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Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Observations on the Latest Modern Fiction Studies
The Winter 2006 number of Modern Fiction Studies hit the streets this morning. This issue is special, devoted to what it calls “graphic narrative,” but which everyone I know calls “funny books.” De gustibus, yes, but accompanied by a strong impulse to legitimize the objects they’re studying. After all, this is MFS, not The Journal of Popular Culture. For the sake of reference, the previous special issue (Summer 2006) was devoted to Toni Morrison, not exactly a marginal figure in contemporary literature. Reading the introduction and first three essays, I sense that the audience of this issue is MFS readers, not scholars of the works in question.
More evidence: Art Spiegelman’s Maus rests the on the tip of everyone’s tongues. Not that Maus isn’t brilliant—although, what with my interest in race and essentialism in contemporary literary studies and fin de siècle evolutionary theory, I find elements of it highly problematic—only that scholars have been embracing it for the better part of two decades. Project Muse alone pulls up 261 references to it, many of which with serious, scholarly titles like Erin Heather McGlothlin’s “No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus“ and Victoria A. Elmwood’s “‘Happy, Happy, Ever After’: The Transformation of Trauma between the Generations in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.” Being the subject of articles in Narrative and Biography indicates a work has acquired canonical cachet—so much, in fact, that its mention lends prestige to the lowly genre to which it belongs. Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven, the editors of this issue, say as much:
The project of this special issue is to bring the medium of comics—its conventions, its violation of its own conventions, what it does differently—to the forefront of conversations about the political, aesthetic, and ethical work of narrative. For many of us interested in graphic narrative, without any clear-cut methodology established for considering contemporary comics texts as multilayered narrative works (aside from debates within the field of postmodern fiction and postmodernism generally), and, until recently, without a range of examples to sit next to Maus on our bookshelves, Maus itself set the terms for ways to talk about what comics could do. It continues to set the terms, as a great, lasting work.
While I endorse all Chute and DeKoven say here, I’m a little perplexed by the notion that “until recently, without a range of examples to sit next to Maus on our bookshelves.” Cerebus—about which I’ll say more in a minute—hit its stride thirty years ago with High Society, Church and State and Jaka’s Story; Neil Gaiman started publishing The Sandman in 1988; the first volume of Maus appeared in 1986. All of which is only to say, if someone couldn’t find something to put on their shelves alongside Maus, they must not have been looking. And before anyone complains this is my inner enthusiast speaking, let me state plainly:
It isn’t. It’s my inner historicist—who is, admittedly, no less petulant—compelling me to defend the genre. Spiegelman may have been key to its acceptance in academic circles, but he sits at the end of a long tradition; one which, as long traditions will, contains a robust culture of immanent critique. To return to Dave Sim’s Cerebus: it began as a parody of works like Conan, Red Sonja and Prince Valiant, but eventually became a 6,000 page novel about conflicts between political and religious authorities, abuses of power and the feminist-homosexualist axis. The open embrace of misogyny is certainly unfortunate, but it points to one aspect of funny books the focus on “graphic narratives” or “graphic novels” ignores—being produced monthly, they capture the development of a person’s thought in a way other, more novelistic genres cannot. The Dave Sim who in 1995 wrote “Male Light does not Merge ... Thinking, Reason, is best served by solitude, isolation” is not the same man who appropriated Oscar Wilde’s voice to tell the story of a young woman coming to terms with her life in Jaka’s Story.
Or maybe he is. It’s arguable. However, the inability to revise work once it’s been published—to smooth over stylistic infelicities, to correct errors of fact or judgment—means that what comic artists produce is a record of thought unlike the one produced by novelists. Intellectual and artistic development can be tracked, month by month, in a way only available to students of the novel after their teachers have died. All of which is only to say that the focus on “graphic narratives” fails to address this particular historicist’s pet concerns. Which is fine. In the coming days, I’ll address the articles individually. Maybe it’s because this is the first time since I renounced my Joycean heritage that I’ve read every single primary text discussed in an article, but for some reason, I feel eminently qualified to analyze this issue of MFS.
Comments
I wouldn’t say that there are no examples of novels that track this progression of thought. What about Dickens or other 18th century writers who wrote their novels as serializations? Or something like Don Quixote, whose second part was written much later than and comments on the first?
That said, I think your main point is valid. There’s something to be said about serious academics finding something to say about graphic “novels” without wanting to touch old-fashioned, serialized comics, presumably because of they don’t want their colleagues to think that they do “Spider-Man Studies” or something.
It seems similar to television studies, long a bastard child of film studies. Only recently have people been able to take TV seriously. HBO has something to do with that, I believe, but TV studies needs to look at both “The Honeymooners” and “The Sopranos,” not just the more respectable, “novel-like” one.
Well, Scott, I read your post and the first thing that popped into my mind was “Where’s the treatment of manga?” I’ve now skimmed the table of contents, the introductory justification for the issue, and the concluding essay-review of seven books (one of which I’ve read, Comic Book Nation) and still, no manga. This doesn’t surprise me. And I’m even a bit reluctant to bring it up here, as I fear it may derail whatever it is you’re attempting to do. Still, if you’re interested in what happens when you publish a story segment by segment over a year, three years, a decade, well, manga’s got lots of titles. And, if it’s history you want, Japan has a long tradition of putting words and images on the same page.
