Benjamin Ivry has a fascinating Forward interview with Hillel Halkin that includes the following tidbits of LH interest:
In a 2011 interview, you said that as a young reader, you strongly identified with the character of Stephen Dedalus the conflicted Catholic protagonist of James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and “Ulysses.” Where are the affinities?
I still have that identification with Stephen, including the Stephen in “Ulysses.” I think “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is perhaps the most beautiful English novel. I’ve read it and read it many times. My own experience of Judaism was very similar to Stephen’s growing up and rebelling against Catholicism. Stephen never gives up on being a Catholic, but in being a believing Catholic. He still thinks like a Catholic and I think that’s true of me too [for Judaism]. […]
Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s “A Guest for the Night,” which you term “one of the greatest Hebrew novels ever written” has an English translation by Misha Louvish that you call a “perfect disaster, one so bad that anyone judging its author by it alone would have to conclude that his winning the Nobel Prize was pure flimflam.” What makes that translation especially bad?
There is a whole series of bad Agnon translations. Louvish translated “A Guest for the Night” back in the 1950s when there were very few translators of Hebrew into English. Agnon writes in a very, very unique Hebrew. It’s not rabbinic Hebrew, and it’s not modern Hebrew; it’s a synthesis of the two: Agnonic Hebrew. Many translators have tried a direct equivalent in English and it’s a complete disaster. You have to try to translate Agnon by a different set of stratagems.
In praising Robert Alter’s translation of “The Hebrew Bible,” you refer to its sensitivity “to the flow and texture of the Bible’s language; its choices are judicious; there are no egregious lapses of taste in it.” Very true, but would you say that the Bible itself entirely lacks egregious lapses of taste?
It certainly seems to us to have them. Alter mentions in his introduction that it’s very hard to judge the Hebrew of the Bible according to some standard because there is no Hebrew outside the Bible from that time to compare it with.
You refer to Erich Auerbach’s book of literary criticism “Mimesis” in the context of biblical translation, which claimed that without believing in Abraham’s sacrifice, it is impossible to fully appreciate the narrative. But unlike Auerbach, you do not feel it is necessary to believe in the Bible to fathom it, just to relish the power of literature?
Not exactly, because I agree with Auerbach that reading the Bible as literature is in a sense reading it in bad faith. I almost said “merely as literature” but of course that’s the wrong term to use about literature. It means reading it as the Bible does not wish to be read. But it’s perhaps the best one can offer with a lack of faith in the Bible. Reading the Bible as literature does pay homage to it as something serious that must be read with utmost care. For those of us who do not have faith, reading it as literature is probably the best we can do, but it’s not what the Bible wants.
He takes a pleasing swipe at Harold Bloom (“Bloom was an odd character and liked to pretend to have greater Jewish knowledge than he did”) and ends with this unmasking:
Many writers have tiptoed around the likelihood that you are the longtime author of the Philologos column in The Forward and later for Mosaic Magazine. Without demanding any belated self-revelation, why write with a pseudonym?
It is me. For about 15 years, the identity of Philologos was a pretty-closely kept secret, but then it gradually leaked out. But I had the habit of denying it, due to coyness. But there’s no point in denying it if so many people know. Now Philologos has an independent status as a fictional character I invented. Philologos often says things or goes out on a limb by expressing crazy things that I would never say. But then he’s Philologos, he can do what he wants. That’s why I started to write that column to begin with; it gave me a lot of freedom. I wasn’t responsible for it.
(For relevant links and other tidbits, click through to the Forward page.) Thanks, RC!
I’m not going to rule out that possibility that Harold Bloom was “embellishing” in the interview in question, but it seems rather uncharitable for Halkin to “only imagine” that possibility and exclude the alternative possibility that a very old man a few months away from death had gotten a bit muddled in his once-legendary memory.* The broader context of the “swipe” is just the natural conflict between the narrow-and-provincial specialist and the polymath (whose knowledge in any single specialty will tend to be shallower than that of a specialist), or maybe between the hedgehog and the fox, perhaps shaded with Halkin’s self-admitted career as a judgmental jerk toward other Jews who neglected to make Aliyah as he did. It is rather darkly hilarious that when discussing the specific context of a prior tussle on that topic with Mordecai Richler he conceded that w/o making Aliyah it *might* also be okay to live “in America, while feeling guilty about not being in Israel.” Apparently there would be no circumstances under which it would be okay to live in Canada, even if guilt-ridden?
