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.

YOUNGFUL TRANSGRESSIONS

At the end of JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 5 I tangentially touched on a concept I've not addressed before on the blog. The concept is that of "lawlines," introduced in Dudley Young's 1991 meditation on anthropology and mythology, ORIGINS OF THE SACRED: THE ECSTASIES OF LOVE AND WAR.


Young's project-- his only purely philosophical work, so far as I can tell-- is an attempt to analyze the ways in which ancient societies formulated their laws, taboos, and other codes of behavior. The author's express purpose in exploring the dynamics of archaic myths is to throw some light upon the ways that we as moderns have fallen away from our own heritage, with catastrophic consequences for our ability to know right from wrong. Though Young invokes many philosophers,poets and pundits of the past two centuries-- Sigmund Freud, William Wordsworth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Buber, Mary Douglas, and Northrop Frye-- the bulk of the book deals with the ancient world, beginning with what we moderns know of paleolithic man and moving into the mythic universes of the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Greeks. Myths for Young are pre-eminently about defining the strictures of law and the powers that support it:

The myths that compose the religious and political structure of every culture are tales of power, how it is to be found and where it is to be used.-- Young, p. 22.

Young contends that there exist meaningful parallels between our own de-sacralized concepts of cultural authority with:

the measures taken by paleolithic man to live with the loss of his innocence, the cultural moves he made to protect himself from further exposure to that sacred monster that had originally tempted him ecstatically into cannibalism and worse. The word I use for these measures is 'lawlines,' and in the beginning this is literally what they are, lines drawn in the mind and on the dancing ground to regulate the flow of energies no longer governed by the codes of primate instinct.-- p. xx. 

Given these abstruse references to "the dancing ground" of hypothetical cave-dweller tribes and to a tempting "sacred monster" who is apparently both the serpent of Eden and Dionysus infecting his Maenads with murderous blood-lust, it should be evident that ORIGINS is not a simple read. I don't propose to review the book in full here, as I've not recently re-read it, though I have given it more than one reading in the past. I could just appropriate his term "lawlines" for my own use, but I felt it would be instructive to meditate on the some of the differences between Young's account of myth and my own.

First and foremost, though Young mentions Jung a few times in the book, his primary influence is Freud's  1913 TOTEM AND TABOO.  Young is not much concerned with the rest of Freud's theory, and he expressly distances himself from the Viennese psychologist's reductive tendencies, but he feels it is important to see Freud's concept within the greater sphere of current anthropological and mythographic knowledge.  Citing Robin Fox's book THE RED LAMP OF INCEST as well as Freud, Young argues that in prehistoric times bands of hominids followed the structural lead of certain anthropoids in that each tribe was dominated by the strongest alpha-male, who kept all the desirable females for himself. At some point a particular tribe (in Young's view, a number of tribes responding to the same internal conflicts) was rocked when the young men ganged up on the older alpha-male-- implicitly the father to at least some of them-- and killed him in order to have access to the women. Freud also asserts that the rebels cannibalized their victim, which is one manifestation of the "sacred monster" mentioned in the quote above. Since then, totemism continued to dominate humankind's development, and countless humans expiated their guilt over the killing of a father-figure, reinforced by the internal dynamic of the Oedipus Complex.

From this germ-idea Young spins a fascinating tapestry of mythic interrelationships that I cannot explore here, but he never strays from the idea that all myths are about forming the "lawlines" that separate order from chaos.  I esteemed ORIGINS OF THE SACRED highly when I first read it, and on a slight personal note, at an early 90s convention I recommended it to Dave Sim-- who had not yet gone public with his doctrinaire Christianity. I imagine that Sim, had he read the book, would have been repulsed by any suggestion that all religions might be traced back to primitive rituals of dance and exorcism.  Yet, Jungian that I am, I was more than a little iffy about that hypothesis from another angle. Though Young is not attempting to reduce all religion to base physical processes as Freud was, even locating the origins of religion exclusively within tribal exogamy-conflicts does have its reductive side.  Once again I cite a favorite Kant passage:

...though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.

Thus, as much as I admire Young's book, I reject the notion that all religion arises from totemism, or that totemism, however one defines it, arises explicitly from the sexual competition of males for females, even if this "primal scene" was one that occured in many parallel situations rather than out of one originary event. At base, I think Young used and transformed Freud in much the same way Bataille used and transformed Marx; extending and improving the mythic kernels within the ideological narratives, and then discarding the ideology.  (Parenthetically, Young only mentions Marx twice in ORIGINS.) Where Young focuses on an opposition between order and chaos, Bataille focuses on one between practical work and sensuous play. Here's Bataille's take, hopefully just One More Time:

In the domain of our life [the principle of] excess manifests in so far as violence wins over reason. Work demands the sort of conduct where effort is in a constant ratio with productive efficiency. It demands rational behavior where the wild impulses worked out on feast days and usually in games are frowned upon. If we were unable to repress these impulses we should not be able to work, but work introduces the very reason for repressing them. These impulses confer an immediate satisfaction on those who yield to them. Work, on the other hand, promises to those who overcome [these impulses] a reward later on whose value cannot be disputed except from the point of view of the present moment.

Bataille was neither Kantian nor Jungian. However, his schema allows for a much broader, much more pluralistic vision of religion's genesis than Young's does-- though I might critique Bataille for also seeing religion as dominantly repressive.  In primitive societies as in modern ones, religion has a double power, to liberate or to enslave-- as much as do any political systems, or artistic credos, or pretty much anything human beings can devise. As a quick example, what if early religions evolved not at attempts at societal control, but out of shamans' claims to be able to heal people and guide the tribes toward good game? One would not necessarily have to believe that such shamans had supernormal powers, but even the illusion of being able to manipulate good fortune might have proved more persuasive to hard-living, practical-minded primitives than an appeal to primeval guilt complexes.

Young's term "lawlines," though, works as an image that mediates between Bataille's concepts of "the taboo" and "the transgression." The Judeo-Christian mind tends to think of the "taboo thing" as something that must not be violated, but the primitive mind, Bataille claimed, knows that only through its violation does the taboo become significant for us.  Thus, one can imagine a "lawline" that is drawn from the initial presentation of a static, taboo situation, to the dynamic status that ensues after the taboo has been broken. Thus, the violation of the Tree in Eden results in the world of toil and labor, but also of the whole history of the Jewish people. Admittedly, some dynamic situations are more horrific than heroic. In THE BACCHAE King Pentheus tries to protect his kingdom from the ecstasies of Dionysus, and his hubris only leads him to be reduced to the status of a hunted animal, albeit not one consumed for his flesh, at least in the play.

I propose that any kind of literature, escapist or realistic, requires conflict, and that conflict springs from violating "lawlines" of one kind or another, though they may deal more with expectation than with matters of cultural jurisprudence.  In the next essay on this topic, I'll demonstrate this theory with reference to the same examples used in THE WORK AND PLAY MIX-A-LOT.