without the power to raise itself above immediate being to mediated meaning.
Attention to the narrative dimension of meaning of ‘relations’ is not only demanded, then, of the reader of the novel, but appears pointedly within the novel itself. The narrative form of the novel corresponds in this way precisely to its narrative content: the formal perspective of the narrator, which in the case of the Joseph novel is also and above all the perspective of a reflective reader of the original text, coincides with the narrated content. The novel itself is that of which it narrates.2
To be sure, the identity of form and content would not be complete if the attention to the meaning that makes the narrator into a narrator appeared in the narrative itself only in the mode of negation – that is, as inattentiveness. The ‘stupid, uneducated man of a meaningless soul’ represents for this reason, in the Joseph novel, only the obscure background against which the meaningful figures of Jacob and Joseph can stand out, gaining their meaning precisely by being two narrative figurations of the attentive ‘meaningful soul’.
In this way, in the Joseph novel, an essential character trait of Jacob’s is formed by his specific gift of being attentive to the resonating harmonics of words and stories: ‘For Jacob was not a man to avail himself of such a curse merely as a feeble allusion. His mind had the power to merge the present most dreadfully into the past, to reestablish the full force of that prior event’ (71). Jacob’s ‘dignity and spiritual solemnity’ is thereby concisely outlined and traced back to its ground, its true source. The ‘blessed one’ is no longer trapped within the narrow confines of the immediate present and, for precisely that reason, lives in a story (and not merely in a Now without relations, or in a meaningless series of single now-points). The blessed one experiences a past and a future in that distinguished and ‘meaningful’ sense which sets itself apart from the banal superficiality with which we all somehow know that there was a yesterday and there will be a tomorrow. A central aspect of the ‘blessing’ that Thomas Mann understands as Abraham’s legacy consists, then, in the gift of being acquainted with time in its fullness, in the talent of being able to link the present with the past and future. The one who is blessed with a sense for narrative relations links the present with the past such that the present becomes a citation, a repetition of an original model that foreshadows a final end.
This characterizes how Thomas Mann, as author and as a narrator who re-narrates, reads the original text. The manner of his reading is articulated, in fact, in the Joseph novel itself, for it is nothing other than a very specific way of reading the original text: in its reflective reading, the novel highlights and translates precisely those narrative references to earlier and later that are contained in the original story itself.
Thus, a complex intertwining of narrative levels of meaning emerges: the inner meaning of the original story consists in a narrative ontology in which being is understood – in a sense that is still in need of elucidation – narratively and historically: as (hi)story. For an adequate understanding, this original story is re-narrated by Thomas Mann himself with the explicit intention of raising the original meaning of the story, its narrative ontology, more clearly into consciousness. He does this by consistently highlighting and thoroughly reflecting the narrative relations – that is, the echoes of the single events in the story’s temporal resonance chamber.
The Narrative Decentring of the I
Of Reuben, Joseph’s oldest brother, the Joseph novel narrates: ‘He was not unique in this world in misjudging the importance of the question that asks who someone is, in whose footsteps he walks, on what past he bases his present, in order thereby to establish his real identity’ (53). Here the question concerning oneself, the striving for self-knowledge, takes on the shape of the genuinely narrative question: in whose footsteps does one walk? To which past does one, or ought one, to relate one’s present, in order to be able to designate and understand it as reality?
In the life stories narratively unfolded by the Joseph novel in time and language, there is a clear awareness of a narrative and historical dimension that enables the I to gain distance to its respective here and now: the horizon of its immediate experiences expands and it gains the capacity to experience a unity of meaning that reaches beyond ‘the immediate and actual reference’. This narrative decentring opens, then, the possibility of relating one’s own respective present to an underlying past, and of understanding it as a meaningful reality in the double aspect of being and meaning.
This leads, however, as the narrator of the Joseph novel expressly discusses and highlights, to the central question that has the power of fundamentally challenging our everyday understanding of the world and ourselves: ‘Is the human I something closed sturdily in on itself, sealed tightly within its own temporal and fleshy limits? Do not many of the elements out of which it is built belong to the world before and outside of it? And is the notion that someone is no one other than himself not simply a convention that for the sake of good order and comfortableness diligently ignores all those bridges that bind individual self-awareness to the general consciousness?’ (94).
This central question is to be pursued here in the form of a philosophical interpretation of the Joseph novel that, again, sets itself the task of speaking not so much about the novel but, rather, about that of which the novel itself speaks. In other words, an attempt will be made to reflect primarily not upon Thomas Mann and his texts, but rather upon what he himself reflects upon in his texts. To the same degree that there are differences between the genuine logic of literary reflection and the genuine logic of philosophical reflection, so there is agreement between both forms of reflection in their critical approach to putting into question conventions for ‘good order and comfortableness’ of everyday consciousness.
The reflections pursued here seek in this way to unfold argumentatively – step by step, in an independent manner – the exceedingly complex thought of a narrative decentralized I in Thomas Mann’s novel, so that not only its manifold aspects are made conceptually explicit but, beyond that, the reasons for a radically changed self-interpretation of human being become clear.
The human self in the Joseph novel turns out not to be ‘solidly encompassed, but, as it were, stood open to the rear, overflowed into earlier times, into areas beyond his own individuality’ (94). To adequately understand this thought, it will be crucial to elaborate its partly explicit, partly implicit, philosophical background. Only in this way will this thought be protected from the convenient deception that we are dealing merely with a ‘poetic’ – and, thus, theoretically insignificant – idea.
Taking the place of the usual interpretation of the world and the self, which objectifies the human I into a ‘graspable thing’ sealed in on itself, there will have to be a new interpretation of the self and the world in which the previously closed and isolated I now recollects the manifold ‘relations’ that lead it beyond its narrow ‘temporal and fleshy limits’. Since every human self-understanding is accompanied, however, by a corresponding understanding of the world, a narrative critique of everyday consciousness leads not only to a new temporal and historical conception of the human I, but, equally, to a ‘revolution’ in the understanding of being.
Coined Archetypes
Now the conditions have been prepared for understanding adequately the answer that the Joseph novel gives to the question why Jacob’s mistaking of the I, in the end, is not a betrayal: ‘In truth, no one was betrayed, not even Esau’ (160). For the narrator of the novel, the betrayal takes place, then, only on the literal surface; in truth – that is, for a reading that is attentive to the deeper meaning – there can be no talk of betrayal (so that there is also no reason for a ‘higher’ correction of the events).
The justification for this interpretation that no one, not even Esau, was betrayed is introduced with a fundamental remark: ‘For if it is
