INCEST WE TRUST PART 7

 I was looking up something about the TV show MODERN FAMILY and stumbled across an academic article for Gale Research, which is only readable through one's library subscription service. In this article, "Modern Family: the Return of the Incest Aesthetic in Culture,"  author Stephen Marche argued that the primary use of incest in traditional societies has been for the purpose of describing the dissolution of stable cultures, and that modern cultural artifacts that utilize incest topics or incest humor (GAME OF THRONES and RICK AND MORTY are cited) represent an "incest aesthetic" oriented on societal dissolution as well.

I don't deny that the trope of incestuous relations can be used to signal societal downfall, but my own occasional examinations of the trope in popular fiction don't bear out Marche's conclusions. In short, like almost any subject matter, incest can be used to signal whatever any author pleases to reference.

Here's a section of Marche's article that gets the subject wrong.

Incest appears at the end of things because the fear of incest, the law against it, rises at the beginning of things, at the beginning of meaning for both individuals and societies. In the early twentieth century, anthropologists struggled with an odd fact about human society: the prohibition against incest was so universal and so ancient that it could hardly be described as cultural. "This rule [against incest] is at once social, in that it is a rule, and pre-social, in its universality and the type of relationships upon which it imposes a norm", Levi-Strauss wrote in The Elementary Structure of Kinship. Nature plays some role in the incest prohibition. We have evolved not to have sex with our family members. A study from 2002 found that same-sex siblings dislike their siblings' smell and that mothers dislike their children's smell--an aversion, the researchers speculated, expressly to prevent incest. For Freud, the repression of the incestuous urge was essential to the formation of the ego. The "family romance" demands prohibition. This prohibition lies at the moment of separation between nature and culture, both a bridge and a fracture.

The problem with this view of Freud, though, is that Freud doesn't just say "incest must be prohibited." Given that he thinks the Oedipus Complex is inevitable in everyone, different only in degree, the complex must not just be prohibited but sublimated. This means that the mature Oedipal male must re-direct his affection for his maternal unit to some more plausible marriage-partner. However, Freud continued to maintain that even sublimation did not destroy the power of the complex. Instead, Freud had it both ways. If the mature male marries someone similar to his mother, he's still "marrying his mother." Yet if he marries someone markedly dissimilar, this is a form of "deflection," which just shows how much work the male goes through to dampen down his original affections.

Actually, most recent iterations of the incest-trope have, in my opinion, followed Freudian orthodoxy, and though I could cite other essays I've blogged here in support, the teleseries MODERN FAMILY actually does counter Marche's "Modern Family." I won't go into onerous detail here, since anyone can find assorted Youtube videos chronicling all the show's humorous jokes about sons subconsciously desiring mothers, brothers sisters, and so on. The point is that this was a well to which the MF writers kept returning-- and yet they certainly weren't trying to sell their fictional family as a paradigm for "the end times." If anything, the showrunners represented their paradigm as the future of American families, inclusive of various ethnicities and sexual proclivities. Within that context, MODERN FAMILY got humor out of sublimation, not actual incestuous feeling. Thus, for just one quick example, the Dunphy daughters at one time or another date males reminiscent of their daffy dad, and one daughter, Haley, marries her goofy beau in the later seasons. The one Dunphy boy, raised by both a permissive dad and a bossy mom, is mainly seen gravitating toward older women as sex-partners, though the series concludes without giving him a permanent love interest.

What MODERN FAMILY celebrates with its take on incest-tropes is a tacit assumption that every family has these little hangups and that sublimating them is just part of the maturation journey, though the hangups remain funny because they're always incongruous to the audience's expectations about what family "ought to be." This has nothing to do with any "end times," and may be closer in spirit to "the carnivalesque" spirit promoted by the Russian critic Bakhtin. The disruptions to "normalcy" are like those of the carnival; they divert, but do not permanently overthrow, the boundaries of normal life. And that, I believe, is the real dominant "incest aesthetic" in the 21st century.