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The final chapter of Metamorphosis reiterates myth while effecting the ultimate failure of all re-presentation to re-present without making any distinction between sign and signifier. The path of the book has been one of metaphorical entropy, the title pages moving from the illusion of singularity (Part One: Pieces) to a plethora of quotes, a stylistic decision that embodies the provisional and inherently fractured nature of Kabuki's consciousness:
These quotes envision the self as a manifold product of one's own thought, although Mack's decision to use the words of others casts doubt on the very assertions made by the quotes. Moreover, the catalogue of names summoned by the quotes suggests disparity, not unification, recalling the aesthetic and cultural discord inherent in the text. Akemi's presence as a quotable voice that emerges from the text itself does not bring these voices together, even constituting her as other. In this last chapter, all interpretive models briefly surge into place before completely faltering. A purported gestalt reading of this novel falls short, disparate parts incapable of unification as Kabuki chooses to absent herself from the fictional unity offered by the patriarchal process. Alphabetical chronology organizes the pages of the last chapter, and yet the words invoke the novel's history, depicted in the multitude of semiotic systems inhabiting the previous eight chapters. By the same token, myth does not operate as the arbiter of meaning here, but emerges as the result of a new organizing principle. The clarity with which myth offered a reading of Metamorphosis begins to stagger, taking shape as a mere collection of signs. This re-visioning of myth then presents myth as only an organizing principle, deconstructing its primacy as a paradigm for reading Kabuki's history. The rewriting of the patriarchal myth here enacts Kabuki's removal of herself from its interpretive tyranny. |
| Although representation in this text was always problematic, steeped in a conflict of representative modes, depiction in this final chapter results in failure. As the board of directors of the Masks of the Noh tries to determine exactly what happened in the fight between Kabuki and the unnamed Noh operative, the given perspective on the page switches to the blurred view offered by the shattered camera. Photography has heretofore been notably absent from Metamorphosis, yet this ostensibly accurate, external form of representation arrives as a broken chronicle at the precise moment it might offer an objective perspective. Its emergence at exactly this moment underscores a crisis of |
| representation. This chapter then portrays Kabuki's escape from the patriarchal mode of representation: she is not subject to the inscription or perspective of the other. Distorted, barely perceptible body parts first | |
| appear in discontinuous panels. Misinformation then soundtracks several panels of the camera's broken lens: "We hear the sounds of someone's last breath. Then there are the cutting sounds. Several minutes of this...minutes later the door opens again...Siamese have to turn the camera in order to remove the tape. That's when we see the body." The conflict between the real and represented here yields an understanding of representative failure in this text, the pages depicting the Noh's conclusion of Kabuki's apparent demise intercut with Kabuki's confrontation with her shadow, Kageko. And yet, the conclusion of her death bears figurative weight. As she walks away from her past, she finally gains a sense of self. | |
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The mirror stage exemplified in the meeting between Kabuki and Kageko completes Kabuki's project of self-conception, precipitated by her act of dismemberment. The self-alienation determining Lacan's mirror stage becomes unified with a transference of myth, such that Kabuki's alienation from her "self" (Kageko) operates in a liberating capacity. Kageko says: "You said that you once had a dream that you walked through the rain...and it washed away your scars." Two opposing panels of Kabuki and Kageko's mutually reflected faces frame an internal panel of Kabuki's scars. This graphic enactment of the mirror stage between Kabuki and her shadow briefly focuses attention on her scars before she disperses their meaning: "It has." Their encounter precedes Kabuki's complete rejection of the novel's past, as she throws away all her doctor's case notes and Rorschach cards into a river. She tears the files to shreds and lets them fall into the river, text and demarcating lines that delineate a masculine reading of her past dissolving entirely. As she throws away the Rorschach cards, she also discards the provisional composition of her own face painted on their backs. |
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When Kabuki tosses her enemy's body parts into the water, her act of dismemberment finds complete realization. When "somehow, the face floats to the durface, [they] watch each other for a time...one disfigured face to another until a swarm of fish come to devour this last identifying feature," Kabuki becomes a witness to the death of her past. Her face then no longer serves as a site of meaning for her. This last chapter dramatizes the dismissal of the representative models that have attempted to represent Kabuki. She absents herself from a patriarchal myth, her incompletion of Turner or Lacan's models of patriarchal growth encapsulating this refutation. The final page of Metamorphosis exists in a totally ambiguous space, the majority of the page spent on unreal art-paper background, with a small lone panel in the bottom left hand corner capturing Kabuki's ephemeral reflection in the puddles of rainwater. Kabuki's murky shadow confounds the patriarchal myth of language, direct representation impossible. The words conjured by the letter Z |