French teenagers love manga [what else is new?]

Aurelien Breeden, France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books. NYTimes, July 28, 2021.

PARIS — When the French government launched a smartphone app that gives 300 euros to every 18-year-old in the country for cultural purchases like books and music, or exhibition and performance tickets, most young people’s impulse wasn’t to buy Proust’s greatest works or to line up and see Molière.

Instead, France’s teenagers flocked to manga.

“It’s a really good initiative,” said Juliette Sega, who lives in a small town in southeastern France and has used €40 (about $47) to buy Japanese comic books and “The Maze Runner,” a dystopian novel. “I’m a steady consumer of novels and manga, and it helps pay for them.”

As of this month, books represented over 75 percent of all purchases made through the app since it was introduced nationwide in May — and roughly two-thirds of those books were manga, according to the organization that runs the app, called the Culture Pass.

And then:

Naza Chiffert, who runs two independent bookstores in Paris, said the Culture Pass had already had a positive impact on her business. “Getting young people who read but who are more used to Amazon or big-box stores to come to us isn’t easy,” she said, but now she has teenagers in her stores every day.

Still, some worry that the pass will be a financial windfall for people from privileged backgrounds while doing little to help others expand their cultural horizons.

“A kid from the projects will lean toward what he already knows,” said Pierre Ouzoulias, a senator for the French Communist Party who has pushed to scrap the pass. “I can’t for one moment imagine a kid using the pass to go listen to Baroque opera.”

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Virtual Tezuka

🤔 pic.twitter.com/tAe9yAwxEU

— tkasasagi🐻@女子熊 (@tkasasagi) August 9, 2020

The data they cropped. I wonder how many. 🤔 pic.twitter.com/qe45ASWZxs

— tkasasagi🐻@女子熊 (@tkasasagi) August 9, 2020

A biography of Osamu Tezuka

Brad Hawley, The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Must-Read for Manga Fans, Fantasy Literature, March 9, 2019. A review of:

The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Life in Manga and Anime by Toshio Ban and Tezuka Productions and translated into English by Frederik L. Schodt. Stone Bridge Press, 2016.

Tezuka was a workaholic:

He was such a workaholic that he rarely left his office, where he often slept and usually ate his meals. Towards the end of his life, he even had multiple desks set up in his office with different ongoing projects on each desk: He would move from desk to desk throughout the day keeping multiple projects going simultaneously, often sleeping as little as three hours a night. He lived 60 years, and in this time period, his complete works became the largest publication of a single author’s output of all time.

And was known as "the god of manga":

Tezuka is Walt Disney, Stan Lee, Will Eisner, and Alan Moore rolled into one plus more. He artistically had impact greater than even what they accomplished all together. Like Walt Disney, Tezuka created loveable characters and cutting-edge animated films and T.V. shows that were for all-ages. Like Stan Lee, he created a universe of characters for all ages, many of them aimed at young men. Like Will Eisner, he paved the way for what sequential art could do and be, and like Eisner, he wrote intelligently about the art form. Like Alan Moore, but unlike Stan Lee and Walt Disney, Tezuka was far more mature, experimental, intellectual, and philosophical in many of his works, much of them coming from later in his life. When Tezuka is referred to as the “God of Manga” in Japan, they are calling him the God of animation and sequential art worldwide. And it is a fact that there is no other single creator of sequential art and animation worldwide who has had a bigger impact than he has. When people talk about the influence of anime on art and culture in the United States, they are talking about Tezuka’s influence. And that’s just a small example of his impact, years after he died.

I hope I have emphasized enough how important to the world Tezuka is as an artist, and therefore, how much a biography worthy of him is needed. The Osamu Tezuka Story is that biography, and most appropriately, it is told in manga format by a man who worked with Tezuka for many years. Therefore, the style is very much in the Tezuka tradition. Toshio Ban has captured visually the fast-paced life of an artist, an artist who was followed around by editors waiting for their pages. In his younger years, Tezuka would hide out in different hotels trying to get work done without interruption from the many editors waiting for work from him, but he took on so many assignments, he could barely keep up with his deadlines. This biography captures the frantic life of a young artist who matured without giving up on his commitments right up until the end of his life, when he left multiple works incomplete, most sadly his life-long work The Phoenix, though multiple stand-alone volumes of this series were completed.

Onna-Bugeisha: Japanese women warriors

Christobel Hastings, How Onna-Bugeisha, Feudal Japan's Women Samurai, Were Erased From History, Broadly, Sept. 24, 2018.

Throughout history, most Japanese women were subject to rigid social expectations of marriage, domesticity, and motherhood, but there also existed women warriors like Takeko who were known to be to be every bit as strong, capable, and courageous as their male counterparts. They belonged to the bushi class, a noble class of feudal Japanese warriors, and helped settle new lands, defend their territory, and even had a legal right to supervise lands as jito (stewards). They were exceptionally skilled in combat; trained in the use of the Kaiken dagger, the naginata, the polearm sword, and the art of tantōjutsu knife fighting. Centuries before the rise of the samurai class in the 12th century, these women would fight in times of war to protect their homes, families, and deep sense of honor.

After the Meiji Restoration in 1868—a new era of imperial rule that stood for modernization, industrialization, and Westernization—the Samurai class who had once bravely protected the nation fell from power, and the legacy of the equally fearsome onna-bugeisha faded from view. Meanwhile, Westerners rewrote the history of Japanese warring culture, overlooking the heroic quests of the onna-bugeisha and elevating, instead, exaggerated representations of swaggering male Samurai and subservient Japanese women, clad in kimono and tightly-bound obi. Indeed, historian Stephen Turnbull regards “the exploits of female warriors as the greatest untold story in samurai history.” [...]

Particularly interesting about Gozen: She was one of the few women warriors who engaged in offensive battle, known as onna-musha, rather than the defensive fighting more common among traditional onna-bugeisha. In 1184, she led 300 samurai into a fierce battle against 2,000 opposing Tiara clan warriors, and during the Battle of Awazu later that same year, she slayed several adversaries before decapitating the Musashi clan’s leader and presenting his head to her master, General Kiso Yoshinaka. Gozen’s reputation was so high, it’s said Yoshinaka considered her the first true general of Japan.

