.: The Absent Narrative :.

My roster of classes this spring semester contains Lectures in Literature (focus on Adaptation), Readings in Contemporary Fiction (focus on post-Boom Latin American literature), Bible as Literature, and Popular Culture.  Though not typically themes I look at, it was interesting to notice that almost immediately each class’s texts (though not yet pop culture, though with the teacher’s continued warnings about potentially offensive material it’s only a matter of time) spiraled around the twin taboos of sexuality and violence, and their potentially liberatory role in narrative traditions.

For instance, take the pre-Brothers Grimm versions of folk tales, such as Sleeping Beauty/ Briar Rose.  In the older Basile version it is not a kiss that wakes the sleeping princess, but the sucking lips of the children she gave birth to after she is raped in her sleep by a traveling king.  Peculiarly, the rape is treated as a release for the princess, from both the pains of loosing her virginity and giving birth.  But they do live happily ever after… after the king kills his ogre of a wife/mother who wants to eat the princess’s children.  In a much more recent, vampiric adaptation, Angela Carter’s Lady in the House of Love, it is the heroic male who is the sexual innocent, but once again, it is only by playing into the traditional roles of sexual desire that he and the sleeping Countess are freed (ie: they can die).

On the opposite side of the globe is a story such as Reinaldo Arenas’ autobiography, Before Night Falls, which recounts his life spent under the Cuban dictatorship of Castro, a life primarily spent trying to find handsome soldiers to fuck him silly, the penalty for which in the regime is imprisonment in concentration camps.  At the beginning of the story Arenas says that, “if you cannot live the way you want, there is no point in living,” but as opposed to many of his contemporaries, who capitulated their views or perished, this book is a testament to the fact that even the struggle to live as one wants is enough of a point to keep living.  In particular, the desire for intimacy with others is painted as a way of overcoming the violence of totalitarianism, though ironically, the thousands of lovers Arenas claims to have had ultimately kill him when he contracted AIDS.

Perhaps the text most entwined with sex and violence is the Old Testament of the Bible.  Reading Genesis today I was cast back to my childhood, when I first read these tales in Sunday School and was absolutely perplexed by an event such as the destruction of Sodom (and even more so by Lot’s daughter’s immediate desire to have children by their father).  While commonly interpreted as a warning against homosexuality, a closer reading shows that the real issue is gang rape: the Sodomites want to rape the visiting angels and so Lot offers them his daughters, making it only “just” when the girls rape him in his drunken stupor.  Reading now, it is easier to see the moral implications and balancing acts of these sexual and violent acts, which by being narrated create taboos against violent sexuality, but as a kid?  Hardly.  It reads as little different (though much less joyously written) than Apollo’s rape of Leda in Greek myth, and certainly gave me a very skewed picture Biblical morality.

Part of the Old Testament’s moral struggle with sex and violence comes from Genesis’s second chapter, when Adam and Eve eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: they become sexually aware, for which they are cursed (a similar issue to Oedipal narrative that haunted Freudian psychology).  God sees the humans’ growing sexual awareness as potentially liberating for them, and thus a threat to his rule.  The only thing left that would keep them from being gods is their mortality, and so he gives them the divine boot, after making sure the fruits of sex will not be as pleasurable as the act.  Similarly, one of the reasons for the Flood was that God’s angels were fornicating with mortal women, once again threatening divine rule.   When I was young, I always used to imagine a different ending for the Garden of Eden story, probably from playing too many video games, an apocryphal revelation that some day the descendants of Adam and Eve would return to the Garden of Eden, somehow pass by the cherubim and flaming sword, and, eating at last of the Tree of Life, become gods themselves and kick out the abusive and morally bankrupt Yaweh, so that humanity could enjoy all its pleasures at last without the pain or guilt of sin.

Sadly, the religious traditions that come out of this story still show no signs of becoming less violent or sexually liberated.  And though American popular cultures revel in sexuality and bloodshed while simultaneously holding on to a Victorian prudishness, those themes remain entwined and secular, without moral certainty or spiritual depth, or the ability to free anyone from the taboos of our narrative traditions.