The Midrashic Impulse and the Contemporary Literary Response to Trauma by Monica Osborne (review)

In The Midrashic Impulse and the Contemporary Literary Response to Trauma, Monica Osborne identifies in discourse surrounding trauma a seemingly irreconcilable gap between the imperative to remember and the impossibility of knowing. She writes, “Attempts to represent the Holocaust violate its memory” (xv). In the face of this difficulty, Osborne urges a shift away from representational modes and draws attention to the potential of the ancient Jewish tradition of Midrash to inform a literary response to the experience of trauma. A midrashic response, she explains, bears witness to what is lost by attending to silences and gaps—by acknowledging absence—rather than attempting to recreate or re-present the unknowable. Osborne shows the midrashic impulse already at work in contemporary literature and makes a powerful case for the value of a midrashic reading to the task of grappling with the traumas of both past and present.

Osborne argues that the desire to respond to the horror of the Holocaust must be checked by the awareness that no adequate response is possible. Taking as her starting point Theodor Adorno’s famous injunction against poetry after Auschwitz, Osborne explains how efforts at representation become a substitute for the act of bearing witness and, in fact, increase the distance between us and the event. She writes, “We attempt, through representation, to fill the gaps and wounds left behind by traumatic moments, when perhaps we should consider allowing the wounds to speak for themselves” (101). According to Osborne, an ethical response to the trauma must begin with failure—with a recognition that any effort to articulate the trauma will fall short or even transgress.

Rather than suggesting that we abandon the work of poetry, however, Osborne points to the example of the ancient rabbinic tradition of Midrash, in which the gaps or “wounds” (xxxv) in a text are invitations to dialogue. Midrash involves creating material extensions of a text by “imagining the stories we don’t know—stories that reside in the gaps” (xvii). In a chapter entitled “Midrashic Reading and Trauma” (which includes a valuable primer on midrashic reading), Osborne effectively demonstrates how the midrashic mode warrants application beyond the realms of Jewish exegesis. She points to works by scholars such as Daniel Boyarin, Gerald Bruns, and Geoffrey Hartman, who bring midrashic thinking into contact with literary criticism. According to Osborne, these scholars teach us how to read. Osborne’s own aim seems to be to teach us how to read trauma. She places existing discourse on midrashic reading in conversation with Maurice Blanchot’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s works on ethical reading. According to Blanchot, the Holocaust is the disaster that shatters. We can only respond ethically if we resist the urge to create a cohesive narrative and bear witness to the trauma by making darkness visible. Osborne argues that this occurs when a text allows for the disruption of what Levinas calls “le dit” (the said) by “le dire” (the saying) (xxiv)—that is to say, the intrusion upon representation by nonrepresentation.

In the chapters that follow, Osborne demonstrates how this midrashic mode is available in many contemporary literary works. She invites us to notice what is unsaid in a literary text by attending to silences, spaces, and fragmented or multivoiced narratives. Osborne models a shift away from patterns of reading in which we only know a text to be about the trauma of the Holocaust if it presents us with the too-familiar and too-graphic images of tortured bodies and camps encircled in barbed wire. In a chapter dedicated to the works of Cynthia Ozick, for example, Osborne identifies Rosa’s muffled scream in “The Shawl” as a moment when the failure of language before atrocity is foregrounded, and her reading of Ozick’s other works demonstrates how that scream echoes throughout the author’s oeuvre. Osborne suggests that what many critics have labeled as “postmodern” (43) in Ozick’s work are textual markers of her struggle with the task of...