*At one point (maybe more than five but fewer than ten years before his death) I happened to mention to Harold the name of the long-deceased professor who had taught me Homeric Greek back in 1986, to which Harold responded that he had been a lovely man but there had been that one unfortunate situation, and then proceeded to tell a somewhat picaresque tale of scandalous misbehavior that had led to the intervention of the police department etc … until his wife suddenly interjected and told him, no that story you’re remembering is about a different (and also long-deceased) member of the Classics faculty and did not involve my old teacher whom I’d mentioned.
it seems rather uncharitable for Halkin to “only imagine” that possibility and exclude the alternative possibility that a very old man a few months away from death had gotten a bit muddled in his once-legendary memory.
True, true, and I should try to be more charitable. But I have often been irritated by Bloom.
Auerbach
Before Amazon killed the second-hand bookshops, a work which you could almost guarantee to see in one was The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature.
This always induced in me a desire to do the pantomime-audience thing: “Oh, no, it isn’t.”
I earned great kudos with my Hispanophone son by (a) possessing (b) having actually read and (c) lending him my copy of Mimesis when he did his MA thesis. A father-son bonding thing …
[Come to think of it, he never gave it back …]
They give you books, your mum and dad;
They may not mean to, but they do…
reading it as the Bible does not wish to be read
one of the things i appreciated most about thomas thompson’s The Mythic Past (besides his name!) is that he applies this understanding to attempts to read the tanakh as history. he doesn’t exactly argue that the ‘bible-as-historical-source’ project is even more a case of “reading it in bad faith” than reading it as literature, but i certainly would!
i hadn’t connected thompson’s argument to auerbach, but now that i see the parallel i appreciate it even more. so a (mildly cranky) thanks to halkin for that, and a wholehearted one to our host!
I should try to be more charitable
i have a hard time being my most charitable self towards either man, honestly. if sartre is right about the afterlife, i suspect they’ll be deservedly stuck in a room together (perhaps with martin buber to make it maximally awkward for everyone?).
besides his name
Reminds me of Thompson and Thompson’s The Thompson Language.
(Which is, in complete seriousness, exactly what it says. It couldn’t really be called anything else.)
The Kirkus capsule review of Thompson’s “Mythic Past” begins “Arguing that the Bible should be read as literature rather than history in the modern sense . . .” which at a minimum makes me think that perhaps “literature” also needs the “in the modern sense” qualifier. Leaving aside the quibble of whether it’s useful to treat “literature” and “history” as mutually exclusive and contrasting, I would also add that the notion that assuming the OT (whether limited to the current Tanakh canon or otherwise) is a unified work in a single “genre,” if only we could successfully identify that genre, may also be hazardous at least if applied at the wrong level of abstraction.
I don’t like the choice between “reading the Bible as literature” and “the Bible wants to be believed”. The latter seems to be telling you that if you are not a Jewish Fundamentalist, too bad for you, you’re missing something. I really don’t like that. I have enough mental turmoil as it is keeping myself from smiting Chabad proselytizers on the streets of wicked secular Tel Aviv.
As to “reading as literature”, that is a very narrow concept, borne, I imagine, out of 20th century academia. Another more recent alternative is “reading the Bible as propaganda concocted by certain late pre-exilic and other factions”. Let’s skip the pigeonholing. The Bible reads very differently to a devout Jewish (whatever it means) person of the Hashmonean period, of Rashi’s time, and of various factions of today. A secular person like me gets to thinking about the language (’cause here we all are), the stori-ness of it (“literature”), the accounts of kings and cities and what not (“history”), the mores of the time reflected in the writing (mostly awful; “social history”), and also how it would read to someone else, say any of these devout audiences of the past and present.
assuming the OT […] is a unified work in a single “genre,” if only we could successfully identify that genre, may also be hazardous
yes, absolutely!
and while i can understand how the Kirkus reviewer got to that sentence, i think it’s a woeful misreading. if i have time later, i’ll find a summary quote, but for now: thompson’s very clear that to read the tanakh (i’m gonna keep using that as shorthand for “that corpus of canonized and canon-adjacent hebrew and aramaic texts, you know the ones”) in good faith* it has to be understood specifically as an assemblage put together for devotional ( / ritual / pietistic / moral / ethical) purposes – not as literature.
