RAVISHMENT OVER RAPE

 In the third part of my essay-series THE ONLY GOOD RAPE IS A FAKE-RAPE, I wrote the following:

Commercial films-- which were, it should be said, aimed equally at both male and female adult audiences-- are replete with such forceful displays of passion, in which the male protagonist forces his attentions-- usually not to the extent Rhett Butler does-- upon a female. It's generally understood that the female protagonist is a stand-in for the female audience that is presumed to want to see sex happen between the lead characters. Ergo, the protagonist's show of reluctance is meant to be broken down in the face of passion; i.e., it is a "no" that really does not mean "no." I do not think that female audiences would have partaken of such scenes in novels and films unless they could relate to them as fantasies. This gives the audiences credit for realizing that such scenarios did not represent real experience, and that they did not represent rape as such.

Were all members of the male audiences aware of "forced attentions" as being in the domain of fantasy, and hence, not justifications of real rape? Here too I think that we must assume that the majority of males knew that they were watching a staged fantasy, though I would admit that there is more potential for misunderstanding from the male point of view.  Still, the male protagonists of novels and films usually were not represented as literally overpowering the female as Rhett Butler did. The more standard scenario was that the reluctant female would finally respond and the curtains would close upon what was then consensual, if only implied, sex.

I just finished reviewing one of the more interesting Golden Age films, Henry King's 1942 THE BLACK SWAN, which features a hero who implies that he takes feminine resistance as a signal to ravish-- but not specifically to rape-- the heroine. Here's the roguish Jamie Waring's response to getting slapped by the irritable Lady Margaret:

 In Tortuga when a woman slaps a man's face, it means she wants him to grab her, overpower her, and smother her with kisses. I understand in Jamaica a gentleman must refuse such overtures.

As I mentioned in my review, at no time in SWAN does Margaret convey the sense of coming on to Waring, nor does she ever admit that she appreciates his attractiveness or forcefulness. Only when he's shown that he's willing to fight against other pirates, and therefore on the side of civilization, does she become interested in Waring as a potential mate. So, even though Waring subdues Margaret twice-- first knocking her out and then wrapping her in a sheet and kidnapping her-- she keeps a certain amount of power in their negotiation of status. Of course, this is only possible because the film shows that the hero has fallen in love only with Margaret, in contrast to his buddy's claim that there are lots of other fish in the sea.

The cinematic situation reflects the opinion in a 2014 PSYCHOLOGY TODAY essay by one Leon Seltzer:

The multiple ironies that emerge from such a depiction can hardly be missed. To Meana, “What women want is a real dilemma.” For, relationally, the female’s paramount need (and this is consonant with evolutionary biology) may be to have a strong, dominant male care for and protect her. So we end up with the eroticized image of her being thrown up against a wall yet, as imagined, not in any real danger. In short, on a very deep level that women might well wish to take exception to—though research strongly supports the idea— it may be a kind of biological imperative that, deep within their psyche, they can’t help but crave a “caring caveman” to whom they must submit.

And the SWAN scenario also parallels that of GONE WITH THE WIND, as I explicated here. The example is complicated in that when the crucial "spousal rape" takes place by that novel's "caring caveman," the male and female protagonist have already had consensual sex. This may not have been all that exciting for Scarlett, since at the time of the caveman-assault, she has banished Rhett from her bed to keep from her bearing any more children.

I like Seltzer's emphasis of the term "ravishment" over the inexact term "rape," and the former term takes in what I've loosely termed "fake-rape." But I will probably keep using the term as one of my subject-tags, since at times the term does take in the real-life, non-fantasy crime.

   

MYTHCOMICS: "THE 24-HOUR MAN" (AMAZING ADVENTURES #35, 1976)

H.G. Wells' 1897 WAR OF THE WORLDS novel spawned countless "BEM-chases-babes" stories along the lines of this image from INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN:

Despite later uses of Wells' alien invasion concept, though, the novel barely alludes to sex. Marvel's 1970s "War of the Worlds" comic book, however, almost had to delve into such matters, given that it was designed to emulate the success of the company's own CONAN comic. That said, whereas the original "Conan" stories and most sword-and-sorcery stories replaced "BEM-and-babe" with "beast-and-babe," Marvel's take on Wells was not nearly as given to outright usages of sex appeal. "War of the Worlds"-- later retitled "Killraven, Warrior of the Worlds"-- thus kept a foot in both the world of barbarian fantasy and that of the science-fiction invasion-drama. When the Martians return to Earth after their failed attack at the turn of the 20th century, their second invasion proves wildly successful, and one of the few Earth-men capable of mounting a defense is buff, long-haired warrior Killraven, who wields a sword as often as he fires a ray-gun. Killraven is joined by a small coterie of freedom-fighters. though in issue #35, Carmilla Frost, M'Shulla Scott, and the slightly dim stalwart Old Skull are the only ones following the main hero. Hot female characters, good and bad, are frequently seen, but rarely does the hero get rewarded with sexual favors, as did most sword-and-sorcery heroes. Indeed, the only ongoing sexiness was between Carmilla and M'Shulla, one of the first white/black racial hookups in commercial comic books.

Further, Earth under the Martians sometimes resembles Wells' ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU, for almost every issue pits Killraven and his buddies against some perversion of humanity, brought into being by Martian experimental science. Even Killraven himself is a perversion of sorts, since from the first issue by Gerry Conway and Howard Chaykin, he's been given a special psychic affinity with the invading aliens, the better to spy on the Martians and learn their weaknesses.

Not until writer Don McGregor teamed with artist Craig Russell, however, did the series earn plaudits with Bronze Age readers. Thus at the time they worked on "The 24-Hour Man," the creators had been receiving some acclaim, which may have encouraged them to experiment along lines of science-fiction speculation. (I should note here that Russell only supplies layouts to this 1976 story, with Keith Giffen receiving pencil-credits.) As in many science-fiction novels, the apocalyptic devastation of the existing world is an excuse to cast aspects of real history into new shapes. This may be one reason that McGregor chose to set the story in Atlanta, Georgia-- though, as I noted here, he barely references the city's Civil War history, except in relation to the movie "Gone with the Wind." McGregor's allusion to the spousal rape of Scarlett O'Hara has little or nothing to do with Margaret Mitchell's meaning, so it would seem that McGregor largely mentions the Mitchell work simply as a jumping-off point for his own concerns, the evocation of the Gothic theme of the persecuted woman.

Killraven and his friends stumble onto a cemetery outside the no-longer-inhabited Atlanta, and in said graveyard they find a never-named young woman ranting over the body of a withered humanoid figure clad in golden armor. When the apparent madwoman flees the cemetery, the warriors chase her, to keep her from harming herself. Then it becomes apparent that the woman has a guardian, a huge, multi-legged serpent-beast, whom she calls by the name G'Rath, and who prevents her from leaving. Killraven and the others intervene to defend the woman, but unbeknownst to them, G'Rath has a ally named Emmanuel ("God is with us" in Hebrew). human-looking except for possessing green hair and green skin.While the heroes battle the monster, Emmanuel covertly takes the gold armor from the dead humanoid, dons it, and proceeds to steal Carmilla from her allies.

Given the earlier mention of rape on the story's first page, the reader would be justified in assuming that Emmanuel abducts Carmilla in order to rape her-- though the unnamed madwoman's has already raved about having carried "G'Rath's child." In Emmanuel's conversation with Carmilla, it's implied that he does not plan to violate her. He wants feminine understanding from her, but he and G'Rath are symbiotically bound to one another in some way. The previous child of G'Rath perished after nine months in his mother's womb and one day outside it, for he was a "24-hour man"-- and so is Emmanuel. McGregor supplies no details as to how this symbiosis came about, nor does he even attribute this biological anomaly to Martian science. In apocalyptic worlds, of course, "mad science" sometimes just happens on its own, and apparently that's what gives a non-human creature like G'Rath the power to impregnate a human woman with a changeling. Emmanel's role in the symbiosis is never clear, though if he didn't have green hair and flesh, maybe he could pass as a "judas goat," able to move freely among humans long enough to catch a potential mate for his "father/sibling."

At any rate, Killraven's group manages to interrupt G'Rath's impending nuptials, and though both G'Rath and Emmanuel are destroyed, the heroes mourn the passing, since the two of them no more chose their own biological destiny than does a mayfly. One page is particularly strong in evoking Carmilla's fear of having her own biology hijacked by an invader, of possibly going as mad as the unnamed madwoman as a result.

Though I'm not a Freudian, it's hard not to perceive some psychosexual symbolism here. Though in actual mythology serpents can be as readily feminine as masculine-- a point Freud missed in his analysis of the Medusa figure-- it's hard to imagine G'Rath as anything but a "penis-monster." And if G'Rath is a penis, then what could Emmanuel be, but that which transmits male genes, that which is doomed to perish if *it* does not unite with a female egg? As I said, this similitude begs to be acknowledged, though not for a moment do I think that it "explains" the story, which is more concerned with grand tragedy than with Freud's reductive concepts.

