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Behind Auerbach's Background: Five Ways to

Read What Biblical Narratives Don't Say
James Adam Redeld
AJS Review / Volume 39 / Issue 01 / April 2015, pp 121 - 150
DOI: 10.1017/S0364009414000671, Published online: 12 May 2015
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0364009414000671

How to cite this article:
James Adam Redeld (2015). Behind Auerbach's Background: Five Ways to
Read What Biblical Narratives Don't Say. AJS Review, 39, pp 121-150 doi:10.1017/
S0364009414000671
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Association for Jewish Studies 2015
doi:10.1017/S0364009414000671
B EHIND A UERBACH S B ACKGROUND : F IVE WAYS TO

R EAD W HAT B IBLICAL N ARRATIVES D ON T S AY
James Adam Redfield
There is a crack in everything

Thats how the light gets in
Leonard Cohen
Abstract: The Hebrew Bibles narrative style has impressed interpreters of many periods and perspectives with its powerful tension between
fragmentary speech and meaningful silence, summed up in Erich Auerbachs famous thesis that the Akedah is fraught with background.
But is it possible to give a coherent account of what the Bible does
not say? This article offers a comparative critical analysis of attempts
to do just that, starting with Auerbachs Mimesis (1946) and continuing through the contemporary work of James Kugel, Robert Alter, Meir
Sternberg, Avivah Zornberg, and others. It claims that, rather than the
text itself, the Bibles background serves as a metaphor by which the
biblical critic navigates a complex relationship with her own normative
construct of the readers mind. This comparison concludes with practical considerations about its potential for research and teaching in
biblical poetics, understood as rigorous intersubjective communication, rather than as either method or ideology.
I NTRODUCTION
In Holes and Other Superficialities, contemporary epistemologists Roberto
Casati and Achille Varsi dare to take a realist approach to an object of obviously
dubious reality. Perhaps only a dry-minded philosopher would hazard questioning the reality of tables and stones, they begin. But just ask any person to tell you
what holes are [...] and he will likely elaborate upon absences, nonentities, nothingnesses, things that are not there. Are there such things?1 In less literal terms,
I would like to thank Steve Weitzman for his generous contributions to this essay, from initial
inspiration to final draft. I also thank Joel Robbins for inviting me to present a paper on the biographical
context of Auerbachs Mimesis at the Comparative Christianities conference (U.C. San Diego, April
2728, 2012), as well as Fr. Dr. Claudio Monge for helping me to access the archives of the monastery
in Istanbul where Mimesis was written. Finally, I would like to thank Avivah Zornberg for a recent interview (Berkeley, May 18, 2014), which of course implies no endorsement of my argument, but which
I 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: MIT
Press, 1995), 1.
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James Adam Redfield

biblical scholars have been debating Casati and Varsis question for nearly half a
century. What, both more and less dry-minded readers have asked, is there to interpret in the Bible?; what more, that is, than the tables and stones of documents
and artifacts, anchored in an empiricist reality by what Robert Alter calls excavative
scholarship?2 As soon as she abandons the terra firma of excavation for the slippery
slope of interpretation, the scholar is using the Bible as something other than a pointer
to the empirical reality of the ancient Near East. From that point forward positions on
the Bibles possible epistemological foundations fall along a wide continuum, giving
rise to debates whose specific terms and broader relevance remain unclear. At the
heart of these debates is the remarkably undertheorized matter of the scholars interpretive warrant: whatever set of presuppositions has licensed her to admit certain
aspects of the texts (and not others) as evidence in the first place.3
For this critical analysis of competing interpretive warrants in biblical scholarship since the advent of the literary approach in the early 1970s, the theory of
holes provides another useful starting point. When we consider a hole as represented by language, Casati and Varsi suggest, this hole (something that is not
there) qualifies as real when we cannot paraphrase it out of existence without producing equal or greater incoherence.4 Applying Occams razor to a hole in space,
for instance, it is more economical to describe this hole than to describe every
point where it is not.5 Likewise, for a temporal hole, my sense of rhythm dictates
that a pause between metrical beats exists, or else I would speak of two beats
with nothing in between (and if I did, taking this reductio to its absurd conclusion,
how could I speak of two beats, rather than one and one?) Finally, consider a
philological example: most readers would be hard-pressed to prove that there is
anything significant about the space between these letters or in the margins of
this 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 Toulmins distinction between data and warrants (Stephen E. Toulmin, The Uses
of Argument [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003 (1958)], 923). Data is what we explicitly cite when we make a claim, whereas our warrant for this claim is a general presupposition implicitly authorizing all claims of that particular type, thereby certifying this data as evidence.
Toulmins insight (Uses, 336) that warrants are backed up by paradigms or fields, rather than by
formal truth-conditions, is highly relevant to my extension of his concept. More recently, see James
Chandler, Arnold Davidson, and Harry Harootunian, eds., Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice,
and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
4. This is an extension of the so-called map is not territory principle; see Borgess classic
parable, On Exactitude in Science (in Juan Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley
[New York: Viking, 1998], 325).
5. As Casati and Varsi point out (Holes, 1834), 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 how
could I then maintain that any other object does exist in that space? By bit-mapping away my hole, I
would have bit-mapped myself into a one-dimensional reality! For a parable about this problem, see
Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (London: Seeley, 1884).
6. Despite certain exceptions that prove this rule, e.g. the fondness for margins in Derridean
deconstruction and in Rabbi Akivas midrash (see my discussion below and Susan Handelman, The
Slayers of Moses: the Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory
[Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982], 38 and 16970).
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Behind Auerbachs Background

real as to compel a response; here we find, not mere blank space, but a problem
with multiple possible solutions.7
The arc of scholarly debates that we will retrace here can be defined as a
collection of just such solutionsmore commonly called readingsto holes
in the Bibles narrative fabric. Unlike literal holes, however, whose reality is
harder to circumvent than it is to circumscribe, the Bibles literary discontinuities
often defy recognition. Indeed, the (w)hole debate could be summed up as Now
you see it, now I dont; for one scholar, the hole is interpretable evidence,
whereas for the other it remains merely an artifact of interpretation. What differences between scholars interpretive warrants have led to such debates, and how
have their tacit epistemological distinctions helped to drive this fields evolution
before and after the literary turn in the 1970s? To address those questions,
this article focuses on how four of the Bibles prominent contemporary readers
(James Kugel, Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg, and Avivah Zornberg) have responded to each other by way of a shared source: Auerbachs discussion of the Akedah
in Mimesis (1946). Auerbachs famous thesis that biblical narrative style is
fraught with backgroundpregnant with latent meaningprovides a
common touchstone for all four of their later epistemological orientations.
We begin with Kugel, for whom most of the Bibles meaning has been
shaped by later interpreters; all the more so for so-called meanings of what the
Bible does not say! Thus Kugel uses a historicist warrant to debunk Auerbachs
background thesis. But on closer inspection, Kugels Auerbach turns out to
be a proxy for literary critics (e.g. Robert Alter) and Kugels historicism makes
more sense as a polemic against Alters imposition of modern literary sensibilities onto the Bibles readers. As we will see, both Kugel and Alter minimize the
readers role, in opposite ways. Kugel uses history to drive a wedge between primitive and modern readers, while Alter assumes that the reader is controlled by the
intentions of a literary author.
In contrast, both Sternberg and Zornberg follow Auerbach by arguing that
the Bibles unspoken implications can open up a window on its readers mind
(s). Relying on psychological interpretive warrants, both scholars elaborate theories of how the Bibles reader might discover hidden meanings by following clues
that were planted in the holes of its narrative texture. Thus they allow for a wider
range of affinities between modern scholars and the Bibles earlier readers. Yet
despite this fundamental similarity, Sternberg and Zornberg prefer to typecast
the Bibles readers as two very different kinds of detective. Sternbergs reader
(think Sherlock) pursues a rationalist warrant for interpretation that privileges
the conscious mind. Zornbergs reader (think Sigmund) plumbs the Bibles
hidden meanings in a zigzag journey through the depths of its reception history.
7. The very naming of such a phenomenon as a problem or difficulty is due to what James
Barr helpfully calls a philological (as opposed to a textual) warrant for interpreting the evidence (see
James Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament [Oxford: Clarendon, 1968],
613. For another acute assessment of biblical philologys implicit epistemology, see Matitiahu
Tzevat, Common Sense and Hypothesis in Old Testament Study, in The Meaning of the Book of
Job and Other Biblical Studies [New York: Ktav, 1980], 189204).
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James Adam Redfield

In short: from Kugels historicism to Alters literary criticism, from Sternbergs rationalism to Zornbergs rabbinic unconscious, each scholars interpretive
warrant is grounded in its own theory of the readers mindtheories that reveal
themselves in their divergent stances on how biblical narratives might speak
through what they do not say.
K UGEL V ERSUS A LTER : D RAWING
B LANK
ON THE
B IBLE
AS
L ITERATURE
James Kugel plays a strong foil to anyone who thinks Auerbachs background thesis describes something essential about how biblical narrative communicates. Throughout our period, Kugel has maintained the contrary.8 Texts are
produced and read by different interpretive communities with diverse hermeneutic
assumptions. In the Bibles case, these assumptions have been radically distinct,
pointing to incommensurable meanings. It is an elementary fallacy to ignore
this fact and conflate the assumptions of the Bibles original audience with
those of its later readers.9 In this vein, Kugel criticizes the literary turn for assuming that modern lit-crit categories can be applied to biblical texts (at least
not without so much modification that they grow cancerously complex and
must be excised by Occams razor). To represent these fallacies of the literary approach, Kugel targets one of Auerbachs corollaries to the background thesis:
that the Bibles reticent styleunlike Homers way of dressing his heroes in
fancy epithets and genealogiesendows biblical heroes like David with the
inner complexity and development that lit-crit calls character. For Kugel,
these folks are far less complicated than literary critics would like them to be,
because their audiences were also far less complicated. In place of Auerbachs
background, Kugel inserts a term that will echo throughout this debate: blanks.
In a famous essay, Erich Auerbach once described biblical characters as
fraught with background. Certainly when they are compared to Odysseus
this is true. But what makes them characters at all? As I have suggested
above, the Bible itself seems to treat them more as ancestors, and
what happens to them is not so much in the category of adventures as of
8. See the conclusion to Kugels Some Thoughts on Future Research into Biblical Style:
Addenda to The Idea of Biblical Poetry, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 9, no. 28
(1984): 116; his criticisms of Fishbane in The Bibles Earliest Interpreters, Prooftexts 7, no. 3
(1987): 269283; his sketch of the wisdom mentality and the four interpretive assumptions of the
Bibles postexilic interpreters, Ancient Biblical Interpretation and the Biblical Sage, in Studies in
Ancient Midrash, ed. James Kugel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 126, developed
in his monumental How to Read the Bible (New York: Free Press, 2007); see especially the appendix
Apologetics and Biblical Criticism Lite, where Kugel criticizes the literary approach as a view from
nowhere, published on his website: http://www.jameskugel.com/apologetics.php (access date 5/9/
2013).
9. By later readers, Kugel does not just mean modern readers; as he sees it, the final few
centuries BCE ushered in an interpretive revolution that still shapes how we understand the texts
today. Kugel argues that this limits the Bibles legitimate uses for Jewish theology, not just for literary
criticism; see his criticisms of Benjamin Sommer in Kugel in JQR, http://www.jameskugel.com/
kugel-jqr.pdf (access date 5/11/2013).
124

