INCEST WE TRUST PART 5

Given that Sigmund Freud regarded his Oedipus complex as the foundation of human psychological development, it’s surprising that Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of pop-Freudianism, said so little about matters Oedipal in their anti-comics screeds. They say a great deal about other perversions that are either caused or abetted by the incessant titillations offered by comic books and similarly unscrupulous media. But aside from Wertham mentioning one case where an oversexed boy wanted a look at his sister, the fear of encouraging incest is nowhere in the same ballpark as the fear of encouraging homosexuality.

Of course the Oedipus complex figures indirectly into their etiology of transgressions, derived, not without modifications, from Freud. As illustration, I'll repeat my earlier Freud-quote:

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."

According to Freud, if an individual did not follow the path of “normal” development, that of sublimating the early libinal feelings for the mother or father so as to allow for healthy relationships, that individual was more likely to stray into the realm of polymorphous perversity. However, as I noted here, Bataille demonstrates that Freud’s concept of “normal sex” was no less fraught with transgression than any paraphilia or perversion. The most that one can say of what Freud considers “normative” is that one can call it (as I do) “cooperative transgression,” which is sex which in theory takes place with the full cooperation of the participants and the full approval of their society. Any other form of sexuality that incorporated an aspect of conflict-- being either against the will of a participant or against some edict of society-- would then be best termed “competitive transgression.”

Of course Freud himself was a past master at asserting that even when one seemed to be obeying society’s edicts, one could be subconsciously transgressing them, if only figuratively. A man could marry a woman, have a consenting relationship of which society would approve-- and yet, if the woman was in some way “a girl just like the girl who married dear old dad,” then he would have figuratively transgressed society’s laws against sleeping with his mother by finding a mother-surrogate. Indeed, Freud’s entire ideal of sublimation would seem to be tied up with this sort of figurative transgression. It certainly never seems to occur to Legman or Wertham that the fantasies experienced by young comics-readers might amount to another form of figurative transgression.

For my purpose it doesn’t matter whether or not most modern psychologists dominantly recognize the Oedipus complex as valid. Within the sphere of literature, any storytelling trope that has expressive significance to humankind is, phenomenologically speaking, “real.” This is why the “four functions” that Joseph Campbell applies to mythology have so much potential for pluralist literary studies. Campbell's approach allows not only for the psychological and the sociological aspects of humankind, which I find to be the two modes on which most literary analyses draw. Campbell's formula also allows one to interpret aspects of the “cosmological” (the nature of physical reality) and the “metaphysical,” (the nature of reality beyond the physical). And just as myth-criticism doesn't judge a myth as "wrong" because it's built upon a cosmological or metaphysical conceit that moderns don't recognize, the same holds true for literary studies. Thus the Oedipus complex, whether "real" or not in the psychological sense, becomes real in the literary continuum by virtue of its expressive power. But of course, in contrast to Freud's exaggerated claims for his complex's universality, Oedipus shares his reality with Jung's Mercurius and any number of other formulas.

Following the popularization of Freud, many literary works went out of their way to consciously reference Freud. Sometimes the authors were trying to seem trendy; sometimes they may've felt some personal resonance with the Oedipal concept. Yet the most interesting instances to me are those that resonate with Oedipal concerns even where the author would seem to have no familiarity with Freud, except perhaps in the most simplified form. A Freudian would consider such subconscious resonance to be a validation of the universality of Oedipus. I would say, rather, that it merely indicates that Artist A may have thought-processes in some way comparable to those of Sigmund Freud, while Artist B’s may be more comparable to those of Jung, and so on.

But whenever one does find an apparent agreement with Freud’s complex, one needs to prove it much more rigorously than he and most of his disciples did. Stan Lee relates a story in his biography about a psychological pundit-- possibly Gershon Legman-- who claimed that a funny-animal comics-cover featuring a long-necked giraffe was actually a display of a disguised phallus. How does one avoid creating another Legman giraffe?

The only possible course is to establish a chain of probable symbolic associations from a close reading of the text, rather than simply trying to fit every work to fit an overriding model.

