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Behind Auerbach's âBackgroundâ: 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 âBackgroundâ: Five Ways toRead What Biblical Narratives Don't Say. AJS Review, 39, pp 121-150 doi:10.1017/S0364009414000671
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BEHIND AUERBACHâS âBACKGROUNDâ: FIVE WAYS TO
READ WHAT BIBLICAL NARRATIVES DONâT SAY
James Adam Redfield
There is a crack in everythingThatâs how the light gets in
âLeonard Cohen
Abstract: The Hebrew Bibleâs 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-bachâs famous thesis that the Akedah is âfraught with background.âBut 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 Auerbachâs 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 Bibleâs âbackgroundâ serves as a metaphor by which thebiblical critic navigates a complex relationship with her own normativeconstruct of the readerâs 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. âPerhaps only a dry-minded philosopher would hazard question-ing the reality of tables and stones,â they begin. âBut 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?â1 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 Auerbachâs Mimesis at the âComparative Christianitiesâ conference (U.C. San Diego, April27â28, 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), 121â150© Association for Jewish Studies 2015doi:10.1017/S0364009414000671
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biblical scholars have been debating Casati and Varsiâs question for nearly half acentury. âWhat,â both more and less dry-minded readers have asked, âis there to in-terpret in the Bible?â; what more, that is, than the âtables and stonesâ of documentsand artifacts, anchored in an empiricist reality bywhatRobertAlter calls âexcavativeâscholarship?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 Bibleâs 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 scholarâs âinter-pretive warrantâ: whatever set of presuppositions has licensed her to admit certainaspects of the texts (and not others) as âevidenceâ 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 ofâholesâ provides another useful starting point. When we consider a hole as repre-sented by language, Casati and Varsi suggest, this hole (âsomething that is notthereâ) qualifies as realwhen we cannot paraphrase it out of existence without pro-ducing equal or greater incoherence.4 Applying Occamâs 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 âpauseâ 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 âtwoâ 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 Toulminâs distinction between âdataâ and âwarrantsâ (Stephen E. Toulmin, The Uses
of Argument [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003 (1958)], 92â3). 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 âevidence.âToulminâs insight (Uses, 33â6) that warrants are backed up by paradigms or âfields,â 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 âmap is not territoryâ principle; see Borgesâs classicparable, âOn Exactitude in Scienceâ (in Juan Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley[New York: Viking, 1998], 325).
5. As Casati and Varsi point out (Holes, 183â4), 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 âbit-mappingâ away my hole, Iwould have âbit-mappedâ 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 âmarginsâ in Derrideandeconstruction and in Rabbi Akivaâs 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 169â70).
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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 solutionsâmore commonly called âreadingsââto holesin the Bibleâs narrative fabric. Unlike literal holes, however, whose reality isharder to circumvent than it is to circumscribe, the Bibleâs literary discontinuitiesoften defy recognition. Indeed, the (w)hole debate could be summed up as âNowyou see it, now I donâtâ; for one scholar, the hole is interpretable evidence,whereas for the other it remains merely an artifact of interpretation. What differ-ences between scholarsâ interpretive warrants have led to such debates, and howhave their tacit epistemological distinctions helped to drive this fieldâs evolutionbefore and after the âliteraryâ turn in the 1970s? To address those questions,this article focuses on how four of the Bibleâs prominent contemporary readers(James Kugel, Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg, and Avivah Zornberg) have respond-ed to each other by way of a shared source: Auerbachâs discussion of the Akedahin Mimesis (1946). Auerbachâs famous thesis that biblical narrative style isâfraught with backgroundââpregnant with latent meaningâprovides acommon touchstone for all four of their later epistemological orientations.
We begin with Kugel, for whom most of the Bibleâs 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 Auerbachâsâbackgroundâ thesis. But on closer inspection, Kugelâs Auerbach turns out tobe a proxy for literary critics (e.g. Robert Alter) and Kugelâs historicism makesmore sense as a polemic against Alterâs imposition of modern âliteraryâ sensibil-ities onto the Bibleâs readers. As we will see, both Kugel and Alter minimize thereaderâs 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 âliteraryâ author.
In contrast, both Sternberg and Zornberg follow Auerbach by arguing thatthe Bibleâs unspoken implications can open up a window on its readerâs mind(s). Relying on psychological interpretive warrants, both scholars elaborate theo-ries of how the Bibleâs 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 Bibleâs earlier readers. Yetdespite this fundamental similarity, Sternberg and Zornberg prefer to typecastthe Bibleâs readers as two very different kinds of detective. Sternbergâs reader(think Sherlock) pursues a rationalist warrant for interpretation that privilegesthe conscious mind. Zornbergâs reader (think Sigmund) plumbs the Bibleâshidden meanings in a zigzag journey through the depths of its reception history.
7. The very naming of such a phenomenon as a problem or âdifficultyâ 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],6â13. For another acute assessment of biblical philologyâs implicit epistemology, see MatitiahuTzevat, âCommon Sense and Hypothesis in Old Testament Study,â in The Meaning of the Book ofJob and Other Biblical Studies [New York: Ktav, 1980], 189â204).
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In short: from Kugelâs historicism to Alterâs literary criticism, from Sternbergâs ra-tionalism to Zornbergâs ârabbinic unconscious,â each scholarâs interpretivewarrant is grounded in its own theory of the readerâs mindâtheories 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 âLITERATUREâ
James Kugel plays a strong foil to anyone who thinks Auerbachâs âback-groundâ 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 Bibleâs 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 Bibleâs original audience withthose of its later readers.9 In this vein, Kugel criticizes the âliteraryâ 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 Occamâs razor). To represent these fallacies of the literary ap-proach, Kugel targets one of Auerbachâs corollaries to the âbackgroundâ thesis:that the Bibleâs reticent styleâunlike Homerâs way of dressing his heroes infancy epithets and genealogiesâendows biblical heroes like David with theinner complexity and development that lit-crit calls âcharacter.â 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 Auerbachâsâbackground,â Kugel inserts a term that will echo throughout this debate: blanks.
In a famous essay, Erich Auerbach once described biblical characters asâfraught with background.â Certainly when they are compared to Odysseusthis is true. But what makes them âcharactersâ 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 Kugelâs âSome Thoughts on Future Research into Biblical Style:Addenda to The Idea of Biblical Poetry,â Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 9, no. 28(1984): 116; his criticisms of Fishbane in âThe Bibleâs Earliest Interpreters,â Prooftexts 7, no. 3(1987): 269â283; his sketch of the âwisdom mentalityâ and the four interpretive assumptions of theBibleâs postexilic interpreters, âAncient Biblical Interpretation and the Biblical Sage,â in Studies inAncient Midrash, ed. James Kugel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1â26, developedin his monumental How to Read the Bible (New York: Free Press, 2007); see especially the appendixâApologetics and Biblical Criticism Lite,â where Kugel criticizes the literary approach as a âview fromnowhere,â published on his website: http://www.jameskugel.com/apologetics.php (access date 5/9/2013).
