Review: The Times of Botchan (Part 1)

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I’ve decided to reprint an old review of The Times of Botchan to tie in with the recent release of the fourth volume in the series. The article was written about two years ago and was first published in truncated form in The Comics Journal. Those seeking further guidance on whether or not to buy these books should read the reviews I’ve listed below.

 

The central figure which unites the 10 volumes (five volumes in Japan and Asia) that make up The Times of Botchan is Natsume Soseki, one of Japan’s greatest writers. The series may be viewed as a history of the closing years of the Meiji era, a biography of various literary and political figures which emerged during those times, and a meditation on the impact of that period on the Japanese psyche.

The series as a whole was awarded the Osamu Tezuka Culture Awards Grand Prize in 1998.

Further reading:

Katherine Dacey’s review (2010). I am inclined to agree with many of the faults enumerated by Dacey, in particular the unwieldy writing and the uneven quality of the first two volumes.

Joey Manley on the first volume and translation issues (from 2006). A somewhat messy rant but he brings up valid issues concerning the distancing elements in the narrative. He also takes down Leo Tolstoy and Boris Pasternak at one point.

Derik Badman’s review (2006) of Volumes 1 and 2. Badman is a much more patient reader than Manley. He describes the general tone of these books and provides a nice summary of the various plot points.

Matthias Wivel’s review (2003) of the earlier volumes in the series (in Danish).

***

 

A Review of The Times of Botchan (Part 1)
by Jiro Taniguchi and Natsuo Sekikawa
Toptron Ltd. /Fanfare (B&W, Softcover)

Vol. 1: 144 pp., $19.99 ISBN: 9788496427013
Vol. 2: 128 pp., $19.99, ISBN: 9788496427099
Vol. 3: 156 pp., $19.99, ISBN: 9788496427129
Vol. 4: 144 pp., $19.99 ISBN: 9788496427136

(1) Introduction

The Times of Botchan is a historical manga concerning the end of the Meiji era in Japan. The manga begins in the early twentieth century and uses as its fulcrum and lens, the life of Natsume Soseki.

The heart of the series is neatly stated in the second chapter of the first volume and bears putting down in whole:

“The roots of Soseki’s illness were the same as those of the malaise of the Japanese who had awoken for the first time to consciousness about their own national identity within a modern social order and of the dilemma faced by the intellectuals, who had no choice but to learn from the West even though they hated it.”

Natsume Soseki (pen-name of Natsume Kinnosuke; 1867-1916) is generally recognized as Japan’s foremost modern novelist. In the manga and to a certain extent even in present day Japan, he is the embodiment and voice of the spiritual conflicts that emerged during the Meiji period.

During his lifetime, Soseki was one of the most respected authorities on English literature in Japan. He brought the modern Japanese novel to fruition through his study of Austen, Dickens, Sterne and Swift. Yet, as the introduction to Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson’s translation of I Am a Cat indicates, he appears to have been largely unimpressed by Western enlightenment; “throughout his career, he remained essentially and uncompromisingly Japanese.” His two years in London were wretched and his views of the English twisted by anemic social contacts. In My Individualism, Soseki writes, “To tell the truth, I do not like England very much, but in spite of this, I must allow it one thing, reluctantly: probably, in no other part of the world, are the people both as free and as policed.”

As is made clear by authors of the manga, this ambivalence was not solely restricted to Soseki. The third and fourth volumes of The Times of Botchan are essentially about the other great literary voice of the Meiji era, Mori Ogai (1862 — 1922). In his story, we find a conflict between the individuality so prized by the West and the sense of duty and honor that was fast being encroached upon in Japanese life during that period.

These volumes also take in the intertwining life of Shimei Futabatei (1864 — 1909), the author of what has been described as Japan’s first, albeit incomplete, modern novel, Ukigumo (The Drifting Cloud). His other great distinction was as a translator of Turgenev. In her commentary on Ukigumo, Marleigh Ryan quotes Futabatei as he reflects on his formative years:

“I had as my ideal in those days the word “honesty.” I wanted to live a life free of shame before Heaven or man. This concept of honesty had been nurtured in me by Russian literature, but an even greater influence was the Confucian education I had received. … The oriental Confucian influence and the Russian literary or Western philosophic influence became bound up together. To these were added an interest in socialism. From these various influences my moral philosophy was formed.”

This statement stands in contrast to Futabatei’s views on unbridled Westernization. In the opening pages of Ukigumo, for example, he describes a thoroughly frivolous and spoilt girl called, Osei, who is under the tutelage of the “loathsome” headmistress of a finishing school:

“Things went from bad to worse after she started studying English at school. She switched from a Japanese under-robe to an undershirt and adopted a Western style hairdo, strangled herself with a scarf and donned eyeglasses which ruined her perfect vision. Her self-approved transformation was perfectly ridiculous.”