Still, there are issues.
One obvious reason for excluding manga is that you can’t cover everything, so why not stick to graphic novels? This is cheek-by-jowl with the institutionalization of literary studies by national literature, with comp lit on the side. Yeah, Neil Gaiman was born in Britain, but that’s English, no? And Marjane Satrapi well . . . a cosmopolitan hard case. But most of the issue seems to be about home-grown stuff. And it’s also about stuff that’s “artsy” in some way, avant-garde, underground, or just plain cool, artsy and adult.
OTOH, a reason to include manga is that we’re living in a global world and graphic narrative is an international medium. Maus gets translated into 20+ languages and Japanese manga is available all over the world, in local translation. To the extent that one is interested in word and image together on the page, manga raises those issues as well. And then there is the fact that many of the artists who produce graphic novels are aware of and influenced by manga. Scott McCloud gets mentioned as a theorist of graphic narrative, and he’s certainly interested in manga. We are, as I said, dealing in an international medium. If you go into the large Barnes and Noble off Union Square in NYC you’ll find graphic novels and manga in the same place up there on the 4th floor. And if you read the trade press, you’ll read about how manga is the fastest growing segment of the domestic graphic narrative market.
And there’s the rub.
I suspect that the real problem with manga is that so much of it really is for kids, and so much of it, for kids and adults, is produced as mass-market commercial product (though there are artsy niche products). Manga accounts for 30% of Japan’s annual print production. So manga raises issues of legitimacy and canon and all that stuff. Under what rubric, if any, can a respectable academic study this material? Mighty though the legitimzing powers of Maus may be, it’s not powerful enough to ward off memories of that other mouse, Mickey, who manages to sneak into Osamu Tezuka’s classic manga, Metropolis, as a species of giant rat, mikimaus waltdisneus. Still, Tezuka’s 8-volume life of Buddha has its value, though it was written for 10-year old boys.
In any event, the University of Minnesota Press has started publishing an annual volume devoted to manga and anime culture. It’s called Mechademia and the first volume is now available. I’ve got a little review in it, where I discuss Rintaro’s Metropolis anime (loosely based on Tezuka’s manga) in conjunction with Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, both of which end in an apocalypse set to bittersweet music.
*Maus* wasn’t the first serious comic, of course. But it was the first comic book that one could read on a bus once one was older than 10 without feeling like a perv.
For me, the difference between comic books and graphic novels comes down to Frye’s distinction between levels of Hero: comic book heroes are always greater than a normal (wo)man, graphic novel heroes are always the same as, if not less than, a normal (wo)man.
(And what Benn Michaels failed to realize about *Maus* is, well, its whole point: Artie still sees the world as separated racially, and he learned this from Vladek, who has internalized the Nazi ideology about race. The book is about how “trauma” is passed down from generation to generation in a family, even when the new generation never actually experienced the direct source of the trauma. This isn’t about racial inheritance; it’s what actually happens in households. It’s why abused children become adult abusers. It’s why the children of survivors often eat their meals as if they are being hounded by Nazis and starving comrades.)
Lucky for me, iTunes decided to randomly shuffle to Rocket From the Tombs’s “Final Solution” as I was writing this: “I don’t need a cure / I need a final solution.”
But I thought that David Thomas always said that “Final Solution” wasn’t supposed to be a Nazi reference, and that’s why Pere Ubu didn’t play the song much later. (Who knows whether that was serious, or just a ploy to get rid of the people who took it the wrong way.) I suppose that could be in keeping with your point about passed-down trauma, though; the song that’s intended to be about an anguished loser and his suicidal temptations becomes larger in scope than intended.
Tom, I thought about the Dickens, then abruptly forgot to mention it. (I didn’t, however, think about Quijote, despite having written on it both extensively and recently.)
Sandman‘s an interesting example here, though, since it’s a serial treated as if it were a “graphic narrative.” Overall though, I’m a little annoyed by my tone in this post, as I really don’t want to seem so critical of the leap MFS‘s made to publish this issue and recognize the quality of work that’s, well, of variable but occasionally high quality.
Bill, I knew I could leave the manga up to you. (I’ve never read much, and when I try, find the conventions too jarring. I still snobbishly associate it with the Robotech reruns I woke up at 5 a.m. to watch as a kid.)
Luther, I’d forgotten WBM wrote about Maus, and had come to my annoyance independently. (Or thought I had.) Your comment makes me think I ought to re-read it before continuing this conversation.
Scott, whether or not you read manga is of course your business. We’ve all got our own agendas and more than enough things to think about. (For example, I own Maus but haven’t read it yet.)
But MFS had a bunch of writers and maybe a third of them writing on Maus and no one even mentioning that graphic narrative is a mainstay of the Japanese publishing industry. I felt a bit like what Carrie described at the MLA: listening to people wax eloquent about the potential of the internet without any apparent experience in the blogosphere.
I’d have been much happier if they’d dared, say, one article on manga. But I’d have been satisfied simply if the introductory article had said as much about manga as I did in the comment above, along with begging off on it in any of the perfectly reasonable ways available. Then I’d at least know that they had some sense of what’s out there. As it is . . . How can you advance a political criticism in this day and age that is apparently so West-o-centric? And gender issues? robots and cyberspace? All over manga.
