood against Isaiah infallibly obtained 23 votes - - the voting strength of embattled Darkness; whoever stood against Beckett as infallibly obtain 21 votes – the voting strength of mobilized Light. There was total deadlock. What was to be done?

At this point the watchers on the academic cliffs began to espy, out at sea, the familiar phenomena of the storm: great shoals of Jellies drifting slowly toward the shore; and within the conclave, by a natural consequence of this news, the cry for a compromise candidate began to be heard. The question was, who could that compromise candidate be? You will have observed that the full toll of voters was 52, but also that the united strength of the two parties amounts only to 44; and whereas we can account for one of the omissions by the fact that the candidate of the moment was always out of the room at the time of the voting, and for a second by the fact that one voter - -Professor Wheare – overcome by the strain of the conclave, had to be carried out on a stretcher, there are still other abstainers to be accounted for. Naturally it was among these abstainers that a compromise candidate would be sought. Who among them was the most appropriate candidate?

Sir Hubert Henderson, Drummond Professor of Political Economy, is a respectable elderly gentleman who is generally known in Oxford for one reason only: in 1949 he made, before the largest Convocation ever remembered at Oxford, the most boring speech that has ever been heard in that assembly. Had there been any votes to lose on that occasion it is universally agreed that Henderson's speech would indubitably have lost them all. ( in fact his speech made no difference at all: everyone came to that meeting with his mind firmly made up that no oratory, however plausible, could have altered it: for we were voting an increase in our own salaries.)

When the first straw vote for the Wardenship of All Souls was taken, Sir Hubert Henderson had only obtained one vote; and it was perhaps this fact (by rendering the whole business academic to him) had caused him to sleep, and thereby abstain, throughout the long struggle of the parties. At all events, when the deadlock within the college walls was complete, and the swish of Jellies in the tide had become audible, the double fact that nobody seemed to want Hubert Henderson and that Sir Hubert Henderson did not seem to want anyone, naturally made him the man of the hour. And thus it was that suddenly, at the crucial moment, when Sir Hubert Henderson was placed in the machine, the handle at last turned effortlessly in its socket; the wheels revolved, the rods and cams, ratchets and pinions all slid with lubricated ease on their intended courses, and the candidate was at last, by 36 votes, carried effortlessly forward into the Warden's Lodgings of All Souls.

It only remains to add that Sir Hubert Henderson, overcome by the excitement of the election, has retired to the hospital with a heart-attack; so a spare hatchment has been commissioned and discrete preparations are already, but I hope wrongly, being made for the resumption of the struggle.



My dear BB, I had meant to touch but briefly on the All Souls election, which concerned your friend Isaiah Berlin, in order thereafter to describe at greater length the even more protracted election - it lasted more than two months – to the Chair of History, which concerned me; but I have already written too much, and perhaps on more personal matters it is more prudent to be brief. Suffice it then that this election ran true to form. For two months there was a total deadlock between those who insisted that they would impose their dead bodies between that candidate and that chair. (The objection is that I write history; and that, they say, should never be done: it is certainly not done by them.) Then, at the usual moment, the Jellies advanced; and the leisure that I had hoped to achieve for study and writing has been awarded instead to a last-minute candidate whose historical studies, confined to one branch of the State Papers during the reign of Elizabeth, have so far yielded, in 25 years, two slender articles. I am sure they are exact and competent articles; but since the author of them touches nothing that he does not desiccate, I cannot find anyone who has read them. However, I must not make any uncivil comment on this election, so I will only say that the standards of Oxford professors of history have been maintained....