McGregor and Russell even manage to tie Emmanuel's tragedy in with that of Killraven, the only member of the group who has been biologically altered. Toward the story's end, Killraven says, "You were right, Carmilla Frost. We could not save him. By our  separate natures and needs, we were forged as opponents, for our own survival. He would shattered you, the way his mother was shattered-- but it is more than passing odd-- it is still as if we shared a common curse."

The common curse may be that of all humanity in the Killraven world has been permanently reduced to a state of abjection by the Martian incursion. And yet McGregor adds in the final panel that the heroes "are only vaguely aware of the hint of beauty amid the darkly perverse events." This observation might bring some critics back to the jumping-off point, wherein spousal rape is more "romantic" than vanilla sex-- or it might also say something about the interactions, however unwelcome, of violence and sexuality.

BRIEF RETURN TO FAKE-RAPE

I summarized my views on the use of rape as a fictional trope in the "Fake-Rape" series, beginning with this 2014 post. The topic will be coming up in this week's mythcomic, but this essay concerns how the comic's author seems to have misread one of the most famous of all "literary rapes."

In "The 24-Hour Man" from AMAZING ADVENTURES #35, Don McGregor makes one reference to Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND, apart from his general strategy of setting the tale in Atlanta, where the main action of  Mitchell's novel takes place. At the story's opening, McGregor writes:

Scarlet O'Hara led Rhett Butler to distraction in this city, till finally he swept her into his arms with Clark Gable finesse-- only to leave her with a casual farewell-- "Frankly, Scarlet, I don't give a damn!

Following a caption designed to bring the reader into the (futuristic) present, Mc Gregor adds:

--and there are still women, even here, in these ruins, who can make a man curse, yet still be lost!

There's no way of telling from the story whether or not McGregor read the novel, but the mention of Clark Gable leads me to guess that he's referencing only the movie-- though strangely, he gets one of the most famous lines in cinema wrong. It's "My dear, I don't give a damn" in the book, and the movie adds the emphatic (and rather courtly) "frankly," but neither line addresses Scarlett by name-- a name which McGregor manages to misspell twice.

My analysis of "24-Hour Man" will touch on some of the larger issues of rape, both in its literal and metaphorical aspects, but I feel constrained to point out that McGregor's interpretation of the story is strangely off-kilter, even if his main motivation was to enlist the icons of GONE WITH THE WIND to enhance his very different theme.

Still, given that McGregor must have  known how well the events were known to educated readers, it's peculiar that he would misrepresent Mitchell's events so egregiously. He telescopes the event of Scarlett's spousal rape with Butler's leavetaking, as if Butler left once he's had his fun. Even the ill-chosen word "casual"-- which doesn't apply to the Butler character, either in the book or the film-- seems calculated to make Butler seem like a "love-'em-and-leave-'em" cad, when in fact he's in love with Scarlett for a much longer period than she is with him. Here's my summation of the spousal rape and the emotions behind it, from the second part of the FAKE-RAPE series:

Yet GWTW's rape is more than a mere "bodice-ripper:" it speaks to specifically female issues, not in terms of the relationships of women to men, but of women to other women.  Few if any female readers will fail to realize my earlier point, that Rhett has fallen in love with Scarlett even at a time when she primarily thinks of him as an attractive scoundrel who has a lot of money.  Scarlett commits many sins for which readers will want to see her punished, as do her detractors within the novel-- but for many readers this will be her worst sin: failing to love the man devoted to her, and forbidding him from her bed simply because she does not want more children.  In addition, her continued pursuit of Ashley Wilkes-- although somewhat on the wane by the time the spousal rape takes place-- adds fuel to the fire that causes Rhett to lose all control. Of course, as both the book and its film-adaptation make clear, the "punishment" is something less than punitive. By the generally sunny disposition Scarlett displays the next morning, Leslie Fiedler surmises that Scarlett has had her first orgasm, though Fiedler admits that Mitchell does not say this in so many words.

 It's at least true that Scarlett drives Rhett "to distraction," though McGregor isn't concerned with the Southern belle's specific, quasi-adulterous actions. "Finesse" is a word that could apply to a lot of Clark Gable's courtship of Vivien Leigh in the film, but it hardly applies to the spousal rape, and indeed it's not finesse that seems to have impressed Scarlett in the book/movie. McGregor's final reference to Mitchell's heroine comes closest to capturing the icon's original appeal, that she has the power to make men curse, and yet cannot save herself from being "lost."

With this bit of cross-comparison out of the way, I can concentrate better on the story proper in the forthcoming mythcomics analysis.

ULTRALIBERAL LYNCH LAW PT. 3

I'm sure I'll have more to say on HU's lynch-happy attitudes in future, but this should be the last time I respond to Ng Suat Tong's hubristic advice to the late Frank Frazetta. Maybe if I'd known that Ng would only answer one question, I would have asked why scenes of interracial sex would cause the writer to think, even sarcastically, of the "light under a bushel" aphorism. I would think that an ideologue like Ng would be glad that Frank Frazetta didn't conceal from readers-- either during his life or thereafter-- his supposed mammoth racial complexes. If these Frazetta drawings had not surfaced, Ng wouldn't have had an excuse to compare interracial erotica with actual slavery (cf. his Thomas Jefferson hyperbole).


Here, I'll address only the subject of "non-ideological" art, which I brought up in opposition to all of the completely ideological interpretations of Frazetta's oeuvre. In my addenda to my comment-preservation, here's what I remembered saying before NB deleted it:

It's been a couple of days since I checked back, but the remark that probably scored the deepest hit in that post had nothing to do with bad faith; it had to do with interrogating the defenders of Ng Suat Tong's essay in the way that they pretend to interrogate purveyors of mass entertainment. (Author Ng chose not to defend his own essay.) In essence, I asked one of the defenders-- not NB-- as to whether he liked to think that all of his personal inclinations were entirely determined by ideological factors, since that's the complexion all of them choose to place upon Frank Frazetta. I didn't even directly mention any individual's leanings toward sexy entertainment, though of course that too would fall under the heading of such personal inclinations. 

 Another thought: since one of the defenders said she found Frazetta's work boring, I remarked that were Frazetta alive, he might find her (performance art) boring, too, but why would either opinion be a matter for ideology? Why couldn't both opinions be purely a matter of personal taste?

Now, in earlier ARCHIVE essays I've already expatiated on the subject of the non-ideological elements in art, though in this essay I used the term "non-political," meaning essentially the same thing. At one point I cited this essay to NB when he wanted to know my stance on something-or-other, and he refuted just one aspect of the essay. So even if NB doesn't agree with anything I've written on these matters, he certainly does know pretty much what I mean by "non-ideological." Thus, an angel dies when he claims not to understand my position:

Gene, are you saying that pornography is not ideological? Or that pleasure is nonideological? I think both of those things are really not the case. Saying that these are racist images doesn’t mean that someone who takes pleasure in them is evil. It just means that the images are racist. Not because Frazetta hated black people (we can’t see his soul), but because reproducing racist stereotypes means you’re reproducing racist stereotypes. Sometimes, some people reproduce racist stereotypes in order to undermine them, or to think about them, or to critique them, or reclaim them. Frazetta doesn’t seem to be doing any of that. He just thinks racist imagery is sexy and funny. That doesn’t make him a monster, but it does make him, (a) boring, (b) dumb (c) in these particular drawings, racist (and hey, sexist also, as Nix points out.) If you dont’ think the drawings are racist, you need to do a bit more than say that the characters are enjoying themselves. The black slaves in Gone With the Wind enjoy their servitude; that doesn’t mean it’s not racist. In lots of rape fantasies, the fantasy is that the woman enjoys the rape, so the fact that the woman here seems to enjoy being reduced to little more than the marker sexy-white-woman doesn’t change the fact that these are sexist either. There are various ways for artists to deal with their control of the art too. Frazetta is pretty straightforward; his presence in the art is pretty much always, “hey, I”m a badass”. In this case, that comes off meaning, hey, I’m a badass because I can take this black guy and this white woman and bang them together for my pleasure. It’s interesting that you don’t actually have an alternate reading, Gene. It’s just, “oh, porn, that can’t mean anything, la-dee-dah, sex is just sex, black men, white woman, means nothing.” If the pairing doesn’t matter, why is it repeated obsessively? If sex has no meaning, why represent it? Keep telling yourself that dollar signs aren’t symbols, though, if it makes art easier to bear for you.

He feels it easy to make all of these wild accusations and associations even *after* I've repeated my stance that art can have aspects that have nothing to do with the political and ideological:

If you’re saying that the material is not totally reducible to ideology, as Ng did, then that’s not contrary to my basic position. I’ve stated above that I can see *some* ideological content in certain scenarios, like the “white goddess” trope mentioned earlier. I don’t think simple pornographic drawings are automatically implicated in whatever ideological content *may* be present in Tarzan narratives though, so that really would be a “contra.”

