Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 47

Male/Scientist in Sw am p Thing

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century “mist-wet old mansion” at “the edge of the swamp” (170). What’s important
about this is that Swamp Thing’s story has happened before, not only to Alex
Olsen and, later, to Alec Holland, but even before that. According to the younger
brother, “In the history of the world, there have come sour times when the earth
feels compelled to create an elemental champion for itself.” He concludes, “Sour
times are returning to your world, and your world has again shaped a protector to
stand against them. That is what you came to learn” (178).
But that is not really it. Abby learns that men have always murdered each
other out of anger, jealousy, obsession, and a self-satisfied conviction in the rightness
of their power. Alex Olsen was such a victim; so was Alec Holland. And so, it turns
out, is the skittish brother, who “must pay the forfeit” for breaking “the rules”
about trying to pass on a secret (179). We know these brothers. As the older one
angrily raises a rock above his head, the younger one cries, “Cain! No! Not again!”
(181), but he cannot prevent the re-enactment of his own original story of treachery
and murder, just as he will be unable to prevent it the next time and the next. And
this is the reason: As Cain stands over Abel’s bloodied body, he tells Abby, “It’s all
we have to do now that nobody wants to hear the stories anymore. The same act
over and over again” (my emphasis). He adds that it’s “our punishment, for doing
it the first time,” but Abby remarks that it doesn’t seem fair that both brothers be
punished for Cain’s crime. “O f course it’s fair! I ’m being punished for being the
first predator . . . and he s being punished for being the first victim” (182). Here are
the two oldest and most confining, destructive definitions of man and woman—
the predator and the victim—gendered roles bom of male paradigms of violence,
conquest and disconnection. And they are still prevalent because no one wants to
hear the stories anymore; no one “drops by” to leam what these brothers actually
long to teach.
That is what Love and Death is all about, the story of what is and what could
be, if only we’d pay attention. When Swamp Thing and Abby join in the final
chapter, they are able to do so because they have accomplished their similar journeys
through the treachery and violence that men visit upon one another and upon women.
Their union is nonphallic, of course, because Swamp Thing is, in Abby’s words, “a
plant, for god’s sake!” (189). But it is also nonphallic because Swamp Thing has
shifted his paradigm. He has willingly let go his reliance on science and technology,
his insistence on a past male identity, and celebrated instead his power as part of
the whole, subjective, interconnected, nurturing and capable of love.
When he plucks a tuber from the area of his right breast and offers it to Abby
to eat, they share the most spectacular orgasm I’ve ever encountered in literature,
a flight through a micro-universe of “little stars,” “little jewels of light,” where
“everything’s alive . . . and it’s all made of the same...strands of pearly stuff’
(196-7), where the lovers become one with the waters, fish, insects, reptiles and