#i started this madness on the autumn equinox. perhaps i should end it on winter solstice. for symmetry sake

[ananke-xiii]

The “body without organs” of Mary Winchester (and… Jimmy Novak).

When I started to pull the resurrection thread in the narrative of Supernatural I identified Castiel’s team-work resurrection in S13 and Mary’s impossible resurrection in S14 as my two main reference points from where I could develop this whole fantasy of mine. My initial idea in a nutshell was the following: Chuck, at certain point, decided that he didn’t want Cas back. He also decided that he didn’t want Mary back. So I asked myself why, of course. There are two characters behind Cas and Mary’s resurrections and these are Jack and Amara. So I thought it was cool to assume that Jack and Amara were what really went wrong in Chuck’s story. Since the show ends with a dethroned Chuck and with the union of Jack and Amara as the new “top dog” in town, it seems like it isn’t just a cool assumption but it’s possibly also correct (correct, again, in my fantasy, because we never saw Amara in the finale so this is just my mind grasping for meaning that makes sense to me).

What I didn’t expect to find while I was resurrecting the narrative threads of this dead show is that, ultimately, Mary Winchester is basically a Jimmy Novak minus Castiel. I’ll explain what I mean by this in a minute but I first want to say that I didn’t expect such a triangulation was going to come up. I already was aware of the connection between the theme of birth/motherhood/death and Castiel but I was surprised to find Jimmy Novak there, too.

Before going on I have to declare a little bit of defeat (for now). I believe that my mind can do any kind of cerebral somersaults but I’m a bit at loss (for now) about the reason why Jimmy Novak was resurrected after Raphael killed Castiel. Jimmy-as-soul doesn’t come back when Lucifer kills Castiel and I can’t come up with, let’s say, “diegetic” reasons to explain it. Is it because Raphael was less powerful than Lucifer? Mmmh. Is it just God’s will? Double mmmh. These reasons don’t satisfy me and I can’t help but see the cogs of the wheel turning behind the scenes, aka the same thing that happened to Final Ruby:

RUBY: Proof. This body is one-hundred percent socially conscious. I recycle. Al Gore would be proud. […] You didn’t want me to take a body with someone in it, and I made sure that the spirit was gone. Apartment was empty. You happy?

Just like Ruby, who allegedly seems on Sam’s side in S4 and therefore “good”, couldn’t be a demon possessing an innocent (since they wanted Sam and Ruby to make out hard… the implications would've been… unpleasant), Castiel, too, couldn't keep sharing his vessel with his rightful owner (Off-topic: further proof that Ruby and Castiel are two different sides of the same character). This is all to say that the show was very aware of the implications of their favourite metaphors and had to come up with creative ways to get around the “law” that they themselves had created.

In other words, Jimmy Novak’s “empty apartment” was a necessary sacrifice to keep Castiel-as-character around (well, apparently, much like Chuck, some showrunners didn’t exactly want Castiel-as-character around but let’s stash this as further proof for the “Chuck is the writers” theory).

Jimmy’s body goes Through.A.Lot. from S4 to S13 where it ends up on a pyre with Kelly Kline’s corpse (!!! The things I have to say about this!!!). From S5 onwards, however, Jimmy’s not “in there” anymore so we can all breathe out because at least this poor man/character wasn’t actually “in there” to suffer and be testimony to all the sufferings. But his body and his new tenant did.

As I’ve said before, after Cas’ resurrection in S13 I don’t know how but I do know that Cas gets back complete with Jimmy’s body and I personally like to think that Cas’ physical appearance from S13 is his own. It’s his “body”. He stole Jimmy’s looks but it’s not Jimmy’s body anymore. Cas’ body is… a replica (of Jimmy’s)… capable of holding… grace. In an unexpected turn of events, then, Jimmy’s body goes from awesome vessel coveted by all angels to a copy of itself. And this process actually frees poor Jimmy’s body from angelic tyranny (as if moving from vessel to copy can even be described as... freedom but anyway). How could this even be possible? Nothing comes from nothing, right?

Well, well, well! How lucky for me that Supernatural had established itself as a universe were “formless matter” was “just there, waiting to be born” and for God to pick and do what he pleases! So I finally come full-circle with my “Jack-as-hidden-threat” thesis: by waking Cas up in the Empty, Jack is creating his father who had gone back to being “formless matter”. In other words, Jack was already God in that he had the capacity to do the same things that God did. This is, by the way, the reason why the angels correctly identified him as the entity who could’ve been able to create more angels. Because, I think, he could have, just not in the same way as the angels imagined (in my fantasy Nick's storyline doesn't happen so please remove all of your memories about Nick waking Lucifer up in the Empty, that never happened on this blog).

In this way Jack, even with all the complex issues he has with power, actually grew up a bit from S13 to S14: in S13 he only started the re-creation of his father by waking him up in the Empty (Cas had to do a lot of work, too) while in S14 he actually managed to bring Mary back. It’s just that what he brought back was “a shell. A body, you know. That it was empty. Just a a replica. "Incapable of holding life."