historyhistory in the particularly biblical sense of present reality projected
back to the time of causes. In that world, everything is significant because
everything produces results going on through the present and into the
future. The people of that world cannot marry or fight or go to sleep or
leave home without producing results of national dimension. And so we
(ancient Israelites) listeners hear the story as, yes, a tale about people like ourselves, but more precisely of ourselves in history, a tale which produces
visible, verifiable results and in that sense is unarguably true, while literature
is fiction. And so what need is there of narrative foreground? All that we
need to know is told to us by the text. I do not find that biblical characters
are fraught with background so much as that they are, quite simply, blanks.10
What is at stake when Kugel rejects the term characters and draws a blank instead?
Specifically, what theory of the biblical readers mind does his blank imply? The
short answer: Auerbach, here, is a proxy for Kugels colleagues on the literary-critical
side of biblical scholarship. Rather than a critique of Auerbach, Kugels move from
background to blanks in this essay (On the Bible and Literary Criticism) is
better read as an effort to police disciplinary boundaries. (The and in his title is
disjunctive, as if to say: The Bible is one thing. Literary criticism? Its all
yours.). Polemically motivated as it is, then, Kugels two versions of the biblical
reader are not really the originals versus the moderns, but two camps of moderns
(Kugel vs. Robert Alter in particular). Kugels camp is historicist, Alter & co.s is
literary-ist, buthere is the key to our longer answerneither modern epistemology
grants much psychological complexity to the Bibles reader. Kugel uses historical
distance to create a primitive/modern split between readers, whereas Alter uses
anachronistic proximity to posit equivalences between the Bible-as-literature and
the implied author of this literary text. In other words, Kugels historicism sets
up a hierarchy in how primitives as opposed to moderns can interpret the text,
whereas Alter assumes that the authors artful intentions dictate the readers 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 a
poor proxy for it Auerbach actually is. First, Auerbach did not mean the usual literary notion of character. Rather, his sense of figures [Figuren] referred to the
original schema of background, foreground, and figure around which his
argument in this chapter of Mimesis turns, a schema that has more to do with
his work at that time on early Christian figural exegesis than with any modern
lit-crit categories.11 But translations aside, the smoking gun for Kugels polemic
is that he has already, before turning to Auerbach, rejected the term characters
for people in the Bible. Citing his own Idea of Biblical Poetry, Kugel shuddered
to hear Joseph called one of the most believable characters in the Bible,12 which
10. James Kugel, On the Bible and Literary Criticism, Prooftexts 1, no. 3 (1981): 230
(emphasis added).
11. John D. Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001).
12. Kugel, Literary Criticism, 219.
125
James Adam Redfield

is more or less just what Alter says in his earlier Art of Biblical Narrative.13 Similarly, when Alter picks up Auerbachs idea of background there, he attaches it to
his literary term character (the title of this chapter is Characterization and the
Art of Reticence).14 These parallels suggest that, when Kugel draws a blank
on biblical characters, he is refusing to recognize Alter more than he is really
scrutinizing Auerbach.
Beyond this policing of disciplinary borders between historians and literary
critics, Kugels under-reading of Auerbach reveals a more important epistemological impasse. If history is what separates us moderns from the Bibles readers, as
Kugel suggests, should we assume that they were ahistorical? On the other hand, if
literature is what connects us to them, as Alter suggests, then how did they gain
our modern literary sensibilities? By their disregard for these questions, we can
see that at the level of interpretive capacity, Kugel and Alter grant the biblical
reader little psychological dynamism or distinctiveness, respectively: Kugel excludes the reader from modern historical interpretation by making her totally different from himself, Alter includes her in modern literary interpretation by making
her basically the same. In this polemic, each leaves out precisely the part of Auerbachs background thesis that should be most relevant to his own argument.
Kugel neglects Auerbachs insight that biblical historiography was not just one
mode of storytelling among others but a major antecedent of Western literary consciousness. Yet Alter ignores Auerbachs equally key point that interpretation of
biblical narrative, however literary, remained determined by its specific historical
interpretive frames. Thus, in Auerbachs dual valence of the background, we can
recover a missed opportunity for reconceptualizing a true dialectic between historical and literary dimensions of the biblical readers consciousness.
To begin from Kugels side of this impasse, recall that he used his historicist
warrant to claim that literary interpretation was alien to the Bibles original
readers. Rather, he says, they read biblical narratives as history, a tale which produces visible, verifiable results and in that sense is unarguably true, while literature
is fiction.15 First, we should note that this is not at all the idea of history that
Kugel himself uses to recapture the biblical readers history. Far from it. He
uses a modern positivist history (a straight-line accumulation of events; the past
wie es eigentlich gewesen ist) to discover that the Bibles reader had a totally different history: a projection of their collective present back onto their ancestors in
their collective past. This is history, Kugel says, in the particularly biblical
sense.16 But how particular is it, really? Kugels definition of the biblical
readers idea of history should be easily recognizable to anthropologists as
what used to be called myth.17 Following from this historicist exclusion of
13. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 164.
17. Kugel says quite plainly that the Biblical world did not have a sense of literature or
history. Rather, these texts were meant to explain the present (How to Read, 62). His idea of the
biblical audiences time as equivalent to the time of their ancestors is ripe for Johannes Fabians critique
126

the biblical reader from historical consciousness, he marshals a phalanx of binary
oppositions that are no less readily recognizable to anthropologists: history versus
myth, past-as-past versus past-as-present, modern versus primitive ... in short, us
versus them.18 These binaries also line up with a familiar mental hierarchy. Although he nods to the literary-critical term interpretive competence to account
for the biblical readers own way of reading the text, Kugel leaves us with the distinct impression that they do not have a different competence but simply that they
have less. For example, rather than elusive thematic connections, he writes of
biblical texts as organized by mechanical principles;19 rather than historical narratives, he sees etiological explanations.20 In a revealing example, whereas we
moderns may identify with the so-called character of Moses (the biblical interpreter, in a sense), Kugel insists that primitive listeners only identified with the
people for whom the Bibles words were too terrible to bear.21 Thus, just as
he used historicism in order to exclude the Bibles primitive reader from his historical consciousness, Kugel excludes the reader from his interpretive competence
by imposing one more binary between primitives and moderns: surface versus
depth, which may be the root metaphor of the modern interpretive enterprise.22
Unlike Kugel, Auerbach grants the Bibles reader strikingly modern historical and literary competence. Both capacities, he says, were refined from the raw
ore of its very narrative style:
... the stories are not, like Homers, merely narrated reality. Doctrine and
promise are incarnate in them, inseparably melded with them; for that very
reason they are fraught with background [hintergrndig] and dark, containing
a second, hidden meaning. In the story of Isaac, it is not only Gods intervention at
the beginning and end that is kept dark, allusive, fraught with background, but
also every factual and psychological detail throughout the story. They remain
dark, only hinted at, fraught with background; this is why we are compelled,
even beckoned, to turn them over slowly, to deepen them, to develop them ...23
of allochronism (Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object [New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002 (1983)], 67).
18. Marshall Sahlins, How Natives Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), for a convincing refutation of these conventional oppositions in the
field of Hawaiian historiography.
20. On etiology as a central function of biblical narratives (myths), see Kugel, How to Read,
628.
22. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970) and The Problem of Double Meaning as Hermeneutic Problem and as Semantic
Problem, in The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 2004), 6176.
23. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: die Wirklichkeitsdarstellung in der abendlndischen Literatur
(Bern: Francke Verlag, 1946), 20 (all translations mine). Auerbachs hintergrndig (backgroundish),
as opposed to the vordergrndig (foregroundish) Homeric style, are clearly marked as the sole technical neologisms in this chapter (Mimesis, 16). The actual phrase, fraught with background, was
127
James Adam Redfield

