User:Timothy Perper/SandboxExtraManga

Sandbox for Extratextuality in Manga article

Please do not make changes directly on the draft text. It causes chaos -- and I speak from experience. Instead, put comments, criticisms, and suggestions below the text under a separate heading. Thanks. Timothy Perper 10:29, 27 September 2008 (CDT)

Extratextuality in Manga Draft Text

"Extratextuality" refers to the fact that many manga and anime (indeed all art and literature) make references to phenomena external to the frame of the story itself and that are not fully explained within the frame of the story. To find out what those phenomena are -- their names, identities, and characteristics -- we must exit the frame and find other material. Examples may prove more illuminating that definitions, so here are a few.

1. In Miyazaki's Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea Ponyo's family are red-haired, sea-dwelling supernatural beings with immense magical powers. What are they called?
2. In Burst Angel, the Good Guys battle a monster on top of a huge steel tower in Tokyo. What is the tower?
3. In Gunslinger Girl, a painting is shown in a museum in Florence of a nude woman standing on a sea shell emerging from the sea. Who is she and what is the painting?
4. In Jin Kobayashi's manga School Rumble, the word cubism appears over an angular and distorted portrait of a woman. What does cubism refer to?
5. In Mamoru Oshii's animated film Innosenzu, the cyborg coroner is named Haraway. Who is she? Later, Tegusa picks up a book by Hans Bellmer. Who is he?
6. In Yoshiaki Kawajiri's animated film Lensman, Kimball's friend Buskirk is shown as having two small horns on his forehead. What is he?
7. In Kazuhiro Furubashi's anime Le Chevalier d'Eon, Beaumont d'Eon's sister Lia is assassinated and her soul moves into Eon's body. When she emerges to take over his actions, he is shown wearing women's clothing. Is this appropriate to Beaumont d'Eon or is it merely a way to indicate that Lia has taken control?
8. In the same anime, a woman named Ekaterina is shown as seizing the throne of the Russian empire after the husband, the heir apparent to the throne, dies. Is this a fictional invention?
9. In the same anime, who are Cagliostro and Saint Germain? Inventions and poetic license, yes?
10. In Shukou Murase's anime Ergo Proxy, Vincent Law is from Moscow and possesses a flying ship (that is, a sea-going ship that can fly). He uses it to visit Moscow with his companions Real Mayar and Pino. This is made up, isn't it?
11. Also in Ergo Proxy, the woman physician is named Daedelus. Is there an Icarus in the anime, and, if so, who is it?
12. In Masaki Watanabe's anime Bartender, the narrator tells a story about how Suntory, a Japanese liquor manufacturer, distilled Scotch whisky for the first time in Japan. Poetic license and invention?
13. In Yuichiro Yano's anime Moyashimon, the hero is able to see microbes that are normally too small to see without a microscope. He can see bacteria everywhere and yeast in the sake vats. Are these bacteria real and does this mean that yeast we use for making bread are used for making sake?
14. In the same anime, one of the characters says it was the job of the shrine maiden to chew the rice used for making sake. What is a shrine maiden and is this true?
15. In the extremely popular anime Sergeant Frog, the Sergeant is obsessed with building Gundam models and we see a good many of them. Are any of them real Gundam models or are they all made up?
16. In the crackpot anime comedy Pani Poni Dash, in one scene we see a burning piece of paper with the words, in romaji, cthulhu R'lyeh...fthagn. Utter nonsense, right? (Pani Poni Dash is so jammed with this kind of thing that ADV, which sells the DVDs in the United States, put in pop-up menus to explain them.)

For some readers, these references to matters external to the story are irrelevant trivia because they do not impinge on the viewer's enjoyment (or lack of enjoyment) of the manga or anime. But that view is not sufficiently deep: it misses a profound set of issues raised by manga and anime, indeed, by all art: the capacity of art to take the viewer outside of the frame of the work itself to phenomena and events elsewhere in the world and in our experience. In his book "Opera Operta," Umberto Eco suggests that this ability of art to depend on extratextual material is the hallmark of modern, as opposed to classical, art: classical art and writing, e.g., Dante's Inferno, creates a closed universe of narrative and reference that operates not to expand our vision but to focus it on a few, canonical truths and realities (in Dante's case, religious truths). But, Eco continues, in modern art, the narrative and expressive universe created by the work of art -- writing, graphic art, and music -- is open, and does not, indeed, cannot, converge on only one or two canonical meanings and interpretations. Instead, modern art -- of which manga and anime are examples -- requires that the reader/viewer fill in missing elements that are not described or depicted in the work itself. Thus, modern art has gaps that are essential to defining what it does and means. The Japanese film critic Kenji Iwamoto has called these gaps "unexpressed expression," because he points out that gaps can be left deliberately by the film-maker in order to bring the viewer into the film as its co-creator. Manga commentator Setsu Shigematsu has made a similar observation about manga, pointing to the role of both conscious and unconscious processes in the viewer to create meaning for extratextual elements, and Perper and Cornog have used her ideas for analyzing portrayals of people and sexual events in manga.

More to come, including references.

Comments and Suggestions

This article is designed for cross-referencing to other articles. Timothy Perper 10:29, 27 September 2008 (CDT)