Faulkner and the Bible at Princeton
By Lauren Matthew
March 28, 2008

Princeton University will host the second lecture in a three-part series April 9, a lecture which will offer listeners a unique perspective on scripture and American literature.

The discussion, led by biblical scholar Robert Alter, will focus on the impact of the language of the Hebrew Bible on William Faulkner -- specifically, on the book "Absalom, Absalom!"

Alter is a professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkley, where he has been teaching since 1967. He has written 17 books, including a translation of the Pentateuch titled "The Five Books of Moses," a translation of Psalms and "The David Story" (focusing on 1 and 2 Samuel). He is currently serving as the president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics and has been named a Guggenheim Fellow twice. Alter has also been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem and an Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard.

"I am one of those people who has a number of fields of study," he said.

Alter's main areas of study are the European and American novel in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the literary aspects of the Bible. In recent years, he as also worked on translations of the Bible from Hebrew to English.

Alter said that when Princeton invited him to give the talks, which are part of the Spencer Trask Lecture series, he thought combining his two interests would be a venture worth pursuing. Bible study, for American writers of those time periods Alter focuses on, was not something that was relegated to Sunday mornings or church school, he explained.

"The Bible is very pervasive in American culture," Alter said in a March 14 phone interview. "Most American homes -- typcially Protestant homes, of course -- grew up reading the Bible."

The Bible these writers -- including Faulkner, Herman Mellville, and Saul Bellow, the topics of Alter's lectures -- grew up reading was the King James version, which includes a translation of the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament completed in 1611. The King James Bible, Alter noted, "has the advantage of being great literary English."

And that great literary English created, Alter said, some great American writers.

"The experience of reading the King James version, in certain significant ways, affected the prose style of some major American novelists," he said.

Specifically, rhythms, certain things having to do with diction, and even syntax mirror the Bible, Alter explained.

"The language came out looking different than it would have looked if they hadn't been reading the Bible in the 16th-century translation," he said.

Alter said that initially, he thought of a different discussion topic for the trilogy at Princeton; he noted that he was thinking of something more along the lines of politics or ideology.

"One of my motives in choosing this topic was that for various reasons... departments of literature across the country over the last 20 years, maybe more, have not paid much attention to style," Alter said. "It seems to me that this is a great lack -- literature lives through its use of style. I wanted to try to recover a sense of the importance of style, and the power and subtlety of style, by talking about it with this line of American novelists."

Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" may not be what leaps to mind when thinking of the prominent English translations of the Bible, but there are serious references to it throughout. These thematic keywords -- as Alter will discuss -- are taken directly from the Hebrew Bible, and it is this choice of words that allowed Faulkner to address the issues he does in his book. The title itself is a throwback to the Bible; Absalom rebelled against his father, King David, and the empire he built, just as Faulkner's character Thomas Sutpen rebels against Southern plantation culture.

And it is the Hebrew Bible, not the Christian New Testament, which left its mark, Alter said. There, its focus on family and nation, politics, and history spoke to the American condition. Beginning with the Pilgrims, Alter noted, generations of Americans saw themselves as the New Israel.

Alter said that this pattern of syntax and style can be seen in the writings of others besides just Mellville, Faulkner, and Bellow. He plans to turn this topic into a book; findings dealing with "several other writers" beyond the scope of the lecture will find their way into publication at a later date.

The lecture will be presented at 8 p.m. in McCosh Hall, Princeton University. Spencer Trask Lectures are free and open to the public.