INCEST WE TRUST PART 1

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."

"[The incest taboo in man was the]fundamental step because of which, by which, but above all in which, the transition from nature to culture was accomplished."--Claude Levi-Strauss, ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES OF KINSHIP.

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.

Now the two scholars quoted above both privilege one particular form of sexual transgression, that of incest, as being central to mankind's experience in some way. Obviously Freud focuses on individual development and Levi-Strauss emphasizes societal factors, but both are putting "the Big I" right at center-stage.

In HO HUM-- BATMAN'S GAY AGAIN I assailed as wrongheaded any literary or philosophical theory which privileged one particular form of sexuality over any other. An example of this purblind tendency can be found in Eve Sedgwick's EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CLOSET, where she argues that "any aspect of modern Western culture" is "damaged" if it does not "incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition." Freud and Levi-Strauss cannot be accused, as I believe Sedgwick can, of forming a concept of sexuality based purely on their personal sexual tastes, but the tendency all three share, that of making one aspect of human sexuality the centerpiece of their theories, is no less problematic.

George Bataille's EROTISM, though strongly influenced by both Freud and Levi-Strauss, disagreed with them on this score:

"The taboo within us against sexual liberty is general and universal; the particular prohibitions are variable aspects of it... It is ridiculous to isolate a specific 'taboo' such as the one on incest, just one aspect of the general taboo, and look for its explanation outside its universal basis, namely, the amorphous and universal prohibitions bearing on sexuality."-- EROTISM, pp. 50-51.

Later, in the chapter entitled "The Enigma of Incest," Bataille examines Levi-Strauss's ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES in depth. The chapter-essay also includes a few side-comments on Freud, as well as quoting L-S's own commetary on TOTEM AND TABOO, which L-S valued for being "an inveterate fantasy" even though the book described the origins of incest in mythic terms that probably never took place in real time. Bataille shows tremendous respect for L-S's theories, praising (page 212) its "accuracy" in answering questions about "the nature of the taboos on incest in archaic societies." However, on the previous page, he says "it is rather a pity that Levi-Strauss has paid so little attention to the bearing of eroticism" in the exchange of women between one tribe and another.

By "eroticism" Bataille means what he calls the "sensuous frenzy" that potentially disrupts societal homeostasis and yet remains indispensible to the continuance of society through propagation of new societal members. One might think he wants Levi-Strauss to be a little more like Freud, more concerned with human syndromes of compulsion, but I feel that Bataille was a little less concerned than Freud with defending his own concept of societal homeostasis. For Freud, the taboo against aberrant sexuality is one with the Law of the Father, and is not meant to be violated without serious repercussions. Bataille, in this and other sections, emphasizes rather that "the transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it." It it because Bataille is aware of man's separateness from other animals that his concept of sexuality is better than that of Freud, Levi-Strauss, or (certainly) Sedgwick, in that Bataille understands that it is in the nature of man that:

"the bounds set on freedom of action give a fresh fillip to the irresistible animal impulse."

ADVENTURES INTO SCARY STUFF

Here be more reactions to Curt Purcell's CAN COMICS BE SCARY post, where I see via the comments-thread that at least one poster, Martin Wisse, shares my impatience with the way the question was originally framed by Richard Cook. Wisse calls the original post:

A mess of baseless assertions and naive reasoning...

I'd just say "ditto" if Rush Limbaugh hadn't tainted the word. Of course mere agreement doesn't make for a good essay, so I'll move on to one of the offhand comments of CWRM, who says:

Aside from the formal challenges of communicating certain varieties of fright, there's the fact that most horror comics aren't really interested in communicating scares. Many of the titles out there (I'm thinking of '70s stuff like "Tomb of Dracula" and modern stuff like "Marvel Zombies") are really more adventure titles with some horror trappings. Then there's a strain of highly structured classic horror. The older anthology titles, like the EC family of titles, with their almost ritualistically repetitious stories and O. Henry "surprise" endings, seem to be less frightening than darkly, almost ironically humorous. Not to drag on (too late), there's also a strain of extreme comic horror that's less about fear and more about the shock of the extremely grisly. Not that any of these are illegitimate exercises in comic horror, but they aren't really meant to frighten the reader.

