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Behind Auerbach's “Background”: Five Ways to Read What Biblical Narratives Don't Say
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 May 2015
Abstract
The Hebrew Bible's narrative style has impressed interpreters of many periods and perspectives with its powerful tension between fragmentary speech and meaningful silence, summed up in Erich Auerbach's 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 Auerbach's 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 Bible's “background” serves as a metaphor by which the biblical critic navigates a complex relationship with her own normative construct of the reader's 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.
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References
1. Casati, Roberto and Varzi, Achille, Holes and Other Superficialities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995)Google Scholar, 1.
2. Alter, Robert, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981)Google Scholar, 17.
3. I rely on Toulmin's distinction between “data” and “warrants” (Toulmin, Stephen E., The Uses of Argument [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003 (1958)], 92–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar). 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.” Toulmin's insight (Uses, 33–6) 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 Chandler, James, Davidson, Arnold, and Harootunian, Harry, eds., Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar.
4. This is an extension of the so-called “map is not territory” principle; see Borges's classic parable, “On Exactitude in Science” (in Borges, Juan Luis, Collected Fictions, trans. Hurley, Andrew [New York: Viking, 1998]Google Scholar, 325).
5. As Casati and Varsi point out (Holes, 183–4), at least in an artificially circumscribed domain, I might try to avoid a hole by giving a point-by-point description of the space around the hole. But 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 Abbott, Edwin Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (London: Seeley, 1884)Google Scholar.
6. Despite certain exceptions that prove this rule, e.g. the fondness for “margins” in Derridean deconstruction and in Rabbi Akiva's midrash (see my discussion below and Handelman, Susan, The Slayers of Moses: the Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982]Google Scholar, 38 and 169–70).
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 Barr, James, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament [Oxford: Clarendon, 1968], 6–13Google Scholar. For another acute assessment of biblical philology's implicit epistemology, see Tzevat, Matitiahu, “Common Sense and Hypothesis in Old Testament Study,” in The Meaning of the Book of Job and Other Biblical Studies [New York: Ktav, 1980], 189–204)Google Scholar.
8. See the conclusion to Kugel's “Some Thoughts on Future Research into Biblical Style: Addenda to The Idea of Biblical Poetry,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 9, no. 28 (1984): 116Google Scholar; his criticisms of Fishbane in “The Bible's Earliest Interpreters,” Prooftexts 7, no. 3 (1987): 269–283Google Scholar; his sketch of the “wisdom mentality” and the four interpretive assumptions of the Bible's postexilic interpreters, “Ancient Biblical Interpretation and the Biblical Sage,” in Studies in Ancient Midrash, ed. Kugel, James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1–26Google Scholar, developed in his monumental How to Read the Bible (New York: Free Press, 2007)Google Scholar; 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 Bible's 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).
10. Kugel, James, “On the Bible and Literary Criticism,” Prooftexts 1, no. 3 (1981): 230Google Scholar (emphasis added).
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12. Kugel, “Literary Criticism,” 219.
13. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 164.
14. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 143–162.
15. Kugel, “Literary Criticism,” 230.
16. Kugel, “Literary Criticism,” 230.
17. Kugel says quite plainly that “the Biblical world” did not have a sense of “literature” or “history.” Rather, these texts were meant to “explain the present” (How to Read, 62). His idea of the biblical audience's time as equivalent to the time of their ancestors is ripe for Johannes Fabian's critique of “allochronism” (Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object [New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 (1983)], 6–7)Google Scholar.
18. Sahlins, Marshall, How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 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, 62–8.
21. Kugel, “Literary Criticism,” 229–30.
22. Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970)Google Scholar and “The Problem of Double Meaning as Hermeneutic Problem and as Semantic Problem,” in The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Ihde, Don (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 61–76Google Scholar.
23. Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: die Wirklichkeitsdarstellung in der abendländischen Literatur (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1946)Google Scholar, 20 (all translations mine). Auerbach's hintergründig (“backgroundish”), as opposed to the vordergründig (“foregroundish”) Homeric style, are clearly marked as the sole technical neologisms in this chapter (Mimesis, 16). The actual phrase, “fraught with background,” was gained in translation by Auerbach's translator, Willard R. Trask. In Auerbach's letters to Princeton University Press (C0728, Folder 9, Box 1, Princeton University Press Archive), he praises Trask's abilities (“He is an excellent translator, but a little touchy.”) Auerbach met Trask more than once to go over 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 Alter's admiration for Auerbach elsewhere (“Response,” Prooftexts 27, no. 2 [2007]: 368).
25. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 144.
26. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 157.
