Читать книгу Narrative Ontology - Axel Hutter - Страница 31

How does Isaac, the father, deal with the fight of his sons? What role is assigned to him in the solemn variation of the already coined models? The answer to this question is given in a longer passage in which the motives of the last reflections are once again narratively celebrated: ‘Esau matured early like a young animal. While still a boy, one might say, he married again and again: daughters of Canaan, Chetites and Hivites, as we have heard, first Judith and Adah, then Aholibamah and Basemath as well. He settled them in tents in his father’s camp, and was fruitful with them, and with total insensitivity allowed them and their brood to pursue their traditional and idolatrous worship of nature before his parents’ very eyes. Lacking any sense whatever for Abram’s lofty inheritance.’ All of this, ‘as the song later put it and as can still be found in the traditional text, was a “grief of mind” to Isaac and Rebekah’ (159).

In this way, the life stories re-narrated in the Joseph novel gain not only depth and meaning by linking present and past and understanding each one’s I as a ‘character role’, but also gain their very own coining, as the model of the past can never be copied exactly into one’s individual life but must instead always be adopted anew and in this sense repeated (wiederholt). The latter is invariably risky, since no variation of the original theme can rule out the possibility of changing into the exact opposite of the model. Thus, Esau is what he is because he lacks ‘any sense whatever for Abram’s lofty inheritance’, which is why he becomes the counter-model of the Abrahamic model.³

Of course, this cannot remain concealed from Isaac, the father; he nonetheless evades the ensuing consequences as far as possible. Thus, it reads in the novel that Isaac ‘was silent, and when he spoke it was in words to this effect: “Mine is the red one. He is the firstborn, and I love him.” But Isaac – bearer of the blessing, keeper of the idea of God that Abram had struggled to win, the man whom his spiritual family saw as the son and reincarnation of the Chaldean – suffered greatly from what he was forced to see, or to close his eyes to in order not to see, suffered, too, from his own weakness, which prevented him from putting an end to this mischief by suggesting Esau take to the desert, as had been done with Ismael, his savagely beautiful uncle’ (159).

Isaac is the blessed one. He is the ‘keeper of the idea of God that Abram had struggled to win’, which – this much can already be said – is essentially linked with a spiritual aversion to the worship of nature and of images that is so close at hand for human being. Yet this Abrahamic aversion to the immediate is foreign to Esau. He is a ‘natural lad’ and the narrator of the Joseph novel does not pass up the pleasure of making this blatantly clear: with shaggy skin, having matured early, fruitful. In his cheerful worship of nature and images, he does not have the ‘weighty and pondering’ concerns of Jacob, and lives his life without a care.

The absence of the blessing cannot be brought out more explicitly. This must actually cause grief to Isaac, the blessed one, and cause him concern. What he sees also causes him pain, but he remains silent and takes flight in the role of a father who sticks by his firstborn while ceding the opposing role to his wife, who takes the side of the younger son. Both adopt, then, as father and mother, pre-coined roles in a play that is surely as old as humanity.

Isaac insists defiantly on his role as father: ‘Mine is the red one. He is the firstborn, and I love him.’ Still, it cannot remain entirely concealed to him that Esau is not blessed. But he closes his eyes before the obvious and refuses to see the character roles that have been assigned to Esau and Jacob. What prevents him? On this point, the novel is very subtle: ‘The “small” myth prevented it, Esau’s actual priority of birth prevented it’; ‘And so Isaac complained of his eyes’ (159). Here, a small myth and a great myth, a small model and a great model, are in conflict.

In this way, the narrative decentring of human existence, which makes the I walk in the ‘footsteps’ of past models, gains new complexity. It becomes patent that, to the human self that lives and understands its own present in the light of the past, it is not clear from the outset which coined model it ought to identify with. Isaac’s tragedy consists, namely, in that he is conflicted about which model he wants to understand as authoritative and as worth pursuing. In the end, as a father who ‘naturally’ sticks to the firstborn, he pursues the small model; and he closes his eyes before the obvious in order not to see the great model that is embodied anew in his two sons. The inner refusal to understand expresses itself externally in him becoming blind, in lamenting the weakness of his eyes.

At the same time, it is his weak eyes (in an outward sense) that make possible the original scene in the first place, in which Jacob wins the blessing ‘deceptively’ and the great myth prevails over the small myth – which Isaac, too, wants to bring about unconsciously through his ailing eyes. Isaac, according to the novel, ‘sought out darkness. Are we claiming that Isaac became “blind” in order not to see the idolatry practised by his daughters-in-law? Ah, that was the least of what it pained him to see, of what made the loss of sight desirable – for only in blindness could those things happen that had to happen’ (159).

The narrator of the Joseph novel interprets, then, the weakness of Isaac’s eyes ‘psychosomatically’. Isaac is working unconsciously towards undermining his conscious loyalty to the ‘small myth’, so that it does not in the end stand in the way of the big model of the blessing. The original scene in which the blessing is deceptively obtained under false pretences is thus desired just as much by Isaac – albeit unconsciously – as by Jacob and his mother. It can only be staged, however, if Isaac can barely see. Thus, he contributes his part in the success of the scene and suffers because of his eyes: ‘for only in blindness could those things happen that had to happen’.

Can one, then, in the end, still speak here of betrayal? Evidently not, for Isaac is deceived only insofar as he deceives himself by adhering ‘blindly’ to the small myth of the firstborn. The deception through Jacob is in truth, then, only the correction of a misunderstanding that Isaac himself wishes and unconsciously induces.