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Review:
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.
121
122
123
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
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
126
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.
19. Kugel, Literary Criticism, 227.
20. On etiology as a central function of biblical narratives (myths), see Kugel, How to Read,
628.
21. Kugel, Literary Criticism, 22930.
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
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).
25. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 144.
26. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 157.
128
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.
129
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
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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132
133
134
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.
135
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).
136
OF
TO
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.
137
138
139
AND
B LESSING
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
141
142
143
144
145
146
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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148
149
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