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The Functions of Eternal

Recurrence in Thomas Mann's
Joseph and his Brothers
a
Joseph W. Slade
a
Long Island University
Published online: 05 Sep 2013.

To cite this article: Joseph W. Slade (1971) The Functions of Eternal Recurrence in
Thomas Mann's Joseph and his Brothers, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern
Literatures, 25:2, 180-197, DOI: 10.1080/00397709.1971.10733134

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00397709.1971.10733134

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 JOSEPH W. SLADE

THE FUNCTIONS OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE

IN THOMAS MANN'S JOSEPH AND HIS
BROTHERS
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THOMAS MANN probably became interested in the concept of eternal

recurrence because of his affinity for Goethe, Schopenhauer, and
Nietzsche, all of whom developed the conception, and all of whom
influenced Mann early in his literary career. In Mann's later years,
a corresponding delight in the mythology of the Ancient Near East
made for a fruitful alliance, the result of which is the tetralogy Joseph
and His Brothers. In this immense work, Mann raises eternal recurrence
to a philosophical and literary power.
But recurrence with a difference; each of Mann's literary creditors uses
the concept for his own purposes. Goethe recognizes that universals,
or Urphaenomen, as he calls them, repeat themselves endlessly, but only
occasionally, as in the figure of Helena, in Faust, does he make literary
use of recurrence. In general, his version of the concept is a gentle one,
a pleasant, reassuring contemplation of permanence in flux. Schopen-
hauer, on the other hand, sees life as conflict and misery, and the
worst aspect of it is that the misery recurs in a continuous circle of
pain. But what remains with Goethe as a mere insight into the nature
of things, and with Schopenhauer as a confirmation of his pessimism,
Nietzsche elevates to the status of a doctrine. In his philosophy,
everything, good or evil, repeats itself; there is no escape. His solution
to what would otherwise be a lamentable situation like Schopen-
hauer's is to have his Superman will that recurrence take place-to
affirm his moment of existence. By so doing, the Superman harmonizes
himself with the metaphysical repetition on which Nietzsche conceives
the universe as functioning. Mann does not necessarily accept the
Nietzschean metaphysics-that an infinite number of events recur an
infinite number of times, but he does adopt the idea of willed recur-
rence. However, Mann's purpose is primarily literary; eternal recur-
rence in the artistry of Joseph and His Brothers is not merely the epic
idea of the novel, but a great deal more; the concept is related function-
ally to every major character, every event, and every important train
180
 JOSEPH W. SLADE 181
of thought in the tetralogy. Such uses of this ancient doctrine are, to
put it mildly, unique.
At least three distinct functions of the concept of recurrence may
be distinguished in Joseph and His Brothers: its use as the plot vehicle
for the novel itself; as a device of formal unity in the four volumes;
and as a tool to cancel time.

I. ETERNAL RECURRENCE As THE PLOT VEHICLE

For Mann the mythical is the timeless, the typical, the etemally-
recurring. Pattems of human experience, the very rhythm of existence,
constitute the dialectical aspects of the myth. For primitive man,
and for other men as well, myth is the ontological basis of life; it is
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the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it
reproduces its traits out of the unconscious. 1
Joseph and his family live the myth, live it by imitation and repeti-
tion. To use Mann's famous phrase, they are "open at the back;" they
disguise and protect themselves with forms from the past. Much that is
external to them gathers to shape their individualities, their egos. But
is man's ego, Mann asks, "a thing imprisoned in itself and sternly
shut up in its boundaries of flesh and time ?"2 What precedes the
individual in time, and all that makes up his environment impinges
upon his psyche. The notion of each individual as isolated, that he is
himself and can be no other is "a convention, which arbitrarily leaves
out of account all the transitions which bind the individual conscious-
ness to the general" (p. 78). Those who have an ear for repetition, who
have received from God the "capacity of thinking in aeons and thus in
some sense a mastery of them" (p. 269), build their egos out of the
fragments of tradition. Every character in the quartet has a mythical
role, a role which, "Freud and the Future" tells us, he plays:

in the illusion that it is his own and unique, that he, as it were, has
invented it all himself, with a dignity and security of which his
supposed unique individuality in time and space is not the source,
but rather which he creates out of his deeper consciousness in
order that something which was once founded and legitimized
shall again be represented and once more for good or ill, whether
nobly or basely, in any case after its own kind, conduct itself accor-
ding to pattern. (pp. 317-318)

For good or ill, the pattems repeat themselves in man. And there is
much that is ill in the shadowy traditions of Joseph's family. Esau,
Jacob's brother, for example, relives the role played by Cain, a role
which has even darker connotations because of its correspondence to
 182 Summer I~7I SYMPOSIUM

