62
PARTISAN REVIEW
threatens
him
with mutilation, Joseph is calm enough to remind her:
"Yet behold, my friend, how madness reduces you for a time below
the level of the human! For its advantage and special property it is to
think beyond the moment and consider what comes after."
Joseph's second fall is the result of the still insufficiently purged
arrogance of his spirit that is implicit in this speech. It is, as a matter
of fact, the arrogance of the super-ego in playing with a situation that
is more dangerous than
it
is willing to admit. For the didactic tone
that he adopts toward the erring Mut, as is made clear through the
symbolism .of the two dwarfs, is really the indirect expression of the
first stirrings in him of his own sexual nature. The whole purpose
of his Egyptian experience has been to submit his newfound manhood
to the contingencies of a particular and concrete social situation, to
bring the spirit into contact with matter. But the spirit too proves to
have its own kind of arrogance, to overestimate its strength in a world
of unexpected subterfuges and betrayals. Those long dialogues be·
tween Joseph and Mut are more than a little reminiscent of the
medieval debates between the soul and the body; and their mournful
termination is a reminder that the soul cannot be too wary of its
opponent.
Joseph is made to pay for
his
failure to discover a symbol that
will enable him to give force and direction to
his
life. But in the
final
volumes we may expect that he will emerge from the Egyptian
prison-house with that full knowledge and control of
his
world which
will make him a true "nourisher" of his people. He will discover
his
generating and organizing symbol in the
idea
of the moral and spiritual
tradition of
his
race.
In the purposely ambiguous title that Mann has chosen for
his
hero we may discover the answer to the question that must have
occurred all through this discussion. Are we to understand that
in
taking Joseph as
his
arch-symbol of the responsible artist-type Mann
intends that the modern artist also should be an active political leader
-the shepherd of his tribe in the
literal
sense of the word? To say
that such is the implication is of course to throw the door wide open
to that description of the artist's role as propagandist of one or another
social doctrine, to that confusion between creation and action which
is enjoying such a vogue at the moment. But it is also to betray a
rather profound misconception of the nature of the myth, in which
everything is possible because everything exists in the pure realm of
the imagination.
As
beauty may be united with wisdom, so also may
the
Homo Dei
and the man of action reveal themselves to us
in
a
single person. To mistake the pure world of myth for the world of
contemporary reality is to mistake the potential for the actual. In the
Joseph story the superior man becomes the "nourisher" of
his
race
