In the novel, the recounting of the original text reads: Jacob came ‘to his father’s tent, put his mouth to the curtain, and said, “It is I, my father”. From deep within the tent came Isaac’s peevish voice, asking, “But who are you? Are you not perhaps a thief on the prowl who has come to my tent saying I? For anyone can say I, but what matters is who says it.”’ Jacob replied, ‘“It is your son who says I.” “That is another matter”, Yitzchak replied from inside. “Then come in.” So Jacob entered the twilight of the tent.’ Yitzchak ‘asked again, “So who are you then?” And in a breaking voice Jacob replied, “I am Esau”’ (165–6).
What happens in this original scene? Isaac (Yitzchak) feels his death is near and wants to pass on to his firstborn son Esau the blessing that he himself received from his father Abraham. He has already sent out Esau to prepare a meal to give the father strength for the impending blessing of his chosen son.1 Yet Isaac is nearly blind and in the tent it is dark. Thus, he has every reason to respond to Jacob’s ‘It is I’ with the question: ‘Who’s speaking?’, ‘Who is it, that says I?’ Jacob, on the other hand, who (incited by his mother) wants to stage, in the darkness of the tent, the interplay of identity and the cunning theft of the blessing, has every reason to answer the question ‘Who are you?’ evasively with the simple ‘I’, in whose universality he can conceal his particularity.
The Joseph novel stages the original scene, taking pleasure in narrative detail and in a way that is almost blatantly obvious – more obvious at least than in the original text, even if all the crucial motifs are already present in the Bible. Psychologically, the scene is highly plausible: Jacob, who has a guilty conscience, seeks to avoid as far as possible the actual crime, the pronounced lie. Thus, he announces himself with the simple and ambiguous ‘It is I, my father’ in order to answer the second question ‘Who are you?’ with the simple: ‘It is your son who says I.’
It is striking that both utterances are entirely correct according to the letter. Just like Esau, Jacob is a son of Isaac. Up to this point, he is entirely ‘innocent’ in his I-saying and is presumably hoping desperately not to be interrogated further and so to avoid the explicit lie. But then he is asked a second time, and Jacob answers: ‘I am Esau.’ And now it has happened.
Readings
An adequate understanding of the original scene will first have to make clear to what extent there is, according to the letter, something wrong going on. There is deception, lying, betrayal, so that the story seems to come down to the blessing going to the ‘wrong’ son. Whether in this injustice and betrayal there is, according to the meaning and spirit, right and truth – in short, blessing – this is what the Joseph novel will contemplate again and again.
To be able to raise seriously, however, the ultimately decisive question whether the betrayal in the end is to be seen in an altered light, in a different meaning, one must highlight in the beginning with just as much seriousness that, proximately, a deception and a lie occur. An adequate understanding of the narrative must equally take into account the proximate appearance on the surface and the depth of the concealed intent. A reading that pushes forward too rashly to a presumable ‘depth’ without honouring the letter misses the specific narrative meaning, just as one that remains on the ‘surface’ confuses the letter with the spirit.
One might think that taking seriously the biblical narratives that the Joseph novel re-narrates – i.e. ‘believing’ them – consists above all in the conviction that the sacred stories literally took place in reality, just as they are told. But the conviction that something happened contributes very little to the understanding of what happened, to what the actual meaning of the narrated events is. For this reason, attention to the specifically narrative meaning of the sacred stories can be facilitated by an ‘unbelieving’ reading that, from the outset, understands the narratives as a literal presentation of meaning and not as a representation of being.
Thus, one finds towards the end of the Joseph novel the pointed remark ‘that unbelief is almost more important than belief. Belief requires a great deal of unbelief, for how can anyone believe what is true as long as he believes nonsense?’ (1181). Belief must accordingly internalize disbelief’s scepticism and spirit of contradiction in order to guard against the danger of naïveté and dogmatic laziness of thinking.
A critically reflected belief that seeks to understand what it believes is distinguished not so much by the conviction that the stories of the Bible literally took place in this (and not another) way, but rather by the quite different conviction that the sacred stories are meaningful in an exceptional way: that they convey a specifically narrative meaning that by no means exhausts itself in a mere report of isolated facts and events.
A believer, too – or especially a believer – will not want to disregard the fact that the sacred texts present their message for the most part in the narrative form of stories. This means, however, that the Geschichtliche itself, in its narrative form as story, is important and is to be taken as important. It will thus be important to direct attention to this specifically narrative dimension of meaning, which must not be confused with a report of external facts.
The narrative form of sacred stories is therefore no mere husk that must be discarded in order to arrive at the contentful kernel. Rather, the constitution of the narratives as geschichtlich itself belongs to the content that is to be understood. The biblical stories must not be grasped as more or less simple ‘reports’ of factual or fictional events, for then the immanent complexity of the story itself, its narrative composition, would not be given adequate attention and its specifically narrative meaning would be missed.
So, it is one of the essential tasks of reflectively re-narrating the original text in the Joseph novel to sharpen and bring to awareness the fundamental difference between attention to the letter, on the one hand, and attention (through the letter) to the meaning of the story, on the other. In this sense, in his essay on Joseph and His Brothers, which is an additional elucidation of the novel, Thomas Mann says the following: ‘I still remember how amused I was, and how much of a compliment I considered it, when my copyist in Munich, a simple woman, brought me the typewritten copy of the first volume, “The Stories of Jacob”, and said: “Now we know at last how all this actually happened.” That was touching – for, after all, it did not happen. The exactness, the realism are fictional; they are play and artful illusion, realization 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