Kabuki: The Myth of Face

 

ìIíve always said that I learned the English I know through two sources ‚ Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.î ‚Umberto Eco (0)

     Ecoís remark concentrates attention on the strange coincidence between highbrow and lowbrow, and the potential of their fusion. David Mackís Kabuki: Metamorphosis, a graphic novel series which began in October 1997, exists within this disjunctive space, an awareness of ìthe exaggerated antithesis between art and life, between the aesthetic and the Philistine, the worthy and the unworthy, the pure and the tainted, embodied in the host of adjectival categories so firmly established at the turn of the century î permeating the text.(1)(2) Metamorphosis seems caught between sensibilities defining texts like Marvel Comics, entrenched in certain generic modes; and like Finnegans Wake, a work by a ëseriousí author who attempts formal experimentation. This theme of betwixt and between -ness infuses Metamorphosis, in terms of character, narrative, and representation: the text and its creatures inhabit a liminal space.(3) As a genre, I would argue that the comic book is considered ëotherí in the highbrow realm. This generic tension between Hi and Lo feeds into Kabuki itself, Mack pursuing heteronomous terms of expression: the other gender, race, body. This drive for difference results finally in the problematization of representation itself. Depiction constructs a framework of overinscription that taxes signs of their meaning.

     Kabuki: Metamorphosis takes place in Control Corps, an asylum where defective/ insane government agents are sent to be rehabilitated. The title character, Kabuki, used to be an agent for the Masks of the Noh, a secret government outfit formed to combat organized crime in Kyoto. She is sent to Control Corps after she first murders her father Kai, a ganglord who raped and mutilated Kabuki and her mother, and then kills the entire Noh Board of Directors (These events are chronicled in Mack's first graphic novel, Circle of Blood).(4) Kabukiís struggle with her identity in this asylum is first a quarrel between herself and her psychoanalyst. She remains psychologically static until she starts receiving notes in origami form from another inmate, Akemi (their communication begins in the prequel to Metamorphosis, Skin Deep). (5)

     Kabuki is conceived in rape. This foundational myth plunges the novel into a primal state of silence, the act of rape operating as a violent means of male inscription. This embryonic moment occurs in history, the ensuing acts of inscription tantamount to the proliferation of myth, falsified history rooted in the project of male elision. The rape instigates what is essentially a patriarchal narrative, where language and myth are entangled. In Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays, Helene Cixous writes ìthat the logocentric plan had always, inadmissibly, been to create a foundation for (to found and fund) phallocentrism, to guarantee the masculine order a rationale equal to history itself. î(6) Metamorphosis articulates a struggle to escape from the condition of silence, multiplicities of representation forming ostensibly reconfigured modes of language to enable Kabukiís scattered female voice.

     Kabukiís face and body serve as overwritten texts, a palimpsest which has continually been inscribed by the patriarchal other. In this way, her face has become an overdetermined site of meaning, containing the mythic markers of the entire novel. Myth inhibits her body through scarification, her past literally written on her face. A scar operates as more than just an inscription. It also signifies a previous wound that may have healed but still leaves its mark. The scar then embodies the nature of writing itself within this text, perpetually tainted by the primal rape moment. Kabuki remains confined in Lacanís pre-oedipal imaginary stage, caught in a perpetual state of identification with her mother. The entire novel may then be conceived as a doubled performance of attempted self-recognition, of Kabuki trying to envisage her own face.

     The text serves as a figurative, if subverted, rite of passage, constructing a liminal space with an apparent thrust towards wholeness or reaggregation, the escape from myth. Both Kabuki and the text itself inhabit this liminal space. In ìLiminality and Communitas,î Victor Turner writes of liminal beings: ìIt is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life î.(7) Kabukiís repeated deaths function as the channel of separation, her first death as a child thrusting her into a violent world where she exists as a ghost. Her second death takes place just prior to the entire shift in location, to the space of the asylum which gives her actual threshold status. This transitional state offers the potential for defying the myth of silence; and yet, Kabuki remains trapped on the threshold, unable to conjure a viable depiction of self. Thus, Kabukiís is a stalled rite of passage, her entrapment within the pre-oedipal stage tantamount to a constant reiteration of liminality.

     The trajectory of the dynamic folding and unfolding process in origami maps the circumscribed shape of the liminality in Metamorphosis. Akemiís notes to Kabuki conceptually breach the bounds of two-dimensional representation, effecting a change in the state of the entire text and positing the permeability of both physical and metaphorical confines. However, Akemiís design pivots on the reversibility of the fold, such that her notes can be read. The impermanence of the fold dissolves one-way direction, asserting the intransigence of the liminal state. Even then, the liminal state does not fulfill the expectation of free movement; though there exists a median space in between the unfurled square and the final paper animal, the permutations are rather strictly transcribed. The history of the fold eternally scars the paper, and so the folding process continually rehearses the same path. The model of liminality in this text is finally this rehearsal, a repetition of the original crime, rather than its undoing.

