658
SELMA
,FRAIBERG
Trueblood becomes an embarrassed hero, a contemporary
marvel for his white neighbors, the man who committed .the
blackest sin and lived to tell the tale. The white folks come to
visit him and hear his story, the plain white folks who are his
neighbors and educated white folks from the university who write
articles about him. They pay him well for his story and take
good care of him and his family. Trueblood and his pregnant
daughter and his pregnant wife are perversely rewarded for sin.
The argument is subtle, here. Mr. Ellison does not consider
incest a laughing matter, of course. But he understands that the
inmost core of the incest myth contains a grotesque comedy, the
comedy of knowing-not knowing. He has expertly brought off the
bitter joke that Mr. Trueblood's dream-sin is the white man's
dream-sin and that Trueblood is rewarded for offering himself
as
a symbol and taking the white man's sin on himself.
Ellison's tale is marvelously contrived to state the dilemma
of the man of our times who can no longer hide behind the myth.
He has written a kind of incest comedy in which moral dread
is
exposed as the other face of desire, but in this treatment he reveals
an irony of such magnitude that the ancient myth acquires a new
dimension as tragedy.
As
ill
the classical model the tragedy pro–
ceeds through its inevitable phases by means of the device of "not
knowing," but "not knowing" in this modem incest tale is a
species of self-deception, the denial of the sinful motive in
the
unconscious.
There are two incest heroes in Ellison's story--<>r one, if you
like-for Mr. Trueblood is Mr. Norton's brother of the dream,
his
black self. Mr. Norton who listens to Mr. Trueblood's dream
with
dread and fascination is the witness to his own dream. Mr. Norton's
dream-sin of incest is concealed from him and from the world.
He atones by creating monuments to the sacred memory of
his
daughter, and his good works for the Negro are the symbols
of
his guilty partnership with the Negro: the Negro sins for Mr.
Norton and Mr. Norton atones. Mr. Trueblood who sinned in a
dream and wakened to find himself embracing his daughter
is
stripped of pretense and the protection of the myth. He is con–
fronted with his naked self and the testimony of his
dream and
the act. He can still take refuge in the myth by submitting·
to