9. By âlaterâ readers, Kugel does not just mean âmodernâ readers; as he sees it, the final fewcenturies BCE ushered in an âinterpretive revolutionâ that still shapes how we understand the textstoday. Kugel argues that this limits the Bibleâs legitimate uses for Jewish theology, not just for literarycriticism; see his criticisms of Benjamin Sommer in âKugel in JQR,â http://www.jameskugel.com/kugel-jqr.pdf (access date 5/11/2013).
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historyâhistory in the particularly biblical sense of âpresent reality projectedback to the time of causes.â 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 âforegroundâ? All that weneed to know is told to us by the text. I do not find that biblical âcharactersâare fraught with background so much as that they are, quite simply, blanks.10
What is at stake when Kugel rejects the term âcharactersâ and draws a blank instead?Specifically, what theory of the biblical readerâs mind does his âblankâ imply? Theshort answer:Auerbach, here, is a proxy forKugelâs colleagues on the literary-criticalside of biblical scholarship. Rather than a critique of Auerbach, Kugelâs move fromâbackgroundâ to âblanksâ in this essay (âOn the Bible and Literary Criticismâ) isbetter read as an effort to police disciplinary boundaries. (The âandâ in his title isdisjunctive, as if to say: âThe Bible is one thing. Literary criticism? Itâs allyours.â). Polemically motivated as it is, then, Kugelâs two versions of the biblicalreader are not really the originals versus the moderns, but two camps of moderns(Kugel vs. Robert Alter in particular). Kugelâs camp is historicist, Alter & co.âs isliterary-ist, butâhere is the key to our longer answerâneither modern epistemologygrants much psychological complexity to the Bibleâs reader. Kugel uses historicaldistance to create a primitive/modern split between readers, whereas Alter usesanachronistic proximity to posit equivalences between the Bible-as-âliteratureâ andthe implied author of this âliteraryâ text. In other words, Kugelâs historicism setsup a hierarchy in how primitives as opposed to moderns can interpret the text,whereasAlter assumes that the authorâs artful intentions dictate the readerâs 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 âcharacter.â Rather, his sense of âfiguresâ [Figuren] referred to theoriginal schema of âbackground,â âforeground,â and âfigureâ 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 Kugelâs polemicis that he has already, before turning to Auerbach, rejected the term âcharactersâfor people in the Bible. Citing his own Idea of Biblical Poetry, Kugel âshudderedâto hear Joseph called âone of the most believable characters in the Bible,â12 which
10. James Kugel, âOn the Bible and Literary Criticism,â 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, âLiterary Criticism,â 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 Auerbachâs idea of âbackgroundâ there, he attaches it tohis literary term âcharacterâ (the title of this chapter is âCharacterization and theArt of Reticenceâ).14 These parallels suggest that, when Kugel draws a blankon biblical âcharacters,â he is refusing to recognize Alter more than he is reallyscrutinizing Auerbach.
Beyond this policing of disciplinary borders between historians and literarycritics, Kugelâs under-reading of Auerbach reveals a more important epistemolog-ical impasse. If history is what separates us moderns from the Bibleâs 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-bachâs âbackgroundâ thesis that should be most relevant to his own argument.Kugel neglects Auerbachâs insight that biblical historiography was not just onemode of storytelling among others but a major antecedent of Western literary con-sciousness. Yet Alter ignores Auerbachâs equally key point that interpretation ofbiblical narrative, however literary, remained determined by its specific historicalinterpretive frames. Thus, in Auerbachâs dual valence of the âbackground,âwe canrecover a missed opportunity for reconceptualizing a true dialectic between histor-ical and literary dimensions of the biblical readerâs consciousness.
To begin from Kugelâs side of this impasse, recall that he used his historicistwarrant to claim that âliteraryâ interpretation was alien to the Bibleâs originalreaders. Rather, he says, they read biblical narratives as history, âa tale which pro-duces visible, verifiable results and in that sense is unarguably true, while literatureis fiction.â15 First, we should note that this is not at all the idea of history thatKugel himself uses to recapture the biblical readerâs âhistory.â Far from it. Heuses a modern positivist history (a straight-line accumulation of events; the pastwie es eigentlich gewesen ist) to discover that the Bibleâs 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 âthe particularly biblicalsense.â16 But how particular is it, really? Kugelâs definition of the biblicalreaderâs idea of âhistoryâ should be easily recognizable to anthropologists aswhat used to be called âmyth.â17 Following from this historicist exclusion of
13. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 164.14. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 143â162.15. Kugel, âLiterary Criticism,â 230.16. Kugel, âLiterary Criticism,â 230.17. Kugel says quite plainly that âthe Biblical worldâ did not have a sense of âliteratureâ or
âhistory.â Rather, these texts were meant to âexplain the presentâ (How to Read, 62). His idea of thebiblical audienceâs time as equivalent to the time of their ancestors is ripe for Johannes Fabianâs 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 âinterpretive competenceâ to accountfor the biblical readersâ 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 âelusive thematic connections,â he writes ofbiblical texts as organized by âmechanical principlesâ;19 rather than historical nar-ratives, he sees etiological explanations.20 In a revealing example, whereas wemoderns may identify with the so-called âcharacterâ of Moses (the biblical inter-preter, in a sense), Kugel insists that primitive listeners only identified with âthepeopleâ for whom the Bibleâs words were âtoo terrible to bear.â21 Thus, just ashe used historicism in order to exclude the Bibleâs 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 Bibleâs 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 Homerâs, merely narrated âreality.â Doctrine andpromise are incarnate in them, inseparably melded with them; for that veryreason they are âfraught with backgroundâ [hintergrĂŒndig] and dark, containinga second, hiddenmeaning. In the story of Isaac, it is not onlyGodâs 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 âallochronismâ (Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object [New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2002 (1983)], 6â7).
18. Marshall Sahlins, How âNativesâ 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, âLiterary Criticism,â 227.20. On etiology as a central function of biblical narratives (myths), see Kugel, How to Read,
62â8.21. Kugel, âLiterary Criticism,â 229â30.22. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1970) and âThe Problem of Double Meaning as Hermeneutic Problem and as SemanticProblem,â in The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UniversityPress, 2004), 61â76.
23. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: die Wirklichkeitsdarstellung in der abendlĂ€ndischen Literatur(Bern: Francke Verlag, 1946), 20 (all translations mine). Auerbachâs hintergrĂŒndig (âbackgroundishâ),as opposed to the vordergrĂŒndig (âforegroundishâ) Homeric style, are clearly marked as the sole tech-nical neologisms in this chapter (Mimesis, 16). The actual phrase, âfraught with background,â was
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Auerbachâs portrait of the readerâs 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 ancestorsâ 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, âall that we need to know is told to us by the text,â then whydoes it tell us apparently trivial things? When we forge links from past to present,we are beckoned and compelled to interpret every detailâin Auerbachâs Akedah,a âthree dayâ journey, the lifting up of a pair of eyes, or a threefold repetition of thedeictic âHere I amâ (hinneni)âas a sign or omen against this narrative backgroundof sacred history. Thus, if we accept Auerbachâs internally complex model of thereader, historiography and fiction actually strengthen each other.
On his side of the impasse between âhistoryâ (fact) and âliteratureâ (fiction),when Alter translates Auerbachâs âbackgroundâ into his own theory, he reciprocal-ly ignores its historical aspect. As a result, Auerbach appears in Alterâs work not asa literary historian but as an inferior literary critic.24 âIt is one thing to say,â Alterconcedes, âthat the sparsely sketched foreground [...] âsomehowâ implies a largebackground dense with possibilities of interpretation.â But Alter criticizes Auer-bach for citing no âspecific meansâ for âhow this âsomehowâ is achieved.â25
For Alter, the historical background that hovers over both the readers and the char-acters does not seem to count as a âspecificâ technical device. But rather than showhow it works, Alterâs sole discussion of historyâs role in the âbackgroundâ (or whathe dubs âthe art of reticenceâ) implies just the reverse: the Bibleâs 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 âstrong, clearlydemarcated pattern of causation in history and individual lives,â but (neverthe-less!?) its charactersâ complex biographies âunsettle the sense of straightforward,unilinear consequence to which lazy mental habitsâancient and modernâaccustom us.â26 For example, Alter implies, it would be a âlazy mental habitâto 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 Auerbachâs translator, Willard R. Trask. In Auerbachâs letters to Princeton Uni-versity Press (C0728, Folder 9, Box 1, Princeton University Press Archive), he praises Traskâs abilities(âHe is an excellent translator, but a little touchy.â) 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 Alterâs admiration for Auerbach elsewhere (âResponse,â 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 narrativeâs merely conven-tional historiographical frame.
But what are the specific means, Auerbach would ask, by which the Bibleâscharacters are âsomehowâ achieved? For Alter, the answer is too often self-evident: either he posits that the Bibleâs 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:
Abrahamâs conduct should be explained, not just by what is happening to himat the moment, not just by his âcharacterâ [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 foreseenâhis 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 âcharacter,ânot just the archetypal outline of an âancestor,â as Kugel would have it. Yet bylocating the Bibleâs historicity in the âdark and mysterious backgroundâ 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 âblank,â 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 heroesâ humblelives against their historically âfraughtâ background; by charging them withthese interpretations, history turns ancestors into characters. Hence Auerbachâscompound term for that whole of which Alter and Kugel each captures onlyhalf: not personality or history but âpersonal historyâ [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 âhistoryâ and âliterature.â 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 âdepths of time, fate, and consciousness.â28
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 Auerbachâs 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 readerâs 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 doesnât say) and thereaderâs possible responses.
STERNBERGâS RATIONALISM: A METHOD FOR SORTING BLANKS FROM GAPS
Although he wrote it over a decade before Kugel and Alterâs debate, MeirSternbergâs first book also responds to Auerbachâs 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 âcriticismâunder the slogan of âhistorical scholarship,â the stick of the âmodernâ readerâsinterpretative waywardness is liberally and somewhat indiscriminatelyapplied. Auerbach energetically brandishes this stick in warning against themodern readerâs 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 contemporaryaudienceâs exhausting their manifold aspects or layers of meaning. I am pre-pared to go further. We are wholly ignorant, in fact, of the âtheory of litera-tureâ prevalent in Homerâs 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 Auerbachâs Mimesis, quite successfully in my opinion (see 7â8, 16).
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Odysseusâ 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 Kugelâs and Alterâs interpretive warrants along-side the kernel of Sternbergâs alternative. Now Sternberg ascribes Kugelâs stricthistoricism to Auerbach: the danger of lit-crit is that it finds meaning in theBibleâs holes whereas in fact they are only âblanks.â Before ascribing modern lit-erary sensibilities to the ancient reader, we should try to understand their ownâtheory of literatureâ and hear the text as they heard it; only then can we decipherwhat it does not say. Sternberg also alludes to Alterâs alternative solution, but herejects it as unverifiable: the text is an irreducible whole, communicating in mul-tiple âorders of mind,â including, of course, however literature communicates. Sowhy not simply assume that the silence surrounding the heroes is a special meansof characterization, not a âblankâ (or, more generally, that the Bibleâs lacunaereflect its âprofound art, not primitivenessâ) and then submit this postulate to areaderâs basically shared human ability to understand how it works in the text?
Sternbergâs 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 ânoiseâ from meaningful emanationsof the Bibleâs âbackgroundâ? How do we refrain from fixating on the serifs of theBibleâs letters, like certain earlier overeager exegetes? Or, in Sternbergâs terms,how do we sort mere âblanksâ from âgaps,â 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 âhistoryâ or âlitera-ture.â Given its anchor in the readerâs innate cognitive capacities and natural re-sponses, Sternbergâs blanks/gaps distinction is âa universal of reading that noone can escape for a moment, including those who shudder at the very mentionof interpretation.â31 While Kugel âshudderedâ to hear lit-crit terminologyapplied to our biblical ancestors, even his historicist horror cannot extend to theâprimary narrative interestsâ 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 authorâs invisible hand, it is thereaderâs narrative interestsâcuriosity, surprise, and suspenseâthat drive her tomake sense of what the text says or doesnât 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 authorâs 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 timeânot (our) modern history, not (their) primitivemythâbut time itself, as this flow reflects and reshapes the readerâs mind, is theepistemological engine of what Sternberg calls âthe drama of reading.â
To unveil this drama, Sternbergâs method sorts gaps from blanksâmeaning-ful from meaningless holes in the narrativeâin relation to the reader. A âblankâ issimply without interest, whereas a hole that piques our narrative interestsâsus-pense, curiosity, or surpriseâis a âgap.â Our interests can be subdivided thisway because we try to close each gap differently, depending on how it fits intothe narrativeâs 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 futureâonly to see one open up in the present, tobe sealed as a new unity later on.33
Speaking of âtheâ narrative, however, elides the real object of Sternbergâsmethod. 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 purelysubjectiveâif it were, how could we distinguish a thriller from a period drama or(as in Auerbachâs 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 âstrong, clearly demarcated pattern of causationâ with little sus-pense. If we read it as literature, then we should instead be more attuned to its char-actersâ internal development. So say Kugel and Alter. The problem with theirholistic approach, from Sternbergâs 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 âuniversalsâ or âmaster effectsâ (âReconceptualizing Narratology: Arguments for aFunctionalist and Constructivist Approach to Narrative,â interview with Franco Passalacqua and Fred-erico Pianzola, Enthymema 4 [2011]: 37.)