27. Auerbach, Mimesis, 17 (emphasis added).
28. Auerbach, Mimesis, 16.
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 Auerbach's Mimesis, quite successfully in my opinion (see 7–8, 16).
30. Sternberg, Meir, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar, 85 (emphasis added). Based on the author's dissertation (Hebrew University, 1971).
31. Sternberg, Meir, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, 236.
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 Sternberg's 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): 327–8Google Scholar. See also: “Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (II),” Poetics Today 24, no. 3 (2003): 517–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34. Not only is this not a new question in biblical poetics, it was not even new in Auerbach's 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-schiller-goethe.de/seiten/zeittafel.php?j=1797, access date 5/10/2013). Auerbach's 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.
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, 12–13 and 308 n. 22). I use these more familiar terms in keeping with the conventions established by Forster, E. M. (Aspects of the Novel [London: Harcourt, 1956 (1927)])Google Scholar.
36. Sternberg, Expositional Modes, 50, Poetics, 186.
37. Sternberg, Poetics, 129.
38. Sternberg, Poetics, 192. Note, however, that although Sternberg's 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 Auerbach's 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 Sternberg's “’izun ‘adin ba-sipur ’ones Dinah,” Ha-sifrut 4, no. 2 (1973): 226Google Scholar.
40. Mintz, Alan, “On the Tel Aviv School of Poetics,” Prooftexts 4, no. 3 (1984): 229Google Scholar.
41. Sternberg, Expositional Modes, 257–8. As a specialist in exposition, surely it is no accident that Sternberg is so circuitous. His formal definition of “gaps” appears at the very end of his chapter (Expositional Modes, 50–55) and is preceded (roughly forty pages into his own book!) by a comment on Trollope that could double as a tongue-in-cheek self-reference: “... the panting and 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. Tomashevsky, Boris, “Thematics,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lemon, Lee and Reis, Marion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965)Google Scholar, 67. This is a slightly abridged version; for the full translation, see “Thématique,” in Théorie de la Littérature, ed. Todorov, Tzvetan (Paris, Le Seuil, 1965), 263–309Google Scholar.
43. Saussure's famous metaphor for the linguistic sign (Cours de linguistique générale, ed. Charles Bally, Albert Séchehaye (with Albert Riedlinger), in the critical re-edition by Tullio de Mauro [Paris: Payot, 1995 (1916)], 157).
44. See Sternberg's detailed criticism in Expositional Modes, 308 n. 22.
45. For Tomashevsky, narrative themes acquire “reality” from “vital issues, current, topical questions” outside the text (“Thematics,” 64). Because he uses this external definition of the narrative “dominant,” the term “formalist” is actually a misnomer for Tomashevsky; on the contrary, he tries to fix how narrative forms operate in order to keep them subordinate to narrative's 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), 350–377). Sternberg countered both of these reifying moves by formulating his “Proteus Principle,” which means, in this case, that there is no fixed correspondence between linguistic form and literary function (see Hebrews between Cultures: Group Portraits and National Literature [Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1988], 58–9Google Scholar).
46. Sternberg, Expositional Modes, 8 and 308 n. 16; Tomashevksy, “Thematics,” 67.
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).
48. For a rare object of Sternberg's admiration, see Bordwell, David, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985)Google Scholar. See also Sternberg, “Universals (II),” his three-part “Telling in Time” article series (Poetics Today 11, no. 4 (1990): 901–948Google Scholar; Poetics Today 13, no. 3 (1992): 463–541CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Poetics Today 27, no. 1 (2006): 125–235)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, or his more succinct “Epilogue: How (Not) to Advance toward the Narrative Mind,” in Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps, ed. Brône, Geert and Vandaele, Jeroen (Hague: de Gruyter, 2009), 455–532CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49. Bal, Mieke, “The Bible as Literature: a Critical Escape,” Diacritics 16, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 71–79Google Scholar; Fewell, Danna Nolan and Gunn, David M., “Tipping the Balance: Sternberg's Reader and the Rape of Dinah,” Journal of Biblical Literature 110, no. 2 (1991): 193–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sober attempts to adjudicate these critiques have been made by, respectively, Boyarin, Daniel (“The Politics of Biblical Narratology: Reading the Bible like/as a Woman,” Diacritics 20, no. 4 [Winter 1990]: 31–42)Google Scholar and Noble, Paul (“A ‘Balanced’ Reading of the Rape of Dinah: Some Exegetical and Methodological Observations,” Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 4, no. 2 [1995]: 172–203)Google Scholar.
50. Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (New York: Schocken, 2001), 134–40Google Scholar, 157. Compare especially to Bal, “Critical Escape.”
