Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Teaching Day (Tatsumi's Good-Bye)

Reading Yoshihiro Tatsumi's dark short-story comic anthology Good-Bye today, re-reading it for discussion I am struck by its fitness for Freudian reading, especially "Click Click Click" (in which a stereotypical heel fetishist is also a barber cutting boy's heads for charity -- hilarious! -- recall that in the classic fetish the trauma of the discovery of the lack of the penis in the woman is presumably remedied by the fetish structure: "x, but through the fetish not x"; hence, absence of the penis, but through the presence of the heel, the penis after all... but in the story the fetish enables our protagonist as well the denial of death more successfully than most of the drifting awful ugly mortals paraded in the collection, warded off for this protagonist not through the farcical dream of a death by a trampling by heels in an act of arson -- already a sexual substitute, as we all know from criminal profiler dramas that crowd our teevees now -- in a theater that wakes him in a cold sweat after spying a prostitute's dead body, but the pleasure of the sniffing and caressing of his collection of heels themselves which staves off awareness of death in a death-in-life of insignificant pleasure in submission to the arbitrary signifier itself) or, "Woman in the Mirror" (in which a man discovers his enabling memory of a possibility of self-love in the refusal of patriarchal masculinity was an imaginary structure, that a shattered mirror never reflected anyone but himself). "The Rash" is truly a beguiling mysterious thing, in which figural and factual realities traffic restlessly but relentlessly between each other and in which, I am finally convinced, two real characters must actually be dreaming one another in the face of death. The photographer-protagonist of "Hell," the story that opens the collection (have a look here) refuses the very idea of objectivity or justice after Hiroshima, but the real hell is depicted in "Good-Bye," which closes the collection and summarizes its claustrophobic misogynist nihilistic post-war universe with brutal almost facile succinctness. My favorite piece is the short enigmatic "Sky Burial," a lovely little miracle of transcendence surrounded by the squalor and meaningless and despair of the collection more generally. Tatsumi is manga's Eisner, a genius, a fore-father.

No comments: