THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 4

The last installment of THYMOS BE DE PLACE appeared in 2009, while the last time I wrote about Frank Fukuyama's magisterial application of Plato's "thymos" concept in a theoretical manner was 2015's MEETINGS WITH RECOGNIZABLE PRESENCES, which focused upon Fukuyama's extrapolation of "recognition" as the process by which human beings experience the abstract faculty of *thymos.*  

In contrast, the concept of literary sadism has continued to crop up fairly consistently over the years, but only in THYMOS Part 3 did I draw explicit parallels between the operations of thymos as described by Fukuyama (who does not address sadism in any way in END OF HISTORY) and George Bataille's formulation that the world of Sadean thrills belonged in the category of non-productive, esteem-related human activities.

Bataille's primary insight for literary criticism is the image he uses to present eroticism and violence as equivalent phenomena: "sensuous frenzy" (p. 192). Whether this adequately describes real-life sex and violence does not matter for the purposes of literary criticism, but I suggest that Bataillean "frenzy" does describe how fictional sex and violence impact upon the majority of readers. Bataille doesn't substantially address literature in EROTISM, except for the sensualized violence-scenarios presented by the Marquis de Sade, but elsewhere he makes the trope of "transgression against the norm" his hallmark, so I feel secure in adapting his terms for the purpose of literary criticism.

What EROTISM makes clear is that even though one may be experiencing fantasies of sex and/or violence through an intellectualized medium (Plato's "copy of a copy"), this is still the essence of a human (as opposed to animal) activity. He does not, as noted before, directly relate this to the subject of thymos, but because fiction is not the "real thing," it is not eros in the raw. Rather, it's closer to the nature of thymos in the same way that the sexual conqueror's boast, his tall tale of sexual conquest, represents thymotic rather than erotic stimulation.        

 

Most of my descriptions of sensual violence in literature have also taken the Bataillean POV. However, I have in various essays specified that there is a distinction between COMMON AND UNCOMMON EVIL. In short, the common form of evil is people doing bad things to another for the purpose of either gaining or protecting some concrete possession, even one's own bodily integrity, while the uncommon form is motivated primarily by the desire of esteem-based recognition. 

Thymos, as mentioned in previous essays, is one of the constituent parts of Plato's tripartite soul, which one Wiki essay sums up thusly:

• nous ("intellect", "reason"), which is or should be the controlling part which subjugates the appetites with the help of thumos.
• thumos ("passion"), the emotional element in virtue of which we feel joy, amusement, etc. (the Republic IV, 439e);
• epithumia ("appetite", "affection"), to which are ascribed bodily desires;

It now occurs to me that if the "uncommon form of evil" aligns with what Plato calls "spiritedness," then the "common form of evil" would align with the concept of "appetite." Further, though I'm in no way an expert on Greek language, I note that the word "epithumia" uses the same word-element found in "thumos," but qualified by the prefix "epi-." There are several contexts for the prefix "epi-" but here it seems to agree with this one:

1. Secondary: a consequence, by-product, additional, or lesser version.

   epilanguage is a second language used regularly for some purpose or purposes, epiphenomenon is an activity, process, or state that is the result of another, epitoxoid is a toxoid that generates less of an immune response than an original one

This would seem to accord with many if not all Greek oppositions between "appetite' and "passion," where the former is of lesser philosophical consequence than the latter.   

And now, with all these considerations in mind, I want to specify that only the "uncommon" operations of sadism are thymotic in nature, while the "common" ones are epithymotic.

This formulation may have a number of applications but I'll wrap up with just two, both from the manga URUSEI YATSURA, one of my "Domme Coms."   

Now, in URUSEI the male lead Ataru is the one who most often suffers comical outpourings of violence. However, some of these violent attacks are *epithymotic,* in that the attacker is retaliating in order to protect himself or herself. For instance, when Ataru is in full horndog mode, and seeks to grope a woman like Sakura, he gets slapped, punched, kicked or otherwise battered. Throughout the series Sakura has absolutely no romantic interest in Ataru, so whenever she hits him, it's for the "common" purpose of maintaining her bodily integrity by repelling unwanted attentions. This may not be exactly what Plato had in mind with respect to "appetite," but the correlation makes sense when seen through the lenses of Bataille and Fukuyama.

In contrast, the reigning champion for torturing Ataru is Lum, the alien wench who falls in love with him and demands that he reciprocate. As extreme as her actions are, they flow from a desire for thymotic recognition; that Ataru should recognize Lum as his one true love. Of course, if Ataru wasn't capable of feeling love for Lum, his continued tortures would just become dull, but author Takahashi is careful to keep hinting that on some level Ataru does reciprocate. However, he refuses to capitulate to Lum's attacks, and so continues to flirt with numerous other women, even though he has almost no chance with any of them and usually gets served just as Sakura serves him. So all of Lum's attacks, or her stratagems to otherwise manipulate her reluctant lover, flow from *thymotic* passion, which, while still comic, embodies the uncommon nature of love rather than common motivations like gain or self-protection.  