Since I clearly said in my first sentence that ideological content could appear in 'certain scenarios," clearly I'm not saying that art as a whole-- be it in the form of pornography or with respect to the many pleasures art generates-- never has ideological content. NB does answer the question I posed to another poster: that he can't countenance what he deems "racist stereotypes" unless they're serving an ideological purpose (critique, reclamation, etc.)  It's pretty amusing that he tries in his opening sentence to make me the mirror of his own ideological obduracy.


It's also ironic that NB cites GONE WITH THE WIND; a work that strongly appealed to a racist audience within the U.S (though not only to them). The racists in the overall audience would have been outraged by the consensual white-black sex Frazetta depicted, but of course that can't be allowed to matter. NB's trying to draw a parallel between objectionable stereotypes in the novel and in the drawings, but his whole case for the Frazetta drawings being objectionable is based in an unsupportable interpretation. One minute NB says we can't know if Frazetta hated black people; the next he mind-reads the artist to say that his only reason for drawing this erotica was because he Frazetta found it "sexy and funny," as well as taking pleasure in being an artistic "badass."


To answer one of NB's few coherent questions, I haven't said that depictions of interracial sex "mean nothing," I just don't think their meaning inheres in passing a political purity test; that they're good if they're used to "subvert the dominant" and bad if they're primarily for pleasure. I think it's possible Frazetta, being an artist, undertook the project just to see if he could pull off (in a technical sense only; ha ha) a set of erotic images involving black and white pleasure. It's even possible that, even if Frazetta never intended the drawings to "go public," that he took some pleasure in imagining how such images would have scandalized Middle America; the same Middle America that might have called him a "wop," or so it's been alleged.


To do my own mind-reading act again, I think what's really at issue here is that Frazetta validates the fantasies of white males, whether he shares them all or not: hence the shots Ng takes at Frazetta's jungle comic books (about sixty years old at the time of Frazetta's death). Is that what NB means black-white imagery being "repeated obsessively?" Who knows? With most if not all HU people, it's "sentence first, evidence not at all"-- especially if it's a white male who dares to play with racial (not racist) imagery without having it vetted by ultraliberal sensibilities.


In closing, I'll note that one of my other deleted remarks responded to NB's wacky reference to Jung, asking me if I thought Jung was a capitalist. I didn't directly respond to this nonsense, except to say that though I'd critiqued his affections for Freud and Wertham on other threads, on this one I hadn't brought up anyone's ideological influences and that I'd only responded to things posters had said, so he ought to do the same. Maybe that's the real reason that last big post got deleted.

PLAYING WITH FUNCTIONS

Not the artist alone but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable." (Jung, PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, 1921, page 63.)

I regard sensation as conscious, and intuition as unconscious, perception. For me sensation and intuition represent a pair of opposites, or two mutually compensating functions, like thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling as independent functions are developed, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, from sensation (and equally, of course from intuition as the necessary counterpart of sensation).-- more Jung.

In the third essay of the series THE ONLY DEFINITION OF ART YOU'LL EVER NEED, I started from Jung's proposition that art should be fundamentally defined as "play," but that so-called "serious art" and "escapist art" respectively would have to be separated out as "play for work's sake" and "play for play's sake."

From this secondary proposition I articulated, in JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4, a schema for assigning merit to each of these art-modes. By the design of this schema, both "good serious art" and "mediocre serious art" would be equal in terms of being "play for work's sake," that is, the narratives of serous art are designed so that the author can put forth some sort of ethical or moral argument. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, I stated that the superior "serious narrative" was one which successfully incorporated elements of play into its "work-oriented" theme. William Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST possessed a "work-oriented" theme comparable to that of J.M. Coetzee's DISGRACE, but Faulkner's novel succeeds on more than one level because the author allowed some elements of play to leaven his serious theme.

Similarly, I stated that even though both Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND and Dixon's CLANSMAN were escapist works, ruled by the principle of "play for play's sake," of imagining the world as one might like it to be rather than as it is. Of these two works, Mitchell's was superior because I could discern that she had incorporated elements of work into a "play-oriented theme." I viewed the verisimilitude that Mitchell conferred on her character-types to be one such element of work, and as such one that seems to have been deficient in THE CLANSMAN, though I admitted that I made this judgment purely from viewing the D.W. Griffith film.

But what, a hostile critic might ask, does it really mean to speak of "elements of play" and "elements of work?"

Just as I endorse Jung's opinion with regard to the "dynamic principle" underlying all creative work, the father of depth psychology also provides the answer to this question.

Not mentioned in the second Jung-quote above is that Jung also divided his four functions into two distinct categories: "the irrational," sensation and intuition, in that no rational meditation is needed for them, and "the rational," thinking and feeling, which both require what Jung calls "reflection."

Given my endorsement of these divisions of the human psyche, I found myself applying these to literary qualities.  In a rough way I was influenced by Gerald Mast's 1984 work of cinema-theory, FILM/CINEMA/MOVIE, in which he argued for evaluating films in terms of both "the mimetic" (the film's ability to reproduce verisimilitude) and "the kinetic" (the film's ability to make the audience feel sensations within their imagined experience). So far as I know Mast's theory was not followed up by later film-critics, and I may be the only one to do so, even though I thoroughly re-interpreted his duality into a quaternity of what I called "potentialities," as stated in FOUR BY FOUR:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of sensations.
The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of discrete personalities.
The THEMATIC is a potentiality that can describe the relationships of abstract ideas.
The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that may describe the relationships of symbols.

(I will henceforth substitute a new name, "the DIDACTIC," to replace "THEMATIC," which word is too easily confused with its more commonplace literary usage.)


I also cited two very brief examples as to how given works in the comics medium might emphasize one or another of the Jungian functions/ Phillipsian potentialities, with a concomitant de-emphasis of the others:

I might attempt to use Jung's function-terms to assert that Dave Sim's cerebral CEREBUS privileges the function of "thinking" more than any other, and that Frank Miller's SIN CITY privileges the function of "sensation." But though it's easy to make such an assertion, it's less easy to demonstrate its truth through textual examples.

I don't plan at this time to develop the theory of the four potentialities, since it's difficult to isolate the operations of each function from the others. But my hypothetical answer to my hypothetical hostile critic would be:

"The elements of play" are those that invoke the irrational kinetic and mythopoeic potentialities of the narrative.

"The elements of work" are those that invoke the rational thinking and feeling potentialities of the narrative.

Again, to a hostile critic, these refinements would still not resonate, but to pursue the concept further, I'll return to the examples cited in JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4.

What "realistic" elements are held in common by LIGHT IN AUGUST and DISGRACE?  Both novels are organized around scapegoat-characters. In the Faulkner novel, the character is Joe Christmas, a man who may or may not be half-black, who becomes the lightning-rod for white-black relations in 1930s Mississippi. The same is the case for the Coetzee novel, where the character David Lurie, a white man in South Africa, generates a white-black conflict based in the heritage of European imperialism. Neither novel emphasizes the irrational function of sensation, and so their potentiality for the *kinetic* is mutually nugatory. However, Faulkner's comprehension of the mythopoeic relationships of his narrative far exceed those of Coetzee.

What "escapist" elements are held in common by GONE WITH THE WIND and THE CLANSMAN? Both novels are organized around the sufferings of a community, oppressed by the liberation of slaves in the Deep South. That greater community is boiled down to the sufferings of a particular white family: the O'Haras in the Mitchell narrative, the Stonemans in the Dixon narrative. In both novels one solution to the South's oppression is the formation of a vigilante group, the Ku Klux Klan, though this solution is the main thrust of Dixon and a side-plot in Mitchell. Neither novel is strong on the "abstract ideas" necessary to support the rational function of thinking, and so their potentiality for the *didactic* is mutually nugatory. However, Mitchell's narrative finds its strength in the potentiality of "feeling," given that it manages to conjure forth a rich tapestry of character interactions, an arena in which Dixon's story cannot compete.

All four of these examples, of course, depend on one's having read the novels. In the coming months it may be possible to provide more extended applications of this theory-- a conflation of the work-play dichotomy and the four potentialities-- to media-works that are, at very least, easier to assimilate.

COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS PT. 4

In SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE PART 1, I outlined a way in which both fictional sex and violence, although ultimately distinct in their various applications, could be subsumed as a sort of narrative "violence" that brought about the transformation from the outset of the narrative to its resolution.  My future discussions of sex and violence in this essay-series, however, aren't meant to be focused on the abstraction of pure narrative, so I've decided to continue this aspect of my ruminations under the rubric COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS. This 2014 essay-series was the first time I considered that both the combinatory mode and the dynamicity mode might be applied to my adaptation of Adler's theory of positive and negative compensation.

