Notes for a Future Manifesto

The principle technique of storytelling is “analytical montage” (Groensteen L’Univers des Mangas (1991)) in which the sequencing of plates [panels] is very resourceful in comparison with a rather constrained Euro-American montage and page layout. In manga, there is no textual interference. Analytical montage entails the “scattering” of a story event over different frames. A scene that would “normally” (at least, from a western point of view) be captured in a single pane - with the necessary (or if you will redundant) descriptive information - is now cut up over different frames. The isolated frames, with alternating “camera-angles”, are put together in a visual continuum. Especially fighting scenes provide excellent illustrative material to this technique. For instance, the narrative in Crying Freeman (Koike & Ikegami 1994) proceeds through a rapid succession of images in the visual chain. Manga artists are real masters in creating such sweeping visual arrangements. Story tension and atmosphere are effected through variation of the number of plates [panels] per page - while applying cinematographical techniques such as fade-out, fade-in and superimposition - ultimately resulting in flexible page layouts. The ‘mise-en-page’ shows endless variation and is baroque compared to prototypical Euro-American page layouts.

Aarnoud Rommens. “Manga story-telling/showing” in Image & Narrative 1 (2000).

The next two lines [of Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish] are similarly structured: “For love / The leaning grasses and two light above the sea.” That is, “For love,” an abstraction, impossible to grasp, the poet should present something concrete: “The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea.” Although I can’t say precisely how the grasses and lights here stand for love, somehow as images they do seem romantic, mysterious, moving to me. This principle of selecting something concrete to stand for an abstraction had already been advocated by T.S. Eliot in 1919 in what turned out to be an extremely influential opinion for the formation of New Criticism: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art,” Eliot said, “is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” (“Hamlet and his Problems”). Not surprisingly, thoughout its history New Criticism has been especially concerned with analyizing the imagery of particular works, noticing how a poem’s “objective correlatives” structure its ideas.

Steven Lynn. Text and Contexts: Writing about Literature with Critical Theory (2nd ed, 1998), p.25.

David B.’s cosmology in these two stories has the same axioms:

1. The eternal world is more real than the human world.
2. It is hostile to humans in its very nature.

This cosmology is a gnostic one in that the eternal world reveals itself subjectively and in pieces. Yet David B. seems ultimately concerned with the idea that it is precisely the illusory world that allows we as people to exist and to survive. Every incursion of the Real destroys us. Merely to touch the Real, as Ziska does at the end of “The Armed Garden,” is enough to blind one. People exist in the space between the Real and nothingness, condemned to see the world in lies and misunderstanding, and it is those fictions that form our very existence. Fictions keep the Real at bay, though it remains a constant presence. Hence the theme of compulsory, obsessive creation that underlies Epileptic.

In addition to gnosticism, it’s also a Hermetic metaphysic. Hermeticism thrives or dies based on the ability of its advocate to enthrall the aesthetic appreciation of the reader, and David B. is sublimely skilled in this regard. Hermeticism is particularly suited to the comics medium, just as Lull and Bruno communicated more intuitively and persuasively in their charts and graphics than they could in their writing.

Waggish. “David B: Two Stories.”

How many people turn on the radio and leave the room, satisfied with this distant and sufficient noise? Is this absurd? Not in the least. What is essential is not that one particular person speak and another hear, but that, with no one in particular speaking and no one in particular listening, there should nonetheless be speech, and a kind of undefined promise to communicate guaranteed by the incessant coming and going of solitary words. One can say that in this attempt to recapture it at its own level, the everyday loses any power to reach us; it is no longer what is lived, but what can be seen or what shows itself, spectacle and description, without any active relation whatsoever. The whole world is offered to us, but by way of a look. (14)

On the contrary, the everyday is always unrealized in its very actualization which no event, however important or however insignificant, can ever produce. Nothing happens; this is the everyday. But what is the meaning of this stationary movement? At what level is this “nothing happens” situated? For whom does “nothing happen” if, for me, something is necessarily always happening? In other words, what corresponds to the “who?” of the everyday? And, at the same time, why, in this “nothing happens,” is there the affirmation that something essential might be allowed to happen? (15)

Boredom is the everyday become manifest: as a consequence of having lost its essential–constitutive–trait of being *unperceived*. Thus the daily always sends us back to that inapparent and nonetheless unhidden part of existence: insignificant because always before what signifies it; silent, but with a silence that has already dissipated as soon as we keep still in order to hear it, and that we hear better in idle chatter, in that unspeaking speech that is the soft human murmuring in us and around us. (16-17)
Blanchot, Maurice. “Everyday Speech.” Translated by Susan Hanson. Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 12-20. Originally “La Parole quotidienne” in L’Entretien infini (1959): 355-66.