but the heart of his historiographic argument, IIRC, is that we do a disservice to the parts of the tanakh that take the form of ‘historical’ genres (royal chronicles; transcribed archival documents; etc) if we read them as evidentiary accounts. not because that (mis)interprets them as “history in the modern sense”, but because it (mis)interprets them as history in the contemporaneous sense, when they’re written/edited/assembled (as you will) to serve quite different purposes (as close readings in parallel with other – historiographic – documents from the region can show).
which i think is very parallel to auerbach’s argument about the ‘bible as literature’ approach as a ‘bad faith’ reading, without making his (dubious) claim that you can’t get to a ‘good faith’ reading of these texts as an unbeliever. the implications are pretty different, though, since taking the tanakh as a source of historical evidence is the basis of so much scholarship, and there are a lot of oxen gored when someone points out that that’s fundamentally unjustified.
.
* i like auerbach’s phrasing; i don’t think it implies that ‘bad faith’ readings are wrong or un-useful, just that they don’t have much to say about what the text thinks it’s doing.
I don’t like the choice between “reading the Bible as literature” and “the Bible wants to be believed”. The latter seems to be telling you that if you are not a Jewish Fundamentalist, too bad for you, you’re missing something. I really don’t like that. I have enough mental turmoil as it is keeping myself from smiting Chabad proselytizers on the streets of wicked secular Tel Aviv.
It seems to me (as an unbeliever of long standing) that you’re allowing your irritation with proselytizers to distort your idea of what’s being said. The point is not “too bad for you, you’re missing something,” in the sense that you’re doomed to an inferior understanding of the text, it’s that the text manifestly does not “want” (in an obvious sense — we all know it’s not sentient) to be read as literature. That doesn’t stop us from reading it in that way, nor should it, but I think it’s important to bear in mind that Isaiah wasn’t writing to provide striking quotations but to threaten his readers with the wrath of a God in which everyone concerned very much believed. Whether we believe or not is not the issue (and it’s hard to imagine anyone today could believe in precisely the same way as Isaiah and his readers did), it’s just a matter of keeping in mind what the text is for. Similarly, one can analyze poetry in all sorts of ways, but one should keep in mind that it was composed to fulfill a certain function as poetry (in traditional poetry, to follow certain patterns of rhythm, etc.) even if we want to use it for other purposes (cultural analysis, say). No one here is saying you’re a failure for not believing (though presumably Isaiah would)!
Absolutely, but Isaiah’s striking language was something that he and his audiences were aware of to some degree as well, just as one can be aware of M. L. King’s oratory and his message at the same time. This part of my objection is the needlessly narrow sense which is attached to the word “literature” here.
I’ll get back to you about the other part after I’ve read Auerbach.
This part of my objection is the needlessly narrow sense which is attached to the word “literature” here.
Ah, gotcha. Yes, “literature” is one of those slippery words…
Nobody seems to raise this objection to reading, say, The Illiad primarily as literature, rather than as the script for the principal player in a participatory religious activity.
There aren’t any believers in Greek religion left. And anyway, the Iliad was never a primarily religious text.
“Thou shalt not be on friendly terms
With guys in advertising firms,
Nor speak with such
As read the Bible for its prose . . .”
–Auden, 1946
A secular person like me gets to thinking about the language (’cause here we all are), the stori-ness of it (“literature”), the accounts of kings and cities and what not (“history”), the mores of the time reflected in the writing (mostly awful; “social history”)
…and then there’s Leviticus and its overly detailed description of assorted specifics of dozens of rituals, many of which, if I recall correctly, hadn’t been practiced for centuries if ever. It’s only marginally history and only marginally literature, and offhand I’m not sure which it’s closer to, if any; back when I tried to read the Bible, when I came to Leviticus I tried my best to scroll through (not as easy with a paper book).
IIRC Numbers is almost as boring in a few places, but at least it’s more blatantly history.