If and when I write further about these concepts, I'll probably cease to use any of Bataille's terms for these opposed operations and invoke "thymotic and epithymotic" instead. And as for what if any function Plato's concept of "reason" might play in these literary domains, that's a subject for some other essay.

    

MYTHCOMICS: "ON THE HORNS OF PASSION" (URUSEI YATSURA, 1980)

There was a time when I would have deemed Rumiko Takahashi's URUSEI YATSURA "mythic" just because the creator was so skilled at creating bizarre characters. But over time I've realized that only in a handful of cases did Takahashi use those characters for what I deem a "symbolic discourse." 

The first adventure, given the English title "A Good Catch" in translation, was rife with such discourse about adolescent sexuality and the ways of Japanese "oni" demons (albeit reworked into science-fiction aliens). Ataru Moroboshi, the typical horny youth who wants every pretty woman he sees, is selected to save Earth fron an invasion of these alien oni, but only if he can defeat the aliens' representative, the vivacious babe Lum, in a game of "tag." Despite false starts, Ataru attempts to be a good guy and win the contest, in part so that his girlfriend Shinobu will marry him. By somewhat crooked means, the young fellow "tags" the elusive Lum, but he makes the mistake of yelling something about marriage. This causes Lum to think he's proposed to her, and the story ends with Ataru due to be frog-marched off to Lum's planet and put through a ray-gun wedding.

The second URUSEI story doesn't mention Lum at all, but by the third, the creative/editorial decision had been made that she was to be added to the cast. Lum comes back to marry her "darling," but he denies that he ever proposed to her. Legalities mean nothing to the lovestruck alien, and for assorted reasons she talks her way into staying at the Moroboshi house, decorously occupying Ataru's closet. No matter how many times Ataru proclaims that they're not married, Lum maintains that they are so bonded-- though over time she makes a point of trying to drag him to the altar, to make it official. 

"On the Horns of Passion," the twenty-fifth story in the manga, is the closest Lum ever comes to trying to wring a "secondary promise" out of her love-mate. At the time of this story, Shinobu-- who for half a year tried to get between Ataru and Lum whenever possible-- finally gives up on her inconstant Romeo. Not long before "Horns," Takahashi introduced to Ataru's class rich-boy Shutaro Mendou, who's just as girl-happy as Ataru but has both wealth and good looks with which to enchant high school girls. Shinobu is one of those who admire Mendou, though they're not yet dating in this story, and Mendou seems more interested in laying claim to Lum.

Lum, who has not yet enrolled in Japanese high school, flies to Ataru's classroom looking for her "darling." Informed that he was last seen in the company of Shinobu, the jealous alien goes looking for the couple. As she departs from a high window of the school, Mendou just happens to be in the process of showing his great wealth by parachuting onto the school grounds. The two of them get entangled and fall.

It just so happens that on the ground beneath, Ataru has been trying to talk Shinobu into forgetting Mendou and coming back to him, slamming Mendou for the upper class refinements that separate his kind from ordinary people. Shinobu buys the argument, but then the tangled bundle containing Lum and Mendou falls atop Shinobu and Ataru. Mendou in particular lies prone upon Shinobu, and though he doesn't make a pass at her like he does with Lum, Shinobu seethes with juvenile passion for the handsome millionaire and runs away. Ataru, deprived of his conquest, storms off, linking Lum and Mendou together in his mind as people far beyond the workaday world. Mendou tries to further the rift by telling Lum that she and he are "above the mundane world." However, for all her faults Lum isn't conceited, and she thinks of herself as an "ordinary girl" who just wants love and marriage. 

It's hard to credence that Lum's never noticed how often Ataru is turned off by all the weirdness she brings into his life, but as far as this story is concerned, this is the first time the thought occurs to her. So the affable alien dons a school uniform and uses a chemical to make her horns retract into her skull. She shows up at class next day, and no one recognizes her, so that all of the boys, particularly Ataru and Mendou, are mesmerized by the "new girl." Shinobu apparently thinks she still has a claim on Ataru despite having refused him earlier, so she gets furious at him, and then at Mendou, even though, as mentioned before, Mendou hasn't even asked Shinobu out yet.

Lum keeps the deception going a little longer, but Mendou, again seeking to undercut Ataru, mentions the fact that to date this new girl (whose name no one even mentions) would be "cheating" on current girlfriend Lum. Ataru, who can only focus on one hot girl at a time, offers to let Mendou take custody of Lum. 

Even though Lum's tigerskin bikini is concealed, it doesn't take much effort to see the "tiger" struggling to burst forth from beneath the facade of the "ordinary girl." There can only be one compensation for having heard her love-mate offer to callously trade her to another man like a baseball card. She must get him to willingly "swear to be faithful unto death," and Ataru, still besotted with passion, does so without a second thought.