The terms "combinatory mode" and "dynamicity mode" are new extrapolations from the established terms "combinatory-sublime" and "dynamic-sublime." The latter terms were appropriate to the particular types of fantasy-narrative I was analyzing in the earlier essays. However, now that I'm speaking of narrative as a whole, I'm forced to apply the concepts across the board. After all, in VERTICAL VIRTUES  and its second part, I took the Huxley-derived position that all fiction is concerned in some way with transcendence, be it "horizontal," "upward," or "downward." The first form of transcendence is defined by its lack of the sublime affects present in the other two forms. But narratives of "horizontal transcendence," while not constituted to deliver the major emotional upsurges seen in the other forms, must be rooted in the same matrix of will and desire that informs the others.  So it follows within my system that a work of horizontal transcendence-- Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND being my chosen example in the VIRTUES essays-- must conform to the same pattern as the two sublime forms. WIND's main theme relates to dynamicity, in that it addresses the regulation of power in its society is negotiated: the death of the Old South and its resistance to the victorious North, even while the North is subtly changing the old values. However, the mode of the combinatory appears as well. Tolkien, whose seminal essay "On Fairy Stories" was a key influence on my refinement of my sublimity-theory, discusses this form of the non-sublime combinatory mode:

Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle. That kind of “fantasy” most people would allow to be wholesome enough; and it can never lack for material. But it has, I think, only a limited power; for the reason that recovery of freshness of vision is its only virtue.

And in this regard Mitchell's "freshness of vision." her invocation of the combinatory mode in its non-sublime form, appears in WIND's highly variegated characters. In this essay I mentioned that "GONE WITH THE WIND lacks the affects of the sublime, but that lack doesn't take anything from Mitchell's amazing ability to create characters who can seem well-rounded even though they may appear for no more than a paragraph or two." I'm not an expert on historical fiction of Mitchell's period, or of any period, but I would venture to guess that most popular writers working in Mitchell's idiom did not work as hard as she did rendering all of these characters, both major and minor. For that matter, there are quite a few authors of canonical literature who are must weaker on minor characters than Mitchell, including "big guns" like Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Turning back to a topic raised in SACRED AND PROFANE, I sought to bring my Bataillean concept of narrative "violence" in line with what I'd written in the essay THE BASE LEVEL OF CONFLICT. I hadn't noticed until recently that I wrote the BASE LEVEL essay a couple of weeks before I made my breakthrough in deducing two forms of sublimity. Prior to the TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I series, I had only defined sublimity in terms of dynamicity. Thus, when I tried to analyze Bradbury's story "The Last Night of the World," I was on some level seeking to express the nature of conflict in terms that would make sense within the dynamic-sublime, and so I asserted that the story was an example of Nietzsche's "will to nothingness." This isn't so much wrong as incomplete, for the "conflict" I was seeking is not one of dynamicity, but of the combinatory mode.

In the past couple of years I've identified instances of "combinatory thinking" in authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, Joseph Campbell and Grant Morrison, but the unintentional father of this concept must be, in a historical sense, Edmund Burke, who emphasized its power in this passage:

Thirdly, by words we have it in our power to make such combinations as we cannot possibly do otherwise. By this power of combining, we are able, by the addition of well-chosen circumstances, to give a new life and force to the simple object. In painting we may represent any fine figure we please; but we never can give it those enlivening touches which it may receive from words.

I still assert that the predominant appeal of "The Last Night of the World" is its defiance of audience-expectations re: the equanimity with which the viewpoint-characters-- and implicitly, all other people in the world except the children-- meet the world's irrevocable end. But this conflict arises from the combination of a dire situation with reactions which do not seem to fit that situation, as seen by this exchange:

"Do you know, I won't miss anything but you and the girls. I never liked cities or autos or factories or my work or anything except you three. I won't miss a thing except my family and perhaps the change in the weather and a glass of cool water when the weather's hot, or the luxury of sleeping. Just little things, really. How can we sit here and talk this way?"
"Because there's nothing else to do."

I should note that this was one of several 1950s stories Bradbury wrote that referenced the possibility of nuclear devastation. "Last Night" hints that the peaceful ending of the world takes the place of such a devastation, and that it comes about specifically because nuclear death is so close to reality:

"There are bombers on their course both ways across the ocean tonight that'll never see land again."
"That's part of the reason why."

Thus Bradbury's strategy for giving "new life and force" to the overly familiar threat of nuclear war was to undercut its power by invoking a greater power, one that simply chooses to end the story of mankind in the manner of "the closing of a book"-- an apt metaphor for a writer frustrated with the follies of mankind.

Thus the conflict of Bradbury's story is expressed through the combination of things that don't quite seem to match, much like the images I reproduced in COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS PART 3.  Of course, these images, like the Bradbury story, seek to evoke the "strangeness" of the sublime, and this provides a contrasting employment of the combinatory mode to what we see in Margaret Mitchell's purely horizontal, representational cast of characters. Yet even the horizontal manifestations serve to illustrate the incredible fecundity of the combinatory mode.

GRADING ON THE CURVE

"A friend of mine once said, 'Nerdy women like fantasy guys with emotional problems. Nerdy guys like fantasy women who are strong enough to kill them."-- reviewer Jason Bradley Thompson in OTAKU USA Vol. 8. #4 (2015).

Thus, when fictional action-heroes do their kickass thing, they are in essence "going with the flow," conforming to an archetype of male behavior based in both culture and physical nature.  When fictional action-heroines kick ass, they are in essence "swimming against the current." This current is best incarnated by the literary trope of "what women want," which in Chaucer and elsewhere is nothing less than "sovereignty over their husbands." In the real world this can only be done by manipulation of the "force that gives," by persuading the man to do her will through "dissimulation" or sexual attractiveness. 

Action-heroines, however, work their own will.  They align themselves with a reverse-archetype that describes not real experience but a gesture toward desired experience.  That implies a greater level of conflict in this reverse-archetype in that it contravenes (albeit in fiction, where nothing is impossible) both physical law and cultural experience.-- WHAT WOMEN WILL (2011).

I'd been giving some thought to the proposition in the title of a 2002 film, "Real Women Have Curves." This was hardly the first time in pop culture that attention has been given to the strategic distribution of adipose tissue upon the female of the species homo sapiens. But if one states this homily as a serious proposition, it raises the question, "If real women have curves, do real men have straight lines?"

An anonymous adage avers that "nature abhors a straight line," though I don't know whether or not that abhorrence precedes nature's dislike of vacuums. In any case, men's bodies are no more "straight" than women's even at the peak of physical development. For instance, men's "washboard stomachs" evince more definition, and hence curvilinear surfaces, than do similar stomachs on women.

So it's not true that women's bodies are "more" curved than men's. Rather, it's that the curves *mean* something different with women's bodies than with men's.

To me as a heterosexual, the sight of women's curves "means" something akin to the Chinese concept *yin,* insofar as *yin* connotes sexual receptivity. And though I am not a poet, the quasi-poetic thought came to me a while back that the difference between women's curves and men's curves is that the former "lead inward" while the latter "lead outward," I know that this is not a "scientific" viewpoint of the physical realities, but I consider it to have reality, at least in an intersubjective sense.

Now, the above statement from the OTAKU USA reviewer strikes me as having some interesting ramifications for pop cultural treatments of gender relations. I've maintained in the WHAT WOMEN WILL series that men can assume a passive/receptive role in society while women can assume an active/assertive role, but that because these roles go against the grain in most cultures, they are more often realized through fiction than in actual practice. I'd go further than the reviewer and his unnamed friend, though, by stating that I think these fascinations are far from limited to the fantasies of nerds. They may be more concentrated in "nerd-readers" than in the fantasies of "regular readers." Yet though there may many examples of "best-seller fiction" in which dominant social roles are wholly validated, I find it interesting that a novel like GONE WITH THE WIND--  published in 1936, prior to many though not all of the major *femmes formidables* of 20th-century pop culture-- nevertheless focuses on a heroine who is constantly "asserting" herself and a leading man whose greater physical strength belies his emotional vulnerability to her charms.

I cannot guess exactly how if at all these ruminations would play with persons attracted to the same sex. If your own curves "lead inward" as much as your partner's, then "receptive curves" can't be the factor that determines who plays "butch" and plays "lipstick lesbian," But then, it's not written in stone that the dominant social roles are inevitable even among heterosexuals. In all likelihood. "assertive will" and "receptive will" work themselves out via psychological factors that are far more subtle than the lineaments of the physical body.

CROSSING THE LAWLINES PT. 5

I'll probably wind up my essays on clansgression for the time being with this entry. There are a number of other subtle ramifications of the theory, but by next week I plan to work on some new angles regarding the NUM theory and the concept of freedom.

In THE CLANSGRESSION FORMULATION I mentioned in passing that violence as much as sex could function, under the proper circumstances, to provide the reader with "the sense of being "caught up" in the experience of having boundaries broken in an explosive, irresistible state of being." Yet I have not explored the element of violence in respect to clansgression, for all of my examples have primarily focused on clansgressive sexual interactions: OEDIPUS, FANTASTIC FOUR, THE MOONSTONE, and GONE WITH THE WIND.  Given that my essay LEAD US INTO TRANSGRESSION details the ways in which the two kinetic elements can either remain separate or become melded into "impure states," the element of violence requires some exploration.

