ADULTERATED COMICS

 I was about to write a comment to this post on Rip Jagger's Dojo but decided to make that comment into a whole post here. The respondent to Rip's post asked the question as to whether it might not have been counter-productive for the early adult collectors of Golden Age comics to focus so much upon the very elements that anti-comics pundit Frederic Wertham vilified: elements like "cross dressing" and "injuries to the eye."                                                                                                 

As far as Wertham was concerned, such things were adult material that did not belong in comic books aimed at children. One might say that the introduction of such elements "adulterated" the pure state of material aimed at innocents, going by the dictionary definition:                                                                                                                         ADULTERATE: "render (something) poorer in quality by adding another substance, typically an inferior one"                                                                                                                            Now, I've provided an ample number of posts here to demonstrate that the purity Wertham defined was "purely" in his own imagination, and, by extension, in the imaginations of the parents and teachers who either got on board with Wertham or, in some cases, anticipated his jeremiad. What interests me here is the question raised: did adult readers of comic books in any way "adulterate" their own reputations by making commodities of the very things that Wertham considered pernicious influences?                     

                                                                                                              The short answer to that question is "no, because the Overstreet Price Guide didn't begin until 1970, and by that time, 'normies' had already formed their generally negative opinions of comics-nerds by that time." Since I became a hardcore comics-fan in the mid-1960s, I kept a pretty good weather-eye on "normie culture's" attitude toward comic books, and I don't think that even in the 1970s non-fans were aware of collectors looking for Werthamite trigger-points. Remember that although sustained comics-fandom in the U.S. started in the very early 1960s with the activities of Jerry Bails and Roy Thomas, not until 1965 did John Q. Public even become aware of grown men (and a few women) collecting and reading old comic books. The first convention for comic book collectors appeared in New York in 1965, the same year that Jules Feiffer's THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES was published. At most there had been some earlier Sunday-supplement essays about the weird adult comics-readers, but for most of those writers, the Wertham Crusade was yesterday's news. Even after the surprise of the "Bat-fad" the next year-- which certainly did not validate comic books in the eyes of sixties adults, however much it influenced later generations-- normies just didn't know much about adult comics-readers.                                                                                                                                                                   In subsequent decades others attempted to revive anti-comics  crusades, but I don't remember anyone making an issue of perverted collectors obsessed by gouged eyes and spanking scenes. At most I recall that a few comics-fans didn't approve of listing such trigger-scenes. But as the subculture got further and further away from Wertham, I think such triggers lost a lot of their appeal.                                                                                                                                    And what was the appeal for those who did look for such pernicious influences, whether or not the comics-creators had intended the scenes to be transgressive? I don't rule out collectors with particular fetishes, of course. But I think that for most adult readers, they commodified the supposedly salacious scenes as a way of mocking Frederic Wertham's screed. The very things he inveighed against, as the practices of sinful adults taking advantage of innocent children, became selling-points for comics-dealers. "Step right up and see the naughty cross-dressing Wonder Woman villain!" In my view, it's on the same level as the sinful sights of your basic carnival, which are "innocent" on a level that Frederic Wertham would never have understood.                 

COMMON AND UNCOMMON EVIL

The overall conclusion of last month's EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD series was my affirmation that the elements of "play for play's sake" in literature were largely immune from accusations of "bad influence," while elements of "play for work's sake," which encourage audiences to take a particular real-world action, could be either a good or bad influence. In Part 2, in order to get across a distinction between types of literary evil, I cited this passage from Bataille:

We cannot consider that actions performed for a material benefit express Evil. This benefit is, no doubt, selfish, but it loses its importance if we expect something from it other than Evil itself – if, for example, we expect some advantage from it. The sadist, on the other hand, obtains pleasure from contemplating destruction, the most complete destruction being the death of another human being. Sadism is Evil. If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it. 

Now, I also said in Part 2 that "Bataille's definition of Evil and its relationship to Good may not be one that can be generally applied, but it does have partial explanatory power within literature..." Yet even though I've specified that Bataille was not offering a general non-literary definition of evil, his statement deserves some consideration as it might apply to all human experience, both "common and uncommon."

Take the proposition: "If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it." I see why Bataille would use the term "purely evil" for a literary reflection of a human action, but the statement is dubious at best regarding common human experience. The Menendez Brothers killed their parents, but the killers' act of gratuitously taking life does not in itself become less evil if informed only by self-interest. If anything, I would guess that the majority of human beings are most often victimized by acts of evil stemming from self-interest without any particular intent to inflict suffering for the criminal's Sadean pleasure. Grifts and robberies are some of the most common experiences that the average law-abiding adult copes with, and that's without even getting into the political realm, where legislators may commit evil acts as a result of "good intentions."  

With the possible exception of the crucible of middle school and high school, where many immature students indulge in overt sadism to gain the approbation of like-minded peers, most "First World" citizens at least aren't often subjected to any Sade-like forms of evil. Consider how absurd it sounds when the speaker in the following comics-panel prates about the "purity" of killing a victim for no reason.

Of course, this sort of purity does exist in the "uncommon" world of literature, and author Michael O'Donoghue is having fun with the notion that poor, imperiled Phoebe Zeitgeist is trapped in a world where no one who oppresses her is motivated by the "lackluster treadmill of goal-oriented drives." Thomas Hobbes may have distinguished between human motivations of gain and reputation. But when he also popularized the phrase "the war of all against all" to sum up the human condition, most persons involved in that war are worried about people with "goal-oriented drives" like theft, not about chimerical acts of gratuitous cruelty. And sometimes the "thieves" are protecting their own lookout, as with the doctor who makes a mistake in treating a patient and then fails to confess his wrongdoing because it would put him at a financial disadvantage.

Given that so much human evil in common experience is depressingly banal, I think it fair to state that self-interest causes more needless suffering than sadism ever has. Of course, in literature both forms of evil are "good" (as per my earlier essay title) because they are necessary to establish conflict and thus make storytelling possible. But it's peculiar that Bataille downplayed the evils of self-interest in the above quote. I've frequently cited him for his insights on the dynamic of work and play, where work is always oriented on achieving real-world goals, and play exists for its own sake, achieving nothing purposeful with its activity. It would be one thing to say that the Evils of Sadism trump the Evils of Self-Interest within the sphere of literature, because there, a fictional sadist like Heathcliffe or Hannibal Lecter knows how to play "the game of sadism" far better than even real sadists like Ted Bundy. But in this quote, Bataille is unusually generous toward the sins of the self-interested, of "goal-oriented drives"-- especially since it might be fairly said that indifference to the suffering of others is just the other side of the coin from reveling in said suffering.

EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD PT. 2

In Part 1, I stated that Northrop Frye wasn't an influence on my own literary theories of "work and play," but George Bataille certainly was, even though most of what he wrote on that pair of concepts concerned his view of anthropology and religion, not literature. Yet he certainly transferred his concept of "religious transgression" to the world of literature. In 1957 that he wrote in EROTISM that "the transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it," and an analogous idea appears in LITERATURE AND EVIL, published the same year:

Evil, therefore, if we examine it closely, is not only the dream of the wicked: it is to some extent the dream of Good. Death is the punishment, sought and accepted for this mad dream, but nothing can prevent the dream from having been dreamt." -- p. 21.

Though I don't consider LITERATURE AND EVIL one of the better books on literature-- it compiles eight essays on particular authors Bataille admired for incarnating his ideas on "literary evil"-- EVIL did greatly influence me to consider that every conflict in a fictional story involved a transgression against someone or something, and that's as good a reason to use Bataille to approach the question posed to me, "Is it possible for literature to be 'evil?'" (And by the bye, Bataille's sense of an interpenetration between Good and Evil is what conjured forth my Miltonian essay-title.)

I don't believe that anyone ever has, or ever will, formulate a definition of evil as such, which any tenable theory of "literary evil" would require. But Bataille's definition is at least a good starting-point. In his very short preface, he states:

These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality.'

Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.

His idea of "hypermorality" probably explains why he's not overly concerned with many of the lesser forms of evil that ordinary morality inveighs against: specifically, those centered in self-interest. In his initial essay, whose main subject is Emily Bronte (and her sublime evildoer Heathcliff), Bataille privileges Evil as the deliberate enjoyment of suffering beyond the considerations of personal advantage.

We cannot consider that actions performed for a material benefit express Evil. This benefit is, no doubt, selfish, but it loses its importance if we expect something from it other than Evil itself – if, for example, we expect some advantage from it. The sadist, on the other hand, obtains pleasure from contemplating destruction, the most complete destruction being the death of another human being. Sadism is Evil. If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it. 

Obviously, a lot of literature engages in moralistic polemic against the evils of self-interest in all its forms-- though polemicists like Frederic Wertham are well-versed in dismissing any such moralizing as being no more than a protective cover, the better for those pundits to attack literature they deem "morally noxious." So Bataille is in the end not offering a general definition of evil, but of a specifically form of Evil that he associated with the sovereign values of literature as a whole. 

Bataille's definition of Evil and its relationship to Good may not be one that can be generally applied, but it does have partial explanatory power within literature, and therefore it serves as a counterbalance to the views of the pundits. For them, all evil is defined by self-interest, and sadistic thrills are just part of that package-- which is why Wertham constantly conflated readers wanting sadistic thrills and publishers wanting to make money off those customers. For Wertham, the taboo exists only to prevent the transgression, and Good never dreams of Evil in any fashion. Yet Wertham's own altruism is compromised and implicated in self-interest when he's caught cooking his casebooks, or even just making insubstantial arguments.

Bataille's idea that "Sadism is Evil" requires separate consideration from his overall definition of Evil in Literature, and Part 3 will touch on that topic, as well as the age-old question, "When an artist shows a thing, is he endorsing it?"

DOORWAY TO XANADU

I don't remember what drew my attention to DC's seventies spiritualist Madame Xanadu, but I found myself wondering how much, if at all, her introductory stories qualified her for (1) centric status, and (2) combative status. My verdict is that she satisfies my criteria for both, but oddly, the original five issues of her debut comic, DOORWAY TO NIGHTMARE, also reflect a strong influence from the Gothic subgenre that DC Comics toyed with during that decade. The Gothic, in my definition, tends to include a strong element of sexual transgression, while the more overarching category of horror fiction does not utilize sexual transgression as prominently.

I'll exclude two of these early "Madame X" stories from this summary, because I want to review them in more detail elsewhere. 

DOORWAY #1-- This issue, like the one following it, uses the title of the book in place of a separate story-title, so I'll use as a title a phrase from the first page of David Micheline's script: "The Emporium of Truth." The mysterious Madame Xanadu runs a fortune telling shop in New York's East Village, and like all the later DOORWAY stories, she seems to draw to her people with romantic conflicts. Actress Cindy Barnes has been dating playwright Brad Jacobs, but she finds herself sidelined by another actress, name of Erika. Xanadu intuits through her reading of her Tarot cards that Erika is more than she seems, and the quasi-heroine displays her ambiguous powers by defeating an apparent demonic attacker.

This scene also establishes a constant motif, that upon defeating a foe, Xanadu seemingly imprisons her former foe's essence in a glass jar. Cindy then learns that Erika is actually an ancient Egyptian sorceress in modern garb, and that she plans to drain Brad of his spirit-energies. Xanadu, rather than directly combating the sorceress, encourages Cindy to break the witch's soul-pyramid, after which the sorceress perishes.

Vaulting over issue #2 for later consideration, issue #3 is the first Xanadu story to merit a title, "Blood Red Tear." Scribe Bill Kunkel and artist Ric Estrada issue a serviceable vampire story, in which an unaging bloodsucker, Victor Christianson, falls for mortal woman Margot. Xanadu does not actively oppose the vampire, but uses her Tarot skills to make Victor sacrifice himself to keep from making Margot one of the undead. Xanadu does apparently collect his soul or whatever for one of her little jars. Given the theme of sacrifice, the last name "Christianson" is probably no coincidence.

DOORWAY #4 contains the risibly titled "Six Claws of the Dragon," written by Andrews and Hopen and penciled by EC legend Johnny Craig. Two mummies from ancient Manchuria go missing from a New York museum, and for some reason police detective Abrahms finds himself seeking the shop of Madame Xanadu for information. He also meets two Asian women, and he falls in love with the younger one, Sue Lie Hau. An undead Chinese swordsman appears to take Abrahms' life, but Xanadu apparently does some  hocus pocus so that, though she Xanadu appears to get knocked out a window by the assassin, somehow the swordsman ends up on the pavement. The older Asian woman is behind it all, seeking to transfer the soul of a mummy-princess into the body of Sue. At Xanadu's urging, Abrahms is able to reach Sue by the power of love, so that the evil spirit is exorcised. Xanadu adds another jar to her collection.

"Day of the Devils" in DOORWAY #5 is by Scott Edelman and Romeo Tanghal, and alone boasts no sexual transgression elements, though it's still a supernatural romance story, Handsome youth Johnny joins a vicious gang to gain acceptance, but cute girl Anne tries to talk him into leaving the gang. They both end up at Xanadu's shop, but for once, the seeress becomes pro-active. At the shop Johnny has a dream in which he becomes a literal devil and Anne wields mystic powers to stop him. When the dream ends, Johnny decides to tread the straight and narrow from then on. This time Xanadu appears to use a mystic jar to create the dream but she doesn't make any new acquisitions.

Once DOORWAY was cancelled, four inventory stories then appeared in DC's anthology magazine, THE UNEXPECTED.

UNEXPECTED #190 presents "Tapestry of Dreams" by Cary Burkett and Juan Ortiz. Young Stephen comes to Xanadu because his girl Lauren has become besotted with an older man, the mysterious Mister Hazel. Prior to Stephen's advent, though, the reader has seen Hazel visit Xanadu's emporium, making clear that he's no mystery to Xanadu. She reveals to Stephen he's truly an incubus named Azazel, and that the only way to free Lauren from his control is by entering the girl's dream-world and defeating the incubus in combat. Xanadu performs no combat herself but does lend Stephen some undefined power, and after the lovers are liberated, Mister Hazel ends up in a jelly jar.

UNEXPECTED #192 offers "Wheel of Fortune" by Bill Kelley and Romeo Tanghal. A girl named Joyce witnesses a "disco inferno" at a New York club, seeing female friend Erica disappear while dancing with the handsome but enigmatic club-owner Damon (whose band-members look like demons). After consulting with Xanadu, Joyce-- who is herself attracted to Damon-- returns to the club and sees Erica again, but the formerly young girl seems aged. Xanadu tells Joyce that a devil-cult has taken over the disco, and Joyce herself learns that the band of demons has suborned Damon. Though there's one incident in which Xanadu seems to protect Joyce from a mundane attack, she allows Joyce to have the triumph of banishing the club's evil, and this time one of the seeress' jars is comparatively crowded. I believe this is the first story in which the script calls Xanadu a "gypsy."

UNEXPECTED #194-- Andrews and Hopen return to write "Moonlight and Laughter" with art by Jess Jodloman. The story starts out with more action than usual, as a werewolf tries to exhort from Xanadu, only to be slain by the rifle of werewolf hunter Lyle Morgan. Xanadu makes a few dire predictions to Lyle, and then he goes to visit his girlfriend Mina, who's working at a comedy club (?) Mina knows all about how Lyle became a hunter after a werewolf slew his first love, and the two of them end up at Xanadu's emporium. Lyle desires vengeance on the particular shapechanger who killed his ex, and after that, a new wolf-thing shows up, almost killing Lyle until Xanadu repels the creature. Later Lyle and Mina learn of a whole cult of werewolves, and this leads to Lyle finding his quarry, though not with the usual upbeat romantic conclusion.

UNEXPECTED #195-- Finally, Denny O'Neil and Johnny Craig execute "Deadly Homecoming," in which an embittered soldier, Johnny Dallas, returns home from Vietnam, meeting his fiancee Vanessa. Johnny expresses rage at both his commanding officer and at Vanessa's father, and both of them die soon after. Vanessa visits the emporium, and Xanadu gives her a protective amulet. It turns that Johnny and his soldier-buddy Frank fell afoul of a Vietnamese war-god, who imbued Frank with mental powers, which he used to make Johnny the catspaw for his murders. Xanadu appears, shows Frank a soul jar, and that's enough for the soldier to commit suicide, so that the war-god somehow ends up in the jar.

In conclusion, like the majority of DC horror stories, most of these are mediocre at best. Though much is made of Xanadu's Tarot skills, none of the writers or artists do much with Tarot symbolism or imagery. The last inventory story happened to be executed by fan-favorites Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, so DC Comics decided to publish this story as a one-shot comic, MADAME XANADU, in 1981. I want to eventually giving this story more detailed attention, so aside from that story and the one in DOORWAY #2, Xanadu's debut is marked by a few scattered myth-nuggets in stories that feel a bit like a romance comic crossed with The Phantom Stranger.

THREE FORMS OF ANTI-TRANSGRESSION, PT. 2

The terminology of "types" that I introduced in this preface can now be brought into line with the terminology of "forms" that I introduced in Part 1.

My main reason for bothering with all of these highly specific terms relates to my fascination with the idea of thresholds as they relate to both real and fictional experience. Earlier I've quoted Philip Wheelwright with respect to his assertions about "the intrinsically threshold character of experience." For me this means that there are certain crucial points, at least in fiction, where one phenomenality shades into another-- as with the naturalistic into the uncanny-- or where a subcombative level of violence can, with just a little extra *amplitude,* be transformed into the level of the combative. The same dynamic also applies to the shadings in between age-related clansgressions.

I gave one example of this subtle shading in this section of CROSSING THE LAWLINES PART 2:

However, even in real-life culture the spectre of clansgression can appear with respect to age-appropriate pairings, even when the subjects involved are not physically related, nor are they raised in circumstances of regular propinquity (cf. "neighbor-kids who grow up together.") In fiction this motif is most frequently seen in the trope "high school girl dates college boy," or (more rarely) the reverse situation with respect to gender assignment. Typically no more than four years separates the collegian from the high-schooler, so it isn't feasible for such pairings to carry the "May-September" vibe. Yet the sense of boundaries traversed is clansgressive, usually because it's assumed that one member of the couple has already had sex and will be initiating the other. 

Looking at this observation through the lens of the "chronophilia" article referenced in the preface, one might assume that even though there's not a large span of years separating "high school girl" from "college boy," the former aligns with what I've called the "E-type," the late adolescent usually aged from 15-19 years of age, while the latter often (though not always) aligns with the "M-type," the functional adult, even though the average collegian would not usually be all that much older than the high-schooler. Still, a sense of transgression, and of clansgression, pertains because there's the sense of mixing "clans" that ought to be separate.

For instance, in Rumiko Takahashi's long-running MAISON IKKOKU, the principal relationship is that of Godai, a college-age young man and a slightly older woman, Kyoko, whose age is cited as 22 on one wiki. However, one barrier to the relationship is the fact that Kyoko, who married her first husband when she herself was in high school, is a widow, and so the potential romance between her and the college student seems slightly out of balance, even if the age-discrepancy is not a great one. However, Takahashi erects other barriers as well.One of these is the above-pictured high-school student Ibuki, who sets her sights on the twenty-something Godai. Ibuki is never successful in her romantic campaign. But since Godai registers as an "M-type," any association with a "E-type" seems massively inappropriate, and Godai always gets in trouble with Kyoko whenever she suspects him of pursuing a high-schooler.

Yet age doesn't always confer the semblance of maturity. In the same LAWLINES essay I wrote this of the manga-series LOVE HINA:

The set-up for LOVE HINA is that nebbishy loser Keitaro Urashima finds himself managing a girls' dormitory for middle school and college-bound high-school students. Naturally, in the long-running tradition of harem comedies, the girls are winsomely cute, and eventually all of them become enamored on some level with Keitaro, the only male living with them. A modicum of adult supervision is provided by Keitaro's aunt Haruka... but most of the time the girls are free to tease and torment Keitaro, who gets no points for being a little older than the oldest of them, since he's failed his college-entrance exams three times at the series' beginning.  The clansgressive vibe generated by the series eventually develops along the lines of an older "brother" being forced to put up with the hijinks of a band of capricious "sisters," all of whom take on a sibling-vibe partly because they share a house...

So even though the Keitaro character is in the same age-range as Takahashi's Godai, Keitaro is often treated as being an "E-type." so that there's no sense of age-based clansgression when he tries to make time with high-schooler Naru. However, I mentioned above that the "clan" in LOVE HINA included middle schoolers.

One is a wacky "foreign" girl. Kaolla, who likes to torment Keitaro both physically and quasi-sexually.

The other is a serious but shy Japanese girl, Shinobu, who's honestly attracted to the older male but becomes easily embarrassed in his presence.

Predictably, though Keitaro doesn't make any moves on either "H-type" girl, he's constantly placed in situations where it seems like he's guilty of this particular age-transgression.

In the Preface I also mentioned that age-based clansgressions might occur even when a particular character only "appeared to be" within a particular span of years. There are quite a few of these in Japanese entertainment, but for variety's sake, I'll give as example the American DC Comics character Arisia Rrab.

When first introduced, the character-- an alien Green Lantern, and a member of the same Corps as Hal Jordan, the titular DC hero-- looked very much an "H-type." She had a schoolgirl crush on M-Type Jordan, and that was all there was to that.

One online reference puts her age at 13 in this introduction, though in a later comic, Arisia argues that even though she looks like an immature Earth female, she's actually much older than her looks because of the longer span of time that her planet revolves around its sun. Jordan still rejected her as a potential lover, urging her to seek out boys "her own age." However, Arisia's inner torment caused her to subconsciously advance her own body in age, so that she became, in effect, an "M-Type" like Hal Jordan.  And at that point, Jordan acquiesced to her logic.

The story in GREEN LANTERN CORPS #206-- in which Arisia became "a woman" in more than one sense-- was entitled "In Deep," and writer Steve Englehart may have chosen this title knowing that he was going to get "in deep" with fan-reaction. He even anticipates the general reaction in the following dialogue:

It's hard to say whether or not the writer had any notion of breaking down this particular clansgressive stereotype, but the story had no such effect. Instead, the trope of "Green Lantern, Child Molester" has become an ongoing joke. Arisia did not last long as Hal Jordan's inamorata, and later continuity seemed to have papered over Englehart's scenario.

To bring the analysis back to the three forms--

The Primary Form would be best represented by Keitaro's romance with high-schooler Naru. Though she's part of the "sorority" in the hotel, and she actually knew Keitaro briefly when the two of them were pre-schoolers, she's the least 'sisterly" of the cast-members.

The Secondary Form is represented by the romance of Godai and Kyoko, whose transgressive association is filtered through, and somewhat inverted by, the interaction with Ibuki. One reason Ibuki becomes obsessed with Godai results from his having been a substitute-teacher at her high school. This institution happens to be the same one where Kyoko, in her high-school years, fell in love with the older man whom she married. Thus, even though Kyoko is older and more experienced than Godai, Godai's apparent flirtation with a high-school girl resonates as a reverse-recapitulation of Kyoko's history with an older man.

