it.
Creating the imaginary terrain where moral judgment is suspended was a move of enormous significance: only there could novelistic characters develop- that is, individuals conceived not as a function of some preexistent truth, as examples of good or evil, or as representations of objective laws in conflict, but as autonomous beings grounded in their own morality, in their own laws. Western society habitually presents itself as the society of the rights of man; but before a man could have rights, he had to constitute himself as an individual, to consider himself such and to be considered such; that could not happen without the long experience of the European arts and particularly of the art of the novel, which teaches the reader to be curious about others and to try to comprehend truths that differ from his own. In this sense E. M. Cioran is right to call European society 'the society of the novel' and to speak of Europeans as 'the children of the novel.'
Profanation
The removal of gods from the world is one of the phenomena that characterize the Modern Era. The removal of gods does not mean atheism, it denotes the situation in which the individual, the thinking ego, supplants God as the basis for all things; man may continue to keep his faith, to kneel in church, to pray at his bed, but his piety shall henceforward pertain only to his subjective universe. Having described this situation, Heidegger concludes: 'And thus the gods eventually departed. The resulting void is filled by the historical and psychological exploration of myths.'
The historical and psychological exploration of myths, of sacred texts, means: rendering them profane, profaning them. 'Profane' comes from the Latin
Thomas Manns tetralogy,
Mann's novel won universal respect; proof that profanity was no longer considered an offense but was henceforward an element of customary behavior. Over the course of the Modern Era, nonbelief ceased to be defiant and provocative, and belief, for its part, lost its previous missionary or intolerant certainty. The shock of Stalinism played the decisive role in this evolution: in its effort to erase Christian memory altogether, it made brutally clear that all of us-believers and nonbelievers, blasphemers and worshipers- belong to the same culture, rooted in the Christian past, without which we would be mere shadows without substance, debaters without a vocabulary, spiritually stateless.
I was raised an atheist and that suited me until the day when, in the darkest years of Communism, I saw Christians being bullied. On the instant, the provocative, zestful atheism of my early youth vanished like some juvenile brainlessness. I understood my believing friends and, carried away by solidarity and by emotion, I sometimes went along with them to mass. Still, I never arrived at the conviction that a God existed as a being that directs our destinies. Anyhow, what could I know about it? And they, what could they know? Were they sure they were sure? I was sitting in church with the strange and happy sensation that my nonbelief and their belief were oddly close.
The Well of the Past
What is an individual? Wherein does his identity reside? All novels seek to answer these questions. By what, exactly, is the self defined? By what a character does, by his actions? Yet action gets away from its author, almost always turns on him. By his mental life, then? By his thoughts, by his hidden feelings? But is a man capable of self-understanding? Can his secret thoughts be a key to his identity? Or, rather, is man defined by his vision of the world, by his ideas, by his
To this unending investigation, Thomas Mann brought his very important contribution: we think we act, we think we think, but it is another or others who think and act in us: that is to say, timeless habits, archetypes, which-having become myths passed on from one generation to the next-carry an enormous seductive power and control us (says Mann) from 'the well of the past.'
Thomas Mann: 'Is man's 'self' narrowly limited and sealed tight within his fleshly ephemeral boundaries? Don't many of his constituent elements come from the universe outside and previous to him?… The distinction between mind in general and individual mind did not preoccupy people in the past nearly so powerfully as it does us today…' And again: 'We may be seeing a phenomenon which we would be tempted to describe as imitation or continuation, a notion of life in which each persons role is to revive certain given forms, certain mythical schema established by forebears, and to allow them reincarnation.'
The conflict between Jacob and his brother Esau is only a replay of the old rivalry between Abel and his brother Cain, between God's favorite and the neglected, jealous one. This conflict, this 'mythical schema established by forebears,' finds its new avatar in the destiny of Jacob's son Joseph, himself one of the favored. Impelled by the immemorial sense of the favored one as culpable, Jacob sends Joseph to reconcile with his jealous brothers (an ill-fated move: they will cast him into a well).
Even suffering, that seemingly ungovernable reaction, is only 'imitation and continuation': when the novel gives us the words and behavior of Jacob mourning Joseph's death, Mann comments: 'This was not his usual style of speech… Noah had previously used analogous or similar language about the flood, and Jacob adopted it… His despair was expressed in formulas that were more or less traditional… though this should not cast the slightest doubt on his spontaneity.' An important note: imitation does not mean lack of authenticity, for the individual cannot do other-
wise than imitate what has already happened; sincere as he may be, he is only a reincarnation; truthful as he may be, he is only a sum of the suggestions and requirements that emanate from the well of the past.
Coexistence of Various Historical Periods Within a Novel