Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (29 page)

1. Simon Rawidowicz, "On Interpretation," in
   Studies in Jewish Thought
   , ed., Nahum Glatzer, (Philadelphia, 1974), p. 52.
   

2. Julia Kristeva,
   Semiotike
   (Paris: 1969), p. 146. Implied here is a claim about the notion of intertextuality. It has been claimed that what distinguishes "intertextuality" from the traditional study of "sources and influences" is the anonymity and generality of the former as ''discursive space," as opposed to the specificity and identifiability of the latter. Jonathan Culler,
   The Pursuit of Signs
   (Ithaca, 1981), p. 106, has raised this question. If this be true, then as Culler claims, it becomes quite impossible, by definition, to study the intertexts of a specific text. The solution may be assayed by distinguishing differently between "sources and influences," which is a
   

   diachronic
   concept, and "intertexts," which is a
   synchronic
   concept. This means that the distinction between traditional sources and influences and intertextuality is
   

   not located in the anonymity and generality of the latter versus the identifiability of the former, but in their systemic status. Sources and influences are comparable to the historical reconstructions of diachronic linguistics, while intertextuality is a function of the semiotic system of relations and differences present in the literary and linguistic system at a given moment. Intertextuality may therefore comprise a
   specific
   identifiable discursive space which makes a
   specific
   text intelligible. Now we may assume that while often the intertexts of a given text will not be remembered consciously, (''anonymous discursive practices, codes whose origins are lost") there is no reason why there should not be other intertexts whose origins are not lost and discursive practices which "make possible the signifying practices of later texts," but are not anonymous. Accordingly, we can then proceed to study allusions and even quotations in literature as a synchronic semantic phenomenon, intertextuality, without thereby confusing it with the diachronic study of sources and influences. This is a different sort of distinction from the one usually made between allusion which is intentional and intertextuality which is not. Cf. James Chandler, "Romantic Allusiveness,"
   Critical Inquiry
   8 (1982), pp. 464–465. In my matrix, allusion and quotation, as well as the lost codes and anonymous discursive practices, are all species of one genus, as opposed to sources and influences. For a similar perspective see Ziva BenPorat, "Intertextuality" [Hebrew],
   Hassifrut
   34 (1985), pp. 170–178 (English abstract, p. vi), especially, p. 170.
   

3. See, for example, even Isaak Heinemann, "For the depictions of the sages are not 'interpretations' in the scientific sense, but even in the places where they gave their words a 'prooftext' [
   asmakhta
   ] from the Bible, in truth they were following the path of artistic creation."
   Darkhe ha'aggadah
   , p. 23.
   

4. Galit HasanRokem,
   Proverbs in Israeli Folk Narratives: A Structural Semantic Analysis
   (Helsinki, 1982), p. 55, has described the semantics of this tension.
   

5. This does not mean that one can say anything one wants about the text and that all interpretations are equally legitimate. I only make this point because this seems to be a common misconception about midrash (and, for that matter, deconstructionism).
   

6. By this term I do not mean poetry as opposed to prose but
   belle lettres
   as opposed to expository or interpretive prose. I do not want to use the term "literature," because it is so contested.
   

7. Mikhail Bakhtin, quoted in T. Todorov,
   Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle
   (Minneapolis, 1984) p. 62. Todorov's book is itself an admirable exposition of Bakhtin's thought, composed almost entirely of quotations.
   

1. For the theory of intertextuality as both violating and preserving a tradition, see the discussion in my "Old Wine in New Bottles,"
   Poetics Today
   8:4 (1988), pp. 540–542 where some comparison to modem poetics is undertaken as well
   

2. Stefan Morawski, "The Basic Functions of Quotation," in
   Sign, Language, Culture
   , ed. Greimas et al. (The Hague, 1970). p. 694. (emphasis mine).
   

3. This is a very different position from those interpretations of midrash that see it as belonging to folk literature. For another case in which folk traditions are cited and made part of the intertextual structure of the Mekilta, cf. Lauterbach's edition, p. 176ff.
   