The Tertiary Form is represented by the "brief candle" of love between Hal Jordan and Arisia, who attempt to use sci-fi rationalizations to justify the clangression between an "M-Type" and a character who had at most been a "E-Type" before she wrought the Change of Womanhood upon herself.

ADDENDUM: I'll note that one reason Keitaro doesn't seem an "M-Type" despite his age is because he's failed his college entrance exams so often, thus consigning him to a sort of "immaturity limbo."

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."

PREFACE TO "THREE FORMS OF ANTI-TRANSGRESSION"

I may as well start out the new year by once more dilating on one of the topics crucial to my literary theory: the Bataillean idea that all art is defined by transgression. My focus in this essay and the one following is a specific type of transgression, which I've dubbed "clansgression," in that it deals with individuals crossing boundaries that are either literally or figuratively akin to those of familial relations.

With one obvious exception, most clansgressions involve interactions between persons of disparate ages. One John Money is credited in this Wiki article with inventing the term "chronophilia" to denote paraphilias in which a given subject showed a penchant for persons within a particular age range. The article shows how chronophilia breaks down into other categories, but the only two I will be referencing in the upcoming essay are "hebephilia," denoting a penchant for early adolescents, generally from ages 11-14, and "ephebophilia," denoting a penchant for late adolescents, which Wiki allots to ages 15-19 (though I personally have seen cases where even characters in their early 20s are given the semblance of "ephebes." However, it's apparent that the "ephebe type" doesn't last too much longer as age advances, at which point one sees at least the late twenty-year-old as being as "mature" as any other adult.

I said I'd reference these terms, but I don't plan to USE them, because they don't adapt well to noun-form. Thus, in the "Three Forms" essay I'll employ these noun-forms:

H-TYPE= a fictional character who is, or appears to be, within the span of the early adolescent

E-TYPE= a fictional character who is, or appears to be, within the span of the late adolescent

M-TYPE= a fictional character who is, or appears to be, within the span of the mature adult


Further subgroups are possible, but for the time being these will suffice.

ULTIMATE PRIMACY

Returning to the matter of clansgression once more, I've been meditating upon the involved nature of what Bataille called "right relations" as I put if forth in CROSSING THE LAWLINES PT. 1: 

...there's no cultural consensus that an Old Suitor is automatically to be preferred to a New one, or vice versa. It's not difficult to call to mind multiple examples of Hollywood movies in which it's right and proper that a New Suitor should displace an Old Suitor...

If one were to transpose these "Old Suitor/New Suitor" criteria into familial relations, one would get something along the lines of "primogeniture" (the firstborn's right to inherit from the parents, and, by extension, all other privileges descending from that status) vs. "ultimogeniture" (the exact opposite re: privileges being conferred to the youngest-born). But age is only sometimes a criterion. Often it has more to do with being first to "call dibs," as it were.

A typical example of "right relations" being governed by the "I saw him first' principle appears in the 1960s comedy teleseries I DREAM OF JEANNIE. As the story goes, modern-day Air Force pilot Anthony Nelson opens an antique bottle and frees a beautiful genie named Jeannie, who then schemes for the next four TV-years to get Nelson to marry her.

In the third season the show introduced Jeannie's sister, also called Jeannie, distinguished only by brunette hair. I don't believe that it was ever established which one was older-- maybe it hardly counted once both of them passed 2,000 years-- but regardless, Jeannie II's attempts to move in on her sister's territory was a clear example of alloting right relations by virtue of Jeannie I being "first in line."

 In contrast, from the same time-period, we have the teleseries THE ADDAMS FAMILY. Unlike JEANNIE, this one starts out with a kooky couple that's married from the first episode: i.e., Gomez Addams and wife Morticia. However, in the show's second season, a two-part episode from 1965 revealed that Morticia also had a near-twin sister, Ophelia.

In this flashback tale, it's revealed that Ophelia actually "had dibs" on Gomez, in that their respective families had arranged a marriage between the two. Ophelia was willing to marry Gomez but was also too ditsy to really feel anything about him one way or the other, while Gomez was frankly terrified of the crazy, occasionally violent broad. However, at first sight he falls in love with her milder sister Morticia, and she with him. The comic scenario in which the lovers who are destined to be together is only possible because they have to find some way to get around Ophelia's privilege as both fiancee and (I believe) older sister.

So in both of these examples, we're dealing with a "true love" and a "false love," irrespective of which female character meets the male character first. However, a complication comes up when there's something along the lines of a "No Exit" situation, where three characters are destined to remain apart.

DC Comics' original ANGEL AND THE APE series from the 1960s was a lightweight comedy series about a girl and a gorilla, two detectives who solved weird crimes. Aside from the following house ad, which carried a strong "King Kong" vibe, Angel O'Day and Sam Simeon (guess which is which) had no relationship beyond their business partnership.

A 1991 mini-series by Phil Foglio revived the concept with a little more sexual interplay, and also added a new continuity-wrinkle: lady detective Angel was the sister of another 1960s DC character, "Dumb Bunny" from the INFERIOR FIVE series.  In one issue of the mini-series, the sister with the questionable intellect reveals that she's interested in Angel's partner.

Then, a little later, Sam the Ape has a confrontation with long-time super-villain Grodd (his grandfather, actually), and this results in the revelation that Sam doesn't have any feeling for Dumb Bunny, but that he does carry a torch for his partner Angel-- who certainly doesn't have any reciprocal feeling for him.

This does cause Dumb Bunny some aggravation for a time, though by the story's end she's shunted off to a more acceptable romantic interest (who is at least of her species...)  There's no indication that "the one who saw him first" will end up with Sam, possibly because of that whole "not-the-same-species" thing, though Angel and Sam are still partners at the end of the mini, which to my knowledge remains non-canonical in DC continuity.