51. Not for nothing is the detective story one of Sternberg's favorite genres; see Expositional Modes, 159–182 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 (Segal, Eyal, “Closure in Detective Fiction,” Poetics Today 31, no. 2 [2003]: 153–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
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 Sternberg's Poetics (1985) was published in the same period that midrash was taken up by literary theory, with much excitement (e.g. Hartman, Geoffrey and Budick, Sanford eds., Midrash and Literature [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986])Google Scholar and critique (e.g. Halivni, David Weiss, Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], 158–163CrossRefGoogle Scholar). As in Kugel's critique of “literature” above, then, the stakes of Sternberg's critique of midrash are more local than he acknowledges: two competing strands of poststructuralism, one (Sternberg's) more in line with Jakobson's original project, the other (Zornberg's) embracing a “turn to the subject” that we might associate more with figures like Kristeva and Lacan.
58. I learned much from debating this aspect of Zornberg's work with Ziva Hassenfeld-Reimer and Steve Weitzman.
59. Ross, Tamar, “Review of Genesis: The Beginning of Desire,”B.D.D. 3 (Summer 1996): 55Google Scholar. See also Daniel Boyarin's discussion of Zornberg and midrash in his 1996 review of her Beginning, available on her website: http://www.avivahzornberg.com/book-reviews.html (accessed 9/5/2013).
60. In addition to book reviews / review essays like Ross's, and her following point-counterpoint with Avraham Walfish (see “Comments on Tamar Ross' Review of Genesis: The Beginning of Desire,” B.D.D. 6 [1998]: 45–51, and her “Response,” B.D.D. 6 [1998]: 53–6), I have found only the psychoanalytic community to have engaged more substantively with Zornberg's work (see the diverse responses to her “Jonah: a Fantasy of Flight,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 18, no. 3 [2008]: 271–299CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
61. Zornberg, Particulars, 5. For closely related reading strategies by (not coincidentally, I think) feminist critics, see Pardes, Ilana, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, and Trible, Phyllis, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1994)Google Scholar.
62. Zornberg resolutely maintains her distinction from narrowly academic criticism, calling it “methodical” (The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis [New York: Schocken, 1995]Google Scholar, 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.)
63. Zornberg, Beginning, 352–381.
64. Zornberg, Beginning, 353 and 419 n. 3–5.
65. Borrowing this phrase from Kermode, Frank (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000])CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 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]Google Scholar, 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 petuḥah] 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).
67. Zornberg, Beginning, 355.
68. Zornberg, Beginning, 356.
69. In reference to the Hebrew Bible, Auerbach playfully stretches the German root for “history” to cover three dimensions of our experience that positivist historicism usually tries to separate: (1) character or “personal history” (Personengeschichte), (2) universal or “world history” (Weltgeschichte), and (3) the “layers” of reader's and character's shared consciousness (the Hebrew Bible is, he says, vielschichtig und hintergründig, with gleichzeitig übereinandergelagerte Schichten des Bewusstseins. See this important passage in Mimesis, 17.).
70. Zornberg, Beginning, 357.
71. Zornberg, Beginning, 359. I assume she is alluding to a talmudic term for the blind: sagya' nehoraya', “filled with light.”
72. See for example Zornberg, Beginning 216–7, and 321–2.
73. Zornberg, Beginning, 359.
74. Zornberg, Beginning, 360.
75. Zornberg, Beginning, 363.
76. Zornberg, Beginning, 361.
77. Zornberg, Beginning, 361–3.
78. Zornberg, Beginning, 368.
79. “The poetic crisis, the experience of the ‘blank’ [is] the model for our understanding of the theme of ‘blocking,’ of the ‘absence of God’” (Zornberg, Beginning, 368). It seems that in Zornberg's lexicon, blank : block :: trauma : symptom.
80. Zornberg, Beginning, 363.
81. For a review of related psychoanalytic problems with Moses's “slowness of speech,” see Barzilai, Shuli, “Mind the Gap: Some Midrashic Propositions for Moses and Monotheism,” Psychoanalytic Review 91, no. 6 (2004): 831–852CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
82. Zornberg, Beginning, 365.
83. Zornberg, Beginning, 368.
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. Aron, Lewis and Henik, Libby (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 236–264Google Scholar.
85. Zornberg, Beginning, 381.
86. Avivah H. Gottlieb, “George Eliot: A Biographical and Intellectual Study,” (PhD diss., Cambridge, 1971). For one of many revealing parallels with her biblical criticism, see Gottlieb/Zornberg's 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. Gombrich, Ernst, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London, Warburg Institute, 1970)Google Scholar, 13.
89. Sternberg, Poetics, 88–9; Kawashima, Death of the Rhapsode, 4–5 and references.
90. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this term.
91. Kugel, “Literary Criticism,” 217.