Joseph the Provider

WITH Joseph the Provider, Thomas Mann concludes the great Joseph cycle which has taken as through Joseph and His Brothers, Young Joseph, and Joseph in Egypt. In the final volume he resumes the story of the Biblical patriarch at the moment of his imprisonment for the affair of Potiphar’s wife, follows Joseph’s rise to power as Minister of Food, and closes, as does the author of Genesis, with the death of Joseph’s father, Jacob.

In the meantime he weaves the previously dangling threads of narrative, symbol, and idea into a single and elaborately meaningful strand The earlier background of religious ideas from the Hebrew, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures is now enriched by the tender monotheistic concepts of the Pharaoh Ikhnaton, who seeks to merge himself in the love of the Father. And the developing ideal of civilized man, for which Joseph is the archetype, is enlarged as Joseph extends his sense of moral reponsibifity beyond the individual to include the world. Joseph at last reaches full stature as a man when, as Egypt’s administrator, he becomes the “provider,” the preserver of life, the benefactor of mankind.

The reader who approaches the volume as an independent novel may find it considerably less satisfactory than he would its predecessor, Joseph in Egypt, which derived both unity and drama from the splendidly characterized wife of Potiphar. Nevertheless, Mann’s comic sense delightfully informs his narration of incidents which are but lightly sketched in the Biblical account, especially in the diverting tales of the two fine gentlemen, Pharaoh’s chief baker and chief butler, of the darkly determined woman, Tamar, and of Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream, with its fine contrast of the royal discoverer of sentimental monotheism and the Hebrew realist.

But Joseph the Provider is after all not a separate novel; it is the concluding book of a vast and leisurely table on the nature, state, and destiny of man. The whole constitutes a work which in encyclopedic scholarship, imaginative power, and magnitude of conception can hardly be approached by any other literary product of our time. Its theme is that man, the world, and God - soul, matter, and spirit are one. Its central concept is of a divine order and purpose which can be darkly perceived in the myths men have created and which are expressions of both man’s and God’s moral nature.

Through the deep and dimly remembered past, men’s responses to life situations have become set in a comparatively few stylized patterns which continually repeat themselves, not because of accident and inertia, but because of men’s vague sense of the appropriateness of the pattern to their natures. Yet man is not entirely bound; within the rigid form of tradition he is free to compose variations. So man’s life is at once a repetition and a creation of myth, through which he is dignified by his identification with the past and the eternal. Thus also, in Mann’s fable, Joseph, who appears in the Biblical tradi tion as the first complete man in the great world, both lives and creates the perfect myth, the pattern for civilized man. Knopf, $3 00.

JAMES F. FULLINGTON