Work Text:
Winter Term
ENG 666 - SUPERNATURAL SEMINAR
Thursdays | 9PM-10PM
Location - Backseat of the Impala, a palimpsestic motel room, the open road.
RAPE IN THE DAMNED IMAGINATION: A SURVEY
“Oh, God! would you like to lie with your soul in the grave?”
–Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Dean: Lucifer’s wearing you to the prom?
–5.14, “The End”
COURSE DESCRIPTION
ENG - 666. RAPE IN THE DAMNED IMAGINATION. 3 CREDITS
In this class, we will examine depictions of rape in the imagination of Sam Winchester. We will draw on his childhood associations with sexual violence as well as his encounters with rape as an adult. Special attention will be paid to his relationship with his older brother, Dean Winchester, and his torment in the Cage at the hands of Lucifer. Students will be expected to understand and write about Sam’s perceptions of both rape in general and of himself as rape victim. The course will culminate in a 10 page paper.
CLASS SCHEDULE
WEEK 1 - BEREISHIT
“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”
-Jeremiah 1:5
A child can’t escape. And later, when I could, it was too late.
-Anonymous, The Incest Diary
Before we begin, we will have already begun. The blood in the mouth turns to blood in the veins. It slips through the system with vile intent. The boy grows, already turned.
Work Due: Hold a mirror to insides and watch them pulse. What is it like to see the machinations of your interior?
WEEK 2 - WHITE PICKET FENCE
Hereisthehouseitisgreenandwhiteithasareddooritisverypretty
hereisthefamilymotherfatherdickandjaneliveinthegreenandw
hitehousetheyareveryhappy…
–Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
it’s 2028, your husband comes up and smacks your butt as you’re unplugging the crockpot full of buffalo chicken dip, your friends have turned the dining room table into a beer pong tournament, the kids are laughing from the playroom, it’s super bowl sunday and your heart is full.
–@HannahFandel11
In the best case scenario Sam grows up with a mother and a father and a big brother. Maybe there are more along the way. A sister, another brother. They go to school and walk home along tree-lined streets. They watch football on Thanksgiving and drink piss-colored beers. The generations turn. There is no monster in this house.
Consider the white nuclear family in the nuclear age. Sitting pretty behind their white picket fence. They smile at each other with big white teeth. The mother bends over the table to set down her apple pie. Big brother holds his fork with his whole fist like a tiny spear. In the bassinet the baby does not cry. The father sits at the head of the table. Something comes from outside to destroy them. It could not come from within them because then something would be wrong with them.
There was never a fire here. The seat of the family was never destroyed. Their crowns never melted into scrap. No, never.
Work Due: Find an American family. Bring them a casserole in a Pyrex. Sit in their kitchen as it heats. Then watch who serves, and who is served first. Afterwards, take the scraps and eat them all. Food from the table of plenty.
WEEK 3 - ALL-AMERICAN
I can’t help but think of it as the Coca-Cola of sex crimes.
–Myriam Gurba, Mean
[T]hat most repugnant of all females, a mid-twentieth century pubescent American girl-woman…
–Richard Schickel, on Dolores Haze
All his childhood he sees her on TV. Daisy Dukes and flip-flops, and sharp, gum-snapping jaws. Blonde or brunette but almost always white. The “American nymphet.” Then in seventh grade a copy of Lolita stolen from the public library. A dark-haired girl sullen in her seductiveness, arms behind her head and one leg propped up to reveal a flash of white underwear. He begins and cannot stop. Already there is his father. Already there is Dean. They guide his life like pole stars. Still he knows he needs a way out.
Work Due: Read Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Mark each word of romance. Mark each word of pain.
WEEK 4 - REFUSAL OF THE CALL
Yale Will Not Save You
-Esmé Weijun Wang
Sam: What if we think this is our life, but it's not?
–4.17, “It’s a Terrible Life”
He goes to school. Yet the ghosts. Yet the long unslept-in nights. Fear of the dark is all he knows. In class the windows open onto California skies burned around the edges. When Dean comes back for him, it’s almost a relief. A boil lanced. He was always waiting; it could not last.
Work Due: Cut off your loved ones. Measure the strain. What do you gain without them? What do you lose? Who can stand this? Can you stand this? Why is it worth it? Why is it not?
