DISCLAIMER : In this introduction I am not going to discuss the plot, but rather the concepts behind the novel.
Why should we read this book today ?
The truth is there is no simple answer. But still, the book stands in the peak of German literature and it is one of the richest books ever written. Thomas Mann manages to lay out his full humanism through the experience of reading, his humanism as a point of view in which man stands in the center of the world and therefore not bound by material in the quest for… everything possible.
The novel represents an approach which emphasizes the importance of language as the sole foundation of thought. Unfortunately the implicit conclusion is that the lack of lingual ability means : deterioration our spectrum life.
The novel is rarely highly philosophical, and language plays a big role as key in understanding of the book, even more it transforms the act of understanding to something more than only literal.
A certain disclaimer about the discussion of this book : it is very difficult, unlike other books, to read a distinguished structure, we do not identify a specific topic, the book do not contain a simple message so to say, while this would bury any other novel, it actually makes this novel special : overcoming the need of structure as part of the methodology of proving a certain point which can’t be transmitted through structure, in other words it supports a certain principle of teaching, showing instead of telling.
The conceptual themes in the novel
Time
Civilization represents our ability to weave the rope of human formation across generations. In its deep point in the past civilization becomes primal mist, times of myth, and from that depth, humanity draws its power, life itself. The Dionysian forces that are part of the human spirit can dissolve and weaken because of progress, technology, formality, we are threatened by this progress. The establishment of religion institutionalized man with the ideal of god, but the act of institution is the fact of failure.
The analogy that Mann is using to describe time, is the empty cistern, the pit. The cistern is the womb, the dawn of humanity.
Read more : Max Frisch – Homo Faber, about the drawbacks of technology
Language
The possible complexity of a German sentence, which is similar to Latin, allows sentences to transcend above a simple understanding of the text, by doing that it represents the principle of avoiding form and essence and staying in the territory of the Goethean becoming. During our semiosis, while reading the book, we encounter no breaks. Without it becoming mystical it conveys complexity. The Romaticist vision of a man is not represented but presented, not limited,
The novel is not a historical reconstruction. Before every chapter of actual events we come across a little composed mass. Mann describes a topic and then illustrates it through human affairs. The topic of the book is the human within time, and the subject is not concrete, not an actual figure. Joseph is more than a man, he is a realization of an ideal of what a man could be.
Myth & Religion
Man can exist in an eternal state only as a part of a Myth and not part of a duration. The myth is blurred and undefined, as in the opposite of a detail. If details gives us a defined and finite part of something then the opposite of it would be undefined, infinite limitless existence, the organic life of ideas, the principle of life and growth which is a function of time, again the philosophical principle of becoming.
Religions are seen as histories of theologies with the role of practicing of myth in a structured way, what also make it a very paradoxical process in terms of means and destinations. The myth is a philosophical extension which has to become an essence before it is transformed and shattered into our daily lives. The ordinary and daily, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie cannot be part of it. Religion becomes a practical institution which misses out on the mythical archetype. Formalization as formulae is only ordinary, only the undefined, limitless, abstract, ideal can be godly.
A lot of myths that have to do with encounters are represented by Mann, the Odyssian (Odyssey) myth of returning home, getting aware of —, treachery, the kiss of Judas Iscariot, etc’. Myth plays a big role in the book because it is the space of expression outside the timeframe that surround us while reading the novel. These universal elements are representing the formation of civilization. In the beginning of civilization, spirit still shines, before it got translated into materia, before it was particularized and lost. Abraham discovered it, Jacob was chosen by it, Joseph is us. Jacob is there as a model, as a connection.
Literary style & devices
This book of the 20th century is even more prominent because of the scholarly status of some writers in that period which were very reflective about their art, about literature. Henry James, was one of the first who added notes to his literature in order to help explain its theme and complexity. Literature became a theoretical field of itself including poetics, aesthetics, narratology.
Thomas Mann adopted a specific style of writing for each of his books, in order to support and maximize his themes as can be read in Buddenbrooks, Magic mountain, Joseph and his brothers, Lotte in Weimar, Dr. Faustus, The holy sinner. In the case of Dr. Faustus as an example Mann had to reinvent himself completely in order to create that masterpiece, he studied musicology from Theodor Adorno, including biographies of major composers. Mann used Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve tone system in one of the chapters as part of the narrative within and outside the Diegesis.
