Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (20 page)

The text of Exodus is declared unclear, because the connection between this passage and the immediately preceding one is not explicit in the biblical text. The immediately preceding verses tell a story of the arrival of the Israelites in a place called Refidim, where they have no water to drink. The people become rebellious,

and even threaten violence against Moses until God intervenes and sends water miraculously. The narrative finishes with the statement "He cared the name of the place Trial and Strife, because of the strife of the Israelites and their trying of God, saying, 'Is God among us, or isn't He?' " [v. 7]. And then immediately, "And Amaleq attacked." What is the connection between the two events, or rather, what is the meaning of the second following hard on the first? This is the gap that the midrash wishes to fir here. The text of Job is invoked as a solution to this hiatus or indeterminacy. In my reading of this text, the actual words cited from Job are only part of the text mobilized here in the interpretation. In order to understand how the text works, we ought to have a look at the quoted verse of Job in its context:

Can the rush grow without a swamp; can reeds wax large without water? While it is still in its youth, will it not be cut down, and be dry before any grass?
So
are the ways of those who forget God, and the hope of the scornful will be lost.

Now it can be seen that the text from Job is itself a simple parable, so by utilizing this parable to solve the indeterminacy of the Exodus text, the rabbis are performing precisely the same sort of hermeneutic operation that we have been considering until now. The explicit meaning of the Job text is that sinners will be punished and the implication is that those who do not sin will not be, as is, indeed, the message of the whole speech from which this is a quotation. This message is inserted into the gap of the Torah text which is now no longer unclear. The attack of Amaleq is a direct result of the previous events. Since they were forgetters of God ("Is God in our presence or not?"], therefore they were doomed to early death, and the connection is explained. However, we can go even further than this. In the story of the Torah, the problem has to do with water. The people have arrived at a desert place and there is no water for them to drink; they complain and ask for water. Now this narrative presents problems of its own, for if they are indeed in the depths of the desert, and there is no water for them to drink, their desperation and crying out for water is quite understandable. This problem has exercised interpreters of Exodus up to the present day. Our midrash, by using the mashal of Job, solves this problem as well. The lack of water which is spoken of is itself to be understood figuratively as lack of Torah, just as in the Job text those who forget God are compared to a stand of reeds whose water has dried up. Note again the interpretation of "water" as a symbol for Torah. Accordingly we see that it is the neglect of Torah which leads to the forgetting of God and then to sin; and the punishment for sin is ''the hope of the scornful will be lost."

The semiotic structure here is identical to that of the previous texts. A gapped narrative in the Torah is explicated by the application to it of a mashal, which is composed of verses from another part of the canon. The narrative gapfilling is structured both in plot and ideology by the mashal. Again as Hayden White perceives, "What the historian must bring to his consideration of the record are general notions of the
kinds of stories that might be found there
."
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The mashal structure therefore has the function of intertext—it controls the possible messages which can be sent and received in the midrashic culture; it is an explicit representation of the culturally specific "meaning system," making reading possible. The mashal itself has either the authority of Scripture or that of an anonymous code.

Another text about the mashal irt the introduction to the midrash on Song of Songs makes this idea clearer:

The rabbis say: Do not let this mashal be light in your eyes, for by means of this mashal one comes to comprehend the words of Torah. A
mashal
to a king who has lost a golden coin from his house or a precious pearl
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—does he not find it by means of a wick worth a penny? Similarly, let not this
mashal
be light in your eyes, for by means of this
mashal
one comes to comprehend the words of Torah. Know that this is so, for Solomon, by means of this
mashal
,
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understood the exact meaning of the Torah. Rabbi Judah says: It is to teach you that everyone who teaches words of Torah to the many is privileged to have the Holy Spirit descend upon him.
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From whom do we learn this? From Solomon, who became he taught words of Torah to the many was privileged to have the Holy Spirit descend upon him and utter three books, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs.
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This passage gives us some very important insight into the nature of the mashal. It is figured here as something which does not cost much, but nevertheless has great value. What is the meaning of this figure? I suggest that it designates the fact that the meshalim (plural of mashal) are themselves a corpus of wellknown narrative themes, characters, and actions. The same relations and events recur over and over: There was a king who had a son; the son angered him and was banished; the king regretted his action. There was a king with a beloved bride, etc. These stories are even more conventionalized and schematized than fairy tales. This point about the meshalim themselves has been made before,
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but it has not been argued that this is essential to the signifying structure of the mashal form of interpretation. Our text does make this clear. The mashal is a wick worth a penny; it is "common coin" and this is precisely its value. Since it comes from the common stock Of possible characters and possible actions and motivations, it provides the possible, legitimate ways to fill in and understand the hidden biblical narrative. This wick which is so common that it is worth only a penny is an excellent figure, it seems, for the intertext in the sense of the cultural code, the anonymous cultural code which is available to everyone.

Our analysis up until now suggests that the mashal is not truly a narrative at all, but a narrative structure or scheme. Lest I be misunderstood, I am making this claim not about the genre, but about the tokens. I claim that the schematic story of a king and his associates is not a story at all, but a metalinguistic statement about another story. It is not analogous to the telling of a fairy tale, but rather to the analysis of the tale by an interpreter. What the mashalinterpretation reveals is a code which allows for the creation of narrative within the culture. The mashal does not stand beside the concrete situation but creates it, or allows it to be created. The very story did not exist before the mashal; it is enfolded within it. The mashal is the matrix or code out of which the narrative of the Torah is generated; it is both syntactic and semantic structural description, and necessarily, then, as conventional and schematic, as fixed, as the morphology of the folk tale described by Propp. Thus it has properties of Kermode's
fabula
.