that of Set, brother and slayer of Osiris, and that of Edom the Red.
Ishmael, Esau's uncle, has played the role before him; both uncle and
nephew lapse into the pattern because of inherent tendencies and
inclinations in their personalities. Esau's "way of looking at things,
and at himself, was conditioned by inborn habits of thought" (p. 86).
Esau's early life, before the blessing is denied him, is far from exem-
plary, from which Mann concludes that blessing and curse alike are
only "a confirmation of established facts, and that Esau's character, his
role upon earth, had long been fixed [...]" (p. 86). Mann, however,
further supposes that Esau became a hunter and rover of the steppes
because of his strongly masculine disposition, but insists that it would
do small justice to the traditional mythology to think that Esau's calling
alone "had imbued him with the feeling and consciousness of himself
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and his role as the sun-scorched son of the lower world" (p. 86). On
the contrary, Esau "had chosen the calling because of its suitability;
that is, out of obedience to the programme and knowledge of the
myth" (p. 86). Internalization of the myth takes place because of its
suitability, and its repetition determines the course of events in the
character's life.
Recurrence, the celebration of the myth in the playing of the role,
absorbs every facet of existence in the lives of its celebrants and brings
order to their world. Without the myth, in the absence of eternal repe-
tition, says Mann in "Freud and the Future," these men would not
know how to act, "would not know which foot to put foremost or
what sort of face to put on" (p. 318). The various roles of the figures
in the tetralogy are the chief dialectic aspects of the novel; their inter-
play creates the tension between form and life, spirit and nature.
Cycles of recurrence, by which the tetralogy progresses, continually
resolve these dialectical roles. Freighted as it is with the dusty tales of
immeasurable antiquity, the story of Joseph would be lost in the time-
coulisses where history and myth meet if time is considered as progres-
sion in a straight line. No order and certainly no meaning would
derive from this chaotic world if one insists on this conception, Mann
protests:

for distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the

sphere. But the sphere consists in correspondence and redintegration;
it is a doubled half that becomes one, that is made by joining an
upper and a lower half, a heavenly and a earthly hemisphere, which
complement each other in a whole, in such a manner that what is
above is also below; and what happens in the earthly repeats itself in
the heavenly sphere and contrariwise [...]. Not only do the heavenly
and the earthly recognize themselves in each other, but, thanks to
the revolution of the sphere, the heavenly can turn into the earthly,
 JOSEPH W. SLADE 183
the earthly into the heavenly, from which it is clear that gods can
become men and on the other hand men can become gods again.
(p. 12 4)

Dialectic tension, then, is governed by the roll of the sphere, in this

theomorphic world of the patriarchs.
If the myth is to function fully as an ethnic guide and also as a
stimulus toward the universal, then Joseph (and the reader) must
first be exposed to the traditions of the tribe. Birth of the ego from the
mythical collective, which Mann stresses as a main theme in the novel,
"the Abrahamitic Ego which is pretentious enough to assume that man
should serve only the Highest,"3 occurs in stages. Parturition of the
ego from the tribal collective in the tetralogy requires four generations,
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not counting those ancestors whose identity floats below the surface of
the past. As partisans of the phenomenon of imitation or succession,
Joseph and his predecessors envisage their task as "the filling out in
present time and again making flesh certain given forms, a mythical
frame that was established by the fathers" (p. 8 I). The cycles of
repetition of these forms labor to bring forth consciousness of the
self and its individual responsibilities. The greater the awareness of
identity and succession, the more detached from the collective is the
ego.
Nevertheless, this growth of the individual from the confines of
the tribe does not mean that the collective is deserted. When Joseph
realizes that his part resembles the roles of his ancestors, he under-
stands himself by reference to communal traditions, and is both him-
self and a part of the group. Repetition provides for a synthesis of
collective and individual; as Mann puts it in "The Theme of the Joseph
Novels," the ego of these prototypes "detaches itself from the collective
in much the same way as certain figures of Rodin wrest themselves out
of the stone and awaken from it" (p. 14). Jacob is one of these semi-
detached figures, a little more developed than Issac, and much more so
than Abraham, who first established the pattern by which their indi-
viduality grows. The cycles of growth culminate in the ego of Joseph;
his ego is conscious of its central importance but still participates in the
collective in a playful way. Abraham, Issac, and Jacob find eternal
recurrence crucial to the expansion of their minds, but as a tool over
which they have relatively little control; their spiritual journey toward
the Highest weighs profoundly on the solemnity of their role-playing.
Joseph, not content merely to be the hero of his story, must direct the
play and write the script as well. Like Gilgamesh, one of his prototypes,
Joseph is the "glad-sorry" man; he learns to use repetition in practical,
active endeavor, to conquer the world where spirit and nature inter-
sect.
 184 Summer I97I SYMPOSIUM

In their search for meaning and significance in their lives, Mann's

characters are not above noticing, or even insisting, on correspondences
with the myths of other divinities, such as Ishtar. By such blatant
idolatry, they mean no disrespect, for God's qualities are in a process of
evolution also. Abraham, by his decision to serve only the Highest, in
a way was God's father: "he had perceived Him and thought Him into
being" (p. z81). God, just embarked on His theological career, can be
apprehended only by the familiar terminology of myth. "He lay in
bonds," Mann says, "and was a God of waiting upon the future; and
that made a certain likeness between Him and those other suffering
godheads" (p. z89), the recurrent nature heroes and divinities. God's
moving finger writes; and having writ. pauses, for the pattern pleases;
there is much that is profound in the schemas of the past. For the
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abstract qualities of God must be clothed in garments of the flesh, and

