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 had struggled to win, the man whom his spiritual family saw as the son and reincarnation of the Chaldean – suffered greatly from what he was forced to see, or to close his eyes to in order not to see, suffered, too, from his own weakness, which prevented him from putting an end to this mischief by suggesting Esau take to the desert, as had been done with Ismael, his savagely beautiful uncle’ (159).
Isaac is the blessed one. He is the ‘keeper of the idea of God that Abram had struggled to win’, which – this much can already be said – is essentially linked with a spiritual aversion to the worship of nature and of images that is so close at hand for human being. Yet this Abrahamic aversion to the immediate is foreign to Esau. He is a ‘natural lad’ and the narrator of the Joseph novel does not pass up the pleasure of making this blatantly clear: with shaggy skin, having matured early, fruitful. In his cheerful worship of nature and images, he does not have the ‘weighty and pondering’ concerns of Jacob, and lives his life without a care.
The absence of the blessing cannot be brought out more explicitly. This must actually cause grief to Isaac, the blessed one, and cause him concern. What he sees also causes him pain, but he remains silent and takes flight in the role of a father who sticks by his firstborn while ceding the opposing role to his wife, who takes the side of the younger son. Both adopt, then, as father and mother, pre-coined roles in a play that is surely as old as humanity.
Isaac insists defiantly on his role as father: ‘Mine is the red one. He is the firstborn, and I love him.’ Still, it cannot remain entirely concealed to him that Esau is not blessed. But he closes his eyes before the obvious and refuses to see the character roles that have been assigned to Esau and Jacob. What prevents him? On this point, the novel is very subtle: ‘The “small” myth prevented it, Esau’s actual priority of birth prevented it’; ‘And so Isaac complained of his eyes’ (159). Here, a small myth and a great myth, a small model and a great model, are in conflict.
In this way, the narrative decentring of human existence, which makes the I walk in the ‘footsteps’ of past models, gains new complexity. It becomes patent that, to the human self that lives and understands its own present in the light of the past, it is not clear from the outset which coined model it ought to identify with. Isaac’s tragedy consists, namely, in that he is conflicted about which model he wants to understand as authoritative