TWO MODERN INCEST HEROES
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the classical fate; for an instant he offered himself to the axe and
then refused; for a short time he exiled himself but chose to come
back. He became a hero because he refused to hide behind the
cowardly deceptions that cloak sin; he faced the truth .within him–
self. In this way Trueblood rose above the myth and escaped the
tragic consequences. He reverses the classic fate of the incest hero.
Instead of an Oedipus blinded we are given an Oedipus newly
sighted.
Norton is Oedipus blinded in this story, for when he is con–
fronted with Trueblood's dream-sin, which is his own, he refuses
to see and is carried from the scene unconscious. In one of the
funniest and saddest chapters of the story, the unconscious Mr.
Norton is carried off to a whorehouse frequented by the Negro
inmates of a local insane asylum and lies serenely unconscious in
the midst of brawling and whoring while the lunatics speak un–
quieting truths about the white man's sickness and the black man's
sickness. They are not heard, and when Norton is revived by a
lucid madman (once a prominent Negro psychiatrist) everyone
works quickly to put Mr. Norton together again, to shore up the
fictions and pretenses, to tell him what he wants to hear and
show him what he wants to see. The young Negro student who
had unwittingly led Mr. Norton to the sharecropper's cabin is
hastily expelled by his college for his part in bringing about the
impossible meeting.
Did Mr. Trueblood sin? Mr. Ellison puts the moral problem
with great delicacy and sees it in all its complexity. Is a man
morally responsible for his dream? This is undoubtedly one of
the most bothersome questions to emerge with Freudian psychology.
Freud himself addressed himself to the problem in a little known
and rarely remembered essay called "Moral Responsibility in
Dreaming." Freud says "yes," and such is the confusion generated
by psychoanalysis that nobody remembers that Freud himself gave
cold comfort to the dream-sinners, that conscious-unconscious a
man cannot escape moral responsibility; he alone is the inventor
of his dream.
Trueblood, the modern incest hero, is obliged to judge °his
own case and cannot find the verdict. He is
guilty-not~guiltyo
in
the uncertain class of modem criminals still waiting judgment
