The body becomes a locus of interpretation in Metamorphosis, for both the graphic self and the reader. Problems of representation emerge through a kind of facial dialectic. All differentiated organic selves try to form one multifaceted conception of the Kabuki self. Moreover, the dismemberment and scarification of the apparent body sets up definition as problematic, different models of bodily trauma operating as a means of continually inscribing and reinscribing self. The organic allies itself with history, both face and body operating as shifting texts open to rewriting. The text itself becomes a reflection of the imaginative process of self-constitution: ìI must recognize myself. My name is written all over my face.î

      A variety of Kabukis populate the text, the different modes of expression identifying a process of both self-consolidation and dispersal involving masks, iconography, dismemberment and replacement.

The representative multitude purportedly performs cohesion, yet ultimately drives textual bodies apart. Kabuki, both its title character and its creator, often attempt self-description through inverted depiction, transcribing potentials and that which is markedly absent. Kabukiís face arrives in three modes, each offering distinct modes of self-conception; there exists no facial paradigm. It can be argued that the entire book is about Kabuki trying to imagine her own face, as a recurring motif in the book shows Kabuki holding her mask. The mask covers half of her face, one of its eyeholes held exactly over one of her eyes. It reveals the scarred half of her face, then creating three eyes, three properties for vision. Her face offers one model of identity, her mask another; the space in-between, the
middle eye, focuses on the interaction between face and mask, this may be the only place Kabukiís search may come to any fruition. Both mask and face contain differently inscribed histories, her scar marking her violent moment of conception, and her mask binding her both to her mother (as a Kabuki performer) and the Masks of the Noh. The liminal space between these histories dramatizes the production of her ìrealî face, one evading myth.  

      Kabukiís face contains the microhistory of the entire graphic novel, giving flesh to the semiotics of Mackís fiction. The scar on her face (the Japanese characters for Kabuki that individually say ìsong,î ìdance,î and ìaction.î) first appear in deep welts down her motherís back, just before the rape that conceived her. These wounds, inflicted on her mother by the same man who would carve them into her face, then are the more obvious joints between past and present,

recurring markers that develop and reiterate Mackís mythic cycle. Ironically, the act of carving these particular words into flesh drains them of meaning, Kabuki losing the facility to sing, dance or act. The transmutation of these historic signs into scars enacts the emergence of a patriarchal myth from history. Myth, and its hieroglyphs, becomes oppressive, stultifying Kabuki in the moment of inscription.
Moreover, the name inscribed on her face permeates the text through artistic rending, the characters acting in their individual capacities (ìsong,î ìdance,î ìactionî) as descriptive joints: the text is the face. These characters annotate a memory of a dance she shared at a ball ‚ her and her partner become transmuted into these ideograms. This bodyís irrevocable bind to history finds crisis in Part 6, with a bodily depiction that references da Vinciís famous anatomical position. Kabukiís history is literally written on her organs, the finger segment she had chewed in Circle of Blood three graphic novels earlier still drifting in her stomach. Her body then becomes a mythic text, a source of identity. In Hiding, Mark Taylor writes:

In the late 1960s, Vito Acconci, one of the most innovative and outrageous body artists, felt it necessary actually to inscribe his own skin. In a 1969 work entitled Performance for a Coffee Hour (Marking Time), Acconci repeatedly pressed a bottle cap into his arm. Less than a year later, he performed Trademarks, in which he bit as many parts of his body as he could reach. In spite of the impression they made, Acconciís marks did not last; they were as fleeting as his performance and faded without leaving a trace. It is as if Acconci feared needles and were [sic] satisfied with temporary tattoos that could easily be washed away. If the body matters, it must be marked permanently.(1)

Acconci had only to deal with a rehearsal of bodily inscription, the disappearance of his marks practically erasing their history.

     Kabukiís scars chronically perform inscription and produce myth. Her body is an obvious site of meaning, both internally and externally, that catalogues the graphic novelís past. The tattoo on her back (labeling her as property of the Masks of the Noh) also activates her bodyís status as textual palimpsest, a body multiply inscribed. The Noh tattoo compounds Kaiís injuries: Both scars operate as markers of male erasure and inscription, capturing multiple false histories that fuel the production of myth. Kabuki must discard these fabricated histories in order to fully comprehend the primal rape moment as a historic event. On the cover of Part 6, the Noh corporate tattoo becomes transmogrified into three dimensions, encircling and trapping her body as she tries to gnaw the tattoo from her shoulder. In Skin Deep, the prequel to Metamorphosis,Kabuki cannot reply to Akemiís origami notes, and so she conceives of baring her scars to Akemi as a revelation of character.
 

Metamorphosis captures the reevaluation of these scars not as identifiers but as disparate wounds, Kabuki now describing her face as a Jungian ìshadowî whose past must be repressed.

