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Behind Auerbach's “Background”: Five Ways toRead What Biblical Narratives Don't Say

James Adam Redeld

AJS Review / Volume 39 / Issue 01 / April 2015, pp 121 - 150DOI: 10.1017/S0364009414000671, Published online: 12 May 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0364009414000671

How to cite this article:James Adam Redeld (2015). Behind Auerbach's “Background”: Five Ways toRead What Biblical Narratives Don't Say. AJS Review, 39, pp 121-150 doi:10.1017/S0364009414000671

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BEHIND AUERBACH’S “BACKGROUND”: FIVE WAYS TO

READ WHAT BIBLICAL NARRATIVES DON’T SAY

James Adam Redfield

There is a crack in everythingThat’s how the light gets in

—Leonard Cohen

Abstract: The Hebrew Bible’s narrative style has impressed interpret-ers of many periods and perspectives with its powerful tension betweenfragmentary speech and meaningful silence, summed up in Erich Auer-bach’s famous thesis that the Akedah is “fraught with background.”But is it possible to give a coherent account of what the Bible doesnot say? This article offers a comparative critical analysis of attemptsto do just that, starting with Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) and continu-ing through the contemporary work of James Kugel, Robert Alter, MeirSternberg, Avivah Zornberg, and others. It claims that, rather than thetext itself, the Bible’s “background” serves as a metaphor by which thebiblical critic navigates a complex relationship with her own normativeconstruct of the reader’s mind. This comparison concludes with prac-tical considerations about its potential for research and teaching inbiblical poetics, understood as rigorous intersubjective communica-tion, rather than as either method or ideology.

INTRODUCTION

In Holes and Other Superficialities, contemporary epistemologists RobertoCasati and Achille Varsi dare to take a realist approach to an object of obviouslydubious reality. “Perhaps only a dry-minded philosopher would hazard question-ing the reality of tables and stones,” they begin. “But just ask any person to tell youwhat holes are [...] and he will likely elaborate upon absences, nonentities, noth-ingnesses, things that are not there. Are there such things?”1 In less literal terms,

I would like to thank Steve Weitzman for his generous contributions to this essay, from initialinspiration to final draft. I also thank Joel Robbins for inviting me to present a paper on the biographicalcontext of Auerbach’s Mimesis at the “Comparative Christianities” conference (U.C. San Diego, April27–28, 2012), as well as Fr. Dr. Claudio Monge for helping me to access the archives of the monasteryin Istanbul where Mimesis was written. Finally, I would like to thank Avivah Zornberg for a recent in-terview (Berkeley, May 18, 2014), which of course implies no endorsement of my argument, but whichI do hope will lead to further work and conversation about her interpretive contributions.

1. Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi, Holes and Other Superficialities (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1995), 1.

AJS Review 39:1 (April 2015), 121–150© Association for Jewish Studies 2015doi:10.1017/S0364009414000671

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biblical scholars have been debating Casati and Varsi’s question for nearly half acentury. “What,” both more and less dry-minded readers have asked, “is there to in-terpret in the Bible?”; what more, that is, than the “tables and stones” of documentsand artifacts, anchored in an empiricist reality bywhatRobertAlter calls “excavative”scholarship?2 As soon as she abandons the terra firma of excavation for the slipperyslope of interpretation, the scholar is using theBible as something other than a pointerto the empirical reality of the ancient Near East. From that point forward positions onthe Bible’s possible epistemological foundations fall along a wide continuum, givingrise to debates whose specific terms and broader relevance remain unclear. At theheart of these debates is the remarkably undertheorized matter of the scholar’s “inter-pretive warrant”: whatever set of presuppositions has licensed her to admit certainaspects of the texts (and not others) as “evidence” in the first place.3

For this critical analysis of competing interpretive warrants in biblical schol-arship since the advent of the literary approach in the early 1970s, the theory of“holes” provides another useful starting point. When we consider a hole as repre-sented by language, Casati and Varsi suggest, this hole (“something that is notthere”) qualifies as realwhen we cannot paraphrase it out of existence without pro-ducing equal or greater incoherence.4 Applying Occam’s razor to a hole in space,for instance, it is more economical to describe this hole than to describe everypoint where it is not.5 Likewise, for a temporal hole, my sense of rhythm dictatesthat a “pause” between metrical beats exists, or else I would speak of two beatswith nothing in between (and if I did, taking this reductio to its absurd conclusion,how could I speak of “two” beats, rather than one and one?) Finally, consider aphilological example: most readers would be hard-pressed to prove that there isanything significant about the space between these letters or in the margins ofthis page.6 But holes in a w rd, or the lack of a holebetweenwords, may be so

2. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 17.3. I rely on Toulmin’s distinction between “data” and “warrants” (Stephen E. Toulmin, The Uses

of Argument [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003 (1958)], 92–3). Data is what we ex-plicitly cite when we make a claim, whereas our warrant for this claim is a general presupposition im-plicitly authorizing all claims of that particular type, thereby certifying this data as “evidence.”Toulmin’s insight (Uses, 33–6) that warrants are backed up by paradigms or “fields,” rather than byformal truth-conditions, is highly relevant to my extension of his concept. More recently, see JamesChandler, Arnold Davidson, and Harry Harootunian, eds., Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice,and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

4. This is an extension of the so-called “map is not territory” principle; see Borges’s classicparable, “On Exactitude in Science” (in Juan Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley[New York: Viking, 1998], 325).

5. As Casati and Varsi point out (Holes, 183–4), at least in an artificially circumscribed domain,I might try to avoid a hole by giving a point-by-point description of the space around the hole. But howcould I then maintain that any other object does exist in that space? By “bit-mapping” away my hole, Iwould have “bit-mapped” myself into a one-dimensional reality! For a parable about this problem, seeEdwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (London: Seeley, 1884).

6. Despite certain exceptions that prove this rule, e.g. the fondness for “margins” in Derrideandeconstruction and in Rabbi Akiva’s midrash (see my discussion below and Susan Handelman, TheSlayers of Moses: the Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory[Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982], 38 and 169–70).

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real as to compel a response; here we find, not mere blank space, but a problemwith multiple possible solutions.7

The arc of scholarly debates that we will retrace here can be defined as acollection of just such solutions—more commonly called “readings”—to holesin the Bible’s narrative fabric. Unlike literal holes, however, whose reality isharder to circumvent than it is to circumscribe, the Bible’s literary discontinuitiesoften defy recognition. Indeed, the (w)hole debate could be summed up as “Nowyou see it, now I don’t”; for one scholar, the hole is interpretable evidence,whereas for the other it remains merely an artifact of interpretation. What differ-ences between scholars’ interpretive warrants have led to such debates, and howhave their tacit epistemological distinctions helped to drive this field’s evolutionbefore and after the “literary” turn in the 1970s? To address those questions,this article focuses on how four of the Bible’s prominent contemporary readers(James Kugel, Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg, and Avivah Zornberg) have respond-ed to each other by way of a shared source: Auerbach’s discussion of the Akedahin Mimesis (1946). Auerbach’s famous thesis that biblical narrative style is“fraught with background”—pregnant with latent meaning—provides acommon touchstone for all four of their later epistemological orientations.

We begin with Kugel, for whom most of the Bible’s meaning has beenshaped by later interpreters; all the more so for so-called meanings of what theBible does not say! Thus Kugel uses a historicist warrant to debunk Auerbach’s“background” thesis. But on closer inspection, Kugel’s Auerbach turns out tobe a proxy for literary critics (e.g. Robert Alter) and Kugel’s historicism makesmore sense as a polemic against Alter’s imposition of modern “literary” sensibil-ities onto the Bible’s readers. As we will see, both Kugel and Alter minimize thereader’s role, in opposite ways. Kugel uses history to drive a wedge between prim-itive and modern readers, while Alter assumes that the reader is controlled by theintentions of a “literary” author.

In contrast, both Sternberg and Zornberg follow Auerbach by arguing thatthe Bible’s unspoken implications can open up a window on its reader’s mind(s). Relying on psychological interpretive warrants, both scholars elaborate theo-ries of how the Bible’s reader might discover hidden meanings by following cluesthat were planted in the holes of its narrative texture. Thus they allow for a widerrange of affinities between modern scholars and the Bible’s earlier readers. Yetdespite this fundamental similarity, Sternberg and Zornberg prefer to typecastthe Bible’s readers as two very different kinds of detective. Sternberg’s reader(think Sherlock) pursues a rationalist warrant for interpretation that privilegesthe conscious mind. Zornberg’s reader (think Sigmund) plumbs the Bible’shidden meanings in a zigzag journey through the depths of its reception history.

7. The very naming of such a phenomenon as a problem or “difficulty” is due to what JamesBarr helpfully calls a philological (as opposed to a textual) warrant for interpreting the evidence (seeJames Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament [Oxford: Clarendon, 1968],6–13. For another acute assessment of biblical philology’s implicit epistemology, see MatitiahuTzevat, “Common Sense and Hypothesis in Old Testament Study,” in The Meaning of the Book ofJob and Other Biblical Studies [New York: Ktav, 1980], 189–204).

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In short: from Kugel’s historicism to Alter’s literary criticism, from Sternberg’s ra-tionalism to Zornberg’s “rabbinic unconscious,” each scholar’s interpretivewarrant is grounded in its own theory of the reader’s mind—theories that revealthemselves in their divergent stances on how biblical narratives might speakthrough what they do not say.

KUGEL VERSUS ALTER: DRAWING A BLANK ON THE BIBLE AS “LITERATURE”

James Kugel plays a strong foil to anyone who thinks Auerbach’s “back-ground” thesis describes something essential about how biblical narrative commu-nicates. Throughout our period, Kugel has maintained the contrary.8 Texts areproduced and read by different interpretive communities with diverse hermeneuticassumptions. In the Bible’s case, these assumptions have been radically distinct,pointing to incommensurable meanings. It is an elementary fallacy to ignorethis fact and conflate the assumptions of the Bible’s original audience withthose of its later readers.9 In this vein, Kugel criticizes the “literary” turn for as-suming that modern lit-crit categories can be applied to biblical texts (at leastnot without so much modification that they grow cancerously complex andmust be excised by Occam’s razor). To represent these fallacies of the literary ap-proach, Kugel targets one of Auerbach’s corollaries to the “background” thesis:that the Bible’s reticent style—unlike Homer’s way of dressing his heroes infancy epithets and genealogies—endows biblical heroes like David with theinner complexity and development that lit-crit calls “character.” For Kugel,these folks are far less complicated than literary critics would like them to be,because their audiences were also far less complicated. In place of Auerbach’s“background,” Kugel inserts a term that will echo throughout this debate: blanks.