33. My summary of these terms is based on Sternbergâs own summary of how he has used themthroughout his work: âUniversals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (I),â Poetics Today 24,no. 2 (2003): 327â8. See also: âUniversals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (II),â PoeticsToday 24, no. 3 (2003): 517â8.
34. Not only is this not a new question in biblical poetics, it was not even new in AuerbachâsMimesis, which responds to an April 1797 correspondence between Goethe and Schiller about how todistinguish âepicâ from âtragedyâ (Mimesis, 9; see the April letters, http://www.briefwechsel-schiller-goethe.de/seiten/zeittafel.php?j=1797, access date 5/10/2013). Auerbachâs innovation (a subversiveone, especially given his Jewish background) is to put the Hebrew Bible, with its suspenseful âback-ground,â 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 detailsâa gesture here, the repetition of a deictic thereâwithno evident historical referents. If we are interested in such details, we promotetheir function in the narrativeâs temporal flow to the status of âgapsâ; if we areuninterested, we demote them to âblanks,â 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.
Sternbergâs key insight here is that when Kugel and Alter try to âwrite offâ 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 SternbergâsRussian 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 âdynamic system of gapsâbetween 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 Sternbergâs 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 âdim and fragmentaryâglimpses of the charactersâ inner lives, because the narrator tells us so little (in theplot) about what the characters are thinking; he keeps it all in the âbackgroundâ(of the story).37 Next, Sternberg applies his method in order to separate warrantedexplanations of what we are told but donât know (gaps) from idle speculationdevoid of evidence (blanks). This can provide grounds for assessing, for instance,if the Bibleâs figures are complex, internally conflicted literary âcharacters.â 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). Abrahamâs feelings, in contrast, are a marked
35. Sternberg would object that I am imprecise in conflating âplotâ with szujet and âstoryâ withfabula (adjust my simplification by referring to Expositional Modes, 12â13 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, âWhere isthe lamb for the burnt offering?ââ 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 (âHere is the lamb for the burnt offering, my sonâ). Thissort of hypothetical gap closure by the reader helps to intensify one of our primarynarrative interests, suspense, while simultaneously adding to Abrahamâs interior-ity. Thus the exposition resutures plot to story by mediating between readerâs andcharacterâs 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 âquantitative indicatorâ (more in-formation = more possible significance, whether we are trying to add apparentredundancies, epithets, sotto voce asides, etc. to the âgapsâ side of our interpretiveledger).39
To complement this sketch of Sternbergâs theory of exposition, it may alsohelp to take a look at his theory from a genetic perspective, and not only in order tocorrect Alan Mintzâs suggestion that the Tel Aviv school of poetics (of whichSternberg is a founding father) is a mere âreincarnationâ of Russian Formalism(hence, âsimply, not newâ).40 Contra Mintz, as careful comparison of Sternbergâsterminology 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 themeâepistemological foundations and inter-pretive warrants in recent biblical criticismâthis comparison reveals that theBibleâs 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 Bibleâs particular stylistic problems, especially its very âgappyâ ex-position, in order to theorize a more dynamic interplay between the reader and thetext than Tomashevsky.
Sternbergâs 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 â(a priori view of the szujet).â41 To clarify this criticism, compare him toTomashevsky on szujet versus fabula:
38. Sternberg, Poetics, 192. Note, however, that although Sternbergâs theory does highlight thismeaningful omission (âgapâ) in the Akedah, in general he agrees with Kugel against Auerbach that itsframing (âGod tested Abrahamâ) undermines most attempts by the reader to project âsuspenseâ into theplot (see his critique of Auerbachâs reading, Poetics, 268).
39. For an earlier and more succinct example of how he applies these logical criteria in order toidentify expositional gaps, see Sternbergâs ââizun âadin ba-sipur âones Dinah,â Ha-sifrut 4, no. 2(1973): 226.
40. Alan Mintz, âOn the Tel Aviv School of Poetics,â Prooftexts 4, no. 3 (1984): 229.41. Sternberg, Expositional Modes, 257â8. As a specialist in exposition, surely it is no accident
that Sternberg is so circuitous. His formal definition of âgapsâ appears at the very end of his chapter(Expositional Modes, 50â55) and is preceded (roughly forty pages into his own book!) by acomment on Trollope that could double as a tongue-in-cheek self-reference: â... 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 âtheaction itself,â the plot âhow the reader learns of the action.â42
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 readerâsattention 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 (âdominantsâ).45
Tomashevsky also takes an a priori attitude towards the smallest undecom-posable units of a narrative: âmotifsâ (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 Sternbergâs,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 âkernelâ properâ (Expositional Modes, 47).
42. Boris Tomashevsky, âThematics,â 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 âThĂ©matique,â in ThĂ©orie de la LittĂ©rature, ed. TzvetanTodorov (Paris, Le Seuil, 1965), 263â309.
43. Saussureâs famous metaphor for the linguistic sign (Cours de linguistique gĂ©nĂ©rale, ed.Charles Bally, Albert SĂ©chehaye (with Albert Riedlinger), in the critical re-edition by Tullio deMauro [Paris: Payot, 1995 (1916)], 157).
44. See Sternbergâs detailed criticism in Expositional Modes, 308 n. 22.45. For Tomashevsky, narrative themes acquire ârealityâ from âvital issues, current, topical
questionsâ outside the text (âThematics,â 64). Because he uses this external definition of the narrativeâdominant,â the term âformalistâ is actually a misnomer for Tomashevsky; on the contrary, he tries tofix how narrative forms operate in order to keep them subordinate to narrativeâs primary ideologicalcontent. In the opposite way, but with just the same result (as Sternberg points out; âReconceptualiz-ing,â 50), âfunctionalistâ 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 (âLin-guistics and Poetics,â in Style and Language, ed. Thomas Seabock (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1960),350â377). Sternberg countered both of these reifying moves by formulating his âProteus Principle,âwhich 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], 58â9).