Despite minimal written historical record, recent archeological evidence suggests that Gozen may not have been a rarity. The excavation of three head-mounds has uncovered a significant female involvement in battle, throwing the exclusion of onna-bugeisha from the history books into greater relief. For instance, DNA tests on 105 bodies excavated from the Battle of Senbon Matsubaru between Takeda Katsuyori and Hojo Ujinao in 1580 revealed that 35 of them were women. According to Turnbull, the details on the excavation confirm that women warriors were almost certainly present on the battlefield.

Could this be part of the deep background for the strong women and girls who are so important in contemporary manga and anime?

Tweet of the Day: Akira tribute poster

'Akira' Tribute Poster by Artist James Jean pic.twitter.com/ypxpUQcsO7

— 41 Strange (@41Strange) November 2, 2018

Time's Arrow in Literary Space: Irreversibility on Three Scales

Another bump to the top. A topic I still think about.

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Here's a not-so-old post from The Valve (March 2010) on a topic that fascinates me. I first published it on New Savanna on June 6, 2011. I'm  bumping it to the top of the pile because it resonates with my recent work on Matt Jockers' Macroanalysis. Jockers found a  century-long pattern (one scale) in a large corpus of texts that just happens to be temporal, but wasn't defined in temporal terms. This post takes up the topic of literary temporality on two other scales: years (Osamu Tezuka) and decades (William Shakespeare). If this post interests you, you might want to go over to The Valve and read the discussion there, which is quite interesting.

Is literary time directional? In some sense the answer, obviously, is “yes.” There is no doubt that Pride and Prejudice was written before A Passage to India. The issue, however, is whether or not Pride and Prejudice must have been necessarily, in some sense, before A Passage to India and, if so, in what sense it must have been written first.

Stephen Greenblatt comes close to suggesting what I’m up to early in “The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and His Heirs” (Learning to Curse, Routledge, 1990, pp. 80—98) which opens with a long passage from an early 19th century magazine article on the how the Reverend Francis Wayland broke the will of his 15-month old child. Greenblatt notes that “Wayland’s struggle is a strategy of intense familial love, and it is the sophisticated product of a long historical process whose roots lie at least partly in early modern England, in the England of Shakespeare’s King Lear.” To be sure, one need not read that as any more than a statement of historical contingency, that Shakespeare’s play just happened to have been written before Wayland’s article. But when one considers the larger institutional changes Greenblatt considers – from the public space of the king’s court (and Elizabethan stage) to the privacy of the bourgeois home – one may suspect that Greenblatt is tracking the directionality of literary time, that one text must necessarily have been earlier in the historical process in which both texts exist.

That directionality is what I want to look at, but not primarily on the scale of decades-to-centuries. My principle example involves three early texts by Osamu Tezuka, the great Japanese mangaka. He was born in Nov 1928, which puts him in his early 20s when these texts were written during the American occupation of Japan after World War II. The three texts have become known collectively as his SF trilogy: Lost World (1948), Metropolis (1949), and Next World (1951). Thus, they are early texts; in particular, they are before the Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) stories that became the centerpiece of his work for almost two-decades.

Prior to World War II Japan had an unbroken history as an independent state stretching all the way back to . . . the primordial times of Japanese mythology. The Japanese Emperor was the living embodiment of that continuity and connection. When he surrendered, that continuity was cut and with it the whole mythological and ideological apparatus that gave shape to the Japanese world, it was gone. Even for someone like Tezuka, who was not a partisan of the militarist regime that ruled Japan at the time, that must have created a profound existential problem. And so, one of the things we see Tezuka doing in this three texts is re-creating a sense of Japan. He is creating a new myth. Without that, how can there be any sense of order about the cosmos?

While there is much one could say about these texts, here I wish to raise a specific issue: Is the order in which Tezuka in fact wrote those three texts the order in which he must necessarily have written them. I don’t have a strong argument to offer. Rather, I simply want to raise the issue. Lurking behind this issue is, of course, another, for if the order IS necessary, whence the necessity?

Tezuka’s Rediscovery of Japan

The first of these texts, Lost World (1948; English translation, Darkhorse Comics, 2003), is set on two planets, Earth and Mamango, a twin of Earth that comes near to Earth every 5 million years. The geographical location of the Earth-bound events is not clear; no geographic locations are named, no cities, no countries. By default, a Japanese audience would be likely to locate these events in Japan (and some of the characters have Japanese names, e.g. Shikishima). But, when the story ends, two people, a man and a woman, remain on Mamango, and will create a new race of human beings. That is to say, in this story, the exciting new stuff of the future is going to take place somewhere else than on Earth.

The second of these texts, Metropolis (1949; English translation, Darkhorse Comics, 2003), is mostly set in some large city named Metropolis, which is explicitly not-Japan. Two of the central characters, Detective Mustachio and his nephew Kenichi, however, are identified as being from Japan and thus being Japanese. Mustachio announces himself as being from Japan (p. 46, cf. p. 53). Japan is now explicitly identified in the story, it is a named place that is differentiated from other names places, such as Metropolis and Long Boot Island. But Japan is not a site of action that is significant to the story.

The last of these texts, Next World (1951; English translation, Darkhorse Comics, two volumes, 2003), is set in locations all over the world. Much of it takes place in the capitalist Nation of Star (obviously the United States) and the socialist Federation of Uran (obviously the Soviet Union). But the story begins in Japan, has episodes there, and ends in Japan. In one plotline the Earth is being threatened by a large approaching mass of space gas. Once this phenomenon is perceived and categorized as an Earth-wide threat, there is a segment where the heads of Star and Uran say, “Let’s escape to Japan” (Vol. 2, p. 99) So Japan is an explicit destination for the most powerful politicians on Earth. Japan is on the map and it is the location of events significant to the story.

It turns out that the gas cloud somehow got neutralized before it reached Earth, so everyone survived. Star and Uran had gone to war, but that was stopped by the Fumoon, advanced humanoids that seemed to have been the product of radioactive fall-out from atomic tests done by Star and Uran. (Yeah, this is a complicated mess of a story.) The point is that Tezuka has positioned Japan outside the conflict between Star and Uran. That is its position in the world and, whatever the geographical relationships between the three nations, Tezuka has given it a political role to play in this, the last of the three books in his SF trilogy. Japan now has a differentiated identity.

On this one matter, Japan as a geographical and political entity, we see a clear progression that matches the order of publication. In the first text Japan is not mentioned at all; in the second it is named, but is peripheral to the action; in the third it is named and becomes a central locus of action on the international scene. Still, the fact that Tezuka wrote the text wrote the texts in that order does not necessarily imply that he had no choice but to write them in that order. To say that he had to write them in that order is to imply some process in his mind that takes place on the scale of months to years and that is linked to his story-telling activity in such a way as the place strong restrictions on the stories he can construct in any given period.

