Category Archives: Drunken Slow-Rolling Dream

Forests and Trees

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(Update: Should have noted this earlier: you can read a pdf of Moto Hagio’s Bianca here.

1.

In his first column for the new tcj.com, Ken Parille discusses Moto Hagio’s story Bianca. Ken says that the first time he read the story he was not very impressed. However, he says, he decided to try reading it over and over to see if it grew on him. And so it did.

What’s most interesting to me is the way Hagio carefully sets up the story to appeal to child readers, in this case, young girls. The central tension that animates “Bianca” is found throughout children’s fiction, especially fairy tales: hostility toward authority figures, such as parents, other adults, and even older children or siblings. Within the logic of such tales, the young child is often an innocent under assault by the actions and beliefs of manipulative older characters. Such stories dramatize a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the reader, who is imaginatively allowed to punish an authority figure, occasionally even committing fantasy patricide or matricide. We see this in tales like “Hansel and Gretel,” in which the evil step-mother, who had abandoned the title characters in the forest, mysteriously dies at the end, just in time to be deprived of wealth the children had taken from the witch, the step-mother’s doppelganger. Identifying strongly with the abused child characters, the reader (who likely resents authority figures who control her) might experience the death of both women as a fulfillment of a kind of revenge fantasy. In “Bianca” revenge is the real theme, enacted, as we will see, on Bianca’s cousin Clara.

Ken goes on to work through the structural contrast between nature (child) and civilization (adult). He concludes (as the above indicates) that Clara, the narrator, is on the side of civilization, and that Bianca is on the side of nature. Where other readers (like Kate Dacey) have seen Clara as allied with Bianca, Ken sees them as opposed. Or as he says:

Yet Clara’s paintings also seem false: every one idealizes Bianca, turning her into a cliché: a perfectly posed dancing ballerina. Clara caused her cousin pain, but she avoids representing this pain in her art. Perhaps Clara learned nothing from her short time with Bianca. Decades later, she still sits in the house (an imprisoned gothic victim?), creating paintings that are a whitewash, that erase all signs of her guilt and complicity. Is Hagio aware that Clara’s art shows none of the complexities and none of the darkness that “Bianca” does? As an artist of the child psyche, Clara is a charlatan compared to Hagio.

This is a stimulating and thoughtful review. I still disagree with it though!

In fact, Ken’s essay is an interesting object-lesson in the dangers of academic criticism. You can find tension and structure in any narrative. The longer you look, the more structure you’ll see; we’re meaning-making creatures. So then, is the point of criticism just to see whether you can play with that structure? Is the goal of evaluation to declare that you have done so? Ken does relate his structure to other ideas (childhood paranoia, fairy tales — lots of things) but his evaluative criteria pretty much all come back to, “look! structure!” Or as he puts it at the end of his essay:

It’s a sentimental-gothic fantasy that plays into a child’s paranoia about elders. And it’s fascinating.

Sentimental-gothic fantasies that play on paranoia aren’t all that original or special. Ken admits elsewhere in the essay that the handling of those themes here is “straightforward” rather than more ambivalent or complex (as Nicole Ruddick had argued). So by Ken’s own admission, we have a familiar binary between nature and culture presented in a straightforward way. Why is that interesting? Nothing in his essay really answers that question.

2.

I’d also argue that Ken’s binary take on the story leaves a lot out. For example, Ken overemphasizes the tension between Clara and Bianca. For Ken, as noted above, Clara is civilization, Bianca is innocent nature. But are they really so separable? They’re cousins after all…and Ken notes that they’re difficult to tell apart visually. They’re parallel. Indeed, it’s possible, without too much difficulty (and in light of Hagio’s story Hanshin) to see them as the same person. Bianca, who becomes adult Clara’s soul and inspiration, could be seen metaphorically as simply Clara’s youth — her younger, freer self. Certainly, she’s an aspect of Clara; her complement, not her antithesis.

In that vein, I don’t see anything in the story that undermines Clara as strongly as Ken wants her to be undermined. Ken above insists that Clara’s paintings are empty and trite. From this Ken concludes that Clara does not understand Bianca’s true conflicted nature.

There’s another, simpler explanation for why Clara’s paintings are cliched and saccharine, though. It’s because they look like Hagio’s drawings! In fact, Clara’s paintings seem more ambivalent than Hagio’s, if anything.

This picture below is by Hagio as herself.

And this is Hagio drawing as Clara.

