and visualization forcibly brought about by all the means of language, psychology, presentation and, in addition, critical comment; and humour, despite all human seriousness, is their soul’ (1996, 186).
This illustrates very well the true reason why the Joseph novel expressly notes that right belief – and this means in this context, firstly and above all, right reading – entails nearly more disbelief than belief. Reaching the right understanding of the relations of meaning requires having already freed oneself in part from captivation by the mere literalness of a narrative, from sole attention to the ‘realistic’ depiction of relations of being.
The true seriousness of understanding manifests itself precisely in the ironic distance of humour, which undermines an overly literal reading of the narrative, paving the way for the required understanding of meaning. What is narrated must not simply be accepted naively as something given. Rather, it requires the critical courage to pose questions: what is the meaning of the narrated particulars? What do the sometimes surprising turns in the narrative actually mean? How is one to understand the individual in the narrative unity of meaning? It may be that the disbeliever, rather than the believer, is inclined to raise such questions; by contrast, a believer may be more likely to muster up the resolute patience for ever new readings and thereby succeed in breaking through the surface of the habitual ways of reading and thinking.
The Unrest of the Blessing
What must stand out in the story of Isaac’s blessing and give reason for reflection is the fact, rarely addressed in traditional religious education, that we are actually dealing here with an outrageous story of betrayal.
One maliciously takes advantage of an old father’s blindness in order to deceive him about his most intimate concern – his concern to pass on the divine blessing to the ‘right one’, to the chosen son. Although the deception is discovered quickly, precisely that which every ‘meaningful’ – that is, ‘pedagogically valuable’ – story would have to demand does not happen. The blessing, stolen in the obscurity of saying ‘I’ under the pretence of a false identity against the intention of the father, is not revoked, and a second blessing is not delivered to Esau, the ‘right’ son. Such an avenging or correcting justice is absent. The story acquires its specific meaning not only by what happens in it but, just as much, by what does not happen in it.
After the mistakenly blessed Jacob leaves the dimly lit tent, and after Esau arrives with his meal and the entire betrayal is brought to light, Esau understandably complains and asks his betrayed father what is to become of him. In the original text, Isaac answers dryly and laconically: ‘“Your brother came with deceit and has taken away your blessing”’ (Gen. 27: 35). Apparently, the blessing was to be awarded only once, and even if it was stolen through cunning, it is lost for Esau. Whoever seeks to understand the meaning of this story must become suspicious here and notice what is striking, what is at first glance nonsensical and in need of explanation in order to be understood.
In fact, it is characteristic of many stories of Genesis that God intervenes to make things right, making clear which events He condemns, which misdeeds He may expunge with the superior power of water or fire. Yet Jacob’s betrayal of Isaac summons no correction, so that by implication one might well suspect that God secretly approves of the course of the story, that He is in secret the true author of the story that appears at first glance so nonsensical.
Jacob has the blessing and will keep it – irrespective of the drawn-out suffering that he must still endure – in order that he himself at the end of his life may pass it on to one of his sons. The theft of the blessing is thus an integral link in the larger story of the blessing, which forms the overarching unity of meaning of the sacred story from Abraham up to Joseph and his brothers. Contrary to the first appearance, this context makes clear that Jacob is the rightful heir of the blessing, for only in this way can he also be the one who passes it on rightfully. Ultimately, the entire Joseph story is held in suspense by the question concerning who in the end will inherit Jacob’s blessing.
The great story from Abraham up to Joseph and his brothers is organized essentially as the narrative of the repeated act of distinguishing an individual through the reception and passing on of the blessing. God distinguishes Abraham at the beginning in saying to him: ‘I will bless you, and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing’ (Gen. 12: 2). The ‘chain of blessing’ that begins here holds the story together and pushes it forward. Those who receive the blessing carry the story forward, and those who do not – they drop out. The blessing keeps the blessed in the story, and by the same token being kept in the story means being blessed. Blessing thus has a narrative dimension, by linking the scattered and isolated into a temporally organized whole and selecting who will be in the narrative, and who will not.
What the Joseph novel as a reflective recounting of Abraham’s blessing story in general, and of Jacob’s theft of the blessing in particular, marks as striking and remarkable is the absence of the question of guilt. This absence is so striking to the narrator of the novel that a great effort is made in the exposition of the story to explain why, in contrast to first appearances, everything is nonetheless correct: that Jacob is not guilty but, rather, blessed.
The concrete task for the narrative understanding consists, then, in making clear why Jacob’s literal betrayal is actually no betrayal, and the literal lie is actually no lie – that is, why the cunning exchange of identities under the spurious pretext of saying ‘I’ was not a deception. That is why the story and its enigmatic central point, I-saying, is much more complex and multi-layered than it appears at first glance according to the letter.
To be sure, one becomes aware of this complex deeper dimension of the story only if one knows how to read it correctly. However, reading it correctly means not merely considering the isolated episode where one is lingering at the moment, but rather viewing the single scene, the single formulation, in the context of the entire narrative, for this is what makes a story into a story in the first place: that the single event does not stand isolated for itself but, rather, in a context. Accordingly, the reader is expected to remember what has already happened, and to form an expectation of what is yet to happen.
The inattentive reader differs from the attentive reader precisely in that the former always reads only what is offered in the narrow horizon of the immediate present, and for this reason does not read the story as a story; by contrast, the attentive reader possesses, as it were, a resonant space of recollection and expectation, allowing each scene to resound with other, related scenes, in which a network of relationships emerges that pervades the story and constitutes its actual meaning.
Identity of Form and Content
The last thought prepares the way for understanding an important sentence of the Joseph novel, though its significance for the narrative composition as a whole does not, to be sure, immediately catch one’s eye. It reads as follows: ‘A stupid, uneducated man of a meaningless soul might doltishly utter such a word free of any relation, thinking only of the immediate and actual reference’ (71). Like every sentence, this sentence has in the first instance a literal or immediate, isolated meaning. The context in which it is embedded by the earlier line of thought lends it, however, a less ‘doltish’ meaning, for it no longer appears ‘free of any relation’, that is, as a single sentence, but rather becomes intelligible as an important link in an overarching unity of meaning.
The phrase that bemoans the absence of a narrative sounding board in the ‘stupid, uneducated man’ has been made to resound through the previous remarks, for it now makes sense why, for the Joseph novel, the ‘stupid, uneducated man’ is in a very precise and sober sense meaningless – that is, without meanings. The stupid man experiences and recognizes no meanings since he does not recognize any ‘relations’ that make up the peculiar fabric (Latin: text) through which the meaning of language and
