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PARTISAN REVIEW
as Rachel brings forth the true Son. The great merit of Mann's
descent into these dim recesses of human recollection is that he brings
again to light that primitive consciousness which has become for us
our unconscious process. The characters in this version of the Biblical
story telescope within themselves whole generations, and live through
experiences and emotions of their ancestors as if those adventures
were their own; thus they are less individuals than more sacred entities,
personages of a mythical drama. Authors and actors each of his own
play, they stop short of tragedy whether because of their comedy of
errors, cheating games and verbal equivocation, or because their
world is ruled by two conceptions (themselves apparently opposed),
the omnipresence of the present and the eternal recurrence of events;
such characters are still, and quite naturally, all of a piece with the
universe. Both Ishmael and Esau are alike the Red Spirit, the Simoon,
and Set the Murderer; Abraham is both grandfather to Jacob and
his immemorial ancestor, the Moon Wanderer who has set forth to
find God beyond the city of Ur (that symbolic archetype of all
cities), a kind of Wandering Jew forever walking anew the road of
time's beginning. Joseph himself is, on the one hand, Tammuz-Adonis,
the Torn and Resurrected; on the other, he is that character par–
ticularly dear to Mann, more pliant than heroic, the darling of fate,
the artist, the delicate, charming heir of an ancient race, a less sickly
brother to Hanno Buddenbrook, a Tonio Kroger with more assurance,
or a less slow-minded Hans Castorp. With him the epic of Jacob's
search for God is resolved almost too readily into a
modus vivendi
with God. A metaphysical work, this, under its aspect of chronicle
replete with human substance: tragic elements disappear in the mo–
notonous majesty of these some thousand pages extending like desert
sand, in the star-strewn night of myth, the irony of mirage, the end–
lessly modulated lines of dunes and of patterns in Oriental carpet.
Literary play, as distinct from phantasy or irony, is long in
coming to the fore in Mann as an essential means of expression.
Among his humorous writings the early novel
Royal Highness
is no
more than a slight comedy for court theater;
Disorder and Early
Sorrow
is a mere occasional piece; the picaresque "autobiography"
Felix Krull,
conceived on the scale of Mann's great books and ap–
parently intended to take a place in his work comparable to that of
Lafcadio's Adventures
in the work of Gide, was not destined for com-