 

In the first volume of the manga, Sekikawa and Taniguchi provide us with some instances of this tension between tradition and modernization. Soseki is first seen potting around his house in a traditional Japanese housecoat and then clothed in Western dress as he navigates the streets of Tokyo. At one point, he is found formulating a scene for his novel Botchan in which the protagonist both physically and intellectually humiliates a European. He then suffers a bout of crippling dyspepsia when he discovers that his job as a lecturer in Tokyo Imperial University has been acquired at the expense of a noble foreigner (the irony here being that Soseki is destined to die of a stomach hemorrhage in 14 years time).

The foreigner in question was Lafcadio Hearn, the Irish-Greek writer and translator who became a naturalized Japanese citizen. He is best known in the West through Masaki Kobayashi’s film, Kwaidan, which is an adaptation of four supernatural tales from his collection of the same name. Of Hearn, Roger Pulvers in an article for The Japan Times writes:

“Even today, Hearn is considered in this country the foreigner who understood the Japanese in the most profound way. … Name a field of study of traditional art or life and Lafcadio Hearn was intrigued by it, swept away by it. He is the founding father of the school of Japanese uniqueness, the fountain that provides the spiritual and aesthetic nourishment … that Japanese people require to convince themselves that they are more than the sum of their borrowed and mechanically transformed parts.”

But Hearn was interested in the “Old” Japan, one which officials (including those at his university) were eager to put aside. This realization would come to haunt him in his later years and Pulvers quotes him as writing, “I felt as never before how utterly dead Old Japan is and how ugly New Japan is becoming. I thought, how useless to write about things which have ceased to exist.” Hearn died in 1904. Eight years later, the death of the Meiji Emperor would prompt what was perhaps the most famous act in response to this sense of passage and change.

In 1912, shortly after the death of the emperor, General Nogi Maresuke committed seppuku, ostensibly in expiation for his military mistakes and specifically for having lost his regimental banner in Kyushu during the Satsuma rebellion over 30 years earlier. His death would leave its mark on the writings of both Soseki and Mori Ogai. In Soseki’s most influential work, Kokoro, we find what may be his own thoughts in the words of one of the protagonists called, Sensei:

“I felt as though the spirit of the Meiji era had begun with the Emperor, and had ended with him. I was overcome with the feeling that I and the others, who had been brought up in that era, were now left behind to live as anachronisms.”

In his introduction to the novel, Edwin McClellan writes that, “Soseki was too modern in his outlook to be fully in sympathy with the general; and so is Sensei … however, he could not help feeling that he was in some way a part of the world that had produced General Nogi”.

(2) The Times of Botchan Vol. 3 & 4

Nogi’s death had an even greater impact on Mori Ogai, and it is this sense of nobility and responsibility that informs the third and fourth volumes of The Times of Botchan (even if the events depicted within occur a number of years before the death of the general).


At the start of these interconnected volumes, it is 1909 and Shimei Futabatei is dead. In five years, the Meiji emperor will also have passed on and, in seven, Soseki will collapse from a stomach hemorrhage. Futabatei’s funeral is attended by some of the most famous writers and thinkers of the time, among them Soseki, Ogai and Ishikawa Takuboku, the three writers whose lives are most developed upon in these series of manga.

As with the first two volumes, this section of The Times of Botchan is also about the creation of literature. The cover description tells us that the book focuses on the relationship between Ogai and Elise Weigert, the inspiration for Ogai’s story, “Maihime” (“The Dancing Girl”), but it is also the story of Futabatei and Ukigumo.

“Maihime” was written in 1890 and has been noted for bringing “a new dimension to the literary expression of personal emotions in Japanese literature.” The story is narrated by the protagonist, Toyotaro Ota, who is the top student in his university and a civil servant of three years. He is sent to Germany to “study matters connected with [his] particular section.” At first he finds himself reading law but soon turns to the arts and history, much to the displeasure of his superiors. The opening pages of the story allow us to look deep into his soul. From Richard Bowring’s translation:

“Some three years passed. … I had studied willingly. … But all that time I had been a mere passive, mechanical being with no real awareness of myself. … I realized that I would be happy neither as a high-flying politician nor as a lawyer. … I felt like the leaves of the silk-tree which shrink and shy away when they are touched. … Ever since my youth I had followed the advice of my elders and kept to the path of learning and obedience. If I had succeeded, it was not through being courageous.”

Toyotaro’s first meeting with Elise differs little from Ogai’s own encounter in the manga. She is a dancer whose father has just died. As she is penniless, she has asked for aid with the funeral expenses from her employer who has sought to take advantage of her. Toyotaro promises to help her and produces his watch for her to pawn. Their feelings for each other deepen and soon turn to those of love. His superior is irked by his diversions and tells his “legation to abolish [his] post and terminate [his] employment.”