In a famous essay, Erich Auerbach once described biblical characters as“fraught with background.” Certainly when they are compared to Odysseusthis is true. But what makes them “characters” at all? As I have suggestedabove, the Bible itself seems to treat them more as ancestors, andwhat happens to them is not so much in the category of adventures as of

8. See the conclusion to Kugel’s “Some Thoughts on Future Research into Biblical Style:Addenda to The Idea of Biblical Poetry,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 9, no. 28(1984): 116; his criticisms of Fishbane in “The Bible’s Earliest Interpreters,” Prooftexts 7, no. 3(1987): 269–283; his sketch of the “wisdom mentality” and the four interpretive assumptions of theBible’s postexilic interpreters, “Ancient Biblical Interpretation and the Biblical Sage,” in Studies inAncient Midrash, ed. James Kugel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1–26, developedin his monumental How to Read the Bible (New York: Free Press, 2007); see especially the appendix“Apologetics and Biblical Criticism Lite,” where Kugel criticizes the literary approach as a “view fromnowhere,” published on his website: http://www.jameskugel.com/apologetics.php (access date 5/9/2013).

9. By “later” readers, Kugel does not just mean “modern” readers; as he sees it, the final fewcenturies BCE ushered in an “interpretive revolution” that still shapes how we understand the textstoday. Kugel argues that this limits the Bible’s legitimate uses for Jewish theology, not just for literarycriticism; see his criticisms of Benjamin Sommer in “Kugel in JQR,” http://www.jameskugel.com/kugel-jqr.pdf (access date 5/11/2013).

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history—history in the particularly biblical sense of “present reality projectedback to the time of causes.” In that world, everything is significant becauseeverything produces results going on through the present and into thefuture. The people of that world cannot marry or fight or go to sleep orleave home without producing results of national dimension. And so we(ancient Israelites) listeners hear the story as, yes, a tale about people like our-selves, but more precisely of ourselves in history, a tale which producesvisible, verifiable results and in that sense is unarguably true, while literatureis fiction. And so what need is there of narrative “foreground”? All that weneed to know is told to us by the text. I do not find that biblical “characters”are fraught with background so much as that they are, quite simply, blanks.10

What is at stake when Kugel rejects the term “characters” and draws a blank instead?Specifically, what theory of the biblical reader’s mind does his “blank” imply? Theshort answer:Auerbach, here, is a proxy forKugel’s colleagues on the literary-criticalside of biblical scholarship. Rather than a critique of Auerbach, Kugel’s move from“background” to “blanks” in this essay (“On the Bible and Literary Criticism”) isbetter read as an effort to police disciplinary boundaries. (The “and” in his title isdisjunctive, as if to say: “The Bible is one thing. Literary criticism? It’s allyours.”). Polemically motivated as it is, then, Kugel’s two versions of the biblicalreader are not really the originals versus the moderns, but two camps of moderns(Kugel vs. Robert Alter in particular). Kugel’s camp is historicist, Alter & co.’s isliterary-ist, but—here is the key to our longer answer—neither modern epistemologygrants much psychological complexity to the Bible’s reader. Kugel uses historicaldistance to create a primitive/modern split between readers, whereas Alter usesanachronistic proximity to posit equivalences between the Bible-as-“literature” andthe implied author of this “literary” text. In other words, Kugel’s historicism setsup a hierarchy in how primitives as opposed to moderns can interpret the text,whereasAlter assumes that the author’s artful intentions dictate the reader’s response,thereby downplaying differences between kinds of reader or modes of interpretation.

This polemic between Kugel and Alter comes to light when we see what apoor proxy for it Auerbach actually is. First, Auerbach did not mean the usual lit-erary notion of “character.” Rather, his sense of “figures” [Figuren] referred to theoriginal schema of “background,” “foreground,” and “figure” around which hisargument in this chapter of Mimesis turns, a schema that has more to do withhis work at that time on early Christian figural exegesis than with any modernlit-crit categories.11 But translations aside, the smoking gun for Kugel’s polemicis that he has already, before turning to Auerbach, rejected the term “characters”for people in the Bible. Citing his own Idea of Biblical Poetry, Kugel “shuddered”to hear Joseph called “one of the most believable characters in the Bible,”12 which

10. James Kugel, “On the Bible and Literary Criticism,” Prooftexts 1, no. 3 (1981): 230(emphasis added).

11. John D. Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2001).

12. Kugel, “Literary Criticism,” 219.

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is more or less just what Alter says in his earlier Art of Biblical Narrative.13 Sim-ilarly, when Alter picks up Auerbach’s idea of “background” there, he attaches it tohis literary term “character” (the title of this chapter is “Characterization and theArt of Reticence”).14 These parallels suggest that, when Kugel draws a blankon biblical “characters,” he is refusing to recognize Alter more than he is reallyscrutinizing Auerbach.

Beyond this policing of disciplinary borders between historians and literarycritics, Kugel’s under-reading of Auerbach reveals a more important epistemolog-ical impasse. If history is what separates us moderns from the Bible’s readers, asKugel suggests, should we assume that they were ahistorical? On the other hand, ifliterature is what connects us to them, as Alter suggests, then how did they gainour modern literary sensibilities? By their disregard for these questions, we cansee that at the level of interpretive capacity, Kugel and Alter grant the biblicalreader little psychological dynamism or distinctiveness, respectively: Kugel ex-cludes the reader from modern historical interpretation by making her totally dif-ferent from himself, Alter includes her in modern literary interpretation by makingher basically the same. In this polemic, each leaves out precisely the part of Auer-bach’s “background” thesis that should be most relevant to his own argument.Kugel neglects Auerbach’s insight that biblical historiography was not just onemode of storytelling among others but a major antecedent of Western literary con-sciousness. Yet Alter ignores Auerbach’s equally key point that interpretation ofbiblical narrative, however literary, remained determined by its specific historicalinterpretive frames. Thus, in Auerbach’s dual valence of the “background,”we canrecover a missed opportunity for reconceptualizing a true dialectic between histor-ical and literary dimensions of the biblical reader’s consciousness.

To begin from Kugel’s side of this impasse, recall that he used his historicistwarrant to claim that “literary” interpretation was alien to the Bible’s originalreaders. Rather, he says, they read biblical narratives as history, “a tale which pro-duces visible, verifiable results and in that sense is unarguably true, while literatureis fiction.”15 First, we should note that this is not at all the idea of history thatKugel himself uses to recapture the biblical reader’s “history.” Far from it. Heuses a modern positivist history (a straight-line accumulation of events; the pastwie es eigentlich gewesen ist) to discover that the Bible’s reader had a totally dif-ferent history: a projection of their collective present back onto their ancestors intheir collective past. This is history, Kugel says, in “the particularly biblicalsense.”16 But how particular is it, really? Kugel’s definition of the biblicalreader’s idea of “history” should be easily recognizable to anthropologists aswhat used to be called “myth.”17 Following from this historicist exclusion of

13. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 164.14. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 143–162.15. Kugel, “Literary Criticism,” 230.16. Kugel, “Literary Criticism,” 230.17. Kugel says quite plainly that “the Biblical world” did not have a sense of “literature” or

“history.” Rather, these texts were meant to “explain the present” (How to Read, 62). His idea of thebiblical audience’s time as equivalent to the time of their ancestors is ripe for Johannes Fabian’s critique

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the biblical reader from historical consciousness, he marshals a phalanx of binaryoppositions that are no less readily recognizable to anthropologists: history versusmyth, past-as-past versus past-as-present, modern versus primitive ... in short, usversus them.18 These binaries also line up with a familiar mental hierarchy. Al-though he nods to the literary-critical term “interpretive competence” to accountfor the biblical readers’ own way of reading the text, Kugel leaves us with the dis-tinct impression that they do not have a different competence but simply that theyhave less. For example, rather than “elusive thematic connections,” he writes ofbiblical texts as organized by “mechanical principles”;19 rather than historical nar-ratives, he sees etiological explanations.20 In a revealing example, whereas wemoderns may identify with the so-called “character” of Moses (the biblical inter-preter, in a sense), Kugel insists that primitive listeners only identified with “thepeople” for whom the Bible’s words were “too terrible to bear.”21 Thus, just ashe used historicism in order to exclude the Bible’s primitive reader from his his-torical consciousness, Kugel excludes the reader from his interpretive competenceby imposing one more binary between primitives and moderns: surface versusdepth, which may be the root metaphor of the modern interpretive enterprise.22

Unlike Kugel, Auerbach grants the Bible’s reader strikingly modern histor-ical and literary competence. Both capacities, he says, were refined from the rawore of its very narrative style:

... the stories are not, like Homer’s, merely narrated “reality.” Doctrine andpromise are incarnate in them, inseparably melded with them; for that veryreason they are “fraught with background” [hintergründig] and dark, containinga second, hiddenmeaning. In the story of Isaac, it is not onlyGod’s intervention atthe beginning and end that is kept dark, allusive, fraught with background, butalso every factual and psychological detail throughout the story. They remaindark, only hinted at, fraught with background; this is why we are compelled,even beckoned, to turn them over slowly, to deepen them, to develop them ...23

of “allochronism” (Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object [New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2002 (1983)], 6–7).

18. Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1995), for a convincing refutation of these conventional oppositions in thefield of Hawaiian historiography.

19. Kugel, “Literary Criticism,” 227.20. On etiology as a central function of biblical narratives (myths), see Kugel, How to Read,

62–8.21. Kugel, “Literary Criticism,” 229–30.22. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale Uni-

versity Press, 1970) and “The Problem of Double Meaning as Hermeneutic Problem and as SemanticProblem,” in The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UniversityPress, 2004), 61–76.

23. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: die Wirklichkeitsdarstellung in der abendländischen Literatur(Bern: Francke Verlag, 1946), 20 (all translations mine). Auerbach’s hintergründig (“backgroundish”),as opposed to the vordergründig (“foregroundish”) Homeric style, are clearly marked as the sole tech-nical neologisms in this chapter (Mimesis, 16). The actual phrase, “fraught with background,” was

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Auerbach’s portrait of the reader’s sense of history includes what Kugel agrees tobe its main difference from our own: biblical history is not the past-as-past but thepast as a template for prophecy and revelation. Precisely because of this strong tel-eology embedded in its historical narrative (its line of development extending fromour ancestors’ past to our collective present and future), however, Auerbach pro-poses that the Bible also opened up new literary awareness to its reader. After all,even if, as Kugel says, “all that we need to know is told to us by the text,” then whydoes it tell us apparently trivial things? When we forge links from past to present,we are beckoned and compelled to interpret every detail—in Auerbach’s Akedah,a “three day” journey, the lifting up of a pair of eyes, or a threefold repetition of thedeictic “Here I am” (hinneni)—as a sign or omen against this narrative backgroundof sacred history. Thus, if we accept Auerbach’s internally complex model of thereader, historiography and fiction actually strengthen each other.