@languagehat: Obviously, the absence of Greek pagans is the reason nobody talks about The Illiad this way. With no adherents around, it is easy to conceive of Greek mythology as a set of stories, rather than components of a participatory religion. However, that strongly suggests that making such claims on behalf of the Tanakh is just special pleading. If a mythic work really “wants to be believed,” that bourne should not depend on the fact that there are actual believers.
Did you skip my second sentence?
Theodor Mommsen got one of the first Nobel Prizes in Literature for his book on Roman history. Apparently it’s just that well written.
Leviticus is largely a mix of a regulatory code and a “recipe book” for the performance of certain important actions. Both of those are to this day recognizable and perfectly useful-in-their-proper-context genres of text. Modern recipe books sometimes try to jazz things up by adding historical or personal-anecdote narrative about how the recipe came to be or how and when it may be relevant to the reader before pausing to shift genre back into the instruction-formula prose of the recipe itself.
Speaking of how one reads Homer and the Bible, I’m immediately reminded of Borges and I’ll quote him at length here because that’s never a mistake—even though he’s admittedly not talking about the Hebrew Bible. From his third Norton Lecture, “The Telling of the Tale:”
A great quote, and an interesting companion-piece to the first chapter of Auerbach — thanks!
We think of Virgil, but we many also think of Snorri Sturluson, who, in his younger era, wrote that Odin—the Odin of the Saxons, the god—was the son of Priam and the brother of Hector.
For “younger era” read “Younger Edda”, and for “many”, read “may”.
(I noticed both of those as obvious transmission errors even before I googled and found a version with this exact wording – alongside many more copies with the wording quoted above. I wonder how the errors occurred.)
As it happens, the prologue of the Younger Edda is to a large extent its own work, much inconsistent with the rest of it; notably it puts quite a few generations between Odin and Thor.
I don’t know offhand whether the prologue or the main text is considered more likely to have been written by Snorri Sturluson, but I’d be quite surprised if both were.
Contrast Bruce Banner: “My secret: I am always angry.” He doesn’t really need to be wronged to be able to turn into the Incredible Hulk, he can do it whenever he chooses. It’s a superpower no different from Superman’s or Spider-Man’s.
What a lousy retcon.
You would that Borges, of all people, would have found a way to make much of the fact that, even if in this present decadent age we can’t do a better version of the Jesus story than we find in the Gospels, the Church in her inscrutable wisdom retained over the centuries four *different* versions of that story rather than just pick one as the authoritative one or cut-and-paste them into a single harmonized and authoritative narrative.
@January-First-of-May:
As it happens, they occurred in different ways. On the one hand, “many” for “may” is an internet copyist’s mistake. I fixed others in the text I copied from the web, but failed to catch that and by now it’s far too late. On the other hand, and more surprisingly, “younger era” for “Younger Edda” is in the print edition: at least in mine (Harvard University Press, 2000, hardcover) which rather surprisingly seems to be the first. It may or may not have been fixed in subsequent printings.
By the way, despite my great love of everything Borgesian, I much prefer reading his Norton Lectures to listening to them. But your mileage may vary and HUP doen’t seem too keen on enforcing its copyright over those recordings. The lecture in question is here.
The theme of this thread could well apply to how one is to read Journey to the West (see elsewhere), what parts of it may be skipped, etc.
@J.W. Brewer:
I don’t recall Borges writing making much of that, but Borges’s works are surely more capacious than my memory. However, I do recall Borges writing a prologue to the Apocryphal Gospels. Not one of his texts I find particularly memorable or insightful; but in case it piques your interest more than mine, here it is in full.
An early Syriac church father wrote the Diatessaron. The WikiP mentions other harmonized versions derived from or similar to the Diatessaron.
And of course, there’s the two creation stories in Genesis, and other unharmonized duplications in the bible.
A lot of people seem to be unbothered by the disharmonic repetitions. I have been told repeatedly by believers, contrary to the very evidence of the text, that there are no contradictions in in the bible/gospels.
*Adán
@Owlmirror: I meant no disrespect to the Holy Fathers of the Syriack tradition by implicitly excluding them from the “Church,” I just wanted to avoid a digression. Perhaps I should have used other hedging language. The incentives that led to the Diatessaron are sufficiently obvious that I find it more interesting that they were resisted elsewhere than that they were responded to in Syriac.