Now, as Bataille has observed, violence is essentially any activity that disrupts the workaday world, and for that reason he viewed sexuality as an aspect of violence, with which statement I do not agree. One of the most significant differences is that violence is not surrounded with nearly as many arbitrary codes as sex is, though there are some. In Part 4 I wrote:

The principle of transgression, however, stems from both the diegetic world of the narrative's characters, as created by the author, and the extra-diegetic world of the audience.

Where violence is coded into a very simple form of transgression-- Criminal A threatens Victim B with violence but is thrashed by Hero C-- there's not a lot of distinction between what the characters think about a fictive act of violence and what the audience thinks about it.  But in the "impure states," violence does become almost as complicated a matter as sex.

The two impure states as defined in the TRANSGRESSION essay were "erotic violence" and "violent sex." Although these are frequently confused, they can be best distinguished by close reading of the motive imputed to the one who commits the violence, to wit: is the agent of violence more concerned with injuring or with screwing?

Of the examples used thus far, only one of the four utilizes either of the impure states, and this is GONE WITH THE WIND. In PART 2 of my essay-series THE ONLY GOOD RAPE IS A FAKE-RAPE, I observed that Scarlett O'Hara's deeds earned her opprobrium from both various characters in the novel and from at least some readers:

Scarlett commits many sins for which readers will want to see her punished, as do her detractors within the novel-- but for many readers this will be her worst sin: failing to love the man devoted to her, and forbidding him from her bed simply because she does not want more children. 

It seems obvious to me that generations of female readers did not take Mitchell's novel to their bosoms because they thought that it advocated spousal rape, or rape of any kind, as a general policy, though some modern ideologues have expressed such opinions. The only way that these female readers can possibly forgive Rhett's action-- or even take vicarious pleasure in it-- is if they are convinced that Rhett's motivation is honest passion, not violence. Violence certainly does shade into the rape-scene: Rhett is clearly trying to humble her, but not to cause her injury as such, even though prior to the rape he openly fantasizes about crushing her skull like an eggshell. And as I noted, Mitchell herself is implicated in the fantasy of rape, or else it would be impossible for her to portray Scarlett in post-coital bliss-- a bliss that implicitly goes beyond whatever functional, baby-making sex the couple has had before.

For a contrasting representation of "erotic violence," where the intent to injure is paramount, I turn to the novel that I cited here as an ideal example of the "bizarre crimes" trope: the Marquis de Sade's JULIETTE. Sade's violence, of course, is always aimed at inspiring erotic satisfaction through violence, but one particular scene relates, unlike the Mitchell scene, to both transgression and clansgression. Juliette, an orphan raised in a convent, escapes the world of righteous morality and becomes a happy convert to the philosophy of torment expounded by a male mentor. There follow many somewhat rote descriptions of Juliette and her fellow sadists getting off on pain and death, but only one strikes me as noteworthy. Late in the novel, orphan Juliette meets M. Bernal, her birth-father. She determines to transgress against all laws of parental respect by killing him, but first she seduces him. Then, having shown that Bernal is a massive hypocrite by society's lights, she binds him, verbally torments him, and then shoots her father through the head. To his credit as the father of a Sadean woman, M. Bernal doesn't beg for his life before he dies.  Although sex certainly figures into this episode, clearly Juliette's intent is always to injure, not to screw.


These two examples are reasonably clear-cut, but others can be confused by the question, "Is violence being used in place of sex?" In SHOOTING THE SHIRT I pointed out how often Japanese comedy-manga made use of the trope in which irate females clobbered the guys they secretly liked when said guys stepped over, or appeared to step over, some lawline. I observed:

the beating may be deemed a symbolic displacement for the sex-act, since the female is almost always hot for the male.

Often these comic versions of Juliette don't admit that violence stokes their engines. Rumiko Takahashi makes frequent use of this trope throughout URUSEI YATSURA, RANMA 1/2, and INU-YASHA, but as far as I can tell through translations, the female protagonists never express any reaction beyond feminine pissed-offed-ness-- an oddly demure reticence from an author who includes so much sex and violence in her work. Takahashi only touched such overt Sadean territory once to my knowledge, in a comic short story about a modern married couple who displayed a peculiar fetish for having violent fights in their home-- but though comic sexual stimulation is suggested, the principal emphasis is on the neighbors giving the couple hell for their disruptive ways.

Ken Akamatsu's LOVE HINA, though, seems to be one of the few works that eventually admits to the sexual nature of the trope, if one can trust the Tokyopop translation. In the last volume, after innumerable incidents in which Keitaro intrudes upon Naru and gets beaten on for it, the two protagonists confess their true feelings to an interlocutor. Keitaro doesn't precisely say that he gets off on masochistic treatment, but he claims that he loves peeping on Naru so much that he doesn't care that he gets beaten for it, while Naru explicitly admits that she loves both his attentions and getting to beat on him for crossing the lines.

If, as I tend to believe, Akamatsu's sado-masochistic representations explain much about the popularity of this trope, then into which "impure state" do they fall? Since intent to injure is the predominant factor, they belong principally to the domain of "erotic violence." However, unlike Juliette's unlucky papa, these victims of female violence always survive their ordeals, so they may eventually have actual sex-- although, like Akamatsu's Keitaro, even "getting the girl" in the end may turn into "getting it in the end," so to speak.

CROSSING THE LAWLINES PT. 4

At the end of Part 3 I said that I would consider those cases 'when transgression is "cooperative" with, or "competitive" with, a given culture's mores.'  I'll stick with the two examples put forth in that essay, but with a preliminary definition of transgressive viewpoint.

My NUM theory of phenomenality is centered almost entirely upon audience-response. For my purposes it doesn't matter whether or not the characters of THE LORD OF THE RINGS think that wizards and dragons are marvelous. All that matters is that the audience reading the book must inevitably think so, since that audience lives in this more phenomenologically uncertain world.

The principle of transgression, however, stems from both the diegetic world of the narrative's characters, as created by the author, and the extra-diegetic world of the audience. For example:

Wilkie Collins' MOONSTONE was published in 1868, and took place within the same time-frame. As I said in Part 3, there's nothing to suggest that either the characters in the novel or the original audience that read the novel regarded first-cousin marriage as transgressive against social mores, at least not when practiced among the aristocracy. Cousin Frank is good and Cousin Godfrey is bad, but the only criterion is only that one is honest and the other is not. In contrast, the 1934 film adaptation of the novel implicitly makes Frank "good" in part because he's entirely unrelated to the heroine, and is hence totally exogamous, unlike Godfrey, who is "bad" in part because he dares to lust after a near relation (though I don't think that the film, unlike the book, specifies how near a relation he is).

So is the cousin-cousin relationship in Collins' original work transgressive at all, if we grant that neither the diegetic characters nor the extra-diegetic audience thought that it transgressed any lawlines?

My verdict is yes, but with the qualification that the MOONSTONE's "incest" is only transgressive-- and clansgressive-- *in posse.*  Because a unison of two near relations of roughly the same age strongly *suggests* a unison between blood-siblings, the basic situation of a sexual relationship between cousins will always carry a potential for transgressivity, no matter whether the author makes use of that potential or whether the audience recognizes it.

If Collins' MOONSTONE is clansgressive *in posse,* Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND is clansgressive *in esse,* for the 1936 novel is lousy with the symbolic form of brother-sister incest-- which is to say, sexual feelings between brother-in-law and sister-in-law.

I noted in Part 3 that there's no suggestion by Mitchell that she disapproves of the liaison between Ashley and Melanie, and it's not likely that any of her readers did either, as long as it was suggested that the consanguinity was sufficiently distant. Some of Mitchell's readers might not have entirely approved of relations between cousins of any sort in their own time, but Scarlett O'Hara's world had gone with the you-know-what, and so it could be regarded as a charming historical relic whose social rules no longer applied to current practice. This would be in marked contrast to my verdict on the behind-the-scenes tinkering with the 1934 MOONSTONE film. In that work, even though the story still took place in England, the story was also updated to the contemporaneous 1930s-- and so I theorize that the only "cousin-relationship" in the finished film was made to be a marker of evil, in keeping with the screenwriter's anticipation of audience-antipathy for cousin-relationships.

Similarly, there's no sense of opprobrium attached to the romantic intermingling of Ellen and her lost love Phillippe, since by the time the audience learns of it, Phillippe is long dead, and Ellen has married, raised three young daughters, and become a sort of Madonna of the Plantation. Ellen's last word at her death, however, is the name of her lost love, occasioning puzzlement for Scarlett, who unlike the audience never knows anything of her mother's secret romance.  However, though the Ellen-Phillippe relationship is not condemned, it also has a quality not found in the Ashley-Melanie relationship: passion. I didn't explain in Part 3 why I considered this relationship "racy" as I called it, but some of the raciness stems from the fact that the Ellen-Phillippe affair is governed by passion, not just a vague inclination between kindred spirits.