On his side of the impasse between “history” (fact) and “literature” (fiction),when Alter translates Auerbach’s “background” into his own theory, he reciprocal-ly ignores its historical aspect. As a result, Auerbach appears in Alter’s work not asa literary historian but as an inferior literary critic.24 “It is one thing to say,” Alterconcedes, “that the sparsely sketched foreground [...] ‘somehow’ implies a largebackground dense with possibilities of interpretation.” But Alter criticizes Auer-bach for citing no “specific means” for “how this ‘somehow’ is achieved.”25

For Alter, the historical background that hovers over both the readers and the char-acters does not seem to count as a “specific” technical device. But rather than showhow it works, Alter’s sole discussion of history’s role in the “background” (or whathe dubs “the art of reticence”) implies just the reverse: the Bible’s author used lit-erary art to bless his figures with a rich modern character (replete with interiority,autonomy, etc.) as opposed to an impoverished historical one (superficial, full oflinear and mechanical cause/effect chains, and other Kugel-like deficiencies). So itis that for Alter (pace Kugel and Auerbach) the Bible assumes a “strong, clearlydemarcated pattern of causation in history and individual lives,” but (neverthe-less!?) its characters’ complex biographies “unsettle the sense of straightforward,unilinear consequence to which lazy mental habits—ancient and modern—accustom us.”26 For example, Alter implies, it would be a “lazy mental habit”to read Abraham as a pawn in a crude hierarchy of divine favor and disfavor,plotted in a straight-line story about how our people came to be. Somehow we

gained in translation by Auerbach’s translator, Willard R. Trask. In Auerbach’s letters to Princeton Uni-versity Press (C0728, Folder 9, Box 1, Princeton University Press Archive), he praises Trask’s abilities(“He is an excellent translator, but a little touchy.”) Auerbach met Trask more than once to go over thetranslation; it is likely that he approved of the change, but he did express reservations about the chapteritself, both in private and in print.

24. Notwithstanding Alter’s admiration for Auerbach elsewhere (“Response,” Prooftexts 27, no.2 [2007]: 368).

25. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 144.26. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 157.

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should discern his rich character, above and beyond the narrative’s merely conven-tional historiographical frame.

But what are the specific means, Auerbach would ask, by which the Bible’scharacters are “somehow” achieved? For Alter, the answer is too often self-evident: either he posits that the Bible’s author applied (presumably universal) lit-erary techniques of characterization, or he empathizes with the characters as (pre-sumably universal) human beings. Auerbach, in contrast, points out that biblicalcharacterization relies on a specific set of historical assumptions:

Abraham’s conduct should be explained, not just by what is happening to himat the moment, not just by his “character” [Charakter] [...] but by his previ-ous history. He remembers and he is continually aware of what God hasalready fulfilled for him and of what God has foreseen—his heart isswayed back and forth by desperate mutiny and patient hope. His mute obe-dience is multilayered and fraught with background.27

Auerbach agrees with Alter that Abraham has the literary depth of a “character,”not just the archetypal outline of an “ancestor,” as Kugel would have it. Yet bylocating the Bible’s historicity in the “dark and mysterious background” of its nar-rative style, Auerbach advances a more reader-sensitive theory of how this char-acter is so fully realized. Abraham, like the reader, sees himself as a player in ahistorical drama of which his particular narrative, down to the smallest details,is merely an episode. He is far from a “blank,” nor is his rich interiority in anyway separable from the fraught background of sacred history which guides andjudges his every action. Rather, a dialectic between doctrine and promise, onthe one hand, and everyday life, on the other, is incarnate in both the playersand the audience of biblical drama. The audience interpret the heroes’ humblelives against their historically “fraught” background; by charging them withthese interpretations, history turns ancestors into characters. Hence Auerbach’scompound term for that whole of which Alter and Kugel each captures onlyhalf: not personality or history but “personal history” [Personengeschichte]. ForAuerbach, there is no necessary contradiction between viewing people in theBible as historical ancestors and as literary characters, provided we do not sub-scribe to overly modern ideas of “history” and “literature.” Rather than distinctdisciplinary compartments, they are two complementary tonalities; simultaneouslycollective and individual registers in which audiences must receive the text. Ratherthan linear positivist history (Kugel) versus the dense interiority of character(Alter), or the bare foreground of conventional tales (Kugel) versus the dark back-ground of literature (Alter), or the simple surface of didactic explanations (Kugel)versus deep moral turmoil (Alter), etc., Auerbach theorizes biblical narrative as athree-dimensional interplay between everyday human lives and historical interpre-tations. This interplay yields new “depths of time, fate, and consciousness.”28

27. Auerbach, Mimesis, 17 (emphasis added).28. Auerbach, Mimesis, 16.

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This critique of Kugel and Alter (by way of Auerbach) has given us someclarity about three criteria for further comparative analysis.29 First, it is unsatisfac-tory to try to fix biblical narrative as history or literature, fact or fiction, even if weacknowledge, as Alter and Kugel do, that these are both genres of discourse ratherthan gradations of one empirical reality. Second, then, we need a theory that re-flects Auerbach’s dialectic between historical interpretation and literary artistry,especially in order to illuminate how both modes of reading biblical narrativesproduce its individual characters, in all their personal depth and collectivescope. Finally, we know that only a theory which takes the reader’s role more se-riously can satisfy these requirements. Such a theory should describe, in detail, theactual process of interpretation as it unfolds over time, pinpointing particularvectors of interaction between what the narrative says (or doesn’t say) and thereader’s possible responses.

STERNBERG’S RATIONALISM: A METHOD FOR SORTING BLANKS FROM GAPS

Although he wrote it over a decade before Kugel and Alter’s debate, MeirSternberg’s first book also responds to Auerbach’s Mimesis, agreeing withKugel and Alter that it begs the question of literary criticism versus historicism.With typical acerbity, Sternberg insists that this is a false dichotomy, reframingthe interpretive imperative in terms that are worth citing at length:

In the eternal, though essentially pointless, crusade waged against “criticism”under the slogan of “historical scholarship,” the stick of the “modern” reader’sinterpretative waywardness is liberally and somewhat indiscriminatelyapplied. Auerbach energetically brandishes this stick in warning against themodern reader’s anachronistically reading into this ancient text what is notthere to be read. In this case, however, I need not even fall back upon the ar-gument that the mark of great works is not only their appeal to various ordersof mind but also their accumulation of meaning throughout the ages; their or-ganization is so complex as to preclude the possibility of their contemporaryaudience’s exhausting their manifold aspects or layers of meaning. I am pre-pared to go further. We are wholly ignorant, in fact, of the “theory of litera-ture” prevalent in Homer’s days or of the actual reactions of hiscontemporary audience. On the other hand, human nature being what it is,there is every reason to believe that people have always evinced curiositywhen some desired information was withheld from them and felt suspensewhen somebody they liked was in mortal danger; and the tense excitementthat characterizes the dramatized reactions of the Phaecian audience to

29. By focusing on how constructions of the reader inform scholarly interpretations of biblicalpoetics, I will take this conversation in a very different direction than Robert Kawashima, whose owncomparison of narrative art in Homer and the Bible analyzes the function of verbal medium under thedesubjectivized rubric of structuralist literary theory (Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode[Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004]). But note that within his own framework, Kawa-shima also tries to defuse the debate between historicism and literary criticism and, in this effort, makesskillful use of Auerbach’s Mimesis, quite successfully in my opinion (see 7–8, 16).

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Odysseus’ account of his adventures strongly confirms this claim. There issimilarly every reason to believe, and a great deal of evidence to supportthis belief, that Homer, like other storytellers ancient and modern, exploitedand manipulated these primary narrative interests. The onus of proof to thecontrary, therefore, obviously rests with the so-called historicists.30

Here, in a nutshell, we rediscover Kugel’s and Alter’s interpretive warrants along-side the kernel of Sternberg’s alternative. Now Sternberg ascribes Kugel’s stricthistoricism to Auerbach: the danger of lit-crit is that it finds meaning in theBible’s holes whereas in fact they are only “blanks.” Before ascribing modern lit-erary sensibilities to the ancient reader, we should try to understand their own“theory of literature” and hear the text as they heard it; only then can we decipherwhat it does not say. Sternberg also alludes to Alter’s alternative solution, but herejects it as unverifiable: the text is an irreducible whole, communicating in mul-tiple “orders of mind,” including, of course, however literature communicates. Sowhy not simply assume that the silence surrounding the heroes is a special meansof characterization, not a “blank” (or, more generally, that the Bible’s lacunaereflect its “profound art, not primitiveness”) and then submit this postulate to areader’s basically shared human ability to understand how it works in the text?

Sternberg’s alternative starts from the premise that the Bible does not sayeverything it means, but nor can it mean anything that it does not say. What weneed, then, is a robust functional theory of how, based on what biblical narrativesdo tell us, we are warranted in selecting some, but not all, of their implicit mean-ings for analysis. How are we to distinguish “noise” from meaningful emanationsof the Bible’s “background”? How do we refrain from fixating on the serifs of theBible’s letters, like certain earlier overeager exegetes? Or, in Sternberg’s terms,how do we sort mere “blanks” from “gaps,” that is, significant breaks in theflow of narrative communication? For him, this blanks/gaps distinction is moreessential than any generic definition of biblical narrative as “history” or “litera-ture.” Given its anchor in the reader’s innate cognitive capacities and natural re-sponses, Sternberg’s blanks/gaps distinction is “a universal of reading that noone can escape for a moment, including those who shudder at the very mentionof interpretation.”31 While Kugel “shuddered” to hear lit-crit terminologyapplied to our biblical ancestors, even his historicist horror cannot extend to the“primary narrative interests” of our mind, which have hardly changed since bib-lical times. Similarly, while Alter leaned heavily on authorial intent in order toaccount for literary effects like suspense, Sternberg refocuses our attention onthe reader. In his new theory, rather than the author’s invisible hand, it is thereader’s narrative interests—curiosity, surprise, and suspense—that drive her tomake sense of what the text says or doesn’t say, steering her interpretive course

30. Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1978), 85 (emphasis added). Based on the author’s dissertation (HebrewUniversity, 1971).

31. Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama ofReading (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), 236.

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as she tacks between blanks and gaps.32 Further, these elementary narrative inter-ests align along a single vector of interaction between text and reader: temporality.The way narrative flows over time—not (our) modern history, not (their) primitivemyth—but time itself, as this flow reflects and reshapes the reader’s mind, is theepistemological engine of what Sternberg calls “the drama of reading.”