4. Both the text and its interpretation are somewhat obscure. Some have understood that the snake falls apart from fear of the bird! (The Hebrew allows both readings.) It is the horror of the snake, however, which the text wishes to convey, and that reading renders it incoherent. Moreover, in Stith Thompson's
   Motif Index of Folk Literature
   (Bloomington, 1955–58), we read of birds that die when their shadows are stepped upon (D 2072.0.4), to which type I believe our tale belongs. B 765.14.1, i.e., "serpent reduces man to a heap of ashes by its gaze" also seems tangentially relevant. Perhaps more to the point, we should notice that this text actualizes a sort of topos (practically a universal at some deep structural level) of narrative structure in which the hero has to pass through a maze, guarded by a monster in order to achieve a desired end. The emphasis on the tracklessness of the waste and the terror of the snakes would be then a vivid realization of what is present within the structure of the biblical account of the passage to the promised land. This explanation accounts for the presence within this text in the immediate sequel of an apparently irrelevant story about snakes which otherwise seems to be merely attached by association. By this means, the intertextual equation, snake=monster, is made explicit and underlined. This interpretation has been suggested by Michael Riffaterre's oral comments regarding the ubiquity of this basic narrative structure in European texts.
   

5. This is why it is misleading to speak of innerbiblical midrash. There is something else going on when the text being interpreted is canonized, than in the precanonical situation.
   

6. Other language could be used to describe this basic opposition, to wit, Jakobson's (largely discredited) metonymy and metaphor, or even displacement and saturation (as in Riffaterre's usage, among others). Moreover, these correspond in fiction to what is called narrative and description (cf. Michael Riffaterre, "On the Diegetic Functions of the Descriptive,"
   Style
   , vol. 20 [1986], pp. 281–295). The point is that these refer to obvious and closely related aspects of all language.
   

7. Aside from changing Judah to Yehuda, I have cited here Judah Goldin's excellent and elegant translation of this passage in
   The Song at the Sea
   (New Haven, 1971), pp. 124–125.
   

8. For another, see below.
   

9. Palestinian Talmud, Rosh Hashana, 3:5=58d.
   

10. Goldin, p. 124 n.
    

11. For the cultural significance of such paradigms, see below, chapter 5.
    

12. Usually translated "parable," but see discussion below and especially chapter 5.
    

13. It would be tempting to see this double movement as a resolution of the difficulty provided by the fact that the verse doubles itself by continuing, "And the pillar of cloud
    

moved from in front of them and went behind them." Once again, biblical critics, noticing this superfluity, have hypothesized a juncture between J and E at this point. The objection to such an interpretation is, however, that the second movement in the midrash places the son behind the father again, so it does not seem like an attempt to interpret the second half of the verse.

1. My claim by this interpolation is that the "his" here refers explicitly to God, or at least that the reference is ambiguous—not merely in the connotative manner as in all midrashic king meshalim. The reason for this assertion is the way the verse is quoted, the verse which explicitly refers, of course, only to God.
   

2. Also drawn from my new translation of the Mekilta, this text has been completely corrupted in current editions, both vulgate and critical, and may only be restored by recourse to the oldest manuscripts.
   

3. HasanRokem,
   Proverbs
   , p. 56.
   

4. This analysis also makes clear the function of those midrashic texts which are
   only
   quotations strung together, sometimes for pages on end. These would be, on my theory, the very ideal type of midrash.
   

5. See his "The Reader's Perception of Narrative: Balzac's
   Paix du ménage
   ," in
   Interpretation of Narrative
   , ed. Mario J. Valdés and Owen J. Miller, (Toronto, 1978), pp. 28–38, especially pp. 35–36. Note that Riffaterre's reading, while it involves reduction, is not ultimately reductive. I emphasize this point because Riffaterre's readings differ from those of many other structuralists, of whom it might accurately be said that they reproduce the form/content dichotomy in such a way that the form of the text comes to be merely one possible way of packaging the content. This charge has been laid against structuralists including Riffaterre by Félix Bonati:
   

Jakobson's idea of the poem is precisely that of a discourse that projects over its syntagmatic axis elements of a single linguistic paradigm, i.e., a discourse that essentially repeats (and expands), by successive actualization of different elements of the same paradigm, the meaning that defines that paradigm (a view that recalls some of Riffaterre's analyses). . . . Moreover, the concrete form of the literary work, i.e., the singularity of its shape and determination, appears in it as, if not completely irrelevant, at least not relevant for the production of the meaning of the work. The rhetorical or stylistic differences of different versions of a story must be consequently regarded as merely artistic and not pertinent to their sense. We recognize here the old notion of a deep content that can be expressed by a virtual myriad of more or less pleasant forms. ("Hermeneutic Criticism and the Description of Form," in Valdés and Miller, p. 91.)