WEEK 5 - THE BROTHERS CAIN
“You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”
–Genesis 4:12
All great and precious things are lonely.
–John Steinbeck, East of Eden
A wandering may be passed down. The slam of a car door. An endless road. A whole life lived on the interstate.
Work Due: Leave your home and never return.
WEEK 6 - WHAT IS THIS?
Dean: Don't you dare think that there is anything, past or present, that I would put in front of you!
–8.23, “Sacrifice”
30 Signs He Likes You, According to Dating Experts
–Cosmopolitan
The way Dean looks at him—hungry. Like it’s not enough to have Sam back from college. Like it’s not enough to have him in the passenger seat of the Impala or on the bed across the room. There’s something there that moves through Sam like waste. He expels it and expels it and still it persists. And after a certain point he doesn’t know what he would do without it. It’s a comforting queasiness. A familiar illness.
He loves Dean with everything he has, it’s true. And he knows Dean loves him. And every day they find their way back to the rhythms of their childhood. The same blind bumps of familial war and peace.
One night he hears Dean in the shower. Grunting, gasping. He pictures him humping his fist, thrusting forward into pleasure. They live in each other’s back pockets and Sam sometimes contemplates escape. But mostly he continues on the way it’s always been.
Work Due: Write 5 pages of incest fanfiction and weigh it against a feather.
WEEK 7 - LITIGATION
In years to come, I’ll think of the kiss as a kind of transforming sting, like that of a scorpion, a narcotic that spreads from my mouth to my brain.
–Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss
[S]eal with a righteous kiss/A dateless bargain to engrossing death!
–William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
He is promised with a kiss. Before he exists, though he always existed. His mother reaches up for her father’s carnivorous mouth.
Work Due: Bite the inside of your cheek until it squirts hot, salty blood. Swallow the taste of yourself and try not to puke. Those who hesitate are lost.
WEEK 8 - THE SHEATH
Vessel (noun) - 1. a) a container (such as a cask, bottle, kettle, cup, or bowl) for holding something. b) a person into whom some quality (such as grace) is infused. “a child of light, a true vessel of the Lord” —H. J. Laski
–Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Lucifer: I will never lie to you, I will never trick you, but you will say yes to me.
–5.3, “Free to Be You and Me”
Someone else sitting in the seat of your mind. Your hand raised to violence by something beyond you. It isn’t you, it can’t be you, and it says absolutely nothing about you that you are the perfect sheath. Possession runs in the family, after all. Generations twisted by the same root curse.
Look, you know the score. You’re Pac-Man and Lucifer has his hand on the joystick. You can’t close your mouth. All you can do is eat where you’re steered. The ghosts go after you until you go after them. And when you turn the tables is not up to you. Somewhere beyond the confines of the screen there is the angel. And he plays with furrowed brow and tongue stuck between teeth. Like a small child knowing nothing but that he cannot lose.
Work Due: Play Pac-Man. Have sex. Open yourself up to another person. Let them put their hand inside you. Feel the pressure against your heart. Cry in front of someone else. Cry until you lose your voice. Wonder if it’s all for nothing. Wonder what you’ve lost.
WEEK 9 - CONSENT
No means no.
–20th century proverb
Yes means yes!
-21st century proverb
Back in college they gave them a talk about rape. About what to do at a party with a drunk girl. You didn’t touch her unless to raise the covers to her chin. When you go on a date with a girl you listen to what she’s saying. When you’re in bed with a girl you don’t push. Afterwards Sam hears a frat guy talking. “Girls who cry rape,” he’s saying, voice thick with disgust.
Cry rape. Cry: “Rape!!”
Sam says yes. He must say yes to enact the trap. Barter his body for the promise of a better future. It hurts. The words on his tongue hurt. The violence of the agreement rips him open, and he does not believe in his own resurrection.
Before you do it, you go to Dean. Here is a yes, un/freely given. You feel both in charge and utterly lost. His mouth is hot and wanting. Your tongues press burningly against each other. He holds you up against the wall. You feel him get hard. You feel yourself get hard. The pleasure expands. So does the pain.
Work Due: For a week, only say yes. Agree to everything. Go places you wouldn’t normally go and sleep with people you normally wouldn’t. Note how it feels never to be able to quit. At the end of the week, die.