Kermode sums up his theory in the following way:

The matter of this chapter is really quite simple. Of an agent there is nothing to be said except that he performs a function: Betrayal, judgment. . . . The

key to all this development—from fable to written story, from story to character, from character to more story—is interpretation. At some point a narrative achieves a more or less fixed form; in the case of the gospels this was the formation of a more or less fixed canon. There were many other gospels, but their failure to achieve canonicity cost them their lives; four remain, and each illustrates in its own way the manner in which precanonical intepretation works. Some of the differences between them are no doubt due to the varying needs and interests of the communities for whom the evangelists originally wrote, and to their own diverse theological predispositions; but many are induced by the pressure of narrative interpretation, not independent of these other pressures, but quite different from the kinds of institutional commentary and exegesis that typically constitute post canonical interpretation. For these early interpretations take the form of new narrative, whether by a reorganization of existing material or by the inclusion of new material. In the first stage this new material characteristically derives from texts—Old Testament texts tacitly regarded as somehow part of the same story.
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Now, in some ways Kermode's description applies directly to midrash. Here also, as we have amply seen, we have narrative expansion derived from other texts, tacitly—or not so tacitly—regarded as part of the same story. As such, however, his system presents several paradoxes. The most obvious is that Kermode claims this type of interpretation to be characteristic only of the precanonical situation whereas midrash is obviously postcanonical. Moreover, Kermode's description wavers on the very crucial point of the status of the primitive fable." Although Kermode himself presents them as if they were equal alternatives,
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it is in fact one thing to state that there was an early, historically accurate account which was elaborated by midrashic techniques or other sorts of narrative expansions and quite another to claim this fabula as the underlying scynchronic structure of the Gospel stories without positing its or their historical reality. Just how fraught this issue is will become clear when we pursue our application of Kermode's analysis to the mashal a little further. It is clear that the mashal can only fit the synchronic version of the primitive fable theory; there is no possible claim that there was a historical story about such agents as a king, his son, and robbers which was somehow elaborated into the Torah's account. But the whole genre of the Torah requires that it be taken seriously as a "true" story. This point has been made by Sternberg, who observes that the narrative "illegitimates all thought of fictionality on pain of excommunication. . . ."
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If the midrashic reading is a claim that the mashal represents the ideological/narrative matrix from which the Bible text is synchronically derived, how can that text claim—in the view of the midrash—to be true? It would seem at first glance that only a fiction in the sense of a madeup story can have an underlying, synchronic structure, but history cannot. Stated baldly, how can a true story have a primitive fabula underlying it?

What we need here is a model that accounts for two structures, each answering to one of the alternatives which Kermode has raised. The issue is not

whether we consider the biblical narrative as fiction with its synchronically underlying fabula or as historiography with the fibula as diachronic "kernel of truth" or ancient eyewitness account, but something much more complex and sophisticated. The Bible must be read as historiography; that much has been made clear by Sternberg, but it is ideologized historiography, as also shown by him. Indeed, according to Hayden White all historiographical narrative is structured by plots and genres in ways that are controlled by the personal and social ideology of the writer of the history.
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Historical narratives are, for White, "metaphorical statements which suggest a relation of similitude between such events and processes and the story types that we conventionally use to endow the events of our lives with culturally sanctioned meanings." Writing history is the articulation "of a complex of symbols which gives us directions for finding an icon of the structure of those events in our literary tradition,'' in a word, a mashal. I claim, therefore, that if the Bible is historiography, then midrash is precisely metahistoriography. The biblical narrative, at least as much as any historiography, is structured by metaphor at its very heart; it could hardly be a mere transparent chronicle of events. The midrashic mashal is to be

understood as a raising to consciousness of the unstated tropics of the biblical history. It is the schematic statement of the icons of the structures of events in the literary tradition, the Prophets and Writings. As the midrash says, "of them it is
interpreted
in the tradition," which means, as we recall, the Prophets and Writings.

Louis Marin in an essay on a parable of Pascal's has brilliantly addressed precisely this use of the parable form. In Pascal's text, the speaker is addressing a young nobleman and in trying to teach him some truth about his place in the world tells him a classic sort of parabolic tale about a man who is stranded on an isolated island, where he discovers the people have lost their king. Since he has the appearance of the king, he is taken as such by the people, and after a period of some hesitation accepts the role, remembering however that it is only a role. Now, on one mode of reading we could take this as a moral parable of a fairly simple semiotic structure. You are the castaway, young friend. Know that you have no more right by nature to be a nobleman than did that man, but accept your role and perform it with self knowledge. Indeed, on one level, Pascal's text authorizes such a straight reading. Matin does much more. He shows how the parable is not merely analogously related to its application, to an interpretation of its meaning, but that it is the underlying structure of the biography of the narrator's interlocutor. Thus:

One perceives how narrative and code function in relation to each other in the construction of Pascalian discourse: the first narrative is (in its textual manifestation) the figural development of the notion of chance occurrence contained in the second code. This notion appears in the narrative only in the form of an "image," without being expressly manifested: the tempest, the

disappearance of the island's king, the shipwreck, and finally the castaway's corporal and facial resemblance to the lost king, are all so many figures of contingency, the notion of which permits the deciphering of the parabolic narrative by another narrative which is unveiled in its turn, as it comes into contact with the "parable," at a point of articulation marked by the term "chance occurrence."
This other narrative is the biographical "structure" of the interlocutor: his birth as son of a duke, his finding himself "in" the world, the marriage of his parents and all those of his ancestors, a thousand unforeseen events which left their mark on his family and whose narration would constitute the family tradition
.
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