In 15 or 20 years are we going to have one institutional system for graphic novels and a different and non-overlapping one for manga? How are you going to maintain that in the face of a population that’s growing up on both?
Rich, you’re totally right about “Final Solution.” I just thought it was weird that, just as I was typing about *Maus*, what should come on my iTunes shuffle (which has 15,000 songs) but a song called “Final Solution.”
In related news, the best section of Greil Marcus’s newest book is on Rocket From the Tombs/Pere Ubu/David Thomas.
Luther, yet again I grieve your refusal to put your unprecedentedly on-the-nose critique of Shape of the Siggy into an article for print.
“But it was the first comic book that one could read on a bus once one was older than 10 without feeling like a perv.” Naw, that’d be Eisner’s graphic novels, at the latest.
“For me, the difference between comic books and graphic novels comes down to Frye’s distinction between levels of Hero: comic book heroes are always greater than a normal (wo)man, graphic novel heroes are always the same as, if not less than, a normal (wo)man.”
But we already have Frye’s terminology for that. Why muddy the waters by introducing a content-linked definition of a form? It’s like the old saw, “If you say, ‘To me, a movie has a story about falling in love with Meg Ryan: if it doesn’t have that, it’s a film,’ you won’t find many other people to accept your definitions.”
I’ve just finished a book chapter about nineteenth century novels published and reissued in illustrated editions. Sequential pictorial narrative was already pretty sophisticated (in the English literary context, anyway) by the 1840s.
A few of the 1890s books I looked at were illustrated with pictures quite clearly derived from & influenced by ukiyo-e, Bill.
Interesting, Laura. By that time influence was also operating in the opposite direction, with European-style cartoons in Japan.
* * * * * *
Another thing on legitimacy. If you present a handfull of graphic narratives as being somehow experimental you don’t really have to challenge the notion that cartoons are for kids. But when you’re dealing with books being read by adults in one of the advanced (post)industrial civilizations, that’s troublesome. Maybe the Japanese are just crazy and decadent, or maybe comics aren’t just for kids. What are we evading or repressing by consigning comics to kids?
Josh is completely right, of course, about Eisner and my Frye distinction. I should have said that comics are for children and sex offenders, while graphic novels are for avid readers of *The New Yorker*.
It’s worth pointing something out about Cerebus though, Scott: while you’re right that Sim underwent a major change of heart about women and men during that time (moving from self-loathing to jes’ plain loathing, among other things), the story itself was constructed early on, and the climax of Minds (book 10 of 16) was literally twenty years in the making. So the central revelations in the storyline, the fantasy elements 200 issues old that needed resolving (what’s up with Cerebus and ‘Cirin,’ etc.) were always set in stone, and when Minds came around ‘New Dave’ was working within constraints that ‘Old Dave’ had put up decades before. That tension grants the middle books of the series an extraordinary richness - Sim isn’t just writing a polemic, he’s criticizing his own old imagined cultural framework.
Worth comparing to the evolution of something like NYPD Blue or Seinfeld or The X-Files over a period of many years, during which the creators’ relationships to the work changed radically.
It’d be interesting to see sustained analysis of the tonal shifts, changes in characterization, and flat-out contradictions in the book leading up to that time, after which he was improvising and responding to his whims in-the-moment. Cerebus is somewhat radioactive even now, but I think it offers more material for scholars than any other series - intentionally and unintentionally.
I appreciate Scott’s critiques of the old-school modernist assumptions of the new MFS issue and Bill’s critiques of its implicit nationalism. What would a transnationalist animation studies look like? It would have to include studies of children’s literature, at the very least--looking at how people working in those fields have handled the “just kids’ stuff” issue would be instructive, no doubt. It should also draw on and learn from the institutional histories of film, tv, and video game studies.
I just heard a great conference paper by Jeffrey Tucker of the University of Rochester that addressed some angles of this issues. What else have people been hearing/reading about lately that relates?
There’s so much to say about manga and anime: their relation to Disney; their multiple genres and audiences/fan cultures (never knew there were slash versions of hit anime/manga, but there are); their vectors of globalization (just read a piece in The Japan Times on their popularity in France); their gender and cultural politics, within and outside Japan....
From the few people I’ve met in Japan working in cultural studies, I’ve heard the manga/anime industry is starting to target older readers more, as they’re beginning to have trouble drawing in younger readers. Giant Robotech special edition “statues” sell for hundreds of dollars, so there’s a big nostalgia market for the old kids’ stuff, too.
I’m not sure what they’re worried about, though, as kids’ tv is saturated with anime--such as a hilarious send-up of the “wise ronin who solve people’s problems” (that is, A-Team) conventions in Zen Mai Samurai, and even wackier things like ninja school and cooking school shows I don’t even know the titles of. Shinchan Curayon is comparable to South Park.
Things move so quickly, though, that they just released a Stand Alone Complex movie that tried to monkeywrench the tv series back into the Ghost in the Shell chronology (an impossible task, but one clearly designed to get younger audiences interested in the ancient history that is the first GitS movie here).
But maybe that’s the problem--what with the video games and the cell phones and the tv and movies, old-fashioned manga may be in trouble....