46. Sternberg, Expositional Modes, 8 and 308 n. 16; Tomashevksy, âThematics,â 67.
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in the plot (or, alternatively, âgappedâ). Instead he lumps motifs into four catego-ries, according to their relative importance in an arbitrarily abridged version of thestory (letâs call it the âCliffâs Notesâ).47 He calls a motif âboundâ if we cannot takeit out without making the Cliffâs Notes incoherent (in Chekhovâs famous example,the gun in a murder story that must, by definition, be fired), but âfreeâ if it just addsdetails to the plot (the color of the gun). Similarly, a motif is âdynamicâ if it de-velops the story (the moment when the butler fires the gun), but it is âstaticâ 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 readerâs 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 readerâs role in the exposition. Nor does his CliffâsNotes (an artificial baseline for what âreallyâ happens that is then re-presented bythe exposition) allow for his readers to reconstruct different versions of the âsameâbasic story.
To summarize Sternbergâs transformation of Tomashevskyâs 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 Sternbergâstheory, motifs have become norms that set limits to readersâ 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 kidsâ books that appeared around the same time, Stern-bergâs narratology invites us to âchoose your own adventure.â For him, how a textregulates the opening and closing of gaps and blanks in our own interestsânot aclunky toolbox of formal distinctions between parts or kinds of narrationâis 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 âstoryâ and malleableâplot,â Sternberg theorizes them as a single temporal matrix of interpretivepotential.
Of course this is just a peek into the mechanics of Sternbergâs poetics, a jug-gernaut which already loomed large in his works of biblical criticism in the 1980s
47. As Tomashevsky says, âThe 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 developednarrativeâ (âThematics,â 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, Sternbergâs 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 readerâa 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, Sternbergâscognitive universalism assures that we, too, can play this readerâs role. Thus heescapes Kugelâs dichotomy between the modern objective historian and the prim-itive biblical audience, on the one hand, and Alterâs overly empathic identificationof the biblical reader with his own âliteraryâ sensibility, on the other. Still moreimportantly, Sternbergâs 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, Sternbergâspoetics 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 âreaderâ is an artificial construct, to be sure, but aconstruct that can be tested and improved by means of the text itself.
ZORNBERGâS CRITIQUE OF STERNBERG: FROM COGNITIVE SCIENCE TO
PSYCHOANALYSIS
When we compared Kugelâs and Alterâs receptions of Auerbachâs âback-groundâ thesis, the very object of our inquiry threatened to vanish in opposite di-rections. For Kugel, marked elisions or âgapsâ in biblical narrative were merefigments of the modern readerâs overactive imaginationââblanksâ to be replacedby historical analysis. For Alter, their meaningfulness could be taken for granted asa token of the authorâs literary art; armed with a standard toolbox, any critic coulddecode their intended meaning just like the Bibleâs ancient audiences must have.Neither Kugel nor Alter, then, allowed for a specifiable range of differencesbetween himself and the Bibleâs implied reader(s) on the basis of a theory ofwhat they certainly share: a human mind.
By contrast, Avivah Zornbergâfrom 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 interpretationâagrees
48. For a rare object of Sternbergâs admiration, see David Bordwell, Narration in the FictionFilm (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). See also Sternberg, âUniversals (II),â histhree-part âTelling in Timeâ article series (Poetics Today 11, no. 4 (1990): 901â948; Poetics Today13, no. 3 (1992): 463â541; Poetics Today 27, no. 1 (2006): 125â235), or his more succinct âEpilogue:How (Not) to Advance toward the Narrative Mind,â in Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps, ed.Geert BrĂŽne and Jeroen Vandaele (Hague: de Gruyter, 2009), 455â532.
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with Sternbergâs general approach: biblical narratives communicate by means ofâgaps,â 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 readerâs mind, however, Zornberg isquite different. She claims that Sternberg does not allow for a wide enoughrange of inner experience to the Bibleâs reader; he unduly constrains thereaderâs narrative interests to a rational conscious level. She does not actuallysay, as others have before and since,49 that Sternbergâs 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-bergâs norm for valid reading is highly rationalist. When we retrace his theoreticalfootsteps in hot pursuit of gaps in the Bibleâs 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 Sternbergâs implied reader, although some of us may feel a bit more likeWatson.51 In opposition to Sternbergâs rationalism, Zornberg makes a caseâsometimes rational, sometimes not, but internally consistent at a very differentmental levelâfor a biblical reader with a broader range of interests and capacities.He looked for solutions to the Bibleâs âgapsâ in the conscious mind of a rationalreader; she hears the Bibleâs âblanksâ 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 Kugelâs or Alterâs 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, âThe Bible as Literature: a Critical Escape,â Diacritics 16, no. 4 (Winter 1986):71â79; Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, âTipping the Balance: Sternbergâs Reader and theRape of Dinah,â Journal of Biblical Literature 110, no. 2 (1991): 193â211. Sober attempts to adjudicatethese critiques have been made by, respectively, Daniel Boyarin (âThe Politics of Biblical Narratology:Reading the Bible like/as a Woman,â Diacritics 20, no. 4 [Winter 1990]: 31â42) and Paul Noble(âA âBalancedâ Reading of the Rape of Dinah: Some Exegetical and Methodological Observations,âBiblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 4, no. 2 [1995]: 172â203).
50. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (New York:Schocken, 2001), 134â40, 157. Compare especially to Bal, âCritical Escape.â
51. Not for nothing is the detective story one of Sternbergâs favorite genres; see ExpositionalModes, 159â182 and a revised chapter from a thesis that he supervised by a scholar whom he hascalled the âthird generationâ of the Tel Aviv school (Eyal Segal, âClosure in Detective Fiction,âPoetics Today 31, no. 2 [2003]: 153â215).
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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 Sternbergâs method investigates the interaction between the ideal readerand the text, for him, rabbis are the non-ideal reader. He calls midrash âillegitimategap-filling,â or arbitrarily upgrading blanks to gaps, because it is âsustained by thereaderâs subjective concerns,â 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 textâs. He even implies that by finding a âsystem atworkâ in biblical poetics, he will make the text pay greater dividends thanmidrash ever did.53 If anything, Sternbergâs ideal reader is not a religious crypto-fundamentalist (as Bal has claimed54) but a maskil, a rationalist heretic!