Toyotaro improves himself through journalistic activities and soon becomes a skilled translator. The arrival of a prominent Japanese minister in Berlin leads to an opportunity to redeem himself but he is urged “to give her up” by a friend and assistant to the minister called, Aizawa. Upon hearing this advice, Toyotaro is struck by severe misgivings: “When he mapped out my future like this. I felt like a man adrift who spies a mountain in the distance. But the mountain was still covered in cloud …”

This passage from “Maihime” may be compared with Sekikawa and Taniguchi’s depiction of Ogai’s vision of Mount Fuji early in Vol. 3. To be precise, there are two visions of note at the start of the third volume. The first is that of Elise Weigert, the German dancer who Ogai has promised to marry following his four years of study in Germany — a symbol for Western self-sufficiency and exuberance. The second (the one that applies here) is that of Mount Fuji, a symbol for Japan, first glimpsed upon Ogai’s return from Germany in 1888.

Upon the exhortation of the ship’s captain to look “higher, look much higher up,” Ogai does so only to see the peak of Mount Fuji appearing through the clouds. This image of Fuji is repeated again in a brush painting that hangs behinds his emotionless parents during his first audience with them since his return. To emphasize his point, Sekikawa narrates:

“At that moment Ogai felt for the first time, that he was back in Japan. In the country, individualism was not regarded as a personal virtue, the “family” had to be considered.”

Toward the close of “Maihime,” Elise becomes ill and discovers that she is pregnant just as Toyotaro is asked to travel to Russia to work as an interpreter. His duties “suddenly [lift him] from the mundane and [drop him] above the clouds into the Russian court.” Elise writes a loving and beseeching letter to Toyotaro and he encounters yet another crisis of confidence amidst his own joy:

“Was my passion cooling? … I thought I had discovered my true nature, and I swore never to be used as a machine again. But perhaps it was merely the pride of a bird that had been given momentary freedom to flap its wings and yet still had its legs bound. There was no way I could loose the bonds. The rope had first been in the hands of my department head, and now, alas it was in the hands of the count.”

Toyotaro, wracked with guilt, falls ill, and Elise learns of his betrayal indirectly from Aizawa even as she nurses him. She goes mad and becomes a “living corpse.” At the end of the story, Toyotaro leaves for Japan with the minister, leaving behind some money to pay for the birth of his child.

There are other links between Ogai and his protagonist not mentioned above: as with the story, the real Elise only learns of Ogai’s betrayal indirectly through his friends; the ornithological metaphor that Toyotaro uses in “Maihime” correlates with Ogai’s use of a captive bird to describe the conflict between dreams and reality in the manga. These connections are weaved into a tangle of fictions juxtaposed for effect. There are also some significant differences between Ogai’s experiences as depicted in the manga and the prose story: the Elise of the manga never becomes pregnant and her exact fate remains unknown.

By way of short interludes interspersed between this story, we see the birth of Futabatei’s novel, Ukigumo, and the difficulties that caused its curtailment. Futabatei would later be the first to translate “Maihime” into Russian but in these early days of struggle, we see Futabatei hard at work on the upper level of a storehouse behind his father’s house. His mother, who considers his novels nothing more than storybooks, makes disparaging remarks about his chosen vocation. Ogai compares Futabatei’s mother to the calculating, shrew like aunt in Ukigumo, but Futabatei is more understanding.

Sekikawa and Taniguchi are engaged in the recreation of the world in which this famous literary work was created. On the streets of Tokyo, we see the dispossessed members of the samurai class who are the main characters of Ukigumo. As Marleigh Ryan informs us:

“By 1868 samurai were often reduced to extreme poverty. … Whether rich or poor, however, in theory at least they shared a common ethical and moral code. This has as its basic tenets a belief in loyalty to one’s family and superiors … devotion to propriety and restraint in social behavior.”

Ukigumo has as its central character a man by the name of Bunzo who lives with his aunt Omasa and cousin Osei. As related by Futabatei, “[Bunzo’s] father had served in the old feudal government receiving a stipend under it.” This feudal order had collapsed with the establishment of the Meiji era. At the beginning of the novel, Bunzo loses his job. He has also fallen in love with Osei, but his current situation puts an end to any dreams he may have had of an early marriage. He watches on helplessly as his smooth-talking, sycophantic colleague Noboru, who is also of samurai stock, inserts himself into the household with the blessings of his aunt and proceeds to seduce Osei. Of Bunzo, Ryan writes, “His are the traditional Confucian values. … It is impossible for him to yield to the fashions of his time, and, as a consequence, he is crushed by the age.”

The events of Ukigumo become a topic in Ogai’s long conversation with Futabatei toward the close of Vol. 4 in which he establishes why he cannot marry Elise. In his opinion, a life without restraints or respect for authority will leave the Japanese, in times to come, with a bitter aftertaste. In so concluding, he compares himself to Noburo who “burns with desire to rise socially” but “[holds] on to the hope that Noboru Honda has self-control and a conscience” and “will not rob Bunzo Utsumi of his fiancee Osei.” Ogai does not identify with Bunzo’s inaction and indecisiveness (the real Ogai labeled Bunzo both “anemic” and “neurotic” in an essay written many years later); rather, he has sympathy with his values and sadness.