I can report that there are many fewer people reading manga in the subways than I would have expected, at least in the parts of Fukuoka I’m commuting on at the hours I am. (Like 1 or 2 people in not-so-crowded subway car average.) But people still tend to treat the convenience and book store offerings as reading rooms, so that aspect of manga culture seems alive and well, in Chiba and Fukuoka, at least.
More at Mostly Harmless over time....
TC: A few quick hits. On kiddie lit, Beverly Lyon Clark has considered the “just for kids” issue quite extensively in her Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America, which I’ve discussed briefly on The Valve. One point she argues is that in the US, we didn’t have a well-institutionalized distinction between children’s literature and adult literature until the first quarter of the 20th century.
As for Disney and manga-anime, yes of course. But not exclusively Disney. I’ve seen it argued, for example, that the big eye conventions of manga and anime derive from the early Fleisher Brothers (Betty Boop). Don’t know whether I believe that or not, but there’s more than Disney going on.
As for adult readers of manga, they’ve certainly been targeted for years; though I have no sense of whether or not that’s on the rise. For example, Lone Wolf and Club has a level of historical seriousness and violence that suggests it was conceived for an adult audience. It first appears in 1970 and continued for a decade.
Scott, Bill: Japanese manga, yes, but the French also appear to have a huge industry of serious comic books for adults, and very lavishly published (hard covers, beautiful paper, rich colors, good printing), much more agreeable to the eye and hand than the manga. And rightly so, perhaps: it’s pictures, something to look at, isn’t it obvious it should be aesthetically appealing? :)
May an outsider to the Valve chime in?
Bill Benzon mentioned the journal Mechademia: An Academic Forum for Anime, Manga and the Fan Arts <http://mechademia.org>. My wife Martha Cornog and I are Review and Commentary Editors for Mechademia, and Martha also co-writes the graphic novels column in Library Journal. If you’d like to know what serious scholarly analysis of anime and manga looks like, the articles and reviews we’re publishing in Mechademia will give you one answer—Volume 1 is now published, Volume 2 is awaiting publication, and we’re now working on Volume 3.
We publish analyses and critiques in the field by Anglophone and Japanese scholars (the journal is in English), including papers on (among other things) Hayao Miyazaki (Susan Napier), werewolves in anime (Antonia Levi), globalization of manga (Wendy Suiyi Wong), costume play (Theresa Winge), video game design (Mark Wolf), the rediscovery of Mori Minoru (Tatsumi Takayami), Revolutionary Girl Utena (Mari Kotani), plus a variety of reviews by Patrick Drazen, Brian Ruh, Bill Benzon, and us. It’s an eclectic and interesting mix. We’re trying to avoid both fan-burbling ("otaku speak") and pomo-litcritese, and so far we’ve succeeded.
In their introduction to the MFS issue about graphic narratives, Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven wrote that Art Spiegelman’s Maus is “... arguably the world’s most famous comics work...” (p. 768). I just Googled “Maus + Spiegelman” and got 416,000 hits for the combination, whereas Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s “Death Note” yielded 1,380,000 hits for “Death Note + manga” (original, Shueisha, 2003; US translation, Viz, 2006). “Sailor Moon” yielded 2,200,000 hits, “Batman + comic” gave 2,820,000 hits, and “Superman + comic” gave 1,730,000 hits.
To be sure, Googling provides only a rough index of the elusive concept of being famous, but “Maus” got about 15-30% of the hits of the really famous comics. And may I suggest, with all due courtesy, that if one can’t rattle off the characters and plotlines of “Death Note” and “Sailor Moon,” then perhaps one is a little bit less well informed than one thinks?
And if it then boils down to someone saying disdainfully that “Maus” is Good Literature, whereas “Death Note” and “Sailor Moon” are not, then we had best admit to overt and in-your-face snobbery. Personally, I think that if one wants to understand what the modern transnational world is (in part) about, then such snobbery is simply counter-productive.
Timothy Perper, PhD
Tastes differ, of course, but I don’t regard Cerebus and Sandman as on the level of achievement as Maus. And it’s not because they’re fantasies: I recently read a fantasy “graphic narrative” which I would place on the same level as Maus, but it was in Japanese. (It’s Kotobuki Shiriagari’s Yaji Kita in DEEP, if anyone’s interested.)
There may also be a more pragmatic reason why Cerebus and Sandman haven’t been studied very much. Maus, in two small paperback volumes, is fairly inexpensive. The complete Cerebus and Sandman, on the other hand, are very expensive, particularly the former. And until recently academic libraries were unlikely to carry them (probably most still don’t). Of course, this doesn’t apply to Watchmen, another title you could have cited. But yeah, that quote Perper cited about Maus is incredibly blinkered: sort of like those people who allegedly couldn’t believe Bush won (or “won") because nobody they knew voted for him.
As far as following changes in an author’s world-view, Cerebus is a special case: few comic-book authors work on a single narrative for over thirty years, and few undergo such violent shifts in their opinions over the course of a single narrative. And even with Cerebus, you can’t really follow Sim’s views changing month-to-month: Sim’s particular brand of misogyny must have been brewing for a while before it burst forth in 1986, to the consternation of many of his fans.
And comics creators can revise their works from the original serialization when they’re collected. Most don’t, either because it’s too much work or because they think of the original comic books as primary, but I can think of a couple who have.