Contrary to Ken’s suggestion, it’s Clara’s picture, with its swirling backgrounds, stiff pose,and staring eyes, which seems (marginally) more haunted. Hagio’s version of the “real” Bianca is a straightforward confection. I really see no evidence (and Ken, despite his close look at many images, provides none) that Clara’s paintings consistently convey a less nuanced vision of Bianca than Hagio’s drawings do. It’s Hagio, who, as Ken says, “idealizes Bianca, turning her into a cliché: a perfectly posed dancing ballerina”. Both pictures are cloying; Clara’s is maybe marginally less so if you squint at it.

The main takeaway, though, is that Clara draws Bianca just like Hagio draws Bianca. Both idealize the child, and both are, in the logic of the story, right to do so. Again, Clara’s insight and artistry are not an antithesis to Hagio’s; they are (such as they are) one and the same.

3.

Similarly, I think Ken’s focus on binaries causes him trouble here:

Ken says of this sequence:

When Bianca looks into the mirror, she looks into an adult-free utopia in which the soul always sees its eternal sunshine reflected back at it. To look in the mirror is to look backwards, a nostalgic glance to the soul’s original perfection. The mirror tells us, “The world would be a child’s paradise if only all of those old people would stop screwing it up.”

Ken thinks Bianca is delighted by the mirror because there are no adults in it. But (in a panel Ken doesn’t reproduce) Bianca doesn’t say, “Hello no adults in the mirror!” She says, “Hello, Bianca in the mirror!” What’s delightful and exciting about the mirror has to do with Bianca herself. The sunshiny day is obviously a (very, very tired) symbol for a world with no troubles…but the playfulness here, the emotional charge, is in the flirtatious doubling.

The flirting with the mirror image reproduces the flirtation between Bianca/Clara. From Bianca’s first coquettery:

to the lover’s quarrel.

This ambivalent relationship between Clara and Bianca mirrors the relationship between Bianca’s parents, whose break-up diagetically accounts for Bianca’s volatility. Notably, it is Bianca’s mother who has left her father. Similarly, in the sequence above, Bianca rejects Clara — the implication being that both mother and daughter are free spirits escaping domesticity. Thus, it isn’t Clara who is acting like an adult; contra Ken, it’s Bianca.

4.
For Ken, the story is about punishing adults. Whether or not that’s the case, there’s not doubt that “Bianca” is more effective at punishing Bianca than it is at punishing Clara. Clara grows up and becomes a successful artist. Bianca suffers death by landscape.

The creator and manipulator of this particular landscape is, of course, Hagio herself. And so it is Hagio who, in an extremely contrived fashion, off the little darling. After which, Clara faints, and her mother swoops in to grab her:

Ken reads this through his familiar binary. It shows adults are bad.

On an interestingly composed page that employs many shading styles, Clara faints after learning of her cousin’s death. Hagio draws Clara’s mother as a series of swirling lines of different weights, and I assume this visual style mimics Clara’s impaired perception: we are “seeing” the mother through the eyes of the fainting girl. Yet these thick black lines give the mother a demonic aspect—and demonic is the deep nature of adults in Bianca’s world, who only appear to be friendly. Coming at a key moment, this visual approach amplifies my reading of the story’s intense antipathy to ageing and adult culture.

But how ominous is this? Clara looks like she’s in raptures. The swirling lines intensify the sense of orgasmic disorientation; it’s one of the loveliest pictures in the story. Moreover, the swirling obscures identity; the mother becomes someone else. Leaning down with her back to the reader, she’s not only a mother, but Hagio herself, protecting — or is that ravishing? — her creation. Bianca drops out of sight and leaves in her wake an ambivalent, melancholy ecstasy.

Clara goes on to spend the rest of her life making an aesthetic fetish of the girl who once rejected her and was then more or less instantly destroyed. For Ken, the fact that this is disturbingly morbid indicates that Hagio is criticizing her character. This rather ignores the fact that Clara and Hagio are doing the exact same thing. Hagio killed Bianca in order to turn her into an aesthetic fetish. Killing children to turn them into aesthetic fetishes is not an especially pleasant thing to witness. And this is why the story is, I’d argue, ugly.

5.

Hagio does not identify as a lesbian. Nonetheless, like almost all of Hagio’s work, Bianca is powered by its queer subtext — emotions unspoken, longings that grow and metastasize like faces in a funhouse mirror. The story desires Bianca, but that desire is not articulated, either by Clara or by Hagio. Bianca is freedom, but what freedom exactly — what emotions, what desires — can’t be named. So Bianca is safely done away with, at which point her image can be retrospectively and safely consumed.