As with “Maihime” and Ukigumo, the manga reflects the triumph, hollow as it may seem to some, of giri (duty) over ninjo (emotion). By the time Elise and Ogai meet at the manga’s conclusion, their decisions have already been determined by force of circumstance. She has already booked a ticket on a steamer leaving Japan and he has already rejected the possibility of love. In Vol. 4, we see Elise’s presumably fictional adventures with a pair of lovers and assorted underworld characters. The lengths to which the young man is willing to go to free his lover from a life of sexual slavery is clearly to be contrasted with Ogai’s Old World hesitancy and reserve. Elise compares Ogai unfavorably to the uninhibited, self-sacrificing lovers she has been helping. Her experiences have shown her a Japan capable of forceful and spontaneous passions, but he can speak only of his obligations to the greater entities of family and country.

In the final pages of the fourth volume, Elise says that she can accept his reasons for abandoning her but not his lack of honesty with his emotions. In the manga, Ogai has no real answer for this. “Maihime,” on the other hand, contains a damning self-description by Toyotaro:

“If I did not take this chance, I might lose not only my homeland but also the very means by which I might retrieve my good name. I was suddenly struck by the thought that I might die in this sea of humanity, in this vast European capital. I showed my lack of moral fiber and agreed to go. It was shameless.”

Sekikawa and Taniguchi provide no hints as to which character has made the superior choice, for their struggle is merely a reflection of the conversations and debates that began in the Meiji era and preoccupy Japan to a lesser extent today.

Shimei Futabatei died in May 1909. On July 1, 1909, Ogai’s book Vita Sexualis (a thinly veiled account, in part, of his own sexual life) would be published in the literary magazine, Subaru. The issue would be banned by the authorities on July 28 and Ogai officially reprimanded by the vice-minister of war in August. Ogai and Elise’s conversation in The Times of Botchan is a counterpoint to that more fervent text, a marker on the road to the creation of a famous story and a literary master.

(Continued in Part 2 tomorrow)

 

Iron Man 2: Iron Harder

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Iron Man 2 (2010)

Directed by Jon Favreau

Starring: Robert Downey, Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johansson, Mickey Rourke, Samuel L. Jackson, Sam Rockwell


After watching the first Iron Man movie, I was curious as to how the franchise would deal with Iron Man’s lack of memorable villains. I suppose the Mandarin is relatively well-known, but Yellow Peril stereotypes don’t play well in Asian markets. And most of Iron Man’s remaining opponents are just guys in battle-suits, and at least half of them are Cold War commies. So they’re both interchangeable and out-dated.


The filmmakers behind Iron Man 2 addressed this problem by avoiding it as much as possible. Much of Iron Man 2 has nothing to do with Iron Man fighting Whiplash. Instead, the movie spends time on Tony Stark’s conflict with the U.S. government, or a subplot about Tony’s father issues, or a subplot about Tony’s impending death from palladium poisoning (due to the device in his chest), or a subplot about Jim “Rhodey” Rhodes becoming War Machine, or a subplot about Pepper Potts assuming control of Stark Industries, or a subplot about a rival weapons developer who wants to publicly upstage Tony, or a romantic subplot with Pepper Potts, or the introduction of Black Widow, or a couple of scenes that set-up the upcoming Thor movie, and a few scenes with Nick Fury that set-up the inevitable Avengers movie.


The avoidance strategy actually works well for most of the film. Easily the most enjoyable part of Iron Man is not the action but Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as Tony Stark. Downey-as-Stark can invent a new technology, outwit his business rival, and score a threesome with Swedish supermodels at the same time. In other words, he’s an unapologetic male empowerment fantasy, but without the trite moralizing of characters like Superman. And the best scenes in Iron Man 2 are when Robert Downey, Jr. hams it up as a self-aggrandizing (but lovable) jackass. Whether he’s mocking a congressional committee, or getting drunk while wearing the Iron Man suit, or flirting with Pepper Potts, Tony Stark is an entertaining character even without the superheroics. Unfortunately, Tony doesn’t get to have as much fun this time around. The Rules of Hollywood Trilogies demand that the second movie be darker than the first, so Tony has to spend a sizable portion of the film fretting over his mortality, which gets tiresome very quickly (spoiler: he doesn’t die).


And the film eventually has to get around to the external conflict. This is a summer blockbuster after all, so explosions are mandatory. And to be fair, there are a lot of explosions in the climax, and Mickey Rourke tries his hardest to make Whiplash seem like an intimidating character. But at the end of the day, Iron Man is still slumming it with a villain that shouldn’t keep him occupied for more than 15 minutes. As a comparison, imagine a Batman film where the only villain was KGBeast.


