Joseph: the plaything of moralists and poets
Bernard Lang's scholarly book about Joseph in Egypt makes Jonathan Wright think about re-reading old classics in a new light

13 November 2009

Joseph in Egypt
Bernhard Lang
Yale University Press, £30

Reading used to be about edification and entertainment. It now feels like a competition. If you haven't ploughed through this year's rivals for the Booker crown then you feel ashamed. Because "keeping up" is so important there is hardly any time to revisit books that you have read before.

No one is going to be impressed at a dinner party if you announce that you've just re-read the Pickwick Papers. I try my best to buck the trend. I read Walden at least once a year because it cheers me up, and I've managed to return three or four times to Moby Dick, the best of Hardy, and Middlemarch. All too often, however, my reading regimen follows a predictable course: rush through it once, ponder it for a couple of days, then put it back on the shelf to gather dust. At least I'll be up to date. How stupid.

As Bernhard Lang reveals, this isn't how our forebears treated literature. Admittedly, they had things easy - there simply weren't as many books clamouring for their attention - but their habit of reading, re-reading, and reading yet again was about more than a paucity of alternatives. Today, we usually seek novelty whenever we visit a bookshop. We are, as scholars sometimes put it, literary nomads, always in search of fresh pastures. This is the modern disease. During the medieval and early-modern periods people were far more interested in looking backwards: to Rome, Greece and the Bible.

They looked for archetypes and guiding lights in the literature of what they regarded as a better, less corrupt age. It was a search for standards of virtue and warnings against vice, for what Lang describes as "imagined structures of stability."

They craved deeds and personalities who fostered order, who helped to make sense of all the workaday chaos, and who were worth imitating.

We might scoff at such a pursuit, but no one could deny that our ancestors were very good at it. When you picked up Cicero for the 14th time, you knew exactly what to expect, but this didn't lead to boredom. Rather, it confirmed the fact that Cicero knew what he was talking about and still had important conclusions to impart. The glow of familiarity was addictive.

Two alternatives were available: you either read canonical texts over and over again, or you rehashed the deeds of iconic characters. Both tactics served the same assumption-bolstering purpose and few figures were more amenable to manipulation than Joseph. He was a gift to anyone in search of a model of chastity (shrugging off the advances of Potiphar's wife), forgiveness (letting those wretched brothers off the hook) or good governance (storing up corn for when the famine hit).

Lang's main focus is on the 17th and 18th centuries. He shows us how figures as diverse as Grotius, Voltaire and Goethe made literary hay out of one of the era's favourite biblical characters. When moralists were battling against Restoration libertinism they turned to the sexually respectable Joseph. When advocates of progressive statecraft required a lodestone there was no better candidate than the loyal, humble-born adviser who set Pharaoh back on track. Playwrights, the writers of epic poetry, and the authors of children's literature all joined in this frenzy of respectful exploitation. In the midst of all this, the modern fixation with unbridled novelty began to take hold, and we all became deeply sceptical of the notion that history could teach us any lessons. Joseph's coat changed colours accordingly. He became the plaything of that new, soon-to-be dominant character on the literary landscape: the novelist (enter Fielding's Joseph Andrews - another of those books I've managed to read more than once). Joseph also became a conduit for those who were engaged in historical biblical criticism and those who, in their Enlightenment way, set about challenging the political status quo.

Joseph, so Thomas Morgan opined, was not a model of savvy leadership: he was the quintessence, perhaps even the origin, of political tyranny. Others were more charitable: Chateaubriand, for instance, who, as part of his post-Revolutionary campaign to remind Europe of Christianity's value, recruited the story of Joseph as an example of just how beautiful and meaningful the Bible could be. The common factor was that Joseph was now a weapon to be deployed, rather than an example to be followed. Lang does not argue that one strategy was more worthwhile than the other, and nor should he. Times changed and Joseph fell into line. Lang simply shows how literary luminaries made use of the story of Joseph for different purposes and across a staggeringly wide range of literary genres.

The scholarship here is phenomenal, the close readings of texts are a delight, and I, for one, had no inkling that the cultural role of Joseph in 17th- and 18th-century Europe was quite as profound as Lang shows it to be.

Perhaps we should all revisit our favourite books and characters more often. At one point, Lang quotes Paul Hunter: "The pleasures of repetition and the comfort of familiarity are seldom given their due in sophisticated literary theory." How true.

The lesson here is that the kids know best. Every child's favourite book is the one that his mum or dad reads to him at bedtime, week in and week out. The trouble is, we adults, even if we dip into Walden umpteen times, still feel obliged to seek out some new insight. That's a noble pursuit, and I wouldn't be without it, but perhaps there is sometimes room to relax.

When confronted with an old literary friend, would it be so awful to turn off our critical faculties for a few hours, to know exactly what was coming next, and to bask in the comfy certainty? It would be intellectually disreputable, by modern standards, but it might just be manna for the soul. We all deserve a respite, after all.