Another good example of large-scale duplication (as opposed to seeming duplication within the same current text) is how the narrative of 1 & 2 Chronicles covers (“retells” makes certain assumptions about which came first …) almost exclusively stuff also covered in other narrative books, albeit with some additional or different details. The book generally known in English as 1 Esdras (and not considered canonical by most Anglophone Christians) is another example, heavily overlapping with Ezra + Nehemiah.
Gospel harmonies have been common enough that there’s a Wikipedia article about them. Tatian’s Diatessaron was merely the first.
Gospel harmonies.
Even with a harmonic gospel, there’s the problem of what to do with the works that the harmony was synthesized from. Do you declare that only the harmony is canonical, and the sources it was composed from to be heretical, to be suppressed and destroyed?
Once a text has been declared to be holy to some religion, turning around and declaring it to be now profane makes the church look like a bunch of flip-floppers. And I suspect that such flip-flops would be rejected by those who take the whole thing seriously.
So as long as the original sources exist, their inconsistencies will be findable, for those who read carefully and worry about such things.
“Even with a harmonic gospel, there’s the problem of what to do with the works that the harmony was synthesized from. Do you declare that only the harmony is canonical, and the sources it was composed from to be heretical, to be suppressed and destroyed?”
As far as I know, that’s never been a problem. The traditional source Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) remain the canonical ones.
One “advantage” if you want to call it that of the Pentateuch is that there are no surviving MSS of the predecessor works which the so-called Documentary Hypothesis assumes the redactors drew upon when concocting the text that has come down to us and thus no evidence to scandalize the faithful of what from those works was left on the cutting-room floor. (There are of course some variations between the MT and the LXX and the Samaritan version and maybe some additional Dead-Sea-Scroll variants – I don’t know many are of a scandalous dimension.)
Well, obviously.
But the original statement seemed to imply that some putative early harmonic synthesis would have taken precedence and that something would have happened to the sources the synthesis was composed from so that only the synthesis would be accepted by the Church. I was pondering the putative situation.
If I misunderstood the statement, then I have no idea what was intended.
Hardly anyone has ever seemed particularly concerned about the inconsistent dates between the synoptic gospels and John.
Sure, the Tanach and the MSS it was composed from were more or less completely in the control of the priest-scribe(s) who redacted the whole thing.
And we can contrast that with the situation in the early Church: The gospels had already spread throughout the Roman-Hellenic Mediterranean, and the Church was hardly unified enough and entrenched enough in its early years to carry out a project of synthesizing a harmony while suppressing the originals.
Concentrated in one place and under complete control, vs widely dispersed and only loosely controlled.
The Quran was compiled out of a lot of disparate manuscripts, but I guess the older works were just left alone once an official compilation was declared.
The Book of Mormon is under complete control of its church. I seem to recall that the church makes changes to the book, at least sometimes to soften or eliminate problematic phrases, which are printed in the most recent editions. The older editions aren’t destroyed or declared heretical, they’re just . . . deprecated.
Or the inconsistent dates between the prologue of Matthew (reign of Herod the Great, just before his death) and the prologue of Luke (reign of Herod Antipas, son of Herod (the Great), about 10 years after the death of HtG, when Quirinius governed Syria)
And so on and so forth
Don’t anthropomorphize the Bible; it hates that.
/someone had to say it
Is it a normal thing to write, that some particular text has wishes and wants?
Lady Chatterley’s Lover does not wish to be read as a manual for early 20th century gamekeeping.
This sentence does not want to be read as a self-referential sentence.
This comment does not wish to be read as a snarky commentary on anthropomorphizing texts.
Who is more knowledgeable about what a text wants; the merely fallible author of the text, or the text itself? Who are you going to believe? The text, or your lying eyes?
All self-referential sentences are liars, but don’t want to be read as lying.
Is it a normal thing to write, that some particular text has wishes and wants?
I don’t know what you mean by “normal,” but it’s perfectly understandable. People are not computers and do not speak in rigorous logical propositions.
I think Owlmirror is posting drunk. 🙂
This comment does not wish to be read as having been posted drunk.
/kinda inevitable, really
@owlmirror
May I offer a correction? Thish cccomm-cccomment does not wi-wi-wi does not want to be rrr-taken as having been ppp-mmm-poshted drunk.