      Kabukiís mask operates as her ëproperí face. Bulletproof and sans expression, it promotes emotional and historical deferral. However, both facial surfaces are somehow labeled with her name, either carved into skin or iconized in mask form. Motion from one to the other allows little actual movement. After Kabuki endures a brutal beating at the hands of the orderlies, a psychiatrist comes to speak with her, giving her the mask, though her face is too swollen to wear it. Of this, Kabuki says:

ìMy faceÖshe leaves with me. It is too painful to wear. So I just hold it in my lap.î Having come to rely on the Noh mask, the pain of wearing the face may refer to both surfaces. The Noh mask logs a fiction of the self. It operates with quite a different capacity then, than the representative iconography fomenting imagistic discernment between the characters populating the pages of Kabuki. Akemi creates her own icon, which she uses to sign off her notes to Kabuki. Kabukiís conception of Akemiís personality arrives in her origami notes allied with this simplified image. Yet, the semantics constructed in part by these icons run into a representative predicament when depicting Kabuki. The mask fails to represent her, despite the fact that she selects it, and the sharp lines of the icon blur. When Akemi finally meets Kabuki in person, Mack annotates their dialogue in graphic form, transforming it into an allegorical journey occurring outside physical space. Watercolour thickens into crayon, the two of them on a sparely drawn boat adrift on a crayon sea. To Akemiís scribbled body, Mack attaches her chosen iconized self-image; yet Kabukiís icon can only be constituted in fuzzy scribbles ‚ she cannot be reduced or

graphed. Her face, scarred flesh, can only be rendered with complete accuracy, Mack proceeds from a real-life model, sketching and painting shade, color, scars. Conventional strategies of representation falter in depictions of Kabuki due largely to the conflicting pasts that inhabit her body: she is herself and m(other), silenced yet struggling to speak.

     Kabukiís face functions as the shifting text. To facilitate her escape, Akemi organizes injury to another inmate in places that correspond to Kabukiís scars so that she may use her bandages as
concealment. With these in place, Kabuki and Akemi enter a new section of the installation, where they meet a motley crew of inmates. Among these, they find an artist, Ann, an operative who has assumed so many identities that sheís forgotten who she is. Her body contains a multiplicity of personalities, dramatizing Kabukiís own representative puzzle. Even her name contains and articulates metatextual problems of representation, focusing the conflict between an ostensibly Japanese subject and an American artist. Ann enacts the project of the graphic novel: ìIím told sheís drawing her self portrait over and over in an attempt to recognize herself.î Humanlike outlines adorn the walls (of the asylum, of the text) at Annís hands. Annís schizophrenia feeds into Kabukiís fractured self, and she asks to draw Kabukiís portrait. She renders it directly onto Kabukiís false bandages, recreating the uninjured face Kabuki cannot quite envision in a childlike

stylized scrawl. Her art here rehearses an act of self-conception Kabuki cannot yet undertake, constructing other characters as Kabukiís psychological/narrative limbs: ìA fantastic deal! A steal! Itís rare for our artist to paint a self portrait of someone else.î A few pages into Part 4, Akemi exchanges these decorated bandages with another inmate, Emi, for a guardís prosthetic eye, and Emi places the bandages on her own face. In this way, Kabuki transfers Annís conception of herself onto another; finally assessing anotherís image of herself as insufficient. A following panel captures Kabuki and Akemi speaking in Noh sign language, Kabuki marred only by the perfunctory letters ìSCARî where she usually brandishes her name. Up to this point, the scar has operated as a paradigm of mythically tainted writing. Its status as wound and word bound its violent patriarchal history to the very concept of writing itself. The duality of the scar served to propagate myth, the signs on her face only attaining meaning through its association with the rape. Associations with myth constructed by the scar fall apart here, her name only a flesh wound, exposing her scar as nothing more than a word. The relationship works in reverse as well, revealing the word as nothing more than a scar. Myth emerges here as a patriarchal construct, the arbiter of meaning.

     At this juncture, the scar registers her face as an arena for misleading myth and inscription. The psychoanalyst serves as reader and historian, excavating the signs built into this myth. The Rorschach cards she uses visually punctuate the novelís constructed history, tracing out the textís new kanji in inkblots. She sees the adolescent image of her father (her motherís murderer), the face of her mother, and on a defective card, the asymmetry of her own face. But these mythic images do not emerge only from Kabukiís mind, these reflected symbols instantly recognizable to the reader. Mack educates the reader in Kabukiís mythic signs, though these signs are themselves deceptive and overdetermined. This constant replication of the novelís history suggests the multiple directives of reading the face, and hence the text. Nonetheless, while these cards imply possibility, they also assert representative confines.

