58
PARTISAN REVIEW
III
In the Joseph cycle Mann reverses his procedure and throws the
symbolical pattern of the myth in the forefront of his work. The
progress is from the personal myth of the individual, fulfilling itself
secretly beneath the social and intellectual encrustations of the bour–
geois consciousness, to the
social
myth, that is, the objectified projec–
tion of the highest experience of the race on the plane of the imagina–
tion. Now the concern is not so much with the unique predicament
of the modern world as with human history, not so much with Euro–
pean man as with man himself-"his state and standing in the uni–
verse." The work is an exhaustive formal application of the ideas of
time adumbrated in
The Magic Mountain.
For time in this series
is at once novelty and repetition, change and permanence, progress
and retrogression. The "bottomless pit of time" invoked in the pro–
logue is shown to reveal its own dialectic pattern when viewed with
a sufficient perspective. So also in attempting to explain the motiva–
tion of an individual at any given moment of time it is not always
possible to distinguish between happening and doing, between the
imperative reenactment of some established form of conduct and the
present deed. When the brothers throw Joseph into the well, for exam–
ple, we are told that "it had come about, indeed, through them, but
they had not done it, it had simply happened to them."
For Mann, in search of an appropriate myth from the past to
illustrate such a reading of history, nothing could be more perfect than
the story of the Hebrew Joseph. Nomadic
in
their habits, belonging
as much to the West as to the East, and through their religion serving
as a bridge between the two, the Jews take on a more universal char–
acter than that of any other race. (For the same reason Joyce makes
Leopold Bloom his complete symbol of "normal" humanity.) More–
over, the long unbroken continuity of their legend and history makes
possible the clearest demonstration of the ideas of time and causality
that are being developed in the work.
As
for the particular choice of
Joseph, we may observe, in the first place, that as a hero he is still
safely within the confines of the human. He belongs to a late, mature,
and rather precociously refined stage of primitive religion when not
only has the separation between the chthonic hero-demon and the
sky-god already occurred but the latter has taken on the highest
spiritual attributes of the race. This is the very first note struck
in
the book: Joseph is rebuked by his father for slipping back into the
old worship of the moon, which is bound up in the less advanced cults
with the worship of the earth and the dead. And if so much is imme–
diately made of the passing on of the "blessing"-from Abraham to
Isaac, from Isaac to Jacob--it is to emphasize that we are still
in
the