Ken is somewhat stumped as to why Bianca is killed in the forest when (by his binary) civilization should kill her. She should logically die by falling downstairs or some such, if indoor/outdoor is really what matters. But of course that isn’t what matters. The issue isn’t civilization vs. the forest. The issue is getting rid of Bianca in a way that makes her ripe for mythologizing. Having her vanish into her nature —neatly eliding all the issues raised by having an actual, real nature, rather than a picture of one — works perfectly. One with the forest, she embodies freedom, a formulation which conveniently gets rid of her body and of any suggestion as to what in particular she would do with that freedom if she had it.

The point here is emphatically not that Hagio has to tell “Bianca” as a coming out story. But it does seem like there needs to be some acknowledgment that Bianca’s tragedy is not the destruction of her innocence, but the failure to destroy it. After all, Bianca doesn’t grow up. Clara and Hagio prevent her from doing so; they conspire to keep her the perfect, frozen ballerina on a cake so she will never become a friend, a sister, or a lover.

In Hanshin, in Iguana Girl, in Drunken Dream, Hagio is able to make art from an acknowledgement — rather than a refusal — of specific bodies and individual desires. In the story AA’, she confronts the bleak, frozen downside of innocence — of not knowing what you want or who you are —as well as its smiling surface. In all the best work of hers I’ve seen, she explores the queer knot at the heart of identity and love. But “Bianca” is not so courageous. It shakes its finger at the mean repressors for silencing the inner kiddies, while surreptitiously devoting its resources to putting those kiddies quickly and safely underground, so they can be either transformed into treacly images and ignored.

Ken looks at the structure of the forest, but he misses the thing dancing there under the trees. “Bianca” seems trite not because readers haven’t looked at it sufficiently closely. It seems trite because it’s a lie. “Bianca” is a story that celebrates freedom by embalming it. As a result, it’s an emotional and aesthetic failure, hiding what could have been its real concerns with shallow moralism and weak allegories. What’s left is only a shadow of an art that wasn’t; a false picture of a false picture.
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This is part of an ongoing series on Moto Hagio’s Drunken Dream.

Moto Hagio: Girls and Artists

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It took me a little while, but thanks to Melinda Beasi I finally caught up with a long review at Manga Curmudgeon by HU columnist Erica Friedman discussing A Drunken Dream. It’s in many ways a response (either intentionally or otherwise) to my series of posts on the book, and particularly to my discussion of critical reactions to the volume. It raises a bunch of interesting issues which I wanted to try to address.

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Criticizing the Critics: Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream

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Over the last couple of months, I’ve written five lengthy posts about A Drunken Dream Fantagraphics’ collection of stories by the great shojo manga-ka Moto Hagio. I’ve spent so much time on this book for a number of reasons. Hagio is a central figure in the history of shojo, a genre in which I’m interested. Matt Thorn, the volume’s editor and translator, is one of the most important manga critics around,so anything he does is worth thinking about carefully. And, finally, this is meant to be the first in a series of reissues of classic shojo tales by Fantagraphics. That’s an exceedingly worthwhile project, and I wanted to draw attention to it.

To finish up my series, I thought I’d look briefly at what other critics have said about A Drunken Dream.

I certainly haven’t been alone in seeing this book as important. Deb Aoki at About.com gave it 4.5 stars and said it was “a long overdue glimpse into Hagio’s 40-year career. Melinda Beasi picked it as her book of the week, calling it gorgeous. David Welsh in a discussion of the best manga of the year similarly, if more somberly, commented that on best of the year lists, “Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories (Fantagraphics) didn’t seem to make much of an impression outside of dedicated manga readers, which is disappointing to me as a dedicated manga reader.”

So…many stars, pick of the week, should be on best of lists. Check, check…check! Sounds good! Long awaited collection by a manga master, critics love it — there must be a lot of juicy articles out there discussing why the book is so wonderful, right? Right?

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Moto Hagio: Who Watches the Watchwoman?

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This is I think my penultimate post about the Moto Hagio’s collection of stories A Drunken Dream. You can read the whole series here.
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Drunken Dream concludes with two entirely forgettable sentimental ghost stories: “The Child Who Comes Home” and “The Willow Tree.” Both exploit familial grief — respectively, dead child and dead mother — and an emotional twist-ending in the service of tear-jerking emotional catharsis. Unfortunately, as has been a problem before in this volume, Hagio has neither the space nor the inclination in these stories to create fully realized characters, and so the grief and pathos come across as both generic and unearned. These are probably the dullest stories in the volume. Some of Hagio’s work is actively stupid and irritating , but these really feel like she’s just filling the form in. Ambiguous death, twist, catharsis. That’s a wrap.