The real interesting critical problem, it seems to me, is posed by comic strips, especially the gag ones. It makes no sense to consider each individual daily or Sunday strip as an independent work: much of the meaning of an individual Peanuts or Krazy Kat strip depends upon our previous knowledge of the characters. But it makes no sense to consider the entire run of the strip as a single narrative either. They were never meant to be read that way, and if you did consider Peanuts, say, as a single narrative, it would be incredibly diffuse and repetitious. And it wasn’t even possible to read most strips this way, unless you cut each strip out of the newspaper and put it in a scrapbook (as some people did). This last is less true than it used to be, with the growing number of strips collected in complete or near-complete form. But in the case of classic strips, most of these collections are far from complete, and of the ones that are, very rarely are all the volumes still in print.
But despite these reservations, I’m looking forward very much to Scott’s analyses of the individual articles.
On the subject of fame: if we measure it by Google hits, Sailor Moon and Batman aren’t in the running either. “Tintin” got 6,530,000 hits, and “Asterix” a whopping 10,900,000 hits. This only strengthens Timothy’s point, of course. (Actually I’d expected Tintin and Asterix to be the other way around.)
While the quote about Maus being the most famous work is obviously incorrect, I don’t think that it’s simply snobbery to say that Maus is Good Literature, while (e.g.) Sailor Moon is not. Sailor Moon is a repetitive, simplistic work, intended for children. If you’re interested in pop culture, then you certainly have to say that Dan Brown’s _The Da Vinci Code_ is more famous than any of Pynchon’s works. That doesn’t mean that both are equally worth studying, if what you’re interested in are the literary aspects of art.
Of course, there are manga that are as worth literary study as Maus is, and ignoring them in an anthology that purports to be about literary graphic narratives would seem to be the real problem. The bit about Maus being the most famous, as evident shorthand for “most famous among literary graphic narratives known of by us”, points up the gap in what’s being said—but that gap is not the non-inclusion of Sailor Moon manga.
Rich Puchalsky wrote: “Sailor Moon is a repetitive, simplistic work, intended for children” (02/04/07 at 11:49 AM). His comment raises a very significant issue and point of view, so let me treat this as a “teachable moment” and make several points about comics and manga criticism.
Probably many students have found William Faulkner and John Milton repetitious and boring. Simplistic too, if they don’t bother to read either writer. But the step from such purely personal opinions and reactions to asserting that *therefore* neither Faulkner or Milton produced good literature leads us astray. If I say that Milton isn’t a good writer because he bores me, then I’m guilty of a fallacy: that maybe I, in my boredom, am missing something of great importance.
Rich, I gather that you know very little about “Sailor Moon,” if only because you said it was written for children. When “Sailor Moon” was first introduced to the United States in the mid-1990s, it was indeed marketed to children (by that word, I mean people under about 12 years old, rather than children in the genealogical sense that my sister and I are my parents’ children). It was a marketing failure, partly because “Sailor Moon” deals with themes like vengeance and lineage that don’t interest children very much. But when it was re-marketed to adolescents and young adults, it became immensely popular. It is long - 18 volumes in the manga, and 200 episodes in the anime (ca. 87 hours) - and is quite intricate in its characters, their relationships and obligations, and in its artwork and narration. And it may bore you witless.
But, in my opinion, criticism and analysis of comics and graphic narrative must go beyond such purely personal responses to begin the far harder tasks of cultural, graphical, and aesthetic analysis. Methods and approaches for achieving those goals have been emerging in recent years, and they will continue to emerge. Yet - again, a personal opinion - we need to go beyond personal opinion in these forms of critical and analytical effort.
Timothy Perper, PhD
Timothy, what I meant is that _Sailor Moon_ was shōjo manga—something which, in Japan, is intended for girls (i.e. grade school and high school age). There is no exact equivalent English genre that I know of, but perhaps the best comparison might be the unironic subset of superhero comics intended for (mostly) boys. The comparison with Faulkner and Milton is highly inapt.
Perhaps you would like to compare it to Harry Potter? Adults blog quite a bit about Harry Potter, but if someone says that it’s a children’s work, they don’t say that well you’d be bored reading Milton, and that you must not think that Harry Potter is worth the same level of effort because the series is lengthy and uses complex themes. The fact that it’s a very good children’s series does not make it a literary work.
Presentation of _Sailor Moon_ as if it should be in the same category as _Maus_ appears to me to be a failure of cultural analysis, frankly, and coming uncomfortably close to exoticism. While knowledge of the Japanese context and of the genre is clearly necessary, methods and approaches of literary analysis do not need to be reinvented for manga simply because the style originated in Japan.
Rich, what, pray tell, makes something a “literary work”? I don’t think we can take the meaning of such terms casually for granted.
. . . methods and approaches of literary analysis do not need to be reinvented for manga simply because the style originated in Japan.
But we do need methods for analyzing the intertwining of text and image on the page. Scott McCloud’s work may well be the best we currently have. And shōjo manga, such as Sailor Moon, presents some very interesting issues in this regard.
Bill, no one has ever been able to give a concise, universally accepted definition of “literariness”, as far as I know. That doesn’t mean that aesthetics, formal qualities of complexity, genre, critical judgement, and taste do not exist. In this case, though, all that I think that you really need to do is compare those manga that Japanese critics consider to be literary works with those like _Sailor Moon_, and then ask yourself, why am I so interested in including _Sailor Moon_? If it’s because you’re interested in pop culture, fine; some people like to study pop culture. But if other people want to do literary studies, presenting _Sailor Moon_ to them becomes an exoticizing gesture, something that disregards Japanese understanding of what is literary and what is not in favor of “this is Japanese and popular, therefore you should be interested in it”.
