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)

I really like the idea of writing mini-articles about each of those cases. But I don't think we should limit ourselves to those 16. For one thing, we need examples from manga as well. But I think of it as an ongoing and open-ended process and which any number of people can participate. As the articles get written, we can then look over them, do a bit of analysis, and come to conclusions about subclasses. Think of it as a reference collection in manga and anime extra-textuality. -- William L. Benzon 10:05, 29 September 2008 (CDT)

Hans Bellmer

This is a quick and dirty transfer of material I wrote in a sandbox (that is, it's not been "released" to "the public") at the Wikipedia. I'll clean it up later.

Actually, Tim, I think Hans Bellmer is more intimately related to Innosenzu than your remark suggests. I didn't recognize the name when I first saw it, so I looked it up. Where? Where else? Wikipedia, that's where. And the first thing I saw in the article was one of his doll sketches. "Gee, that body looks a lot like the female cyborgs at the center of the action in Innosenzu," so I thought.

Indeed it does. And the article mentions that. If it weren't for the fact that Bellmer's name is explicitly in the movie, we'd have pretty much the situation you've got with Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea and shōjō. There's something in a movie that looks an aweful lot like something described and depicted in another source. The fact that a connecting name is explicitly there in Innosenzu simply reinforces the connection.

The Wikipedia article directed me to an essay by one Sue Taylor, an art historian at U of Chicago: Hans Bellmer in The Art Institute of Chicago: The Wandering Libido and the Hysterical Body. I've not read the whole thing, but it's got some inteesting illustrations and what I have read is most interesting. Not only did he make sketches of dolls, but he constructed dolls, some of them life-size, and photographed them in various (often erotic) poses. Consider this passage from Taylor's essay:

Bellmer's doll, the first sculptural construction of an erstwhile graphic designer, developed out of a series of three now legendary events in his personal life: the reappearance in his family of a beautiful teenage cousin, Ursula Naguschewski, who moved to Berlin from Kassel in 1932; his attendance at a performance of Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann, in which the protagonist falls tragically in love with the lifelike automaton Olympia; and a shipment from his mother of a box of old toys which had belonged to him as a boy. Overwhelmed with nostalgia and impossible longing, Bellmer acquired from these incidents a need, in his words, "to construct an artificial girl with anatomical possibilities...capable of re-creating the heights of passion even to inventing new desires."

Bellmer celebrated his invention of the doll in a delirious essay, "Memories of the Doll Theme" (1934): "It was worth all my obsessive efforts," he wrote, "when, amid the smell of glue and wet plaster, the essence of all that is impressive would take shape and become a real object to be possessed." In their explicit sexual implications, the images of "young maidens" he put forth in this essay depart dramatically from the ideal of the innocent femme-enfant.

If you know Innosenzu, then you realize that that is right smack at the heart of the film.

So what? At the very least we know that Oshii was in some way influenced by Bellmer. Beyond that, this film is jam packed with references of all sorts, including Haraway. That's part of its technique. Does one need to "get" all of these references in order to "understand" this film? If so, then I certainly don't understand it, because there must be scads of references I don't "get." I'm not even sure I "understand" the film any better now that I know who Hans Bellmer is and what he did. I understand something a bit better, something about the film, about the circulation of cultural tropes in the early 21st century. But the film itself?

Consider a related example, The Matrix. We know that film was inspired, in part, by Ghost in the Shell. It has motifs from GitS. For example, the cascading green characters in the title sequence and here and there in the film, that's from GitS. Do you need to know that in order to understand what's going on in The Matrix? I don't think so. Whatever's going on in The Matrix, I don't think it's playing off of GitS in any interesting way. If you're interested in understanding something we might call "the international film system," then, yes, you need to know about the connection between GitS and The Matrix, and lots of other connections as well. But if you just want to curl up and enjoy a flick, then knowing that connection isn't going get you more juice out of the popcorn.

More:

Somewhere not too far above, Tim, you assert, of these sorts of things: "In every case, it is a matter of fact, not interpretation or judgement, what the answers are." However, determining matters of fact may be easy or it may be difficult and there are certainly situations where matters of fact cannot be definitively determined. For example, whether or not OJ Simpson murdered his wife is a matter of fact, but a criminal court has not determined that to be a matter of undisputed fact, though many people certainly have earnestly held beliefs to the contrary. As another example, whether or not there is intelligent life somewhere out there in the universe is a matter of fact (subject, no doubt, to all sorts of quibbling over the definition of "intelligent life"), but determining that fact is a rather difficult matter. I bring this matter up, not because I think any of your examples involve matters of fact that are as perplexing as those two examples (in the different ways), but because, as you well know, we makes lots of statements about literary works that are irreducibly matters of interpretation and judgement. I rather imagine that someone somewhere has argued that Shakespeare's King Lear is a critique of the patriarchal family. That is a matter of interpretation and requires an appropriate argument. The sorts of things you're interested in aren't like that.

So, let's return to Innosenzu and Bellmer. We have that book that Batou finds in the library in the boathouse where the inspector was murdered. The name "Hans Bellmer" is on the cover of that book. The link between that name and the German artist, Hans Bellmer, is an undisputed matter of fact. It is, however, a fairly obscure fact. Most people don't know it and so at least some of them are going to require some kind of evidence for an assertion linking the image in the movie with that historical figure. Unless we're dealing with a philosopher who wants to score as many epistemological points as possible, there is little difficulty supplying such evidence. If we are dealing with such a philosopher, well then, all is lost.

But let's consider a related issue. The nature of the anime medium is such that one can't just invoke a generic book with "Hans Bellmer" on the cover. If this were a purely literary work, yes, we could get away with that. But anime is a visual medium. We see the image of a book. Hence, the lettering has to be in some definite style, it has to have some specific coloring, it has to be in a specific place on the cover, and so forth. Given those requirements, we can ask this question: Does the film depict some specific real book by or about Bellmer, or is the image a fabrication? That question is about a matter of fact, but I don't have the evidence needed to answer it. If I had to guess, I'd guess that its an image of a real book, but I don't really know. I just have an intuitive sense that Oshii would prefer to depict a real book over making one up. If that's what he did, then one ought to be able to find a copy of that book somewhere and thus verify that assertion. For all I know, Tim, the article you reviewed does just that. But I'm not in a position to do anything more than offer judgements and interpretations.

I rather imagine that that article is filled with many uncontested matters of fact about Bellmer and about Innosenzu. And it surely has some uncontested matters of fact about the relationship between the two. But, once we start talking about such relationships we're in territory where some judgements and interpretations may never be anything other than judgements and interpretations. For such relationships surely involve the issues Bellmer was exploring in his art and Oshii in his. Those issues don't strike me as being about matters of fact; they are of a different kind.

What kind?

I wish I knew. The meaning of life, the universe, 42? William L. Benzon 10:11, 29 September 2008 (CDT)

Eco, Dante, Interpretation

As I've indicated, I've not read Eco's book, but Amazon lets you read the first half-dozen pages or so and he does quote Dante there. I can make a comment about that, though that may not be what you had in mind.

There Eco is talking about a medieval scheme of Biblical interpretation in which each passage would be interpreted on four levels, with the literal meaning being one of them. He quotes a passage where Dante illustrates the scheme with a particular Bible verse. This four-level scheme is well-known and is a standard element in histories of lit crit. But I haven't the faintest idea what it meant for actual Biblical commentary written under that scheme. Who was authorized to write such commentary and did they have disagreements on the meaning of this or that passage? If so, did they let the disagreements stand, or did they work somehow to resolve them? I don't know. I assume that someone does, but I certainly don't. That much detail hasn't made it into the standard treatments. [Eco himself might know, as he is a Medievalist by training.]