According to Dr. Henry Unger some complications that arise when analyzing Mann can be a result of Mann choosing to change his working method. This can be a strategic choice that is derived from the specific subject of choice. To give an analogy : choosing a filming style in a film that would support the subject of the film, for example : claustrophobia. Mann was a remarkable example of a writer who had full control of his literary tools, there is certainly criticism about his work, but it becomes negligible and sometimes ridiculous in the context of his full scope of work. To say in other words, although his criticisms can serve a topic of research, the average reader should disregard them if he wants to understand what Mann tried to give to the reader. To give an example : there is no ontological connection between the somewhat obscure biblical Joseph and the one in this book.
Inspired by theories like the ones from Henri Bergson, Mann avoids creating a certain structure around the main character, around the main topic, the subject is not static, cannot comply to a formula or a pattern. Reading this books one gets lost in the fog of myth, magic, Jungian animism, amorphic sense of time. Finding a pattern or a formula in the text would mechanize it and disrupt its flow, maybe something we can compare with Schoenberg’s atonality, lack of a tonal center, lack of direction. The main topic of the novel is man, therefore the lack of definition of man is matching its idealist endless possibilities, its complexity.
Although Joseph is the ‘main character’ of the book, we can see in Jacob, his father, an aspect of itself, something similar to the place a father has psychology and more the place of a writer in art itself. Rachel, Joseph’s mother is also a part of certain models of psychology (C.G. Jung).
Mann’s Humanism
Humanism deals with the question of man and his possibilities. Different semantic systems deal with that question in different way, starting from Plato and Aristoteles’ treatise ‘De Anima’. Each mass about the human spirit uses a certain literary technique that translate words to thoughts and then to ethics, code of behavior, morals.
For the writing of the novel, Mann studied history, anthropology, Hebrew Aramaic, Egyptian. He did it also with his later novel, Doctor Faustus, as he studied musicology with Theodor Adorno and specifically being interested in atonal music. Mann himself practiced the ideals he described in his books : absolute control and knowledge, the spectrum of topics he knew is huge. He put himself in a place like other authors : Joyce, Borges and T.S. Elliot, they became the last cartographers of the west, they mapped western society.
The question of the ultimate man can be explored in relation to transcendental spheres, through its relation to his environment – social and economic, as a philosophical scheme, against forces of determinism and fatalism, in the context of morals and the cosmos, usually the specific parameters are matching the development of ideas in a certain time period which means that man is bound to be constrained to be and act in the spectrum of ideas in his life.
The book symbolizes a specific last attempt, which is almost pathetic in terms of its power, the swan song of the humanist. The feeling reflected becomes even stronger concerning the events during the time writing : World War II and rise of Nazism. That was definitely the end of hope of a certain ideal of humanism, belief in certain values and a certain possible type of man. It was a turning point in history in which certain aspirations, certain dreams, hopes were abandoned : naivety, rationalism, strong common understanding between people, ideals, culture, Deutsches Requiem.
Goethe
In 1796 Goethe published Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. It was a Bildungsroman , a story of a man on his journey of self-realization. Goethe presents the idea of man in its formation. Man is the endless process of realization and not a stagnated pattern or form. That concept of man, of Goethe, Mann developed even further, to extremes in terms of possible human realization.
Mann, through the life story of Joseph, relates to Goethe’s Faust, in a sense that he has no clear destination or target or reachable destination, any of these would miss out the point. The point is the ‘Extension’ (Existentialism), being practical is missing the important. Faust, makes a pact with Mephistopheles with the condition that he would reach and stay in a state of happiness. According to Goethe, the primal sin is to absolve oneself of the responsibility for motion and activity. movement, action, and striving are equated with virtue, while nonmovement, passivity, and resignation are sin.
“You are aware of only one unrest;
Faust, Goethe
Oh, never learn to know the other!
Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,
And one is striving to forsake its brother.
Unto the world in grossly loving zest,
With clinging tendrils, one adheres;
The other rises forcibly in quest
Of rarefied ancestral spheres.