Sure, critical methods for analyzing the intertwining of text and image on the page are in a very early stage of development. But I don’t see what that has to do with this point. What are the issues that shōjo manga present that other manga do not?
Rich—I simply won’t discuss this with you. Unless you yourself have read and studied manga, including shojo manga, your comments do not convince me, especially not about “Sailor Moon.” You have personal opinions, and you’re entitled to them. However, my point is that comics, manga, and anime criticiism and analysis must go beyond personal opinions like yours. We need criteria-based methods, not vague apperceptions that something bores us. Let’s leave it at that, because we have no common ground for discussion between us.
Timothy Perper, PhD
Sure, Timothy—but I should point out, in the interest of accuracy, that I didn’t write that Sailor Moon bored me. I wrote that it was repetitive, simplistic, and intended for children. All of those are descriptions of the work, not descriptions of my response to the work.
Oh, put a sock in it, Rich! <grin--meaning that’s a joke> You gonna claim that you find repetitive, simplistic stuff intended for children to be fascinating and riveting? Your point is perfectly clear: you don’t like “Sailor Moon,” you’re bored by it, and therefore think that it must be bad literature (even though in your reply to Bill Benzon you weren’t able to define good OR bad literature). Why do you have to buffer your opinions with all these intellectual gyrations? You don’t like it; that’s it.
But your opinion is NOT an analytical or critical judgment. It’s a personal opinion and preference, and that is all. Once again, my point is that comics, manga, and anime scholarship has to go beyond personal opinions. The MFS essays are one example; what we’re doing at Mechademia is another, and there are many more.
You’re not analyzing “Sailor Moon” or its immense appeal (2.2 million hits). You’re saying only that you find it yucky in ways you haven’t been able to define. That’s not enough.
Timothy Perper, PhD
FWIW I think that judgments about good and bad literature are arrived at on an intuitive basis and communally negotiated in terms of richness, complexity, reflexivity, and so forth, while quoting appropriate passages here and there to illustrate what’s being talked about. But, such examination and discussion are applied ONLY to those texts judged to be good. It is simply assumed that the bad ones do not measure up on those rather vague standards.
One of the standard cliches is that good texts can support many readings; that’s a measure of their goodness. And, what do you know, we have many readings for the good texts. That’s because the community that believes this doesn’t bother to provide readings for bad texts.
As for the value of these readings, my guess is that it has more to do with the critic than with the text or texts being criticized.
What we do not have anywhere, as far as I know, are explicit criteria applied to a wide variety of texts with the evaluations being done in some way that permits objective comparison between valuations.
The issue is not, of course, your personal taste, Tim, nor mine, nor Rich’s. That’s irrelevant. The issue is how one builds an intellectual discipline. Can you build an intellectual discipline on collective aesthetic judgments negotiated through vague concepts?
Timothy, I thought that you wrote that you weren’t going to discuss this with me anymore?
Since you evidently are, I should mention that children’s literature can be read by adults for enjoyment for all sorts of reasons: because they have children, or because they want to relax, or because they are nostalgic, or because they interpret it as camp, or because it becomes a peer marker of coolness, or because they admire a well-made piece of children’s literature.
You haven’t said one word about Sailor Moon, other than to harp on its 2.2 million hits, and to claim that the descriptions I’ve made of it are untrue because you know how I feel. Do you really have anything to say about it?
Bill, clearly one can build an intellectual discipline on collective aesthetic judgement negotiated through vague concepts, because literary studies has been so built. Attempts to use “explicit criteria” and “objective comparison between valuations” have failed. There’s a whole lot of ideas about why they failed; that the part of “theory” that I generally agree with.
But if you can’t describe a work as repetitive, simplistic. or made for children without being accused of making personal judgements, then I don’t see how you can describe anything. Complexity and genre, as characteristics of works, are more evaluable than nearly anything else.
Perhaps it will help if I figure out what the bottom of the barrel of my anime-watching or manga-reading is and admit to enjoying it. OK, I’ve watched about five season’s worth of _Dragon Ball_, in an English-translated version. If anything at all could be described as repetitive, simplistic, or intended for children, DBZ certainly could be. It was enjoyable because of the circumstances involved. But the fact that “dragon ball” + anime got 1.8 million Google hits does not mean that literary analysis of the series is warranted. Sure, I could make up something for Joseph’s two-parter on apocalypticism based on it, just as someone could write something Butlerian on Haruka Tenoh from Sailor Moon. But if you can’t even admit to the evident qualities of the work, you can’t even try the dubious re-use of pop culture as literary fodder.
Alright already, Rich, quit showing off. No one is impressed that you have watched Dragon Ball. Millions of people have. The reason I won’t discuss Sailor Moon with you is that you haven’t convinced me that you have anything to say about it except to confuse your personal opinions with critical, analytical, and scholarly knowledge. Those of us who work in this area DO think that Dragon Ball is worth critical analysis, and so are Sailor Moon, Fruits Basket, and many more.
