The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age by Robert Alter PDF

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Thy dread E mpire , C HAOS ! is restor'd ; Light dies before thy uncreating word; Thy hand, great Anarch ! lets the curtain fall; And U niversal Darkness buries All. (IV:653-656) Put out the Light is also exactly the sentence Othello says, twice , in the brief soliloquy just before he murders Desde­ mona. Are we intended at the end of Frost's poem to recall Shakespeare's image of a dark man enraged with jealousy about to destroy the beautiful woman he passionately loves? There is no way of knowing whether Frost meant that echo to be heard, but the very possibility of its presence suggests how the accumulated images, themes, and actual verbal formula­ tions of literary tradition become charged particles in the mind of the writer (and "mind" is surely more than what is conscious and intentional) and of the reader.

There are hardly grounds for debate on the 32 THE PLEASURES OF READING subject, but one wonders why the male makers of this patriarchal canon included the story of Tamar and Judah (Genesis 38), Ruth, Esther, the portrait of female shrewdness and male malleability in Rebekah and Jacob, the satire of muscle-bound concupiscent male gullibility in the Samson story. Still more drastically, how did Job, with its radical rejection of an anthropocentric creation and of retributive justice, Ecclesiastes, with its sense of futile, meaningless cycles , the Song of Songs , with its exuberantly playful eroti­ cism, get into the Bible?

Character and the Connection with Reality 59 A few pages after the initial portrait of M . de Renal, his wife is introduced-it should be noted, without the benefit of any thumbnail sketch. Instead, we see her in action, strolling with her husband and her three small sons, suddenly alarmed when her eleven-year-old threatens to climb up on a parapet. The narrator's sole initial comment is that she "appeared to be a woman of thirty, but still quite pretty. " The age and the prettiness are needed narrative data because both will figure in her subsequent affair with Julien .

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