As for whether Iron Man 2 is worth your hard-earned money, it depends on your taste for big, dumb action movies. Iron Man 2 isn’t as good as its predecessor and it lacks a strong villain, but it does everything an action movie is expected to do, and in just over two hours.

Hooded Polyp: Beyond the Binary

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Much has been said, this past week—not to mention and this past year or so—about David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, and I feel I don’t have much to add to the discussion of the work itself that I haven’t already said in my earlier examination of the book. However, I think much of the discussion in the present forum has highlighted how excitingly—albeit also frustratingly—open discourse on comics is in these times of redefinition. My contribution, thus, will at least initially concentrate on this discourse rather than on the book, which is perhaps fitting in that Asterios Polyp itself can be seen as meta-discourse on comics.

I agree fully with Caroline’s Sunday post that the binary of visual and literary is ultimately a false one, not the least in comics, but it remains central to contemporary comics discourse, and critical approaches that do the form justice as a synthesis of word and image have yet to develop beyond pubescence. Caroline rather cavalierly accuses Mazzucchelli and his critics of missing the point by perpetuating this pernicious binary, while bluntly claiming that the book “pays disproportionate attention to one side of the binary, the “visual.”

I see Mazzucchelli’s aspiration precisely as the “performative enactment of the ways in which comics defies the binary between literary fiction and visual art” that Caroline solicits from progressive comics. As she rightly points out, ‘literature’ does not necessarily equate ‘words only’, and Mazzucchelli follows that insight in order to craft comics as literature. Reducing Asterios Polyp’s thematic core to a set of trite literary clichés, as several of the present pundits have done, is symptomatic of how vigorously said false binary animates comics criticism—like so many important works of art, Asterios Polyp’s originality lies exactly in how it presents these common tropes in highly sophisticated comics form.

Furthermore, Asterios Polyp is hardly a manifestation of “delayed modernism”—I don’t believe there is such a thing: comics as we know them are gloriously a creation of modernity and they experienced ‘modernism’ along with all the other art forms, long ago. Rather, Mazzucchelli’s project is emphatically post-modern, in that he addresses the modern(ist) legacy of comics in an attempt to assert its value, as well as to suggest its current limitations. His choice of protagonist, plot structure, and symbology is patently deliberate and highly self-reflexive—in order to examine the notion of comics as literature, what could be more natural than approaching some of the most tried tropes of modern literary fiction in the exaggerated, simplified form developed and refined historically in comics?

As I wrote in my essay, Mazzucchelli reveals his post-modernist hand in a crucial feat of obfuscation. Presenting us with a self-consciously heavy-handed refutation of his protagonist’s dualist worldview in lucid, fully-realized comics form, he leaves unstated essential aspects of his story. When probing these, his “formalism” takes on literary meaning in the broad sense of the term, and the book ends up, on one level, as a deconstruction not only of its constitutive tropes—literary as well as cartoony—but of comics as literature in the narrower modernist sense.

As metadiscourse, Asterios Polyp as bold and sophisticated as anything in comics, but its success ultimately might have to be gauged elsewhere and on more uncertain terms. The readings made here of the main characters, Asterios and Hana, have tended toward the ungenerous, and this is no doubt in part Mazzucchelli’s own problem for miring them in this seemingly prescriptive construction of a story, which threatens his larger ambition of transcending the limitations of his form. It’s arguable how well he succeeds, but I, for one, find the lives they live beyond what he makes visible recognizably affecting. Asterios’ worldview doesn’t provide a satisfying framework for understanding his actions, but we can try by going beyond it. And for Asterios, and therefore the reader, the true Hana remains intuited rather than stated. But they are both there, beyond the binary.

Hooded Polyp: Earthy Anecdotes

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In Caro’s recent post she argues that Asterios Polyp fails to deliver a kind of literary complexity.

The result is the reiteration – on the level of performance if not assertion – of a hierarchical division between “the literary” and the “graphical”: a dichotomy that is aggressive and dismissive in precisely the same way as Asterios’ treatment of Hana. It is completely uninformed about how literary fiction works. It creates a destructive incoherence at the center of the book.

I’ve probably bashed Asterios Polyp enough for one lifetime at this point. But I thought it might be interesting to look at a couple of examples of works that I think demonstrate the kind of literariness Caro is looking for.

I’ve been rereading Wallace Stevens recently, and I’m quite taken with this poem, the first in his first collection:

Earthy Anecdote
Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.

As with a lot of Stevens’ poetry, nobody seems all that certain what the fuck this means. I’ve seen various efforts to parse it as some sort of allegory (the firecat means “change” was one particularly painful example.) But none of them are very convincing. Even the relation of title to poem seems maddeningly obscure. How is this earthy? Is there some sort of bizarre sexual double entendre known only to Stevens? That seems fairly unlikely — and yet, no other explanation presents itself.