Auerbachs portrait of the readers sense of history includes what Kugel agrees to
be its main difference from our own: biblical history is not the past-as-past but the
past as a template for prophecy and revelation. Precisely because of this strong teleology embedded in its historical narrative (its line of development extending from
our ancestors past to our collective present and future), however, Auerbach proposes that the Bible also opened up new literary awareness to its reader. After all,
even if, as Kugel says, all that we need to know is told to us by the text, then why
does it tell us apparently trivial things? When we forge links from past to present,
we are beckoned and compelled to interpret every detailin Auerbachs Akedah,
a three day journey, the lifting up of a pair of eyes, or a threefold repetition of the
deictic Here I am (hinneni)as a sign or omen against this narrative background
of sacred history. Thus, if we accept Auerbachs internally complex model of the
reader, historiography and fiction actually strengthen each other.
On his side of the impasse between history (fact) and literature (fiction),
when Alter translates Auerbachs background into his own theory, he reciprocally ignores its historical aspect. As a result, Auerbach appears in Alters work not as
a literary historian but as an inferior literary critic.24 It is one thing to say, Alter
concedes, that the sparsely sketched foreground [...] somehow implies a large
background dense with possibilities of interpretation. But Alter criticizes Auerbach for citing no specific means for how this somehow is achieved.25
For Alter, the historical background that hovers over both the readers and the characters does not seem to count as a specific technical device. But rather than show
how it works, Alters sole discussion of historys role in the background (or what
he dubs the art of reticence) implies just the reverse: the Bibles author used literary art to bless his figures with a rich modern character (replete with interiority,
autonomy, etc.) as opposed to an impoverished historical one (superficial, full of
linear and mechanical cause/effect chains, and other Kugel-like deficiencies). So it
is that for Alter (pace Kugel and Auerbach) the Bible assumes a strong, clearly
demarcated pattern of causation in history and individual lives, but (nevertheless!?) its characters complex biographies unsettle the sense of straightforward,
unilinear consequence to which lazy mental habitsancient and modern
accustom us.26 For example, Alter implies, it would be a lazy mental habit
to read Abraham as a pawn in a crude hierarchy of divine favor and disfavor,
plotted in a straight-line story about how our people came to be. Somehow we
gained in translation by Auerbachs translator, Willard R. Trask. In Auerbachs letters to Princeton University Press (C0728, Folder 9, Box 1, Princeton University Press Archive), he praises Trasks abilities
(He is an excellent translator, but a little touchy.) Auerbach met Trask more than once to go over the
translation; it is likely that he approved of the change, but he did express reservations about the chapter
itself, both in private and in print.
24. Notwithstanding Alters admiration for Auerbach elsewhere (Response, Prooftexts 27, no.
2 [2007]: 368).
128

should discern his rich character, above and beyond the narratives merely conventional historiographical frame.
But what are the specific means, Auerbach would ask, by which the Bibles
characters are somehow achieved? For Alter, the answer is too often selfevident: either he posits that the Bibles author applied (presumably universal) literary techniques of characterization, or he empathizes with the characters as (presumably universal) human beings. Auerbach, in contrast, points out that biblical
characterization relies on a specific set of historical assumptions:
Abrahams conduct should be explained, not just by what is happening to him
at the moment, not just by his character [Charakter] [...] but by his previous history. He remembers and he is continually aware of what God has
already fulfilled for him and of what God has foreseenhis heart is
swayed back and forth by desperate mutiny and patient hope. His mute obedience is multilayered and fraught with background.27
Auerbach agrees with Alter that Abraham has the literary depth of a character,
not just the archetypal outline of an ancestor, as Kugel would have it. Yet by
locating the Bibles historicity in the dark and mysterious background of its narrative style, Auerbach advances a more reader-sensitive theory of how this character is so fully realized. Abraham, like the reader, sees himself as a player in a
historical drama of which his particular narrative, down to the smallest details,
is merely an episode. He is far from a blank, nor is his rich interiority in any
way separable from the fraught background of sacred history which guides and
judges his every action. Rather, a dialectic between doctrine and promise, on
the one hand, and everyday life, on the other, is incarnate in both the players
and the audience of biblical drama. The audience interpret the heroes humble
lives against their historically fraught background; by charging them with
these interpretations, history turns ancestors into characters. Hence Auerbachs
compound term for that whole of which Alter and Kugel each captures only
half: not personality or history but personal history [Personengeschichte]. For
Auerbach, there is no necessary contradiction between viewing people in the
Bible as historical ancestors and as literary characters, provided we do not subscribe to overly modern ideas of history and literature. Rather than distinct
disciplinary compartments, they are two complementary tonalities; simultaneously
collective and individual registers in which audiences must receive the text. Rather
than linear positivist history (Kugel) versus the dense interiority of character
(Alter), or the bare foreground of conventional tales (Kugel) versus the dark background of literature (Alter), or the simple surface of didactic explanations (Kugel)
versus deep moral turmoil (Alter), etc., Auerbach theorizes biblical narrative as a
three-dimensional interplay between everyday human lives and historical interpretations. This interplay yields new depths of time, fate, and consciousness.28
27. Auerbach, Mimesis, 17 (emphasis added).
28. Auerbach, Mimesis, 16.
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James Adam Redfield

This critique of Kugel and Alter (by way of Auerbach) has given us some
clarity about three criteria for further comparative analysis.29 First, it is unsatisfactory to try to fix biblical narrative as history or literature, fact or fiction, even if we
acknowledge, as Alter and Kugel do, that these are both genres of discourse rather
than gradations of one empirical reality. Second, then, we need a theory that reflects Auerbachs dialectic between historical interpretation and literary artistry,
especially in order to illuminate how both modes of reading biblical narratives
produce its individual characters, in all their personal depth and collective
scope. Finally, we know that only a theory which takes the readers role more seriously can satisfy these requirements. Such a theory should describe, in detail, the
actual process of interpretation as it unfolds over time, pinpointing particular
vectors of interaction between what the narrative says (or doesnt say) and the
readers possible responses.
S TERNBERG S R ATIONALISM : A M ETHOD
FOR
S ORTING B LANKS
FROM
G APS
Although he wrote it over a decade before Kugel and Alters debate, Meir
Sternbergs first book also responds to Auerbachs Mimesis, agreeing with
Kugel and Alter that it begs the question of literary criticism versus historicism.
With typical acerbity, Sternberg insists that this is a false dichotomy, reframing
the interpretive imperative in terms that are worth citing at length:
In the eternal, though essentially pointless, crusade waged against criticism
under the slogan of historical scholarship, the stick of the modern readers
interpretative waywardness is liberally and somewhat indiscriminately
applied. Auerbach energetically brandishes this stick in warning against the
modern readers anachronistically reading into this ancient text what is not
there to be read. In this case, however, I need not even fall back upon the argument that the mark of great works is not only their appeal to various orders
of mind but also their accumulation of meaning throughout the ages; their organization is so complex as to preclude the possibility of their contemporary
audiences exhausting their manifold aspects or layers of meaning. I am prepared to go further. We are wholly ignorant, in fact, of the theory of literature prevalent in Homers days or of the actual reactions of his
contemporary audience. On the other hand, human nature being what it is,
there is every reason to believe that people have always evinced curiosity
when some desired information was withheld from them and felt suspense
when somebody they liked was in mortal danger; and the tense excitement
that characterizes the dramatized reactions of the Phaecian audience to
29. By focusing on how constructions of the reader inform scholarly interpretations of biblical
poetics, I will take this conversation in a very different direction than Robert Kawashima, whose own
comparison of narrative art in Homer and the Bible analyzes the function of verbal medium under the
desubjectivized 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, Kawashima also tries to defuse the debate between historicism and literary criticism and, in this effort, makes
skillful use of Auerbachs Mimesis, quite successfully in my opinion (see 78, 16).
130

Odysseus account of his adventures strongly confirms this claim. There is
similarly every reason to believe, and a great deal of evidence to support
this belief, that Homer, like other storytellers ancient and modern, exploited
and manipulated these primary narrative interests. The onus of proof to the
contrary, therefore, obviously rests with the so-called historicists.30
Here, in a nutshell, we rediscover Kugels and Alters interpretive warrants alongside the kernel of Sternbergs alternative. Now Sternberg ascribes Kugels strict
historicism to Auerbach: the danger of lit-crit is that it finds meaning in the
Bibles holes whereas in fact they are only blanks. Before ascribing modern literary sensibilities to the ancient reader, we should try to understand their own
theory of literature and hear the text as they heard it; only then can we decipher
what it does not say. Sternberg also alludes to Alters alternative solution, but he
rejects it as unverifiable: the text is an irreducible whole, communicating in multiple orders of mind, including, of course, however literature communicates. So
why not simply assume that the silence surrounding the heroes is a special means
of characterization, not a blank (or, more generally, that the Bibles lacunae
reflect its profound art, not primitiveness) and then submit this postulate to a
readers basically shared human ability to understand how it works in the text?
Sternbergs alternative starts from the premise that the Bible does not say
everything it means, but nor can it mean anything that it does not say. What we
need, then, is a robust functional theory of how, based on what biblical narratives
do tell us, we are warranted in selecting some, but not all, of their implicit meanings for analysis. How are we to distinguish noise from meaningful emanations
of the Bibles background? How do we refrain from fixating on the serifs of the
Bibles letters, like certain earlier overeager exegetes? Or, in Sternbergs terms,
how do we sort mere blanks from gaps, that is, significant breaks in the
flow of narrative communication? For him, this blanks/gaps distinction is more
essential than any generic definition of biblical narrative as history or literature. Given its anchor in the readers innate cognitive capacities and natural responses, Sternbergs blanks/gaps distinction is a universal of reading that no
one can escape for a moment, including those who shudder at the very mention
of interpretation.31 While Kugel shuddered to hear lit-crit terminology
applied to our biblical ancestors, even his historicist horror cannot extend to the
primary narrative interests of our mind, which have hardly changed since biblical times. Similarly, while Alter leaned heavily on authorial intent in order to
account for literary effects like suspense, Sternberg refocuses our attention on
the reader. In his new theory, rather than the authors invisible hand, it is the
readers narrative interestscuriosity, surprise, and suspensethat drive her to
make sense of what the text says or doesnt say, steering her interpretive course
30. Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978), 85 (emphasis added). Based on the authors dissertation (Hebrew
University, 1971).
31. Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of
Reading (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), 236.
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James Adam Redfield

