Books
THE COMEDY OF THE DIVINE
JosEPH THE PRoVIDER.
By
Thomas Mann. Alfred A. Knopf.
$3.00
T
HE
LAST
volume of Mann's transcendental comedy finds the hero in
the pit for the second time. The excess of love he had permitted
to grow in Potiphar's wife has brought him to the dungeon, thus complet–
ing the cycle begun when the excess of hate he had aroused in his broth–
ers caused them to thrust him into the empty well in the desert. But the
second pit is, of course, like the first, a symbolic situation, preparing
Joseph for passage to a new role, that of the exalted semi-divine ad–
ministrator of Egypt's foodstuffs and the returned lost one of Jacob.
As the story has neared its last movement, Joseph has become incre–
asingly aware that he is really an actor in .a sublime charade, which
Mann calls at its conclusion the "God-invention of Joseph and His
Brothers."
Everythin~
has been working to make the favorite son of the
last of the Fathers a provider for many and to bestow upon him a special
place in the hereditary descent. And the figure of this design has be–
come unmistakable to Joseph himself--it is almost as if he had read
his own story in the Bible. Thus he feels himself to be something of an
author and stage manager of his own epic, it being his duty to act in
such a way as not to Jet the great Plot down. "What a history, Mai, is
this we are in!" he exclaims to his steward. "One of the very best. And
now it depends on us, it is our affair to give it a fine form and make
something perfectly beautiful of it, putting all our wits at the service
of God."
Once again, therefore, Mann is re-telling the story of the Artist.
But Joseph is not a divided man like Aschenbach or Tonio Kroger. For
he is living a story, not writing one, and his story was "written by God,"
who, in one way or another, always puts an end to vacillations.
Possessing such a high degree of consciousness as to what he has to
expect at every turn, Mann's Joseph is not quite serious, in the emotional
sense. His session in the second pit is definitely not "a dark night of the
soul." Nor are his aggrandisement by Pharaoh and his subsequent en–
counters with his brothers and his father profound in dramatic feeling.
They belong rather to an idyllic pageantry of correct gestures, decorating
a procession of tableaux moving towards a sad-happy ending .. . A story
"written by God" can only be commented upon by man, and like a
jesting rabbi Mann appeals to the mind's pleasure in beholding with
mingled awe, credulousness and skepticism, a legend that has become
part of itself.