I believe that, at least in the case of Riffaterre, what prevents this charge from being accurate is the attention that he pays precisely to the transformations of the matrix paradigm into its successive syntagmatic realizations. While the theory sounds reductive, the practice is anything but. Similarly, the midrashic reduction of the meaning of a complex narrative to an element in a paradigm could be reductive, but somehow is not. The singularity of the narrative always remains with its irreducible residue of meaning. This is not to say, of course, that I accept in every respect Riffaterre's theoretical position. Where I sharply part company with him is in his insistence that the text rigidly

controls its own decoding, and even the filling of its gaps, a proposition which is obviously antithetical to my grounding of midrash in a theory of reading.

1. Oral presentation at seminar on "Semiotics of Fiction," at School of Criticism and Theory, 1987.
   

2. William Sibley Towner,
   The Rabbinic "Enumeration of Scriptural Examples": A Study a Rabbinic Pattern of Discourse with Special Reference to
   Mekilta d'R Ishmael, (Leiden, 1973).
   

3. This text has been analyzed by Towner on pp. 145ff.
   

29. Ibid., p. 99.

1. Mekilta to Exod. 16:4 and 14. (This is my own translation, based on the best manuscript readings and not on standard editions.) Characteristically, R. Shim'on's very verse is an amalgam of two verses.
   

2. M. Bakhtin, quoted in pp. 60–61.
   

3. The phrase "In (or by) your blood you will live," is actually repeated in the verse itself, and it is this repetition on which the midrash hangs its reading.
   

4. The verb "rebelled" occurs several times in the context of the verse, but the midrashist preferred here the explicit reference to Horev[=Sinai], in order to make his historical point.
   

5. Song of Songs Rabba
   , ed. Shimon Dunansky (Tel Aviv, 1980), pp. 29–30.
   

6. I do not wish to take any stand whatever on the historicity of the facts which are related in such stories. Whatever the answer to that question (and I am not sure we will ever have definitive answers to it), the stories nevertheless by definition tell the truth—that is, the truth of the view of the world which we can discern in their formcontent.
   

7. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Baba Metsia
   , fol. 59a–b.
   

8. I. Heinemann,
   Darkhe ha'aggadah
   , p. 11. Susan Handelman,
   The Slayers of Moses
   , pp. 40–41.
   

9. In a deeper sense, these two aspects of the content are one, and we have here an explicit reflection of the nexus between political power and "validity in interpretation." See Daniel Cottom, "The Enchantment of Interpretation,"
   Critical Inquiry
   11 (1985), pp. 573–594, who takes a position very similar to the one in our talmudic story. David Stern has treated the narrative from this point of view in a lecture delivered at Yale University's Faculty Midrash Seminar in Spring, 1985. See his "Midrash and Indeterminacy,"
   Critical Inquiry
   15 (1988), pp. 132–162. For an excellent general survey of the interpretive tradition regarding this narrative, see Izhak Englard, "The 'Oven of Akhnai': Various Interpretations of an Aggada'' [Hebrew],
   Annual of the Institute for Research in Jewish Law
   , 1 (1974), pp. 45–57.
   

10. The problem of the historical reference of talmudic stories is an extremely thorny one, particularly stories told in the late Babylonian Talmud about early Palestinian rabbis. Therefore, when I say "R. Yehoshua," it should be understood as shorthand for R. Yehoshua
    as represented in this text
    .
    

11. See Handelman,
    Moses
    , p. 42, who does not italicize the words, "It is not in heaven," although she does italicize, "Incline after a majority," indicating that she has missed the point that the former is a cited verse as well. She thus implicitly accepts the "tame" late reading of R. Yermia [see below] of
    what
    R. Yehoshua says, and ignores precisely the radical implications of
    how
    he says what he says.