Goethe once mused, “This natural story is highly amiable; only it seems too short, and one is tempted to carry it out in all its details.”
By “this natural story,” Goethe meant the Book of Genesis. The “one” who was inspired by his remark to “carry it out in all its details” was Thomas Mann, whose 2,000-page tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers (JAHB), has just been reissued in a new translation by John E. Woods to mark the 50th anniversary of Mann’s death in August. By coincidence, the Torah reading in synagogues for this Shabbat, which falls on Christmas Eve, is Parshat Vayeishev, in which the Joseph story begins with him being sold into slavery in Egypt.
Moreover, JAHB is a particularly apt subject for a Christmas column, because Mann understood the Hebrew Joseph to be a mythic forerunner to Jesus. (I use the term “mythic” not to mean imaginary, but in literary critic Northrop Frye’s understanding of the term. Myths, Frye says, are “the stories that tell a society what it is important for them to know.”)
I’m glad I read JAHB in undauntable youth, as it was a peak literary experience. Beside JAHB, panoramic in scope, and a full-blown dramatic realization of the original’s teasing promise, the Book of Genesis seems in strictly literary terms like a mere film story board. When I finished reading Mann’s version, I understood why his secretary, placing the final pages of manuscript on his desk, sighed: “Now at last we know what really must have happened.”
In the light of Mann’s literary penchant for creating artistic alter egos, the reasons for his attraction to the Joseph character are obvious. Joseph is the only Bible character of Abrahamic descent in whom charisma, an aptitude for performance and what Mann calls a “friendliness to humanity” are defining traits. He is also the only Bible character whose life is divided between two civilizations. Brutally wrenched from his pastoral Canaanite home and transplanted in cosmopolitan Egypt, his personality undergoes the kind of sea change that spoke to the artist-bourgeois clash Mann continually wrestled with in himself.
Mann’s four novels rotate on the axis of the Bible’s terse dialogue and austere narrative cues, but JAHB’s genius lies in Mann’s surrounding interpretative landscape. Though Joseph is narcissistic and theatrical—he is always the center of attention in his prophetic dreams of others’ submission to him—he eventually emerges as a mature and responsible leader. Joseph also represents a mythic type—heroes reborn or made whole after a real or symbolic death or dismemberment—that recurs with more than coincidental frequency in ancient cultures.
Through creative allusions, Mann joins Joseph to other sacred icons. In Egypt, for example, Joseph assumes the name Osarsiph, meaning “in death I have forgotten my father’s house.” An Egyptian asks, “Are you born from the reeds? Are you an Usir in the rushes? Did the mother search and find you in the water?”
Joseph is thus symbolically linked backward in time to the Egyptian death-god, Osiris, and forward to both Moses and Jesus. Mann suggests that all these redemptive heroes—pagan god, prophetic benefactor, deliverer from oppression, messiah—strove toward a common ideal of enlightened national or spiritual stewardship.
Joseph is also portrayed as an important political figure: Mann sees him as the invisible hand behind the conversion to monotheism of Ikhnaton, father of the boy-king Tutankhamen. Mann’s Joseph is both the first “diaspora” Jew and the first “court Jew,” a recurrent figure of influence in history (Maimonides, Disraeli, Wolfowitz), variously inspiring respect, fear or resentment.
Although Joseph rises to great temporal heights in Egypt, second only to Pharaoh, he always remains true to the God of Israel. He is moreover a faithful son, a loyal minister and a forgiving judge. Taken all together, Mann conceives his artist-provider hero as an embodiment of the moral, aesthetic and intellectual forces that would eventually shape modern western civilization.
JAHB was written between 1925 and 1943, a period when Mann was mourning the implosion of the culture that had shaped him. Half was written in America (there is much of the Roosevelt New Dealer in Joseph’s management of Egypt’s grain crisis), where Mann and his Jewish wife took political refuge, so he understood what it was to live in a European diaspora. Its publication was a non-event in Germany—WWII was raging, and this was a book with a Hebrew protagonist—but, as Mann explained in a 1943 Atlantic Monthly article:
“To write a novel of the Jewish spirit was timely just because it seemed untimely … The manner in which the book treats the [myth of national redemption] is so different from a certain contemporary manner of employing it—a malevolent and anti-human manner whose political name we all know … In [JAHB] the myth has been taken out of fascist hands and humanized down to the last recess of its language. If posterity finds anything remarkable about it, it will be this.”
Mann’s prediction of a post-war global Humanism for which Joseph was the prototype failed to materialize, which in no way diminishes the distinction of his work, any more than our continuing failure to fully realize our heritage ideals diminishes the Bible’s power to dignify our endeavours. And far from distracting us from the original, JAHB encourages us to return to and cherish the stories of Genesis with renewed appreciation for the breadth and depth of their humanity.
Merry Christmas 2005. Happy Hanukkah 5766.
- Why Quebec is banning the burka - Wednesday May 19, 2010 at 7:15 pm
- I distrust Obama—but that doesn’t make me paranoid - Wednesday May 12, 2010 at 8:33 am
- The cult of multisexualism: It’s not all good - Wednesday April 28, 2010 at 7:07 am