In China, Sima Qian’s long history the Shiji stands alone. To my knowledge none of the earlier works he relied on survived. Most of the pre-Qin (pre 210 BC or so) books that we have were edited much later, and in most cases the edited version is all we have. Archaeology is remedying this deficiency somewhat.
The Qin (Ch’in) dynasty “Burning of the Books” is legendary, and probably not the main reason so few books survived. The destruction of war was most of it, and then various cultural changes.
the Tanach and the MSS it was composed from were more or less completely in the control of the priest-scribe(s) who redacted the whole thing.
while i like the concentrated/dispersed analysis, i don’t see much reason to believe this part of it. we know from the existence of the qumran scrolls and the samaritan canon that there were multiple versions of these texts in circulation even after they’d been put into a form similar to the current jewish canon’s version. and we know next to nothing about the process that resulted in either those variants’ (hypothetical) common sources or the current text. we do know that part of the context for the canonization of the tanakh was the shift from centralized ritual authority in the jerusalem temple to decentralized ritual practice centered in study-houses throughout the eastern mediterranean and western asia. but that’s at least as good an argument for a decentralized process as for a centralized one.
Well, I, at least, have trouble understanding what Halkin actually meant.
1) The first point that bothers me is that I know that “the Bible” is not a uniform text. Whatever he’s talking about, it seems unlikely to apply to every single book.
2) So is Halkin referring to the point that the authors were pious, and had in mind that what they intended for what they were writing to be read as revelation and law by a pious and charitable audience? Are they the ones who would actually not want the Bible to be read as literature? Would he make the same claims for the Enuma Elish, Hesiod’s Theogony, the Mahābhārata, and so on and so forth — all of religious writing everywhere?
3) Or does he mean that the Bible is revered by a faith community (or rather, different factions of related faith communities), and it is the faith community’s desires that he is in fact expressing? So writings of other faith communities of faiths that are still extant should not be read as literature, but, by implication, writings of defunct faith communities would be exempt from this stricture?
4) Or, more narrowly, does he mean that the Bible is revered by the faith community that he came from, and it is only their wants that he intends to express — the writings of other faith communities are all fair game for being read as literature, and by implication, anyone who didn’t come from his faith community could in fact read the Bible as literature?
5) Something else I haven’t thought of?
I think that we ought to be as clear as possible. We don’t need to be computers to say what we actually mean. Making the statement about what the texts want obscures whose actual wants he’s actually referring to.
The theme of this thread could well apply to how one is to read Journey to the West (see elsewhere), what parts of it may be skipped, etc.
I saw (some decades ago) a very similar logomachy over the Quixote. For me as for Dante and Frye, the notion that you can read any text, even one in Lojban, in only one way is self-evidently absurd. I even invented a Lojban proverb to the effect that the price of infinite precision is infinite verbosity. (My other Lojban proverb is that naming in Lojban is the prerogative of the namer, which Nick Nicholas capped by saying that the consequences are the prerogative of the namee.)
@Owlmirror:
with no claim (or desire – i’d hate to be inside that man’s head) to understand how halkin means it, what i mean when i say a text wants to be read in one or another way is pretty simple. it’s my shorthand for the “new critical” assumption that even where there is a known author, their intent is always to a meaningful degree unknowable or opaque (including to the author), and that texts do things beyond and outside and against their authors’ intents. so if we want to understand how to read a text, we need to (among other things) bracket any notion of authorial intent, and instead consider how genre conventions, rhetorical choices, and other linguistic elements work within it (in a context, be it contemporaneous or otherwise), and how they direct us as readers. which i’m very comfortable describing as a text’s desires: just as a bolt desires a pre-drilled hole while a screw desires the combination of torque and pressure (to riff on, or possibly mangle, a perfectly good marge piercy poem).
i may be especially given to this phrasing because in the speech habits of the theater worlds i work in, we constantly talk about inanimate objects wanting this and that – “that stack of tunics wants to be in the red box”, “does that backdrop want to be stenciled with this same pattern?”, etc. which i’m pretty sure comes from the Bread & Puppet Theater’s internal vernacular, so may reflect some silesian german influence, or some upland vermont regional influence.
For wants read needs and supply “anybody who agrees with me” as the agent/experiencer. Cf the car needs warshed.