as she tacks between blanks and gaps.32 Further, these elementary narrative interests align along a single vector of interaction between text and reader: temporality.
The way narrative flows over timenot (our) modern history, not (their) primitive
mythbut time itself, as this flow reflects and reshapes the readers mind, is the
epistemological engine of what Sternberg calls the drama of reading.
To unveil this drama, Sternbergs method sorts gaps from blanksmeaningful from meaningless holes in the narrativein relation to the reader. A blank is
simply without interest, whereas a hole that piques our narrative interestssuspense, curiosity, or surpriseis a gap. Our interests can be subdivided this
way because we try to close each gap differently, depending on how it fits into
the narratives temporal structure so far. Suspense is prospective: we look
forward to closing a gap between what we know now and what we will learn. Curiosity is retrospective: we fill in a gap between what we are learning and what we
do not yet know about the past. And we experience surprise when we thought there
were no gaps in past, present, or futureonly to see one open up in the present, to
be sealed as a new unity later on.33
Speaking of the narrative, however, elides the real object of Sternbergs
method. How do we identify holes before we can even begin sorting them into
gaps 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 suspenseful or dull, curious or banal, surprising or obvious. Nor is narrative interest purely
subjectiveif it were, how could we distinguish a thriller from a period drama or
(as in Auerbachs Homer/Bible opposition) an epic from a tragedy?34 We could
keep ducking this question, and sustain the illusion that each narrative comes prepackaged as a coherent whole, by classifying narratives according to generic features. For instance, we could say that history recounts truths, whereas literature
invents amusing fictions. If we read, for example, the Akedah as history, then
we should find a strong, clearly demarcated pattern of causation with little suspense. If we read it as literature, then we should instead be more attuned to its characters internal development. So say Kugel and Alter. The problem with their
holistic approach, from Sternbergs reader-oriented standpoint, is that there is no
firm 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 reactions as narrative universals or master effects (Reconceptualizing Narratology: Arguments for a
Functionalist and Constructivist Approach to Narrative, interview with Franco Passalacqua and Frederico Pianzola, Enthymema 4 [2011]: 37.)
33. My summary of these terms is based on Sternbergs own summary of how he has used them
throughout his work: Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (I), Poetics Today 24,
no. 2 (2003): 3278. See also: Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (II), Poetics
Today 24, no. 3 (2003): 5178.
34. Not only is this not a new question in biblical poetics, it was not even new in Auerbachs
Mimesis, which responds to an April 1797 correspondence between Goethe and Schiller about how to
distinguish epic from tragedy (Mimesis, 9; see the April letters, http://www.briefwechsel-schillergoethe.de/seiten/zeittafel.php?j=1797, access date 5/10/2013). Auerbachs innovation (a subversive
one, especially given his Jewish background) is to put the Hebrew Bible, with its suspenseful background, right into the slot that Goethe had assigned to Greek tragedy.
132

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 includes singular detailsa gesture here, the repetition of a deictic therewith
no evident historical referents. If we are interested in such details, we promote
their function in the narratives temporal flow to the status of gaps; if we are
uninterested, we demote them to blanks, meaningless add-ons to a relatively
thin original text. Either way, our interpretive ambition never ventures far
beyond the circle of our generic assumptions about the text itself, that is, about
what kind of story it must tell us.
Sternbergs key insight here is that when Kugel and Alter try to write off in
advance what sort of interest we should take in the narrative, by falling back on its
generic classification, they do not describe how we experience the narrative but
only what we are told in the narrative. We can call this the plot or, in Sternbergs
Russian 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 are
able 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 or
less artfully told events and start looking at it as a dynamic system of gaps
between plot and story.36 As readers, our interests are directed, not by generic features of the plot in itself, but by the systematic weaving between plot and story as
they are knit together over time. If this is happening now, we ask, what else might
have happened? And: What might happen next? This dense texture of cruxes and
reconstructions he calls narrative exposition. Much of Sternbergs work, especially
on the Bible, involves technical analysis of how exposition is handled and how it
affects readers.
Sternberg uses his theory of exposition to analyze gaps/blanks in the Bible in
three steps, following a more methodical and verifiable process than any that we
have considered so far. First, he isolates discontinuities in the narrative where the
plot and the story do not coincide. For example, he (like Alter and Auerbach) reads
the Akedah as a narrative in which the style gives us only dim and fragmentary
glimpses of the characters inner lives, because the narrator tells us so little (in the
plot) about what the characters are thinking; he keeps it all in the background
(of the story).37 Next, Sternberg applies his method in order to separate warranted
explanations of what we are told but dont know (gaps) from idle speculation
devoid of evidence (blanks). This can provide grounds for assessing, for instance,
if the Bibles figures are complex, internally conflicted literary characters. Returning to our example of the Akedah, we are not told a word about Sarah in
the narrative itself, so her feelings would be a blank (contra certain midrashim,
piyyutim, and feminist critics). Abrahams feelings, in contrast, are a marked
35. Sternberg would object that I am imprecise in conflating plot with szujet and story with
fabula (adjust my simplification by referring to Expositional Modes, 1213 and 308 n. 22). I use these
more 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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James Adam Redfield

gap; why else, for example, would Isaac heighten our interest by asking, Where is
the lamb for the burnt offering? Signals like these give us a warrant to close the
gap of what Abraham is feeling by, for instance, assigning a doubled referent and
heavy tone to his answer (Here is the lamb for the burnt offering, my son). This
sort of hypothetical gap closure by the reader helps to intensify one of our primary
narrative interests, suspense, while simultaneously adding to Abrahams interiority. Thus the exposition resutures plot to story by mediating between readers and
characters minds.38 Finally, Sternberg proposes criteria for delimiting our gapfilling prerogatives, beyond our primary narrative interests. These criteria
include logical norms (integrity, analogy, causality), norms of proportion
(between minimal and implied readings and, in the latter category, between reticence and significance) and even an all-purpose quantitative indicator (more information = more possible significance, whether we are trying to add apparent
redundancies, epithets, sotto voce asides, etc. to the gaps side of our interpretive
ledger).39
To complement this sketch of Sternbergs theory of exposition, it may also
help to take a look at his theory from a genetic perspective, and not only in order to
correct Alan Mintzs suggestion that the Tel Aviv school of poetics (of which
Sternberg is a founding father) is a mere reincarnation of Russian Formalism
(hence, simply, not new).40 Contra Mintz, as careful comparison of Sternbergs
terminology with one of its key sources (the Russian Formalist Boris Tomashevksy) shows, much has changed from Moscow to Tel Aviv, both in the specific
functions of this terminology and in its underlying conceptual architecture. But
more importantly in terms of our themeepistemological foundations and interpretive warrants in recent biblical criticismthis comparison reveals that the
Bibles artful discontinuities were not just a new example to which Sternberg
applied an apparatus that he imported from the Russian Formalists. Rather, Sternberg used the Bibles particular stylistic problems, especially its very gappy exposition, in order to theorize a more dynamic interplay between the reader and the
text than Tomashevsky.
Sternbergs major innovation with respect to Russian Formalism is exposed,
typically, in a parenthesis at the end of his first book where he accuses the Formalists of an (a priori view of the szujet).41 To clarify this criticism, compare him to
Tomashevsky on szujet versus fabula:
38. Sternberg, Poetics, 192. Note, however, that although Sternbergs theory does highlight this
meaningful omission (gap) in the Akedah, in general he agrees with Kugel against Auerbach that its
framing (God tested Abraham) undermines most attempts by the reader to project suspense into the
plot (see his critique of Auerbachs reading, Poetics, 268).
39. For an earlier and more succinct example of how he applies these logical criteria in order to
identify expositional gaps, see Sternbergs izun adin ba-sipur ones Dinah, Ha-sifrut 4, no. 2
(1973): 226.
40. Alan Mintz, On the Tel Aviv School of Poetics, Prooftexts 4, no. 3 (1984): 229.
41. Sternberg, Expositional Modes, 2578. As a specialist in exposition, surely it is no accident
that Sternberg is so circuitous. His formal definition of gaps appears at the very end of his chapter
(Expositional Modes, 5055) and is preceded (roughly forty pages into his own book!) by a
comment on Trollope that could double as a tongue-in-cheek self-reference: ... the panting and
134