The brother-in-law/sister-in-law relationships are characterized by similar passionate spirits. Scarlett, despite her quasi-sisterly relationship to Melanie, tries to get Ashley to run away with her, and he comes damn close to yielding to the Southern vixen. Scarlett doesn't actually care about the two Tarleton Twins that she pulls into her orbit, but they're equally passionate about her, and Mitchell explicitly says that each of them would happy even if the other one married Scarlett-- which suggests almost a "Corsican Brother" level of identification. Finally, there's the convict Archie. This mountain-man character is understandably omitted from the movie, for his only function in the novel is to express scorn for Scarlett when she starts treating white convicts like black slaves at her mill. He's easy to omit from a plot-angle, but he adds a strong humorous element to the postwar section of the novel, not least because he's the only white Southerner who admits outright that he can't stand black people (though of course he does not call them by that name). But he also shows that even with this minor character, Mitchell was fascinated with the brother/sister dynamic, in that Archie's term in prison comes about because he killed his brother for-- what else?-- sleeping with his wife.


All of this should indicate what I've said above: MOONSTONE appears to "cooperate" with societal mores in respect to consanguinity mores, so it keeps its transgressions in the realm of the merely potential. GONE WITH THE WIND finds sneaky ways to flout social mores, and makes those clansgressions seem all the more raunchy for having the allure of the forbidden.

CROSSING THE LAWLINES PART 3

The relationship which "manages to be exogamous and endogamous at the same time" is that of the cousin-cousin relationship.

Cousin-marriage is ideal for any group that wishes to keep its resources "all in the family." The Old Testament is rife with marriages that are not technically within the immediate family-- and so are somewhat exogamous-- but which are within a more general clan, and are hence endogamous in their effect.

Though some cultures split hairs about how far the cousins could be "removed" before intermarriage was possible, some literary works make it clear that first-cousin marriage endured into comparatively recent times, especially for the aristocracy, who certainly had the best motives for centralizing their resources. On my film-blog I reviewed two movie-versions of Wilkie Collins' detective novel THE MOONSTONE here, and in this essay I included a brief summation of the novel, calling attention to the fact that nowhere in the novel does anyone think it odd that wealthy heiress Rachel is romanced by not one but two of her first cousins.  I noted also that the first American-made film to adapt the novel dispensed with this trope, that the female lead's "good" suitor was completely unrelated to her while the "bad" suitor remained a near relation. This doesn't mean that one can't find any positive examples of "first cousin marriage" in early American films. But the change certainly suggests that one or more of the persons producing the 1934 MOONSTONE film felt that the audience might not accept such a situation, even though the action of the movie is still set in England.

Yet in some American cultures the practice of cousin-marriage did continue, possibly in subconscious imitation of English customs.  When I read Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND for the first time, I was taken aback by how chock-full of "sibling clansgression" it is.
The 1939 movie maintains the plot-thread in which Scarlett steals a beau from her sister Sue Ellen, but it omits the fact that early in the novel Scarlett also swipes the attention of the man adored by her other sister Careen-- and does so not because she Scarlett wants to bed or marry the fellow, but just to assert her superior skills at "vamping" males.

I don't recall whether or not the movie mentions the fact that Ashley and his bride Melanie are distant cousins, but the novel is far clearer on the point that their family's members prefer to "stick to their own kind." They are, Mitchell suggests, a pure strain of Old South aristocracy that will prove unable to cope with the demands of the New South, unlike Scarlett, who inherits her commoner Irish father's skills at wheeling and dealing. Scarlett marries Melanie's brother Wade, who dies early in the war, and so Scarlett becomes sister-in-law to Melanie, thus transgressing on the rules of propriety both when she desires and when she pursues Ashley.

Finally, there's no relation between Scarlett and her eventual husband Rhett Butler, though he is of course from a genteel Southern family and is of good stock, in contrast to the "cracker" Will Benteen, who ends up marrying Sue Ellen. However, cousin-cousin romance stands behind the relationship of Scarlett and Rhett in a symbolic sense. While the movie tells the audience nothing about the backstory of Scarlett's mother Ellen, the reader learns from Mitchell that Ellen once had a passionate love-affair with one of her cousins, name of Phillippe. But because Ellen's family sent him away from the home, Phillippe-- implicitly a hell-raiser like Rhett Butler-- died in a bar-brawl, and thus Ellen married Scarlett's father Gerald on the rebound.  It seems fairly obvious that Mitchell meant to suggest that the Ellen-Phillippe relationship prefigured that of Scarlett and Rhett on a non-diegetic level, even though no character but Ellen ever knows about the forbidden-- and thus implicitly racy-- relationship.

I regard cousin-cousin liaisons as symbolically parallel to those of siblings because in most though not all cases, there is no significant difference in age between the subjects. When a difference in age does appear in such a relationship, that difference tends to overpower the quasi-sibling symbolism.

Next up: when transgression is "cooperative" with, or "competitive" with, a given culture's mores.

JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4

In PART 3 of THE ONLY DEFINTION OF ART YOU'LL EVER NEED, I followed up my examination of "art as fundamental play" with this reference to Bataille:

I considered putting forth a longer definition with special reference to Bataille's "two types of economic consumption," lining up "the reality-oriented aspect of consumption, "production and acquisition" with the dynamic of work and "the desire to pointlessly but satisfyingly expend one's energies" with the dynamic of play. 

I decided not to pursue that line of thought at the time. Now I'm bringing it up again because I've been giving more thought as to the proper pluralist evaluation of the kinetic elements of sex and violence in fiction-- though this will only be developed in subsequent essays.

In the ONLY DEFINITION essay-series, I expanded on my fundamental division of all art into two realms-- that of "thematic escapism" and "thematic realism"-- with reference to Jung's assertion that all creative endeavor requires play, regardless of how much of the "principle of serious work" enters into the mix. From this standpoint the two realms took on the formulas of "play for play's sake" and "play for work's sake."

Now, contrary to some critics, defending escapist narratives is not the same as defending bad narratives. Both realist and escapist narratives can be good or bad, but when they are bad, it is not with reference to one another, but on their own respective terms.

Superior narratives of "thematic realism," a.k.a,, "play for work's sake"-- are what most people would call "good literature." Such stories almost if not always have a moral or aesthetic point to convey, one that aligns with Jung's "serious work" principle. But the best "realist art" can make its rhetorical points without losing the dimension of creative play.  Faulkner's 1932 novel LIGHT IN AUGUST and Coetzee's 1999 novel DISGRACE both take as their subjects the evils of Caucasians abusing Negroes (sorry, there's no other established word that takes in both African Americans and Black Africans).  But Faulkner's novel contains great imagination and creative fertility, while DISGRACE is, well, a disgrace in that respect.  I only have space for a very simplified comparison. Faulkner's "Southern Gothic" exposes the absolute dependence of the then-modern South on the demonization of the black underclass, but makes it part and parcel of their existence, while Coetzee presents a South African scenario whose brilliant insight never goes beyond this Wiki-statement: that its protagonist "is a white South African male in a world where such men no longer hold the power they once did."

I choose to reduce the nature of inferior "thematically realistic" narratives to the following formula: such narratives suffer from "too much work," so much so that the rhetoric overpowers the principle of creative play.

Superior narratives of "thematic escapism," a.k.a. "play for play's sake," have a more involved relationship to the principle of serious work. In these stories the principle of work does not bond with the principle of play as in the previous form. It is always the nature of thematically escapist works to provide a vacation from morals and rigor. Yet the work-principle does have a decided influence on the quality of a "play for play's sake" narrative.

What does the realistic theme of "white sins against black people" look through the lens of thematic escapism? Well, an escapist story can express roughly the same sentiments as the Faulkner and Coetzee novels cited above, but the rhetoric will generally remain superficial because the narrative is predominantly focused upon fanciful content. A well-known example in the realm of comic books would be LOIS LANE #121.  Thus in this tale veteran white journalist Lois Lane temporarily transforms herself into a black woman so that she can see how the "other color" lives. I don't doubt that this story was well-intentioned, but to say the least it lacks the *gravitas* of even a bad literary novel like DISGRACE.

I provide this example only to illustrate the point about political affiliations; it isn't fair to compare a short comic book story with two prose novels. For that reason, and to provide a validation of my criterion that one can find "good play" even in novels with bad ideas, my contrary examples are Margaret Mitchell's 1936 GONE WITH THE WIND and Thomas Dixon's THE CLANSMAN.  Some may regard this a flawed comparison, because I must admit that I have not read the Dixon novel. I only know the CLANSMAN story from the famous film BIRTH OF A NATION, which was technically an adaptation of the play Dixon wrote from his own novel. Nevertheless, from what I've read the film is generally an accurate representation of the author's ideology.

Both CLANSMAN and GONE WITH THE WIND are primarily concerned with presenting an idealized view of the American South and its pro-slavery ethic, and any story-elements that might detract from that ideal are either ignored or dismissed.  Yet the aesthetic failure of Dixon's story is not that it holds stupid political views; it is that it has nothing else to offer. Dixon reportedly despised both Harriet Beecher Stowe's views and her novel, but he seems to have learned nothing from his predecessor about how to create appealing characters that can persuade the target audience into at least a consideration of the author's rhetoric. It's a mark of D.W. Griffith's genius that Dixon's paper-thin characters become vital when they're depicted by a master of the cinematic art.