WEEK 10 - THE CAGE
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it? … It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
–Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
–Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
It’s a poisonous pill dropped in a fizzing cocktail leading to snatches of pain, a rolling swath of bed; or it’s in the back of the car with the windows rolled up tight against the night; it’s on the football field, in the gym showers; in a racecar bed; it’s with him on his stomach or on his back with his legs up over his head; and sometimes it’s in his ass and sometimes in a pussy. His dick hangs limp or it hardens; it slaps against his abs or leaks and drools pathetically against the sheets. At first he was afraid, and then he was nothing, and now he is still nothing, though sometimes still afraid.
It would be easier to say time does not exist in this place. But although scenes repeat and he’s back to the cradle, the seconds stack into minutes into hours into days. Into years. Into a century. He falls from Dean’s bed into Lucifer’s again and again. His mother rises with an empty face and falls before he can see her clearly. Jess brushes hot against him and he falls. Dean touches him and he cannot unfeel it. Did it happen like this? Storytelling becomes living. He cannot escape the constant narrative pressures of the subterranean.
“Beg,” says Lucifer. Sam refuses until he cannot anymore. Then he opens his mouth.
Work Due: Find yourself between the shifting walls of your story. Watch the way the author straightens them and knocks them into place. Watch the way the author fences you in, until their choices are yours. You were always going to pick the left-hand path. You were always going to open that door.
WEEK 11 - GRATUITOUS SEXUAL VIOLENCE
I don’t like when writers throw in sexual violence just to show how fucked up someone is. Like there are other ways to show how bad something is without resorting to rape.
–Anonymous saying
Allegedly…
–Ward against evil
Has it been too much? All his life has it been too much? You mean he got here because of a kiss? You mean he rode into this world on the electric shock of a daughter’s lips meeting her father’s? And now he thinks there is no way out. Because all his life he has been in the sort of pain a person can’t escape.
Sometimes it seems like too much, doesn’t it? How can one person experience all that? Sometimes he thinks he’s dreamed it up. The space of his body violable. The space of his mind similarly porous. No matter how much he hardens himself. The gaps always open, like an irrepressible maw. But is he eating? Or is he being eaten? And how can he tell?
Work Due: Mine your life for its most shocking story and tell everyone you know. Tally who believes you and who doesn’t. Contort yourself to fit the shape of a person to whom this never happened.
WEEK 12 - THE VIRGIN
The Ethiopians were being devoured in numbers by the serpent; and, learning from the oracle that they could be freed from the pest only if Andromeda were offered up to it, they forced Cepheus, her father, to consent.
–Edith Hamilton, Mythology
God said, “Take your son, your only son whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah. Offer him up as an entirely burned offering there on one of the mountains that I will show you.”
–Genesis 22:2
Sam’s father loves him. Sam knows that his father loves him but one time years later his father pulls Dean aside. “Take care of your brother, Dean.” Take care of him because your blood is his blood. Take care of him in one way or another.
And so Sam grows straight towards the future with a reckless misunderstanding. That he is supposed to be saved. That at the end of the day, he will find a home.
Eventually, he leaves the Cage. And like an arrow shot true—straight back to Dean.
Work Due: Grow up lonely. Feel deeply that you are somehow wrong. Tell yourself it’s not true. Then find out the truth.
WEEK 13 - REPRESENTATIONS
Sam: You know, a lot of cultures believe that a photograph can catch a glimpse of the soul.
–1.06, “Skin”
After four decades of big-budget Hollywood disaster films, “It felt like a movie” seems to have displaced the way survivors of a catastrophe used to express the short-term unassimilability of what they had gone through: “It felt like a dream.”
–Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
A TV show is like a dream. The sum of our drives filtered through image. The sound of the forgotten stepping through the slants of light to set down soles on the creaking floorboards. We wander haunted houses every night.
The camera devours our souls and bears its teeth. We see ourselves reflected in their pearlescent shine. Slick and distorted with Hollywood spit.
Work Due: Collate the sources for your final paper in MLA format. Realize that every source trembles with the weight of what it has to say and understand that every piece is sick with meaning. Be prepared to discuss what you’ve picked in class.
FINAL PAPER DUE ONE WEEK AFTER LAST CLASS.