I agree that there are a lot of EC stories that are so self-conscious about their twist endings that they seem more like shaggy-dog stories than horror tales. But some, like my earlier example of "Foul Play," don't communicate that sort of humor to me. The ending of "Foul Play" is over-the-top and becomes ridiculous if you give it any sustained thought, but I don't think the story's almost ritualistic desecration of the human body (albeit the body of an inhuman villain) is humorous. If I'm correct that a receptive reader can "take in" a given sight depicted in comics-panels and convert it within the mind into something more horrible than what the eye sees, then I think that in "Foul Play" you have a fine recipe for what Lovecraft called "the thrill of unutterable ghastliness," and not just, as CWRM says in his next paragraph, "anxiety."

I've written a fair amount about some of the problems I've encountered in sussing out where the horror-genre stands with respect to my chosen Fryean mythoi, with certain strands verging closer to the adventure-mythos (BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER) while others, like the prose DRACULA, hew closer to the mythos of drama, which I view as a mythos of compromised power. So while I understand CWRM's tendency to see a Marvel book like TOMB OF DRACULA as an adventure title with horror trappings-- after all, the one thing one can always find in a 1970s Marvel book is a gratuitous fight-scene!-- I still think of TOMB OF DRACULA as hewing closer to the dramatic mythos than that of adventure. Possibly in future I'll look at a few representative TOD stories to make my case, just to satisfy my own classification "jones."

COLD COMFORT COMICS

A lot of thoughts, both even-handed and oddly-formed, have appeared in response to Curt Purcell's blogpost, "Can Comics Be Scary?" Inasmuch as a number of comics-fans do testify to memories of comics that scared them (and many have done so long before the era of blogging), I'm going to nitpick Curt's title and say that it shouldn't be about whether comics can be scary but under what circumstances are they scary, and to what audience. The factor of a willing audience is one I touched on fleetingly in the post I made in the comments-section:

I think I have a way to logically put paid to the notion that the square panels & borders make all that much difference to the reader amenable to the horror-comics experience-- and my logic involves sex.

The apparent continued success of the porn comics market, as testified by the continuance of the Eros Comix brand and assorted others, demonstrates that those readers who really want to get into sexually-explicit comic books can do without their, er, responses being inhibited by panel borders and page-turning.

So if the porn-lovers can conjure in their minds a kinetic experience even in the less-than-kinetic medium of comic books--

Why should horror lovers be any less capable of such mental magic?

One could certainly hypothesize at length about what kinds of mental adjustments a willing audience-member must make to let himself be pulled into the horror within the bland white panel borders, but at base I don't think it's all that different from doing so with prose horror. Much has been made (not so much on Curt's blog) of the notion that when a willing reader gets freaked by the descriptions of a Stephen King tale, he's in part conjuring up the horrors suggested by the words, and perhaps even improving upon them in his own mind. But I don't see why the same amplificative process can't take place for a comics-reader, and in truth I think that it does for those capable of such amplification. Should a reader testify that he was freaked by the sight of the dismembered body of the evil ballplayer in EC's "Foul Play," I submit that it's not because the horror of the Jack Davis drawings leaped out at him, as similar sights in a George Romero flick might do, but that the reader has amplified the body's depictions into something near-tangible in his own mind. I submit that this is essentially the same process one goes through when a reader of SALEM'S LOT extrapolates King's prose description of his Nosferatu-wannabe Kurt Barlow into a mental reality. I doubt that any lover of prose horror has ever complained that the white borders of a book's pages distracted him from his desired frisson, and I'd argue that people who think comics-borders are a big problem are over-intellectualizing the semiotic process, are unsympathetic to the horror-experience, or both.

Over-intellectualizers tend to underestimate the facillity of the human mind to compensate for the shortcomings of any medium in the quest for a particular "kinetic experience," as my counter-example of the effects of sex-comics should make clear. They also serve as a counter-example to this blogpost by Tom Spurgeon:

Since everything's possible, the better question might be why aren't more comics scary? The answer to that is that people don't want them to be. 1) The primary genre in comics is about comfort rather than fear, so it's what many people come to them expecting and as a resulting function of the market what we find scary in a modern sense has been largely unexplored. 2) The medium puts tools in the hands of the reader that they can more easily avoid being scared if they wish it, and they frequently do. 3) How most people measure scary is through the effects brought about by scary films, and the differences in the way identification works in comics as opposed to film puts comics in a bind when it comes to duplicating those effects.

The (3) comment about the competition from scary films is one many respondents have made but seems basically irrelevant to the question I reformulated above. Since Tom's blog doesn't allow responses I couldn't ask him what he means by the "tools" referenced in the (2) comment. By tool does he mean the hand of the reader itself, that puts down the comic if he's not scared enough. Maybe he'll address this somewhere, as I honestly don't get his point.