So yeah; not a lot to say. Except…I’ve been thinking a little about feminist film gaze theory and how it would work in comics. So I’m going to try to read “The Willow” through Laura Mulvey’s classic 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and see what happens. Maybe it’ll even get me to like the story better; who knows?
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Mulvey’s essay is based in Lacanian and Freudian theory. I’ll quote from second paragraph.

The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies….. To summarise briefly: the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is two-fold, she first symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end, it does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack. Both are posited on nature…. Woman’s desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic.) Either she must gracefully give way to the word, the Name of the Father and the Law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the half-light of the imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

So to summarize the summary (as much for my benefit as anyone else’s): woman=castration. This symbolic difference is the basis for symbolization itself; it’s the difference that enables or creates meaning. Woman exists only to embody this difference; she is the non-meaning (castration) which enables meaning (the phallic father’s realm of law and language.) Woman cannot take up the law and language herself; she can attain mastery only vicariously through a child who acts as a substitute phallus. (Ideally, the woman will give this phallus up to the world of law; alternately she may try to retain it, preventing it from entering adulthood and the world of law.) The phallic law rules, and what it rules or regulates is non-meaning/castration/woman. Woman is then by definition silent and controlled.

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Moto Hagio: “Iguana Girl”

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I’m blogging my way through Fantagraphics’ Moto Hagio collection, “A Drunken Dream.” You can read the whole series of posts here.
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In reviews of Drunken Dream, “Iguana Girl” is generally pointed out as the highlight of the collection along with Hanshin: Half-God. The two stories are similar in a lot of ways; both involve sisters, one beautiful, dumb, and beloved, the other (our heroine) homely, smart, and despised. And both are engaged with ideas about self-image, femininity, gender, and identity.

Hanshin, as I said in my review, is more a poem than a story. It raises questions deliberately to leave them unanswered — the narrator’s self is ultimately her lack of self. The identity she finds is that she does not know who she is: herself, her congenital twin, or the space left between her and her sister when they are separated.

“Iguana Girl”, while using a more arresting gimmick than “Hanshin,” ends up being a more conventional (and to my mind a less interesting) story. The plot focuses on Rika, a child whose mother sees her as an iguana from the moment of her birth. Rika’s perceived ugliness makes her mother hate her; she much prefers her second daughter, the lovely (and rather dumb) Mami. Rika sees herself as an Iguana too, though everyone else sees her as a beautiful girl (and eventually as a beautiful young woman).

The problem here is the same one that dogs many of Hagio’s stories — a lack of characterization resulting in glibness.

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Moto Hagio: “Angel Mimic”

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I’m blogging my way through Fantagraphics’ Moto Hagio collection, “A Drunken Dream.” You can read the whole series of posts here.
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Hanshin: Half-God and A Drunken Dream were both more plot hole than story; odd broken fairy tales with glimpses of trauma breaking through the prevailing aphasia. They’re unique, bizarre, and lovely.

“Angel Mimic” is, alas, much better constructed. There’s foreshadowing, thematic development, a final shock reveal — in short, all the elements of a traditional plot. As for what that plot is… Joe McCulloch over at Comics Comics has a good summary.

while a double-barreled blast of soap opera sees a suicidal girl hauled off death’s doorstep by a rough but handsome man who *gasp* turns out to be her new biology professor, resulting in detailed, evolution-themed educational segments (not unlike the learning bits in Golgo 13 or a Kazuo Koike manga) inevitably lashed to Our Heroine’s Dark Secret. “I wonder if humans will evolve into angels?” she muses, probably gauging the reader’s appetite for comics of this tone.

Joe’s a kinder man than I, so he doesn’t quite come out and say it, but — yeah, this is godawful. In her better stories, the fact that Hagio’s characters never for a second seem real gives her world an eerie air of unreality, like they’re pasteboard props erected to conceal an abyss. Here, though, more of the cracks are filled in, and Tsugiko ends up seeming less like a mask concealing wells of emotion and more like a hollow doll being pushed by rote towards the inevitable epiphany. There’s initial tension with the man who saves her — he wanders back into her life — they are thrown together by circumstance — they happen to meet her ex — they separate — they come back together — the secret is revealed — happy ending.

That secret (and hey, I’m going to spoil this crappy story now, so be alerted)….