Let’s return to my assertion–merely assumed here, without argument–that Tezuka is using these texts as a vehicle for restoring some sense of order in the world in the wake of Japan’s defeat. We know that he found that transition to be traumatic. As Frederick Schodt has noted in The Astro Boy Essays (Stonebridge Press, 2007, pp. 29-30):

With the end of the war, new difficulties appeared. Tezuka also witnessed starvation among a once proud people, and during the wild, unstructured early days of the occupation, he suffered the humiliation and anger of being beaten by a group of drunken American GIs who could not understand his broken English. It was a brutal and direct experience in cultural misunderstanding that he never forgot. Like all young Japanese of his age, he had also seen how an authoritarian government—his own—had been able to manipulate information and public opinion, and how, after the war, the entire value system of the country was overturned and replaced by a new democratic ideology. It was horrifying, he later said, to realize that “the world could turn 180 degrees, and that the government could switch the concept of reality,” so that what had been “black” or “white” only days before was suddenly reversed.

All of that, I believe, is what Tezuka was working through while writing these three stories, Lost World, Metropolis, and Next World. I suggest that the process was comparable to mourning the death, for example, of one’s parents. As such it was a process that involved his whole psyche and not just some relatively localized notions about how the state functions and just who is in office now. And it is not just that Tezuka was working through the death of his nation during this period, but that he was using his fiction as a vehicle to work through that process and so to arrive at the beginnings of a new conception of Japan, its place in the world, and the place of individual Japanese in this emerging Japan.

We are still a long way from understanding just how and why the demands of this psycho-symbolic process influenced Tezuka’s manga so as “determine” the order in which certain themes and motifs appeared in them, but that is what I think is going on. That is the direction our investigations must take if we are to gain a deeper understanding, not only of Tezuka’s artistic work, but of artistic work in general, and of the human mind.

Longer Time Scales

Tezuka wrote these three texts over a period of three to four years. What about longer time spans? Many artists have been productive over decades and it is common to talk of early, middle, and late works, not as mere temporal markers, but as indicators of characteristic themes, concerns, and sometimes even of aesthetic quality. Some of this development may reflect technical command of the medium, but surely we are dealing with personal development and maturation as well.

Shakespeare presents an interesting case. Early in his dramatic career he tended to write comedies and histories; then he gravitated to tragedy; and he finished his career with curious tragic-comic hybrids, or romances. In a paper that looks at one play from each of these periods—Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale—I relate this sequence to ideas about adult development by Erik Erikson, Daniel Levinson, and George Valliant. Thus, while we can read or see Shakespeare’s plays in whatever order we wish, and at whatever time in our lives we wish, Shakespeare himself was constrained to write certain kinds of plays during certain periods of his life. There was a certain necessary order to his artistic production. He could not have written Othello before he wrote Much Ado About Nothing, nor The Winter’s Tale before either of those others. His psyche made demands on his artistic work, and his artistic work was a vehicle for shaping his psyche.

But the life of literature is longer than the lives of any individual writers and readers. And so we are back at the time scale implied in Greenblatt’s interest in a Nineteenth Century article on childrearing and a Shakespeare tragedy, a time scale of centuries and—why not?—millennia. Is there an intrinsic ordering there as well? If so, what is that ordering about? Does the human mind develop, perhaps mature, and, dare I even suggest it? progress over the course of centuries? Are we allowed even to thing such thoughts without being struck dumb?

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Meta comment: I've made no attempt to hide my affection for the newer psychologies in the study of literature. The subject of this post, however, owes little or nothing to those psychologies nor does it owe much to various post-structuralist approaches (I don't follow them), though I'd be happy to find out that some new historicists have something to say about it. Nonetheless it seems to me a matter central to the study of literature. It arose in my thinking simply from thinking about literary texts and relations between them.

Kiddie Lit

Back in the middle of 2006 I’d blogged about Kiddie Lit. I’m republishing that post because it’s  relevant to my interest in Disney’s Fantasia and, in particular, to the issues of cuteness and family presented by the Pastoral episode. I note also that I’ve been looking through Nicholas Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (2005).

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A few years ago I read Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America by Beverly Lyon Clark (2003). I had just gotten interested in manga and anime and figured that, as many titles are produced for children, that scholarship on children’s literature would be useful. I was attracted to Clark’s book because it addressed the institutionalization of children’s literature, which I figured would help me think about the institutional landscape in which manga and anime must make their way in America, along with homegrown comics, and graphic novels, and cartoons.

Clark argues, and demonstrates, that our (that is, America’s) fairly firm distinction between adult literature and children's literature did not exist in 19th century America (probably not in the UK either). Writers would write for both children and adults, the reviewers would review (what we now think of as) children's books as well as (what we now think of as) adult books. And magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly assumed their audience included children as well as adults.

As one case study, Clark considers Mark Twain, in particular, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These days we think of Huckleberry Finn as an adult book and Tom Sawyer as a boy's book. But that distinction was not a firm one for Twain and his contemporaries. In his own statements on both books Twain vacillated in his sense of his audience and so did his reviewers. Similarly, Louisa May Alcott and her audience did not think of Little Women as a specifically girl's book. It was a book that could be read with pleasure and edification by both children and adults. In fact, at the time, some considered it a mark of excellence that a book was accessible to children as well as to adults.

The move to differentiate the adult from the children's audience came in the first and second quarters of the 20th century and succeeded so well that we now assume it without question. And children's literature has been, for the most part, marginalized.

Clark devotes her final chapter to Disney. She makes the point that prior to the 40s Disney and his work was quite highly regarded in intellectual circles. Some even thought his cartoons were more aesthetically significant than contemporary live-action films. She also points out that anyone going to the movies assumed they would see cartoons before the feature. It didn't make any difference whether the feature was a light-hearted comedy or a serious drama, you'd see cartoons first. Cartoons became children's fare, she argues, after WWII and as a side-effect of TV, which made it easier to develop niche audiences. Families went to the movies, but it was easy to let kids watch cartoons on TV while mother went about her duties elsewhere in the house. As for Disney, Clark argues that opinion turned on him when he introduced human figures into his cartoons (with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the later 1930s, his first feature-length film).

One issue looms large: How can we properly value children’s literature? Is the study of children’s literature a proper part of the general study of literature or should it remain the province of schools of education and developmental psychologists?

