BOOKS
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In brief, the
Joseph
series, like his earlier works, reveals that Mann's
distinction lies less in his talents as a dramatist than in his genius as a
dialectical comedian, in the highest sense of the term. And the idea of
the god-story is a genuine contribution to his system of high-comedy
conceptions. Whether or not God actually exists, His relation to man is
an absolute cultural and psychological fact, and Mann's half-lyrical, half–
mocking reverence for this fact is in the tradition of the great humanists.
Like Kafka, Mann examines the specific data of the divine with a radical
literalness only possible in a scientific culture.
It is part of Mann's later method to define characters in terms of
their gods. For men "only imitate the gods, and whatever picture they
make of them, that they copy." Thus Potiphar's wife, after the col–
lapse of her infatuation, switched her gods from the "omni-friendly
Atum-Re of On, Lord of the Wide Horizon," to "him rich in bulls of
Ipet-Isowet, and to his conservative sun-sense." Needless to say, her
body now grew hard and spare. For the god is Mann's key to the "I-Thou
feeling" of the individual; one who worships a soft voluptuous god,
drunken with goodwill, cannot but be somewhat dim in outline and grace–
fully imprecise in personal mannerism.
The god lies in the deepest source of individual feeling. But he is
' more than personal; he gives his form to political philosophies, moral
codes, esthetic attitudes, as well as to rituals and conventions. Hence the
god-conception of the individual is more inclusive imaginatively than
that of individual psychology, for it touches upon psychology at the point
where it is one with social behavior and cultural history. Joseph, bound
to a strange god, feels qifferently from the Egyptians, acts differently,
comes from elsewhere, and has a different story to tell. That is, he is
an alien-and Mann shows that when we speak of the alien what we
mean is simply one who tells a different story intervened in by a different
god.
In the sense that individual life is determined from outside the self,
all stories of men are "written by God."
But when, at the moment that he is living his story, one is conscious
of, a specific plan in this "outsidedness" of self, when he knows that all
the fluctuations of feeling and hazards of event have a steadfast core
and central plot-direction, then he is driven to think and talk a double
language, in order to represent at the same time the eternal seamless
deducible
god-narrative, finished and known before it is even begun,
and the eroded accidental human episodes by which it is taken down
into duration and made into the actual life of a man or woman. This
double language we know as
wit,
and its function is to mediate between
the gross fact and the compelling dream of meaning inseparable from
it. In this respect wit has, of course, analogies with science.
It is a matter of both philosophical and stylistic doctrine with Mann
that to get to the bottom of a situation demands breaking through layer