Zornberg critiques Sternbergâs 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 âunambiguous enthusiasm for Godâs omnipotence.â55 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 aGodâs-eye view typifies the âPlatonic idealâ that Zornberg seems to associate withmethodological criticism in general: the quest for a âtriumphal and unequivocalmaster storyâ 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 âthe basis of Sternbergâs accountâof this transparent master-narrative.57
Zornberg understands Sternbergâs desire to see/know the Bibleâs master plan,but for her, âthere is a sadness about the constant appeal to the eyes.â 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 (âCritical Escape,â 72) accuses him of âattributing to the narrator a divine power that
âmust be acceptedââ and thereby âcircumscribing the position of the reader who cannot but submit, pas-sively, to what the text states.â
55. Zornberg, Particulars, 140.56. Zornberg, Particulars, 140.57. Zornberg, Particulars, 157. Let us recall that Sternbergâs 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], 158â163). As in Kugelâs critique of âlitera-tureâ above, then, the stakes of Sternbergâs critique of midrash are more local than heacknowledges: two competing strands of poststructuralism, one (Sternbergâs) more in line with Jakob-sonâs original project, the other (Zornbergâs) embracing a âturn to the subjectâ that we might associatemore with figures like Kristeva and Lacan.
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hearingâan internal, embodied, nondominating mode of knowledgeâas the idealposture for the Bibleâs reader. We should not, however, mistake this for a primarilytheological position.58 As Tamar Ross notes,59 Zornbergâs religious backgroundclearly plays a role in her approach to the Bible, and perhaps she stressesâhearingâ because of her Torah teaching in oral settings. But notwithstandingthe lack of engagement with Zornbergâs 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 narrativesdonât say? By adopting the stance of an analyst who is receptive to âsymptomsâof the Bibleâs repressed âcounter-narratives,â61 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 senseâbecause it says too little, too much, or too many contradictorythings at onceâand she calls these moments of dense incoherence by a familiarname: âblanks.â But unlike Kugel and Sternberg, for whom âblanksâ were theresult of unwarranted interpretive license, Zornberg suggests that at the navel ofbiblical readersâ collective unconscious, what makes the least sense may be themost symptomatic. For her, incoherence is not a failureâit is the chance to startmaking a very different kind of sense.
ZORNBERGâS UNCONSCIOUS: BLOCKS, BLANKS, AND BLESSING
While a full appreciation of Zornbergâs psychoanalytic theory deserves aseparate study, especially as she is averse to such scrutiny,62 we can explorehow it emerges from a case study: Jacobâs blessing of his children at the end of
58. I learned much from debating this aspect of Zornbergâs work with Ziva Hassenfeld-Reimerand Steve Weitzman.
59. Tamar Ross, âReview of Genesis: The Beginning of Desire,â B.D.D. 3 (Summer 1996): 55.See also Daniel Boyarinâs 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 Rossâs, and her following point-counterpoint with Avraham Walfish (see âComments on Tamar Rossâ Review of Genesis: The Begin-ning of Desire,â B.D.D. 6 [1998]: 45â51, and her âResponse,â B.D.D. 6 [1998]: 53â6), I have foundonly the psychoanalytic community to have engaged more substantively with Zornbergâs work (seethe diverse responses to her âJonah: a Fantasy of Flight,â Psychoanalytic Dialogues 18, no. 3[2008]: 271â299).
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 itâmethodicalâ (The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis [New York: Schocken, 1995], xi), âPla-tonicâ (Beginning, 95; Particulars, 4), or âanalytic.â (Albeit not psycho-analytic ... presumably herclaim that, âIn order to analyze a subject, one must, in a sense, kill itâ [Beginning, 267] does notapply to her own enterprise.)
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Genesis.63 Jacobâs case brings us full circle to the specific formulation of ourgeneral problem that all four earlier critics also debated: are people in the Bibleâcharactersâ with complex self-reflective interiority, or are they national arche-types whose inner lives were opaque to their original audiences? How can wetellâbased 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 âblank,â or is he âfraught withbackgroundâ?
Zornberg argues that we can indeed find clues to the depths of Jacobâs char-acter by probing holes in this parashah. But unlike Alter, who emphasized theauthorâs intention, and Sternberg, who presumed a critically analytic reader, Zorn-bergâs 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 textâespecially of its most problematic passagesâunlockslatent 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 charactersâ 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 Jacobâs case, Zornberg uses three key terms to attune us to the psychody-namics of his character: âblock,â âblank,â and âblessing.â Each of these termsindexes a different aspect of the contradictions that, together, drive Jacobâs person-al history and make him intelligible as a psychologically coherent character. Thus,rather than simply oppose Sternberg, Zornbergâs approach picks up right where hisleft offâat the limits of rational consciousness. Specifically, by appropriating histerm âblanksâ (or, as she also calls it, âblocksâ), Zornberg inverts Sternbergâs ra-tional method. In place of his stark dichotomy between relevant gaps and irrele-vant blanks, Zornberg argues that the Bibleâs lack of information (âblanksâ) andexcessive information (âblocksâ) are two sides of one psychological coin.Rather than rely on Sternbergâs gold standard of cognitive relevance for sortingout this irregular distribution of information, she uses these irregularities in thetext to amplify Jacobâs inner struggleâwithout 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 Zornbergâs first symptom ofrepressed meaning in Jacobâs life story. After all, the story is about the death of a
63. Zornberg, Beginning, 352â381.
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patriarch, but the title refers to his life: and he lived signifies Jacobâs quest forclosure and fulfillment, a quest not yet concluded. How can we account for thisapparent discrepancy? To this traditional interpretive problem, Zornberg addsanother. Jacobâs death is ultimately codified by the only âliving willâ 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 âârevealing the endââ(49:1) and blessing his children, Jacob does not actually do so. His inability(âblockâ) is not clearly marked in the text itself, but she draws it out by usingRashiâs midrash on the verse: âthe eyes of Israel were heavy with age, for hecould not seeâ (48:10). Lacking foresight, how can Jacob bless the next genera-tion? The âsense of an endingâ that will endow his life with meaningful coherenceis sorely lacking.65 Nor does Sternbergâs 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 Jacobâs own character.
For the underlying psychic etiology of Jacobâs âblock,â Zornberg againturns to Rashi, who notes that the narrative of Jacobâs death is the only parashahsetumah: the only weekly Torah reading not introduced in the scroll by the usualminimum nine spaces.66 Just as Jacobâs sight is occluded, then, his vision is liter-ally âblockedâ in the text. Connecting this textual block to the context of Jacobâsblessingâhis sojourn in EgyptâZornberg treats his âblindnessâ 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 âbackgroundâ in terms of which hisblock should be interpreted:
Egypt is a grave that threatens to swallow all of his familyâs aspirations for adistinct destiny. His last speech is, therefore, âfraught with backgroundâ ... 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. 3â5.65. 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 âopen sectionâ [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 (âtotally closedâ, the mostclosed of all).
