Robert Alter

Augustine’s Confessions, though frequently set at the beginning of a line of literary history that leads to Rousseau and Henry Adams, is a narrative of the writer’s life only in a highly intermittent and drastically selective way. Its aim, as has often been noted, is more spiritual exhortation then self-revelation, or, more precisely, it is an exposition of the divine scheme with reference to a particular life-experience. As Henry Chadwick observes in the judicious introduction to his useful new English version, in explaining the role of the philosophic Books X to XIII that constitute over a third of the whole, ‘the story of the soul wandering away from God and then in torment and tears finding its way home through conversion is also the story of the entire created order.’

These two meticulous surveys of modern criticism in all its vertiginous variety lead one to ponder what it is all about and where it may be heading. The book by René Wellek, focused on Central and Eastern European critics, is the penultimate volume of a vast project he began in the Fifties. The two previous volumes dealt respectively with English and American criticism in this same half-century, and chapters of the first four volumes of the series covered earlier critics that fall within the scope of Patrick Parrinder’s study. Authors and Authority in turn is an expansion of a 1977 book that stopped with the beginning of the 20th century. Now nearly twice its original length, it comes all the way down to the Yale Deconstructionists, the American proponents of cultural studies and the New Historicists. To judge by what René Wellek has observed elsewhere of these recent developments, he is no doubt quite happy to end his own account a generation before they all began.

It is a critical commonplace, often intoned with pathos, to insist on the absolute discontinuity between what occurred in the Nazi genocide and the realm of ordinary experience. Because of that discontinuity, it is sometimes claimed, the mechanised mass murders are an unimaginable and hence indescribable subject: any representation of them is bound to be a misrepresentation, or, to follow the logic of Adorno’s famous dictum about no poetry after Auschwitz, a misconceived and wrongly consoling aestheticisation. Perhaps there is a laudable motive of respect for the awful fates of the victims in this impulse to draw a categorical cordon around the death camps, but common sense suggests that if there were no strong continuities with the moral patterns of existence before the Holocaust, it could not have happened.

This is a book that makes large claims both for itself and for the documents it presents. ‘The First Complete Translation and Interpretation of 50 Key Documents Withheld for over Thirty-Five Years’, the dust-jacket announces. As a matter of fact, about half these texts have already been published elsewhere, as the New York University Scrolls scholar Lawrence Schiffman has noted, so the rubric would be defensible only if the Eisenman and Wise interpretation were the first to qualify as ‘complete’. Then there is the question of whether many of these really are ‘key’ texts and whether they have been ‘withheld’ or rather, which strikes me as far more likely, left languishing through scholarly indolence. Withholding suggests the deliberate suppression of material that could be ‘explosive’, a favourite adjective of Eisenman and Wise’s. This notion of a scholarly conspiracy, hinted at in the text, has recently been trumpeted by the journalists Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh in The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, which is largely a popularisation of Robert Eisenman’s theories. Unsurprisingly, Baigent and Leigh contribute an effusive blurb to this book. Eisenman for his part has been putting himself forward as the embattled champion of a campaign (crowned with success a year ago) to liberate the Scrolls from a scholarly monopoly which, he claims, has kept them from the public on grounds of their dangerous contents, which threaten to subvert accepted theories about Qumran, the sectarian community associated with the Scrolls, as well as cherished notions about Judaism and Christianity.

One of the most intriguing and in some ways bewildering aspects of the Hebrew language is that it has managed to stay in continuous literary use for over three thousand years; roughly the same length of time as Chinese and Sanskrit, the two other major ancient literary languages that are still in written use. The most dramatic changes that have occurred over the centuries have been the emergence of rabbinic Hebrew from Biblical Hebrew towards the end of the pre-Christian era; the complex encounter of Hebrew with Arabic poetry and philosophy beginning in the tenth century; and the early 20th-century revival of Hebrew as a vernacular in the new Zionist settlements, itself preceded – and made possible – by the revival in Enlightenment Europe of Hebrew as a secular literary language. In each of these historical transitions, the language went through significant changes in vocabulary, grammar, syntax, verb-tenses and patterns of idiom. Because of the authority of the Bible, however, orthography and morphology, as well as much essential vocabulary, remained relatively constant. And because Jewish culture as a whole clung so tenaciously to its ‘sources’ (as they are habitually called in Israeli Hebrew), the earlier strata of the language may have become in some ways antiquated but were never made obsolete. A literate speaker of modern Hebrew is probably no farther removed from the language of the Bible than a speaker of modern English is from the language of Shakespeare: the basic vocabulary is perfectly accessible, though a modern reader is likely to construe some terms anachronistically and puzzle a bit over the tenses (which may in fact be aspects – designating completed and uncompleted action – rather than tenses in the modern Western sense).’