That brings us to (1), which is-- sigh-- another attack on the "primary genre in comics." "Comfort rather than fear," Tom? What are you think is the reigning form of superhero comics these days: THE BATMAN ADVENTURES? In the last year two of the biggest "events" from the Big Two mainstream companies have concerned the "dark reign" of a sadistic super-villain who becomes Marvel's version of Donald Rumsfeld, while the other, as Curt Purcell covered in depth, dealt with the unfortunate tendency of various DC villains and heroes to recrudesce as rotting zombies.

Cold comfort, indeed. I think one can argue that the average consumer of sex comics, whether those of Eros or another publisher, might be a better example of the consumer entirely preoccupied with a "comforting" kinetic experience and nothing more.

This figures in with some of my "adult pulp" posts as well, as will be seen in a later essay.

LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION

"In the structuralist paradigm as developed by Lévi-Strauss in Les structures élémentaires de la parenté--whose limitations are dissected by Bataille in one of the sharpest chapters of his book [Erotism]--"incest" is simply the violation of marriage rules. Implicit in this binarism is that what is not a violation is legitimate and therefore unproblematic. Durkheim’s ambiguous and never fully analyzed notion of the sacred is reduced to precisely what Durkheim insisted it could not be reduced to: the opposition between "right" and "wrong" sexual relations. But, as Bataille makes clear, sexual relations are always transgressive. Marriage as a rite of passage is not simply a permitted move in a game; it is the conferral of a right of transgression..."-- Eric Gans, Originary Thoughts on Sexuality, the online journal of ANTHROPOETICS.

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, as Bataille says here:

"In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation"-- Bataille, EROTISM, p. 16.

In this essay, I essentially agreed with this statement insofar as both sex and violence could both be broadly defined as transgressions of somatic boundaries. However, I also said Bataille was guilty of over-identifying the two modes of human action, and suggested that the Hegel-influenced theories of Francis Fukuyama could be used as a corrective. Bataille was strongly influenced by Hegel but I don't think he ever made any attempt to crossbreed his theories of transgression with Hegelian recognition. Such a cross-pollination might prove an interesting project but I won't pursue it here.

Now, while I critiqued Bataille for over-identifying sex with violence, I've also said that the two do intersect in literary narrative in a variety of ways. Thus I
don't have to draw a hypothetical dividing line between the phenomena as I did with the literary associations of juvenility and of adulthood. The domains of literary sex and violence are better seen as two intersecting circles, where some parts overlap and others do not. At the same time, while it may be a murky matter to sort out where the two modes disassociate themselves in the psyches of real people, in literature it's a good deal easier. In literature, when sexuality and violence do intersect, one tends to dominate over the other in a pure narrative sense. Thus, if one pairs these two classes of dominance with those in which there's no meaningful intersection at all, one gets four classifications of the two modes:

1) EROTIC VIOLENCE
2) NON-EROTIC VIOLENCE
3) NON-VIOLENT SEX
4) VIOLENT SEX

Each of the illustrations featured in the previous post illustrates one of these classes. In showing distinctions between these categories, I'll be relying on both narrative and significant values (see this essay for definitions) to support my distinctions. Hopefully, though all such interpretations are somewhat subjective, by looking at both I can avoid the sloppy one-on-one equivalences asserted by Freud-influenced elitists, who come up with howlers like, "Duh--hh, da supahhero's big muskles I think looks like some sorta toigid pinnis, so dat proves supahhero's is gayboys!"




First up is an example of erotic violence: the cover of DETECTIVE COMICS #203, in which the villainous Catwoman has somehow trapped Batman and Robin into performing in a cage alongside a handful of big cats. Plainly both this comics-cover and the story it advertises-- originally marketed to juvenile readers-- is meant to emphasize the heroes' peril in this sticky situation, both from the big cats and from Catwoman's whip. It would certainly be possible to frame an alternate version of the cover in which there was only a violent threat: indeed, the cover of issue #9 of DC's 1970 JOKER title shows the Joker cracking a whip at Catwoman in a similar circus-y situation, but because the Joker isn't dominantly seen as a sexual icon, I'd argue that JOKER #9 is non-erotic violence (though not interesting enough to be my chosen example for same). But because the established mythology at the time of this 1954 comic continually emphasized a romantic tension between Batman and Catwoman-- that's the narrative value-- the scene (which isn't in the story) takes on a significant value of "battle of the sexes," which is certainly one motif within the story proper (a reformed Catwoman returns to crime because she wants to challenge Batman again). We cannot know if the adult raconteurs who crafted the story (Edmond Hamilton and a "Bob Kane" ghost) were aware of the S&M associations of the whip, particularly when it's wielded by one gender against the other, but if they did they may've assumed that the scene would "tease" readers into buying the comic even though, being 1954 juveniles, they might not know consciously why the scene seemed appealing. All of the violence in the cover and story is of course "clean" violence, but some "dirty" symbolism does find its way in.