Jack could have brought Mary back. As a matter of fact, in this fantasy of mine, I think Chuck had to intervene because he realized that Jack’s next step in his progress would’ve been the final one that would’ve allowed him the complete mastery over resurrection (and over souls...). Jack could’ve brought souls back without deals just like Amara could.

Now, I don’t know if Chuck can actually bring back souls or not. He apparently brought Jimmy back once. I thereofre don’t believe the “it’s complicated”  travesty he came up with in “Moriah” because it’s a fact that even basic demons, provided that there was a deal, could bring souls back so why not Chuck? It’s true, however, that, if it was Chuck who brought specifically Cas back before S13, then it would seem like he can manipulate grace rather than souls. It’s also true that when he got angry in “Moriah” he wasn’t able to resurrect the people in the cemetery who all came out zombie- and ghost-like. Following my fantasy I would say that Chuck can’t resurrect souls but I’ll have to think about this, for now I can’t really decide.

What’s important here, to me anyway, is that, at a certain point in the story (according to this fantasy of mine), both Mary and Jimmy are “just” bodies that aren’t even real bodies: they are empty copies, replicas unable to hold life (but able to hold grace). What’s even more “hilarious” is that Mary, who’s THE mother of the story, is first “absolved” of her “sin” of giving birth to Sam and Dean via the construction of a world where she never was a mother and then, the following season, she’s reduced to a copy of a body incapable of holding life (!!!) the creation of which was the reason why her whole family was damned. Jimmy, on the other hand, had to "do penance" because he had abondoned his family first, his angel second and accepted a life of torture to spare his own daughter the same life of pain. And he wasn't even successful! He's eventually reduced to a replica of a body that will never be capable of holding life again, only grace, the acceptance of which was his first "original sin".

What I'm trying to say is that Mary and Jimmy are repeatedly punished because they brought DEATH and destruction upon their respective families IN PERPETUITY. The more they try to protect their children, the more they seem to damn them. The punishment goes to the point where they can only be "free" once their souls are locked in heaven with their fictional spouses, their actual bodies are completely erased from earth and the threat of their reproduction is forever erased. We only get reproductions of them, copies to burn on pyres so that they would never, ever be able to hold and give LIFE again. The body is ABSENT.

Mary and Jimmy are reproductions (as in replicas) so that they could never again reproduce (as in procreate).

Supernatural is THE show about saturnine sterility if I’ve ever seen one. There can’t be life in this show. Everything must stay recycled, characters can resurrect but never give new birth and, if they do (Hello Kelly Kline Forever), they must die.die.die. Love is okay only if it's lived in the after-life in a prison/suburbia-like Heaven with little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky ("And your mom and dad… they got a place over yonder"). Love in the physical realm, on the other hand, well... you can't get that, AND you can't have physical sex. Touch is forbidden.

And this is the reason, I think, why Castiel must also, eventually, die. He’s too closely associated with the desire of creation. He wants to be god, he wants to feel human, he is woman, he is man, he wants to be mother, he wants to be father, he wants to hold grace, he wants to hold life, he wants to give, give, give, he wants to touch too much. Now I’m talking symbolically here (although I believe that, my fantasy or not, this holds true textually too) but there’s too much fertility, too much sex around Cas in a show that’s ultimately about sterility. So he must die.

This is why I’ve chosen the “body without organs” for Mary and Jimmy: it’s both an image of freedom (well, more or less since Heaven is a scam but okay) and an image of pain, of the cost, of the madness behind that freedom. They’re finally “free”, even COMPLETE (!!!) from the narrative once their bodies are utterly destroyed and what lives on is copy of what they used to be and never will be again.

The phrase “Body without organs” comes from “To Have Done With the Judgement of God” by Antonin Artaud:

[…]

They have found a new way to bring out god and to capture him in his microbic noxiousness. This is to nail him though the heart, in the place where men love him best, under the guise of unhealthy sexuality, in that sinister appearance of morbid cruelty that he adopts whenever he is pleased to tetanize and madden humanity as he is doing now. He utilizes the spirit of purity and of a consciousness that has remained candid like mine to asphyxiate it with all the false appearances that he spreads universally through space and this is why Artaud le Mômo can be taken for a person suffering from hallucinations. - What do you mean, Mr. Artaud? - I mean that I have found the way to put an end to this ape once and for all and that although nobody believes in god any more everybody believes more and more in man. So it is man whom we must now make up our minds to emasculate. - How's that? How's that? No matter how one takes you you are mad, ready for the straitjacket. - By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy. I say, to remake his anatomy. Man is sick because he is badly constructed. We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally, god, and with god his organs.   For you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ. When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom. They you will teach him again to dance wrong side out as in the frenzy of dance halls and this wrong side out will be his real place.