the garments must be tailored by individual repetition.
Joseph "knows the course in which the world rolls," although he
must be reminded at intervals of his lack of understanding and over-
weening pride by his chastisements in the well. With the supreme self-
confidence of the star actor, Joseph interprets these punitive events
as integral parts of his role rather than deviations from his pattern of
repetition. The depths of the well erupt in a fountain of allusions.
And his association of his imprisonment in the bar with the chthonian
gods has a validity beyond that of poetic allusion; his fall into the
underworld is also a plunge into the unconscious, an effort at self-
realization and self-correction which results in the refreshment of a
psychological rebirth. When first his brothers then Mut-em-enet tear
away the Veil of Maya, Joseph accepts reality with humility and resolves
to seek anew the fulfillment of his dreams. Convinced that his lot holds
nothing of the ordinary, Joseph raises every event in his life to a high
plane of meaning by his conscious repetition; at every step he hears the
meshing of cosmic gears. Strangely enough, as Joseph matures, as his
ego detaches itself from the collective, he finds repetition of archetypal
nuances and gestures less necessary; knowledge and understanding
take its place. By dint of self-examination in the well, his ego assumes
supremacy over his unconscious. At this point, when the sphere has
almost completed its revolution, Joseph resolves to play out the
pattern, to ravel up the loose themes of his story. To this end he
becomes the stage-manager of his dreams, and like some Hebrew
Ibsen, writes a transition-scene for the future.
Each of the four generations of the tetralogy is an archetype.
Prototypes who have their fingers on the pulse of their epochs, they
represent four stages in the evolution of mankind from savagery. The
blessing, passed from one generation to the most worthy (i.e., he who
repeats the correct archetypal patterns) in the next, is the rediscovery
 JOSEPH w. SLADE 185

of the personality, the polarization of the ego by its trophism toward

the Highest. The individual who has reconstructed his psyche and
lifted it above the herd collective frees himself for responsible action.
Death, stagnation and disregard for humanity and its nobility provide
the stimulus toward Highest. Joseph defeats the dead gods of Egypt
in their own graves, for he identifies with them, repeats their roles as
Osarsiph, the dead Joseph. But whereas their graves remain tightly
sealed with sterility, the fertility of his spirit raises him to the status of
the Provider. Pure spirit cannot live in proximity with death: Abraham
fled Ur of the Chaldees; Issac drove Ishmael into the desert; Jacob
betrayed Esau and then Laban, taking flight each time. Joseph's grave
yawns open twice, but from the underworld of Egypt he does not
return. Joseph lives in peace and rules over his enemy as mediator
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between god and men, spirit and nature; he is the buffer between
Ahknaton, whose pure spirit had never known the refreshment of a
rebirth, and the people of the black soil. For his reconciliation of these
antipodes, the blessing conferred on him is not that of the spirit, but
of "heaven above" and "the deep that lieth under" (p. 1195); Joseph's
role lies in the present, while the spiritual blessing is a promise for the
future. "Play and playing it was," Jacob tells Joseph, "approaching
salvation yet not quite seriously a calling or a gift" (p. 1195). To act
one's role, even with consummate artistry, is not always to understand
the whole drama; the cosmic spotlight must pass to Judah, the bearer of
the spirit's blessing.
Yet Joseph plays out his role, repeats his pattern to its conclusion,
because he knows that the men of the present outnumber those of the
future and the spirit, and knows also that he too is creating a pattern.
For Another will come, a Pure Spirit who will also be a sacrifice to the
secular and the present, that the spirit and the future may endure.

II. ETERNAL RECURRENCE AS A DEVICE OF FORMAL UNITY

Eternal recurrence not only contributes to the content of Joseph and

His Brothers, but also functions as the chief means of unifying the
narrative into a whole. In a letter of 1939, Mann tells Karl Kerenyi of
the importance of recurrence (Wiederholtmg) in the novel: "Das Fest im
Sinne der mythischen Ceremonie und der heiter-ernsten Wiederholung
eines Urgeschehens is ja beinahe das Grund-Motiv meins Romans [...].""
With recurrence as the central leitmotif, Mann achieves complete unity
between the world of the recurring myth and the structure of his
novel. As Erich Heller remarks: "it is only in Joseph and His Brothers
that the literary method of the Lei/-Motif, which ever since Budden-
brooks had steadily gained in meaning and in eloquence, together with
the idea which it seeks to realize, comes clearly into its own."o Joseph
 186 Summer Ij7I SYMPOSIUM

and His Brothers represents the culmination of Mann's use of the leit-
motif as a literary tool.
In his eagerness to demonstrate his mastery of schematic unity,
Mann uses the leitmotif to a degree bordering on the absurd. Huge,
by the author's own admission (p. v), the tetralogy almost collapses
beneath its own ponderosity of design. Actually, however, the over-
burdened architectonics of the work provoke an intended humor.
In "The Theme of the Joseph Novels" address at the Library of Con-
gress, Mann singles out two works, Tristam Shane!Y and "Faust," as
having infI.uenced the writing of the tetralogy (p. 13). "Faust," con-
taining a wealth of mythological figures, appears a fairly obvious choice
of companion-piece, but Tristram Shane!Y seems hardly appropriate,
until one remembers Sterne's propensity for spurious documentation
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and apparently (but not in actuality) arbitrary arrangement of his scenes.