In earlier posts I've assailed Dirk Deppey's attack on this comic for its supposed decadence, so I won't repeat my earlier arguments here. I've reread SUPERGIRL #14 (2007) a couple of times and still find that the narrative by Joe Kelly and Ian Churchill is purely about two super-chicks fighting each other, with Batgirl trying not to fuck Supergirl but to cut her bloody head off. Patently the argument that reads this scene sexually is one that ignores the narrative values of the story, and how they are expressed, in order to force the imagery into a Freudian lockbox that doesn't reflect what happens in the story. Perhaps if Batgirl were stabbing Supergirl with one sword, a Freudian could rejoice at seeing yet another confirmation of the female gender's secret desire for a phallus. But Batgirl's using two swords to cut off Supergirl's head doesn't make much sense as a displaced sex act. If Supergirl was a male, one might buy into the Freudianism "head=phallus" motif, but if the subject of the beheading doesn't even have a phallus, then maybe, just maybe, her head is just a head, and the only reason Batgirl has her legs locked around Supergirl's waist is to set her up for being sliced up by the magic crystals growing from Supergirl's back. Thus the significant value to be derived from the narrative has more to do with setting up Supergirl's X-MEN-style anxiety over her body's freakishness than with suggesting girl-on-girl sex.


SWAMP THING #34's story "Rites of Spring" (Moore/Bissette/Totelbein) features about the most non-violent sexual encounter one can imagine, since the sex act is abstracted into an interweaving of minds rather than bodies. The narrative concept is that because Swamp Thing doesn't have a penis, he uses one of the hallucinogenic fruits growing on his vegetable body to give his human love Abby an ecstatic ride into his enhanced consciousness. Thus the mind-sex scenes in ST #34 bear kinship with those Hollywood sex-scenes which depict the literal sex-act as a flurry of abstract movements, with lots of touching but no hint of one body actually entering another body. I imagine that a simplistic Freudian would read the significant value of this story as an instance of "castration anxiety." But since the sex-scene takes place in a story that hypothesizes that all living things possess energy-fields to which Swamp Thing and Abby are both attuned, it's more accurate to the narrative to see "Rites of Spring" as a celebration of Jungian energy/libido in all things. In addition, to the extent that Swampy does "put" his consciousness "into" Abby, he doesn't function as a castrated male in narrative or significant valuations.



Finally, from Frank Miller's THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN, we get an encounter of superheroes in which the "fighting" really is all about sex, as Superman and Wonder Woman have themselves a super-shag that shatters icebergs, knocks down airplanes, etc. Previous to this encounter Frank Miller seems to take great pleasure in overturning Wonder Woman's "porcelain saint" image, portraying her as a hard-bitten man-hater who continually busts Superman's balls (figuratively) because she realy, really wants them inside her. Whether Miller subscribes to the notion of female castration anxiety I don't know, though I wouldn't be surprised given some other Freudianisms in his past works. It's a little harder to talk about narrative or significant values in TDKSA because it's something of a jumble of Scenes Frank Miller Thought Would Be Really Cool. Still, all the violence-in-real-sex that we see elided in the SWAMP THING scene and its congeners comes roaring back with a vengeance here. Of course even rough sex is still sex first and violence second, and the super-shag does result in a super-kid who may or may not have a certain Oedipal relationship with her super-dad. Notably, her name is the same as Superman's mother, while Batman's female sidekick, "Catgirl," dons a costume plainly (to the reader) modeled on that of Catwoman, Batman's old flame.

However, that particular extrapolation of significant values leads me into a deeper delving than I can cover here. Possibly an essay on the aforementioned critique Bataille made of Freud's incest complex will allow for more attention to this type of transgression.

NONE OF THESE THINGS IS AT ALL LIKE THE OTHER

--at least not with respect to the aspects of sex and violence I'll be analyzing in my next essay.

SMOKEY UNLOCKE AND HIS TEMPTATIONS

The 4-20 episode of LOST, "The Last Recruit," reminds me of words I wrote here in response to the notion that Desmond Hume was more of a hero than Jack Shepard.