     Kabuki can only formulate her own body as the sum of fractured parts, the entire textís multiplicity reproducing her thrust for wholeness. As her psychiatrist insists that she finger-paint a series of self-portraits, Kabuki creates a mass of abstract pictures on the back of the Rorschach cards, except for the defective card.In this way, she denies
the feigned psychological abstraction the cards purport to offer, subverting them to her own mode of representation. She literally inverts the blurred signs, composing a provisional model of self that purportedly ignores her myth even as it remains an integral part of that self-construction. In part seven, the psychiatrist assembles the pictures to discover that Kabuki has indeed drawn herself, but as the sum of constituent finger-paintings, the errant markers of her history bordering this face. The final result blurs physiognomy altogether, her features, her scar all barely perceptible. Kabukiís self is the final production of this entire novel, a barely constituted palimpsest that blurs due to its multiplicity. Her

self-conception struggles to maintain coherency, ultimately transient because it predicates itself upon a patriarchal system of interpretation, both literally (in the Rorschach cards) and metaphorically.

      Kabuki uses different bodily strategies both to define the self, and to release the self from that definition. Kabuki depicts the parallel and connected instabilities of selfhood and representation that emerge from the patriarchal strategy of female dismemberment as a mode of erasure. Themes of dismemberment and replacement proliferate through Kabuki, dissolving the boundaries within and between bodies. At first, mutilation does work to compound the narrative past, binding Kabuki to her history. The scars on her face truss her to a label encompassing both herself and her mother, to a vicious past that has, up to this point, determined her future. Her digestion of her own finger also served as an immutable marker of action, a gloss pointing the reader to the first graphic novel, Circle of Blood. Recurring themes of mutilation serve to give the text itself its own history and intertextual foundation. However, at this juncture, within the space of the institution, Kabuki can use her violent finesse to her own ends. As a child, Kabuki must learn to take apart chickens until she can rend them in the dark. In part four, a butterfly collection finds itself slowly being deprived of its wings, capturing too the unfolding of Akemiís origami animals. Like Akemiís notes, dismemberment provides a space of transformation.

      In her essay Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme, Nancy Vickers interrogates Petrarchís description of Laura in Rime Sparse, examining how his linguistic dispersal of her body operates with regard to male self-definition. She posits that Petrarchís obsession on particularities of description is an ìinsistence that would in turn generate multiple texts on individual fragments of the body or on the beauties of woman.î(2) This echoes Kabukiís physics, the sum of discrete parts: each one has its own psychological or artistic directive. In Petrarchís poem, Laura ìgains immortality at the price of vitality and historicity,î an inverse relationship to the one that finally occurs in Kabuki(3). The figurative method of dismembering Laura allows the speaker to unify himself; the repetition of her fragmented image makes him practice his own configuration: ìëIí speaks his anxiety in the hope of finding repose through enunciation, of re-membering the lost body, of effecting an inverse incarnation ‚ her flesh made word.î(4) The poet silences the female body to assert his own primacy: ìbodies fetishized by a poetic voice logically do not have a voice of their own; the world of making words, of making texts, is not theirs.î(5) The erasure of the female body and voice through metaphorical dissection is, in Vickerís eyes, the project of this male poet.

     Maiming in Kabuki both literalizes and subverts this dynamic. The agent of violence is female, the dismemberment not mere disassembly. Towards the end of the narrative, Kabuki precipitates her literal and allegorical escape through this subversive model of mutilation. She must fight an unidentified member of the Noh (unidentified, ironically, because she does

not wear her mask) who has infiltrated the institution under the guise of Kabukiís psychiatrist. She defeats and ìcleansî her assailant in the Noh fashion, which requires the removal of the face, teeth, and fingers from the body. All scars are to be gouged out so the body is beyond recognition. Kabuki, however, reconstitutes herself by remaking the body of another. The scars she gouges correspond to the position of scars on her own body. The body faces away from the reader; its back, inscribed with both the Noh corporate tattoo and Kabukiís deep gashes, becomes the only means of identification. Kabukiís act of dismemberment is also an act of transference, the brutal past associated with her scars and wounds now residing on another (dead) body. She walks away with her enemyís face and the remnants of her body wrapped in Kabukiís painted Rorschach cards. Unlike Petrarch, Kabuki constructs the other as herself, discarding the history of the body. Wrapping the body parts in her once-more segmented pictorial self dramatizes the failure of graphic representation, and completes the rejection of myth. As a result, she is declared dead for the third time in her life, and in so doing, regains her scattered voice. She becomes an agent of violent inscription, enacting the brutality done to herself and her mother as a strategy of reclaiming an overwritten identity.

     Yet, Kabukiís ìmetamorphosisî does not end here, she has merely freed herself. Lacking direction, she has left a chasm in the hierarchy of characters and of the Noh. The agent known as Kabuki must be replaced, as well as the agent Kabuki has killed. Akemi, once the mediator of Kabukiís voice, penetrates the Noh using the costume of the dead, still unidentified, agent. Kabuki meets her reflection, Kageko, who will also slot into place. Despite Kabukiís rejection of her violent past, it continues seemingly unaltered.

(1)Taylor, Mark C. Hiding. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997. p. 111-113.

(2)Vickers, Nancy J. "Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme." Critical Inquiry. Vol 8, No. 2. (Winter 1981): p. 266.

(3)Ibid. p. 272.

(4)Ibid. p. 275.

(5)Ibid. p. 277.