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That’s not the issue that faces me now, however, though it’s important, not simply to literary culture, but to film culture as well. There IS Disney, of course, but also Hayao Miyazaki and a host of others.

Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan

I've put another publication online (title above). Download at:

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/15502928/Dr._Tezuka_s_Ontology_Laboratory_and_the_Discovery_of_Japan

Abstract, TOC, and introduction below.

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Abstract: Not long after the end of World War II Osamu Tezuka published three manga known collectively as the SF Trilogy: Lost World (1948), Metropolis (1949), and Nextworld (1951). Taken together they represent an effort to rethink Japan’s place in the world, and that, in turn, required rethinking the world itself from top to bottom. Each text features a parade of creatures, from plants to animals, to humans; each has scenes of primordial nature. All involve radiation that changes the flora and fauna of the world, all involve strange humanoid creatures, some ‘natural’ and some artificial. In particular, Tezuka plays with gender identities. In Lost World a woman made of plant matter becomes the ‘Eve’ of a new world. In Metropolis the central character is an artificial being that can be either male or female. In Nextworld we have a pair of physically identical young women where each is raised in a different society and so has quite different adult characteristics. Japan is not mentioned in the first book, but by the third Japan is a mediating factor between two warring superpowers. The strange humans in these manga are precursors to the robots, cyborgs, and quasi-Utopian humanoids that have proliferated in Japanese popular culture over the last half century.

CONTENTS

Stories As Equipment For Living 2

Geopolitics: What Is Japan? 2

The Ontology Lab 3

Primordial Scenes 4

Parade Of The Creatures 5

Varieties Of The Human 6

Radiation And Artifice In The Building Of Worlds 7

At The Core: Grief And Loss 8

Things To Come: Astro Boy And Beyond 9

References 10

This is the final draft of an essay published in Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World. Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog, editors. Westport, CT, USA: Libraries Unlimited, an imprint of ABC-Clio/Greenwood. 2011, pp. 37-51.

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Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan

On August 15, 1945, the Empire of Japan came to an end. It was on that day that the Japanese people heard a radio broadcast in which Emperor Hirohito read the Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War, announcing Japan’s surrender. As an abstract entity, the Empire was at an end. Yes, the land was still there, the people too, and the infrastructure of an advanced civilization, though much was in shambles. But certain symbolic and social bonds that had held Japan together as a single socio-cultural entity – those bonds were sundered: for example, the Imperial rhetoric that the Emperor’s lineage went back in time to the mythological origins of the Japanese islands (Benzon 2010). Even for someone like Osamu Tezuka, who was not a partisan of the militarist regime that had ruled Japan, Japan’s surrender and all it implied must have engendered a profound existential problem. What was to come next?

As Frederick Schodt notes:

With the end of the war, new difficulties appeared. Tezuka also witnessed starvation among a once proud people, and during the wild, unstructured early days of the occupation, he suffered the humiliation and anger of being beaten by a group of drunken American GIs who could not understand his broken English. It was a brutal and direct experience in cultural misunderstanding that he never forgot. Like all young Japanese of his age, he had also seen how an authoritarian government—his own—had been able to manipulate information and public opinion, and how, after the war, the entire value system of the country was overturned and replaced by a new democratic ideology. It was horrifying, he later said, to realize that “the world could turn 180 degrees, and that the government could switch the concept of reality,” so that what had been “black” or “white” only days before was suddenly reversed. (2007, 29-30)

How did Tezuka allow the old, Imperial “Japan” to die in his mind so that he could create a new Japan to replace it? How did he restore a sense of order and meaning to the world?

I certainly do not have a general answer to those questions. It seems to me, however, that the process would have been comparable in scope and magnitude to mourning the death, for example, of one’s parents. As such, it would have been a process that involved Tezuka’s whole psyche. This process was certainly emotional, grieving for the old Japan; but it would also have been intellectual.

Imagine a conceptual system as a vast network of interconnected concepts; think of a large roadmap where each city, town, and junction is a concept and the roads are relations between concepts. For the Japanese of Tezuka’s day “Imperial Japan” would have been a subnetwork within that larger network, one with connections to an extensive range of related concepts about Japan, but also about humans and families, about animals and artificial things, and about the kinds of actions and agency appropriate to each. Now, remove “Imperial Japan” from the network. What happens?

What happens is that the network has a lot of dangling connections; as an analogy, recall what happened to world-wide air travel when New York City airports shut down in the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center attack. Those connections have to be repaired or replaced. That reconnecting and replacing is, at least in part, what Tezuka was doing, one wave after another, in his early so-called science fiction trilogy: Lost World, Metropolis, and Nextworld. Tezuka was using his fiction as a means of working through that process so as to arrive at the beginnings of a new — and non-imperial ¬— conception of Japan, its place in the world, and the place of individual Japanese people in this emerging Japan.

Plucky Heroines from Haggard to Hikaru and Buffy

This is a guest post by Timothy Perper, PhD and Martha Cornog, MA, MS, who served as Book Review editors for Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts, a scholarly journal about Japanese cartooning and popular culture. Cornog is the graphic novel columnist for Library Journal. They have written extensively about manga and anime and edited Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World (Libraries Unlimited 2011). Perper and Cornog, who are married, have also written extensively about gender and sexuality.

In an essay on The Valve (and republished on New Savanna), Bill Benzon asked a series of questions about H. Rider Haggard, a 19th century English novelist who wrote adventures set in Africa about supernatural white heroines. Haggard’s characterizations raise questions about how women and girls were portrayed in his adventure fiction, and are prescient in view of later portrayals in American and Japanese popular culture in both text and visual media.

It's not hard to place Haggard's views of women. In principle, he idealized the "pure womanhood" of England – for example, missionary Mackenzie's wife in Allan Quatermain – but at the same time his work reflects his male readers' uneasy yearning, heavily though not explicitly eroticized, for women who are passionate, active, heroic, and sexually motivated. Haggard was not writing Victorian pornography, but in his treatment of white women from Africa – ESPECIALLY white women like Ayesha in She and many other of his mature white heroines – he reveals the same impulse to eroticize the exotic that Steven Marcus saw as fundamental to Victorian pornography. (note 1) For Marcus, such pornography finds its closest genre relatives in utopian fantasy – hence Marcus' term "pornotopia" for the worlds portrayed in such literature. In such a pornotopia, women are not passive wallflowers, timid, meek, and obedient to their masters or to the patriarchy; instead, they are active agents of their own sexual purposes and desires, intermingled with a desire and capacity to rule the state as queens and empresses. (You will find an echo of this set of attributions to women in the Empress card in the standard Tarot deck.)