     Reading the origami in Metamorphosis as the expression of a bounded path refers too to its position as semiotic model. This text uses the graphic as a means of pushing against the confines of representation, attempting to disentangle language with a myth defined by patriarchy. Metamorphosis expresses hope for a new means of representing self, utilizing the graphic form to constitute an apparently different semiotic system. And yet, though different descriptive forms compose the pages of the novel, the recurrence of mythic signs problematizes the capacity for a reconstituted model of expression. In their introduction to Embodied Voices, Leslie Dunn and Nancy Jones suggest: ìSuch narratives testify to the persistent desire of male artists to control through representation the anxieties aroused by the female voice, even while they license the display, and the enjoyment, of its powers î.(8) Mack takes history into the realm of his novel, dispersing temporality to proliferate his own myth. The conjunction between his myth and the patriarchal one is not simply one of overlap, however. Mack attempts to rewrite the patriarchal myth, but the arena he conceives for female self-construction continues to lie in difference.

     Kabuki the graphic novel seems to desire a different end than Kabuki the character. Kabuki seeks consolidation, manipulating the aesthetic liminal space offered her to construct a provisional concept of self. The array of artistic forms in Kabuki generates Kabukiís self as palimpsest: multiple rehearsals of self-conception through many different explorations of selfhood. As Kabuki begins her escape from Control Corps, she meets a schizophrenic artist Ann, whose host of personalities has driven her to madness. She performs the project of the entire graphic novel: ìIím told sheís drawing her self portrait over and over in an attempt to recognize herself. î When Mack gives Kabuki the capacity to draw her self-portrait, she produces a series of images that tenuously integrates into a picture of wholeness.

     Kabuki must finally use violence, the medium through which she was originally silenced, to reclaim her voice. The ability to undo the patriarchal narrative here must be encoded in violence, an appropriation of the ëmasterís toolsí that undermines the recovery of the female voice. Kabukiís liminal status pivots on death as the modus operandi for separation, as if dying is a rehearsal for freedom.

     However, Kabuki is not a bastion of patriarchal hegemony. After all, Mack does create Metamorphosis as a struggle against female silence, even if that silence is of his own doing. Metamorphosisí mixture of accommodation and resistance creates a tension between patriarchy and its critics, articulating language and representation itself as being predicated on phallocentrism. Kabuki then maps the journey from an entrenchment within a patriarchal narrative to the only viable means of self-assertion, absence: of selfhood, representation and difference itself.

     This thesis takes a three part hypertext form as a means of theorizing the shape of the graphic novel. The beginning image establishes Kabukiís face as inherently fractured, invoking the concept of her selfhood as provisional and indistinct. The three rollover images that appear reconstitute her face/self as palimpsest, exploring three modalities of reading or representing her face. These modalities take the form of three essays addressing three different but entangled subjects: myth as emergent from history, language or representational systems, and the face/body as texts. These individual texts are linked with each other at various different points, the connections between texts analogous to the origami fold, or scars, in Metamorphosis. Terry Harpold writes of hypertext:

The link (the place or the moment of a turn) marks a boundary between lexias in two ways: at the level of the interface, it is the irreducible, concrete signature of a pause; it is as really ìthereî as the letters on the screen ìreallyî describe the textual fields they represent. Phenomenologically, it traces a pure interval, spatiality deferred in time, displacement as dis-place-ment. (9)

The deferred moment of time charts the progression of the fold. With the hypertext form, I hope to posit an ostensibly new reading system that is, like the semiotic system in Metamorphosis, ultimately restricted in its permutations.

     The essay on myth and history in Metamorphosis first articulates how Kabukiís moment of conception scatters her voice and patriarchally reinscribes her. Kabuki remains stultified throughout the text, myth emerging from a patriarchal reading of history. In this essay, I map Turnerís liminal rite of passage onto Lacanís mirror stage, suggesting that Kabuki fails to move on, either to a state of social integration or a state of fictive wholeness.

     The essay on semiotics catalogues Mackís development of new modes of representation, the conjunction of which purports to depict and consolidate Kabukiís self. However, his systems of graphic and textual representation inhabit the same circumscribed liminal space, ultimately limited in their representative capacity. In this way, representation itself comes under question ‚ can Kabuki be accurately represented in a language essentially confounded by patriarchy?

     In the essay on Kabukiís face and body, I posit Kabukiís face/body as text, a container for patriarchal myth. Her face and thus, self, is defined and redefined by strategies of scarification and dismemberment. Several models of facial representation, such as iconography, perform Kabukiís project of facial reconstitution. Yet, these systems fail to represent, constituting Kabukiís self as provisional when founded on a phallocentric model of description. Kabukiís attempt at reclaiming herself and regaining her silenced voice requires her to utilize the vernacular of dismemberment. Ecoís tongue in cheek comment articulates a certain semiotic comprehension that arises from the differential space between high and low, all the English he'll ever need swirling in the HiLo vortex. Kabuki, however, remains in a state of betwixt and between-ness, her process of self-consolidation predicated on negation, an absenting from the available models.

(0) Eco, Umberto. "Italian Hero." http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue24/eco.shtml

(1) Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, Masachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988. p. 232.

(2) Mack, David. Kabuki: Metamorphosis. California: Image Comics, 2000.

(3) Turner, Victor W. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1969. p. 95.

(4) Mack, David. Kabuki: Circle of Blood. California: Image Comics, 1997.

(5) Mack, David. Kabuki: Skin Deep. California: Image Comics, 1997.

(6) Cixous, Helene. "Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays." In Postmodern America Fiction: A Norton Anthology. Ed: Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, Andrew Levy. United States of America: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1998. p. 585.

(7) Turner, Victor W. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. p. 95.

(8) Dunn, Leslie C. and Nancy A. Jones. Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture. Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1994. p. 3.

(9) Harpold, Terry. "Conclusions." In Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. p. 643.