result of the fact that each of them had an excellent understanding of who he was in his essence – that is, outside of time, mythologically, typologically – including Esau, of whom it has been said, and not without good reason, that in his way he was as pious a man as Jacob’ (160).
So the narrator of the Joseph novel first considers the deeper dimension of the story of Esau and Jacob with a profound, far-reaching reflection on the double-layer form of human identity, which is of fundamental significance for the novel and has already been touched upon in the leitmotif of the ambiguity of saying ‘I’. While the protagonists who essentially determine the narrated events do not always know exactly who they are, this uncertainty always concerns, according to the narrator, only the individual and temporal, and thus the unessential. Even more, this uncertainty is to be understood as a consequence of their exceptional certainty regarding the essential. They are, in fact, entirely certain with regard to a different identity – and precisely because, in the end, solely the identity they are certain of really matters, they can allow an occasional uncertainty with regard to their unessential identity as an individual in time.
The essential I-identity of human being is to be characterized, then, in a first approach, as what someone is ‘outside of time, mythologically, typologically’. Yet every protagonist of the sacred story knows this identity very well, even Esau, so that he is to be considered ‘as pious a man as Jacob’.
The significance of this last point for the question of how far Jacob’s ‘I-mistake’ is to be understood as betrayal becomes patent immediately following the passage on Esau’s ‘piety’ just quoted: Esau ‘wept and raged after he had been “betrayed” and laid snares in his blessed brother’s path more deadly than those Ismael had laid in Isaac’s’. ‘But he did it all because it was part of his character’s role, and because in his piety he was perfectly aware that everything that happens is a fulfilment, that what had happened had happened because it had to happen according to a coined archetype. Which meant: this had not been the first time; it had happened as part of a ceremony and according to the model, had gained its reality in the present, like a feast, and had reoccurred just as feasts reoccur’ (160). The protagonists of the Joseph novel, the persons who say ‘I’, do what they do because it lies in their respective character role. Esau, too, plays such a role, and his ‘piety’ consists not least in that he knows his role very well. It may be that it is not the best role of all, not the one he may have wished for, but that is not what matters: he plays his role as the solemn repetition of a coined archetype and model as best he can.
Thus, the Joseph novel asks the reader to consider the thought – which appears at first glance quite objectionable – that Esau’s plans to murder his brother Jacob are harboured ‘ceremonially’, that all actions of the narrative, the ‘good ones’ like the ‘evil ones’, follow a coined archetype that reoccurs in the here and now of the present. The reoccurrence, as the narrator succinctly adds, is ‘like a feast’ in which, indeed, something past is recalled in a lively manner and in this way gains a renewed present. The actions and the persons narrated about are, for this reason, not merely what they are in the immediate present, in the here and now, but rather the citing repetition of a model, the staging that makes present a character role coined in the past.
One can reproach an actor who plays the role of a murderer for playing his role badly, but not for playing the role of a bad person. One cannot accuse him of acting as cunningly and malevolently as his role requires. On the contrary, an actor who plays a bad person as a ‘good person’ would be a bad actor. An actor’s action knows, then, its genuine norms for distinguishing between good and bad, but these norms do not pertain to what is done but solely to how it is done.
Esau knows this very well and, as a consequence, seeks his brother’s life in the here and now with the clear consciousness that he does it because it is expected of him as ‘character’. He finds himself in the role of the betrayed brother and, as a result, wants to play his character role with propriety and care: ‘But Esau, damned to the desert … wept because tears were his due, because they fit his role’ (104). Yet this is not enough: he is also angry and out for revenge, as the model requires.
The coined archetype that thereby guides him is the ‘model’ of Ismael, whose name is thus linked with Esau in the passage just quoted. Ismael, Isaac’s older half-brother, had been sent into the desert by his father Abraham (not without support from Isaac’s mother), in order to prevent him from someday raising claims to the father’s inheritance against the younger brother. In this version of the original story, the red colour of the desert is thereafter linked with the image of the outcast brother, so that Esau is often simply called ‘the Red One’.
Esau is thus sufficiently ‘pious’ to play well the role of the evil one. Nevertheless, the forcefulness of the narrative’s language reaches a climax where no longer Esau’s, but rather Jacob’s, self-understanding comes into view. Jacob’s soul was ‘weighty and pondering … for all the stories rose up again before him and were present in spirit, just as they had once again been present in flesh moulded according to their coined archetype. And it seemed to him as if he were walking on transparent ground made up of infinite layers of crystal leading down into fathomless depths and brightly lit by lamps hung in between. But here above them he walked in the stories of his own flesh, was present as Jacob, and he looked at Esau, cursed by means of cunning, who was also walking now in his archetypal mould – and his name was Edom the Red One’ (149–50).
In such sentences, the narrative style and language of the Joseph novel comes fully into its own. The solemn and ponderous tone justifies itself aesthetically by the strict unity of form and content, for the ‘mood’ of the narrative is Jacob’s ‘mood’, the attunement of a ‘weighty and pondering’ soul, which understands itself and the world in a ‘characteristic’ manner, and for which being and meaning are identical. Thomas Mann’s own narrative and language hereby form a late echo that varies the original text, seeking to make present the original meaning solemnly and to let it resonate in the reader of the Joseph novel.
Isaac’s ‘Blindness’
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