Haggard, Women, and the Wild

In many ways, Flossie Mackenzie in Allan Quatermain – the 10-year old daughter of a Scottish missionary – is simply a very young version of a heroine like Ayesha. Flossie is self-reliant, unafraid, armed, and dangerous, and kills a Masai warrior with the two-barreled Derringer pistol she carries when he attacks her. Although she is therefore attractive, Haggard seems uneasily aware that such a life is somehow not right for Woman, that is, not what a patriarchal God intended: here are his comments about Flossie, put into the mouth of his spokesman Allan. When Mackenzie decides to return to England with his wife and Flossie, Allan praises him:

"I congratulate you on your decision," answered I, "for two reasons. The first is, that you owe a duty to your wife and daughter, and more especially to the latter, who should receive some education and mix with girls of her own race, otherwise she will grow up wild, shunning her kind..." [Chapter 8]

Allan – and therefore Haggard – seems well aware that for Flossie a life in Africa is a ticket to the "wild," a place where 10 year-old girls like Flossie shoot leopards and men and live their own lives under their own rule, certainly not (Allan thinks) a world or role suited to an ideal Englishwoman.

Center Point Construction and the Computational Mind

Edit (12.12.13): Jim Hoagland pointed out that my discussion of the basic symbol sets of arithmetic and natural language was wrong. I've corrected the problem (I think).

I was looking at Mary Douglas’s checklist for ring forms and realized that each item on it had a plausible interpretation in the domain of computation. So that’s where I’m going in this post. But that’s not where I start. First I want to talk a little about computation, then another look at Tezuka’s Metropolis, and then the Douglas checklist.

What is Computation, Anyhow?

If, when you think about computers and computation, you mostly think about numbers and arithmetic, then you’re likely to be puzzled, if not horrified, at the idea that literature is somehow computational. Literature, after all, is not about numbers – though the pages and chapters of books may be numbered.

But then, computation isn’t necessarily about numbers either. It depends on how you think of it.

“625” and “six-hundred and twenty-five” are strings of characters and each represents the same number. The first string is of the sort used in arithmetic calculation while the second is not, though not for any inherent problem. It’s a simple matter of convenience; the string of numerals is more compact, and hence more convenient, than the string of words. Note, however, that when “625” is read aloud it might sound the same as “six-hundred and twenty-five”, though it might also be abbreviated to “six-twenty-five”.

When you learn arithmetic you learn the tables for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. These tables consist of basic propositions about numbers and how they behave under those four operations. You also learn a handful of simple rules to be used in applying those operations to multi-digit numbers. What you are learning – and practicing, hour upon hour – is symbol manipulation, but symbol manipulation of a very restricted kind.

Ordinary language use, after all, is also symbol manipulation. And, while there are restrictions, and lots of them, the proper manipulation of the symbols of ordinary language is open ended in a way the arithmetic calculation is not. Perhaps the most fundamental difference has to do with the set of symbols used to spell the names of the entities.

For both arithmetic and natural language is finite and quite small. For arithmetic the set consists of ten numerals (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9), four operators (+ - * /), and an equals sign (=). The symbol set for any natural language is complicated by the fact that, for written languages, there may not be a one-to-one relationship between the symbol set for the written and spoken versions. There we would have to have separate discussions for alphabetic and non-alphabetic writing systems. And in either case, the spoken language has prosodic features that are not well represented in the written language.

Consider written English. We have the 24 letters of the alphabet and a handful of punctuation marks. That’s finite and small. However, letter combinations are used to form words, but the way they are combined to do so is completely arbitrary with respect to what the words mean and how they are used. That gives rise to what linguists call duality of patterning; the fact that language is patterned with respect to sound (phonetics and phonology) and with respect to meaning (semantics and syntax).

That isn’t the case with arithmetic. There is a systematic relationship between how a number is spelled and the value of the number designated by its name. Thus the spellings tell us that, of “478”, “829”, and “321”, 829 is the largest and 321 is the smallest. But the spellings of “dog”, “dot”, and “elephant” do not tell us which, if any, are living creatures. In particular, of the two that have similar spellings, one is living, the other is not. The third (“elephant”) is also a living creature though its spelling shares no letters with “dog”.

Center Point Construction: Coleridge, Tezuka, Conrad, and Coppola

This one's going to take awhile; it's got 5800 words, plus several tables. You might want to have some snacks ready and make sure the cell phone's been silenced.

Yesterday I declared the psychological “revolution” in literary studies to be stillborn. Neither the cognitive poetics born of the so-called cognitive revolution nor the Darwinian literary criticism born of evolutionary psychology has yet delivered a new criticism. Nor, for reasons I explained in the post, do I expect them to deliver a robust and insightful new criticism any time soon. As currently constituted, those psychologies can tell us something about the bricks and mortar of our texts, but they can say nothing about the designs.

This post is about design, one particular design that I call center point construction. I describe it – and that’s all I do, describe it – as I’ve found it in four texts, four texts of very different kinds: 1) “Kubla Khan”, a lyric poem, 2) Metropolis, a Japanese manga narrative, 3) Heart of Darkness, a novella, and 4) Apocalypse Now, a motion picture. That the last two should share the same formal armature, to borrow a term from Lévi-Strauss, is perhaps not surprising. But the form I’ve found in both of them has not, so far as I know, before been described in either of them. That the same form can be found in two other texts that differ as much from one another as either in turn differs from Heart of Darkness or Apocalypse Now, that seems worthy of our attention.

A psychological model that could account for the same form in those very different realizations would thereby be one of considerable interest. For it would have to deal with radically differences in temporal scale and presentation medium. I am willing to leave the creation of such a model to the psychologists: evolutionary, cognitive, and neuroscientific. While they’re working on that I plan to be describing more texts, some having center point construction, but others based on different organizing principles.

After some preliminary throat clearing I go through the texts in order: “Kubla Khan”, Metropolis, Heart of Darkness, and Apocalypse Now. I’ve collected references to more detailed work on these texts at the end of the post.

Beyond “Kubla Khan”

As I’ve written in several posts, it was my early work on “Kubla Khan” that sent me down the path I’ve been traveling for the last four decades. However, I’ve always had a problem “selling” that work to others. “Kubla Khan” seems to be a one-off poem; there’s no other poem quite like it. Thus, however interesting its structure, it’s difficult to generalize from that work.