To unveil this drama, Sternberg’s method sorts gaps from blanks—meaning-ful from meaningless holes in the narrative—in relation to the reader. A “blank” issimply without interest, whereas a hole that piques our narrative interests—sus-pense, curiosity, or surprise—is a “gap.” Our interests can be subdivided thisway because we try to close each gap differently, depending on how it fits intothe narrative’s temporal structure so far. Suspense is prospective: we lookforward to closing a gap between what we know now and what we will learn. Cu-riosity is retrospective: we fill in a gap between what we are learning and what wedo not yet know about the past. And we experience surprise when we thought therewere no gaps in past, present, or future—only to see one open up in the present, tobe sealed as a new unity later on.33

Speaking of “the” narrative, however, elides the real object of Sternberg’smethod. How do we identify holes before we can even begin sorting them intogaps and blanks? Unlike my example of a w rd that is clearly missing something,in a complex narrative, there is no straightforward set of rules for what is suspense-ful or dull, curious or banal, surprising or obvious. Nor is narrative interest purelysubjective—if it were, how could we distinguish a thriller from a period drama or(as in Auerbach’s Homer/Bible opposition) an epic from a tragedy?34 We couldkeep ducking this question, and sustain the illusion that each narrative comes pre-packaged as a coherent whole, by classifying narratives according to generic fea-tures. For instance, we could say that history recounts truths, whereas literatureinvents amusing fictions. If we read, for example, the Akedah as history, thenwe should find a “strong, clearly demarcated pattern of causation” with little sus-pense. If we read it as literature, then we should instead be more attuned to its char-acters’ internal development. So say Kugel and Alter. The problem with theirholistic approach, from Sternberg’s reader-oriented standpoint, is that there is nofirm threshold between genres. The Akedah does pursue a linear course of

32. See also Sternberg, Poetics, 259. In a recent interview, Sternberg speaks of these three re-actions as narrative “universals” or “master effects” (“Reconceptualizing Narratology: Arguments for aFunctionalist and Constructivist Approach to Narrative,” interview with Franco Passalacqua and Fred-erico Pianzola, Enthymema 4 [2011]: 37.)

33. My summary of these terms is based on Sternberg’s own summary of how he has used themthroughout his work: “Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (I),” Poetics Today 24,no. 2 (2003): 327–8. See also: “Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (II),” PoeticsToday 24, no. 3 (2003): 517–8.

34. Not only is this not a new question in biblical poetics, it was not even new in Auerbach’sMimesis, which responds to an April 1797 correspondence between Goethe and Schiller about how todistinguish “epic” from “tragedy” (Mimesis, 9; see the April letters, http://www.briefwechsel-schiller-goethe.de/seiten/zeittafel.php?j=1797, access date 5/10/2013). Auerbach’s innovation (a subversiveone, especially given his Jewish background) is to put the Hebrew Bible, with its suspenseful “back-ground,” right into the slot that Goethe had assigned to Greek tragedy.

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development in time and space, from early in the morning to the top of Mt.Moriah, adhering to simple laws of physical and moral causality. But it also in-cludes singular details—a gesture here, the repetition of a deictic there—withno evident historical referents. If we are interested in such details, we promotetheir function in the narrative’s temporal flow to the status of “gaps”; if we areuninterested, we demote them to “blanks,” meaningless add-ons to a relativelythin original text. Either way, our interpretive ambition never ventures farbeyond the circle of our generic assumptions about the text itself, that is, aboutwhat kind of story it must tell us.

Sternberg’s key insight here is that when Kugel and Alter try to “write off” inadvance what sort of interest we should take in the narrative, by falling back on itsgeneric classification, they do not describe how we experience the narrative butonly what we are told in the narrative. We can call this the plot or, in Sternberg’sRussian Formalist parlance, the szujet. But Sternberg points out that the plot/szujet(what we are actually told) is only half the narrative. The other half (what we areable to say, when the telling is done, really happened) is the story or fabula.35

Sternberg challenges us to stop seeing a narrative as a smooth series of more orless artfully told events and start looking at it as a “dynamic system of gaps”between plot and story.36 As readers, our interests are directed, not by generic fea-tures of the plot in itself, but by the systematic weaving between plot and story asthey are knit together over time. If this is happening now, we ask, what else mighthave happened? And: What might happen next? This dense texture of cruxes andreconstructions he calls narrative exposition. Much of Sternberg’s work, especiallyon the Bible, involves technical analysis of how exposition is handled and how itaffects readers.

Sternberg uses his theory of exposition to analyze gaps/blanks in the Bible inthree steps, following a more methodical and verifiable process than any that wehave considered so far. First, he isolates discontinuities in the narrative where theplot and the story do not coincide. For example, he (like Alter and Auerbach) readsthe Akedah as a narrative in which the style gives us only “dim and fragmentary”glimpses of the characters’ inner lives, because the narrator tells us so little (in theplot) about what the characters are thinking; he keeps it all in the “background”(of the story).37 Next, Sternberg applies his method in order to separate warrantedexplanations of what we are told but don’t know (gaps) from idle speculationdevoid of evidence (blanks). This can provide grounds for assessing, for instance,if the Bible’s figures are complex, internally conflicted literary “characters.” Re-turning to our example of the Akedah, we are not told a word about Sarah inthe narrative itself, so her feelings would be a blank (contra certain midrashim,piyyutim, and feminist critics). Abraham’s feelings, in contrast, are a marked

35. Sternberg would object that I am imprecise in conflating “plot” with szujet and “story” withfabula (adjust my simplification by referring to Expositional Modes, 12–13 and 308 n. 22). I use thesemore familiar terms in keeping with the conventions established by E. M. Forster (Aspects of the Novel[London: Harcourt, 1956 (1927)]).

36. Sternberg, Expositional Modes, 50, Poetics, 186.37. Sternberg, Poetics, 129.

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gap; why else, for example, would Isaac heighten our interest by asking, “Where isthe lamb for the burnt offering?’” Signals like these give us a warrant to close thegap of what Abraham is feeling by, for instance, assigning a doubled referent andheavy tone to his answer (“Here is the lamb for the burnt offering, my son”). Thissort of hypothetical gap closure by the reader helps to intensify one of our primarynarrative interests, suspense, while simultaneously adding to Abraham’s interior-ity. Thus the exposition resutures plot to story by mediating between reader’s andcharacter’s minds.38 Finally, Sternberg proposes criteria for delimiting our gap-filling prerogatives, beyond our primary narrative interests. These criteriainclude logical norms (integrity, analogy, causality), norms of proportion(between minimal and implied readings and, in the latter category, between reti-cence and significance) and even an all-purpose “quantitative indicator” (more in-formation = more possible significance, whether we are trying to add apparentredundancies, epithets, sotto voce asides, etc. to the “gaps” side of our interpretiveledger).39

To complement this sketch of Sternberg’s theory of exposition, it may alsohelp to take a look at his theory from a genetic perspective, and not only in order tocorrect Alan Mintz’s suggestion that the Tel Aviv school of poetics (of whichSternberg is a founding father) is a mere “reincarnation” of Russian Formalism(hence, “simply, not new”).40 Contra Mintz, as careful comparison of Sternberg’sterminology with one of its key sources (the Russian Formalist Boris Toma-shevksy) shows, much has changed from Moscow to Tel Aviv, both in the specificfunctions of this terminology and in its underlying conceptual architecture. Butmore importantly in terms of our theme—epistemological foundations and inter-pretive warrants in recent biblical criticism—this comparison reveals that theBible’s artful discontinuities were not just a new example to which Sternbergapplied an apparatus that he imported from the Russian Formalists. Rather, Stern-berg used the Bible’s particular stylistic problems, especially its very “gappy” ex-position, in order to theorize a more dynamic interplay between the reader and thetext than Tomashevsky.

Sternberg’s major innovation with respect to Russian Formalism is exposed,typically, in a parenthesis at the end of his first book where he accuses the Formal-ists of an “(a priori view of the szujet).”41 To clarify this criticism, compare him toTomashevsky on szujet versus fabula:

38. Sternberg, Poetics, 192. Note, however, that although Sternberg’s theory does highlight thismeaningful omission (“gap”) in the Akedah, in general he agrees with Kugel against Auerbach that itsframing (“God tested Abraham”) undermines most attempts by the reader to project “suspense” into theplot (see his critique of Auerbach’s reading, Poetics, 268).

39. For an earlier and more succinct example of how he applies these logical criteria in order toidentify expositional gaps, see Sternberg’s “’izun ‘adin ba-sipur ’ones Dinah,” Ha-sifrut 4, no. 2(1973): 226.

40. Alan Mintz, “On the Tel Aviv School of Poetics,” Prooftexts 4, no. 3 (1984): 229.41. Sternberg, Expositional Modes, 257–8. As a specialist in exposition, surely it is no accident

that Sternberg is so circuitous. His formal definition of “gaps” appears at the very end of his chapter(Expositional Modes, 50–55) and is preceded (roughly forty pages into his own book!) by acomment on Trollope that could double as a tongue-in-cheek self-reference: “... the panting and

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Plot [szujet] is distinct from story [ fabula]. Both include the same events, butin the plot the events are arranged and connected according to the orderly se-quence in which they were presented in the work. In brief, the story is “theaction itself,” the plot “how the reader learns of the action.”42

Rather than, say, two sides of a sheet of paper that cannot be cut without alteringboth,43 for Tomashevsky, story and plot are just stacked on top of each other. Thestory is no less a priori than the plot; it exists independently as an ensemble of real-life or imaginary events, while the plot serves only to bring the story to the reader’sattention in an aesthetic way. The story is a straight logical-chronological progres-sion; the plot is a partial series of diversions from it. These diversions may be moreor less pleasant, of course, but beyond that, Tomashevsky has no clear way toanalyze how the two narrative modes are related.44 For him, whatever makes a nar-rative effective must be outside the text itself, in its historical and ideologicalthemes (“dominants”).45

Tomashevsky also takes an a priori attitude towards the smallest undecom-posable units of a narrative: “motifs” (e.g. the gun in a murder mystery).46 Bothplot and story contain motifs. They share some but not all; not all motifs in theplot are essential to the story. Exposition works its magic by including somemotifs but not others, in strategic combinations, over time. So far, Sternbergand Tomashevsky seem to agree. But again, because he has no formal modelfor how plot and story are related, let alone a temporal model like Sternberg’s,Tomashevsky does not describe the concrete ways in which motifs are arranged

exasperated reader, having grunted his way through forty close-packed pages of continuous exposition,finally reaches [...] the starting-point of the ‘kernel’ proper” (Expositional Modes, 47).

42. Boris Tomashevsky, “Thematics,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. andtrans. Lee Lemon and Marion Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 67. This is a slightlyabridged version; for the full translation, see “Thématique,” in Théorie de la Littérature, ed. TzvetanTodorov (Paris, Le Seuil, 1965), 263–309.

43. Saussure’s famous metaphor for the linguistic sign (Cours de linguistique générale, ed.Charles Bally, Albert Séchehaye (with Albert Riedlinger), in the critical re-edition by Tullio deMauro [Paris: Payot, 1995 (1916)], 157).

44. See Sternberg’s detailed criticism in Expositional Modes, 308 n. 22.45. For Tomashevsky, narrative themes acquire “reality” from “vital issues, current, topical

questions” outside the text (“Thematics,” 64). Because he uses this external definition of the narrative“dominant,” the term “formalist” is actually a misnomer for Tomashevsky; on the contrary, he tries tofix how narrative forms operate in order to keep them subordinate to narrative’s primary ideologicalcontent. In the opposite way, but with just the same result (as Sternberg points out; “Reconceptualiz-ing,” 50), “functionalist” is a misnomer for Jakobson, who puts literary effects into a fixed typologyof linguistic functions in order to reconcile poetic processes with synchronic linguistic systems (“Lin-guistics and Poetics,” in Style and Language, ed. Thomas Seabock (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1960),350–377). Sternberg countered both of these reifying moves by formulating his “Proteus Principle,”which means, in this case, that there is no fixed correspondence between linguistic form and literaryfunction (see Hebrews between Cultures: Group Portraits and National Literature [BloomingtonIN: Indiana University Press, 1988], 58–9).

46. Sternberg, Expositional Modes, 8 and 308 n. 16; Tomashevksy, “Thematics,” 67.

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in the plot (or, alternatively, “gapped”). Instead he lumps motifs into four catego-ries, according to their relative importance in an arbitrarily abridged version of thestory (let’s call it the “Cliff’s Notes”).47 He calls a motif “bound” if we cannot takeit out without making the Cliff’s Notes incoherent (in Chekhov’s famous example,the gun in a murder story that must, by definition, be fired), but “free” if it just addsdetails to the plot (the color of the gun). Similarly, a motif is “dynamic” if it de-velops the story (the moment when the butler fires the gun), but it is “static” ifit fails to spur development (the fact that it is fired in the kitchen). These twosets of motifs are not equivalent: bound motifs are logically necessary, whereasdynamic and free motifs can be compared in terms of their various effects.Thus, Tomashevsky does have an incipient theory of narrative interest andhence of the reader’s mind: we could very roughly measure this interest byranking the contributions of dynamic and free motifs against bound ones alonga linear temporal axis. But again, because he has no model for how plot andstory coevolve over time, and no clear typology of reader-responses, Tomashevskydoes not shed much light on the reader’s role in the exposition. Nor does his Cliff’sNotes (an artificial baseline for what “really” happens that is then re-presented bythe exposition) allow for his readers to reconstruct different versions of the “same”basic story.

To summarize Sternberg’s transformation of Tomashevsky’s Russian For-malist model: what Tomashevsky seems to have pictured as a spatial modelwith motifs arranged by positive criteria in relation to an artificial version of theminimal story, Sternberg has turned into a temporal model with motifs arrangedby negative criteria in relation to multiple implied readers. In Sternberg’stheory, motifs have become norms that set limits to readers’ responses to theplot. We should no longer think of the narrative as a fixed sequence of events pre-sented by a fluid set of fictional devices, but as a collaboration (or competition!)between author, narrator, and reader, who strive to actualize the concrete semanticresources embedded in a given sequence of textual information. Recalling apopular series of American kids’ books that appeared around the same time, Stern-berg’s narratology invites us to “choose your own adventure.” For him, how a textregulates the opening and closing of gaps and blanks in our own interests—not aclunky toolbox of formal distinctions between parts or kinds of narration—is thebest way to make sense of it. Nor does the author necessarily have the upper hand:just as he can arrange the plot in multiple ways relative to its implicit story, hisreaders can reconstruct the story in many ways from the fragments of its plot.Thus exploding any conventional dichotomy between fixed “story” and malleable“plot,” Sternberg theorizes them as a single temporal matrix of interpretivepotential.

Of course this is just a peek into the mechanics of Sternberg’s poetics, a jug-gernaut which already loomed large in his works of biblical criticism in the 1980s

47. As Tomashevsky says, “The relative importance of a motif to the story may be determinedby retelling the story in abridged form, then comparing the abridgement with the more fully developednarrative” (“Thematics,” 71).

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and has since morphed (most dramatically in two series of long articles in the1990s and 2000s) into an elaborate theory of human mental life that, he argues,both anticipates and surmounts nearly all its followers in narratology and cognitivescience.48 Yet in contrast to Kugel and Alter, Sternberg’s contribution is clear.Rather than a reader whose response is limited from the outset by fixed genericfeatures of the narrative, Sternberg theorizes and tests the biblical text againstan active reader—a reader who constantly constructs and reconstructs new ver-sions of a protean story from the scraps of information and rapidly changingplot that the author and the narrator have chosen to give him. Further, Sternberg’scognitive universalism assures that we, too, can play this reader’s role. Thus heescapes Kugel’s dichotomy between the modern objective historian and the prim-itive biblical audience, on the one hand, and Alter’s overly empathic identificationof the biblical reader with his own “literary” sensibility, on the other. Still moreimportantly, Sternberg’s theory includes internal criteria for verifying its applica-bility on a case-by-case basis. We can ask, How would I, the reader, close a gap atthis point in the narrative, on the basis of the information I have, in order to fulfillmy primary narrative interests? By opening avenues to this question, Sternberg’spoetics of biblical narrative often reveals a great deal about how it works withoutfalling into then-ascendant critical trends: neither the fantasticalpseudo-objectivity of structuralism nor the ideological bent of many poststructur-alisms and postmodernisms. His “reader” is an artificial construct, to be sure, but aconstruct that can be tested and improved by means of the text itself.

ZORNBERG’S CRITIQUE OF STERNBERG: FROM COGNITIVE SCIENCE TO

PSYCHOANALYSIS

When we compared Kugel’s and Alter’s receptions of Auerbach’s “back-ground” thesis, the very object of our inquiry threatened to vanish in opposite di-rections. For Kugel, marked elisions or “gaps” in biblical narrative were merefigments of the modern reader’s overactive imagination—“blanks” to be replacedby historical analysis. For Alter, their meaningfulness could be taken for granted asa token of the author’s literary art; armed with a standard toolbox, any critic coulddecode their intended meaning just like the Bible’s ancient audiences must have.Neither Kugel nor Alter, then, allowed for a specifiable range of differencesbetween himself and the Bible’s implied reader(s) on the basis of a theory ofwhat they certainly share: a human mind.

By contrast, Avivah Zornberg—from a famous rabbinic family in Scotland,originally a scholar of English literature but now known as a Torah teacher in Je-rusalem, worldwide lecturer, and author of original biblical interpretation—agrees

48. For a rare object of Sternberg’s admiration, see David Bordwell, Narration in the FictionFilm (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). See also Sternberg, “Universals (II),” histhree-part “Telling in Time” article series (Poetics Today 11, no. 4 (1990): 901–948; Poetics Today13, no. 3 (1992): 463–541; Poetics Today 27, no. 1 (2006): 125–235), or his more succinct “Epilogue:How (Not) to Advance toward the Narrative Mind,” in Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps, ed.Geert Brône and Jeroen Vandaele (Hague: de Gruyter, 2009), 455–532.

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with Sternberg’s general approach: biblical narratives communicate by means of“gaps,” and we can analyze how they do so, if and only if we simultaneouslyuse the Bible to test a model of what sort of mind it is communicating with.When it comes to her own model of the reader’s mind, however, Zornberg isquite different. She claims that Sternberg does not allow for a wide enoughrange of inner experience to the Bible’s reader; he unduly constrains thereader’s narrative interests to a rational conscious level. She does not actuallysay, as others have before and since,49 that Sternberg’s ideal reader (even Stern-berg himself!) is therefore sexist, crypto-fundamentalist, and obsessed with omni-science or omnipotence, but her criticisms echo each of these well-knownarguments in more subtle ways.50

For our purposes, we only need to follow Zornberg this far: indeed, Stern-berg’s norm for valid reading is highly rationalist. When we retrace his theoreticalfootsteps in hot pursuit of gaps in the Bible’s exposition, we leave behind our af-fective, cultural, and otherwise warranted interpretations. Yes, technically, Stern-berg has a slot for these in his theory, but in practice, he applies them far less than afamiliar series of deductions or recursive inductions: a relentless quest from textualclue to rational hypothesis, followed by textual proof. Sherlock would be a perfectfit for Sternberg’s implied reader, although some of us may feel a bit more likeWatson.51 In opposition to Sternberg’s rationalism, Zornberg makes a case—sometimes rational, sometimes not, but internally consistent at a very differentmental level—for a biblical reader with a broader range of interests and capacities.He looked for solutions to the Bible’s “gaps” in the conscious mind of a rationalreader; she hears the Bible’s “blanks” as symptoms of an irrepressible unconsciousthat she shares with the characters, the rabbis, and maybe you and me.

If the rabbis seem to enter our comparison a bit abruptly at this point, it issimply because we cannot exclude them any longer. Midrash had no specialmandate in either Kugel’s or Alter’s interpretive warrants. In keeping with theirbasic strategies, Kugel used history to keep midrash distinct from the Bible,whereas Alter adopted rabbinic insights when they happened to agree with hisliterary-critical readings. But the rabbis are more vocal interlocutors for bothSternberg and Zornberg, who recognize that midrash, like their methods, oftenuses holes in the biblical text as a starting point for interpretation. By considering

49. Mieke Bal, “The Bible as Literature: a Critical Escape,” Diacritics 16, no. 4 (Winter 1986):71–79; Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, “Tipping the Balance: Sternberg’s Reader and theRape of Dinah,” Journal of Biblical Literature 110, no. 2 (1991): 193–211. Sober attempts to adjudicatethese critiques have been made by, respectively, Daniel Boyarin (“The Politics of Biblical Narratology:Reading the Bible like/as a Woman,” Diacritics 20, no. 4 [Winter 1990]: 31–42) and Paul Noble(“A ‘Balanced’ Reading of the Rape of Dinah: Some Exegetical and Methodological Observations,”Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 4, no. 2 [1995]: 172–203).

50. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (New York:Schocken, 2001), 134–40, 157. Compare especially to Bal, “Critical Escape.”

51. Not for nothing is the detective story one of Sternberg’s favorite genres; see ExpositionalModes, 159–182 and a revised chapter from a thesis that he supervised by a scholar whom he hascalled the “third generation” of the Tel Aviv school (Eyal Segal, “Closure in Detective Fiction,”Poetics Today 31, no. 2 [2003]: 153–215).

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how they both relate to midrash, we can see at a glance how inverted their episte-mological positions really are.

If Sternberg’s method investigates the interaction between the ideal readerand the text, for him, rabbis are the non-ideal reader. He calls midrash “illegitimategap-filling,” or arbitrarily upgrading blanks to gaps, because it is “sustained by thereader’s subjective concerns,” rather than by cognitive universals like curiosity,suspense, surprise, logic, and all the other ways that we find and fill gaps tomake sense of the text.52 For Sternberg, incoherence is a sign of interpretivefailure, not of divine truth. Naturally, then, he has little use for rabbis who overreaddetails, mishandle contradictions, ignore quantities and proportions, and projecttheir own world onto the text’s. He even implies that by finding a “system atwork” in biblical poetics, he will make the text pay greater dividends thanmidrash ever did.53 If anything, Sternberg’s ideal reader is not a religious crypto-fundamentalist (as Bal has claimed54) but a maskil, a rationalist heretic!

Zornberg critiques Sternberg’s rationalist reader by noting that his meta-phors for valid knowledge of the text seem to be weighted toward just one percep-tual modality: vision. For him, Zornberg says, vision is the human equivalent ofdivine omniscience. By trying to see through the gaps in biblical narrative, hisreader shows an “unambiguous enthusiasm for God’s omnipotence.”55 Hismethod is not just a mode of knowledge but also a form of power, one that clas-sifies, dissects, penetrates, and dominates. His desire to see/know the text from aGod’s-eye view typifies the “Platonic ideal” that Zornberg seems to associate withmethodological criticism in general: the quest for a “triumphal and unequivocalmaster story” that will finally close all the gaps in the text.56 In a rather ironicaside (considering his efforts to distance himself from the rabbis), Zornbergeven says that a midrash by Nah.manides is “the basis of Sternberg’s account”of this transparent master-narrative.57

Zornberg understands Sternberg’s desire to see/know the Bible’s master plan,but for her, “there is a sadness about the constant appeal to the eyes.” By insteadplacing the rabbis at the heart of a vast tradition of biblical reception, she adopts

52. Sternberg, Poetics, 188.53. Sternberg, Poetics, xiv.54. Bal (“Critical Escape,” 72) accuses him of “attributing to the narrator a divine power that

‘must be accepted’” and thereby “circumscribing the position of the reader who cannot but submit, pas-sively, to what the text states.”

55. Zornberg, Particulars, 140.56. Zornberg, Particulars, 140.57. Zornberg, Particulars, 157. Let us recall that Sternberg’s Poetics (1985) was published in

the same period that midrash was taken up by literary theory, with much excitement (e.g. GeoffreyHartman and Sanford Budick eds., Midrash and Literature [New Haven: Yale University Press,1986]) and critique (e.g. David Weiss Halivni, Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rab-binic Exegesis [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], 158–163). As in Kugel’s critique of “litera-ture” above, then, the stakes of Sternberg’s critique of midrash are more local than heacknowledges: two competing strands of poststructuralism, one (Sternberg’s) more in line with Jakob-son’s original project, the other (Zornberg’s) embracing a “turn to the subject” that we might associatemore with figures like Kristeva and Lacan.

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hearing—an internal, embodied, nondominating mode of knowledge—as the idealposture for the Bible’s reader. We should not, however, mistake this for a primarilytheological position.58 As Tamar Ross notes,59 Zornberg’s religious backgroundclearly plays a role in her approach to the Bible, and perhaps she stresses“hearing” because of her Torah teaching in oral settings. But notwithstandingthe lack of engagement with Zornberg’s work among biblical scholars,60 Isuggest that her cultivation of a particular way of listening to the text is also adirect response to the epistemological problem that we have already seen in Auer-bach, Kugel, Alter, and Sternberg: How can we know what biblical narrativesdon’t say? By adopting the stance of an analyst who is receptive to “symptoms”of the Bible’s repressed “counter-narratives,”61 Zornberg combines psychoanaly-sis and midrash to discover unconscious connections between narrative, charac-ters, and reader. Like Sternberg, she focuses on moments when the text doesnot make sense—because it says too little, too much, or too many contradictorythings at once—and she calls these moments of dense incoherence by a familiarname: “blanks.” But unlike Kugel and Sternberg, for whom “blanks” were theresult of unwarranted interpretive license, Zornberg suggests that at the navel ofbiblical readers’ collective unconscious, what makes the least sense may be themost symptomatic. For her, incoherence is not a failure—it is the chance to startmaking a very different kind of sense.

ZORNBERG’S UNCONSCIOUS: BLOCKS, BLANKS, AND BLESSING

While a full appreciation of Zornberg’s psychoanalytic theory deserves aseparate study, especially as she is averse to such scrutiny,62 we can explorehow it emerges from a case study: Jacob’s blessing of his children at the end of

58. I learned much from debating this aspect of Zornberg’s work with Ziva Hassenfeld-Reimerand Steve Weitzman.

59. Tamar Ross, “Review of Genesis: The Beginning of Desire,” B.D.D. 3 (Summer 1996): 55.See also Daniel Boyarin’s discussion of Zornberg and midrash in his 1996 review of her Beginning,available on her website: http://www.avivahzornberg.com/book-reviews.html (accessed 9/5/2013).

60. In addition to book reviews / review essays like Ross’s, and her following point-counterpoint with Avraham Walfish (see “Comments on Tamar Ross’ Review of Genesis: The Begin-ning of Desire,” B.D.D. 6 [1998]: 45–51, and her “Response,” B.D.D. 6 [1998]: 53–6), I have foundonly the psychoanalytic community to have engaged more substantively with Zornberg’s work (seethe diverse responses to her “Jonah: a Fantasy of Flight,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 18, no. 3[2008]: 271–299).

61. Zornberg, Particulars, 5. For closely related reading strategies by (not coincidentally, Ithink) feminist critics, see Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), and Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1994).

62. Zornberg resolutely maintains her distinction from narrowly academic criticism, calling it“methodical” (The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis [New York: Schocken, 1995], xi), “Pla-tonic” (Beginning, 95; Particulars, 4), or “analytic.” (Albeit not psycho-analytic ... presumably herclaim that, “In order to analyze a subject, one must, in a sense, kill it” [Beginning, 267] does notapply to her own enterprise.)

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Genesis.63 Jacob’s case brings us full circle to the specific formulation of ourgeneral problem that all four earlier critics also debated: are people in the Bible“characters” with complex self-reflective interiority, or are they national arche-types whose inner lives were opaque to their original audiences? How can wetell—based on what they do not say, say unclearly, or seem to say too much?Are we overreading these hiccups in the text or might they be symptomatic ofdeeper psychodynamic processes; processes that transgress individual and collec-tive, literary and historical modes of analysis and force us to go beyond discipli-nary boundaries? In short: is Jacob just a “blank,” or is he “fraught withbackground”?

Zornberg argues that we can indeed find clues to the depths of Jacob’s char-acter by probing holes in this parashah. But unlike Alter, who emphasized theauthor’s intention, and Sternberg, who presumed a critically analytic reader, Zorn-berg’s warrant for opening up these implicit meanings relies on an entire commu-nity of readers and readings. The tacit premise of all her work is that rabbinicreception of the text—especially of its most problematic passages—unlockslatent psychological dynamics in the text itself, forging new links between itscreator(s), readers, and characters. These dynamics are not necessarily subject tocritical ratiocination any more than they are to conscious authorial control. Theirparadoxes and semantic excesses, their ambiguities and enigmas, oblige Zornberg,with the rabbis, to adopt a radical openness to new ways of identifying and puttingback together what seem to be significant discontinuities in the characters’ wordsand actions. For her, these holes in the text force us to recognize the psychic truthof contradiction itself: a truth that thwarts or even subsumes rational analysis.

In Jacob’s case, Zornberg uses three key terms to attune us to the psychody-namics of his character: “block,” “blank,” and “blessing.” Each of these termsindexes a different aspect of the contradictions that, together, drive Jacob’s person-al history and make him intelligible as a psychologically coherent character. Thus,rather than simply oppose Sternberg, Zornberg’s approach picks up right where hisleft off—at the limits of rational consciousness. Specifically, by appropriating histerm “blanks” (or, as she also calls it, “blocks”), Zornberg inverts Sternberg’s ra-tional method. In place of his stark dichotomy between relevant gaps and irrele-vant blanks, Zornberg argues that the Bible’s lack of information (“blanks”) andexcessive information (“blocks”) are two sides of one psychological coin.Rather than rely on Sternberg’s gold standard of cognitive relevance for sortingout this irregular distribution of information, she uses these irregularities in thetext to amplify Jacob’s inner struggle—without explicit awareness on his ownpart and with no direct appeal to authorial control. In so doing, she irrevocablyblurs the line between, on the one hand, stylistic problems in the text as suchand, on the other hand, how the rabbinic commentaries empower their readersto interpret these problems.

The very title of this narrative unit, Va-yeh. i, is Zornberg’s first symptom ofrepressed meaning in Jacob’s life story. After all, the story is about the death of a

63. Zornberg, Beginning, 352–381.

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patriarch, but the title refers to his life: and he lived signifies Jacob’s quest forclosure and fulfillment, a quest not yet concluded. How can we account for thisapparent discrepancy? To this traditional interpretive problem, Zornberg addsanother. Jacob’s death is ultimately codified by the only “living will” inGenesis, a symbolic statement of blessing upon his children and all Israel.64 Yetat the beginning of the story of his death, on the verge of “‘revealing the end’”(49:1) and blessing his children, Jacob does not actually do so. His inability(“block”) is not clearly marked in the text itself, but she draws it out by usingRashi’s midrash on the verse: “the eyes of Israel were heavy with age, for hecould not see” (48:10). Lacking foresight, how can Jacob bless the next genera-tion? The “sense of an ending” that will endow his life with meaningful coherenceis sorely lacking.65 Nor does Sternberg’s ideal reader (who also prized the meta-phor of visionary knowledge) magically appear to clarify this problem for us. Itis rooted in something internal to Jacob’s own character.

For the underlying psychic etiology of Jacob’s “block,” Zornberg againturns to Rashi, who notes that the narrative of Jacob’s death is the only parashahsetumah: the only weekly Torah reading not introduced in the scroll by the usualminimum nine spaces.66 Just as Jacob’s sight is occluded, then, his vision is liter-ally “blocked” in the text. Connecting this textual block to the context of Jacob’sblessing—his sojourn in Egypt—Zornberg treats his “blindness” as an internalizedexile; a blocked existential condition. She diagnoses him as suffering from apsychic legacy of slavery in Egypt and therefore unable to bless his family.Citing Auberbach, she calls this trauma the “background” in terms of which hisblock should be interpreted:

Egypt is a grave that threatens to swallow all of his family’s aspirations for adistinct destiny. His last speech is, therefore, “fraught with background” ... in areality of exile and diffusion, how is the identity of this family to be pre-served? This identity, that began to be forged in a heroic abandonment ofall known paradigms, in an exquisite training of vision to sights neverbefore seen, now threatens to end in a peculiar blindness, a failure of thesenses and the sensibilities.67

64. Zornberg, Beginning, 353 and 419 n. 3–5.65. Borrowing this phrase from Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory

of Fiction with a New Epilogue [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]), Zornberg also analyzes theEsther story as lacking psychic closure in her most recent book (The Murmuring Deep: Reflections onthe Biblical Unconscious [New York: Schocken, 2009], 116).

66. Rashi to Genesis 47:28. Note that by setumah here, Rashi means that there is only the spaceof one letter at the start of this Torah reading, whereas, as formalized by Maimonides (Mishneh Torah,Hilkhot Sefer Torah, 8:1-2), a section is marked as setumah by a minimum space of nine letters within aline (versus an “open section” [parashah petuh.ah] which always starts at the beginning of a line). Rashiis not using setumah in that technical sense but as a jarring exception to it (“totally closed”, the mostclosed of all).

67. Zornberg, Beginning, 355.

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To follow this “block” even more deeply into Jacob’s mind, Zornberg draws on theZohar’s proposal that he suffers, not just from a physical lack of vision or speech,but from a lack of imagination—from “failure to read reality as though it consti-tuted an intelligible text.”68 Thus she redefines Jacob’s “slavery” as a psychicbondage, not only a political/national one. His block is now part of a “history”in the medical/psychoanalytic sense, rather than in Kugel’s more usual political/national sense. It is a residue of Auerbach’s “personal history”: the layers ofmemory, or the “depths of time, fate, and consciousness” that hover over biblicalcharacters long after the critical events have passed.69 Zornberg senses the pres-sure of Jacob’s personal history in semantic slippages between how he promisesto bless his children and how he actually does. This is the “discontinuity ... thatgenerates the midrashic narrative” and, again, the reason, at the very instantwhen he reaches out for a meaningful conclusion to his life, that he discoversinstead that “the tragic experience of blocking is now his.”70

Blocked speech, blocked imagination, a personal history of exile and slavery—formidable obstacles to psychic closure in themselves. But finally, Zornberg arguesthat none of these are inseparable from the deepest block in Jacob’s consciousness:his relation to God. She draws from a midrash in which the divine presence (shek-hinah) departs from his bedside, leaving Jacob not just bereft of his own sight buteven blinded (“blocked”) by its detached radiance.71 This sudden disconnectionfrom the divine runs against everything Jacob has stood for. He is, as Zornberghas said throughout,72 “concerned with the question of coherence”; he yearns tobe “whole, complete ... a life fully used, energies fully metabolized, its partstending toward integral meaning.”73 To explain this existential hole in his biogra-phy, Zornberg cites Rambam for what she calls a “clinical psychological diagno-sis”: Jacob’s pathology has been caused by repressing his anger for Joseph’s longabsence. This anger returns as God’s absence at the end of his life: “Because ofJacob’s sorrow and anxiety, during all the days of his mourning for Joseph, theholy spirit departed from him. ... The Sages make the point in this way: ‘Prophecydoes not come to rest in the midst of lethargy, or of melancholy ... but only in themidst of joy’” (Rambam).74

Mirroring Jacob’s own internalized exile and slavery, Joseph’s enslavementin Egypt has left hidden scars in his father’s character that resurface at this moment

68. Zornberg, Beginning, 356.69. In reference to the Hebrew Bible, Auerbach playfully stretches the German root for

“history” to cover three dimensions of our experience that positivist historicism usually tries to sepa-rate: (1) character or “personal history” (Personengeschichte), (2) universal or “world history”(Weltgeschichte), and (3) the “layers” of reader’s and character’s shared consciousness (the HebrewBible is, he says, vielschichtig und hintergründig, with gleichzeitig übereinandergelagerte Schichtendes Bewusstseins. See this important passage in Mimesis, 17.).

70. Zornberg, Beginning, 357.71. Zornberg, Beginning, 359. I assume she is alluding to a talmudic term for the blind: sagya’

nehoraya’, “filled with light.”72. See for example Zornberg, Beginning 216–7, and 321–2.73. Zornberg, Beginning, 359.74. Zornberg, Beginning, 360.

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of frustrated catharsis. Zornberg’s diagnosis echoes that of R. Mordechai YosefLeiner (the Ishbitzer) when she says that Jacob’s blessing is blocked by “repressedresentment and suspicion: he is angry with his sons....”75 In a psychological viewof Jacob’s inner reality, in fact, there is no essential difference between theRambam’s and the Ishbitzer’s readings of why he cannot speak. “God” is amode of Jacob’s relation to himself (his own “wholeness,” shalom). “This is noarbitrary movement of God, present and then absent, but a movement withinthe intimacies of Joseph’s spirit. There, something flickers and goes out.”76

To reviewZornberg’s diagnosis of Jacob’s problem, perhaps themost strikingthing about it is how far she has pushed the limits of his consciousness in search oftheir hidden dynamics. She began with a symptomatic reading of his inchoatespeech, moved onto a case history of his family’s exile and slavery, touchedlightly on his broken relation to the divine, and ended by equating this to hisbroken relationship with his own sons. Clearly, for her, Jacob is both more andless than an individual character. In his role as “Israel” he incorporates and playsout unconscious tensions of the whole national narrative up to this point; yet as adying old man, these tensions have overwhelmed his personal capacity to processthem and articulate an ending. Given this simultaneously overdetermined and inco-herent character, it follows that as readers, we should not try to interpret Jacob byfixing someArchimedean point outside his story fromwhich to judge and reconcilethe inner conflicts that define him, as Kugel, Alter, and Sternberg, each in his ownway, would have us do. On the contrary, we must embrace the structure of Jacob’sessential contradiction before we can articulate a truly therapeutic response.

Zornberg names this contradiction in appropriately contradictory terms: notonly is Jacob “blocked” by too much meaning, he also suffers from a lack ofmeaning, a parallel pathology that she calls the “blank.”77 Jacob’s inner “blank”and “block” are related as trauma is to symptom: “the experience of the ‘blank’ [is]the model for our understanding of the theme of ‘blocking,’ of the ‘absence ofGod.’”78 Zornberg notes that the very words blank and block help us to hear thisuncanny coincidence of opposites. “Both blank and black have the same root”; tobe “blank” is also to be “black,” “blocked,” obscure, thick with inchoate feeling, “as-sailed by emptiness or density, unintelligible, like an unreadable page.”As if directlyresponding to Sternberg’s disdain for midrashic blank drawing, Zornberg concedesthat “the blank is in the eye of the beholder. But ...” she continues, if the reader canopen himself to hear Jacob’s melancholia and the self-shattering cacophony oftrauma, “... no mere chiding will transform the unmeaning colorlessness/blacknessof things.” At the bottom of Jacob’s mind—in the “background” that charges hisevery word with repressed meaning—blank and block are one and the same.79

75. Zornberg, Beginning, 363.76. Zornberg, Beginning, 361.77. Zornberg, Beginning, 361–3.78. Zornberg, Beginning, 368.79. “The poetic crisis, the experience of the ‘blank’ [is] the model for our understanding of the

theme of ‘blocking,’ of the ‘absence of God’” (Zornberg, Beginning, 368). It seems that in Zornberg’slexicon, blank : block :: trauma : symptom.

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Once the reader adopts Zornberg’s psychoanalytic commitment to these ir-reducible complexities of biblical characterization, she should not try to resolveJacob’s problem by applying a historical or literary or cognitive methodology.Having acknowledged the problem’s paradoxical etiology, her only authentic re-sponse (not necessarily a solution, but still therapeutic) is to repeat Jacob’sproblem in a way that helps to unstick its most intractable inheritance. To thisend, following her diagnosis of Jacob’s “blanked”/“blocked” consciousness, Zorn-berg rereads his deathbed “blessing” on the psychodynamically warranted as-sumption that it will offer the opposite of blanks/blocks: integration, closure,catharsis, shalom. Just as she used midrashic readings of Jacob’s foreclosedspeech to palpate his repressed unconscious, midrash will help her to hearJacob as he works through this blockage. If his trauma had resulted in too muchor too little speech, his blessing will articulate a newfound balance.

In this search for the proportion and harmony that will be the sign of Jacob’sblessing on Israel, Zornberg, still following the Ishbitzer,80 asserts that he musttranscend his indistinct mass of emotions (“blanks”) to name each of its elementsclearly; like Moses’s blessing, which begins, “And this is the blessing ...”81 Tolearn how Jacob can attain “this” clarity (the lucidity of this), she reads forwardto the blessing that he eventually does give his sons, fastening onto its fluidimagery: “wine,” “grapes,” and “milk” (Genesis 49:11–12). Her intuition that flu-idity and clarity—again, apparent opposites—are the key to Jacob’s overcomingof his block/blank then takes her into a long midrash on Ezekiel’s “dry bones.”Asking these “dry bones” to “speak” and to “live again” is, she suggests,exactly what Jacob must have asked himself as his blessing flowed forth. By op-posing his “water, wine, and milk” to Ezekiel’s bones, she suggests that “Jacob’suse of fluid imagery is profoundly connected to the question of integration that sotroubles him.”82

But of course, given that this opposition is generated by the fluidity in Zorn-berg’s own language—she is circling, not just between Jacob and the midrash, butbetween Jacob and an entirely distinct biblical passage—when she finally inte-grates the opposition, it is as much a response to her own dialogue with Jacobas it is to his projected inner monologue. His ability to speak clearly to his sons(“and this is the blessing”), is, Zornberg says, “a lucid focus gained, paradoxically,through the medium of the ‘other things,’ the ‘other words,’ that he had to speak,in the ‘blank cold’ of his poetic crisis.”83 But these “other words” are none otherthan Zornberg’s; as a sounding board for Jacob’s silences, she guides his stutteringtransference back to himself. Only then can he speak his “own” words which—thanks to the blocks/blanks that she has found in him—finally voice his solutionto “a failure, a forgetting, a blurring of focus.”

80. Zornberg, Beginning, 363.81. For a review of related psychoanalytic problems with Moses’s “slowness of speech,” see

Shuli Barzilai, “Mind the Gap: Some Midrashic Propositions for Moses and Monotheism,” Psychoan-alytic Review 91, no. 6 (2004): 831–852.

82. Zornberg, Beginning, 365.83. Zornberg, Beginning, 368.

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This circular movement between the character’s and reader’s consciousnessis what sets Zornberg’s psychoanalytic theory apart from the other four that wehave examined. In Kugel’s historicist approach, the Bible’s so-called charactersare as simple as their original readers; all the complexity comes from laterlayers of interpretation. But Zornberg teaches us to read these “later” layers aslatent in the intrinsically overdetermined Bible itself (provided that we acceptthe universality of her psychoanalytic theory). By contrast, in Alter’s literary crit-icism, biblical characterization is an effect of authorial intent; hardly trivial yettightly contained in the narrative frame as a vehicle for artistic communication,a frame where no less putatively universal aesthetic principles predominate.And in Sternberg’s rationalism, the reader gained a more active role in the produc-tion of meaning, but this role was still constrained by concrete traces in the narra-tive, which he saw as signposts guiding the reader’s underspecified attention andreactions.

By contrast to all these options, Zornberg has created an interpretive frame-work where the Bible’s characters and readers only become more evolved as theyinteract, blurring their boundaries and disturbing the premise that the plot/story(rather than, say, the life/death) should be our unit of textual analysis. Thisfusion of rabbinic tradition with psychoanalysis is informed by her reading ofthe name ‘Ivri (“Hebrew”) as a “translator” (one who “carries across”).84 By shirk-ing the sine qua non of methodology (a fixed standpoint from which to objectifythe text) she succeeds in creating audible—if not always historically, literarily, orrationally plausible—resonances between what the Bible does not say and whatwe project onto it. In this sense, she is the most direct heir to Auerbach’s “back-ground.” This concept may not describe the characters themselves—who may, ev-eryone admits, remain forever inaccessible to us—but it does describe somethingabout how we want to relate to them. Zornberg’s implied reader has been exposedto a reason whose reasons Sternberg’s reader does not know: the incessant, trans-gressive, and potentially transcendent logic of desire.

