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hotep, ex'cessively godly and therefore life-denying, and takes from him
the staff of authority in order to feed the peoples through the dream
of hunger and plenty.
Mann's own rabbinical wit is at its most characteristic in the analysis
of the seven years of fatness and drought dreamed of by Pharaoh and
foreseen by him through the Socratic prodding of Joseph. Could those
solid and symmetrical numerals actually stand up under investigation?
Were the good years all equally good and the bad ones equally bad?
"In these fourteen years things were neither quite so definitely good nor
so definitely bad as. the prophecy would have them.
It
was fulfilled, no
doubt about that. But fulfilled as life fulfils, imprecisely. For life and
reality always assert a certain independence, sometimes on such a scale
as to blur the prophecy out of all recognition. Of course, life is bound
to the prophecy; but within those limits it moves so freely that one
al–
most has one's choice as to whether the prophecy has been fulfilled or
not.... In fact and in reality the prophesied seven looked rather more
like five.... The fat and the lean years did not come out of the womb
of time to balance each other so unequivocally as
in
the dream . . .
[they] were like life in not being entirely fat or enirely lean ... Indeed,
if the prophecy had not existed [a couple of the lean years] might not
hava been' recognized as years of famine at all." This passage may well
be recommended to all the naive:
i.e.,
to those who see history following
a plan, and to those who do not see it following a plan.
Joseph is Mann's second image of the Provider. Peeperkorn, in
The
Magic Mountain,
was also a "Provider," though in a less literal sense.
He did not overcome a famine and feed nations, he only provided a
marvelously simple and tasty supper for the glutted consumptives of
Behren's sanitarium. But with his golden omelets and pure grain gin
he "fed" them, bringing back to food those who had only known how to
surfeit themselves with meals.
The Provider is a life-bringer, whose sign is the riches of the earth.
But by these very tokens of the material world he identifies himself also
with the mysteries of creation and spirit. He is rich because he is
whole.
Mounting above the contradictions 'which Mann finds in every culture,
contradictions arising out of the duality matter and spirit, the Provider
lives simultaneously in both worlds as a dynamic synthesis. And this
wholeness marks him as most human and yet also divine. Able to bring
gifts to man because he receives from both god and nature, the Provider
is associated with Providence itself.
The sublime wholeness of Peeperkorn lay in the peculiar quality of
his personality, which Mann tried to convey through reflecting it in other
characters of the novel as something great and overwhelming. Peeper–
korn did not do or say anything great, he merely
was
great. He was a
symbol of a philosophical wishfulfillment, he represented a need of
