TWO MODERN INCEST HEROES
653
Mann allows his story to be told with heavy piety and solem–
nity by a monk who
is
at great pains throughout to see that the
reader draws the correct moral lesson from this tale. The monk is
a windy old bore who deplores and shudders but recounts this
history of abominations with an unhurried detailing of events. And
all the while he is telling his pious monk's story Mann has teased
him into telling a scandalous modern version. For the innocents in
this
medieval incest tale are our contemporaries in the same way
that we are theirs, and as the myth knows many forms and no
time, these sinners give the wink to their formal pageantry and,
without shifting for a moment the Gothic mask, play Freud's ver–
sion behind the monk's story, the play within the play.
Sibylla has a dream before giving birth to her son. "She
dreamed that she gave birth to a dragon who cruelly tore her
womb. Then he flew away, which caused her great mental anguish,
but came back again and gave her even greater pain by squeezing
back into the torn womb." In the first encounter between Sibylla
and the knight Grigorss who has come to deliver her, the mother
is stunned by the resemblance of the boy and her brother with
whom she sinned. She is also disturbed by the fact that the material
of the garment which Grigorss wears is identical with that in which
she wrapped her infant son in preparation for his voyage in the
tiny cask. With all this-and her old dream of the dragon, too,
Sibylla in the monk's tale is unable to draw any conclusions regard–
ing the possible identity of the young knight and finds easy ra–
tionalizations for her disturbing thoughts. She is already in love.
The monk reflects briefly on this womanish nearsightedness but
can make nothing of it.
Behind this ornate and florid monk's tale Mann carries on
his burlesque. He allows his incest hero and his mother to know
and not know, to carry on the most preposterous self-deceptions
and to enjoy their incest tb the utmost while subduing their secret
knowledge. This is the kind of exquisite joke that Mann is par–
ticularly fond of telling, one that he brought to perfection in the
lyric wedding night of Jacob and his false bride. The comedy tums
on the indifference of Nature to the means by which she attains her
end, her disregard for the images of love which she serves, and the
conspiracy through which she smuggles her claims at night while
