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 invoke 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). For Eco, such works deny the validity of all other interpretations and attempt to prevent the reader from making any interpretation other than the canonical one. However, 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. No single canonical interpretation can now be laid upon the art so that instead of convergence, modern art is divergent. 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.

It follows that the existence of matters external to the text -- for example, those in the list above -- are not trivia at all, but point to issues fundamental to defining art, including popular art, in the modern world.

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)

Where's this going?

It's not clear to me where you're going with this, Tim. On the one hand we have those 16 examples at the top, which could be expanded to 160 or 1600 in linear time at a rate approaching one's typing speed. It seems to me that most involve fairly limited issues with definite answers. As you indicate, such issues are not specific to manga and anime, but are true for all art. But, they're also true for ordinary conversation. For years students of discourse have been recording and transcribing ordinary conversations and analyzing them for various phenomena, including for those things that are unsaid but presupposed or implied by what was said. That's one sort of thing. Call it "connect the dots."

Then we have your comments about Eco et al. Now you seem to be talking about interpretive schemes that apply to whole works of art. That involves issues of a different scale and kind. What's more Eco (whom I have not read) is claiming that modern art is uniquely open and so its works yield divergent interpretations. You endorse this view and enlist it for manga and anime even as you asserted, in your opening sentence, that all art and literature involve extratextuality. So, are we dealing with something that's unique to modern art or something that's characteristic of all art?

Getting back to those sixteen examples, it seems to me that while some of them do not go beyond ordinary connect-the-dots, others are a bit different. Lets start with an easy case.

Consider your second example. I'm not familiar with Burst Angel, but I suspect that Japanese viewers will recognize that tower while Western viewers will not - unless they've been to Tokyo or have consulted one of the many guides to things-Japanese-in-anime-and-manga that one can find in bookstores. That is, for a Japanese viewer, recognition of the tower is as simple and direct as recognition of the sun in the daytime sky. For the Western viewer, recognition of the sun is the same as it is for the Japanese, but recognition of the tower is different. The Westerner needs to consult a reference work of some kind.

But we can tell similar stories about elements in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late 14th century English romance. When a contemporary English aristocrat (or churchman, the text was probably written by a cleric) encounters the name "Felix Brutus" in the first stanza, he knows who that is without giving it a second thought. It's part of the national lore. But you and I, who didn't grow up with that lore, we need some help from external sources. (Felix Brutus is great grandson of Aeneas and the legendary founder of Britain.)

Your examples from Innosenzu, however, seem to me to be different in character. While both are of a limited sort and so have determinate answers, I don't think Oshii assumed an audience who would know who Haraway or Bellmer are. That movie is jammed with cultural references, at least some of which would be obvious to anyone watching the film, but just which ones would depend on the viewer. This is not ordinary connect-the-dots. This is something else. And this something else may well be characteristic of modern (or even postmodern) art, but not of all art. And it seems characteristic of certain anime but not all anime.

Then we have Ergo Proxy. I've only watched a few episodes, and I don't remember them well. What I mostly remember is a grim world and some characters named after European philosophers. This is not ordinary connect-the-dots either, nor is it characteristic of all anime. But I don't think it's the same as what Oshii does in Innosenzu.

Thus, what I find interesting is that there are distinctions to be made within your 16 cases. But how many, and what kind, I don't know. That's an open ended research project, but it's a different kind of research project from one extending from those (and other) cases to general problems of interpretation. --William L. Benzon 15:21, 28 September 2008 (CDT)

Where's it going? Well, we have to work that out in more detail, don't we. I don't know how many examples will remain, but what I was thinking of was using them as a series of anchors to subpages -- I think that's possible here -- and asking you, for example, to put the comments you made on Bellmer (over on Wiki) into the Bellmer subpage. The result will be a series of explorations of the general interpretational questions raised by each. Ultimately, the purpose is to illustrate that unlike Dante (assuming Eco is right about him, and it sounds right) there can be no single canonical interepretation of works like these.

Burst Angel isn't all that simple. Matt read a Wiki version of the BA comment, and said that it might be the Kobe Tower too -- or, if you've seen the anime "The Place Promised in Our Early Days," the mysterious and hostile tower that They built on Hokkaido, whoever They might be, the Russians maybe... Japan is filled with such towers, and although Tokyo has one, the moment one starts thinking, Matt has a point. The identity of that tower proves a bit more elusive than it seems. That conclusion is especially true when one watches the Good Guy mecha clamber up the tower carrying a young man in its metal fist, and puts him down on the platform at the top of the tower to defend itself as flying relatives the Bad Guy monster attack dive-bomber style. And it's not a hero who is controlling the Good Guy mecha -- it's a girl. This stuff is not so simple once one gets beyond being a fanboy and seeing it only as diversion and entertainment.

We're going to publish a first-rate review of Ergo Proxy in Mechademia, by a brilliant young British film critic named Paul Jackson.

So far as reader response theory and ambiguity in conversation go, I was going to get to it eventually. But, since you mentioned it, why don't you put together a couple of paragraphs on the subject and put them into a separate section of this Sandbox?

Or, if not that, then something about the distinctions you find in this collection of examples?

Timothy Perper 16:26, 28 September 2008 (CDT)