"Very often, though we imagine the avant garde to be taking risks, the art culture really reinforces the status quo while popular culture, which seems to uphold tradition, is far more experimental."-- James Twitchell, FORBIDDEN PARTNERS, p. 79.
Twitchell's 1987 study of the incest-motif in culture and literature, written with a heavy dose of doctrinaire Freudian and Bettelheimian interpretation, followed his similarly-Freudian study of horror-fiction (DREADFUL PLEASURES) but preceded his Freudian study of fictive violence, PREPOSTEROUS VIOLENCE, whose thesis I touched upon here. Despite my finding some strong insights in both PLEASURES and VIOLENCE, I put off reading PARTNERS until recently, when I finally decided what Twitchell had to say about the complex that Father Freud thought to be the fundament underlying all human consciousness.
Unfortunately, PARTNERS is a heavily-researched but unimaginative survey of the incest-motif, which repeats some of the basic concepts from DREADFUL PLEASURES but doesn't enlarge on them. And though I agree with Twitchell's opinion above re: the merits of "art culture" and "popular culture," I disagree entirely with his reasons for making that statement.
Like Freud, Twitchell is an empiricist who sees art as primarily a mirror to outward (rather than inward) nature. He defends pop culture as carrying content that can be analyzed in greater depth than your average elitist would admit. And yet the content just comes down to a more tedious recapitulation of the omnipresent Oedipus complex than Freud himself rendered.
Most modern elitists would probably dislike that he largely uses Romantic-era poetry as representative of the "avant garde," but his use of this span of literary work is reasonably well-justified by his assertion that when the Romantics used the incest-motif, they did so less for titillation or instruction (as Twitchell says their literary predecessors did) than for "self-knowledge." Inasmuch as I can see a similar thematic current that informs many works of the later avant-garde, both "modernist" and "post-modernist" alike, I can agree with this proposition.
Further, since it would be impossible for anyone to do a broad survey of all popular fiction as much as to do one for all "art culture" literature, I don't have a problem with his choice to survey only two species of popular culture that arose roughly around the same time as the Romantic era: Gothic novels and novels of pornography.
As a devotee of Jung and Campbell I can picture many ways in which a popular novel might prove itself more "experimental" than a novel shooting for the status of canonical art. Empiricist Twitchell, however, can only picture one: does the work in question portray the threat of father-daughter incest? If so, it is considered more "radical" than the work that elides or displaces the incest-motif into something else, usually sibling incest.
In this skewed survey, Twitchell is probably less directly beholden to Freud than to another of Freud's intellectual descendants: Bruno Bettelheim. Just as Bettelheim argued that fairy tales were essentially about teaching juvenile audiences the cruel ways of the world, Twitchell asserts that the Gothic novel is all about "one general message to young women... with regard to relationships with an older male relative: always stay away from him" (p. 155). In his appendix Twitchell even seeks to ground the prevalence of the motif in terms of sociobiology's take on incest:
"Sociobiologists have conjectured that intense, although unconscious, competition may account for the fact that father-daughter incest is far more common in all human societies than mother-son incest."
I find that sociobiology, like Levi-Straussian structuralism, relies a little too heavily on tautology: "X did Y because it was advantageous for X to do Y." In any case what's noteworthy here is that Twitchell's justification of popular fiction is built upon pop fiction's supposedly superior ability to replicate some pattern of human life that is verified as statistically dominant through an empiricist's lens. My own take on popular fiction is precisely the opposite: it does indeed reproduce aspects of the consensual world, even as does "art fiction," but in both those aspects of the objective are fused with a subjective range of expressive emotions far beyond the scope of sociobiology's scope. "Art fiction" usually inculcates a more distanced and intellectual take upon subjectivity than does popular fiction, but at heart the two are more like one another than they are like such purely discursive disciplines as psychology and philosophy.
In conclusion, much as I disagree with Twitchell's take on art and empiricism, I did enjoy his breakdown of the Latin roots for the word "incest," which in essence comes down to "in + castus (pure)"= impure. Thus my punny title for this series could be boiled down to, "Impurity/unholiness we trust."
Bataille, who wrote that the transgression fulfilled the purpose of the taboo, might have approved.
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