For instance, a poor example of an associational chain is to be found in Michael Fleischer’s BATMAN ENCYCLOPEDIA, where he reads Batman’s relationship with Catwoman in Oedipal terms, though possibly with more debt to Melanie Klein than Freud: “Bad women, like the Catwoman, represent [to Bruce Wayne] the wicked, irresponsible, unloving mother who, by dying, ‘deserted’ him in childhood when he needed her most” (p. 106) This reading might be minimally feasible if the backstory of Bruce Wayne were only about his mother’s dying, but it fails given that he loses both mother and father in the same catastrophe. By this logic, one would have to assume that the Joker and all Batman's other male villains were all stand-ins for the late father. But even without invoking Thomas Wayne, a solid chain of associations should at very least demonstrate some textual similarity between the mother and the mother-surrogate. In early Batman stories Martha Wayne is litle more than a visual signifier that means “mother,” so her character is too marginal to bear any textual similarity to the more complex figure of the Catwoman. Fleischer’s argument depends upon the notion that every relationship that suggests “forbidden fruit”-- in this case, one between a criminal and a law-enforcer-- must automatically connote the Oedipus complex in operation. But his chain breaks easily under the least testing.

A sturdier chain can be found in SUPERMAN, though again, the precise tone resembles Freud less than yet another psychoanalyst: this time Carl Jung. Roughly a year after both Superman and his girlfriend Lois Lane debuted in ACTION COMICS #1, authors Siegel and Shuster took the very minimal origins ascribed to Superman in the comic books and expanded it into a cosmic soap opera for the first set of daily SUPERMAN comic strips. The details of the origin are as well known as Batman’s, but to my knowledge only a few fans have remarked upon an Oedipal trope in the former story.

One visual joke of the comic-strip sequence is that Superman’s parents, Jor-L and Lora, are dead-on ringers for Superman and Lois Lane, respectively. Some fans have argued that Joe Shuster was simply drawing a standard female type, but limited though his skills were, Shuster was certainly capable of having drawn Superman’s mother to look like someone other than Lois Lane, had he wished to.

In terms of tone, this is less Freudian than Jungian incest. Jor-L and Lora are “heavenly” echoes of the couple that Superman and Lois will become, however long the latter relationship may be deferred. (Critics who make windy arguments about the perpetual childhood of the superhero should remember that in 1940 Jerry Siegel attempted to set the stage for a more mature Superman-Lois relationship, but was overruled by his editors.) But even though the visual resemblance of Lois and Lora is probably just a visual joke, the resemblance of their names may carry a little more psychological heft. Critics may never be sure exactly why Jerry Siegel used the name “Lora” for Superman’s mother, in contrast to the name of the father Jor-L, whose name is certainly derived from JERry SiegEL. But as we don't know of a particular "Laura" who influenced Siegel in these years-- at least I find none in Jones' MEN OF TOMORROW-- it’s possible that consciously or subconsciously Siegel modeled the mother’s name on the girlfriend’s. Not only does “Lora” have the same number of letters/syllables as “Lois,” one finds an interesting congruence given that the first two letters of Lois Lane's first and last names come out to LO and LA. And if one makes a metathetic substitution of the letter ‘R’ for the second ‘L,’ one sees that the name of the prospective wife symbolically embodies that of the mother.

Further, it’s arguable that Jerry Siegel did find the verbal joke worth telling again. In ACTION #2, still months before the 1939 strip debuted, Lois Lane is framed by a spy named “Lola Cortez,” whose cognomen is patently derived from the real-life adventuress Lola Montes.

Years later, Siegel would introduce in 1959 one of Lois Lane’s earliest romantic competitors, mermaid Lori Lemaris, whose name strongly resembles the original name of the Kryptonian mama, though by that time she had been re-dubbed “Lara” by someone other than Siegel. And then in 1960 Siegel took his hero back to “Mother Krypton” herself. There he not only becomes friends with his parents in their youth, but also meets another beauty with a name just like the name of the girl who married dear old dad: “Lyla Lerrol,” which name seems determined to pun --probably unconsciously-- on both the “Lola” and “Lora/Lara” constructions. Within the narrative Superman’s own mother even contrives to make sure that he ends up dating the sweet young thing with the soundalike name.

I’ve argued before that there are deeper sexual symbolisms in the earliest SUPERMAN stories, and the same is even more true of the Silver Age tales. What’s interesting is that even though on these surface these stories stress the most innocent-seeming form of sexuality possible for an audience of eight-to-ten-year-olds, that sexuality still incorporates aspects of the transgressive, in keeping with Bataille’s notion that all sex is a transgression of some sort. Nevertheless, a responsible critic won’t just force everything to fit on the Procrustean beds of the Oedipus complex or queer theory or what have you. The conflict between law and crime in Batman-Catwoman tales may be transgressive enough without bringing in Freud in that particular manifestation, and it may be that one can still find elements of “cooperative transgression” even in the blandest Superman-Lois encounter, whether the name of the Kryptonian uber-mama is invoked or not.