Narrative Ontology. Axel Hutter
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eyes before the obvious in order not to see the great model that is embodied anew in his two sons. The inner refusal to understand expresses itself externally in him becoming blind, in lamenting the weakness of his eyes.
At the same time, it is his weak eyes (in an outward sense) that make possible the original scene in the first place, in which Jacob wins the blessing ‘deceptively’ and the great myth prevails over the small myth – which Isaac, too, wants to bring about unconsciously through his ailing eyes. Isaac, according to the novel, ‘sought out darkness. Are we claiming that Isaac became “blind” in order not to see the idolatry practised by his daughters-in-law? Ah, that was the least of what it pained him to see, of what made the loss of sight desirable – for only in blindness could those things happen that had to happen’ (159).
The narrator of the Joseph novel interprets, then, the weakness of Isaac’s eyes ‘psychosomatically’. Isaac is working unconsciously towards undermining his conscious loyalty to the ‘small myth’, so that it does not in the end stand in the way of the big model of the blessing. The original scene in which the blessing is deceptively obtained under false pretences is thus desired just as much by Isaac – albeit unconsciously – as by Jacob and his mother. It can only be staged, however, if Isaac can barely see. Thus, he contributes his part in the success of the scene and suffers because of his eyes: ‘for only in blindness could those things happen that had to happen’.
Can one, then, in the end, still speak here of betrayal? Evidently not, for Isaac is deceived only insofar as he deceives himself by adhering ‘blindly’ to the small myth of the firstborn. The deception through Jacob is in truth, then, only the correction of a misunderstanding that Isaac himself wishes and unconsciously induces.
Selfhood as Self-Understanding
In the story of Jacob, the narrative sounding board, which is caused to resonate through the isolated events on the surface and which links them meaningfully through a common deeper dimension, acquires a first concrete elaboration. The protagonists of the narrative are shaped in their own self-understanding by precisely that fundamental distinction between meaning and being, significant model and temporal–individual repetition ‘in the flesh’, which for Thomas Mann is the principle of all narration and thus also the principle of narrative understanding. This principle is not only a principle of readings and texts, but in the first instance a life principle.
Thomas Mann makes this explicit in his talk ‘Freud and the Future’, which contains in an important part a commentary on the Joseph novel.4 He speaks of ‘the schema in which and according to which the supposed individual lives, unaware, in his naïve pride in being first and unique, of the extent to which his life is but formula and repetition and his path marked out for him by those who trod it before him. His character is a mythical role which the actor … plays in the simplicity of illusory uniqueness and originality, 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 to conduct itself, in its own way, according to models’ (1947, 374–5).
It belongs essentially to the form of a genuine human life that it first gains its genuine reality where it ‘plays’ – that is, where it repeats – past models by interpreting and varying them, and then presents them on the stage of its present. If one misunderstands oneself exclusively as a unique individual, then one lives, according to Thomas Mann, clueless in one’s ‘naïve pride in being first and unique’. One first gains one’s own reality and character through the specific ‘role’ that one also plays when one plays ‘in the simplicity of illusory uniqueness and originality’.
Human action and speech is only possible and understandable because it repeats coined models. Literally unique action or speech is impossible for human beings because it is not understandable: ‘Actually, if his existence consisted merely in the unique and the present, he would not know how to conduct himself at all; he would be confused, helpless, unstable in his own self-regard, would not know which foot to put foremost or what sort of face to put on. His dignity and security lie all unconsciously in the fact that with him something timeless has once more emerged into the light and become present; it is a character; it is native worth, because its origin lies in the unconscious’ (375).
Accordingly, the life of the protagonists in the original story re-narrated by the Joseph novel means understanding their own being ‘of the flesh’ as the citing repetition of a coined model. One can therefore say that the condition of the possibility of being able to narrate them in a distinguished way consists precisely in that they understand their own being in the sense of a narrative ontology. Their mode of understanding, their attentiveness or inattentiveness to the meaning of the stories in which they live, makes them into what they are. Each makes explicit, in his or her own way, that human beings are precisely what they understand themselves to be.
Yet human self-understanding, which defines human selfhood, articulates itself concretely in the narrative unity of meaning of the story, which one repeats in one’s own self-understanding in various ways, thereby gaining an understanding of one’s own life story. This means the narrative decentring that one achieves by realizing the importance of the question who one actually is – that is, in whose ‘footsteps’ one walks – is far from putting into question the reality of the human I; on the contrary, it is in this questioning that the human I gains in the first place the narrative form of reality that is characteristic of human selfhood, and that relates each one’s own present to a particular past in order to recollect it and understand it as the reality of one’s own life story.
The decisive point of the Joseph novel is that the narrative view of human identity is not an arbitrary external perspective on the human I. Rather, it describes the inner perspective of those distinguished persons whom the novel narratively brings into view. Esau and Jacob, to stay with these two ‘pious men’, understand themselves in the double-layer manner mentioned above: on the one hand as a small I in the being of the here and now, and on the other hand as a great I in the narrative fabric of meaning that reaches far back into the past, and likewise far ahead into the future.
Notes
1 1. In the Joseph novel, some biblical names are written differently from the norm (in German: Issak/Jizchak, Jakob/Jaakob), whereby the spelling may even vary within the novel. (By contrast, the customary spellings are used for the thought pursued here in order to make clear that the reflections relate not only to the narrative of the Joseph novel but also to other narratives – for instance, from the original text.) This deliberate inhomogeneity of the names takes into account the central issue that the ‘I’ is ambiguous and human identity unstable.
2 2. It is for this reason remarkable that, in 1939 – that is, as work on the Joseph novel was already well advanced – Thomas Mann provides in retrospect a precisely matching characterization of The Magic Mountain. The ‘ambition’ of the earlier novel, according to Thomas Mann, consisted in pretending ‘to give perfect consistency to content and form, to the apparent and the essential; its aim is always and consistently to be that of which it speaks’ (1999a, 725). This identity of content and form that was already striven for in The Magic Mountain reaches completion, however, in the Joseph novel, in which it acquires its most consistent and radical form. Precisely for this reason, Thomas Mann is ‘compelled to believe the voices that consider that Joseph represents the climax of his life work’ (Letter to Otto W. Zenker, 10 April 1949; Sk 315).
3 3. To be sure, it is obvious that an exact counter-model is also a form of the varying repetition. Whoever does the opposite of what is expected likewise follows the established model – only in an inverted form. The negating, inverting repetition testifies just as much to a ‘father bond’ as does the affirming repetition.
4 4. Thomas Mann gave the speech in Vienna on 8 May 1936, on the occasion of Freud’s eightieth