Ataru pays for his lustful nature when Lum reveals her true nature, her normally tiny horns elongating three times their normal length, just to signal how mad she is. Yet she doesn't shock him or even punch him, but only pins him to the floor, repeating the promise he's now made to her, "Unto death, darling! Unto death!" The similarity to the English phrase "until death do us part" may not be in the original Japanese. But her act of pinning him down suggests that this time he's bound himself to her, as if she were a demon who had to be invited to take possession of her victim. And she's triumphed over Shinobu as well. At the start of the story, Shinobu may not be actively trying to win Ataru any more, but Lum sees that the Earthgirl has an advantage in being what an Earthman considers "ordinary." Lum's masquerade screens out all the extraterrestrial aspects that "alienate" the boy she's chosen for her own, and this proves that Lum can beat Shinobu in a contest of purely ordinary feminine charms. 

On a semi-related note, the last panel also sets up future "eternal quadrangle" action, in which Lum pursues Ataru, Ataru pursues Shinobu, Shinobu pursues Mendou and Mendou pursues both women, but Lum more than Shinobu.

In all likelihood, had I the ability to read Japanese, I strongly doubt that I would find a single later reference to this story anywhere in the rest of the URUSEI corpus. Takahashi has continuing characters noodle over past actions in her more soap-operatic MAISON IKKOKU, but not here. Still, though HORNS makes absolutely no reference to Ataru's non-proposal in the first tale, the overarching history of the characters makes HORNS more mythic than the average "current girl pretends to be new girl" folderol. I won't say that Takahashi felt the need to "justify" Lum's almost unshakable devotion to, and obsession with, her Earthbound choice. But I think it suited Takahashi's perverse sense of humor to put Ataru in the position where he has an immediate response, almost on an instinctual level, to Lum's insuperable glamour, once all of the associated weirdness is put out of the way. The very fact that Lum  affects Ataru so deeply may be part of the reason he keeps chasing women who can never mean as much to him.

CALLING ALL ENSEMBLES

 

I’ve established here and elsewhere the way that a narrative’s centricity can be either concentrated upon one starring character or distributed across an ensemble of characters. And in this essay I showed how a particular narrative with a huge cast of characters, DC THE NEW FRONTIER, could center upon a more limited ensemble of characters who possessed stature superior to all of the others. I’m contemplating a more involved definition of stature with respect to centricity, one that might define stature as a sort of “motive force,” something that impels the narrative, but I haven’t concluded those meditations.

Because of my recent reading of the manga NISEKOI, which I’ll discuss separately, I’ve noted that it’s not impossible for a narrative, particularly a serial one, to possess two ensembles, a superordinate one and a subordinate one. The subordinate ensemble does not simply consist of all the supporting characters within the narrative. In DC THE NEW FRONTIER all the characters who lack centric status are simply support-characters. A story with a subordinate ensemble, however, has a collection of characters who function in the same way as the characters in a superordinate ensemble, except that the former simply lack the stature of one or more starring characters.

I’ve expended a fair amount of attention to the interlinked teleserials ANGEL and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. According to my lights, BUFFY is always focused on the titular character, and every else in the story exists to support her. However, her “inner circle” of allies, informally called “the Scooby Gang,” function to have strong interactions with Buffy and to generate plot-threads centered temporarily upon them. Originally the subordinate ensemble includes only Xander, Willow and Giles, while later seasons introduce a variety of other featured characters to the ensemble, including a former adversary, Spike. However, some of the Scooby Gang’s allies—Angel, Riley, Tara—never reach the same stature. Angel is transformed into a foe and then leaves the show to star in his own series, Riley only lasts one season as a temporary boyfriend for Buffy, and Tara is killed in order to give her lover Willow a new emotional arc.

Angel starts out his own series as the sole star, with just two characters, Cordelia (a transplant from the BUFFY show) and Doyle forming a subordinate ensemble. But within the first season Doyle is slain and Cordelia inherits his precognitive talent, which makes her character more consequential. In addition, another refugee from BUFFY, Wesley, joins the team. The stories shift to stress the importance of the team rather than just Angel, and from then on Angel and all of his form a superordinate ensemble. Though other characters join the team  the ANGEL series never generates a corresponding subordinate ensemble but only handfuls of disparate support-characters.

Some serials may generate huge subordinate ensembles in which none of the characters ever quite eclipse a single central figure, as I’ve observed in both DRAGONBALL and BLEACH. A number of serials in the romantic comedy genre center upon a male and female lead, such as both URUSEI YATSURA and RANMA 1/2. Both of these Takahashi serials generate populous casts who function as subordinate ensembles, and URUSEI in particular includes a number of stories in which the romantic duo of Lum and Ataru is sidelined by the activities of ensemble-characters like Mendou or Ryunosuke, though none of these characters ever assume greater stature thereby. NISEKOI follows this basic paradigm in that the serial’s main emphasis is a romantic couple, but the activities of the subordinate ensemble are more centered upon either enhancing or undermining the romance of the two main characters.

MYTHCOMICS: "A BAD CUT" (1987)

RANMA 1/2, Rumiko Takahashi's second long-running serial, marked a change in approach from her previous extended project, URUSEI YATSURA. The earlier serial focused on the adventures of two prickly paramours, Japanese boy-teen Ataru and alien girl Lum-- and although Takahashi often devoted considerable time to the series' support-cast, Lum and Ataru were front and center when the artist finally brought the series to a close.

However, a close reading of URUSEI's first stories suggests that Takahashi may not have originally intended Lum to be the co-star. (It's my recollection that the artist said as much at a San Diego Con many years ago, but I didn't write down her remarks.) My close reading suggests that Ataru and his normal girlfriend Shinobu might've have been Takahashi's original romantic team, with Lum registering as little more than an obnoxious intruder.

The first major arc of RANMA 1/2-- which I've chosen to title "A Bad Cut" after one of the story-titles-- seems designed to leave no room for any Lum-like character to oust the "normal girl."In URUSEI, Takahashi doesn't really devote much attention to Shinobu, but Akane Tendou, the female co-star of RANMA, gets her own personal psychology. She also has her own unique place within her family, consisting of her widowed father Soun and her two older sisters Kasumi and Nabiki. To be sure, Takahashi never, in the entire series, devotes much detail to the sisters' late mother. The mother's absence has no perceptible psychological effect on the older sisters, especially not Kasumi, who essentially takes on the role of the family's "mother" by handling all the cooking and cleaning of their home. Indeed, Kasumi never shows any sexual feelings for anyone, nor evinces any intention of leaving her faux-mother position in the family.

Akane, lacking a feminine role-model capable of helping her negotiate her interactions with boys of her own age, apparently emulates her father instead. In "Bad Cut," the reader knows little about Soun Tendou, except that he maintains the girls' home in some Japanese suburb by running a dojo (although no students are ever seen, and he's not even seen instructing Akane). Martial arts offer Akane a way to keep the male of the species at a distance, as is seen early in the arc, when she's seen literally fighting off boys at high school who think she'll date them if they defeat her.

So Akane becomes a Japanese Atlanta, using her athleticism to avoid contact with males. However, unlike the folkloric father of Atlanta, Soun does want Akane-- or at least one of his three daughters-- to marry in order to carry on the heritage of Soun's dojo. To accomplish this, Soun promises to marry one of his daughters to Ranma, the son of Soun's fellow martial artist Genma Saotome.

One day Genma and Ranma come to Japan to visit Soun-- but neither of the Saotomes is anything like what Soun remembers. It's eventually revealed that while the Saotomes traveled in China, brushing up on their martial arts disciplines, they foolishly trained in "the Ground of Accursed Springs." Over the years, many creatures, including human beings, have fallen into this or that spring and drowned-- and any spring that has drowned a living creature also has the magical power to "impress" the physical appearance of the drowned creature onto any living creature who falls into a given spring. The transformation is temporary, in that it can be reversed if the victim is doused in hot water. However, the reversal is also temporary, since cold water will return the victim to his or her cursed status. In the case of Ranma, he's cursed to transform into a girl (hence the title, which means something like "Ranma between two states"), while his father Genma does double-duty as a giant panda.

The shape-shifting antics of the Saotomes naturally provide lots of craziness for the relatively normal Akane to deal with. Neither she nor Ranma agree to their patents' idea of an arranged marriage, but Soun nevertheless invites the Saotomes to be his permanent house-guests. Thus the two teenagers are obliged to interact every day, as well as going to the same high school, and they frequently quarrel as a result, not least because they do have a tentative attraction to one another. Ranma is more often the source of the quarrels, for his upbringing as an itinerant martial artist have made him into a bantam rooster who views every confrontation as an excuse for a fight. Further, while Genma isn't particularly put out by his periodic transformations into a panda, Ranma's masculine ego is perpetually injured by his assumption of female physicality. His male mentality is never altered by his transformation, and one could hypothesize that his many years of training have atrophied his sexual instincts. Whereas URUSEI's male lead Ataru could think of nothing but chasing girls, Ranma is even less practiced than Akane at dealing with the opposite sex. Often he needles Akane about her looks, acting more like a twelve-year old than a boy of about seventeen, and yet he's immediately threatened if another male makes up to Akane. As for Akane, whenever any competition arises-- and Ranma, despite his lack of manners, attracts a lot of other girls-- she responds by violently beating up Ranma, who refuses to fight back out of a sense of chivalry.

I won't explore every incident in "A Bad Cut," which includes introducing two of Ranma's frequent foes and sexual competitors, Tatewaki Kuno and Ryoga Hibiki. It's during one of Ranma's wild fights with Ryoga that Akane's long hair gets sliced off by one of Ryoga's weapons.

Despite her masculine aggressiveness, this attack on one of her feminine attributes strikes Akane hard. Takahashi then uses flashbacks to show how as a child Akane formed a crush on a handsome local twenty-something physician, given the winsome name "Doctor Tofu." However, even as a kid Akane notices how besotted Tofu is with Kasumi, who, for her part, seems oblivious. The child-Akane lets her hair grow out in the vain hope of attracting Tofu when she's old enough, making him something of a father-imago for her.

In the intervening years, apparently Tofu never works up enough courage to disclose his feelings to Kasumi, and his character quickly disappears from the RANMA narrative, given that he served his purpose by providing Akane with an early crush-object. Clearly Takahashi found in Tofu a means to intimate the existence of Akane's normal feminine instincts, which then had to be directed toward a more appropriate boy her own age. The accidental cutting of her hair, brought about by the aggressive behavior of boys, allows Akane to "get over" her childhood crush, and although her relationship with Ranma remains fractious for the rest of the series, it's from this point on that the reader's been assured of the continuance of the "dueling lovebirds" theme for the rest of the series.

Significantly, about a year later Takahashi does get around to bringing a female character who strongly resembles Lum in being a powerful "alien" figure" the Chinese Amazon Shampoo. Though Ranma never makes love to any of the women who pursue him-- being, in his way, faithful to Akane despite her constant suspicions-- Shampoo, with her greater martial skills and her exotic sexiness, seems the greatest threat to the main romantic relationship. But Shampoo never has any of Lum's charming qualities, thus assuring that she's really no danger to the romance at all.

MYTHCOMICS: "BOY MEETS GIRL" (URUSEI YATSURA, 1987)

For my 100th mythcomics post, I chose a story that had some major resonance, and the same holds true for #200.

In my analysis of a particular arc of URUSEI YATSURA stories, I observed that despite the great creativity of manga-creator Rumiko Takahashi, she often didn't go much further than create wacky comic situations.

However, in subsequent stories Takahashi doesn't truly examine the Lum-Ataru relationship in mythic depth. It becomes just a comic routine; Ataru refuses to acknowledge his "marriage" to Lum (or for that matter, whatever genuine feelings he eventually has for her), runs around futilely trying to date other women, and gets punished for it by Lum's demonic powers. 

Still, like most manga-makers, at some point Takahashi decided to wrap the series, which obligated her to give her readers a finale. However, though the author had suggested the possibility of the two hyper-aggressives being permanently married, she chose not to have them wed at the feature's conclusion. It may be that she wanted to keep the situation open-ended for the purpose of independent anime productions (though only one such production came out in 1991, following the anime-adaptation of BOY MEETS GIRL).

In any case, BOY starts out typically enough. Lum has a minatory dream of impending darkness, but Ataru won't listen as he goes girl-chasing, resulting in the usual chaos.

However, Lum's dreams anticipate a long-buried family secret: that her great-great-great grandfather promised her hand in marriage to a scion of the "World of Darkness."  This is a sunless world inhabited by dark-skinned humanoids in Arab-looking attire. The Darkworlders are sustained by mushroom, given that fungi don't need sunlight to grow. Lum's intended, Prince Rupa, shows up on Earth, driving a flying chariot pulled by flying pigs (apparently a reference to porkers and their love of truffles), and asserts that he is to be married to Lum. He slips a ring on her finger, but not just as a promise of his intentions.

Rupa's ring is designed to accelerate Lum's aging process just enough that she loses her horns and her powers, making it easy to do a Hades-routine with Lum as Persephone.

Ataru, belying his usual indifference to Lum, organizes a pursuit party made up of Lum's circle of friends, but as soon as they arrive in the Darkworld, their spaceship crashes into another one. The friends are all captured except for Ataru, who encounters a Darkworld native, Lady Carla, who was the pilot of the other spaceship. She finds Araru and wants him to marry her-- or, rather, to fake a marriage so that Carla can prevent Lum from marrying Rupa, who was at one point Carla's intended.

Without going into all of Takahashi's fine points of comic confusion, Lum doesn't marry Rupa-- not least because she gets back her powers-- but both she and Ataru become estranged, having respectively been convinced that the other has cheated with one of the Darkworlders. Takahashi gives the quarrel an epic connotation, however, in that Lum has finally had enough of Ataru's constant attempts to woo other women. Rupa and Carla are perhaps more substantive threats because they are loose mirror-images of Ataru and Lum, though Rupa is not as lustful as Ataru and Carla is more casually violent than Lum. Rupa returns to Earth with Ataru and the other rescuers, while Lum remains in the Darkworld with Rupa.

Through more comic complications, the Earth gets overrun by Carla's giant mushrooms.

This gives Lum an inspiration. Though she's pursued her "darling" for years, it's always been out of an instinct that he loved her, rather than any outright confession on his part. So Lum makes a deal with Rupa. The two of them will send Rupa's mushroom-eating pigs to devour the offending fungi, if Ataru can win a race against Lum, essentially a replay of the contest that brought them together in the first URUSEI episode, A GOOD CATCH. Lum stipulates that he can only win one of two ways, by grabbing her horns against her will, or by capitulating by admitting his true love for her. (This would seem to be Lum's way of forcing Ataru to make a commitment less equivocal than his apparent marriage-proposal in CATCH.)

Araru defies Lum, believing that he can catch her as he did before, though on another level, he doesn't want her to hear a confession that's been coerced.

To up the stakes even more, Lum unleashes an "amnesia device" that will, if Ataru loses the contest, erase the memories of all Earth-people about their alien visitors. Lum's mix of alien and human friends don't want to forget one another, and try, with slapstick results, to stop the device. As for Ataru, he's determined not to forget Lum, even though he has no chance to capture her against her will.