Plot [szujet] is distinct from story [fabula]. Both include the same events, but
in the plot the events are arranged and connected according to the orderly sequence in which they were presented in the work. In brief, the story is the
action itself, the plot how the reader learns of the action.42
Rather than, say, two sides of a sheet of paper that cannot be cut without altering
both,43 for Tomashevsky, story and plot are just stacked on top of each other. The
story is no less a priori than the plot; it exists independently as an ensemble of reallife or imaginary events, while the plot serves only to bring the story to the readers
attention in an aesthetic way. The story is a straight logical-chronological progression; the plot is a partial series of diversions from it. These diversions may be more
or less pleasant, of course, but beyond that, Tomashevsky has no clear way to
analyze how the two narrative modes are related.44 For him, whatever makes a narrative effective must be outside the text itself, in its historical and ideological
themes (dominants).45
Tomashevsky also takes an a priori attitude towards the smallest undecomposable units of a narrative: motifs (e.g. the gun in a murder mystery).46 Both
plot and story contain motifs. They share some but not all; not all motifs in the
plot are essential to the story. Exposition works its magic by including some
motifs but not others, in strategic combinations, over time. So far, Sternberg
and Tomashevsky seem to agree. But again, because he has no formal model
for how plot and story are related, let alone a temporal model like Sternbergs,
Tomashevsky does not describe the concrete ways in which motifs are arranged
exasperated reader, having grunted his way through forty close-packed pages of continuous exposition,
finally reaches [...] the starting-point of the kernel proper (Expositional Modes, 47).
42. Boris Tomashevsky, Thematics, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and
trans. Lee Lemon and Marion Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 67. This is a slightly
abridged version; for the full translation, see Thmatique, in Thorie de la Littrature, ed. Tzvetan
Todorov (Paris, Le Seuil, 1965), 263309.
43. Saussures famous metaphor for the linguistic sign (Cours de linguistique gnrale, ed.
Charles Bally, Albert Schehaye (with Albert Riedlinger), in the critical re-edition by Tullio de
Mauro [Paris: Payot, 1995 (1916)], 157).
44. See Sternbergs detailed criticism in Expositional Modes, 308 n. 22.
45. For Tomashevsky, narrative themes acquire reality from vital issues, current, topical
questions outside the text (Thematics, 64). Because he uses this external definition of the narrative
dominant, the term formalist is actually a misnomer for Tomashevsky; on the contrary, he tries to
fix how narrative forms operate in order to keep them subordinate to narratives primary ideological
content. In the opposite way, but with just the same result (as Sternberg points out; Reconceptualizing, 50), functionalist is a misnomer for Jakobson, who puts literary effects into a fixed typology
of linguistic functions in order to reconcile poetic processes with synchronic linguistic systems (Linguistics and Poetics, in Style and Language, ed. Thomas Seabock (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1960),
350377). Sternberg countered both of these reifying moves by formulating his Proteus Principle,
which means, in this case, that there is no fixed correspondence between linguistic form and literary
function (see Hebrews between Cultures: Group Portraits and National Literature [Bloomington
IN: Indiana University Press, 1988], 589).
46. Sternberg, Expositional Modes, 8 and 308 n. 16; Tomashevksy, Thematics, 67.
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in the plot (or, alternatively, gapped). Instead he lumps motifs into four categories, according to their relative importance in an arbitrarily abridged version of the
story (lets call it the Cliffs Notes).47 He calls a motif bound if we cannot take
it out without making the Cliffs Notes incoherent (in Chekhovs famous example,
the gun in a murder story that must, by definition, be fired), but free if it just adds
details to the plot (the color of the gun). Similarly, a motif is dynamic if it develops the story (the moment when the butler fires the gun), but it is static if
it fails to spur development (the fact that it is fired in the kitchen). These two
sets of motifs are not equivalent: bound motifs are logically necessary, whereas
dynamic and free motifs can be compared in terms of their various effects.
Thus, Tomashevsky does have an incipient theory of narrative interest and
hence of the readers mind: we could very roughly measure this interest by
ranking the contributions of dynamic and free motifs against bound ones along
a linear temporal axis. But again, because he has no model for how plot and
story coevolve over time, and no clear typology of reader-responses, Tomashevsky
does not shed much light on the readers role in the exposition. Nor does his Cliffs
Notes (an artificial baseline for what really happens that is then re-presented by
the exposition) allow for his readers to reconstruct different versions of the same
basic story.
To summarize Sternbergs transformation of Tomashevskys Russian Formalist model: what Tomashevsky seems to have pictured as a spatial model
with motifs arranged by positive criteria in relation to an artificial version of the
minimal story, Sternberg has turned into a temporal model with motifs arranged
by negative criteria in relation to multiple implied readers. In Sternbergs
theory, motifs have become norms that set limits to readers responses to the
plot. We should no longer think of the narrative as a fixed sequence of events presented by a fluid set of fictional devices, but as a collaboration (or competition!)
between author, narrator, and reader, who strive to actualize the concrete semantic
resources embedded in a given sequence of textual information. Recalling a
popular series of American kids books that appeared around the same time, Sternbergs narratology invites us to choose your own adventure. For him, how a text
regulates the opening and closing of gaps and blanks in our own interestsnot a
clunky toolbox of formal distinctions between parts or kinds of narrationis the
best 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, his
readers can reconstruct the story in many ways from the fragments of its plot.
Thus exploding any conventional dichotomy between fixed story and malleable
plot, Sternberg theorizes them as a single temporal matrix of interpretive
potential.
Of course this is just a peek into the mechanics of Sternbergs poetics, a juggernaut which already loomed large in his works of biblical criticism in the 1980s
47. As Tomashevsky says, The relative importance of a motif to the story may be determined
by retelling the story in abridged form, then comparing the abridgement with the more fully developed
narrative (Thematics, 71).
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and has since morphed (most dramatically in two series of long articles in the
1990s and 2000s) into an elaborate theory of human mental life that, he argues,
both anticipates and surmounts nearly all its followers in narratology and cognitive
science.48 Yet in contrast to Kugel and Alter, Sternbergs contribution is clear.
Rather than a reader whose response is limited from the outset by fixed generic
features of the narrative, Sternberg theorizes and tests the biblical text against
an active readera reader who constantly constructs and reconstructs new versions of a protean story from the scraps of information and rapidly changing
plot that the author and the narrator have chosen to give him. Further, Sternbergs
cognitive universalism assures that we, too, can play this readers role. Thus he
escapes Kugels dichotomy between the modern objective historian and the primitive biblical audience, on the one hand, and Alters overly empathic identification
of the biblical reader with his own literary sensibility, on the other. Still more
importantly, Sternbergs theory includes internal criteria for verifying its applicability on a case-by-case basis. We can ask, How would I, the reader, close a gap at
this point in the narrative, on the basis of the information I have, in order to fulfill
my primary narrative interests? By opening avenues to this question, Sternbergs
poetics of biblical narrative often reveals a great deal about how it works without
falling into then-ascendant critical trends: neither the fantastical
pseudo-objectivity of structuralism nor the ideological bent of many poststructuralisms and postmodernisms. His reader is an artificial construct, to be sure, but a
construct that can be tested and improved by means of the text itself.
Z ORNBERG S C RITIQUE
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When we compared Kugels and Alters receptions of Auerbachs background thesis, the very object of our inquiry threatened to vanish in opposite directions. For Kugel, marked elisions or gaps in biblical narrative were mere
figments of the modern readers overactive imaginationblanks to be replaced
by historical analysis. For Alter, their meaningfulness could be taken for granted as
a token of the authors literary art; armed with a standard toolbox, any critic could
decode their intended meaning just like the Bibles ancient audiences must have.
Neither Kugel nor Alter, then, allowed for a specifiable range of differences
between himself and the Bibles implied reader(s) on the basis of a theory of
what they certainly share: a human mind.
By contrast, Avivah Zornbergfrom a famous rabbinic family in Scotland,
originally a scholar of English literature but now known as a Torah teacher in Jerusalem, worldwide lecturer, and author of original biblical interpretationagrees
48. For a rare object of Sternbergs admiration, see David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction
Film (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). See also Sternberg, Universals (II), his
three-part Telling in Time article series (Poetics Today 11, no. 4 (1990): 901948; Poetics Today
13, no. 3 (1992): 463541; Poetics Today 27, no. 1 (2006): 125235), or his more succinct Epilogue:
How (Not) to Advance toward the Narrative Mind, in Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps, ed.
Geert Brne and Jeroen Vandaele (Hague: de Gruyter, 2009), 455532.
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James Adam Redfield

with Sternbergs general approach: biblical narratives communicate by means of
gaps, and we can analyze how they do so, if and only if we simultaneously
use the Bible to test a model of what sort of mind it is communicating with.
When it comes to her own model of the readers mind, however, Zornberg is
quite different. She claims that Sternberg does not allow for a wide enough
range of inner experience to the Bibles reader; he unduly constrains the
readers narrative interests to a rational conscious level. She does not actually
say, as others have before and since,49 that Sternbergs ideal reader (even Sternberg himself!) is therefore sexist, crypto-fundamentalist, and obsessed with omniscience or omnipotence, but her criticisms echo each of these well-known
arguments in more subtle ways.50
For our purposes, we only need to follow Zornberg this far: indeed, Sternbergs norm for valid reading is highly rationalist. When we retrace his theoretical
footsteps in hot pursuit of gaps in the Bibles exposition, we leave behind our affective, cultural, and otherwise warranted interpretations. Yes, technically, Sternberg has a slot for these in his theory, but in practice, he applies them far less than a
familiar series of deductions or recursive inductions: a relentless quest from textual
clue to rational hypothesis, followed by textual proof. Sherlock would be a perfect
fit for Sternbergs implied reader, although some of us may feel a bit more like
Watson.51 In opposition to Sternbergs rationalism, Zornberg makes a case
sometimes rational, sometimes not, but internally consistent at a very different
mental levelfor a biblical reader with a broader range of interests and capacities.
He looked for solutions to the Bibles gaps in the conscious mind of a rational
reader; she hears the Bibles blanks as symptoms of an irrepressible unconscious
that 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 is
simply because we cannot exclude them any longer. Midrash had no special
mandate in either Kugels or Alters interpretive warrants. In keeping with their
basic strategies, Kugel used history to keep midrash distinct from the Bible,
whereas Alter adopted rabbinic insights when they happened to agree with his
literary-critical readings. But the rabbis are more vocal interlocutors for both
Sternberg and Zornberg, who recognize that midrash, like their methods, often
uses holes in the biblical text as a starting point for interpretation. By considering
49. Mieke Bal, The Bible as Literature: a Critical Escape, Diacritics 16, no. 4 (Winter 1986):
7179; Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, Tipping the Balance: Sternbergs Reader and the
Rape of Dinah, Journal of Biblical Literature 110, no. 2 (1991): 193211. Sober attempts to adjudicate
these critiques have been made by, respectively, Daniel Boyarin (The Politics of Biblical Narratology:
Reading the Bible like/as a Woman, Diacritics 20, no. 4 [Winter 1990]: 3142) and Paul Noble
(A Balanced Reading of the Rape of Dinah: Some Exegetical and Methodological Observations,
Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 4, no. 2 [1995]: 172203).
50. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (New York:
Schocken, 2001), 13440, 157. Compare especially to Bal, Critical Escape.
51. Not for nothing is the detective story one of Sternbergs favorite genres; see Expositional
Modes, 159182 and a revised chapter from a thesis that he supervised by a scholar whom he has
called the third generation of the Tel Aviv school (Eyal Segal, Closure in Detective Fiction,
Poetics Today 31, no. 2 [2003]: 153215).
138

how they both relate to midrash, we can see at a glance how inverted their epistemological positions really are.
If Sternbergs method investigates the interaction between the ideal reader
and the text, for him, rabbis are the non-ideal reader. He calls midrash illegitimate
gap-filling, or arbitrarily upgrading blanks to gaps, because it is sustained by the
readers subjective concerns, rather than by cognitive universals like curiosity,
suspense, surprise, logic, and all the other ways that we find and fill gaps to
make sense of the text.52 For Sternberg, incoherence is a sign of interpretive
failure, not of divine truth. Naturally, then, he has little use for rabbis who overread
details, mishandle contradictions, ignore quantities and proportions, and project
their own world onto the texts. He even implies that by finding a system at
work in biblical poetics, he will make the text pay greater dividends than
midrash ever did.53 If anything, Sternbergs ideal reader is not a religious cryptofundamentalist (as Bal has claimed54) but a maskil, a rationalist heretic!
Zornberg critiques Sternbergs rationalist reader by noting that his metaphors for valid knowledge of the text seem to be weighted toward just one perceptual modality: vision. For him, Zornberg says, vision is the human equivalent of
divine omniscience. By trying to see through the gaps in biblical narrative, his
reader shows an unambiguous enthusiasm for Gods omnipotence.55 His
method is not just a mode of knowledge but also a form of power, one that classifies, dissects, penetrates, and dominates. His desire to see/know the text from a
Gods-eye view typifies the Platonic ideal that Zornberg seems to associate with
methodological criticism in general: the quest for a triumphal and unequivocal
master story that will finally close all the gaps in the text.56 In a rather ironic
aside (considering his efforts to distance himself from the rabbis), Zornberg
even says that a midrash by Nah.manides is the basis of Sternbergs account
of this transparent master-narrative.57
Zornberg understands Sternbergs desire to see/know the Bibles master plan,
but for her, there is a sadness about the constant appeal to the eyes. By instead
placing the rabbis at the heart of a vast tradition of biblical reception, she adopts
52. Sternberg, Poetics, 188.

53. Sternberg, Poetics, xiv.
54. Bal (Critical Escape, 72) accuses him of attributing to the narrator a divine power that
must be accepted and thereby circumscribing the position of the reader who cannot but submit, passively, to what the text states.
55. Zornberg, Particulars, 140.
56. Zornberg, Particulars, 140.
57. Zornberg, Particulars, 157. Let us recall that Sternbergs Poetics (1985) was published in
the same period that midrash was taken up by literary theory, with much excitement (e.g. Geoffrey
Hartman 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 Rabbinic Exegesis [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], 158163). As in Kugels critique of literature above, then, the stakes of Sternbergs critique of midrash are more local than he
acknowledges: two competing strands of poststructuralism, one (Sternbergs) more in line with Jakobsons original project, the other (Zornbergs) embracing a turn to the subject that we might associate
more with figures like Kristeva and Lacan.
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hearingan internal, embodied, nondominating mode of knowledgeas the ideal
posture for the Bibles reader. We should not, however, mistake this for a primarily
theological position.58 As Tamar Ross notes,59 Zornbergs religious background
clearly plays a role in her approach to the Bible, and perhaps she stresses
hearing because of her Torah teaching in oral settings. But notwithstanding
the lack of engagement with Zornbergs work among biblical scholars,60 I
suggest that her cultivation of a particular way of listening to the text is also a
direct response to the epistemological problem that we have already seen in Auerbach, Kugel, Alter, and Sternberg: How can we know what biblical narratives
dont say? By adopting the stance of an analyst who is receptive to symptoms
of the Bibles repressed counter-narratives,61 Zornberg combines psychoanalysis and midrash to discover unconscious connections between narrative, characters, and reader. Like Sternberg, she focuses on moments when the text does
not make sensebecause it says too little, too much, or too many contradictory
things at onceand she calls these moments of dense incoherence by a familiar
name: blanks. But unlike Kugel and Sternberg, for whom blanks were the
result of unwarranted interpretive license, Zornberg suggests that at the navel of
biblical readers collective unconscious, what makes the least sense may be the
most symptomatic. For her, incoherence is not a failureit is the chance to start
making a very different kind of sense.
Z ORNBERG S U NCONSCIOUS : B LOCKS , B LANKS ,
AND
B LESSING
While a full appreciation of Zornbergs psychoanalytic theory deserves a

separate study, especially as she is averse to such scrutiny,62 we can explore
how it emerges from a case study: Jacobs blessing of his children at the end of
58. I learned much from debating this aspect of Zornbergs work with Ziva Hassenfeld-Reimer
and Steve Weitzman.
59. Tamar Ross, Review of Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, B.D.D. 3 (Summer 1996): 55.
See also Daniel Boyarins 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 Rosss, and her following pointcounterpoint with Avraham Walfish (see Comments on Tamar Ross Review of Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, B.D.D. 6 [1998]: 4551, and her Response, B.D.D. 6 [1998]: 536), I have found
only the psychoanalytic community to have engaged more substantively with Zornbergs work (see
the diverse responses to her Jonah: a Fantasy of Flight, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 18, no. 3
[2008]: 271299).
61. Zornberg, Particulars, 5. For closely related reading strategies by (not coincidentally, I
think) feminist critics, see Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), and Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: LiteraryFeminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1994).
62. Zornberg resolutely maintains her distinction from narrowly academic criticism, calling it
methodical (The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis [New York: Schocken, 1995], xi), Platonic (Beginning, 95; Particulars, 4), or analytic. (Albeit not psycho-analytic ... presumably her
claim that, In order to analyze a subject, one must, in a sense, kill it [Beginning, 267] does not
apply to her own enterprise.)
140

Genesis.63 Jacobs case brings us full circle to the specific formulation of our
general problem that all four earlier critics also debated: are people in the Bible
characters with complex self-reflective interiority, or are they national archetypes whose inner lives were opaque to their original audiences? How can we
tellbased 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 of
deeper psychodynamic processes; processes that transgress individual and collective, literary and historical modes of analysis and force us to go beyond disciplinary boundaries? In short: is Jacob just a blank, or is he fraught with
background?
Zornberg argues that we can indeed find clues to the depths of Jacobs character by probing holes in this parashah. But unlike Alter, who emphasized the
authors intention, and Sternberg, who presumed a critically analytic reader, Zornbergs warrant for opening up these implicit meanings relies on an entire community of readers and readings. The tacit premise of all her work is that rabbinic
reception of the textespecially of its most problematic passagesunlocks
latent psychological dynamics in the text itself, forging new links between its
creator(s), readers, and characters. These dynamics are not necessarily subject to
critical ratiocination any more than they are to conscious authorial control. Their
paradoxes and semantic excesses, their ambiguities and enigmas, oblige Zornberg,
with the rabbis, to adopt a radical openness to new ways of identifying and putting
back together what seem to be significant discontinuities in the characters words
and actions. For her, these holes in the text force us to recognize the psychic truth
of contradiction itself: a truth that thwarts or even subsumes rational analysis.
In Jacobs case, Zornberg uses three key terms to attune us to the psychodynamics of his character: block, blank, and blessing. Each of these terms
indexes a different aspect of the contradictions that, together, drive Jacobs personal history and make him intelligible as a psychologically coherent character. Thus,
rather than simply oppose Sternberg, Zornbergs approach picks up right where his
left offat the limits of rational consciousness. Specifically, by appropriating his
term blanks (or, as she also calls it, blocks), Zornberg inverts Sternbergs rational method. In place of his stark dichotomy between relevant gaps and irrelevant blanks, Zornberg argues that the Bibles lack of information (blanks) and
excessive information (blocks) are two sides of one psychological coin.
Rather than rely on Sternbergs gold standard of cognitive relevance for sorting
out this irregular distribution of information, she uses these irregularities in the
text to amplify Jacobs inner strugglewithout explicit awareness on his own
part and with no direct appeal to authorial control. In so doing, she irrevocably
blurs the line between, on the one hand, stylistic problems in the text as such
and, on the other hand, how the rabbinic commentaries empower their readers
to interpret these problems.
The very title of this narrative unit, Va-yeh.i, is Zornbergs first symptom of
repressed meaning in Jacobs life story. After all, the story is about the death of a
63. Zornberg, Beginning, 352381.
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patriarch, but the title refers to his life: and he lived signifies Jacobs quest for
closure and fulfillment, a quest not yet concluded. How can we account for this
apparent discrepancy? To this traditional interpretive problem, Zornberg adds
another. Jacobs death is ultimately codified by the only living will in
Genesis, a symbolic statement of blessing upon his children and all Israel.64 Yet
at the beginning of the story of his death, on the verge of revealing the end
(49:1) and blessing his children, Jacob does not actually do so. His inability
(block) is not clearly marked in the text itself, but she draws it out by using
Rashis midrash on the verse: the eyes of Israel were heavy with age, for he
could not see (48:10). Lacking foresight, how can Jacob bless the next generation? The sense of an ending that will endow his life with meaningful coherence
is sorely lacking.65 Nor does Sternbergs ideal reader (who also prized the metaphor of visionary knowledge) magically appear to clarify this problem for us. It
is rooted in something internal to Jacobs own character.
For the underlying psychic etiology of Jacobs block, Zornberg again
turns to Rashi, who notes that the narrative of Jacobs death is the only parashah
setumah: the only weekly Torah reading not introduced in the scroll by the usual
minimum nine spaces.66 Just as Jacobs sight is occluded, then, his vision is literally blocked in the text. Connecting this textual block to the context of Jacobs
blessinghis sojourn in EgyptZornberg treats his blindness as an internalized
exile; a blocked existential condition. She diagnoses him as suffering from a
psychic legacy of slavery in Egypt and therefore unable to bless his family.
Citing Auberbach, she calls this trauma the background in terms of which his
block should be interpreted:
Egypt is a grave that threatens to swallow all of his familys aspirations for a
distinct destiny. His last speech is, therefore, fraught with background ... in a
reality of exile and diffusion, how is the identity of this family to be preserved? This identity, that began to be forged in a heroic abandonment of
all known paradigms, in an exquisite training of vision to sights never
before seen, now threatens to end in a peculiar blindness, a failure of the
senses and the sensibilities.67
64. Zornberg, Beginning, 353 and 419 n. 35.

