THOMAS MANN
61
In Freudian terms, this corresponds to the new equilibrium that has
been set up in the individual psychology; and the foreignness of the
material setting emphasizes the transition from the narrow world of
the self to the wider world of complex social relations. It is also, in
Joseph's case, into a more "advanced" world that he moves, insofar
as the cosmopolitan
ci~ilization
of Egypt represents a higher level of
social and economic development than the pastoral life of
his
fathers.
But it is the meaning of these two volumes that in another sense the
corrupt and decadent customs of this new land betoken a much lower
stage of
human
development, so that Joseph's journey into Egypt is
a descent in the most literal sense of the word.
This ambiguous progress is also indicated through Joseph's
~rans
ference of the object of ego-identification from the noble and high–
minded Jacob to the practical and matter-of-fact merchant, and from
the merchant to the ailing overseer Montkaw, who may also be taken
as a kind of entrepreneur. The process of substitute-finding reaches
its
end in the high-priest Potiphar, before whom Joseph is finally made
to have such feelings as Hans Castorp experienced before Peeperkorn.
For Potiphar, the functionary without any ' function, the soldier who
wears but cannot use the sword, the husband as pure social form, is
the human zero who symbolizes the complete cancellation of experi–
ence that is evident in every phase of Egyptian life and thought.
As
the child of incest he is the past breeding on the past; and
his
emascu–
lation stands for the empty formalism of the state-religion. For Joseph
such a figure cannot stand as the center of a new equilibrium of
psychological forces, as the Freudian analysis demands; he represents
the pathetic and reprehensible attempt to preserve an already estab–
lished equilibrium of the past. This is made very clear in the conver–
sation between the incestuous brother-sister pair that Joseph overhears
in
the closed garden.
As
happens when the individual cannot discover an adequate
object for self-identification in the outside world he makes the fruitless
attempt to lose himself in his own super-ego. Here the tragic conse–
quences of such an attempt are brought out in the climactic episode
of Joseph's affair with Potiphar's wife. Mut-en-emet, with her smoul–
dering and angry passion, is in the direct line of Gerda Buddenbrooks,
Clavdia Chauchat, and all those other feminine denizens of the abyss.
But unlike Hans Castorp, who dissolved in an agony of self-abasement
before the feet of his mother-mistress, Joseph exposes himself to Mut's
company merely to test his own powers of endurance. The voluptuous
thords of the
Liebestod
give way to a sterner music. Love is not to be
accepted in terms of another and even more speedy descent into the
pit. In the terrible and magnificent scene in which the unfortunate
woman, after conjuring up the whole monotonous ritual of delight,