In any event, that's Biblical commentary, not criticism of secular texts. That's how Dante looked at the Bible. Eco also indicates the four-fold scheme was extended to secular works, but he doesn't say anything about that, at least not it the little bit that's available on Amazon. Whatever that amounted to, it was the application of a Medieval scheme to various texts.

Beyond that, the systematic and detailed interpretation of secular texts didn't really get off the ground until relatively recently, the second and third quarters of the 20th century. Eco published Opera Aperta in 1962, which is about when critics began to wonder just what this interpretation business was all about: they'd been at it for long enough that it was time to do some serious thinking about methods. The Johns Hopkins conference that brought Derrida, Lacan, and others to America was four years in the future. By the time the dust had settled from that conference some were thinking that all texts were opera aperta.

And that's more or less where we are today. Though a few people have begun to wonder whether or not there's something to do that's different from, other than, interpretation. In 1989 a film critic named David Bordwell published Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Most of the book is an account of how film critics arrive at interpretations (make meanings). What cues do they look for in the films and how do they analyze them so as to yield an interpretation? But Bordwell also calls for a shift from interpreting films to a poetics of film, arguing that interpretation has become mechanical and predictable.

But what does any of this say about those 16 cases, and others like them? Not much that I can see. William L. Benzon 07:12, 29 September 2008 (CDT)

Some More Examples

Tim: I was looking through my notes and came across an email I'd written you back when I was first getting into manga and anime. I'm copying it into the sandbox because it has some more examples of extratextuality (in bold) and a remark or two. I discuss CLAMP's "Wish" and Tezuka's "Metropolis."

I've now read the first chapter of "Wish" and I'm delighted. And, you know, it's not just that Prospero rescued Ariel from a tree, while Suichiro rescues Kohaku from a tree. We've also got Ariel as a magical being thereby in service to Prospero and doing magic things for him. Prospero is an extremely learned man, Suichiro is a surgeon. And, at the end of the chapter, we have Kohaku telling us that "no man is an island." That of course is the English translation of I don't know what in Japanese. But it sure reads like a reference to the fact that Prospero had been marooned on an island. That pretty much clinches it for me; "The Tempest" is in play in this book and that's how I'll be reading it.

Not, mind you, that I think that one must do that in order to understand the book. But if you want to understand the larger cultural process, that's when you need to know that Prospero is in play here. & BTW, the more I think of it, the more it seems to me that Shakespeare is a good background for reading this stuff. I'm not so much thinking about catching Shakespearean references, but about the range of material that shows up in S's work, from vulgar puns, though Greek and Roman mythology, folk lore, etc. He put the full resources of his culture to use in his art. Well, that seems to be what's going on in manga, in the large. I digress.

Betting back to our little phrase, it is also a cliché about the need for other people, and was coined by John Donne and used as an epigraph to Hemingway's "For Whom the Bells Toll." And then there's the panel where one of those little bird commentators observes "Tears are fallin' like rain." Now, is that a Japanese cliché, or a blues cliché, or both?

Here's where the need for a community of sophisticated analysts comes in. Am I imagining these connections or are they real? If I saw these allusions in a work of "serious" literary art in English by some English or British writer I'd assume these allusions are as I've suggested above. Despite the fact that this book comes from Japan and is intended for teens (and older) I figure I've pretty much got to grant the same assumption. After all, back in 1949 Tezuka wrote a classic manga inspired, in part, by a still from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis." One Sherlock Holmes, master detective from London, appears as a character in this book, along with huge rodents described as rats but looking an aweful lot like Mickey Mouse and having the scientific name, mikimaus waltdisneus. [BTW, a native Japanese has verified that this is what was in the Japenese original, though not in romanji.] If that's what was going on in this world back in 1949, well "Wish" is almost 50 years later.

The only way to get this stuff sorted out is to get serious people -- albeit with a sense of fun and play -- working on it. The range of relevant material is vast and so requires a whole bunch of people working on it. William L. Benzon 18:02, 29 September 2008 (CDT)