Mitchell's ideal, in contrast, is not just a superficial paean to the South: for many readers, it is the South. I've mentioned in this essay that GONE WITH THE WIND lacks the affects of the sublime, but that lack doesn't take anything from Mitchell's amazing ability to create characters who can seem well-rounded even though they may appear for no more than a paragraph or two.  Ironically, though Dixon actually experienced the Old South and Mitchell did not, Mitchell succeeds in putting across her fantasized ideal because the people inhabiting it possess the vitality needed to make it seem real.

Now, since I'm downgrading Dixon for over-dependence on his concept of "serious work," that might sound like CLANSMAN, like DISGRACE, could be guilty of the same fault: that of "too much work." On the contrary, though, CLANSMAN suffers from "too little work"; of Dixon's inability to provide the verisimilitude that could make his characters come alive, even in the service of a poorly reasoned ethic.  Mitchell doesn't consciously pattern her characters on literary archetypes, but she knows how to invoke such figures as the whore, the Madonna, the scapegrace, and the vixen with enough verisimilitude that they seem to be real people. This apparent grounding in reality provides the "decided influence" I mention above. Play is the dominant mode of both GONE WITH THE WIND and THE CLANSMAN, but only GONE WITH THE WIND puts any work into the game-- and as some may have noticed, often the best games are those on which the players exert the most effort.

Hmm, I worked in Bataille this time, but nothing on goal-affects. Maybe next time.

DIVORCE HERS, DIVORCE HIS-- SOMETIMES

In this essay I referenced Dave Sim's GLAMOURPUSS writings, which reflected, in part, on the career of Margaret Mitchell. I pointed out that Sim's conclusions about Mitchell and many other female celebrities could be valid only in terms of the concept of intersubjectivity. I'm reasonably sure that Sim would not agree with this perspectivist take on "truth:" at most, he might admit-- as he does in an essay I'll touch on later-- that as he is not God he can't be absolutely sure as to what is or is not true.

While I've dismissed some psuedofeminist complaints about the "old boy's network," in GLAMOURPUSS #25 (May 2012) Sim made one remark on Margaret Mitchell that left me nonplussed.  In a printed exchange between Sim and his interlocutor Eddie Khanna, Khanna remarks on the disparity between Mitchell's first beau Clifford West, a decorated war hero who died in battle, and her first husband Red Upshaw, an alleged drunk and wife-beater. Sim replies:

It's one of those sad instances, I suspect, where a woman gives full vent to the extent of her heartache-- going completely "over the edge" as an expression of her darkest emotions and her extreme sense of loss-- and thereby does a grave disservice to the memory of a genuine hero who has paid the ultimate price.

To back up slightly for context, Mitchell certainly used aspects of her own life to provide the dramatic pattern for GONE WITH THE WIND.  Clifford West, whom Mitchell never actually married, provides a loose parallel to Charles Hamilton, the man Scarlett O'Hara marries out of spite when Ashley Wilkes rejects her. Mitchell's first husband, who sounds like a reprobate, is transformed into the rather more charming scalawag, Rhett Butler, who becomes Scarlett's third husband.  Rhett, in contrast to the alleged acts of Red Upshaw, never beats his wife. Rhett does rape Scarlett, but this, as mentioned earlier, is something less than a punishment.

To some degree I could understand Sim's polemic if Mitchell had been actually married to Clifford West.  Though divorce hardly if at all carries the social stigma that it once did, there are some persons who believe that even after one spouse dies the remaining spouse is not free to re-marry. Sim's negative feelings about divorce are expressed to some extent in this essay on the MOMENT OF CEREBUS blog, though they are not apposite to the subject of re-marriage after one spouse's death.

BUT-- of course, Mitchell was not married to West; God never "joined them together." So I cannot fathom, either from the specific essay in GLAMOURPUSS or in any other Sim essay of my acquaintance, in what way Mitchell did a "grave disservice to the memory of a genuine hero."

(I note in passing that though Khanna describes Upshaw as a "debauched, violent, alcoholic bootlegger," Sim says nothing in issue #25 about Upshaw, who, according to this post, not only married again after his divorce from Mitchell-- just as Mitchell did-- he also left his wife and child to fend for themselves. I'm not sure why Upshaw wouldn't make just as good an example of "going over the edge" as Mitchell-- except that his example would weaken Sim's ideological concentration upon the supposed greater emotionality of women.)

Anyway, the question arises: is Sim imparting this special privilege, that of a woman being somehow bound to a beloved even sans marriage, to all men? I don't think so; this seems to be a special case, due to the fact of West's stellar military performance. Prior to Sim's remark about Mitchell, he contrasts West's "genuine heroism" to that of Alex Raymond, who was *potentially* heroic in that he refused a "natural deferment" but did not end up making a "similar ultimate sacrifice."

The odd thing about Sim's remark is how much he sounds like certain characters in the Atlanta of Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND-- namely, the generally female gossips who castigate the widowed Scarlett for a host of cultural offenses. But again, within the novel's fictional context, all of these castigations make some sense: Scarlett is an actual widow, seen as doing a disservice to Hamilton's death by dancing with, and keeping company with, scalawag Rhett Butler.  In contrast, Sim is apparently perturbed because Mitchell made herself "a public disgrace in Atlanta;" because she did not don "widow's weeds" and remain chastely unmarried for the remainder of her days. Amusingly, this goes further than even the fictional old biddies of GONE WITH THE WIND would have gone, even though they "existed" in an Atlanta of over a hundred years ago.

This, in conclusion, supports my earlier statement that emotion is not opposed to reason, as Sim has claimed. Rather, emotion "provides a lens through which everything, including rational cognition, is colored."  Sim's focus upon "haughty women brought low" indicates that he has chosen his examples of irrationality in a fundamentally irrational fashion.

A side-note: Sim also calls Mitchell's novel "a precursor of today's feminist 'victimology.'  I don't agree with this assessment, though I've found myself opposed to many other manifestations of false victimologies, particularly those of Kelly Thompson and Gail Simone. But in making this irrational attack on the character of Mitchell, Sim practices his own male-oriented form of victimology, and so pokes holes in his own polemic.

THE ONLY GOOD RAPE IS A FAKE-RAPE PT. 2

It's debatable as to whether there have been "good rapes" in the medium of comic books. There have been a lot of bad stories involving rape, like the aforementioned IDENTITY CRISIS, and there have been stories in which rape is addressed as An Important Issue, like this issue of Alan Moore's SWAMP THING.

By my own lights, though, a "good rape" in the comics medium would be the same as it is in other media: a fictional scenario that speaks to humankind's inescapable nature.  That nature is the desire to dominate, which, as Francis Fukuyama has pointed out, is inseparable from the human desire to excel.  *Megalothymia* is not, as the Marquis de Sade was pleased to believe, the essence of human nature, for it has its opposing number in *isothymia,* the desire to share a commonality of rights and privileges with others. Both are equally part of our inherent nature, even if we exercise their respective desires only through the medium of fantasy.

I said earlier that (1) I did not want to take refuge in examples taken from Established Literature, and (2) the examples I would take from popular fiction would be "works aimed at particular genders." With that in mind, I'll begin with what may be the most famous rape in a work of bestseller fiction aimed predominantly at a female audience.

Though the 1936 novel GONE WITH THE WIND has had many male readers, there can be little doubt that it was primarily aimed at female readers. Not only does the novel stay almost completely in the viewpoint of protagonist Scarlett O'Hara, most of its action takes place in domestic settings, upon which the male world of violence only occasionally intrudes.  Even Rhett Butler, consistently portrayed as a "man's man," fades in importance when he's out running guns or belatedly joining the Confederacy's lost cause; he becomes important to the story primarily for the many ways he pays court to Scarlett-- one of which is that he falls in love with her long before she reciprocates.

The novel also makes much of the feminine propensity for gossip, and Mitchell makes clear that a great deal of it serves to displace the women's own sexual desires.  Every time Scarlett scandalizes the straight-laced community of Southern women, there's a sense that they enjoy a forbidden pleasure in fantasizing about her misdeeds, even while they excoriate her.  One might extrapolate that this does not speak well for the sexual capacities of Southern men, if their women's greatest pleasure stems from fantasy-sex.

One of those fantasies is, of course, that of being raped, whether by ruthless Yankees or bestial black men. While Mitchell is too fully implicated in the fantasy to invert it-- as a politically correct author might-- it is ironic that no character in the novel actually gets raped in the general sense of the word, that is, in terms of a criminal assault. Twice Scarlett is confronted by threatening males, but though in both cases rape is a possible outcome, it's clear that both the pilfering Yankee soldier at Tara and the two lowlifes in Atlanta are primarily out to rob her.