So, the poem’s got an interesting structure, what of it? It’s only one poem fer chrissakes!

Things began to open up a few years ago. The late Mary Douglas got me interested in ring form, where texts are organized like so: A, B, C…X…C’, B’, A’. The last episode mirrors the first, the next to last mirrors and second, and so forth around a central episode. While the two movements of “Kubla Khan” are symmetrical about a mid-point, they don’t appear to have other features of ring form and the poem as a whole doesn’t have a ring form.

Then I discovered that Osamu Tezuka’s manga, Metropolis, has a ring form. And, though it is a narrative not a lyric poem, it shares an important feature with “Kubla Khan.” It has an emblematic ending. Just at the first movement of “Kubla Khan” ends with a line that is an emblem for the whole poem – “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” – so Metropolis ends with an image that can stand as an emblem for the entire narrative – the central character, Michi, in effect becomes transformed into a statue.

What if I analytically decomposed the form of “Kubla Khan” into different elements such that each element is a formal device that can perform certain functions? Maybe those different devices can be found in other texts.

The Ring Form Challenge

The challenge is simple: for any given text – poem, drama, novel, film, what have you – is it a ring or not? That is, does it have the form:

A, B, … X … B’, A’

OR

A, B, … X, X’, … B’, A’

The question seems fairly straightforward, and, yes, the QUESTION is. But answering it may not be. I speak from experience.

Note that the question is about form, not meaning, and that answering the question requires that you describe the text, not that you figure out what it means. You will, however, have to pay attention to meaning to determine, say, whether or not two elements function in parallel. But comparing the meanings of elements within a text is quite different from translating meanings into some theoretical discourse.

I think we need to know, for any text we wish to study, whether or not it has a ring form. And if not a ring, then what? Why should we know this? Because form is important, it guides our apprehension of the text.

What I REALLY think is that if enough people set out in search of ring forms, by the time, say, that a 100 new ring form texts have been identified, a new mode of literary study will be emerging, one that can be commensurate with the new psychologies, but which is not subordinate to any other discipline or body of knowledge.

Mary Douglas on Rings

The study of ring forms is not new. I first learned about ring forms in a 1976 article in PMLA: R. G. Peterson, Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature (PMLA 91, 3: 367-375). He was reporting on a literature that was two decades old by that time, though it was mostly about classical and biblical texts. Beyond verifying the chiasmus in Dylan Thomas’ “Author’s Prologue”, however, I did nothing with the article. I simply filed the topic away in my mind.

I didn’t begin to think about rings until Mary Douglas brought them to my attention earlier in the decade. She had been kind enough to blurb my book – Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture – and my editor put me in touch with her after the book came out. She’d been working on the topic for some time and had published books on two Old Testment texts: Leviticus As Literature (Oxford 1999), In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (Oxford 2001). She believed that rings are fundamental to human thought.

Culture Evolving: Egyptian Mahraganat Music Flowers in the Arab Spring

In just a few years, these and other young musicians have created a new genre of youth-driven, socially conscious music and forced it on the Egyptian soundscape.

Their music predated the political revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, and most of the musicians did not join the uprising in Tahrir Square. But the turmoil since has left Egypt’s huge youth population searching for voices that address issues they care about.

Half of Egypt’s 85 million people are under 25, and many found what they were looking for in the raucous, defiant new music known as “mahraganat,” Arabic for “festivals.” The songs’ addictive beats helped, too.

“We made music that would make people dance but would also talk about their worries,” said Alaa al-Din Abdel-Rahman, 23, better known as Alaa 50 Cent. “That way everyone would listen and hear what was on their minds.”

The music is a rowdy blend of traditional Egyptian wedding music, American hip-hop and whatever else its creators can download for free online.

The Egyptian revolution, such as it is, created a new cultural landscape in which an already existing form of music called “mahraganat” could thrive and animate a much larger audience.

The music’s swift rise from the alleys of neglected Cairo neighborhoods to car stereos and high-class weddings and even television commercials reflects the profound shifts in Egyptian society since the revolution. More people are looking for open discussion of social issues and willing to reach across class lines to find it. Like the revolution, the music came from young people who looked at their lives and did not see much to look forward to. So they made noise, spread their ideas through social media and were surprised by the results. ... Arab popular music has long been dominated by beautiful stars who croon about love and heartbreak and market themselves with music videos shot in luxurious settings that many Egyptians will never visit. Mina Girgis, an Egyptian ethnomusicologist, said that left a wide opening after the revolution for music more in touch with its audience.

It remains to be seen, of course, just how deep this musical revolution goes. Will the new styles persist in Egypt and spread elsewhere in the Arab world? Will they move beyond the Arab world? Will they change the political climate in Egypt? Indeed, can music do that sort of thing?

By way of comparison, I note that manga existed in Japan before World War II, but it grew tremendously after the war, as though Japan's defeat changed the cultural landscape is a way that allowed this heretofore minor form of popular culture to grow and diversify to the point where it now constitutes 30% to 40% of Japan's annual print output.

Will these new grooves change Egyptian society as profoundly as African-American grooves have changed American society?

Grooves, Grafs, and Toons: Transnational Cultural Forms

I'm bumping this one to the top of the list because it's more current than ever. Another one from olden times at The Valve (November 2006).

Word up:

It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

–Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

For the last three years or so I've been telling myself - and a few others as well - that anime and manga will do for the visual culture of this century what African-American music did for the musical culture of the last century:

Provide idioms that are adopted everywhere and adapted for local use.

I've now added graffiti to the list - not graffiti in general, but the kind of grafs I discussed in Shrine of the Triceratops, the contemporary sort that originated in America in the late 60s and early 70s and was then assimilated to hip-hop culture. The purpose of this post is simply to play around with the notion that grooves, grafs, and toons have been providing and will continue to provide the basic transnational idioms of musical and visual culture in the global age. This is an exercise in throat-clearing, thinking out loud, sizing things up.

Outa' Here

Grooves

African American music - Europe meets Africa in North America - has been around the longest. I've seen a reference to minstrelsy in India in the mid-19th century, but have been unable to follow up on it. For the most part it seems to me that this florescence happened mostly in the 20th century; first jazz, then rock and soul (with the blues tagging along), and finally hip-hop. Each time a new set of idioms arose, they went international. By the late 20th century all the major idioms were performed in all continents (Antarctica excepted, though I suppose some of the folks working there might play a little something sometime - surely someone has taken a guitar or a harp there) and local hybrids have given rise to so-called world beat music - a marketing category for fusions of this or that African American idiom with anything else.

