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."

NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT DISCOURSES

In keeping with my observations in DISCOURSES WITH LIVING SYMBOLS, I've advanced the idea that when an author who is in touch with the mythopoeic potentiality-- even if only temporarily-- he displays the greatest ability to generate discourses of symbolic density. These discourses may exist either for the author's own delectation and illumination (Kafka) or, more typically, for the entertainment and/or enlightenment of his audience.

In my essay POETRY IN MOTION PART 3 I noted how Frye made a distinction between the narrative and significant values of literary narratives. To boil Frye’s argument down to its essentials, he regarded a given element as having a “narrative value” to the extent that it functioned to play a role in the way the narrative was constructed, while a “significant value” applied to an element which was meant to serve the purpose of a pattern hypothetically extrinsic to the narrative, what is usually called “theme” or “meaning.”

This week’s “near myth” essay analyzes MAYO CHIKI, a manga derived from a Japanese “light novel” series. My analysis identified a psychological pattern of clansgression, but this pattern was largely extrinsic to the narrative in which the characters are involved. This pattern can only be deduced by looking at Jirou’s psychological quirk-- that of desiring a love-partner who bears some resemblance to his younger sister—as if it were the hidden meaning toward which the story’s events point. This, then, would be dominantly a “significant discourse," since the narrative serves the primary purpose of piecing together the story's events, after the fashion of inductive reasoning, in order to reveal a meaning. 

However, it’s possible for an author to structure his narrative not to reflect a hidden significant value, but more as a commentary on other narratives. This reflects the "top-down" approach of deductive reasoning, and I term this form a “narrative discourse.”

I touched on an example of a “narrative discourse”—albeit without this terminology -- in my essay on “The InjusticeSociety of the World,” Robert Kanigher’s first story for the Justice Society of America series in ALL-STAR COMICS. Kanigher’s tale was not the first time a superhero feature had teamed up a group of villains to oppose a hero, or group of heroes, but it seems to be the first time a comics-writer used this narrative situation to create a Carroll-esque mood of inverted values. This too stands scrutiny as a psychological pattern in my quasi-Campbellian sense. However, the reader can only apprehend the particular qualities of Kanigher's narrative by comparing them to the broad patterns of other, similar narratives.

This distinction came to mind as a result of my mediations on this week's mythcomic, which will be immediately forthcoming.

NEAR MYTHS: "MAYO CHIKI" (2010)

I've wondered on occasion if it would be possible to find much mythic material in the genre of teen humor comics. At present I haven't come across much of interest in American teen comics, but I must admit that the Japanese show a genius for infusing wacky adolescent antics with weird psychological touches.

One psychological aspect of the 2010 manga MAYO CHIKI led me to consider whether or not at least a portion of the finished story might qualify as a "mythcomic." However, MAYO CHIKI did not begin as a comic book, but as a series of light novels, which in turn were adapted to both manga and anime. Since from the first I've focused on mythcomics only if they were original to the comics-medium, MAYO CHIKI does not qualify. The novel series as a whole may comprise a literary myth, but the manga does not generate that myth, but only transmits the myth from the prose works, though some details may have changed in the translation. 

There's no reason, though, that I can't treat the manga as a "near myth," with the stipulation that it's derived from a primary source.

In some ways, MAYO CHIKI is a typical enough Japanese teen comic. It begins with a male character who is, at least on the surface of things, "average," and then creates a situation in which he's pursued by a small harem of pretty girls. 

However, in the case of MAYO's POV character, Jirou Sakimachi, he's got a biological peculiarity. He was raised by a mother who was a pro wrestler, and who, for no clear reason, constantly used Jirou as a "sandbag" (by which the translation means a "practice dummy.") In addition, his younger sister Kureha is also a wrestler, and has doled out the same punishing treatments to Jirou since she became old enough to wrestle. As a result of all this punishment, Jirou bleeds from the nose whenever he even comes into sustained contact with a female.