Takahashi does formulate a way to give Lum her victory without forcing Ataru to make a direct commitment, which, as I said before, allows the author to restore the status quo. Yet on the final page, Takahashi gives her final comment on the "war between men and women." Lum pledges to spend the rest of her life trying to make Ataru confess his love, and he answers that "I'll say it on my death-bed." It's a conclusion that allows Ataru to hold onto his stubborn masculine reticence, and yet also gives Lum a confession more implicit than explicit, thus binding them not to a marriage contract, such as the one Lum's relative negotiated, but a social contract appropriate to their equally bull-headed natures.

THREE FORMS OF ANTI-TRANSGRESSION, PT. 1

"Anti-transgression" as I conceive it largely exists for the sake of contrast to the more primary literary source of conflict, transgression. The term is an alloform for what I called "societally cooperative transgression" back in INCEST WE TRUST PART 1, in 2010, where I said, in part:

In LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION I agreed with George Bataille's theory of transgressive sexuality, in which even "right" sexual relations are essentially transgressive. I do draw my own non-Bataillean distinction about differing types of transgression, though, and will expound on the differences between "cooperative" and "competitive" forms of transgression in a future essay.

I've continued to touch on the cooperative/ competitive distinction over the years, but here I'm advancing "anti-transgression" in order to explore how it manifests in fiction in specific forms.


THE PRIMARY FORM of anti-transgression is what modern persons would assume to be the one that seems not to suggest clansgression in any manner. For instance, in the comedy-manga URUSEI YATSURA, Ataru is a normal, if oversexed, Earth-male, and he's ceaselessly pursued by Lum, an alien who is by all accounts the same age he is. Despite the atypicality of their union, the Lum/Ataru mathcup would be primary, since there is no suggestion that their union would be clansgressive. There's neither any significant difference in the character's ages nor any suggestion that either of them symbolically represents a family member to the other.

THE SECONDARY FORM of anti-transgression is the one that Freud tries to sell as normative for the human species.

It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister.-- Sigmund Freud, "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love."

I don't believe most psychiatrists believe this today, but it has had a vast effect on literature. I cited one example in a recent essay on the light-novel-turned-manga/anime MAYO CHIKI. My essay on the manga adaptation notes that main character Kenjiro, though he never evinces any conscious sexual feelings toward his younger sister, becomes bonded to a same-age high-school girl who is not technically related to him, but whose father had once dated Kenjiro's mother. This association is the type of thing Freud was writing about, in assuming that every man must marry either his mother or his sister, who are the sources of his first sexual stimulation. The author of the original MAYO CHIKI light novels may not have believed this as a rule, but he certainly must have amused himself with the transgressive notion that the starring character had manifested a sister-fetish without even being aware of it.

THE TERTIARY FORM of anti-transgression is one in which the characters in the story are fully aware that they have crossed some societal boundaries regarding the proprieties, but the clansgressive types feel so strongly about their relationship that they consider it valuable in itself, even if society will never understand it. In the United States, the most famous example of this form may be the "sibling-love" novels in V.C. Andrews' best-seller series, "the Dollanganger series." The form seems quite popular in Japan as well, and I may as well choose as my example the series AKI/SORA. In this softcore sex-series, a brother and sister simply have loads of unprotected sex for months, patently with no consequences, and it's all intensely meaningful for them, though at the series' conclusion they do agree to break up so as to not suffer societal condemnation.

In Part 2 I'll address some of the other variations on these themes, in line with the "Preface."

NEAR-MYTHS: "JUST LIKE A WOMAN" (URUSEI YATSURA. 197?)

Rumiko Takahashi's inventiveness with creating memorable characters is, as far as I'm concerned, on a par with that of her more lauded predecessor, Osamu Tezuka. However, it's possible that she's never been as celebrated as Tezuka and her contemporary Miyazaki because she channeled that inventiveness into slapstick humor. Certainly in the U.S. it's rare to see comedy given the same props as "serious" drama, though from my pluralistic standpoint it's easy to see them as possessing the same potential for mythic import.

The first URUSEI YATSURA story, analyzed here, re-interprets the Japanese folklore of tigerish demons called "oni" into an alien lookalike species, of which Lum is the primary representative. Though she's not a literal demon, Lum becomes fascinated with a Japanese teen, Ataru Moroboshi, when he's selected to contend with her in a game of "tag," the stakes being the freedom of the Earth from Lum's people. Though Lum's feelings are not explored in detail, one interpretation might be that she's attracted to him because he's as feisty and demon-like as she is. In the earlier analysis, I said:

Perhaps Lum “stoops to conquer”—which is another way of saying that she conquers the conquering male by drawing him into her (literal) orbit, making him one of her demonic people. Of course this specific “doom” is set aside for the sake of future stories, since Ataru remains largely on Earth. But a lot of later stories end much the same as the first one, with Ataru and/or his male friends condemned to suffer some outrageous fate as a punishment for lustful desires. Perhaps there’s a sense in which, from the outset, Ataru is consigned to a comedic version of the Japanese hell—one where he will be the eternal victim of demonesses who constantly present alternating faces of feminine compassion and feminine sadism.

