Interdiction-Violation

 In a recent post, I described the "Cupid and Psyche" episode from Apuleius's classical novel, The Golden Ass, as the "definitive fairy tale" and "a kind of index in its own right of the genre's primary motifs." I had in mind the fact, for instance, that the protagonist "violates not one but two sets of instructions through her impetuous curiosity." I knew that there was a name from folklore studies for this particular thematic element, though I couldn't remember exactly what. I went with "injunction" in the earlier post. 

This week, having gotten around to reading Vladimir Propp's classic study, The Morphology of the Folktale (Scott-Wagner translation), I now realize the word I was searching for was "interdiction"—though Propp also uses the term "prohibition" with it interchangeably. 

I continue to think, however, that "Cupid and Psyche" is perhaps the perfect example of the effective use of the interdiction motif. The plot of the story (which has so charmed centuries of readers that Walter Pater reproduced it in full, in his historical novel Marius the Epicurean) hinges upon two separate incidents in which the protagonist, Psyche, receives a specific instruction that she subsequently disobeys. 

The first occurs when her divine husband, Cupid, forbids her to look upon his sleeping form. The second follows when Psyche receives a box from the hand of Proserpine, queen of the underworld, and is ordered not to look inside it. In both cases, Psyche succumbs to a natural curiosity—with dire consequences. In both cases, the disobeying of the instruction becomes associated with a kind of expulsion from paradise and denial of immortality. 

Propp points out that this two-fold plot element (interdiction-violation) occurs in folktales around the world. Indeed, he includes it as one of the essential features of the ur-tale he reconstructs through its functional parts. Every tale, he notes, proceeds at first from a perception of a "lack" (as every Disney screenwriter knows, a musical always has to start with an "I want" song). The protagonist who experiences this lack receives some instruction which they violate, and this kicks off the story's main action. 

Propp doesn't tell us much about why so many stories around the world contain these same elements. He confines himself to a structural analysis, and does not venture to offer a complete explanatory theory for where this basic framework comes from. In a few passages, however, he throws out hints. He observes, for instance, that the tales could all share the same geographic origin. Or, perhaps more plausibly, they could all share a source in the same universal human psychology. 

If this latter hypothesis is true, then I would like to hazard a further guess as to what specifically in the shared human mental experience would lead to the salience of the "interdiction-violation" motif. 

It seems significant to me, after all, that the interdictions in fairy tales (as in Cupid and Psyche) are always arbitrary. They always take the form of an inexplicable rule for which no rational justification is provided. This is so in the Cupid and Psyche story, for instance—where no one bothers to explain to Psyche why exactly she cannot gaze upon the sleeping form of her husband or look inside the mysterious box. 

In this regard, the myth of the Garden of Eden no doubt also belongs to the same category of tale. God, as he walks in the garden, warns the first humans that they must not eat of a particular tree. But he hardly provides any sound justification for this policy; still less does he clearly explain what will happen if they do so. 

The arbitrary nature of these prohibitions nearly always means that we sympathize with the central characters who violate them. Of course, we would eat of the one forbidden tree too. We would light the candle to look upon the person sleeping next to us. We would glance inside the proscribed Proserpine box as well. Naturally, we would be curious. And the elaborate set of rules surrounding these mysterious objects would only make us wonder the more what could be so special about them. 

It must have some psychological significance, then, that every myth and fairytale contains not only a rule that is violated—but an arbitrary rule, specifically. If the rule were a self-evidently sound one, after all, then we would sympathize less with the protagonist who violates it. They would cease to be the hero and become a villain. But because, in every case, the rule seems stupid, and its violation seems natural and even unavoidable, we cannot help but identify with the person who breaks it. 

I suggest that this same basic archetype lies at the heart of so many folktales and myths because it is the universal experience of childhood. The child comes into "a world [they] never made," and in which they find they are subject to inscrutable "laws of God" and "laws of man" to which they never consented to be bound (to quote from a poem by A.E. Housman). Inevitably, children break these rules—often because they have no idea where the rules came from, or what possible purpose they could serve. 

This, surely, is the psychological basis of the idea of original sin. We enter into consciousness as children feeling already guilty somehow without being able to help that fact. We violate the rules, not because we have any evil desire to do so, but simply because we do not understand the rules or see that they have any point—and so we have no real choice but to transgress them. And in so doing, we face the wrath of our parents. 

And thus ends the first happy phase of childhood—infancy—in which we could do no wrong in our elders' eyes. Once we learn to speak, by contrast, we become capable of disobedience. Once we become toddlers, our parents start holding us responsible for our actions—even when everything we do still seems to us to be the only thing we can do—the necessary and unavoidable consequence of our natural impulses, over which we cannot exercise meaningful control. 

We all, then, feel ourselves on some level to be in the position of the fairy tale protagonist. 

And this, surely, is the real expulsion from paradise that we must all undergo. It is the great event in every individual's life history that all the myths and stories commemorate. The infant becomes a toddler, and suddenly becomes convicted of sin. Life from that point on is never as free or whole as before. Here the elements of selfhood, self-consciousness, and awareness of mortality all find their root. 

But we need not despair at this fact. For, even though the violation of the arbitrary interdiction must occur in every tale, it never ends the story. The protagonist faces some dire consequence from breaking the rules—but it never destroys them. In the end, they live to conquer this adversity. The violation of the rule is therefore always the start of the hero's misfortunes; but it is also the start of his or her adventures. The hero always survives the effects of the violation and lives to triumph in spite of them. 

So it is with us. The moment of the first disobedience may mark the end of the first phase of childhood and the expulsion from the paradise of infancy. But without it, life's quest—the real meat of our story's action—would never get going in the first place.