So does "clansgression" in the sense of "sister-competition" over a male even exist here, given that one sister wants Sam for a boyfriend, but doesn't get him, while the other doesn't want him, but does remain at least in his company? I would say that Foglio is toying with the more normal trope seen in the previous examples, but has deliberately flummoxed the pattern because he doesn't really want to depict an interspecies romance. Yet one may still say that clansgression exists here in the same I said it could in Wilkie Collins' novel THE MOONSTONE:

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.-- CROSSING THE LAWLINES PT. 4.

If Sam had been a human character, I would expect that in a roughly similar scenario Foglio might have left the door open for some future liaison between the detectives-- in which case the sibling-rivalry would have become *in esse.*

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 2

In this essay I said:

When people voice the familiar cliché, “X is old enough to be your [parental unit],” it’s not because they literally fear that every May-September liaison will result in corporeal incest. Rather, aversion to such liaisons seems more rooted in a quasi-religious sense of the proper order of life: young with young, old with old. These are just two examples of what I term “incorporeal incest.”

The terms "corporeal incest" and "incorporeal incest" are henceforth subsumed by the term "clansgression," implying, for fiction, a narrative action that confuses the proper hierarchies of familial and quasi-familial relations.

For some time I've contemplated the consequences of this statement. I still hold to the idea that May-September heterosexual pairings may recapitulate strong "daughter-father" or "son-mother" connotations. But does that necessarily mean that pairings between heterosexuals of roughly the same age are inevitably closer to the model of "right relations"-- even if, with Bataille, one believes that even the closest that humans can get to that model is still transgressive in nature?

The obvious answer is that it ain't necessarily so. Even age-appropriate status between two given subjects does not nullify the possibilities for clansgressive activity. One can find some suggestion of the potential for the symbolic reading of "sister-brother" clansgression in the familiar joke: "If all men were brothers, would you let one marry your sister?" The joke is primarily a play on the different connotations of the word "brother," but its logic is irrefutable: if all males and females were siblings, sibling incest would be the only way to reproduce the human race.

However, even in real-life culture the spectre of clansgression can appear with respect to age-appropriate pairings, even when the subjects involved are not physically related, nor are they raised in circumstances of regular propinquity (cf. "neighbor-kids who grow up together.") In fiction this motif is most frequently seen in the trope "high school girl dates college boy," or (more rarely) the reverse situation with respect to gender assignment. Typically no more than four years separates the collegian from the high-schooler, so it isn't feasible for such pairings to carry the "May-September" vibe. Yet the sense of boundaries traversed is clansgressive, usually because it's assumed that one member of the couple has already had sex and will be initiating the other. The motif appears prominently in the 2010 film EASY A, in which high-school protagonist Olive, tired of having a friend bug her about her virginal status, makes up a story about losing her cherry to an unnamed college student. Making her imagined seducer a college student suits Olive's purposes of anonymity, so that no one at her school will contradict her tale, but every high-school student immediately finds it credible that a collegian makes a likely enough seducer. It's an interesting detail that in Olive's fabricated tale, the person who introduces her to her seducer is none other than her college-age brother, a character who does not appear in the film, any more than does the collegiate suitor.

Earlier I mentioned the motif of propinquity with respect to the backstory of Reed and Sue of the Fantastic Four. That narrarive isn't the best illustration of the motif, though, for the circumstances of Reed and Sue's meeting are delivered as an explanatory toss-off in the original Lee-Kirby comics. In general those stories tried as hard as they could not to acknowledge a significant age-difference between Sue (young enough to have a teenaged brother) and Reed (old enough to have served in World War II). A better illustration of clansgressive propinquity might be Ken Akamatsu's LOVE HINA.

The set-up for LOVE HINA is that nebbishy loser Keitaro Urashima finds himself managing a girls' dormitory for middle school and college-bound high-school students. Naturally, in the long-running tradition of harem comedies, the girls are winsomely cute, and eventually all of them become enamored on some level with Keitaro, the only male living with them. A modicum of adult supervision is provided by Keitaro's aunt Haruka (the dark-haired woman at far left), but most of the time the girls are free to tease and torment Keitaro, who gets no points for being a little older than the oldest of them, since he's failed his college-entrance exams three times at the series' beginning.  The clansgressive vibe generated by the series eventually develops along the lines of an older "brother" being forced to put up with the hijinks of a band of capricious "sisters," all of whom take on a sibling-vibe partly because they share a house, with special emphasis on the arrangement of Keitaro's room being located directly beneath that of Naru Narusegawa (the girl at extreme right holding Keitaro's arm). Naru, it will eventually be revealed, has a connection to Keitaro than neither of them remembers when they meet, for they were the children of neighboring parents-- a connection that plays a large part in the development of their romance.

The young girls seen on Keitaro's left-- wacky Kaolla, shy middle-schooler Shinobu, aggressive Kitsune, and diffident Motoko-- are also not really related to Keitaro, any more than Naru is. However, they relate to Keitaro in ways that suggest sibling kinship. Even though Keitaro is older than the oldest girl, Kitsune, she gives the impression of having had sexual experience whereas Keitaro has none, which may be the reason why she chooses to call him her "younger brother." Shinobu, who like Kitsune has no siblings that are mentioned, relates to Keitaro like an older brother, though at the same time she has a mild crush on him, which brings down on Keitaro the righteous wrath of Naru, as she accuses him of trying to get jiggy with a middle-schooler. Motoko's backstory involves her convoluted relationship with her sister, a relationship that may have involved Motoko coveting her sister's never-seen husband, who is Motoko's brother-in-law. Finally, Kaolla frequently stresses that Keitaro reminds her of her brother-- also never seen in the manga series-- and though she too is a middle-schooler who would be age-inappropriate for Keitaro, Kaolla possesses a magical ability to "age" herself temporarily, so that she can become closer in age to the beleaguered dorm-manager.