As for normative sex, the reader only knows that Scarlett has had sex at least three times prior to the novel's famous scene of spousal rape. One knows this because Scarlett has three children, one of whom is born only to be killed in the novel while the other two might as well be phantoms for all the presence they have.  It's not surprising that in 1936 Mitchell was circumspect about the sexual act when writing to a majority audience, although she herself was a devotee of erotica ranging from Cabell to Cleland.  Yet Mitchell-- whose second husband, the putative model for Rhett Butler, was rumored to be a wife-beater-- isn't merely being circumspect.  Rhett Butler's rape of his wife Scarlett is, in essence, the culmination of the fantasies of the fallen culture of Southern womanhood and of Mitchell's female readership.

Yet GWTW's rape is more than a mere "bodice-ripper:" it speaks to specifically female issues, not in terms of the relationships of women to men, but of women to other women.  Few if any female readers will fail to realize my earlier point, that Rhett has fallen in love with Scarlett even at a time when she primarily thinks of him as an attractive scoundrel who has a lot of money.  Scarlett commits many sins for which readers will want to see her punished, as do her detractors within the novel-- but for many readers this will be her worst sin: failing to love the man devoted to her, and forbidding him from her bed simply because she does not want more children.  In addition, her continued pursuit of Ashley Wilkes-- although somewhat on the wane by the time the spousal rape takes place-- adds fuel to the fire that causes Rhett to lose all control.

Of course, as both the book and its film-adaptation make clear, the "punishment" is something less than punitive. By the generally sunny disposition Scarlett displays the next morning, Leslie Fiedler surmises that Scarlett has had her first orgasm, though Fiedler admits that Mitchell does not say this in so many words.

For many feminists this may be the novel's worst ideological offense, and many would rush to condemn the novel for supposedly validating real-world instances of rape, spousal and otherwise.  Some might even accuse Mitchell of indirectly supporting Sigmund Freud's thesis that the sexuality of women is inherently masochistic.

Nevertheless, good intentions aside, they would be wrong to do so.  Though GONE WITH THE WIND is directed at female readers, its evocation of a world in which sexual predators supposedly lurk around every corner may have had some appeal to male readers as well. In terms of thematic orientation, Mitchell's Civil-War Atlanta is no less a fantasy than one of James Branch Cabell's horny otherworlds, and should be evaluated on that basis.

Next: the "He Said" side of the question.

VERTICAL VIRTUES PT. 2

In this essay I began my current set of essays on the interlinked topics of sublimity and transcendence in reaction to the outlook dominant among comic-book critics, and possibly academics generally as well:

Whatever their individual differences, in general all [comic critics] display the desire not to regard the productions of fantasy as significant in themselves, but only as signifiers of "reality" that can be viewed as either ideologically pure or ideologically suspect.

In my follow-up essay I cited a discussion-thread on HOODED UTILITARIAN, whose link I provided there. Here is a prime example of a critic deciding to reduce a fantastic text to realistic signifiers:

Any status quo is heterogeneous. When you’re fighting to keep things the same, you’re fighting to keep things the same. I guess it would depend on the particular narrative at hand, but (for example) in Crisis on Infinite Earths, the destruction of the universe is embodied in the anti-monitor, who’s basically a super-villain; opposite of all that is good (monitor, anti-monitor, whatever.) So fighting to save the universe is figured basically as just another especially big battle against bad guys who are trying to change who’s in charge. They’re evil rebels, a la Shakespeare (who also always supported the status quo.)

I think you’d have to talk about a particular green lantern story, but this is how a lot of destroying the universe stories work. It’s just a big, impressive way of saying “you’re going to destroy the status quo!”

Since I recognize that this was not a formal analysis of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, I won't repeat the points I made in the thread to refute Berlatsky. However, since I have myself stated that it's possible to produce narratives whose appeal is largely on the "horizontal plane," this means that there are some narratives where this sort of reasonable "status quo" argument can be correctly applied. Further, since so many sociological readings of this type boil down to "Superman= Super-Imperialist," I may as well choose three examples of texts that involve the sort of race/class struggles so beloved by critics of the Sociological School.

For my horizontal example, I choose Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND. I recently finished this work for the first time, and it's my verdict that although it's rife with all manner of agreeable "sympathetic affects" (the blissful images of the Southern aristocracy) and disagreeable "antipathetic affects" (those uppity Carpetbaggers and white trash), I find no trace of any affects that reach into the realms of the sublime, either going "up" or "down." Religion appears in the novel but only as a social form; a character like Scarlett's mother may incarnate a sort of mundane Madonna-figure, but she's only significant to the novel as a whole as an incarnation of the blessed South. There can be little question that this is a novel set up to defend a status quo, albeit one that has been overthrown. Mitchell's justification for slavery is based on the viewpoint character's conviction that all black people are essentially childlike, except when bad whites put ideas of freedom in their heads, thus causing the blacks to run amuck. Interestingly, Mitchell makes a brief reference to the Haitian slave revolt of the late 1700s, but no one in the novel ever inquires as to the reasons for this revolt.

However, not all works involving slavery can be reduced to "is it ideologically pure or ideologically suspect." Case in point: in 1855, less than ten years before the Emancipation Proclamation, Herman Melville wrote BENITO CERENO. This fictional tale was based on a real 1805 incident wherein a group of slaves revolted aboard a Spanish ship and took it over, only to be later defeated by American forces. Melville does not argue for or against slavery in this novella. Rather, his purpose is to show how the Spanish captain, the "Benito Cereno" of the title, is traumatized by the suspense of being captured by the black slaves. The viewpoint character is an American, Captain Delano, who comes aboard the ship after the slaves have taken it over. However, Delano is so dense that he never guesses until the end that the slaves are forcing the Spaniards to pretend that everything is normal. The Spanish captain Benito Cereno is particularly terrorized by the slaves' demonic-seeming leader "Babo," who at one point holds a razor to Cereno's throat in full view of Delano, on the pretext of giving Cereno a shave. In time Delano tumbles to the deception and naval forces re-take the slave ship. Babo is sentenced to death but never once shows any concern for what the white people may do to him. The last conversation between Delano and Cereno makes clear that Cereno, despite having escaped his captors without injury, is haunted by the power of the rebellious slave. Cereno even goes to his own grave a mere three months after Babo's execution, signifying the typical fate of a man enthralled by a demonic presence.

To call this story either a defense of slavery or a refutation of it would be foolish in the extreme. Melville is concerned with portraying Cereno as a man haunted by ill fortune, in terms similar to the fate of the author's more famous Captain Ahab. Babo is at no time a literal demon, but he and his fellow slaves are spectres of demonic retribution, and as such, are grotesques who produce the effect of downward transcendence as surely as more obviously monstrous figures like Dracula and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Is it possible to realize the obverse, to transform the ugly realities of American slavery into something that suggests "upward transcendence," the experience of a sublime affect that expands consciousness?  I find a serviceable example in the novel Leslie Fiedler asserts to have been the first novel to create fully realized black characters: Harriet Beecher Stowe's UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.

Like GONE WITH THE WIND and BENITO CERENO, CABIN is resolutely naturalistic in its phenomenality. However, whereas in GONE WITH THE WIND religious symbols are used merely to buttress Mitchell's beatific vision of Southern society, Stowe uses religious discourse to condemn the abomination of slavery. As Fiedler and others have observed, though, this does not signify that the Connecticut-born authoress believed that African traditions were on a par with the Christianity of her world. Fiedler asserts that she envisioned a future in which black people were both freed from slavery and sent back to Africa, where their Christianity would spread throughout the "Dark Continent." Modern readers might find this only slightly more palatable than Margaret Mitchell's political views. Still, the fact remains that Stowe used her religious ideals to oppose the secular defenses of the slave institution.

Yet UNCLE TOM'S CABIN at base is not a political novel. Stowe's commentary attests that the novel began with a vision of a black man being beaten to death by a white man: later, the novel itself would feature the titular character beaten by two black slaves under the aegis of the Yankee slaver Simon Legree. CABIN recapitulates many motifs common to the Christianity of Stowe's time-- not least that of the mother wailing for her children, a motif that had strong emotional appeal for an author who, like Stowe, had borne children. But the most important one is that of the imitatio dei enacted by Uncle Tom when he gives up his life to shield two slaves who escape Legree. Whatever emotions the scene may inculcate in modern readers, clearly the intent at the time was to invest Tom's sacrifice with the gravity of Christ's sacrifice on the cross. Thus the effect of seeing Tom forgive his murderers before he dies is an expansive one, one that transforms Tom's sufferings into a scenario of expansive, positive emotion-- that is, in Huxley's terms, "upward transcendence."

Again, this is not to suggest that there are no affects in the latter two novels that approximate the "horizontal transcendence" affects that dominate the Mitchell novel. But BENITO CERENO and UNCLE TOM'S CABIN are more concerned with bringing forth extreme states of sympathetic or antipathetic affects-- and for that reason, they cannot, any more than a fantastic farrago of apocalyptic superheroes, be reduced to simplistic sociological factors.