458
PARTISAN REVIEW
upon layer of titillating ambiguities. "Just because it is so solemn it
mu~t
be treated with a light touch. For lightness, my friend, flippancy, the
artful jest, that is God's very best gift to man, the profoundest knowl–
edge we have of that complex, questionable thing we call life."
A mind even faintly touched by modern positivism will have ob–
served that everything divine is always ambiguous-the breath of inspira–
tion is also the wind of Chaos. Mann seems to derive an interesting
reverse principle from this phenomenon. Everything divine is ambiguous?
Well, then, perhaps everything ambiguous is divine. (Compare William
Empson's theory that the ambiguous is the sign of the poetic.) The am–
biguous, the many-in-the-one, resembles always the dream and the
vision, has most likely the same source, and provides in the witness a
similar dreamy sensation of dispersion and yet discovery.
In any case, Joseph demonstrates his divine election by habitually
dealing in ambiguities. With these he fascinates the decadent Amen–
hotep, as he had earlier seduced the "formal" Potiphar, god's eunuch.
"All your speaking," says the delighted Pharoah, "turns on the Yes and
at the same time on the No.... The wrong right one, you say, and the
wrong one that was the right one? That is not bad; it is so crazy that
it is witty."
Because, then, he is a conscious character in a god-story, Joseph is
a wit, and the same is true of the other lead-personages of his tribe. It is
evident that for Mann the Jews are a people of wit, since they have
always been faced with the need to reconcile opposites. From the start
they were aware that God had a plan for them, yet, perhaps because
they were people compelled to fight for bread rather than a ruling caste,
something made them hang on to the here-and-now-they did not spoil
their story by converting it into a masquerade of spirits. The Fathers
were dreamers of the sheepfold who had discovered an absolute ident–
ity and drama for t:htmselves and learned to come to terms with it through
a masterly sharpness in shuffling antitheses. This humanistic and dramatic
religion of the early Jews, which seen in
1
this perspective hardly seems a
religion at all, "Mann tries to mould by innuendo into whatever there
is in the Greek and Christian traditions that is also witty and double–
minded in relation to earth and spirit. The humanistic ideal is the ironist
who unites in himself the most solid here-and-now with a sense of the
remotest unknown. That is why the confronting of Joseph and Amen–
hotep is the intellectual climax of the whole .narrative, and even, as
Mann says, the big scene for which the whole story is a preparation.
Egypt had no ironists, and its imagination remained divided. It was a
culture that contributed to religion and science but gave nothing to the
progress
o~
living human relations. And the scion of Jacob-Ulysses, who
believes in the most-distant-and-nearest god, reveals this weakness of the
Egyptian "monkey-land" when he faces the mystical and feeble Amen-