The confusion here is, I think, on one hand simply a result of looking too deeply, or of coming at the poem from the wrong perspective. A lot of Stevens’ writing seems to me to be inspired not by abstruse epistemological theories or Romanticism, but by children’s poetry. “Earthy Anecdote” makes most sense if read not as allegory or complicated symbol, but as nonsense verse. Dr. Seuss’ battling tweetle beetles aren’t symbols of the futility of martial endeavor. They’re just goofy fun for kids. Similarly, the clattering bucks and the firecat are entertaining images. It’s fun to say “bucks went clattering over Oklahoma.” (Go ahead, try it. I’ll wait.)

At the same time…Stevens was also, and undoubtedly, inspired by abstruse epistemology and Romanticism. And he was writing verse for adults, not kids. Starting his first volume of poetry off with a bit of extravagant silliness is a fairly dramatic line in the sand — even if the line is curved. It’s a certain kind of statement; an elliptical declaration of love for the earthy, clattering bucks rushing about in glorious, purposeless panic — metaphors in frantic search for a meaning. In that vein, perhaps you can see the firecat as Stevens himself, leaping here and there to goad his images (and perhaps his readers) into a lather, before closing his bright eyes in self-satisfied pleasure. Or, alternately, Stevens might be the bucks, thrashing this way and that in an effort to avoid a meaning which is always leaping to thwart them — and which, in lazy triumph, curls around the poem at the end despite every horse’s best efforts.

None of these explanations are “right”, I don’t think. Rather, the point of the poem is the pleasurable possibilities of the point of the poem. That’s how the modernist puzzle works; the poem is playing with its own interpretation. Form and content (buck and firecat?) aren’t separated, or even separable; the content of the poem is its own metaphors. The reader doesn’t so much understand the poem, as shuttle about inside it. It’s a joke where the punchline is that the form of the joke is the punchline.

There are not a ton of comics that play these kinds of shell games with meaning, form, and content. But one example that does spring to mind for me is Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel. In my review on Comixology I wrote:

Yokoyama had wrong-footed me. I was looking for realism, and so I found the epistemological uncertainty frustrating. But the book isn’t realism — or not exactly. It’s pomo; Yokoyama’s tongue is in his cheek the entire time. Take the scene of ducks flying over the plane as hunters shoot at them. The footnote points out that the hunters all miss, and indeed, you can see the ducks traveling in a perfect V, not even disturbed by the shells exploding in pristine, regimented bursts all around them. The demands of narrative (somebody shoots, somebody hits) are sacrificed, with a wink, to the exigencies of layout. It’s as if the hunters and the ducks are not adversaries at all, but part of some single great mechanism, controlled by one guiding hand. As, of course, they are.

In Travel, as in Stevens, the sleight-of-hand manipulation of the tropes of the medium, the formal elements of the work, are themselves the content. As a result, modernist works like this are like two facing mirrors; absolutely flat surfaces leading into infinite depths.

I’m not saying that this is the only kind of worthwhile art by any means. I don’t want all art to be playful modernist puzzles anymore than I want all art to be slasher films or shojo. Still, Stevens and Yokoyama are great, and I wouldn’t at all mind seeing more comics that followed in their hoofprints.

Hooded Polyp: Parallax Review

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Following links from Noah’s kickoff post through Matthias’ earlier essay on Asterios Polyp and on into the plethora of reviews gives a tour de force of puzzle-book annotation: Hellenistic references, astronomy, symmetry, architecture and fine art, the metaphorical/symbolic use of color and styles of linework, the yin-yang, and so forth. All of this clever, creative, and well-executed formalism works in the service of the book’s themes, which, the critics tell us, are myriad permutations on emotional naturalism and the limitations of duality – pretty much every duality you can think of.

What this emphasis on parsing the puzzle pieces and tracking the themes all adds up to is another tour-de-force: this time of modernist reading. Matthias sums up it up when he asserts, beautifully and certainly accurately, that the “graphic representation happens on a narrative level above that directly experienced by the characters, directing the reader’s understanding of their inner lives and states of mind.”

I’m going to pick on Matthias here, kindly I hope, because I found his essay to be far and away the most sophisticated and compelling articulation of this approach to interpreting Asterios Polyp — but it’s an approach that I find neither sophisticated nor compelling. With attribution to Bart Beaty (although Doug Wolk also makes the point), Matthias describes all this meaning-rich formalism as a “delayed Modernism,” and to some extent it is – particularly the Joycean puzzle-box elements and the self-conscious effort to push and expand the ways the form can make meaning. But for whatever motivation, this Modernism is small in a way that the more timely Modernisms of the early- to mid-20th century were not: it is primarily a modernism of technique rather than a modernism of ideas. Pound’s dictum of “Make it new!” finds its manifestation here not in new ideas about the world, but in new ways of representing and documenting old ideas about the world using the comics medium. Taking on the project of modernism 75 years after its time has passed is art in the defensive mode: starting from the assumption that comics has something to prove rather than something to offer.

