Wimpfheimer_ Is it not so.pdf

Toward a Poetics of Legal Narrative in the Talmud ❙ 69
reinterpretation, law must read actions by themselves, without the help of supplementary
signi®ers. Despite an impulse to allow actions to speak for themselves,
though, cases sometimes turn on the very fact that actions are silent. The initial
presentation of the facts is a seemingly omniscient third-person narration that states
clearly what Mar's intent was. Reinterpreting that intent shatters the myth of
omniscience in factual presentation. It highlights Mar's intent as the site of
controversyÐthe subject of competing claims. The form of Rava's unshaming is
signi®cant, for it reminds us of law's fundamental subjectivity, not merely with
respect to jurists, but with respect to the facts themselves. Law must be interested in
the inner workings of Mar's mindÐthe quintessential subjective space.
In narrating a profound shame and then resurrecting its subject, the narrator
performs a clash of two vital forms of memoryÐhistory and legacy. The power of
this shame narrative is necessary for the force of the historical momentÐfor what it
tells us about amoraic law and the power dynamics inherent in a legist and in the law
itself. But Rava's myth would be damaged, his legacy tarnished, were shame to
remain his ®nal characteristic.
The narrator's focus on Mar's intent sharpens our focus on the narrator's own.
In another moment of replication, the narrator's inner intent con¯ictÐthe struggle
between the history of Rava's shame and its legacyÐis performed through the
description of con¯icting intents. Here, too, the nonconscious struggles inherent in
textual production manifest themselves on the surface of our text. By providing the
reader with a historical shamed Rava and a resurrected mythic Rava, the narrator
defers the struggle to the next writer, the reader.
This clash between history and legacyÐbetween two forms of memory that
vie over RavaÐpositions itself as the third and ®nal elemental clash in this drama.
While the legal case that arrives in Rava's courtroom ushers in a clash of formal legal
principles (owner presence and negligence) and the baggage of prior legal situations
tows along a clash of principles of adjudication (immediate fault and lenient
empathy), the narration of shame and its undoing is best comprehended not as a
linear development, but as a con¯ict over Rava's good name.
Elsewhere in the Talmud, the text protects a judge from erroneous adjudication
based on an error in the facts by stating, ``a judge only has what his eyes can
see.''⁷³ Rava's error is procedural; the faulty facts are not the cause of his blunder. He