If there be spirits in the air
That hold their sway between the earth and sky,
Descend out of the golden vapors there
And sweep me into iridescent life.
Oh, came a magic cloak into my hands
To carry me to distant lands,
I should not trade it for the choicest gown,
Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown.”
While Goethe created a character like Werther, which is a seismic eruption of emotion in the spirit of Romanticism, Thomas Mann has a richer more complex concept of man, which is nevertheless based on the spirit of Goethe. This type of humanism is dynamic, it is a result of Goethean becoming, as a drive to formation’ or Bildungstrieb, a law binding the action of the Bildungstrieb, that “nothing can be added to one part without subtracting from another, and conversely.”The God-head is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly the intuition is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and logic only to make use of the become and the set-fast
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto
Publius Terentius Afer / Goethe
Goethe in the expression : “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me” means that also the concept of good and evil is not strange to him, therefore in this humanistic approach they are supporting each other as part of a bigger scheme which is called human. Nietzsche developed it further on in his writings. The existence of evil supports the good, “Part of that Power, not understood, which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good.”
Ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft
Goethe, Faust, words of Mephistopheles
Thomas Mann is considered an heir of Goethe in the context of literature, a follower of Nietzsche, and a follower of Freud in the context of anthropology. They all shared the opinion that man cannot be reduced to a scheme (although Freud eventually did support a kind of schematic approach, explicitly : conformity).
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
1872, “The Birth of Tragedy”. Nietzsche was already four years after being the youngest person ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24.
Nietzsche discusses the history of the tragic form and introduces an intellectual dichotomy between the Dionysian and the Apollonian (very loosely: reality as disordered and undifferentiated by forms versus reality as ordered and differentiated by forms). Nietzsche claims life always involves a struggle between these two elements, each battling for control over the existence of humanity. In Nietzsche’s words, “Wherever the Dionysian prevailed, the Apollonian was checked and destroyed…. wherever the first Dionysian onslaught was successfully withstood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic god Apollo exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing than ever.” And yet neither side ever prevails due to each containing the other in an eternal, natural check or balance.
We find some text in the book which apparently was a direct reference for Mann in his writing of Joseph and his brothers :
“Apollo seeks to pacify individual beings precisely by drawing boundary lines between them, and by again and again calling attention thereto, with his requirements of self-knowledge and due proportion, as the holiest laws of the universe. In order, however, to prevent the form from congealing to Egyptian rigidity and coldness in consequence of this Apollonian tendency…”
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. “THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY”
This relates to Egypt as a country of rigidity and formalization, which Mann probably related to Germany at the time.
Later on he writes :
“In reality, however, this hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, a god experiencing in himself the sufferings of individuation, of whom wonderful myths tell that as a boy he was dismembered by the Titans and has been worshipped in this state as Zagreus whereby is intimated that this dismemberment, the properly Dionysian suffering, is like a transformation into air, water, earth, and fire, that we must therefore regard the state of individuation as the source and primal cause of all suffering, as something objectionable in itself. From the smile of this Dionysus sprang the Olympian gods, from his tears sprang man. In his existence as a dismembered god, Dionysus has the dual nature of a cruel barbarised demon, and a mild pacific ruler. ”
Friedrich Nietzsche. “The Birth of Tragedy”
Which relates to Joseph being thrown into the pit by his brothers.
Depths of the past in the context of 20th century in the novel
The Novel is an encyclopedia of human formations: magical, mythical, naturalistic, realistic, schematic, romantic, dynamic. In contrast to other authors, Thomas Mann, claims that a human can be all of this together.
How can you not build a scheme when you are dealing with a story, characters, relationships, chapters from the bible ? Thomas Mann was building an allegoric portrait of the ultimate man, not less, being one of the greatest realist writers, with such an elusive subject, elusiveness becomes a property. Against the risk of becoming a failed attempt to establish a character it becomes Goethe’s vision of capturing the essence of the human spirit. That Essence and spirit of man is connected to endless environmental factors : Genetic, spiritual, psychological, physical, these needed 1500 pages to materialize and to make ripe. Thousands of nuances are forming the main character to the point of excellence, to the point of recognition, but not to the point of definition. Thomas Mann managed to represent an identity without a scheme, which feels contradictory to common sense.