Sterne often quotes a Latin "authority" in support of his nonsensical
theories; Mann, in his casual dismissal of the dubiousness of his
"legendary" events by an "all the evidence agrees" (p. 555), or an
"everybody knows" (p, 1000), employs a similar technique. "The
exactness, the realism are fictional," he says in "The Theme of the
Joseph Novels": "they are play and artful illusion, [...J and humor,
despite all human seriousness, is their soul" (p. 5). All this pseudo-
exactness, of course, exists not only for the increased realism of the
tale, but also to foster its unity by creating the illusion of the recurrence
of events and characters.
One of the most glaring, and at times annoying, examples of this
manipulation of leitmotifs is Mann's juggling of dates. He calculates
with painstaking detail the precise length of Jacob's service under
Laban and that of Joseph's stewardship to Potiphar, in order that it
may appear that a parallel exists and that recurrence has taken place. A
more subtle tampering with history involves the figure of the Pharoah
under whom Joseph becomes the Provider. Amenhotep IV, known as
Akhnaton, has been widely discussed as the precursor of monotheism.
Freud, for instance, in his Moses and Monotheism, theorizes that the
religion transmitted to the Hebrews through Moses was that of Akh-
naton. There is no evidence that Akhnaton actually held the throne
during the time of Joseph (if Joseph himself were an actual personage).
No other Pharoah would have served Mann's passion for recurrent
themes, however; by emphasizing Akhnaton's preoccupation with
Aton, who represents a development of the older Egyptian divinities
analogous to the evolution of the major Hebrew divinity, Mann
creates a Pharoah in the image of Christ; a rather pallid Christ, but one
sufficient to establish a quality of anticipation and recurrence.
Joseph, as Mann portrays him, not only repeats the patterns begun
in the past by Abraham, but also corresponds to the figures of Moses
 JOSEPH W. SLADE 187
and Christ in the Hebrew future. As the Midianite merchants, having
purchased Joseph from his brothers, travel toward Egypt, dust
cyclones like "pillars of fire" (p. 556) guide their caravan. This famous
image both enhances the nimbus of destiny that surrounds Joseph's
adventures and increases his prototypical significance for later ages.
Parallels with the life of Christ also appear at intervals throughout the
text. Astonished at his pupil's rapid learning in his studies, Eliezer
begs Joseph to "remember me, when thou comest into thy kingdom"
(p. 2.72.). At Joseph's birth, Bilhah the handmaid runs to tell Jacob
"that unto us a child is born, and unto us a child is given" (p. 2.30).
Joseph himself attempts to convince Potiphar that he was born of a
virgin on the wholly symbolic grounds of Rachel's long period of
sterility and the ascendancy of the astrological sign of the Virgin at
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the time of her deliverance. Mann strengthens these adumbratory

glimmerings less deftly by increasing the Genesis account of the
purchase price of twenty pieces of silver to thirty, and by having Judah
betray Joseph with a kiss.
Many aspects of the Genesis story lend themselves easily to the
theme of recurrence and require little manipulation. Mann adopts
the preference of the father for the younger son rather than the elder,
who by right of primogeniture should receive more favor, into a
recurrent motif. Abraham establishes the pattern by bestowing the
blessing on Issac instead ofIshmael, the elder son. Jacob, by trickery,
cheats Esau out of his birthright and blessing, but Mann makes Issac a
party to the deception by insinuating that Issac's blindness is feigned:
"Is it possible for a man to become blind, or as nearly blind as
Yitzchak was in his old age, because he does not like to see, because
seeing is a torture to him, because he feels better in a darkness where
certain things can happen which must happen?" (p, 130). Such intimations
effect the simulacrum of recurrence. At the very end of the saga, when
Joseph brings his sons before Jacob to be blessed, Jacob crosses his
hands, putting his right hand on the head of Ephraim, the younger, and
the left on Manasseh, contrary to the proper procedure. Jacob's
mistake is deliberate: "For Jacob, brother of the hairy one, was of
course repeating a pattern. He was copying his own father, the blind
man in the tent, who had given him the blessing before the red one.
And to his way of thinking, the blessing did not work unless there was
a trick in it" (p. 130). Could Zarathustra have asked for a better example
of willed recurrence?
Another crucial and related recurrent theme is that of the substi-
tution of the sacrifice, which also points backward and forward in
the Hebrew tradition. In the savage past, the first-born son had been
sacrificed to insure the benignity of the gods. But Abraham's discovery
of God modifies this barbarous custom; Elohim requires only the
 188 Summer I91I SYMPOSIUM

demonstration of faith. He substitutes the ram in lieu of Issac. Issac, as

he is dying, speaks "very darkly and oracularly, of "himself" as the
rescued sacrifice, and of the blood of the ram, which was to be thought
of as his very own blood, the true son's, poured out in sin-offering for
all" (p. 121). Issac also prophesies the actual sacrifice of the son "in the
place of God" (p. 122); Joseph, and later Christ, the Lamb of God, are
these son-sacrifices. Even though Joseph is ultimately sacrificed to the
temporal world and lifted up as the Provider of Egypt, he does not
die a physical death, and his brothers unconsciously perform the
symbolic substitution. They slay a lamb, and sprinkle its blood on
Joseph's coat.
The coat of many colors, which the brothers furiously rip during
the simulated sacrifice, becomes a leitmotif tour de force for Mann. By
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a highly imaginative transference of associations, Mann transmutes

