I understand that there is also a film version of the novel with Kristin Scott-Thomas in it. I'm not going to see the film, though, until I have read the Suite.
But first I have to finish reading Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers. Now there is also a very great book with an ironic
view of history and myth. Here's my take on the early parts. It's long, but I just love Thomas Mann's work and can't help myself.
As I read the "Dinah" section of Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, the vivid description of the horrible attacks on Shechem and its court, particularly the way that Sichem, the prince for whom Dinah was abducted, was "shamefully disfigured, stuck head-down in the waste-pipe of his own latrine," reminded me of that early scene in Aleksei German's film Hard to Be a God where the literate man was forced head first down the hole of the outdoor wooden latrine. Then as I read the rest of the Dinah section, I kept thinking about the possibility that a certain tradition owing to a long history and a value for vivid and detailed description seemed to infuse European and Eurasian art. Both works are very disturbing but move the viewer and the reader out of complacency and impart a sense of actually being there that is both monstrous and sublime since the artistry is so great. In fact, that very "Unheimlichkeit" (or unhomelike) sense of home should serve as a wakeup call to examine our sense of tolerance for equally savage and horrible actions on the part of our troops and mercenaries both here and abroad. We humans come out of a very savage ancestry with a sense of god-given proprietary selfishness that just won't quit. Even Manifest Destiny and the racist white supremacist worldview that Dylann Roof took on comes straight from Genesis. So I am very thankful that such great artists as German and Mann have worked to show us in honest and ironic terms what this kind of thinking leads to. Mann particularly shows us in a very beautiful fashion how myth and history get conflated to the point that the one becomes the other, resulting in a kind of eternal recurrence which also makes me think of Heine and Nietzsche, but not in the same sense. Mann's idea of recurrence has more to do with universal archetypes or prototypes that take space in the psyche upon its experience of the world: the Great Deluge; the Tower of Babel; the Garden of Paradise; the Senex god and the Divine Child-Savior god; and so on. In the Prelude, Mann puts it like this: "Certainly it becomes clearer and clearer that the dream memory of man, formless but shaping itself ever anew after the manner of sagas, reaches back to catastrophes of vast antiquity, the tradition of which, fed by recurrent but lesser similar events, established itself among various peoples and produced that formation of coulisses which forever lures and leads onwards the traveller in time." It's the same story over and over but with different timely and cultural inflections, a confusion of "present affliction with the subject of the tradition." And the upshot is this: "The event consisted less in that something past repeated itself, than in that it became present. But that it could acquire presentness rested upon the fact that the circumstances which brought it about were at all times present. The ways of the flesh are perennially corrupt, and may be so in all god-fearingness." Thus, as Mann continues, "At any time": therein lies the mystery. For the mystery is timeless, but the form of timelessness is the now and the here." The next step is thus rendered: "It too was only a repetition, the becoming-present of something profoundly past, a frightful refresher to the memory.... [...] // What concerns us here is not calculable time. Rather it is time's abrogation and dissolution in the alternation of tradition and prophecy, which lends to the phrase 'once upon a time' its double sense of past and future and therewith its burden of potential present. Here the idea of reincarnation has its roots. [...] Such is the meaning of ritual, of the feast. Every Christmas, the world-saving Babe is born anew and lies in the cradle, destined to suffer, to die and to arise again."
Another picture of the folly surrounding the need to take history as truth, much less that strange proclivity to take myth as history, is shown in Mann's narrative snippet on language. The idea is that the discovery of ancient accounts meant that someone had to transcribe and render them in language understandable to contemporaries. What is then glaringly obvious is this, that the old writings were very probably unintelligible or extremely difficult to render. In The Prelude it says: "Memory, resting on oral tradition from generation to generation, 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.... [...] but ... everybody is begotten and points backwards, deeper down into the depths of beginnings, the bottoms and the abysses of the well of the past." And what really is ever the very first beginning? And then on the texts: 'Now we know these verses and legends; we have texts of them, written on tablets found at Nineveh, in the palace of Asshurbanipal, king of the universe son of Assarhaddon, son of Sennacherib; some of them, preserved in graceful cuneiform characters on greyish-yellow clay, are our earliest documented source for the Great Flood in which the Lord wiped out the first human race on account of its corruption.... Literally speaking, this source itself is not an original one; these crumbling tablets bear transcriptions made by learned slaves only some six hundred years before our era, at the command of Asshurbanipal, a sovereign much addicted to the written word and the established view.... Indeed, they were copied from an original a good thousand years older, from the time, that is, of the Lawgiver and the moon-wanderer; which was about as easy, or as hard, for Asshurbanipal's tablet-writers to read and to understand as for us to-day a manuscript of the time of Charlemagne. Written in a quite obsolete and undeveloped hand, a hieratic document, it must have been hard to decipher, whether its significance was wholly honoured in the copy remains matter for doubt." Great understatement there: matter for doubt. Mann then continues: "And then, this original: it was not actually an original; not *the* original, when you come to look at it. It was itself a copy of a document out of God knows what distant time; upon which, then, though without precisely knowing where, one might rest, as upon a true original, if it were not itself provided with glosses and additions by the hand of the scribe, who thought thus to make more comprehensible an original text lying again who knows how far back in time; though what they probably did was further to transmogrify the orignal wisdom of his text. And thus I might go on -- if I were not convinced that my readers already understand what I mean when I speak of coulisses and abysses."
And then there is the idea that this is the actual word of God, which Mann goes on to parse ironically when he writes: "The Egyptians expressed it in a phrase which Joseph knew and himself used on occasion. [...] ... speaking of something that had high and indefinite antiquity, would say: 'It comes from the days of Set.' By whom, of course, they meant one of their gods, the wily brother of their Marduk or Tammus, whom they called Osiris, the Martyr, because Set had first lured him into a sarcophagus and cast it into the river, and afterwards torn him to pieces like a wild beast and killed him entirely, so that Osiris, the Sacrifice, now ruled as lord of the dead and everlasting king of the lower world. 'From the days of Set'; the people of Egypt had many uses for this phrase, for with them the origins of everything went back in undemonstrable ways into that darkness." In fact, Mann very deftly shows how one god bleeds into another; and how the god of Abraham derived from other gods and merged with others. Thus the idea of a unique cultural amalgamated god serving as the "one true God" is set on its heel as a kind of universal cross-cultural experience that only becomes "the one" upon the territorial victory of the richest and most savage proprietary community. Those tribal battles of the Middle East do seem as though they are eternally recurring now as the ownership interests of whatever is known as the "Judeo-Christian God" wage their Manifest Destiny in the lands of infidels of a lesser God who need help bringing out the correct, greater, and only true God inherent there. Maybe there really is such a thing as eternal recurrence to the point of madness ending in the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of total extinction and end times. It is not a great leap of logic to come to that conclusion these days.
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