Why did this happen? Well, there is good old Western Imperialism organizing a international flows of goods, services, and ideas. But that just gets the music around; that doesn't make it stick, much less flourish and breed. For that the only reasonable answer is that it is locally attractive, not to everyone (it's not even that attractive at home), but to enough people to make a home for it. Why is it so attractive? The answer to that is not obvious, so let's leave it alone for now (see here for some fairly standard speculation).

Grafs

Then we have graffiti. The standard story is that the modern idiom arose in Philadelphia and New York City in the late 60s and early 70s with simple “tags” aerosoled in publicly visible places. Ornate elaboration started in Philadelphia and then spread to New York, which it achieved its first flourishing on the sides of subway cars. As that died in chemical baths, the idiom spread to any and all available surfaces. When hip-hop came along in the late 70s, it picked up graffiti as one aspect of general hip hop culture and hence graffiti made the world trip along with hip hop. (At least I think that's what happened. I don't know how far it had spread before hip-hop picked it up.)

Some Varieties of the Hero

Tim Perper has added extensive comments to yesterday’s bleg in which I asked for books about heroes. I’ve copied those comments into the first part of this post. After his remarks I’ve appended a passage by Northrup Frye.

Tim Perper: Preliminary Remarks on Heroes and Heroines in Manga and Anime

I was recently asked to comment on a paper about heroes in manga and anime, not only in general, but also specifically suggesting sources the author might want to use from other writers and critics. I’m no expert on Heroes in literature, but I know something about manga and anime.

The paper talks about the nature of the “hero,” failed heroes in particular, about manga and anime, about Fate/Zero and Madoka Magica, about Emiya Kiritsugu and Homura Akemi, and quite a range of other topics. I suggested that some focusing might help, but some related ideas might be more interesting here.

Thanks to your comments, it sure looks like there’s not all that much written by Western literary critics about the Hero as archetype – Joseph Campbell did a book on such heroes, and there’s a psychoanalytical literature as well, e.g., Otto Rank. However, there IS a good deal of writing on individual heroes in novels, plays, films, and comics. Franco Moretti did a book on the modern epic that covers a lot of this ground, and there are others as well.

The basic idea is that the concept of the Hero has changed very drastically in Western literary history – for example, starting with tales of King Arthur and of various Irish folk heroes, from a millennium or more ago, and then running into the “death of the hero” in the 19th century “bourgeois” novel, followed by his resurrection as Anti-Hero in the 20th Century, like Rieux, the anti-hero of Camus’ 1947 The Plague. The first kind of hero (King Arthur) is a man – no women in this literature! – who embodies the nation and its people, beliefs, and ideals in himself. The earliest and greatest was perhaps Beowulf from the 700s in Old English – he is archetype of the Ideal Man of his society. In 1936, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a masterful essay about this kind of hero. By contrast, Rieux is simply a physician stranded by World War II in Oran when the black plague strikes...

With the development of the bourgeosie in Europe starting ca. 1850, heroes like King Arthur and Cormac mac Airt faded away into memory. They have reawakened today only as cardboard fossils in modern video games of sword-swinging “heroes” who fight an endless array of multicolor computer monsters. Those computer game “heroes” are NOT heroes in the original sense of a man of great courage facing moral uncertainty and death – like Odysseus in Homer’s poetry or the heroes in medieval stories of Roland.

Part of the Sartrean existentialist vision – it arose in France after the end of World War II – denies that such heroes can even exist today. Hegel – who wrote an analysis of these king-heroes – is dead; long live Nietzsche – who wrote about the Lesser Man who supplanted the king-hero. With the Lesser Man comes Willy Loman from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) – a failure, not heroic enough even to be tragic. In US supercomics, we move away from one set of cardboard characters, like early Superman and Batman, to other cardboard characters like Peter Parker as Spiderman and Batman, the Dark Knight: the hero as a neurotic. The bourgeois “hero” has become not a heroic king, but Marcus Welby, M.D., played on US television by Robert Young from the 60s to mid-70s, and Jim Anderson, also played by Robert Young on Father Knows Best from the 50s to the mid-70s.

Another Lesser Man is Luke Skywalker – and with Star Wars a new element begins to emerge: the heroine starts to replace the Lesser Man in strength, courage, and just plain rattling warriorship. A much discussed subgenre of the Dangerous Heroine is the rape-revenge film, which has attracted a fair amount of critical attention, e.g., by Jacinda Read.

Manga Mania: Of Old Boots and Live Fish

What happens when you download a million pages of manga and start playing with them using some very sophisticated computer equipment?

Frankly, that’s not at all clear to me. But it sure would be fun to play around with the analytical toys created by the Software Studies Initiative at the University of California – San Diego. Here’s the main project page, with a brief description. The page also contains a link to an article, which I’ve downloaded but not read, and a slide presentation, which I have examined. The presentation's worth a look, and perhaps more than that depending on your interests, temperament, and conceptual style.

It has the feel of a fishing expedition, a fairly well-funded expedition with lots of nice gear and some pretty clever fisherman. The thing about fishing expeditions, though, is you don’t know what you’re going to get, an old rubber boot or a live fish. They seemed to have landed both, but can’t tell the difference.

Here’s one of their visualizations, of style space:

Tank Tankoro, by Gajo Sakamoto

Gaja Sakamoto. Tank Tankuro: Prewar Works, 1934-45. Presspop, Inc. 2011.

I was browsing in Jim Hanley’s Universe* a few weeks ago and saw a handsomely slipcased volume by someone I’d never heard of, Gajo Sakamoto, about a character I’d never heard of, Tank Tankoro. That I’d never heard of either means nothing, of course. The fine print on the label pasted to the cellophane wrapper indicated that this Tankoro character was “the preeminent robot superhero manga from pre-WWII Japan” and that it had somehow gotten lost even in Japan and wasn’t rediscovered there until the 1970s, at which point it was republished to much joy and acclaim.

A very convincing sales pitch and, as I said, the slipcasing was very handsome. But I didn’t buy that first time. But two weeks later . . . then I bought. I ripped off the cellophane wrapper, took the book out of its case and started leafing though. Good paper, high quality printing, I thought, and funny.