Rachel's veil, her leatonet passim, into the garment which Joseph
wheedles from his father. Leah wore the veil to deceive Jacob on his
wedding night, but it is Rachel's garment and serves to stress the
identity of mother and son. Joseph believes he is a reincarnation of his
mother, as he tells Reuben: "Knowest thou not that Mami's garment is
likewise her son's and that they wear it by turns, one in the other's
place? Name her and thou namest me. Name what belonged to her
and thou namest what is mine" (p. BS). But the veil, because of Leah,
retains its deceptive qualities. Joseph must lose it in order that he may
realize his shortcomings.
These related themes not only determine the roles of the characters
in the novel, but also serve to unify the work by bridging the gaps
in the accounts of each generation. Themes and variations, by their
mutual involvement in the lives of the characters, give an appearance
of organic unity to the novel as a whole. Every event in the life of one
character strikes a chord already sounded in the life of another;
harmony of the work is the result. Portrayal of life as lived myth is the
subject of the work; but life as myth involves a succession of roles.
The form of life, the role, turns upon the repetition of themes; the form
of the tetralogy is thus a function of a pattern of changes and rearrange-
ments of these leitmotifs. All the thematic parts integrate into a whole
by creating coherent patterns in the events of the plot. The roles of
Joseph and his family constitute the rhythm of the life depicted; the
themes which recur in their lives constitute the rhythm of the work.
Recurrence becomes both picture and frame.
Mann devotes a great deal of space to the tales of Jacob and his
ancestors, in order to establish patterns to the events which are a
sequel in Joseph's life. "The pattern comes first," Joseph tells Potiphar,
"then recurs in many ways" (p. 613)' But the patterns of the Hebrews,
although universal in their implications, have much in common with
 JOSEPH W. SLADE 189
the legends of the many races that populate the Near East. To supple-
ment the Hebrew themes, Mann adds paradigmatic myths of equally
respectable antiquity. They too serve to guide Joseph on his path.
Chief among these supplementary materials are the myths of the
mutilated nature gods. Jacob himself identifies his son with these
gods; "he called him 'Damu,' little child-and 'Dumuzi'-the true son;
names which the people of Shinar gave to Tammuz" (p. 75). Jacob's
fondness for such allusions reveals itself in flights of poetic fancy and
in fits of deep despair; when Joseph is snatched away, he irrationally
contemplates descending into the underworld to rescue him, as
Astarte had sought to rescue Tammuz, Astarte, of course, was the
mother-lover of the mangled god, but Jacob's "wandering wits led
him to make the most fantastic analogies" (p. 435). Such poetic
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confusion facilitates the illusion of recurrence.

One of Joseph's favorite pastimes is to weave himself a garland
of myrtle, an adornment sacred to the dying nature gods, and to go
with Benjamin into the Grove of Adonis, there to recite the tales of
the mangled gods to his brother. The lord of the grove "is Tamrnuz
the shepherd, who is called Adonis here, but Osiris in the underworld"
(p, 305), Joseph tells Benjamin. Tammuz "is the sufferer and is the
sacrifice. He descendeth into the abyss that He may rise again and be
glorified" (p. 299). Joseph's subsequent life, beginning with the
affair of the well and ending with his glorification as the Provider, is a
re-enactment of the festival of Adonis. Mann's skillful recitation and
intermittent introduction of parallels with the seasonal gods sustain a
festive atmosphere for Joseph's tribulations. Joseph's fall into the
well, for instance, echoes Tammuz's descent into the underworld:
"It was the abyss into which the true son descends, he who is one
with the mother and wears the robe by turns with her. It was the
nether-earthly sheepfold, Etura, the kingdom of the dead, where the
son becomes the lord, the shepherd, the sacrifice, the mangled god.
Mangled? They had only tom his lips and his skin here and there [...]"
(pp. 390-391). For Joseph and his contemporaries, however, symbolic
mangling has nearly the significance of actual death, especially a
mangling so rich in fruitful associations. During his imprisonment in
the well, Joseph retreats into the archetype for comfort and aid: "No
danger of the flesh and the soul could prevent the concentration of
his spirit upon the wealth of allusion by which the event proclaimed
itself as higher reality, as a transparency of the ancient pattern, as the
uppermost turning undermost; in short, as written in the stars" (p. 390).
Joseph tends to see everything in terms of prototypes. Mann's devotion
to the design of his plot has been so meticulous that the reader finds
Joseph's flaiF quite natural. The Midianites who free Joseph from
the well are duly impressed by the circumstances of Joseph's incar-
 190 Summer I91I SYMPOSIUM

ceration, and regard his appearance almost as the epiphany of a god.

His success in this instance leads Joseph to exploit the predilection
of men to listen for refrains from the past by changing his name to
Osarsiph (joseph as Osiris), and to emphasize his godlike quali-
ties.
By virtue of their manifold associations, these images recall other
images from the far-off recesses of the novel. As each image assumes
an ascendancy over others, Joseph's role changes in almost impercep-
tible phases; by willfully repeating, like Nietzsche's Ubermensch, the
gestures of tradition, Joseph is never at a loss in adjusting to a changed
situation. The dialectic tension between the various roles adopted by
the characters, though resolved in the roll of the sphere, balances
delicately on the periodic succession of themes. Repeated themes carry
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the plot forward; old themes condition and qualify new situations.
Juxtaposition of one leitmotif with another provides new points of
departure for still others, as in a pendulum's swing. Momentum of one
swing begins a second; and the plot moves along its path of develop-
ment. Once this internal motion commences, if discontinued, the plot
will collapse, as it almost does in Joseph the Provider. For Joseph, once
resurrected from his pit and raised up as the Provider, has little need, it
would seem, for repeated patterns in the more practical concerns of
his life. Yet he merely pauses to change masks.
Mann's effort to utilize recurrence to its fullest capacity reaches its
zenith in the fourth volume, as Joseph stands before Pharoah. During
their first conversation, Joseph and Pharoah exchange stories. Akhna-
ton recites a tale of a mischievous god; Joseph counters with stories of
Jacob's hoaxing of Esau and Laban, and refers to his father as a rogue.
The reader, conditioned by Joseph's affinity with the moon, whose
mediation between heaven and earth "is of the jesting kind" (p. 960),
immediately makes an association between Joseph and this roguish
aspect of his father. Heretofore, Mann details Joseph's roles at length;
little imagination is required of the reader. But Joseph is again shifting
roles, this time to a more permanent one, that of the rogue god Hermes-
Thoth, the mediator between gods and men, who will stand between
Pharoah and his people. The reader intuitively knows the cycle of the
theme of moon and rogue is incomplete, and completes the recurrence
himself. Joseph's subsequent actions bear out this assumption of a
new role; his solution for the famine requires all the wit and artifice of
the playful god.
Mann's education of the reader in the tectonic principles of his
novel is indicative of the faultless structure of the work. Events must
recur if the plot is to retain its motion, and recur at the proper time.
Joseph's command of his life instinctively seizes upon a theme but
mutely sounded in the past, when he hears Pharoah's laughing approval
 JOSEPH W. SLADE 191