However, in subsequent stories Takahashi doesn't truly examine the Lum-Ataru relationship in mythic depth. It becomes just a comic routine; Ataru refuses to acknowledge his "marriage" to Lum (or for that matter, whatever genuine feelings he eventually has for her), runs around futilely trying to date other women, and gets punished for it by Lum's demonic powers. Most of the time, the women Ataru pursues are instantly turned off by his overbearing attentions. However, in a couple of stories, Takahashi formulated what might have been the biggest threat to Lum's hold on Ataru: a woman who doesn't care about having a meaningful relatonship.

In "Just Like a Woman," Ataru and his various cast-members meet Princess Kurama. Kurama, like Lum, is a sci-fi rewrite of a form of traditional Japanese creature: the "crow-demon" called *tengu.*
Ataru is kidnapped by a bunch of crow-men, who want him to mate with their princess so that she can repopulate the planet, presumably with human-crow hybrids who look more like Kurama than like her avian subordinates.

Note that in this panel Takahashi rewrites the famous "Snow White" myth. In popular retellings of the tale, Snow White is awakened by "love's first kiss." Here, Ataru has nothing on his mind but hormone-crazed lust. This would presumably be okay with Kurama, since she doesn't want anything from her potential mate but his sperm. However, she doesn't initially find Ataru physically attractive. Ironically, the only thing that makes her at all interested in him is the knowledge that another female covets him, which inspires her, bird-like, to "poach" on another female's territory.

The way Kurama does so, however, has nothing to do with romance: she wants to make Ataru over, so that he's more manly and less the lust-crazed idiot.

Naturally, Kurama's attempt to make a man of Ataru comes to nothing. "Just Like a Woman" concludes by infusing Ataru with "enhancing his anima" his feminine spirit. The goofy result is that Ataru starts acting like a woman in all respects, but a lesbian woman still oriented on babe-hunting.

Kurama doesn't give up at the conclusion of this story. The immediate sequel, "Dream Lover," shows her trying to use a form of aversion-therapy, designed to make Ataru fear the violence and capriciousness of women-- though how this would make the young fellow into good breeding-stock, Takahashi only knows. The sequence is noteworthy for having most of Ataru's female cast persecute and nearly kill him, though once again Ataru's lustfulness re-asserts itself over Kurama's technology.

"Father, You Were Strong" was Kurama's final attempt to remold Ataru before she gave up and started trying to find mates among other URUSEI cast-members, with no greater success than before.
In "Father," she takes Ataru back in time to expose him to the simple virtues of her own father, apparently a human being of medieval Japan who at some point produced Kurama's line by mating with a female tengu.

And of course, Ataru learns no lesson at all, and comes close to corrupting Kurama's image of parental strength and rectitude.

Now, I don't consider any of these stories "mythcomics," because the motifs used in them are not sufficiently organized. Takahashi often used concepts related to behavioral conditioning in her comic tales, but she was generally satisfied just to use them to put a given (usually male) character through the mill for a while, before his original nature re-asserted itself. Even the revelation that Kurama has a "father-complex"-- which would certainly go toward explaining why no man is good enough for her-- is left undeveloped.

Still, even if the characters of Takahashi rarely go beyond their basic comic setups, I feel that there's always a great deal of mythic potential there-- which is more than I can say for the majority of modern manga-artists.

MYTHCOMICS #21: URUSEI YATSURA (1978)

PLOT-SUMMARY for “A Good Catch” (Rumiko Takahashi, 1978): High-school boy Ataru Moroboshi begins his first adventure by having a fight with his girlfriend Shinobu and a slapstick encounter with a demented Buddhist monk named Cherry. After Cherry prophecizes that Ataru is doomed, the teenager returns to his house and learns from his parents that he’s been selected for a unique destiny. An alien race, whose members resemble the horned Japanese demon called the “oni,” has announced that it plans to overwhelm Earth with its superior technology. However, Earth can avoid invasion if one human, selected at random by computer, can defeat the aliens’ combatant in a special game of “tag.” Ataru has been chosen for the task, which he accepts gladly once he sees that his opponent is Lum, a curvy young female oni dressed in a tigerskin bikini. However, as the contest begins—giving Ataru ten days to overtake Lum and “tag” her by grasping her horns—he learns to his chagrin that Lum can fly, and thus can easily elude him.


For seven days Ataru fails to catch Lum. The entire world reviles him for his failures, while Shinobu chastises him for his lustful inclinations. On the eighth day Ataru manages to leap high enough to grapple with Lum, but she knocks him off and he falls, albeit with a prize: her tigerskin bikini-top. That night Lum, still half-naked, shows up at Ataru’s house trying to get her top back, but even though they fight again she has to retreat without it. The ninth day’s contest begins. Though Lum has the disadvantage of still being half-naked and thus trying to conceal her breasts during the contest, she again avoids being tagged. Shinobu, hoping to give Ataru motivation, promises to marry him if he wins. The last phase of the contest begins, but Ataru conceives a trick. He pulls out Lum’s bikini-top, suckering her into coming close enough that he can pull her down and firmly grasp her horns.







Earth is saved, but Ataru makes the mistake of crying “I will marry her” while he’s contending with Lum. Lum thinks he proposed to her, and Shinobu, whom Ataru meant to marry, remarks archly that Ataru’s still holding onto Lum pretty good. The story ends with everyone but Ataru thinking that it’s a great idea for him to go off to the planet of the oni as Lum’s husband.



