Mark Noll review's Robert Alter's new Book on American Prose and the KJ Bible

Robert Alter’s careful examination of the ways in which the KJV informed the novels of six significant American authors aims to record how “the resonant language and the arresting vision of the canonical text” continue to echo in American cultural memory. His title is itself taken from the KJV’s rendering of Jeremiah 17:1”””The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond: it is graven upon the table of their heart.” Without stating his intention in so many words, Alter is recording a specific indebtedness before awareness of its presence fades, as the biblical origin of so much common English has faded into a mere recognition of something old-fashioned, quaint, or musty in the prose of Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Marilynne Robinson, and Cormac McCarthy.

Alter’s short book spins off enough sparkling asides to inspire a shelf of very long volumes. On, for example, why England’s canonical novelists seem less indebted to the language of the KJV than the United States’ (because American fiction has always exhibited a heteroglossia, to use Bakhtin’s term, where writers deliberately mix levels of diction that English deference to decorum did not permit). Or how academic literary study now treats works written in English as if they were translations originally composed in another language (because translated fiction can capably communicate the power relationships in novels, but hardly ever what is communicated by an author’s style, and American English departments have been obsessed with questions of power instead of “reading the untranslatable text”). Or why in Alter’s view the KJV remains the best of all English Bible translations (because it comes closest to the direct, concrete, and parallel style that marks the Hebrew and much of the Greek in Scripture).

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