of the stories of his father. Joseph knows the form which his life
must follow; at this late date, the reader knows it too.
Mann's penchant for irony must be indulged, even at his own
expense. By having Joseph act out the last scene of his drama, he not
only adds the finishing touches to his creation, but also mitigates the
blame for his thematic manipulation. Joseph, in his determination to
add significance to his life, has. done his part to "discover" recurrence
in the events of his career, but Mann certainly helps. Mann's statement
concerning the story-telling propensities of the shepherds applies to
himself as well: "they suppressed some of the facts and rearranged
others all for the sake of the story and with perfectly clear consciences"
(p. 106). Together Joseph and Mann, with perfectly clear consciences,
create a recognition-scene which, for sheer contrivance, would have
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made Aristotle positively venomous.

TIL ETERNAL ~CORRENCE AS A TOOL TO CANCEL TIME

Taken by themselves, events possess only limited importance in

the lives of men. But taken collectively, one occurrence points to
another, without prejudice to its own reality. From almost the begin-
ning of his career, Mann has adhered to and developed this position.
Like Proust, Mann endeavors to extract the essence of events, to
emancipate his characters from an exterior temporal sequence and the
limited meaning of the particular moment. At the same time, he wishes
to exploit every moment to the fullest to discover its relationship to
other events, by unearthing the universal elements of human experience.
He does not think of this relationship of events as a chronological
(or even causal) development, but as a unity of which each occurrence
is but a reflecting facet. By plumbing the depths of anyone moment,
then, he should be able to discover its affinity for others, and thus
expand its significance. But in order thoroughly to investigate indivi-
dual phenomena, time must be slowed down, suspended; the road-
blocks to past and future must be removed from the highways of
duration. No event remains a single point in a continuum, but becomes
open to past and future. As Mann says in the tetralogy: "in the end it
is an arbitrary business, this dividing up of time-not greatly different
from drawing lines in water. One can draw them so, or again so, and
even as one draws the water flows together again into uniformity"
(p. 163). Duration, in the tetralogy, consists of a succession of quali-
tative changes which melt into and permeate one another without
precise boundaries. To reveal this fluidity of time, Mann again has
recourse to the versatile tool of eternal recurrence.
Primitive man places his trust in a reality beyond time, a fact which
 I9Z Summer I97I SYMPOSIUM

influenced Mann in his choice of subject matter for his novel. As

Mircea Eliade points out:

Basically, if viewed in its proper perspective, the life of archaic man

(a life reduced to the repetition of archetypal acts, that is, to cate-
gories and not to events, to the increasing rehearsal of the same
primordial myths), although it takes place in time, does not bear
the burden of time, does not record time's irreversibility; in other
words, completely ignores what is especially characteristic and
decisive in a consciousness of time. Like the mystic, like the reli-
gious man in general, the primitive lives in a continual present,"

As Eliade suggests, primitive man avoids the burdens of time by repet-

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ition of archetypes. Primitive man's ceremonial repetition of things

in illo tempore, he reasons, brings about the recreation of the world as it
was in the beginning; all intervening time between then and the present
does not count. The painful and the tedious are obliterated along with
time. The universe thus becomes endurable through this desperate
effort to retain contact with reality. Joseph and the other characters of
the tetralogy are but little removed from the primitive; consequently,
this concept of temporal suspension is a very amenable one.
Actually the suspension of time in Joseph and His Brothers is accom-
plished in two ways. First, the characters transcend their temporal
limitations by participation in an ongoing process; they have "a
cause." As bearers of the blessing, the patriarchs live for the future,
and act so as to bring a future state into existence. Secondly, time is
abrogated through judicious repetition of things in the past. The two
ways are not dissimilar, for Joseph and his family, in playing their
roles, i. e., repeating archetypes, know that others in the future will
model themselves on their actions.
For primitive man, all time blends into the present. The great
reaches of the past, for instance, hold little awe for the collective
group; the great body of their tradition fills the void. Life continues
in close proximity to what has gone before:

Yet on the whole time then had been more conservatively minded
than time now, the frame of Joseph's life, his ways and habits of
thought were far more like his ancestors' than ours are like the cru-
saders'. Memory, resting on oral tradition from generation to gene-
ration, was more direct and confiding, it flowed freer, time was a
more unified and thus a briefer vista; young Joseph cannot be
. blamed for vaguely foreshortening it, for sometimes, in a dreamy
mood, perhaps by night and moonlight, taking the man from Dr for
his father's grandfather-or even worse. For it must be stated here
 JOSEPH W. SLADE 19~

that in all probability this man from Ur was not the original and
actual man from Vr. (p. 8)

The figure of Abraham belongs to a past so remote that his true

identity remains somewhat nebulous. In their eagerness to shorten
time, his descendants attribute events spread over several generations
to him. He serves as a repository of ideas, a matrix of qualities; he is
merely a convenient stopping place in time, the archetype of the race.
Time for the patriarchs expands and telescopes upon demand; it is
flexible in a way that is foreign to the modem age. Despite the fact
that they too measure time in discrete divisions, temporal progression
has not for them the objectivity that people of today attribute to it:
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True, we have received our mathematical sidereal time handed

down to us from ages long before the man from Ur ever set out on
to our furthest descendants. But even so, the meaning, weight and
fullness of earthly time is not everywhere one and the same. Time has
uneven measure, despite all the objectivity of the Chaldean chronol-
ogy. Six hundred years at that time and under that sky did not
mean what they mean in our Western history. They were a more level,
silent, speechless reach; time was less effective, her power to bring
about change was both weaker and more restricted in its range-
though certainly in those twenty generations she had produced
changes and revolutions of a considerable kind: natural revolutions,
even changes in the earth's surface, in Joseph's immediate circle, as
we know and as he knew too (pp. 7-8).

Twenty generations, six hundred years, had elapsed between Abraham

and Joseph by Eliezer's reckoning, generations and years of elasticity.
Such immense stretches of time weigh heavily on a people, but Joseph's
family carry them with ease. "People spoke in the present," Mann
says, "but they referred to the past, and transferred the one to the
other" (p. 2.79)' Past events hold the same immediacy as the present.
Every major event in the past is ready at hand to the members of the
family because of oral transmission; a favorite pastime of Jacob and
Joseph is to chant the history of their race in mnemonic phrases.
Footsteps clearly traced are gratefully accepted as guides for the
present.
The individual, as he emerges from the collective, is conditioned by
this concept of time. He cannot break his ties with tradition, cannot
discard his past, because his past forms part of him. Tradition dictates
his development, not by tyrannical force, but by providing him with a
basis for action, in the form of archetypal figures and situations. He
models his actions on the characters in his past with whom he feels the

7
 194 Summer I97I SYMPOSIUM

greatest correspondence. By abrogating time in his imitation of his

chosen archetype, he revitalizes the past. Mircea Eliade deals with this
phenomenon in his Cosmos and History, and remarks: "For traditional
man, the imitation of an archetypal model is a reactualization of the
mythical moment when the archetype was revealed for the first time"
(p. 76). To play another's role by no means destroys one's own indivi-
duality, for "thanks to the revolution of the sphere the unity and
identity of the person may go hand in hand with a change of role"
(p. 12.S). The imitator lives in time, and the essence of time is parti-
cularity; the mythical is the universal and timeless. And, Joseph tells
Potiphar: "the general and the typical vary when they fulfil them-
selves in the particular, so that the known becomes unknown and you
cannot recognize it" (p. 937). Nevertheless, the timeless comforts and
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sustains the role-player, for "the form of timelessness is the now and
the here" (p. 18).
Because of this willed repetition, present time projects itself into
mythical time. Thus the novelty of the present pales beside the reality
of the archetype. Those whose identities are "open at the back," whose
very beings are saturated with tradition, are products of all that has
gone before them. To understand themselves. time in the conventional
sense must be set aside.
Joseph's repetition of an event in the past establishes its presentness
in much the same way that modems conceive of the Eucharist as a
celebration of an event in the life of Christ. Since, in days to come,
the event will exhibit similar qualities of recurrence, the future becomes
present as well. To the mind, events are always simultaneous in their
impingement upon the consciousness; the effect of one may be more
forceful than that of another event, but the whole of one's remembered
experienced is present at the same time. Language, Joseph tells
Pharoah, "belongs to time and must deal with one thing after the
other, unlike the world of images, where two can stand side by side"
(p. 9 so). Time but facilitates the appearance of things; it has no final
influence. for the essence of things remains unruffled by temporal
passage. Time, Chronos-Mann tells his audience-"devours his
children that they may not set themselves over him, but must choke
them up again to live in the same old stories as the same children"
(p. 12.z).
Apprehension of the universal, the real in the world and in human
nature, depends upon the capacity to grasp the present moment in
its flight and to analyze its components in the light of past and future.
Joseph does just this in his celebration of his roles, and by so doing he
fathoms the past, understands the present, and prepares for the future.
The very pervasiveness of eternal recurrence in the novel attests to its
importance in the author's mind. Is Joseph and His Brothers merely an
 JOSEPH W. SLADE 195
historical novel, or is Mann suggesting that the conception is still
viable today?
One obvious drawback to such a suggestion is the oppressive
nature of tradition. But Mann carefully forestalls this criticism. The
doctrine of eternal recurrence, as exemplified by Joseph, allows, even
demands, salubrious permutations. Tradition, if properly utilized as a
storehouse of archetypes, fosters not inertia, but progress. Tradition
and change are compatible because the role-player selects a pattem
from tradition and re-establishes it in a new setting. Elsewhere in one
of his essays, Mann remarks on the relationship of the two: "Reaction
as progress, progress as reaction, the interweaving of the two, is a
continually recurring historical phenomenon."? Although Joseph
suspends time in order to perceive the real, i.e., the universal and time-
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less, by willing that recurrence take place, he still lives in and is condi-
tioned by his particular time. Temporal circumstances are powerful,
and Joseph acknowledges their force by choosing to repeat pattems
that retain their vitality in contemporary situations. In repetition there
always occurs variation, because no two human experiences are exactly
alike. Environmental time, as well as individual uniqueness, modulate
human repetition. Tradition or recorded experience is not necessarily
hostile to change; the beneficiaries of tradition must simply learn to
distinguish between the vital and the unessential, the pertinent and the
irrelevant, and to preserve the good pattems while condemning the
bad. Many patterns may function adequately in one generation, but
become useless or injurious in another context. Some pattems, how-
ever, remain prototypical throughout differentiation from age to age,
like the perpetually recurring archetypes of death and rebirth. Men
should commemorate these universal patterns by repeating them,
always allowing for modifications in their manifestations.
With the crucial deterrent of the denial of progress removed, the
concept of recurrence becomes a reasonable philosophical aid for men
today. Again, it is necessary to emphasize that for Mann, imitation of
the archetype does not necessarily destroy individuality. Joseph's
playing of his role invokes mimesis in the Aristotelian sense of imagina-
tive re-creation. The individual ego emerges from the collective into
the realm precisely because it repeats the old patterns in a new design.
The old and the new meet on a plane of freedom, to redefine the
personality. A good actor does not scruple to learn from a Booth or a
Barrymore; without prejudice to his own unique personality, the
individual learns by repetition and by perception of recurrence that
which is of continuing and vital importance to all men.
Why should men of today attempt to make use of recurrence? For
the same reasons that Joseph does: to rise above the pedestrian and
the prosaic, to add significance and symbolism to life, to bring order
 196 Slimmer I97I SYMPOSIUM