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 the
Esther story as lacking psychic closure in her most recent book (The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on
the 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 space
of 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 a
line (versus an open section [parashah petuh.ah] which always starts at the beginning of a line). Rashi
is not using setumah in that technical sense but as a jarring exception to it (totally closed, the most
closed of all).
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To follow this block even more deeply into Jacobs mind, Zornberg draws on the
Zohars proposal that he suffers, not just from a physical lack of vision or speech,
but from a lack of imaginationfrom failure to read reality as though it constituted an intelligible text.68 Thus she redefines Jacobs slavery as a psychic
bondage, not only a political/national one. His block is now part of a history
in the medical/psychoanalytic sense, rather than in Kugels more usual political/
national sense. It is a residue of Auerbachs personal history: the layers of
memory, or the depths of time, fate, and consciousness that hover over biblical
characters long after the critical events have passed.69 Zornberg senses the pressure of Jacobs personal history in semantic slippages between how he promises
to bless his children and how he actually does. This is the discontinuity ... that
generates the midrashic narrative and, again, the reason, at the very instant
when he reaches out for a meaningful conclusion to his life, that he discovers
instead that the tragic experience of blocking is now his.70
Blocked speech, blocked imagination, a personal history of exile and slavery
formidable obstacles to psychic closure in themselves. But finally, Zornberg argues
that none of these are inseparable from the deepest block in Jacobs consciousness:
his relation to God. She draws from a midrash in which the divine presence (shekhinah) departs from his bedside, leaving Jacob not just bereft of his own sight but
even blinded (blocked) by its detached radiance.71 This sudden disconnection
from the divine runs against everything Jacob has stood for. He is, as Zornberg
has said throughout,72 concerned with the question of coherence; he yearns to
be whole, complete ... a life fully used, energies fully metabolized, its parts
tending toward integral meaning.73 To explain this existential hole in his biography, Zornberg cites Rambam for what she calls a clinical psychological diagnosis: Jacobs pathology has been caused by repressing his anger for Josephs long
absence. This anger returns as Gods absence at the end of his life: Because of
Jacobs sorrow and anxiety, during all the days of his mourning for Joseph, the
holy spirit departed from him. ... The Sages make the point in this way: Prophecy
does not come to rest in the midst of lethargy, or of melancholy ... but only in the
midst of joy (Rambam).74
Mirroring Jacobs own internalized exile and slavery, Josephs enslavement
in Egypt has left hidden scars in his fathers character that resurface at this moment
69. In reference to the Hebrew Bible, Auerbach playfully stretches the German root for
history to cover three dimensions of our experience that positivist historicism usually tries to separate: (1) character or personal history (Personengeschichte), (2) universal or world history
(Weltgeschichte), and (3) the layers of readers and characters shared consciousness (the Hebrew
Bible is, he says, vielschichtig und hintergrndig, with gleichzeitig bereinandergelagerte Schichten
des Bewusstseins. See this important passage in Mimesis, 17.).
71. Zornberg, Beginning, 359. I assume she is alluding to a talmudic term for the blind: sagya
nehoraya, filled with light.
72. See for example Zornberg, Beginning 2167, and 3212.
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of frustrated catharsis. Zornbergs diagnosis echoes that of R. Mordechai Yosef
Leiner (the Ishbitzer) when she says that Jacobs blessing is blocked by repressed
resentment and suspicion: he is angry with his sons....75 In a psychological view
of Jacobs inner reality, in fact, there is no essential difference between the
Rambams and the Ishbitzers readings of why he cannot speak. God is a
mode of Jacobs relation to himself (his own wholeness, shalom). This is no
arbitrary movement of God, present and then absent, but a movement within
the intimacies of Josephs spirit. There, something flickers and goes out.76
To review Zornbergs diagnosis of Jacobs problem, perhaps the most striking
thing about it is how far she has pushed the limits of his consciousness in search of
their hidden dynamics. She began with a symptomatic reading of his inchoate
speech, moved onto a case history of his familys exile and slavery, touched
lightly on his broken relation to the divine, and ended by equating this to his
broken relationship with his own sons. Clearly, for her, Jacob is both more and
less than an individual character. In his role as Israel he incorporates and plays
out unconscious tensions of the whole national narrative up to this point; yet as a
dying old man, these tensions have overwhelmed his personal capacity to process
them and articulate an ending. Given this simultaneously overdetermined and incoherent character, it follows that as readers, we should not try to interpret Jacob by
fixing some Archimedean point outside his story from which to judge and reconcile
the inner conflicts that define him, as Kugel, Alter, and Sternberg, each in his own
way, would have us do. On the contrary, we must embrace the structure of Jacobs
essential contradiction before we can articulate a truly therapeutic response.
Zornberg names this contradiction in appropriately contradictory terms: not
only is Jacob blocked by too much meaning, he also suffers from a lack of
meaning, a parallel pathology that she calls the blank.77 Jacobs inner blank
and block are related as trauma is to symptom: the experience of the blank [is]
the model for our understanding of the theme of blocking, of the absence of
God.78 Zornberg notes that the very words blank and block help us to hear this
uncanny coincidence of opposites. Both blank and black have the same root; to
be blank is also to be black, blocked, obscure, thick with inchoate feeling, assailed by emptiness or density, unintelligible, like an unreadable page. As if directly
responding to Sternbergs disdain for midrashic blank drawing, Zornberg concedes
that the blank is in the eye of the beholder. But ... she continues, if the reader can
open himself to hear Jacobs melancholia and the self-shattering cacophony of
trauma, ... no mere chiding will transform the unmeaning colorlessness/blackness
of things. At the bottom of Jacobs mindin the background that charges his
every word with repressed meaningblank and block are one and the same.79
79. The poetic crisis, the experience of the blank [is] the model for our understanding of the
theme of blocking, of the absence of God (Zornberg, Beginning, 368). It seems that in Zornbergs
lexicon, blank : block :: trauma : symptom.
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Once the reader adopts Zornbergs psychoanalytic commitment to these irreducible complexities of biblical characterization, she should not try to resolve
Jacobs problem by applying a historical or literary or cognitive methodology.
Having acknowledged the problems paradoxical etiology, her only authentic response (not necessarily a solution, but still therapeutic) is to repeat Jacobs
problem in a way that helps to unstick its most intractable inheritance. To this
end, following her diagnosis of Jacobs blanked/blocked consciousness, Zornberg rereads his deathbed blessing on the psychodynamically warranted assumption that it will offer the opposite of blanks/blocks: integration, closure,
catharsis, shalom. Just as she used midrashic readings of Jacobs foreclosed
speech to palpate his repressed unconscious, midrash will help her to hear
Jacob as he works through this blockage. If his trauma had resulted in too much
or too little speech, his blessing will articulate a newfound balance.
In this search for the proportion and harmony that will be the sign of Jacobs
blessing on Israel, Zornberg, still following the Ishbitzer,80 asserts that he must
transcend his indistinct mass of emotions (blanks) to name each of its elements
clearly; like Mosess blessing, which begins, And this is the blessing ...81 To
learn how Jacob can attain this clarity (the lucidity of this), she reads forward
to the blessing that he eventually does give his sons, fastening onto its fluid
imagery: wine, grapes, and milk (Genesis 49:1112). Her intuition that fluidity and clarityagain, apparent oppositesare the key to Jacobs overcoming
of his block/blank then takes her into a long midrash on Ezekiels dry bones.
Asking these dry bones to speak and to live again is, she suggests,
exactly what Jacob must have asked himself as his blessing flowed forth. By opposing his water, wine, and milk to Ezekiels bones, she suggests that Jacobs
use of fluid imagery is profoundly connected to the question of integration that so
troubles him.82
But of course, given that this opposition is generated by the fluidity in Zornbergs own languageshe is circling, not just between Jacob and the midrash, but
between Jacob and an entirely distinct biblical passagewhen she finally integrates the opposition, it is as much a response to her own dialogue with Jacob
as it is to his projected inner monologue. His ability to speak clearly to his sons
(and this is the blessing), is, Zornberg says, a lucid focus gained, paradoxically,
through the medium of the other things, the other words, that he had to speak,
in the blank cold of his poetic crisis.83 But these other words are none other
than Zornbergs; as a sounding board for Jacobs silences, she guides his stuttering
transference back to himself. Only then can he speak his own words which
thanks to the blocks/blanks that she has found in himfinally voice his solution
to a failure, a forgetting, a blurring of focus.
81. For a review of related psychoanalytic problems with Mosess slowness of speech, see
Shuli Barzilai, Mind the Gap: Some Midrashic Propositions for Moses and Monotheism, Psychoanalytic Review 91, no. 6 (2004): 831852.
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This circular movement between the characters and readers consciousness
is what sets Zornbergs psychoanalytic theory apart from the other four that we
have examined. In Kugels historicist approach, the Bibles so-called characters
are as simple as their original readers; all the complexity comes from later
layers of interpretation. But Zornberg teaches us to read these later layers as
latent in the intrinsically overdetermined Bible itself (provided that we accept
the universality of her psychoanalytic theory). By contrast, in Alters literary criticism, biblical characterization is an effect of authorial intent; hardly trivial yet
tightly contained in the narrative frame as a vehicle for artistic communication,
a frame where no less putatively universal aesthetic principles predominate.
And in Sternbergs rationalism, the reader gained a more active role in the production of meaning, but this role was still constrained by concrete traces in the narrative, which he saw as signposts guiding the readers underspecified attention and
reactions.
By contrast to all these options, Zornberg has created an interpretive framework where the Bibles characters and readers only become more evolved as they
interact, blurring their boundaries and disturbing the premise that the plot/story
(rather than, say, the life/death) should be our unit of textual analysis. This
fusion of rabbinic tradition with psychoanalysis is informed by her reading of
the name Ivri (Hebrew) as a translator (one who carries across).84 By shirking the sine qua non of methodology (a fixed standpoint from which to objectify
the text) she succeeds in creating audibleif not always historically, literarily, or
rationally plausibleresonances between what the Bible does not say and what
we project onto it. In this sense, she is the most direct heir to Auerbachs background. This concept may not describe the characters themselveswho may, everyone admits, remain forever inaccessible to usbut it does describe something
about how we want to relate to them. Zornbergs implied reader has been exposed
to a reason whose reasons Sternbergs reader does not know: the incessant, transgressive, and potentially transcendent logic of desire.
Yet despite the clear psychological progression that we witnessed in Jacob