After reading the book one gets the notion that its main character, which has risen from depth of the time, and being discussed in terms of the 20th century, is the realization of the ideal man. He is totally independent, and committed to spirit in debt of its essence of humanity. The ideal appears in the form of the creator, his father’s eyes, the strategic ability to encompass everything, and expresses itself through wisdom, and more importantly through perfected lingual eloquence.
The power of the human ideal is extracted with the help of thought it, the thought can only take the form of words, and they only have the power to influence, to create, to express power, to understand and to explain.
This is why Joseph comes to Egypt, he visits the land of schematisation, of formalization, everything is being written down, they respect the language, and the use of language can also be the gateway to hell, the underworld in which death is godhead, but it can also be turned to a healing force, a living force that can connect to the spirit, spirit as an obscure force which has incomprehensible system of affinities. Though it is an immanent internal force within every man, spirituality is also the beating heart of humanity, which comes to pronounce itself in tales about god, the connection of one person with this specific element and against the lack of connection with all other inferior elements.
Thomas Mann managed to beautifully intertwine the mythical idea of the birth of god with the idea of death of god of Nietzsche. Mann recognizes, in the same way the Kierkegaard did, the leap of faith. Everything is imminent, everything comes from within and not from outside. To say in other words, one can rise above the forces of his time, and reconstruct, even in the 20th century, the same powerful ideals that shaped and empowered humanity throughout time and history. In the past it took forms that we no longer recognize today, but the essence we can still reach through art, through reading, through careful guidance, through experience, the journey of Joseph can also be our journey.
The book itself is like poem, there isn’t any hierarchy, in the sense that every scene or sub story cannot be removed, or they are not less important than the rest, they are all crucial. It serves the methodology of reflection as a set of negative and positive elements if you like to call it like that, missed opportunities and realizations, a neutral, not-harmonic-or-disharmonic (just like Schoenberg’s 12 tone system) dialectic of the mind with the body. In that process spirituality is revealed and put to test against all dangers. The dangers are passions, desires, foolishness, stagnation – the will to live well, interests, self-love, financial interests, the grind of the banality of life.
When one adopts the Goethian / Niezschean approach (Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto), one becomes addicted to the diversity of the trivial. Raymond Carver (author) manages to present exactly that, the triviality of life in which once in a while we get a glimpse in the shape of a spark of life.
The growing up of Joseph is the journey to the sublime, his formative years and spiritual education. Time is nothingness, as a background to our flow while reading the novel. The Novel encompasses a philosophy of time in which Thomas Mann deals with other concepts of time, of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Hegel, Bergson etc’, and not as a decoration, but as an essential part of his work, presented in a perfect and coherent way.
Mann brings out the question of possibility of spirit in specific times of historical movement, the ancient time of Egypt finds a parallel in World War II, certain ideas, formalizations, created the potential of the destruction of the spirit, so Mann claims. The novel was written during the German Zyklon. Just before, the German spirit reached unprecedented peaks, human wealth, philosophers, musicians, writers, poets, architects etc’. Mann asked what got lost and not coincidentally choose the roots of Judaism as a contrast. The loss of human spirit and the long journey to Hades, the burial grounds, there on the suicidal grounds, which is represented through the Egyptian formalization which parallels the German (and not German) bureaucracy, even there the human spirit can be found and through it the world of materia can be saved by the spirit. Egypt was saved from extinction (in the Novel by that spirit) through the connection to god, the human ideals, looking into the future made possible by human wisdom, not with individual, but universal interests. This subject by itself is unique.
A myth is a primal archetype of the spirit. Religion is supposed to keep us in connection with the spiritual, but fails. Formalization stands in contrast with the spiritual, therefore the materialistic mundane daily life are preventing the possibility of the spiritual. Man becomes a material with interests, which burns quick like a flame and leaves his mark only with similar people. Therefor there is no true progress without the spiritual. The first man is described as light in from a Gnostic perspective.
The light is pure from the dawn of time, man is made from the fragments of that light, the material and corporal are a limited and dull, but man is trapped between these two elements. If we dive deep to the dawn of time we can try to discover the pure light even through the veil of material.