For everyone else who is reading this thread, the reason I am making these points is that they are directly relevant to what the MFS essays are about and to Scott Eric Kaufman’s comments dealt with. To a large extent, comics/graphic narrative “criticism” up to now has been built along the lines illustrated by Rich Pulchalsky’s comments—that is, on **personal** preferences and opinions. We in the field are trying—and starting to succeed—in moving away from these kinds of fan-speak comments. They do not provide any sure guidelines to comprehending how graphic narratives work or what they are about logographically or pictographically. Saying something is “repetitious” simply isn’t analysis. But saying that Sailor Moon deals in part with vengeance and lineage, as I did, is at least a start in the direction I think we should be going.
Timothy Perper, PhD
Timothy, I’m having some difficulty understanding the incredible condescension that you’re showing in this thread. Dude, your oft-boasted Ph.D. is in biology, you’re currently engaged in the ancient fan tactic of equating popularity with literary importance, and you seem to think that contemporary literary studies are “pomo-litcritese”, speaking instead in favor of some kind of antiquated scientism. Please don’t start every comment with yet another admonishment for me to put a sock in it, or quit showing off, or something. If you want to discuss something here, discuss it, and accept that others may as well.
Vengeance and lineage are such common tropes in all children’s literature, graphic or not—remember my earlier mention of Harry Potter?—that I don’t see how they really provide an important opening into an understanding of children’s graphic narrative in particular. Repetition does. The types of repetition in something like Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball are different than the types of repetition in something like Harry Potter. For instance, Dragon Ball anime has a well-established cyclic structure that goes beyond the necessities of periodic publication—in addition to the threat-and-response cycle within each episode, and the escalation of moves within each battle in each small sequence of episodes, there’s a larger alternation between training-and-guru and conflict. That serves to allow for continued progress without progress; Goku can apparently do more and more impressive things, but can never grow out of the frame of the series. In Harry Potter, the repetitive framing still allows for Harry to grow up, and for an eventual end; compare that with adult works like _Kozure Okami_, which can really only escape its cycle of repetition when the vengeance-plus-lineage tropes become subverted and the object of vengeance becomes, symbolically, the foundation of lineage. I recommend reading Umberto Eco’s piece on closed works like Superman (in his _The Open Work_, if I remember rightly).
But the first step in getting any useful analysis out of this is to admit that the series, is, in fact, repetitious and simplistic.
You googled me, huh? My doctorate is from CUNY, 1969, and by training I’m a geneticist. For the past 30 or so years, I have been working and writing about a variety of topics in human behavior, including human sexuality and manga, among others. I’ve written a number of books that you can find on amazon.com. As of the moment, I’ve published nine papers about manga in the scholarly literature, including a 125 page monograph on depictions of sexuality in manga. You want more information about me? Just ask.
And I still insist that personal opinions of the kind you believe represent analysis are counter-productive. You talk glibly—quoting my mention of vengeance and lineage themes without saying you’re quoting me (that’s bad form, Rich)—about tropes, Harry Potter, Umberto Eco, and Dragon Ball without any point at least I can follow. There are specific ways in which Takeuchi explores lineage obligations in “Sailor Moon” that are neither repetitious or simple; in fact, they are ethnographically and narrationally extremely complex. One example is the lack of parallelism within Usagi’s matriline of Sailor Moon’s relationship to Queen Serenity (a relationship of respect and admiration from the younger woman to the older progenitrix) and Rini’s relationship to her mother Sailor Moon (where the younger woman is openly and overtly hostile to her mother). A different kind of obligation is created, and explored extensively by Takeuchi, by relationships **outside** the matriline, e.g., between Usagi and Minako, or between Rei and Ami. Still other kinds of obligation exist between the older “Outer Planet” Sailor Senshi (Pluto, Uranus, Neptune) and the younger “Inner Planet” Sailor Senshi (Usagi, Rei, Ami, Minako, and Lita). So, in a microcosm depicted through the astronomical metaphor of the solar system, the older and younger Senshi function in older-sister/younger-sister relationships. In consequence, the matriline and its female quasi-kin form a kind of symbolic parallel to the planets themselves (I will defer discussing Takeuchi’s meanings for the word “symbol"). Notably absent is the existence of a solar or other Father; this system is matrilineal, not patrilineal (the unmentioned planet Saturn explicitly represents death). Takeuchi works out these parallels or metaphors in considerable detail, and, in turn (!) they are paralleled in the last story arc (the Sailor Stars arc) by the central galactic “cauldron of stars,” where all things that were, are, and will be exist in synchronic simultaneity, and which gives birth to the stars and therefore to the planets and their family/matrilineal inner workings.
But, for you, “Sailor Moon” can be dismissed, in an exercise of considerable arrogance, as repetitious, simplistic, and meant for children. I don’t care that you know Sailor Uranus’ family name; your opinion of “Sailor Moon” is simply wrong. It is anything BUT repetitious or simplistic, and it *certainly* wasn’t meant for children. No understanding of the cosmology or mythology of “Sailor Moon” can come UNLESS we understand the complex relationships Takeuchi sets out among matrilines, maternal kinship, and the solar system and its embedding galaxy. And I have touched on only a few details of those relationships, and have not even come close to talking about vengeance.