None of these sibling-constellations would be remarkable by themselves, but it seems quite significant that brother-relationships are the only ones mentioned for all of the girls. This almost excludes Keitaro's aunt Haruka, but then, because she shares Keitaro's last name, she can only be the unmarried sister of Keitaro's never-seen father-- so even she is partly defined by a brother-relationship. Keitaro's parents, and those of the young women, are referenced obliquely if at all, with only Haruka and her sometime lover Seta providing adult input-- but they're essentially the "fun aunt" and "fun uncle" who don't interfere with any of the adolescent hijinks. The lack of parental influence might indicate that LOVE HINA actually is a "world of siblings," devoted to almost every conceivable take on sister-brother clansgressive relations, except for relations between biological siblings.

Late in the series Akamatsu introduces Kanako Urashima, who is Keitaro's adoptive sister, but she's even more aggressive than Kitsune, for she earnestly plans to seduce Keitaro. Keitaro is not willing, since he does think of her as the same as a biological sister, but given that LOVE HINA is a comedy, his consent is not important. What is important is that Naru, the romantic front-runner in the Keitaro Derby, is finally forced to put her affections on the line to prevent a forbidden level of clansgressive activity-- though as noted earlier, Naru herself is implicated in the sibling-clansgression vibe by virtue of her childhood association with Keitaro.

Having shown that sibling relationships can be potentially just as clansgressive as those between "age-inappropriate" subjects, in PART 3 I'll move on to the subject of a form of sibling relationship that manages to be exogamous and endogamous at the same time.

THE CLANSGRESSION FORMULATION

Aside from the fact that "clansgression" is not a real word, the above title might almost pass as the title of CBS' THE BIG BANG THEORY, since said titles usually stress the formal, hyper-academic usage of words.

The only "big bang" I'm concerned with, though, is the explosive experience that Georges Bataille calls "the sensuous frenzy"-- and even then, for the purposes of this blog I'm only concerned with its appearances in art and literature.

The primary elements of kinetic experience, as noted several times before, are sex and violence. Both can appear in literature in purely functional modes, but they are most effective when they provide to the reader the sense of being "caught up" in the experience of having boundaries broken in an explosive, irresistible state of being.

Sex and violence, obviously, are not the only elements that bring about the state of transgression. A plant growing from a seed "transgresses" against the soil it shoves aside as it grows, but no one would seriously call this violence, nor is it sex, though the seed's existence comes about as a result of a sexual process. Early human culture is governed by a wealth of taboos that may have no overt correlations with sex or violence, much less any utilitarian purpose. It's not impossible to believe, with Bataille, that these taboo simply exist to be transgressed, to serve as "lightning rods" around which the culture of practical work can organize itself.

I've agreed with Bataille that Freud's favorite taboo doesn't rate a special etiology as against other taboos, nor does it explain any of the others. However, I've stated in the essay INCEST WE TRUST PART 3 that the taboo against incest does occupy a special place in the history of culture:

In Part I I went to some pains to explain why Georges Bataille was right to say that no particular transgressive form of sexuality was any more important to human development than any other (in contradistinction to Freud and Levi-Strauss). That distinction made, I will note that the phenomenon of incest is probably the best possible metaphor FOR transgressive sexuality as a whole. Unlike homosexuality and bestiality (for two), incest in its most popular conception-- that is, its heterosexual form-- can give rise to living progeny whose proper relationships will thus be confused after the fashion of the riddle in PERICLES:

          I am no viper, yet I feed
          On mother's flesh which did me breed.
          I sought a husband, in which labour
          I found that kindness in a father:
          He's father, son, and husband mild;
          I mother, wife, and yet his child.
          How they may be, and yet in two,
          As you will live, resolve it you.


In CROSSING THE LAWLINES PT. 1  I gave two examples of sexual transgression: Oedipus sleeping with his mother and Ben Grimm coveting the fiancee of his best friend. I remarked that there was no form of incest-motif in the latter narrative, but it's not absent only because there's no genetic relationship between Ben Grimm and Sue Storm. I further argued that a relationship between Oedipus and the woman whom he believed to be his mother would also have carried incestuous connotations, and this is in part because such a pairing would also confuse the "lawlines" between family members, whether or not Oedipus was aware that Merope was not his biological mother. In fact, I mentioned a schema of three types of incestuous liaison in this essay, though I'm currently somewhat dissatisified with the terminology used therein, and not much happier with my recent opposition of "physical" and "cultural" types of transgression.

At any rate, I feel the need of a subcategory within the greater category of transgressive activity: a subcategory that would include all activities that seem to confound the boundaries between the roles and/or identities of family-members. My latest neologism, then, is "clansgression"-- a demonstrably false construction in the etymological sense, since it's produced by interbreeding two unrelated languages: "clan," which carries the connotation of "the extended family," and "-gress," meaning "to step." Thus, while the legitimate word "transgress" means "to step over," my made-up word "clansgress" means "to step into family"-- thus confusing the implied familial boundaries by said action.

By this logic, then, Ben Grimm's desire for Sue Storm and his antipathy to her bond with Reed Richards would be transgressive, because Ben wants to break the social bond between Reed and Sue, but it would not be clansgressive. Oedipus marrying his mother would be both, but so would even the most highly symbolized forms of quasi-incestuous events, such as the Superman story discussed in INCEST WE TRUST PAT 5.

In Part 2 of CROSSING THE LAWLINES I'll devote space to refining these arguments.

CROSSING THE LAWLINES PT. 1

Though I've discussed Bataille's concept of transgression frequently on this blog, Dudley Young's idea of "lawlines" affords me with an apt metaphor for both the physical and the cultural matrices that are being transgressed-- a word that means "stepped over."

In LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION, I considered only the physical effects of the kinetic elements of sex and violence, because I wanted to illustrate how the two elements were distinct but could shade into one another. Thus I wrote:

If even "right" sexual relations are a transgression, as Bataille clearly *does* argue in his 1957 book EROTISM, then what is being transgressed against? Clearly, although there have many marriages in which one or both of the spouses were coerced into marital bliss, many were not so coerced and so did not transgress against either the will of the spouses or the will of the community.
I may be taking Bataille into something more like the territory of object relations with my own answer, but it seems evident to me that the only constant transgression is that of one body interacting with at least one other body so as to violate the integrity of both...

So it's in the physical sense that "right" sexual relations can be transgressive. But generally speaking, "wrong" sexual relations tend to be transgressive in terms of cultural matrices.

Consider, as a starting-point, one of the most transgressive sexual acts in the history of culture, the one that Big Sigmund Freud made the centerpiece of his theory of interpersonal relations.

Now, it's often a source of amusement for some people to say, "Hah, Freud named his complex after Oedipus, and Oedipus didn't even know he was sleeping with his own mother!" But that ignores the deeper reason that the Oedipus myth attracted Freud. What Freud must have liked about the Oedipus myth was that the hero, upon receiving the cryptic prophecy, was properly disgusted at the idea of marrying his own mother-- whom he believed to be his adoptive mom Merope-- and so he took measures to avoid doing so.  Yet the prophecy is fulfilled precisely because Oedipus took that precipitate action-- an action which is are especially ironic in Sophocles' version, since the hero recounts that some of the nobles in his adopted city of Corinth had questioned his background. Freud often represented his complex as being just as insuperable as a Delphic oracle; no matter how one might try to avoid marrying one's mother, one would always do so, at least in a metaphorical sense.

For moderns, Oedipus' transgression may be more cultural than physical. Yes, Jocasta is his true mother, but neither of them knows that, either during their sexual relations or when they bear children. Greek religion, being focused on the physical, viewed the sex between unknowing parents as a source of pollution, though Sophocles emphasizes the killing of Laius above all else. Yet had Oedipus had sex with Merope, who was the adoptive mother who raised him, in one sense this would have a much more "physical" transgression, since Oedipus had grown up believing that he'd come from Merope's womb.  However, had he possessed from childhood full knowledge of Merope's identity and had done the deed with her when he became old enough to do so, that would have been a purely cultural transgression.

So OEDIPUS REX is a transgression against both physical, personal boundaries and against cultural boundaries. Do we see the same types of transgressiveness in my other example from THE WORK AND PLAY MIX-A-LOT?

I argued in the above essay that in the backstory of the Fantastic Four, one can find a "taboo-and-transgression" pattern akin to that of Oedipus, even though this particular FF story has nothing to do with the incest-taboo.  Obviously I could have chosen other examples of the trope "two male friends fighting over the same woman," ranging from Shakespeare's TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA to late-night movie fare like WHAT PRICE GLORY? The conflict in FANTASTIC FOUR is particularly interesting, though, because Lee and Kirby step around it as if it were a literal taboo.  In the above scene Ben Grimm only agrees to fly Reed's plane to counter Sue's disparaging view of him, and the only other clue that Ben fancies Sue appears a few pages later, when he starts a fight with Reed later, claiming that Sue "loves the wrong man." There are no other references to unrequited love in the rest of the issue, and the conflict is only referenced indirectly from then on-- most significantly with the introduction of the character Alicia, clearly a "consolation prize" for Ben Grimm in that she looks a lot like Sue but cannot see the Thing's ugliness.

This reluctance on the part of the creators is especially strange in that in other contemporaneous features, the "two guys fighting over the same woman" trope is played for all it's worth: Tony Stark vs. Happy Hogan, Peter Parker vs. Ned Leeds (though the two of them are never really friends), and Thor vs. Balder (though once again, the latter's brief passion for Sif is forgotten when Balder takes up with another "consolation prize" figure, albeit one very unlike his original love-object.) It's possible than one or both of them felt queasy about introducing too much heavy drama in the feature-- for though they seem to have taken pains to keep it from looking like a standard superhero comic of the period, they must have known that their only probable audience was that of preteen boys. Since no one up to that point had incorporated "heavy drama" in a superhero-like feature, Lee and Kirby probably decided that bringing up Ben's unrequited love would be too disruptive to group unity on a regular basis. It was easier to have him or Johnny simply storm off about this or that perceived slight, so that the family-like dynamics could be perpetuated. Later, in fact, Ben and Johnny become comparable to quarreling children whose squabbles Sue and Reed must break up, making Sue into a symbolic mother-figure to both of them.

Now, this example of transgression is not physical in the least: Sue is certainly not related to Ben, nor have they even had a sibling-like relationship. If anything, Reed fits that profile better, since he's eventually given a backstory that suggests a sibling-like closeness, in that Reed and Sue are said to have been neighbors. So the transgression must be cultural. But what lawlines are being transgressed?

Of course there's no cultural consensus that an Old Suitor is automatically to be preferred to a New one, or vice versa. It's not difficult to call to mind multiple examples of Hollywood movies in which it's right and proper that a New Suitor should displace an Old Suitor, as well as examples that support the verdict of Lee and Kirby's setup: that Reed and Sue alone are "right" for each other.  So in this case the "lawlines" are entirely contingent on the internal logic of the series: the lawlines exist because the authors say that they exist, at least within the cosmos of FANTASTIC FOUR. In contrast, in the cosmos of IRON MAN, the contention of Tony Stark and Happy Hogan lasts only so long as the authors can get some mileage out of it. Finally the authors end up giving the girl to the supporting character, at least partly because there was no future in matching up Tony with his secretary-- in marked contrast to the current movies.

In a future essay in this series, I'll enlarge on some of the other ways in which implied lawlines can be just as arbitrary, if not more, than the real laws that govern society.