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Permanence and Change

Joseph and His Brother by Thomas Mann. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. Alfred A. Knopf

The New Republic, June 1934, 186–187. Also in The Philosophy of Literary Form

This first volume of Thomas Mann’s trilogy carries us, as down a deep shaft, to old Biblical regions across which lie peaceful and pastorally melancholy landscapes. Down into the big black hole of the past we drift, until we come upon a world that lived three thousand years ago and is now, by Orphic conjuring, made to live again. The book has about it a quality that has almost vanished from contemporary fiction. It is contemplative, or ruminant—so perhaps one could speak more intelligently of its effects after a long interim of silence during which one returned to it only in memory. One must judge Mann, not as an adept in quickly caught and quickly forgotten impressions (not as the equivalent in pure art of the methods of advertising in applied art)—his value resides rather in a subtle, patient and skillfully sustained evangelism which produces changes in us capable of developing through decades.

Mann is a very thorough writer—and surely this melancholy volume, with its astonishingly complex morality, is the end-product of his thoroughness. As one reads it, one understands the solemn note that has gained prominence in his later critical writings. It seems clear that, in a pre-scientific era, Mann would have become a priest—or still farther back, in more primitive groups, he would have taken his place in the college of elders who carefully scan the tribal archives that all new acts may be judged and shaped by precedent. Indeed, as we read this reworking of the Biblical legends clustered about Isaac, Jacob, Esau, Leah, Rachel and Joseph, we get a new understanding of the part played by precedent in the matter of human motives. In earlier days, we feel, precedent was not the purely legalistic device it has since become, a way of preventing new decisions by reference to past decisions made under different conditions and for different purposes. The reference to precedent was revealing rather than obstructive, precisely because the conditions and purposes had remained constant. Again, these precedents were not the individualized events we meet when we go back to the records of 1929 to find out what the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Johns vs. Johns. They were mythical precedents: they were group products—they were “right” because they took their form as a collective enterprise. They were selective and interpretative, the results of long revision at the hands of many people through many years. They were the “key” situations of the tribe that had evolved them, after all that could be forgotten had been forgotten and all that could not be forgotten had been made salient. They were not “facts,” as legalistic precedents are, but communal works of art. And when the individual understood his own role by reference to them (saying, “I am like Jacob,” or “This situation is like Leah’s”) he was being himself and a member of his group simultaneously. It is in this sense that Mann sets about to write of “people who do not know precisely who they are,” and “the phenomenon of open identity which accompanies that of imitation and succession.”

At least, whether one agrees with the suggestion or not, it is the feeling that one takes away with him from the reading of Mann’s latest piously ironic novel. What one can do with it, I do not know. The author has simplified and idealized his point of view by eliminating attempts at modern parallels. He is not concerned with strict modern-ancient correspondences like Joyce, who would chart the new equivalents to the old wanderings of Odysseus. In the altered ways of life which technology has brought, perhaps the situations are so radically changed from those earlier pecuniary or stock-breeding days that we must abandon the attempt to understand ourselves by reference to the precedents of myth. Again, the myths are bewilderingly intermingled: they are not living art, but art in a museum. Yet even for this state of affairs, perhaps, there is a mythical parallel—for is there not everywhere the legend of the Tower of Babel that arose to confound primitive men when they were elated by such ambitions as have in recent centuries elated us, and the vast projects of building were confused by a multitude of tongues quite as our specialized vocabularies continually threaten to confuse us?

“Without passion and guilt nothing could proceed.” If I chose the word “thorough” as the label that might most briefly characterize this book, it is because Joseph and His Brothers profoundly pursues the ramifications of this thought. The strange intermingling of kindness and cruelty which animates it could all, I believe, be shown to flow from this statement. The pervasive imagery of the pit, the phenomena of indentured service which he considers with insistence, his constant concern with the psychology of waiting, his almost fierce emphasis upon the cult of fertility, his remarks on the “upper and lower half of the sphere,” his deliberate affronts to the mechanistic concepts of causality, his ironic sympathy with opportunism, his somewhat awestruck pondering on the subject of recurrence—all this, I believe, could be shown to follow, directly or indirectly, from his care as to the part which the “problem of evil” plays in the civic, or historic process. An author in search of metaphor, he makes us feel that life itself is metaphorical.

I have probably said enough to suggest that another word might replace my adjective “thorough.” Mann’s new book is “mystical.” It brings us to the edge of things, to that fearful dropping-off place which, before the feat of Columbus, could be geographically imagined but has since usually been relegated solely to a disposition of the mind under duress, though it is brought back once more in the physical sense perhaps by the contemporary physicist’s suggestion that electronic activity is like a radiation from a non-existent core (as were it to well up from some other region like water quietly moving the sand at the bottom of a spring). It is an eschatological book, dealing with the “science of last things.” As such, it is disturbing, and will perhaps be rightly repudiated by happier fellows who prefer to shape their acts by contingencies alone. To live by contingencies alone is unquestionably the most comforting way to live—and contented ages have probably been those in which the concepts of duty were wholly of this specific sort, harvesting when the crops were ripe, shearing when the sheep were heavy, and coupling when the body felt the need of its counter-body. But the world of contingencies is now wholly in disarray. In our despicable economic structure, to do the things thus immediately required of us is too often to do despicable things. It is at such times, I imagine, that the question of duty naturally becomes more generalized, and attempts at defining the “ultimate vocation” seem most apropos. Mann’s new book is written in this spirit.