I want to posit for the sake of argument that Asterios Polyp is in fact not a work of Modernist fiction that yields its greatest insights and makes its strongest contribution through this puzzle-box formalist reading but that it is a work of Postmodernist fiction that yields equally well to readings of its “deep structure.” This is, I think, somewhat inaccurate: Mazzucchelli clearly intended all those clever references and allusions and manipulations of formal elements, and it is unarguable that they form the most impressive and coherent texture of meaning in the book.

But there is content in the form overall: it’s apparent when we redirect the attention we’ve been paying to Asterios and Hana as archetypes of gendered characters and instead abstract them into archetypes of cultural genealogy and influence: the Hellenistic and the Japanese. The book works passably well – although it is difficult to knit all the elements in – as an allegory for the gradual shift of Western culture (particularly art culture) away from rigid Hellenism to incorporate the more fluid and holistic perspective of the East. Read diachronically, it is a representation of the history of this evolution across the 20th century; read synchronically, it depicts their aggregated and therefore simultaneous presense in contemporary art and culture. (This reading accounts for all those niggling elements that felt anachronistic, but renders many of the specifics of the formalism irrelevant.)

I’m going to pick on Matthias again – I think this is extremely literary. But I want to take a fairly passioned exception to the assumptions about literary meaning – and even to the definition of “literary” – implicit in sentences like this one: “A textbook example for the literary crowd if one is needed — and it might well be — that graphic novels are not, actually, novels with pictures in them.”

There are two obvious ways to respond to the contempt for the “literary crowd” that drips from this sentence. The first is to point out that any literary-minded person who has been paying attention to graphic novels enough to have an opinion at all by now should be fully aware of this fact. The second is to point out that the main reason why a literary-minded person who is paying attention would agree with the statement “graphic novels are not, actually, novels with pictures in them” is that graphic novels are not, yet, consistently rising to the level where a literary person would grant the appellation “novel.” (Asterios Polyp indeed comes closer than most.)

For “literary” people, “literary” entirely stopped denoting “tightly constructed narrative story” sometime between Joyce and Coover. The deconstruction of that idea, of the very concept of narrative coherence as a “literary” attribute, was the project and product of literary Modernism. Statements like these miss that entirely:

Furthermore, the centrality of autobiography as a genre to the development of the European comic book is almost by default primarily a literary achievement. And, almost without exception, the artists who have found greater audiences – the Satrapis, the Sfars and the Trondheims – work within relatively traditional visual idioms and privilege their storytelling over graphic experiments.

“The point being, firstly, that most of the visual innovators of the last couple of decades have primarily explored the already existing visual tropes and strategies of narrative cartooning, rather than go beyond them, and secondly, that they have predominantly done so in service of a tightly constructed, “literary” narrative.

Both the quotes and my stock responses reproduce a contrived and unnecessary distinction — even a hostility — between the literary and the visual. Both ignore the extent to which that binary – that particular binary – is not only just as false as any of the binaries in Asterios Polyp, but specifically, and inherently, and inescapably false in comics more than in any other medium. Claiming that comics are a visual medium and not also a literary one is not only misunderstanding what literature is after Modernism, it is using as the model for “art comics” a “formalism” more like what literature espoused before Modernism.

And that is the great failure of both this book and its critics: this subject matter and medium in the hands of our greatest literary figures would not be just a meditation on history or emotional naturalism or the limitations of binaries; it would be a performative enactment of the ways in which comics defies the binary between literary fiction and visual art. Cartooning by definition deconstructs its “constitutive binary logic.”

The formalist instantiation of that deconstruction is the great opportunity for “metafiction” that is missed here.

As Noah rightly pointed out, this book pays disproportionate attention to one side of the binary, the “visual.” Neither Mazzucchelli nor his reviewers learned the book’s lesson – at least not as anything more than an aphorism. The result is the reiteration – on the level of performance if not assertion – of a hierarchical division between “the literary” and the “graphical”: a dichotomy that is aggressive and dismissive in precisely the same way as Asterios’ treatment of Hana. It is completely uninformed about how literary fiction works. It creates a destructive incoherence at the center of the book.

The “delayed Modernist” project in comics, especially insofar as it describes a formal project focused on making the medium’s visual components more fully saturated with meaningfulness, arrogantly rejects – against the spirit of Modernism – any exploration of the ways in which the experiments in prose conducted in literary modernism and postmodernism are applicable to the graphic form. This disciplinary prioritization of the visual is not delayed Modernism. It is delayed Enlightenment. But comics were always already postmodern. So this is also nostalgia, in academic’s clothing.