67. Zornberg, Beginning, 355.
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To follow this âblockâ even more deeply into Jacobâs mind, Zornberg draws on theZoharâs proposal that he suffers, not just from a physical lack of vision or speech,but from a lack of imaginationâfrom âfailure to read reality as though it consti-tuted an intelligible text.â68 Thus she redefines Jacobâs âslaveryâ as a psychicbondage, not only a political/national one. His block is now part of a âhistoryâin the medical/psychoanalytic sense, rather than in Kugelâs more usual political/national sense. It is a residue of Auerbachâs âpersonal historyâ: the layers ofmemory, or the âdepths of time, fate, and consciousnessâ that hover over biblicalcharacters long after the critical events have passed.69 Zornberg senses the pres-sure of Jacobâs personal history in semantic slippages between how he promisesto bless his children and how he actually does. This is the âdiscontinuity ... thatgenerates the midrashic narrativeâ and, again, the reason, at the very instantwhen he reaches out for a meaningful conclusion to his life, that he discoversinstead that âthe tragic experience of blocking is now his.â70
Blocked speech, blocked imagination, a personal history of exile and slaveryâformidable obstacles to psychic closure in themselves. But finally, Zornberg arguesthat none of these are inseparable from the deepest block in Jacobâs 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 (âblockedâ) by its detached radiance.71 This sudden disconnectionfrom the divine runs against everything Jacob has stood for. He is, as Zornberghas said throughout,72 âconcerned with the question of coherenceâ; he yearns tobe âwhole, complete ... a life fully used, energies fully metabolized, its partstending toward integral meaning.â73 To explain this existential hole in his biogra-phy, Zornberg cites Rambam for what she calls a âclinical psychological diagno-sisâ: Jacobâs pathology has been caused by repressing his anger for Josephâs longabsence. This anger returns as Godâs absence at the end of his life: âBecause ofJacobâs 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: âProphecydoes not come to rest in the midst of lethargy, or of melancholy ... but only in themidst of joyââ (Rambam).74
Mirroring Jacobâs own internalized exile and slavery, Josephâs enslavementin Egypt has left hidden scars in his fatherâs character that resurface at this moment
68. Zornberg, Beginning, 356.69. In reference to the Hebrew Bible, Auerbach playfully stretches the German root for
âhistoryâ to cover three dimensions of our experience that positivist historicism usually tries to sepa-rate: (1) character or âpersonal historyâ (Personengeschichte), (2) universal or âworld historyâ(Weltgeschichte), and (3) the âlayersâ of readerâs and characterâs shared consciousness (the HebrewBible is, he says, vielschichtig und hintergrĂŒndig, with gleichzeitig ĂŒbereinandergelagerte 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: sagyaâ
nehorayaâ, âfilled with light.â72. See for example Zornberg, Beginning 216â7, and 321â2.73. Zornberg, Beginning, 359.74. Zornberg, Beginning, 360.
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of frustrated catharsis. Zornbergâs diagnosis echoes that of R. Mordechai YosefLeiner (the Ishbitzer) when she says that Jacobâs blessing is blocked by ârepressedresentment and suspicion: he is angry with his sons....â75 In a psychological viewof Jacobâs inner reality, in fact, there is no essential difference between theRambamâs and the Ishbitzerâs readings of why he cannot speak. âGodâ is amode of Jacobâs relation to himself (his own âwholeness,â shalom). âThis is noarbitrary movement of God, present and then absent, but a movement withinthe intimacies of Josephâs spirit. There, something flickers and goes out.â76
To reviewZornbergâs diagnosis of Jacobâs 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 familyâs 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 âIsraelâ 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 Jacobâsessential contradiction before we can articulate a truly therapeutic response.
Zornberg names this contradiction in appropriately contradictory terms: notonly is Jacob âblockedâ by too much meaning, he also suffers from a lack ofmeaning, a parallel pathology that she calls the âblank.â77 Jacobâs inner âblankâand âblockâ are related as trauma is to symptom: âthe experience of the âblankâ [is]the model for our understanding of the theme of âblocking,â of the âabsence ofGod.ââ78 Zornberg notes that the very words blank and block help us to hear thisuncanny coincidence of opposites. âBoth blank and black have the same rootâ; tobe âblankâ is also to be âblack,â âblocked,â obscure, thick with inchoate feeling, âas-sailed by emptiness or density, unintelligible, like an unreadable page.âAs if directlyresponding to Sternbergâs disdain for midrashic blank drawing, Zornberg concedesthat âthe blank is in the eye of the beholder. But ...â she continues, if the reader canopen himself to hear Jacobâs melancholia and the self-shattering cacophony oftrauma, â... no mere chiding will transform the unmeaning colorlessness/blacknessof things.â At the bottom of Jacobâs mindâin the âbackgroundâ that charges hisevery word with repressed meaningâblank and block are one and the same.79
75. Zornberg, Beginning, 363.76. Zornberg, Beginning, 361.77. Zornberg, Beginning, 361â3.78. Zornberg, Beginning, 368.79. âThe poetic crisis, the experience of the âblankâ [is] the model for our understanding of the
theme of âblocking,â of the âabsence of Godââ (Zornberg, Beginning, 368). It seems that in Zornbergâslexicon, blank : block :: trauma : symptom.
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Once the reader adopts Zornbergâs psychoanalytic commitment to these ir-reducible complexities of biblical characterization, she should not try to resolveJacobâs problem by applying a historical or literary or cognitive methodology.Having acknowledged the problemâs paradoxical etiology, her only authentic re-sponse (not necessarily a solution, but still therapeutic) is to repeat Jacobâsproblem in a way that helps to unstick its most intractable inheritance. To thisend, following her diagnosis of Jacobâs âblankedâ/âblockedâ consciousness, Zorn-berg rereads his deathbed âblessingâ 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 Jacobâs 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 Jacobâsblessing on Israel, Zornberg, still following the Ishbitzer,80 asserts that he musttranscend his indistinct mass of emotions (âblanksâ) to name each of its elementsclearly; like Mosesâs blessing, which begins, âAnd this is the blessing ...â81 Tolearn how Jacob can attain âthisâ clarity (the lucidity of this), she reads forwardto the blessing that he eventually does give his sons, fastening onto its fluidimagery: âwine,â âgrapes,â and âmilkâ (Genesis 49:11â12). Her intuition that flu-idity and clarityâagain, apparent oppositesâare the key to Jacobâs overcomingof his block/blank then takes her into a long midrash on Ezekielâs âdry bones.âAsking these âdry bonesâ to âspeakâ and to âlive againâ is, she suggests,exactly what Jacob must have asked himself as his blessing flowed forth. By op-posing his âwater, wine, and milkâ to Ezekielâs bones, she suggests that âJacobâsuse of fluid imagery is profoundly connected to the question of integration that sotroubles him.â82
But of course, given that this opposition is generated by the fluidity in Zorn-bergâs own languageâshe is circling, not just between Jacob and the midrash, butbetween Jacob and an entirely distinct biblical passageâwhen 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(âand this is the blessingâ), is, Zornberg says, âa lucid focus gained, paradoxically,through the medium of the âother things,â the âother words,â that he had to speak,in the âblank coldâ of his poetic crisis.â83 But these âother wordsâ are none otherthan Zornbergâs; as a sounding board for Jacobâs silences, she guides his stutteringtransference back to himself. Only then can he speak his âownâ words whichâthanks to the blocks/blanks that she has found in himâfinally voice his solutionto âa failure, a forgetting, a blurring of focus.â
80. Zornberg, Beginning, 363.81. For a review of related psychoanalytic problems with Mosesâs âslowness of speech,â see
Shuli Barzilai, âMind the Gap: Some Midrashic Propositions for Moses and Monotheism,â Psychoan-alytic Review 91, no. 6 (2004): 831â852.
