TW O M O DERN INCEST HEROES
655
,
.He brusnes-aside SibyUa's-pr.otests..
... A youth who sets out to find his mother and wins by conquest
a wife,-who,
~owever
beautiful, could be his mother, must reckon
with it that she might be his mother whom he marries. So much for
his understanding. But to his blood the identity of wife and mother
was familiar long before he "learned the truth and play-acted about
it.
The
st~ry
ends when the Pope and Sibylla drop the last pretense
of not knowing and acknowledge that each had recognized the
other at first sight in the Pope's chambers and that the time had
come to end the play-acting between Pope and penitent-son and
mother, to unblind themselves in spite of shame.
The story ends with this extraordinary confession, the con–
fession that Freud forced from this reluctant century. This most
durable myth of sin can no longer shelter man from knowledge
of his own sinfulness.
In
Mann's story the Christian ideas of sin
and salvation are given a new and imponderable dimension in the
last act. Mann's pious monk wants us to believe that it was
penance, the most extreme humiliation before God which freed
the sinners from their terrible crime. But the Pope speaks clearly
for Mann: it is this confession from the depths, the casting off
of pretense, that earns them God's mercy.
The monk tells us, too, that "it is wise to divine in the sinner
the chosen one, and wise that is too for the sinner himself. For the
, divining of his chosen state may make him worthy and his sinful–
ness fruitful so that it bears him up for high flights." This is one
of the points in Mann's story where the monk and the modern
man traveling in opposite directions pass each other with a flash
of recognition, for in modern psychology it is recognized that the
aspect of man that is instinctual and may give rise to evil and
• criminal impulses will also give rise to the highest ideals and social
attainments.
Ralph Ellison brings together a Negro Sharecropper and a
white philanthropist for the impossible meeting, the meeting which
has been postponed until the white man's- Judgment Day.
It
is
the meeting that reveals the motive in the white man's abhorrence
