From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: sci.psychology,alt.postmodern
Subject: Deconstructing Bullies and Wimps
Date: 27 Sep 92 16:30:37 GMT
Article-I.D.: depsych.qDqRRB3w164w

I must have been somewhat younger than 10 years old when I
realized that in real life the good guy doesn't always win nor the
bad guy automatically lose.  I was considerably older than that
before I realized that identifying who _is_ the good guy and who
_is_ the bad guy is not only problematical but may be even be an
artifact of the very narrativity which so inaccurately reflects
that "real" world we think we know and which we used as a standard
to judge the "realisticness" of the narratives which had the good
wimp triumph over the bad bully.

I think I've been working over and over in my mind the
deconstruction of the major American juvenile narratives -- which,
when you think of it just about _are_ American narrativity since
there _is_ _no_ real adult American narrativity in the way that
English novelists from Thackeray to Fowles created narratives for
adult Englishmen and French novelists from Stendhal and Flaubert
to Camus created narratives for adult Frenchmen -- since I was a
kid and noticed the poor fit between the fictional universe
described in the narratives and the "real" universe in which I
lived. (Actually it went as far back as the world that Dick and
Jane and Spot seemed to live in, which didn't look at all like the
blue collar tenement neighborhood in which I was growing up.)

As far back as I can remember I've asked myself why there _is_
narrative.  Why, for example, do we sit in a darkened theater
watching images flicker on a screen, on in our living rooms
watching the even thinner images on a television monitor, or
reading words describing the doings of people who never were.
(Quite a few psychologists, behaviorists in particular, have asked
similar questions.)  More recently I've come to ask myself if
there is a center or core or narrative engine -- an ur-narrative
or deep structure or core phantasy underneath the shifting
"surface" of the phenomenal or evident narrative.

Postmodernism seems to tell us that there is not.  It sees the
phenomenal narrative as resulting from the "play" of forces which
are themselves surface phenomena, like the gestation of a storm on
the surface of the sea.

But depth psychology, particularly Freud's version, especially as
developed by Melanie Klein and Theodore Reik, does suggest a
phantasy "engine" at the core of the narrative.  That encounter
between the bully and the wimp, which is such a poor mirror of
"reality," does apparently mirror _something_, and that something
seems to be a variant of a sadomasochistic phantasy in which the
apparently strong bully is going to get his comeuppance and end up
somehow defeated.  It resembles the core narrative in a
professional wrestling match, where an outrageously bad persona is
pitted against an unbelievably good one.

I think it is worth noting that these narratives, from _Tom
Brown's School Days_ down to the latest episodes of _Step by Step_
or _Home Improvement_, are written by adults.  Even if children
are the intended receivers and the narrative purports to teach
some "valuable lesson about life," to quote Homer and Bart
Simpson, it still came out of the teeming unconscious stew of an
adult author.  Thus the unathletic wimp is able to defeat a bully
who became a bully in part because of his superior muscular
strength. Even if the intended moral of the story is that getting
mad or really trying or having right on your side will enable you
to triumph, underneath all that there is the more primal psychic
drama of one person in combat with another.

Whether one takes a psychodynamic view and foregrounds the
interaction between father and son, or some kind of neo-Darwinian
ethological view and sees an "instinctual" struggle for position
and status on the dominance hierarchy of peers, it is probably
true that we all have a baggage of unconscious phantasy stemming
from unfulfilled wishes and unrealized fears.  Watching or reading
these narratives we probably identify with both the bad aggressive
bully who meets defeat and with the good wimp who is reluctantly
resorting to force only as a reaction to the bully's aggression.
If that is true and the unconscious phantasy engine is driving the
narrative, then the narrative can never be "resolved."  It isn't
something merely conceptually impossible, like squaring the
circle, but psychodynamically impossible. Suppose we try to
increase the "reality elements" in it, like an intelligent
paraphiliac striving to make his masturbation phantasy more
realistic.  Realizing that the wimp couldn't really lick the bully
in a fight we have some extraneous event happen -- lightning
strikes the bully or an even bigger bully comes along -- and we
find that we have moved even _further_ from reality (because
accidents seldom happen just to save us from real movements in
reality).  It may be that there is no way to start with the
traditional narrative involving the bully and the wimp and
creatively resolve it in any way that provides any kind of
normative guidance, that "valuable lesson about life," or any
moral or aesthetic balance.

--
Richard Carlson
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