And if anyone else is still reading this thread, I want to repeat what I have been saying all along: critical, scholarly, and analytical study of graphic narrative must move beyond the assertion of mere opinion.
Bad form to reply to your mention of vengeance and lineage themes without mentioning that I’m quoting you—perhaps the problem is that you haven’t written in a blog comment box before? MLA style citations are not generally used; neither are CV listings.
Now, is it really surprising that this example of shōjo manga features older sister/younger sister relationships, motherhood, and not much interest in fathers? The style is for young girls. You can certainly spend a lot of time on how who relates to who in Sailor Moon, just as boys “studying” Dragon Ball can work out elaborate charts of comparative power levels. Girls, as the stereotype embedded in the genre goes, are more interested in relationships, so they are given plenty of them. But those relationships are placed there in a neatly symbolic pattern for you to discover; they are simply not as ambiguous or multivalent as those in adult literature. Treating a look at the prefab relationships between these characters as ethnography is an example of scientism.
But let’s see what you’re leaving out. Feminism and gender roles? No mention. I don’t really see how any kind of contemporary study of Sailor Moon could avoid them—unless part of your agenda is indeed to deny that this is a series intended for girls.
So I’m not impressed. The problem with your scholarship, as described, is that it relies on denying facts about the work that are not really in question. It’s possible to say that it’s a really good children’s series, sure, but not “it *certainly* wasn’t meant for children”, or, more seriously, to elide the difference between children’s and adult literature (not to mention literary vs non-literary adult works) in favor of popularity as the measure of all kinds of cultural importance.
I do still recommend that you read Eco’s _The Open Work_. He’s done some significant study of graphic narratives.
But the fact that “dragon ball” + anime got 1.8 million Google hits does not mean that literary analysis of the series is warranted.
I don’t know what you mean by “literary analysis” in phrases like that. Is this a special type of analysis that can only be applied to certified-literary texts or that only produces interesting results when applied to literary texts? This would leave open the possibility of some kind of non-literary analysis. Or do you mean that only certified literary texts are worth the time and attention required for careful analytic work? If so, why? Texts are read by people. The fact that a text is read by a lot of people doesn’t make it a work of high literary art, but isn’t the experience of those people worthy of our interest?
I recently did a detailed analysis of ring-structure in Osame Tezuka’s Metropolis, a popular one-volume manga published after WWII for an audience of boys. I learned a great deal from that work, as much as I did, for example, early in my career when I worked on symbolic inversion in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The fact that the structures I found in that text are somehow accessible to 10 year old boys doesn’t make them any less interesting or significant.
Sure, I could make up something for Joseph’s two-parter on apocalypticism based on it, . . . .
So high-art apocalypticism is worthy of our attention, but pop-cult apocalypticism is not?
Bill, there’s nothing wrong with study of pop culture, and certainly, the experience of large groups of people is worthy of interest. Just not specifically literary interest. If you have found something that you accurately characterize as being published for an audience of boys, and find that it has an interesting structure, that in itself may make the work of literary interest (or, at least, your analysis of it may be interesting in a literary sense), but the mere fact that the series was read by X number of people does not.
The concept of literary certification sounds bad, of course, but in practise it’s impossible to read wholly without reference to a critical community. It’s possible for one critic, by sustained effort, to redefine a “popular” work as “literary”. But it takes a certain kind of effort, and a certain kind of communication. That communication would not be facilitated by denying that Metropolis was published for an audience of boys in the first place.
So, if you want to study pop culture, that’s fine—but remember, this thread started in terms of comparisons to Maus, and in terms of what the MFS should include. They should not have mentioned Batman instead because it’s more famous, any more than they should have mentioned Sailor Moon.
You may think I’m being unnecessarily pedantic, Rich, but that’s OK.
There’s a worthwhile difference between saying “graphic narrative consists of stuff like Maus“ vs. saying that “graphic narrative includes a whole bunch of stuff, from children’s comics to Japanese manga and so forth and so on; but in this issue we’re interested in in stuff like Maus because X Y Z.” The former seems insular and ultimately defensive, while the latter seems more open to the world. The difference seems of akin to the one I evoked in comparing Ken Burns jazz series to Martin Scorsese’s blues series:
Burns presented a self-absorbed America while Scorsese presented an America both generous and welcoming.
Even where Scorsese’s episodes faltered they offered useful examples for further [documentary] work. The only work that can come from Ken Burns is more Ken Burns. Not only did Burns examine music from the past, but he was always looking to the past, never the present or the future. At their best, Scorsese’s episodes summoned the past as a source of raw materials for a new and different future. Scorsese managed to display a life and a moral truth that could only be displayed in this medium of moving images and manifest sound. Burns only used the medium to present documents framed in a sepia-toned glow.
When I read the framing of that issue of MFS against my knowledge of the profession, I get worried. Holbo’s perused the whole issue—which I have not—and he’s made a comment that gives me further cause for worry: “I guess if I have one complaint about the Modern Fiction Studies issue it’s that none of these folks can hold a candle to McCloud. But they all seem to realize that. At least they reference him respectfully.” But will they try to build on what McCloud’s done or while they simply do what they know how to do and rest content with respectful reference to his word? My guess—and it’s only that, a guess—is that people who are willing to flat-out ignore the existence of manga are also willing to pay lip service to Scott McCloud forever.