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own.
He has been seduced by the marvels of the unconscious and
has lost interest in studying the surfaces of character.
If
many 'of
the characters in contemporary novels appear to be the bloodless
relations of characters in a case history it is because the novelist
is
often forgetful today that those things that we call character
manifest themselves in surface behavior, that the ego is still the
executive agency
oj
personality, and that all we know of per–
sonality must be discerned through the ego. The novelist who has
been badly baptized in psychoanalysis often gives us the impression
that since all men must have an Oedipus complex all men must
have the same faces.
II.
I have argued that Oedipus of the Oedipus complex has
a
doubtful future as a tragic figure in literature. But. a writer who
lias a taste for irony and who sees incest in all its modern
dimen~
sions can let his imagination work on the disturbing joke in the
incest myth, the joke that strikes right at the center of man's
humanness. Moral dread is seen as the other face of desire, and
here psychoanalysis delivers to the writer a magnificent irony and
a moral problem of great complexity.
There is probably some significance in the fact that two ·of
the best incest stories I have encountered in recent years are bur–
lesques of the incest myth. The ancient types are reassembled in
gloom and foreboding to be irresistibly drawn to their destinies,
but the myth· fails before the modern truth; the oracle speaks false
and the dream speaks true.
In
both the farmer's tale in Ralph
Ellison's
Invisible Man
and in Thomas Mann's
The Holy Sinner,
the incest hero rises above the myth by accepting the wish as mo–
tive; the heroic act is the casting off of pretense.
Thomas Mann wrote
The Holy Sinner
in 1951. .It was con–
ceived as a leave-taking, a kind of melancholy gathering-in of the
myths of the West,
"bevor die Nacht sinkt, eine lange Nacht viel–
[eicht und ein tiefes Vergessen."
He chose a medieval legend . of
incest, Gregorius vom Stein, and freely borrowed and parodied
other myths of the West, mixing themes, language, peoples and
times in a master myth in which the old fornis continually renew
themselves, as in his previous treatment of Joseph.