For some thirty years at least, it's been a well-traveled trope in Japanese culture to depict male sexual excitation in the form of nosebleeds. However, going by the dialogue in the second manga-opus, Jirou supposedly does so as an avoidance technique. "If you made bloodshed," another  character suggests to Jirou, "they'd stop hitting you, isn't it like that?" This may not be the whole truth, but the authors clearly meant it to be part of Jirou's makeup. In addition, it provides the girls in his harem with an excuse to "cure" him of his reticence toward women, while they can feel confident that he's not likely to become an aggressor. 

Further complicating the romantic drama is that the girl Jirou likes the most, Subaru Konoe, can't be seen publicly as a girl. For assorted reasons Subaru, in order to serve as butler to the heiress of a rich family, has to pretend to be male. For the bulk of the series, there are endless misunderstandings about the relationship between Jirou and Subaru, most of them revolving around the idea of "boys' love" (a particular fascination for high-school girls, it seems). In fact, Jirou's sister Kureha-- who lives with him, even though their mother is conveniently out-of-country for the whole story-- is one of the students who enthuses most about her brother being united with the supposedly male Subaru.

"The portion" I mentioned in paragraph two is the last few installments of MAYO CHIKI's conclusion. Jirou proposes to Subaru, but she has a widowed father, Nagare, who seems to hate Jirou on general principles. Nagare won't allow any marriage unless Jirou fights him, and he's a much better fighter than Jirou. The young man is forced to ask his sister Kureha to wrestle him again-- by this time, Jirou's mostly mastered his bleeding-problem-- and of course, Kureha clobbers him just as she did in the earlier practice sessions. However, though Jirou doesn't win the fight with Nagare, the younger man scores enough points that his future father-in-law has to concede him some respect, paving the way for a future wedding. To be sure, though, the authors manage to contrive a method by which Jirou doesn't entirely have to give up his "harem" in all respects.

In section 36, though, the authors choose to give Nagare a strange connection to Jirou that goes beyond the standard trope of the "heavy father." Jirou asks the older man why he hates him, and Nagare replies that Jirou reminds him of his younger self. Nagare then finds out Jirou's surname, which he's somehow avoiding learning in 36 volumes, and makes the odd revelation that he was a boyfriend to Jirou's wrestler-mother. This gives Nagare another reason to resent Jirou, because he's the child of the man who beat out Nagare for the favors of Jirou's mother. Yet it ends up meaning a little more than that.

While Nagare is in no way physically related to Jirou, the revelation that the former was at least a potential love-interest to Jirou's mother makes Nagare a "symbolic father." He thus takes the place of Jirou's deceased real father who is referenced even less than Jirou's mother. And if Nagare is Jirou's symbolic father, then Nagare's daughter is also Jirou's symbolic sister.

Though Japanese manga-works are awash with replete with numerous narratives of sibling-incest, it's not overtly suggested that Jirou has ever had a sexual response to the younger sister with whom he lives, or, for that matter, to his absent mother. He's also not an overt masochist, as he's never shown enjoying the violence Kureha wreaks upon him. But Subaru the symbolic sister may be seen as a displacement for Kureha the real sister, and possibly for the mother as well.

One cannot really interrogate the interior feelings of a fictional character, who has no depth. But one can inquire into the ways that the living authors encode certain patterns in the characters. One thing that *may* have been going on in the authors' skulls was that though they claimed that Jirou's nose-bleeding served as an avoidance-technique, they arranged things so it's not impossible to read it normatvely, as an indicator of sexual stimulation. That would mean that Jirou may have undergone some sexual stimulation through his contact with his family-members, and that this, and any masochistic stimulation, was so unwanted that it manifested in spontaneous nose-bleeds from any and all sustained contacts with females. The nose-bleeds don't stop until Jirou is united with a female whom he doesn't consider a familial transgression. And yet-- because she's a "symbolic sister"-- first seen trying to beat up Jirou when he accidentally sees her in her underwear-- one may argue that Jirou is still fulfilling the familiar pattern of sibling-incest, albeit only on a symbolic level.

In conclusion, MAYO CHIKI, even if it doesn't possess the full density of a mythcomic, seems far richer than anything one finds in the teen humor titles of America. Whether one considers that a boon or a deficit will depend on one's definition of "innocent entertainment."