Page:The Theme of the Joseph Novels.djvu/9

 reality, down to economic matters. It is a world of infinitely mutual implications, and to talk about belletristic literature, about a novel, is not necessarily insipid infidelity toward the great and burning concerns of our time, and toward the plight, the struggle, the longing of humanity.—Of course, it depends a little on the novel.

I have often been asked what it actually was that made me turn to this remote and out-of-the-way subject and induced me to transform the biblical legend of the Egyptian Joseph into a broad cycle of novels, requiring many years of work. In answering this question, there is little importance in the external and anecdotical circumstances which prompted me, almost a decade and a half ago when I was still in Munich, to re-read the story in my old ancestral bible. Suffice it to say that I was delighted, and that immediately a preliminary probing and productive searching began in my mind as to what it would be like to renew and reproduce this charming story in fresh narrative and with modern means—with all modern means, the spiritual and the technical ones. Almost immediately, these inner experiments significantly associated themselves with the thought of a tradition: the thought of Goethe, in fact, who relates in his memoires "Dichtung und Wahrheit" how he, as a boy, had dictated the Joseph story to a friend and, in doing so, had woven it into a broad narrative. However, it soon met the fate of destruction because, in the author's own judgement, it still lacked too much in "substance." As an explanation of this youthful and premature venture, the sixty year old Goethe observes: "This natural story is highly amiable: only, it seems too short, and one is tempted to carry it out in all its details."

How strange! Immediately, these words from "Dichtung [5]