MYTH-ANALYSIS: First, a few points:
(1) This analysis is based upon the Gerald Jones translation of the Japanese original, published in 1989 by Viz Comics.

(2) The ending is little more than a joke with no impact on Ataru’s future adventures; indeed he and Shinobu appear in the next UY story with no reference to Lum at all, who only joins the feature’s cast as a regular presence in the third story.

(3) The third story is the first time in the manga where Takahashi gives Lum her famous electrical powers, which is why she only fights Ataru hand-to-hand in “A Good Catch.”

URUSEI YATSURA epitomizes the old saw, “A man chases a girl until she catches him.” Following Lum’s re-introduction in the third UY story, the bulk of the series charts Lum’s never-ending battle to bring Ataru to the marriage-altar, Takahashi’s feminine reversal of the pattern of masculine pursuit and conquest.
That said, there’s no evidence that Takahashi meant Lum to become a regular cast-member when the artist conceived “Catch.” Nevertheless, even had Lum never appeared again, “Catch” would stand as a solid comedic tale based on the mythology of sexual conflict.


The first action in the story consists of Shinobu slapping Ataru for looking at some other woman, which in his private reverie he admits having done. Ataru’s licentiousness, though not extraordinary for a high-school male, is the aspect of his character that marks him for his “doom,” as Cherry calls it. When he’s confronted with a sexy girl as his opponent, Ataru drools like a letch and gets clobbered by Shinobu. Later Shinobu upbraids him for having fallen into the aliens’ trap by letting Lum tantalize him. From a purely rational point of view, this seems unfair. No Earthman would have had any better chance against a flying opponent, no matter how pure his heart. But the comic purpose of the story is to dump on Ataru, and males generally, for their wandering eyes. It might be argued that Ataru does overcome whatever lustful feelings Lum arouses in him in order to get serious during the last days of the contest, but Takahashi doesn’t really emphasize any mental transformation on Ataru’s part.


Indeed, any conscious attraction Ataru feels for Lum seems to go south as soon as he realizes that she’s tricked him by concealing the fact of her flying-power. However, Takahashi was enough an entertainer to continue suggesting sexual titillation at every turn. When Ataru jumps onto Lum on the seventh day, she calls him a “pervert” even as she knocks him off of her, even though he shows no desire for anything but victory. That same evening Lum pays Ataru a visit in his room; an action that suggests a sexual rendezvous even though there is none in the offing. When Lum demands the return of her bikini, Ataru reveals that he’s got it stuffed under his tracksuit. Lum is offended that he’s apparently “wearing it,” but in context the motive seems less like transvetitism than an attempt to train while focusing on a trophy taken from the enemy. When Ataru challenges Lum to take back the bikini by force, and she accepts, neither one has sex on their minds. But readers are likely to think of sex as the two teenagers go at each other.


The bikini itself serves as a talisman of sexual displacement. Obviously the fragile logic of Takahashi’s story would’ve gone awry had Lum simply donned a different bikini-top, and the only explanation the text can give is that “She must not have a spare.” This contrived notion gives Takahashi an excuse to titillate her readers with a handful of boob-shots, but it should be noted that even though Lum is handicapped by trying to conceal her bosom with her arms, she still wins the ninth-day contest, kicking Ataru off of her while exclaiming, “Never underestimate a woman!”


The bikini-theft parallels a similar displacement of sexual conquest in the European cycle of “swan-maiden” tales. In this archetypal story-pattern, a male protagonist comes across a lake where swan-maidens in human form are bathing, having left on the shore the feather-suits that can transform them back to swans. The hero steals one of the suits, forcing one of the maidens to assume the status of a mortal woman, whom he then marries until such time as she gets her swan-suit back. In “Good Catch,” Ataru manages to steal Lum’s top, but Lum isn’t reduced to helplessness. Even when handicapped, she fights back savagely. It might be too Freudian to claim that either the swan-suits or Lum’s bikini-top represent the male’s “taking” of the female’s virginity. Nevertheless, Ataru’s theft does give him in the end a psychological advantage, and he uses her top to trick her in the same way that she used her looks to trick him.


After Ataru beats Lum—albeit with trickery—her fierce demeanor vanishes once she thinks he’s proposed marriage to her. Should one interpret this as a female’s being seduced by a male’s demonstration of superior strength and/or cunning? Or is it, as I noted at the start, a sort of subtle revenge? Perhaps Lum “stoops to conquer”—which is another way of saying that she conquers the conquering male by drawing him into her (literal) orbit, making him one of her demonic people. Of course this specific “doom” is set aside for the sake of future stories, since Ataru remains largely on Earth. But a lot of later stories end much the same as the first one, with Ataru and/or his male friends condemned to suffer some outrageous fate as a punishment for lustful desires. Perhaps there’s a sense in which, from the outset, Ataru is consigned to a comedic version of the Japanese hell—one where he will be the eternal victim of demonesses who constantly present alternating faces of feminine compassion and feminine sadism.