I leafed through to page 73 and noticed a bunch of guys and a canon, but no ammunition. I turned the page and saw a nice two-page spread (74-75), in four color printing (the earlier pages had been only black and red). On the right-hand page some guy had a basket stacked high with octopi while on the left-hand the guys with the canon were wondering “What’ll we do with them?”

Of course, I new exactly what they were going to do with them, and started chuckling at the notion of using octopi as canon balls (while also thinking that that wasn’t too kind to the octopi). And, yep! that’s what happened on pages 76 and 77. And then 78 and 79 formed another two page spread, which you can see on the web, here (page 78) and here (page 79). The octopi formed a chain stretching from Tankuro up there in the air down to the guys on the ground, who were trying to reel him in: “It’s like beach net fishing.”

What an utterly absurd and wonderful conception. Of course, it didn’t work. Tankuro freed himself, because he’s the hero. I was hooked.

To Copy is To Be, Not: Tezuka’s Book of Human Insects

Osamu Tezuka. The Book of Human Insects. Translated by Mari Morimoto. Vertical, Inc. 2011.

Originally serialized in Japan as Ningen Konchuuki in 1970-71, Tezuka’s The Book of Human Insects deals with themes and motifs that have been present in his work from the beginning, but presents them to an audience more mature than we normally associate with Astro Boy, though we would do well to remember than many adults eagerly followed Astro’s adventures. Just how mature, that’s a judgment call, but The Book of Human Insects presents us with genuine violence, with thugs, gang bosses, overly ambitious industrialists, and with explicit, though not pornographic, sex, including an encounter between two women. If I hesitate to call it lesbian or gay sex, well, that’s because what’s going on in that relationship is, well, not so complicated, but it doesn’t fit into neat socio-sexual categories either. Not American categories at any rate.

One woman in the encounter is the private secretary, assistant, and mistress of one of the above mentioned industrialists, Kiriri Kamaishi. She’s being fooled and exploited, and by a woman she’s supposed to watch and follow. That woman, and the party to sexual relationship, is Toshiko Tomura, Kamaishi’s new wife in a match that’s explicitly constructed as a competitive wager. Tomura is our protagonist. The wager takes the form of a marriage contract between them that places heavy restrictions on Tomura’s actions, but which also has one clause that Tomura herself added: “Any unilateral divorce will not be recognized. And if either spouse should happen to violate any of the these terms, all of their assets shall be transferred to the other.”

There’s a certain logic to fiction that pretty much betrays how this wager is going to work out. Further, the rather absurd nature of the covenant gives this segment of the story, “Longhorn Beetle”—the third of four—the feel of parable. But then, the whole story has that feel, a feeling that ebbs and flows as the story twists and changes. The point of this extended parable, however, is nothing so simple as a lesson. Of perhaps it is, and the lesson is: what is, is.

Tezuka, Genius, Kids, and Stories

So here’s what I’m thinking: Yesterday I put up a post in which I talked about Osamu Tezuka’s science fiction trilogy, three manga that he wrote early in his career. In that post – which also included discussions of two of the premier texts of English literature, “Kubla Khan” and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – I argued that the trilogy emerged from a conceptual and emotional crisis brought on by Japan’s defeat in World War II. Yet – and here’s the thing – Tezuka wrote those stories for children. Not the youngest children, but certainly 9 or 10 year olds. The story had to absorb and interest them. Yet it also had to absorb and interest a sophisticated young adult, Tezuka himself, in the process of working through deep and fundamental issues in his life world.

How’s that possible? To create texts that speak to two such disparate audiences? Or are they that different? Where’s the point where the adult issues met the childhood issues? Tezuka’s texts – and many others. Obviously. But how’s that work?

See also:
The Robot as Subaltern: Tezuka's Mighty Atom
Ponyo for Adults
Universal Kid Space

Being in Crisis and the Ontological Text

"Kubla Khan", Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Fantasia, and Tezuka’s Science Fiction Trilogy

Early in my career I was immersed in the ideas of a handful of Continental thinkers, including Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Piaget, and Lévi-Strauss, but, as I explained in an essay, about my encounter with Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, that poem forced me away from a more or less philosophical grounding toward the cognitive briar patch of the newer psychologies. The poem presented problems that simply didn’t register with Merleau-Ponty or even Lévi-Strauss, but that seemed more commensurate with the world of Chomsky, but also, though less directly, that of the neurosciences.

I have subsequently come to realize the “Kubla Khan” is what we might call an ontological text, and that I have an affinity for such texts. While all poems and fictions have an ontological dimension, not all of them focus on ontological matters. Most texts deploy an ontology in order to tell a story. Ontological texts ‘tell stories’ in order to deploy and ontology.

In the case of “Kubla Khan” the poem doesn’t tell a story at all, not in the way, for example, Coleridge’s so-called Conversation Poems do. It presents us with a succession of situations, each in a different world. In the large, the poem unfolds in two movements. The first is set in the physical world of Xanadu around and about a river and some marvelous structure; the second is set nowhere in particular, but is a tissue of thoughts and imaginings. The two worlds are connected only be an emblem: 1) “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” (l. 36), 2) “That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!”. And the nature of that connection is mysterious and problematic. What is at issue in this poem is the stations of Being, if you will, that bind these objects and processes into a world.

So that’s one text I’ve pondered. And pondered.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is another. The action moves toward the third part, which takes place over three days. Sir Bercilak goes hunting in the forests while Sir Gawain goes hunting in Bercilak’s bedroom – more accurately, he is the hunted. At the end of the day they exchange the spoils of their respective hunts. That exchange thus asserts an equivalence between two realms of being, that of the hunt and that of courtship. This action, of course, is framed by the larger action which has Sir Gawain journeying from Camelot, to Hautdesert, to the Green Chapel and then back to Camelot. As I have argued in an essay about the narrative, Hautdesert is an inversion of the ‘normal’ courtly world of Camelot: a woman presides at court, not a man; a woman pursues Sir Gawain, not vice versa. And the Green Chapel seems a negation of the world of human artifice, being but a mound deep in the forest. The narrative sets these worlds into interaction with one another and asserts that interaction through an emblematic object, the green girdle Bercilak’s wife gave to Sir Gawain, which saved his life at the Green Chapel (at the cost of a nick on the neck) and which, upon his return to Camelot, came to symbolize the fellowship of knights at court. (Did it really save his life?)

Another ontological text. A narrative, yes. But a highly ritualized one, one emphasizing different kinds of and modes of being.