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Half-Drawn

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I’m blogging my way through all the stories in A Drunken Dream, the collection of Moto Hagio’s stories out from Fantagraphics. You can see all posts about this collection here.
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Moto Hagio’s “Hanshin: Half-God” is about Yudy and Yucy, conjoined twins. Yudy, who tells the story, is ugly, shrivelled, articulate, and competent; her twin sister, Yucy, is a beautiful, mute parasite, who sucks away both Yudy’s nutrients and the affection of parents, relatives, and passersby. Yudy has to help Yucy walk and bathe and perform even the simplest tasks; in return, the simple Yucy gives Yudy frequent fevers and bothers her while she tries to study genetics. Eventually, doctors decide that the twins will die if they are not separated; the only choice is to cut loose Yucy, who will die, allowing Yudy to live. Separated from her twin, Yudy grows into a normal young woman. The end.

Sort of. If that was the story, it would be a fairly straightforward, even banal feminist parable about casting off gender expectations in order to find your true self. Yucy, the delicate, helpless, beloved beauty, has to be destroyed before Yudy can grow up into a competent, independent woman. QED.

In this reading, Yudy and Yucy are different aspects of the same person…and there’s plenty of evidence for that in the art. For instance:

The first panel show Yucy off to the left against a blank background; then the second shows Yudy in the same position. In the third we see the two together…and only in the final panel on the page do we learn that they’re “attached at the hip.” The surprise reveal is, though, clearly rigged. If the two are attached, we shouldn’t be able to see them without each other. Particularly in the second panel, Yudy is placed so that we should see Yucy to her right — but all we see is blank space. The implication is that Yucy doesn’t exist except as metaphor…or perhaps, that Yudy doesn’t, since it’s Yucy we see first.

Again, just after the sisters have been separated, Hagio put in a tell.

“I felt as if I’d been dreaming a long dream.” The twin is just a fantasy; only when she is separated is Yudy living real life for the first time. The perfect girl she is supposed to be doesn’t exist.

Except that she sort of does. Yucy doesn’t die immediately after being separated; instead she slowly wastes away. Yudy goes to visit her one last time, and is startled to see that her sister has turned into her own mirror image.

You could see this as still being about the escape from gender stereotypes — “Isn’t it really me who is dying? No it really is my sister.” Again, this could be a statement that the gender-normative self is not Yudy; that she has escaped other’s expectations. But the affect is off. Instead of joy or release, Yudy feels disorientation and grief. The self she has left behind is “really” a self; indeed, it now seems more like the real her than the her that has survived. As time goes on and she becomes healthier and healthier, Yudy begins to look like the sister who died, until finally she wonders which of them was killed:

The story is no longer about casting off an oppressive femininity. Instead, it’s about…what? Betraying the self perhaps…but how exactly? Has Yudy betrayed herself by turning into the femininity she thought she was rejecting? Or was the rejection of that femininity — which also encompasses childlike innocence — itself a betrayal? Or is it the loss of her pain which is a betrayal; leaving behind the helpless, shrivelled, wretched self to become a competent adult? If so, the bind seems double and unescapable; to grow up, one has to abandon one’s attractive weakness, but doing so is always a betrayal of that weakness. The child is not the adult, even moreso because the child is still there in your face. Or, perhaps, the conflict is not internal at all. Perhaps the bond that holds together Yudi and Yuci isn’t sisterhood or self, but love, and it’s the abandonment of that love for femininity which causes Yudi to both become more feminine…and to be haunted by the conviction that she has lost herself.

There isn’t any one “solution” to the story, of course. This is emphasized by the fact that there isn’t one Yudy, or even two, but many. In a recent post about doubles in comics, Caroline Small suggested that comics can do doubling in a way that is less “labored” than prose. I was skeptical about this — but Hagio’s story may have changed my mind. Because in “Hanshin,” the metaphorical uncertainty around Yudy and Yuci becomes an actual, concrete ambiguity. That is, when Yudy sees Yuci lying on the hospital bed, and wonders, “Is this me or is this my sister?”, the narrative insistence on ambiguous doubling actually obscures the concrete doubling — Hagio is, in this sequence, drawing the same person twice — or more accurately, six times.

Yudi and Yuci in Hanshin are just names, assigned as Hagio wishes to different iterations of the same body. In her confusion about who she is, Yudi is more, not less, aware of reality — she senses the arbitrariness of Hagio’s choices, the way that names and identities are linked, not as absolutes, but through arbitrary decisions.

We “know” that is Yudi, but if Hagio changes the words, it could just as easily be Yuci who grew up. Which raises the question…who is talking here? Is that Yudi? Yuki? Or is it Hagio herself? “I loved you more profoundly than love. I hated you more deeply than I could bear. A shadow superimposed on myself….My deity —” Whose shadow? Whose deity? If one is drawn as two and two as one, who is doing the drawing? The same person who did the killing? Is the deity the one who is there or the one who is not, and how can you tell the difference? To create your soul is to split your soul; a god who has always already left half of herself behind.