Narrative Ontology. Axel Hutter
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and there will be a tomorrow. A central aspect of the ‘blessing’ that Thomas Mann understands as Abraham’s legacy consists, then, in the gift of being acquainted with time in its fullness, in the talent of being able to link the present with the past and future. The one who is blessed with a sense for narrative relations links the present with the past such that the present becomes a citation, a repetition of an original model that foreshadows a final end.
This characterizes how Thomas Mann, as author and as a narrator who re-narrates, reads the original text. The manner of his reading is articulated, in fact, in the Joseph novel itself, for it is nothing other than a very specific way of reading the original text: in its reflective reading, the novel highlights and translates precisely those narrative references to earlier and later that are contained in the original story itself.
Thus, a complex intertwining of narrative levels of meaning emerges: the inner meaning of the original story consists in a narrative ontology in which being is understood – in a sense that is still in need of elucidation – narratively and historically: as (hi)story. For an adequate understanding, this original story is re-narrated by Thomas Mann himself with the explicit intention of raising the original meaning of the story, its narrative ontology, more clearly into consciousness. He does this by consistently highlighting and thoroughly reflecting the narrative relations – that is, the echoes of the single events in the story’s temporal resonance chamber.
The Narrative Decentring of the I
Of Reuben, Joseph’s oldest brother, the Joseph novel narrates: ‘He was not unique in this world in misjudging the importance of the question that asks who someone is, in whose footsteps he walks, on what past he bases his present, in order thereby to establish his real identity’ (53). Here the question concerning oneself, the striving for self-knowledge, takes on the shape of the genuinely narrative question: in whose footsteps does one walk? To which past does one, or ought one, to relate one’s present, in order to be able to designate and understand it as reality?
In the life stories narratively unfolded by the Joseph novel in time and language, there is a clear awareness of a narrative and historical dimension that enables the I to gain distance to its respective here and now: the horizon of its immediate experiences expands and it gains the capacity to experience a unity of meaning that reaches beyond ‘the immediate and actual reference’. This narrative decentring opens, then, the possibility of relating one’s own respective present to an underlying past, and of understanding it as a meaningful reality in the double aspect of being and meaning.
This leads, however, as the narrator of the Joseph novel expressly discusses and highlights, to the central question that has the power of fundamentally challenging our everyday understanding of the world and ourselves: ‘Is the human I something closed sturdily in on itself, sealed tightly within its own temporal and fleshy limits? Do not many of the elements out of which it is built belong to the world before and outside of it? And is the notion that someone is no one other than himself not simply a convention that for the sake of good order and comfortableness diligently ignores all those bridges that bind individual self-awareness to the general consciousness?’ (94).
This central question is to be pursued here in the form of a philosophical interpretation of the Joseph novel that, again, sets itself the task of speaking not so much about the novel but, rather, about that of which the novel itself speaks. In other words, an attempt will be made to reflect primarily not upon Thomas Mann and his texts, but rather upon what he himself reflects upon in his texts. To the same degree that there are differences between the genuine logic of literary reflection and the genuine logic of philosophical reflection, so there is agreement between both forms of reflection in their critical approach to putting into question conventions for ‘good order and comfortableness’ of everyday consciousness.
The reflections pursued here seek in this way to unfold argumentatively – step by step, in an independent manner – the exceedingly complex thought of a narrative decentralized I in Thomas Mann’s novel, so that not only its manifold aspects are made conceptually explicit but, beyond that, the reasons for a radically changed self-interpretation of human being become clear.
The human self in the Joseph novel turns out not to be ‘solidly encompassed, but, as it were, stood open to the rear, overflowed into earlier times, into areas beyond his own individuality’ (94). To adequately understand this thought, it will be crucial to elaborate its partly explicit, partly implicit, philosophical background. Only in this way will this thought be protected from the convenient deception that we are dealing merely with a ‘poetic’ – and, thus, theoretically insignificant – idea.
Taking the place of the usual interpretation of the world and the self, which objectifies the human I into a ‘graspable thing’ sealed in on itself, there will have to be a new interpretation of the self and the world in which the previously closed and isolated I now recollects the manifold ‘relations’ that lead it beyond its narrow ‘temporal and fleshy limits’. Since every human self-understanding is accompanied, however, by a corresponding understanding of the world, a narrative critique of everyday consciousness leads not only to a new temporal and historical conception of the human I, but, equally, to a ‘revolution’ in the understanding of being.
Coined Archetypes
Now the conditions have been prepared for understanding adequately the answer that the Joseph novel gives to the question why Jacob’s mistaking of the I, in the end, is not a betrayal: ‘In truth, no one was betrayed, not even Esau’ (160). For the narrator of the novel, the betrayal takes place, then, only on the literal surface; in truth – that is, for a reading that is attentive to the deeper meaning – there can be no talk of betrayal (so that there is also no reason for a ‘higher’ correction of the events).
The justification for this interpretation that no one, not even Esau, was betrayed is introduced with a fundamental remark: ‘For if it is our ticklish task to tell of people who did not always know precisely who they were’, then ‘this occasional lack of clarity really only affected what was individual and time-bound and was itself the direct 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