82. Zornberg, Beginning, 365.83. Zornberg, Beginning, 368.
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This circular movement between the characterâs and readerâs consciousnessis what sets Zornbergâs psychoanalytic theory apart from the other four that wehave examined. In Kugelâs historicist approach, the Bibleâs so-called charactersare as simple as their original readers; all the complexity comes from laterlayers of interpretation. But Zornberg teaches us to read these âlaterâ layers aslatent in the intrinsically overdetermined Bible itself (provided that we acceptthe universality of her psychoanalytic theory). By contrast, in Alterâs 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 Sternbergâs 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 readerâs underspecified attention andreactions.
By contrast to all these options, Zornberg has created an interpretive frame-work where the Bibleâs 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 âIvri (âHebrewâ) as a âtranslatorâ (one who âcarries acrossâ).84 By shirk-ing the sine qua non of methodology (a fixed standpoint from which to objectifythe text) she succeeds in creating audibleâif not always historically, literarily, orrationally plausibleâresonances between what the Bible does not say and whatwe project onto it. In this sense, she is the most direct heir to Auerbachâs âback-ground.â This concept may not describe the characters themselvesâwho may, ev-eryone admits, remain forever inaccessible to usâbut it does describe somethingabout how we want to relate to them. Zornbergâs implied reader has been exposedto a reason whose reasons Sternbergâs reader does not know: the incessant, trans-gressive, and potentially transcendent logic of desire.
Yet despite the clear psychological progression that we witnessed in Jacobâfrom symptoms to trauma towards catharsisâit seems typical of Zornbergâs ap-proach that even when he does âreveal the end,â Jacobâs children never actuallyrespond to his words. In the last line of her book, he is just about to âmergemystery and meaning, and teach his children to speak themselves toward bless-ingâ85 ... 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 Zornbergâs 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, âLet Me See That Good Land: The Story of a Human Life,â in Answering a Ques-tion with a Question: Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Jewish Thought, ed. Lewis Aron and LibbyHenik (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 236â264.
85. Zornberg, Beginning, 381.86. Avivah H. Gottlieb, âGeorge Eliot: A Biographical and Intellectual Study,â (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 âspokenâand even unspokenâ responses made it possible forme to discover ... what further might be said....â87 Perhaps this skepticism as tothe possibility of authentic dialogue is the dark side of her theory of the mind.
*****
âDer liebe Gott steckt im einzelnen,â as Aby Warburg used to say. Our dear Lordis in the details.88 Warburgâs 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 Bibleâs 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-enceâs interest, of course, such reticence is available to all narrators, but it seemsthat the Bibleâs 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 âblanksâ by writing them off to textual errors or othertokens of our own historical distance from the Bibleâs 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 criticsâ solutions diverged.For Kugel, the only real âblankâ was our own incapacity to let the Bible be. Hewould be deaf, for example, to the âsuspenseâ that Auerbach heard in Abrahamâssilence during the Akedah. To Kugel, the Bibleâs 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 Alterâs notion that the subtle interplaybetween a characterâs 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 âhistoricalâ distance and modern âliter-aryâ nearness, Sternberg introduced an essential new variable: an explicit,
Zornbergâs analysis of the âobstinate blocking of the popular imaginationâ 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, 88â9; Kawashima, Death of the Rhapsode, 4â5 and references.
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verifiable construct of the Bibleâs implied reader. Instead of objectivist or merelysubjective criteria for evaluating whether or not the Bibleâs omissions are system-atically meaningful, Sternberg used this reader-response model in order tocompare the concrete effects of omissions (âgapsâ) on narrative development.Thus he recovered Auerbachâs and Alterâs premise that the Bibleâs reticencemay be significant, but he also gave it a clearer functional profile by correlatingit to the readerâs basic narrative interests. In the process, he even absorbedKugelâs counterclaim that absence of information is not necessarily significant:there is also room for meaningless âblanksâ in Sternbergâs theory, but their lackof functionality must be proven by their lack of effect on the reader. As Sternbergâscredo says, âThere are no package deals in narration.â 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 Bibleâs 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 âblankâ in Josephâs character. ForZornberg, this blank, like its opposite pole (the âblock,â a surfeit of signification),is not an aesthetic device to be defused but a cipher of desire to be pursued in thedirection of âblessingâ... a cathartic answer from an auditorâdivine or human?âwho 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 âmeta-criticism.â90 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 Bibleâs poetics, I hope thatby comparing oneâs own interpretive warrants to each of these scholarsâ, it will beeasier to distinguish more clearly between how we, in our role as readers, establishâtheâ 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 âinterpretive warrantsâ) 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 thenâonly thenâtry to sort out this dialogue from what âtheâ text itself tells us. Naturallythese dialogues include (sometimes polemical) scholarly debates between theBibleâs 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 Bibleâsimplied 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 âsomeoneâ 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 âamiable Californian insneakersâ (as Kugel calls those of us who still feel that the Bible can bebrought alive to students under the rubric of âliterature,â91 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 âgivethem what they wantâ by making the text as accessible as possible, perhaps at thecost of problematizing their own simplifications. Recently I have wondered ifâwhat they wantâ is somewhere between these two options. Perhaps they dowant to learnâin an explicit, step-by-step wayâhow 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, âLiterary Criticism,â 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 âis,â 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 Bibleâsimplied reader is, whatever relationship to her we cultivate, her silent presence me-diates our experience of the texts just as much as their authorsâ intention or their nar-rative architecture. Precisely because this reader, unlike the text, remains silentâadark mirror of our desires, ideals, and ambitionsâour 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 textâs dense semantic âbackgroundâ has generatedsince long before Auerbachâs influential thesis and will continue to radiate longafter our own reactions have faded.
James Adam RedfieldStanford UniversityPalo Alto, California
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