from symptoms to trauma towards catharsisit seems typical of Zornbergs approach that even when he does reveal the end, Jacobs children never actually
respond to his words. In the last line of her book, he is just about to merge
mystery and meaning, and teach his children to speak themselves toward blessing85 ... 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 conversation
with oneself by way of the other, runs deep in Zornbergs work on the Bible and
already in her doctoral thesis from the 1970s.86 Even as she instructs us to cultivate
an attentive sensibility, Zornberg also accentuates a deafening silence, a yawning
84. Zornberg, Let Me See That Good Land: The Story of a Human Life, in Answering a Question with a Question: Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Jewish Thought, ed. Lewis Aron and Libby
Henik (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 236264.
86. Avivah H. Gottlieb, George Eliot: A Biographical and Intellectual Study, (PhD diss.,
Cambridge, 1971). For one of many revealing parallels with her biblical criticism, see Gottlieb/
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chasm between her and us. Her audience are not interlocutors but, precisely, auditors, whose spokenand even unspoken responses made it possible for
me to discover ... what further might be said....87 Perhaps this skepticism as to
the possibility of authentic dialogue is the dark side of her theory of the mind.
*****
Der liebe Gott steckt im einzelnen, as Aby Warburg used to say. Our dear Lord
is in the details.88 Warburgs aphorism holds equally true for each of these five
twentieth-century biblical scholars (more literally for some; more literarily for
others). Each scholar, from Auerbach (1946) to Zornberg today, framed a panoramic viewpoint on the Bibles poetics from the angle of one problematic stylistic
feature. Further, despite their very different solutions, they shared a general sense
of why this feature is so problematic. The Bible organizes information with singular reticence; its words are neither tied together by the smooth hypotaxis of Homer
nor broken by the radical syncopation of Gertrude Stein. Rather, biblical characters and events seem to form meaningful connections because of the occult links
between whatever is not explicitly told about them. As a way of piquing the audiences interest, of course, such reticence is available to all narrators, but it seems
that the Bibles narrators, unlike Homer and more proximal counterparts,89 were
the first to turn it into a full-blown technique. As critics, then, rather than circumnavigate these marked blanks by writing them off to textual errors or other
tokens of our own historical distance from the Bibles narrators (as did Kugel),
maybe we need to integrate them within a more general theory of how the
Bible communicates (as did everyone else).
Starting from this shared problem, however, our critics solutions diverged.
For Kugel, the only real blank was our own incapacity to let the Bible be. He
would be deaf, for example, to the suspense that Auerbach heard in Abrahams
silence during the Akedah. To Kugel, the Bibles audience knew Abraham and
what he stood for: rather than a dramatic play of words and silence or light and
shadow, they experienced his story as a fairly transparent myth. All the more
so, then, was Kugel obliged to reject Alters notion that the subtle interplay
between a characters speech and reticence must be artfully controlled, as in the
case of Joseph. Whereas Alter gave the Bible a literary author who speaks by
means of silence (and expects us to listen), Kugel maintained that Alter, as a literary reader, had learned to hear voices that were never really there.
To overcome this polemic between historical distance and modern literary nearness, Sternberg introduced an essential new variable: an explicit,
Zornbergs analysis of the obstinate blocking of the popular imagination that Eliot had to confront in
her 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, 889; Kawashima, Death of the Rhapsode, 45 and references.
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verifiable construct of the Bibles implied reader. Instead of objectivist or merely
subjective criteria for evaluating whether or not the Bibles omissions are systematically meaningful, Sternberg used this reader-response model in order to
compare the concrete effects of omissions (gaps) on narrative development.
Thus he recovered Auerbachs and Alters premise that the Bibles reticence
may be significant, but he also gave it a clearer functional profile by correlating
it to the readers basic narrative interests. In the process, he even absorbed
Kugels counterclaim that absence of information is not necessarily significant:
there is also room for meaningless blanks in Sternbergs theory, but their lack
of functionality must be proven by their lack of effect on the reader. As Sternbergs
credo says, There are no package deals in narration. Any categorization that
leans too hard on formal, historical, or ideological criteria will fail to describe
how a text actually develops as a temporal system of signs and interpretations.
In practice, however, by overlaying the narrative timeline with the logical sequence of possible readings, his approach actually put the Bible into a very
tight package of narratological tactics. Maybe too tight: Zornberg agrees with
Sternberg that the reading process itself is the best guide to biblical poetics, but
she does not accept his version of the Bibles implied reader. Rather than reconcile
contradictions and seek closure at every turn, Zornberg uses midrash and psychoanalysis to conjure a reader who doubles as a permeable seam where the text and
its intertexts can leak, bleed, mingle. It is hard to say what, exactly, governs their
alchemical interaction. Yet their dynamics do crystallize more clearly around our
shared interpretive problem: a poignant lack or blank in Josephs character. For
Zornberg, this blank, like its opposite pole (the block, a surfeit of signification),
is not an aesthetic device to be defused but a cipher of desire to be pursued in the
direction of blessing... a cathartic answer from an auditordivine or human?
who remains strangely mute.
The main goal of this comparison has been to do for each of these scholars
what they have done for the Bible itself: to show how their solutions to textual
anomalies and their frequent moments of mutual misrecognition arise from their
more general interpretive warrants, that is, from basically different things that
they consider themselves licensed to seek in the text. Hence it could be called
an exercise in biblical meta-criticism.90 Its argument, however, is not limited
to this meta-level, as it comes from, and should return to, a series of specific interpersonal and pedagogical encounters with equally complex dynamics. As literary theory for the sake of theory has reached a dead end in my view, and as no
meta-criticism is complete without self-criticism, let me conclude by trying,
ever so briefly, to specify my own position in these dynamics and by sketching
the praxis of theory, that is, the pedagogy, that I hope this essay will reinvigorate.
First, within the field of research on the Hebrew Bibles poetics, I hope that
by comparing ones own interpretive warrants to each of these scholars, it will be
easier to distinguish more clearly between how we, in our role as readers, establish
the text for us to interpret in the first place, and what we think this text really
90. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this term.
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says. Of course, in general, these are two points on the same hermeneutic circle.
The very assumptions that inform our selection of particular versions, variants,
and aspects of the text as evidence (our interpretive warrants) are major determinants of its meaning. But there is still a choice to make between three ways
that we can deal with this inherent circularity of all interpretation. We can methodologically limit it by circumscribing the text in advance as a particular kind
of object; we can ideologically perpetuate it by failing to distinguish ourselves
from the text at all; or we can rigorously and recursively objectify the implicit intersubjective dialogue that always motivates what we look for in the text and then
only thentry to sort out this dialogue from what the text itself tells us. Naturally
these dialogues include (sometimes polemical) scholarly debates between the
Bibles lines, and so at a very crude level this helps to keep a lid on personal
feuds. But as I have argued, an equally influential and more elusive partner in
our encounter with the text is the specter of its implied reader(s), towards whom
we 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 on
our own theories of the text than our explicit methodology or paradigm, and
often the two do not neatly coincide. For instance, all these scholars (even the defiantly postrabbinic Sternberg) are obliged to entertain the rabbis as one of the Bibles
implied readers and they all must position themselves in relation to midrash. Some
of their reactions to midrash are conscious and explicit, others much less so, but
without drawing the line more clearly, it is difficult to tell who is really arguing
with the rabbis and who is arguing with, say, fans of the rabbis in postmodern literary criticism. The biblical scholar often writes alone, but she is always talking to
someone; this someone is not just whomever she cites but may be an imagined,
concealed, collective, historical, or hybrid interlocutor as well. Her chosen text is
a product of their conversation, not the other way around.
Translating this into the classroom, perhaps this mode of reflexive intersubjectivity (rather than objectivity or subjectivity) also offers the model for a narrative poetics of the Bible that is better adapted to teaching the Bible as part of an
undergraduate humanities curriculum. As an unabashed amiable Californian in
sneakers (as Kugel calls those of us who still feel that the Bible can be
brought alive to students under the rubric of literature,91 without necessarily endorsing literary criticism as a freestanding research paradigm), I see this problem
as a gap between the specialized debates that drive research and the human interests that bring students to the text. To address this problem, some biblical scholars
may try to translate research into teaching; others may skip the research and give
them what they want by making the text as accessible as possible, perhaps at the
cost of problematizing their own simplifications. Recently I have wondered if
what they want is somewhere between these two options. Perhaps they do
want to learnin an explicit, step-by-step wayhow to participate in both the affective and the intellectual experience of great scholars as they encounter the text
in dialogue with one another and with many earlier interpretive traditions. A
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rigorously intersubjective approach to the Bible as narrative communication can
help to unpack how this mixed bag of passions and obsessions motivates even
the most subtle debates about what the biblical text is, let alone what it means.
To that end, my comparison of these scholars does not promote any disciplinary norm for what counts as valid knowledge of the Bible. Instead I try to illuminate the competing commitments that seem to make each of these norms so
valuable to their adherents. At bottom, these are human commitments, no
matter how rarefied or reified they might seem. Whoever we think the Bibles
implied reader is, whatever relationship to her we cultivate, her silent presence mediates our experience of the texts just as much as their authors intention or their narrative architecture. Precisely because this reader, unlike the text, remains silenta
dark mirror of our desires, ideals, and ambitionsour relation to her is most of
all a displaced relation to ourselves. But if this approach takes a certain distance
from methodological objectification, it does not entail a relapse into ideological
navel gazing. Rather than valorize a particular ideal reader, the practice of its critical poetics, and critical pedagogy, is to assess the fusion and fission between
minds of many kinds that this texts dense semantic background has generated
since long before Auerbachs influential thesis and will continue to radiate long
after our own reactions have faded.
James Adam Redfield
Stanford University
Palo Alto, California
150

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AJS Review 39:1 (April 2015), 121150

B EHIND A UERBACH S B ACKGROUND : F IVE WAYS TO

James Adam Redfield

There is a crack in everything

James Adam Redfield