Yet despite the clear psychological progression that we witnessed in Jacob—from symptoms to trauma towards catharsis—it seems typical of Zornberg’s ap-proach that even when he does “reveal the end,” Jacob’s children never actuallyrespond to his words. In the last line of her book, he is just about to “mergemystery and meaning, and teach his children to speak themselves toward bless-ing”85 ... but the blank page swallows them up. This movement towards dialogue,only to veer away from it at the last moment in favor of an introverted conversationwith oneself by way of the other, runs deep in Zornberg’s work on the Bible andalready in her doctoral thesis from the 1970s.86 Even as she instructs us to cultivatean attentive sensibility, Zornberg also accentuates a deafening silence, a yawning

84. Zornberg, “Let Me See That Good Land: The Story of a Human Life,” in Answering a Ques-tion with a Question: Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Jewish Thought, ed. Lewis Aron and LibbyHenik (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 236–264.

85. Zornberg, Beginning, 381.86. Avivah H. Gottlieb, “George Eliot: A Biographical and Intellectual Study,” (PhD diss.,

Cambridge, 1971). For one of many revealing parallels with her biblical criticism, see Gottlieb/

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chasm between her and us. Her audience are not interlocutors but, precisely, au-ditors, whose “spoken—and even unspoken— responses made it possible forme to discover ... what further might be said....”87 Perhaps this skepticism as tothe possibility of authentic dialogue is the dark side of her theory of the mind.

*****

“Der liebe Gott steckt im einzelnen,” as Aby Warburg used to say. Our dear Lordis in the details.88 Warburg’s aphorism holds equally true for each of these fivetwentieth-century biblical scholars (more literally for some; more literarily forothers). Each scholar, from Auerbach (1946) to Zornberg today, framed a pano-ramic viewpoint on the Bible’s poetics from the angle of one problematic stylisticfeature. Further, despite their very different solutions, they shared a general senseof why this feature is so problematic. The Bible organizes information with singu-lar reticence; its words are neither tied together by the smooth hypotaxis of Homernor broken by the radical syncopation of Gertrude Stein. Rather, biblical charac-ters and events seem to form meaningful connections because of the occult linksbetween whatever is not explicitly told about them. As a way of piquing the audi-ence’s interest, of course, such reticence is available to all narrators, but it seemsthat the Bible’s narrators, unlike Homer and more proximal counterparts,89 werethe first to turn it into a full-blown technique. As critics, then, rather than circum-navigate these marked “blanks” by writing them off to textual errors or othertokens of our own historical distance from the Bible’s narrators (as did Kugel),maybe we need to integrate them within a more general theory of how theBible communicates (as did everyone else).

Starting from this shared problem, however, our critics’ solutions diverged.For Kugel, the only real “blank” was our own incapacity to let the Bible be. Hewould be deaf, for example, to the “suspense” that Auerbach heard in Abraham’ssilence during the Akedah. To Kugel, the Bible’s audience knew Abraham andwhat he stood for: rather than a dramatic play of words and silence or light andshadow, they experienced his story as a fairly transparent myth. All the moreso, then, was Kugel obliged to reject Alter’s notion that the subtle interplaybetween a character’s speech and reticence must be artfully controlled, as in thecase of Joseph. Whereas Alter gave the Bible a literary author who speaks bymeans of silence (and expects us to listen), Kugel maintained that Alter, as a lit-erary reader, had learned to hear voices that were never really there.

To overcome this polemic between “historical” distance and modern “liter-ary” nearness, Sternberg introduced an essential new variable: an explicit,

Zornberg’s analysis of the “obstinate blocking of the popular imagination” that Eliot had to confront inher own life (350, her emphasis).

87. Zornberg, Beginning, xi.88. Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London, Warburg Institute,

1970), 13.89. Sternberg, Poetics, 88–9; Kawashima, Death of the Rhapsode, 4–5 and references.

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verifiable construct of the Bible’s implied reader. Instead of objectivist or merelysubjective criteria for evaluating whether or not the Bible’s omissions are system-atically meaningful, Sternberg used this reader-response model in order tocompare the concrete effects of omissions (“gaps”) on narrative development.Thus he recovered Auerbach’s and Alter’s premise that the Bible’s reticencemay be significant, but he also gave it a clearer functional profile by correlatingit to the reader’s basic narrative interests. In the process, he even absorbedKugel’s counterclaim that absence of information is not necessarily significant:there is also room for meaningless “blanks” in Sternberg’s theory, but their lackof functionality must be proven by their lack of effect on the reader. As Sternberg’scredo says, “There are no package deals in narration.” Any categorization thatleans too hard on formal, historical, or ideological criteria will fail to describehow a text actually develops as a temporal system of signs and interpretations.In practice, however, by overlaying the narrative timeline with the logical se-quence of possible readings, his approach actually put the Bible into a verytight package of narratological tactics. Maybe too tight: Zornberg agrees withSternberg that the reading process itself is the best guide to biblical poetics, butshe does not accept his version of the Bible’s implied reader. Rather than reconcilecontradictions and seek closure at every turn, Zornberg uses midrash and psycho-analysis to conjure a reader who doubles as a permeable seam where the text andits intertexts can leak, bleed, mingle. It is hard to say what, exactly, governs theiralchemical interaction. Yet their dynamics do crystallize more clearly around ourshared interpretive problem: a poignant lack or “blank” in Joseph’s character. ForZornberg, this blank, like its opposite pole (the “block,” a surfeit of signification),is not an aesthetic device to be defused but a cipher of desire to be pursued in thedirection of “blessing”... a cathartic answer from an auditor—divine or human?—who remains strangely mute.

The main goal of this comparison has been to do for each of these scholarswhat they have done for the Bible itself: to show how their solutions to textualanomalies and their frequent moments of mutual misrecognition arise from theirmore general interpretive warrants, that is, from basically different things thatthey consider themselves licensed to seek in the text. Hence it could be calledan exercise in biblical “meta-criticism.”90 Its argument, however, is not limitedto this meta-level, as it comes from, and should return to, a series of specific in-terpersonal and pedagogical encounters with equally complex dynamics. As liter-ary theory for the sake of theory has reached a dead end in my view, and as nometa-criticism is complete without self-criticism, let me conclude by trying,ever so briefly, to specify my own position in these dynamics and by sketchingthe praxis of theory, that is, the pedagogy, that I hope this essay will reinvigorate.

First, within the field of research on the Hebrew Bible’s poetics, I hope thatby comparing one’s own interpretive warrants to each of these scholars’, it will beeasier to distinguish more clearly between how we, in our role as readers, establish“the” text for us to interpret in the first place, and what we think this text really

90. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this term.

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says. Of course, in general, these are two points on the same hermeneutic circle.The very assumptions that inform our selection of particular versions, variants,and aspects of the text as evidence (our “interpretive warrants”) are major deter-minants of its meaning. But there is still a choice to make between three waysthat we can deal with this inherent circularity of all interpretation. We can meth-odologically limit it by circumscribing the text in advance as a particular kindof object; we can ideologically perpetuate it by failing to distinguish ourselvesfrom the text at all; or we can rigorously and recursively objectify the implicit inter-subjective dialogue that always motivates what we look for in the text and then—only then—try to sort out this dialogue from what “the” text itself tells us. Naturallythese dialogues include (sometimes polemical) scholarly debates between theBible’s lines, and so at a very crude level this helps to keep a lid on personalfeuds. But as I have argued, an equally influential and more elusive partner inour encounter with the text is the specter of its implied reader(s), towards whomwe may feel beholden or hostile, responsive or inert, often all of these at once.This muted dialogue with the implied reader has a no less profound impact onour own theories of the text than our explicit methodology or paradigm, andoften the two do not neatly coincide. For instance, all these scholars (even the defi-antly postrabbinic Sternberg) are obliged to entertain the rabbis as one of the Bible’simplied readers and they all must position themselves in relation to midrash. Someof their reactions to midrash are conscious and explicit, others much less so, butwithout drawing the line more clearly, it is difficult to tell who is really arguingwith the rabbis and who is arguing with, say, fans of the rabbis in postmodern liter-ary criticism. The biblical scholar often writes alone, but she is always talking tosomeone; this “someone” is not just whomever she cites but may be an imagined,concealed, collective, historical, or hybrid interlocutor as well. Her chosen text isa product of their conversation, not the other way around.

Translating this into the classroom, perhaps this mode of reflexive intersub-jectivity (rather than objectivity or subjectivity) also offers the model for a narra-tive poetics of the Bible that is better adapted to teaching the Bible as part of anundergraduate humanities curriculum. As an unabashed “amiable Californian insneakers” (as Kugel calls those of us who still feel that the Bible can bebrought alive to students under the rubric of “literature,”91 without necessarily en-dorsing literary criticism as a freestanding research paradigm), I see this problemas a gap between the specialized debates that drive research and the human inter-ests that bring students to the text. To address this problem, some biblical scholarsmay try to translate research into teaching; others may skip the research and “givethem what they want” by making the text as accessible as possible, perhaps at thecost of problematizing their own simplifications. Recently I have wondered if“what they want” is somewhere between these two options. Perhaps they dowant to learn—in an explicit, step-by-step way—how to participate in both the af-fective and the intellectual experience of great scholars as they encounter the textin dialogue with one another and with many earlier interpretive traditions. A

91. Kugel, “Literary Criticism,” 217.

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rigorously intersubjective approach to the Bible as narrative communication canhelp to unpack how this mixed bag of passions and obsessions motivates eventhe most subtle debates about what the biblical text “is,” let alone what it means.

To that end, my comparison of these scholars does not promote any discipli-nary norm for what counts as valid knowledge of the Bible. Instead I try to illu-minate the competing commitments that seem to make each of these norms sovaluable to their adherents. At bottom, these are human commitments, nomatter how rarefied or reified they might seem. Whoever we think the Bible’simplied reader is, whatever relationship to her we cultivate, her silent presence me-diates our experience of the texts just as much as their authors’ intention or their nar-rative architecture. Precisely because this reader, unlike the text, remains silent—adark mirror of our desires, ideals, and ambitions—our relation to her is most ofall a displaced relation to ourselves. But if this approach takes a certain distancefrom methodological objectification, it does not entail a relapse into ideologicalnavel gazing. Rather than valorize a particular ideal reader, the practice of its crit-ical poetics, and critical pedagogy, is to assess the fusion and fission betweenminds of many kinds that this text’s dense semantic “background” has generatedsince long before Auerbach’s influential thesis and will continue to radiate longafter our own reactions have faded.

James Adam RedfieldStanford UniversityPalo Alto, California

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