60
PARTISAN REVIEW
appreciation of himself, as the moon that he worships was supposed to
mirror the light of the earth. But after
his
three days in the well, in
darkness and surrounded by his own filth, he learns the classic lesson
of humility. Through the chastisement of the self through the body,
the spiritual through the physical, Joseph attains to his "second birth,"
which, as the first has been simply into the realm of sterile and self–
contained matter, is into the realm of a more active moral and social
consciousness.
Without this initial moral experience Joseph would never be able
to acquire the knowledge and self-discipline necessary for the perfor–
mance of his role. Without his successful working-out of the personal
problem he would not even be able to take his place by the side of
his
fellows, much less lead them to a higher destiny. The point
is
important because it is evident that Mann does not intend us to
understand that everyone in the social group is submitted to such a
rigorous test of endurance. The common run of humanity, the ordi–
nary members of the tribe, the social mass, as represented here by the
brothers, are never disturbed by considerations of the relationships
between God and man, the spirit and the flesh, the old and the new.
Only through the intensely personal ordeal of "the marked man"
among them, to recall Tonio Kroger's phrase, do they ever rise above
the level of the soil which they spend their lives tilling. And it has
already neen suggested what unpopular figure in the modern civilized
world Mann has in mind for the possible fulfillment of this role
tcday. Only the artist, in a culture given over to the false and senti–
mental optimism of a unilinear view of progress, has anything like a
sense of the responsibilities involved in being a complete human being.
The artist, through his preoccupation with the aesthetic integrity of
his work, has been forced into a recognition of the fundamemally
dialectic nature of the processes at work in reality, of the never alto–
gether resolved conflict between form and matter. He alone has
appreciated the interrelationship between the old and the new, con–
servatism and radicalism, time and history. And he alone has attained
to the knowledge that even the most temporary equilibrium between
these processes is a matter of the most intense individual discipline.
In
Joseph
i!,-
Egypt
Mann exposes his hero to the full spectacle
of a great civilization in decay so that he may come to recognize that
the same struggle between the old and the new from which he has
just emerged in his own experience is also to be traced out in history.
Indeed, the whole pattern of his adventures in the "monkey-land" of
Egypt may be related to the Freudian description of the relations of
the individual ego to the world.
As
in all the classic myths (Oedipus,
Theseus, Beowulf), the hero recovers from some nearly fatal experi–
ence in infancy or youth to appear in triumph in some foreign land.