I don't deem Desmond all that much of a "hero." He's a good guy, no doubt, but to me he's just as prone to anxiety and doubt and self-questioning as Jack Shephard ever has been.

I don't retract that, but I will qualify it in light of "Last Recruit" and its newest wrinkle in the program's long-running theme of temptation. The particular scene involves Sayid, who has given in to the blandishments of Unlocke in search of a prized goal (his wife's restoration), and who has been told by Unlocke to kill Desmond. In relation to Sayid, Desmond certainly is more of a "hero," and their interaction underscores this. Says Desmond to Sayid:

This woman, when she asks you what you did to be with her again… What will you tell her?

Viewers don't see whether or not Sayid shoots Desmond, but we're pretty strongly led to believe that Sayid doesn't do the deed. If Desmond does indeed succeed in helping Sayid throw off Unlocke's influence, then I would affirm this as the act of a hero. More, it's an appropriate one for Desmond, as he faced the temptation himself.

In the third season ep "Catch-22," Desmond has a psychic flash that seems to suggest that he will be reunited with his own lost love if he allows Charlie to perish in a death-trap. Because Desmond heroically rejects this temptation-- albeit only a moment before Charlie's killed-- this gives Desmond's confrontation with Sayid special resonance beyond the immediate concern of whether or not Sayid will pull the trigger. So in respect to overcoming temptation, I will say that Desmond's pretty heroic, though he's not any less messed-up than Jack.

Speaking of Jack, he surely seems the next target to be offered his heart's desire by Unlocke, since at the end of "Recruit" Jack's the only castaway that Unlocke has still in his power. But the question is-- does Jack even have a heart's desire?

What do you use to tempt a man so screwed up with his daddy issues that he can't stay with the woman he loves over them?

My guess--

You get him daddy's absent love.

(Or an unreasonable facsimile thereof)

TWO WRONGS MAKE A PROPERTY RIGHT

"I created SPIDER-MAN."-- Jack Kirby, COMICS JOURNAL interview, Feb 1990.

As I noted in this essay, Jack Kirby was certainly not the originator of any form of Spider-Man. At best, he inherited a small bundle of ideas put together by his partner Joe Simon and two freelancers Simon had employed: Jack Oleck and C.C. Beck. This proposal-idea was called "the Silver Spider" in its submission phase, though to emphasize its actual creators I'll call it SOB (Simon/Oleck/Beck) for short.

I won't revisit the same points I made in the previous essay, but after ruminating about some of the discussions of the Kirby family's current litigation against Marvel, I thought it ironic that their claim on Spider-Man is based in the notion of "intellectual property."

That is, because Kirby worked on the character when he and Simon rejiggered it into Archie's THE FLY, and because Kirby submitted a bare concept of the character to Stan Lee, Kirby's transmission of the idea of a spider-powered hero gives his estate claim to the "intellectual property" of Spider-Man.

But Kirby based his idea on the SOB concept. Does that mean that Simon and the two late freelancers also participate in the intellectual property that is Spider-Man?

One presumes that lawyers could be found to argue such a case, but such dubious legality isn't my concern.

What I find ironic is that when Kirby brought the rough Spider-Man concept to Stan Lee, he was in effect nullifying any "intellectual property" rights that the three SOB authors had to the concept, in that he claimed it as his own. Had Lee chosen to let Kirby do the SPIDER-MAN concept-- which as Greg Theakston once argued would probably have turned out a lot like THE FLY-- Kirby would have even further nullified the intellectual property claims of SOB.

Of course, back in that day and age, few people working in comic books worried about "intellectual property." The companies might have occasionally persecuted competitors, as with DC's suit against Fawcett, for copyright violations. But for those working in the trenches, ideas were common ground shared by all. One artist might resent another for "swiping" an idea, particularly if said idea made more money for Artist 2 than it did for Artist 1. But nobody owned the ideas as such.

I'd say that by the act of Kirby presenting the SOB bundle to Stan Lee as if it was Kirby's own "intellectual property" to sell, he was in essence ratifying the treatment he received by Marvel, in which even the intellectual properties to which Kirby undoubtedly created were entirely co-opted by Marvel Comics.

Like many others who've commented on the Kirby/Marvel suit, I doubt that the Kirby family will be able to get more from Marvel than "go-away money." But I'd feel a lot better about supporting them if they weren't laying claim to a property that Jack Kirby essentially "swiped" from other artists. It may have been a "swipe" given an approving nod by Joe Simon, as some fans have claimed. But IMO it vititates the rightness of the greater case, by further ratifying earlier wrongs.