Tag Archives: gaze

Reading Between the Lines: The Subversion of Authority in Two Graphic Novels for Young Adults by Ariel Kahn

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Editor’s Introduction: This month’s “Sequential Erudition” features Ariel Kahn’s paper originally presented at the IBBY UK/NCRCL Conference last November. We choose it for this month’s column because its use of Laura Mulvey’s concept of the “gaze” fits with Noah’s recent post on Moto Hagio here at HU and a number of comment conversations. Personally, I appreciate the way Kahn combines thematic and formal analysis in combination with theoretical texts to make his point and provide an engaging essay. We’ll still looking for more papers for future columns, so if any academics out there would like to participate, leave a message. -Derik.

Reading Between the Lines: The Subversion of Authority in Two Graphic Novels for Young Adults by Ariel Kahn

Originally presented at IBBY UK/NCRCL Conference, 14 November 2009 at Roehampton University, London.

A recent resurgence in the publication of comics and graphic narratives specifically aimed at young adults raises a range of issues about the nature of authority, and the role of the reader in negotiating the narrative and constructing meaning in and through the interplay of image and text. This paper explores the diverse relationships between image and text, and the implications of the enhanced role they create for the reader.

The Problematics of Children’s Literature

The notions of authority and of the relationship between writer and reader are central to critical discussions of literature for children and young adults. This is evident in the contrasting positions taken by Jacqueline Rose (1984) and Peter Hollindale (1997). Rose argues that ‘children’s fiction is impossible … it hangs on an impossibility, … this is the impossible relationship between adult and child’ (1984: 1). The use of the author’s adult authority to shape and instruct the reader leads Rose to view children’s literature pessimistically as an act of repression. In contrast, in Signs of Childness in Children’s Books, Hollindale defines the divide in critical focus in children’s literature as existing between those who ‘prioritise either the children or the literature’ in the study of children’s literature (1997: 8). He advocates instead a study of children’s literature as a ‘reading event’ (p.30) in a strategy that allows both the child and the text to have a place.

Image/Text Relationships in Picture Books and Comics

The possibility of such a ‘strategy’, and the exploration of the narrative possibilities of such a ‘reading event’ are, I will argue, particularly striking in comic books written for young adults, picture books in which the active engagement with image and text opens up a multiplicity of possible readings, rather than enacting the closure and repression of which Rose warns. In How Picturebooks Work (2001) Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott identify ‘a taxonomy of picture book interactions’, which places the interactions of image and text on a sliding scale from Symmetry, to Enhancement, Counterpoint, and Contradiction. The authors are most interested in those picture books that use ‘counterpoint’, i.e., when ‘words and images provide alternative information or contradict each other in some way’ (Nikolajeva and Scott, 2001: 17, quoted in Donovan, 2002: 110).

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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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