Comics rightly should stimulate conversation between the best of literary post/Modernism and the best of visual post/Modernism, with the aim of generating increasingly subtle and sophisticated hybrids and an increasingly subtle and sophisticated understanding of the possibilities and internal logics of those hybrids. For whatever reason – be it the technical demands of drawing, the training of art school, or just plain imaginative disposition – the dominant trend is to privilege and prioritise the “visual” over the “literary” – a category which critics and cartoonists seem incapable of understanding as anything other than a synonym for “well-wrought prose storytelling.” I hope comics won’t have to lose an eye before you figure out how stupid that is.

Note: updated for clarification June 6 1:20pm.

Update by Noah: You can read the entire Asterios Polyp roundtable here.

Update by Noah 6/20/10: This comments thread was damaged in a blog outage. I have manually restored the damage, but time stamps are off and one or two comments may be out of order. Please let me know in comments if you notice errors.

Talking Polyps

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I thought we’d take a pause in the middle of our Asterios Polyp roundtable to highlight some of the points that have come up in comments.

Craig Fischer had a fascinating comment on Mazzucchelli’s use of word balloons:

You can see how appealing and effective Mazzucchelli’s word balloons are by comparing them to the balloons in most contemporary mainstream comics, which look ugly to me: resolutely rectangular, filled with text that looks like it was generated by computer.

Mainstream creators have struggled with personalizing captions, especially when the text moves across panels and the speaker is unseen in the second panel.

Kurt Busiek will sometimes write one panel where a character says something like, “If we can’t stop that dinosaur…” This panel is then followed by another that (1.) visually eliminates the speaker (showing, say, only the rampaging dinosaur); but (2.) continues his/her speech (“…we’re all DEAD!”) in a caption.

Alert readers realize that the words in the second-panel represents the character continuing to talk. But Busiek and his collaborators have tried to insert other cues to eliminate any ambiguity about who’s speaking. One solution: characters are assigned different colors, and their captions are always in that color.

When Busiek wrote THE AVENGERS, he sometimes included the logo of the speaking character at the beginning of the caption box. For instance, a little shield appeared at the beginning of the caption if Captain America was talking but was unseen.

All of this really cluttered up the visuals, though–sometimes you’d have five different logos and colors for the captions littering a single page–and was nowhere nearly as elegant as the balloons in ASTERIOS POLYP.

Suat compares Asterios Polyp and Born Again (scroll down in comments for my response.)

What’s also interesting is that Born Again is filled with hoary cliches: damsel in distress, betrayal and redemption, the hero’s “rebirth” etc. Exactly the kind of thing which Noah decries in his review of AP. How many times have we seen the noir hero pull himself up from the gutter? (Darwyn Cooke’s Parker must be the most recent example/adaptation in comics)

And yet Born Again seems less tiresome in that respect when compared with AP which is similarly choked with cliches (or archetypes, whichever way you want to look at it). Does genre work at a different level than work of more serious intent? Does it appeal to some subconscious craving particularly in the male mind? I imagine that some of Born Again’s success must be put down to its pacing and the detailing of emotions(the later of which is lacking in AP possibly by choice). But is it only that extra twist of lemon in the plotting and the characterization?

Sidenote: You can actually see some of the dry brush work mentioned by Derik (re: the rocks in AP) in Born Again. I presume it became an even greater aspect of his art following his sojourn in Japan. Born Again would appear to be a steep learning curve for Mazzucchelli – you can see him improving as an artist right up to the final issue.

Robert Stanley Martin provides a choice Mazzucchelli quote

Here’s Mazzucchelli’s account of his collaboration with Miller on Born Again, from TCJ #194:

Frank was writing full scripts, but we were also discussing the stories. In fact, it was Frank’s idea to list our credits on the book as just reading “by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli,” not broken up into writer/artist/whatever. He asked me if that would be okay with me, because he didn’t want there to be any confusion. And as far as I was concerned it was perfectly acceptable, because the way we were working, there were ideas going back and forth where it would have been difficult to draw a clear line of demarcation–this came from one person, this came from the other person. Frank had the ideas for the stories, and he would call me up and we’d talk about it. And we’d hash it out and I’d have ideas of my own: “Well, what if this happens? And how about if we show it this way?” or whatever. And then he’d write a full script and then we’d have another long discussion about the script and then I’d draw from that. In fact, as I recall, everything that happens in the first three issues or so Frank initially wanted to put into the first issue. But because of discussions we had, we ended up expanding that, so that it was much slower, more densely packed.

And Daniel BT highlights the fact that the roundtable has been awfully cranky.

Anyways, one thing that bothers me about all this reviewing about Asterios Polyp is that nobody seems to ENJOY the comic. Rather than point out the innovations in the drawings, they’d rather point out how superficial the story is, how one-dimensional the characters are, and how unlikeable the main character is. I don’t like Woody Allen that much either, but I prefer Asterios better, since he’s not as neurotic, even when the spotlight keeps shining on him.

Lot’s more chatter in comments, and three more reviews to go (by Caroline Small, Robert Stanley Martin, and Matthias Wivel) before the roundtable winds down.