Those Extraordinary Twins

MARC SHELL Those Extraordinary Twins So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed. —Melville, "The Monkey-Rope"1 I. WHO S WHO Do you know who your parents are? -Sophocles, Oedipus the King2 The commonplace view is that consanguineous kinship is real, or literal, kinship. Anthropologists and sociologists usually lump togethet all other kinds as pseudo-kinship (ot kinship by extension), which they then divide into subcategories such as figurai, fictive, and ritual.3 However, the fundamental distinction between "real" kinship and "pseudo"-kinship—or between literal and figurai structure—is the topic of a still-unresolved debate about whethet kinship is essentially a matter of biology or sociology. For the substance or quality that makes people akin varies from culture to culture, as the skeptical Montaigne insists,4 and it is ambiguous even within a culture. Which is more fundamental, for example, my likeness to my supposed genitoi ot my likeness to God, who created me in his image? Which substance is fundamental: the genes I share with my genitor, the love between my adoptive parent and myself, the milk I sucked from my mothet, the blood I commingled with my blood brother, the wafer and wine I shared at a communal feast, or the dust from which all things (including myself) are made? Arizona Quarterly Volume 47 Number 2, Summer 1991 Copyright © 1991 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1 6 10 30Mark Shell The literalist view, even as it belittles the figurai as merely fictive, itself involves a key fiction: that we can really know who are our consanguineous kin. For any particular consanguineous link is always deniable if not always denied. Who can deny that it is possible that het children or parents ate not het children ot parents? Bastardy, the stuff of fears and also hopes, is always possible. Who can know for sure that any given child is a changeling ot not? Mothers and fathers can always find reasonable grounds to doubt or deny their children, and children can always find grounds to deny mothets and fathets. By the same token, it is always deniable, if not always denied, that one's lover is not one's consanguineous kinsperson. The logical reality, that my lovet really may be my consanguineous kinsperson, merges on the oneirological dream or nightmare, that my lover is my consanguineous kinsperson . The particulat family dissolves in the republic of dreams. The literal disappears in the figurai. This disappearance is the subject of jokes but it is itself no joke. For belief in the difference between literal and figurai kinship—in the possibility of knowing for sure Who's Who in the kinship system—is necessary to society if, as psychoanalysts and structuralist anthropologists generally aver, obeisance to the taboo on incest is a precondition fot the continuation of society ot of society as we know it. This need to believe in the possibility of absolute knowledge of kin may be one reason so many people believe in it. Many thinkets aver, for example, that while the fathet-child bond is unknowable in an absolute sense the mother-child bond is knowable.5 Some even project onto a male god the certainty about kinship relations they wrongly believe to obtain fot human beings only among women, sometimes going so far as to deny to women any essential tole whatevet in reproduction.6 The desire to know Who's Who in the kinship system may also help to explain the attraction to litetalists of figurai standatds of kinship that ate mote dependent on witnessed political rites than on biology while at the same time including an incest taboo (as do some kinships by collactation ).7 Thus the mere fiction of knowing who are one's literal patents is matched by the actual knowledge of who are one's figurai parents. It makes as much or as little sense in this view to call "btothet" the young man my sociological father thinks of as a "son" as to call any one else "brother." "Think of us as of a...