into experience. Eternal recurrence as Mann conceives it provides

insight into eternal processes and a conception of the continuity of
human experience. By familiarizing himself with the universal in men.
the modern man can inculcate its teachings in his own existence, and
recognize it in others.
Unfortunately, modern man, in contrast to the man of the myth, has
not been very receptive to this idea. In seeking solutions for problems,
contemporary society tends to ignore the lessons of the past. Even the
theologians, burrowing into the subsoil of religion, dismiss myth
because it is not true in a factual sense. The reformers postulate divine
essence in existential formulas; they point out the anguish of man in
isolation from God and the universe, while disregarding the panacea
for anxiety which lies in the myth and in an identification with the past.
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At the same time, the modern age all too often feels competitiveness
with the past and its accomplishments. As Miguel de Unamuno, in Tb«
Tragic Sense oj Life, points out:

We are jealous of the geniuses of former times, whose names,

standing out like the landmarks of history, rescue the ages from
oblivion. The heaven of fame is not very large, and the more there
are who enter it the less is the share of each. The great names of the
past rob us of our places in it; the space which they fill in the popular
memory they usurp from us who aspire to occupy it. s

Perhaps eternal recurrence could help us assuage this pain.

Recurrence, as Mann sees it, offers a means of polarizing the personal-
ity. of knitting up past experience and pointing the person toward the
future. In recurrence time and the world stand renewed, and he who
perceives the recurrence finds refreshment and regeneration. Repeated
events glitter like little oasises in the dusty procession of life's moments.
To consciously repeat a pattern from the past is to move inward from
the ordinary periphery of events, to participate in a world drama
by becoming one of the players. For every player there exists a role
which will challenge his talents yet not be beyond his grasp. Even the
saddest of roles may be acted with grace. "A tale with a lamentable
close," says Mann, "has yet its stages of honor" (p, 133). The actor
must seize upon a good script when he finds it in the storehouse of
cumulative culture. He who fails to study the past does not condemn
himself to relive it, but only denies himself the possibility of reliving it
well.

LongIs/anti Univer.ri!J
 JOSEPH W. SLADE

I. Thomas Mann, "Freud and the Future," EsJayJ, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter

(New York, 1958), p. 317.
~. Thomas Mann, Jouph and His BrotherJ, trans. H. T. Lowe Porter (New York,
1956), p. 78. All page references, unless otherwise indicated, are to this edition.
3. Thomas Mann, "The Theme of the Joseph Novels," Th011lar Mann'J Addru-
111 D,Iiv,r,d at th, Library ojCongrl1J, f,-/2-f,-/, (Washington, 1963), pp. 13-14.
4. Thomas Mann and Karl Kerenyi, R011landirhtung lind Mythologi,: Bin Brief-
7II,ch.r,I (Zurich, 1945), p, 7~.
5. Erich Heller, Tbe Ironic G,rman: A Stu47 of Th011lar Mann (Boston, 1958),
p. ~4°'
6. Mircea Eliade, COJ11I01 and Hiltory: th, Myth of th, Eternal R,IIIrn, trans.
W. R. Trask (New York, 1959), p, 86.
7. Thomas Mann, "Freud's Position in the History of Modem Thought,"
Pari MarterJ and Other Papers, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York, 1933), p. 170.
8. Miguel de Unamuno, Th, Tragir S'N' of Lif" trans. J. E. C. Flitch (New
Downloaded by [University of Otago] at 10:05 02 January 2015

York, 1954), p. 54.