The Aesthetics of Violence in The Penal Colony

Amy Goh #260354243
GERM 129-197 Images of the Other
Professor Bernard Deschamps
24th November 2009

The Aesthetics of Violence as seen in the Colonialism Trope in The Penal Colony

Even though “In the Penal Colony” does not explicitly state that it is a parable on colonialism, an intertextual layer of motifs underlies the text, revealing a surprising similarity between its fictional happenings and the mechanics of actual colonialism that was rampant in the 19th century European world. What is achieved is a complex interweaving of aesthetic, literary and religious elements that, ultimately, reveal the driving force behind all colonial aspirations, as well as the brutal instruments the colonizing force inflicts upon the colonized in order to 'communicate' his desires. Through the language of pain and punishment, exemplified both by the name of the text- Strafkolonie, meaning ‘the punishment colony1’ in the literal sense- and the central object of the narrative, the “remarkable apparatus”(Kafka, 532) of the machine, the colonizer is able to deliver a totalizing system of technical, political and psychological dominance.

This essay will seek to unearth the methods by which colonialism holds its power, as well as the grand ideas that drive the colonizer to conquer more land through the figures of the officer, the condemned man and the machine. Lastly, I will show how Kafka provides the reader with a
harsh criticism of colonialism by displaying the deterioration of the colonizer's ‘grand narrative’ 3, in which the colonizer is inevitably destroyed by the sheer unreality of the ideal itself, underpinning the stark irony of all colonial aspirations: that colonialism, in essence, is unsustainable.

1 Penal colonies existed in actual reality and were usually situated on a remote island, or on inhospitable land. Prisoners were sent to these places as a form of punishment, and were often subjected to harsh lives under a severe prison regime. Many often died from neglect, hunger, excessive labour, or in an escape attempt.

The machine, the grand apparatus “like no other” (53), consists of three parts: a bed, a harrow and a sketcher. The condemned man is laid on a bed of cotton wool naked, his mouth stuffed with a piece of felt. The harrow possesses two needles, a long and a short one. The long one inscribes the sentence of the condemned man upon his skin, while the short one squirts water to wash away the blood. The bloodied water then enters a system of grooves that flows into a pit in the earth. It is stated the condemned “deciphers (his sentence) with his body” (63) through the language of pain. The sentence itself is described as illegible, consisting of “maze-like lines in complicated criss-crosses, covering the paper so completely it was hard to see the white spaces between them” (60). In ideal, the machine imparts the divine revelation of the condemned man's sin via the medium of unnameable pain.

3 The term ‘grand narrative’ was coined by the French philosopher Jean--François Lyotard in his 1979 work “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge” to explain the form of thinking that shaped the modern mind. It refers to the uniting truths and worldviews people subscribe to.

In the mechanics of the machine, colonialism is revealed as an unnatural system involving, firstly, the invasion of the colonizing force into the land of the indigenous. In order for the colonizer to successfully colonize the people, he needs to, firstly, erase the existing history of the colonized, and to replace it with his own narrative. This narrative is born out of the particularities of the political and social milieu of his European Imperial roots and the Western rational ideas he is a product of. Only when this replacement has taken place will the spirit of the colony be successfully harnessed, and the colonizer free to exploit the land for his own ends through the construction of a mobilized workforce bound by psychological and physical chains. Labour generated, thus, serves in realizing the colonizer's goals, whether it is economic profit or military prestige on the world front. As this invasion is intrinsically unnatural, the methods by which it is characterized have to be, likewise, unnatural- that of the medium of violence, which is in its purest essence an irrational disruption of the natural order of being. The colonizer, thus, communicates with the colonized in the language of physical violence, which can, like a mechanized arm, take the form of material apparatus such as the chain with which the condemned man is bound in the text, or the whip that was used in actual colonialism to subjugate the locals by the British (Bernault, 1944).

In the text, this is executed by the machine which, by an intricate system of punishment, serves to communicate the colonizer's 'narrative' in the language of pain. By inscribing the sentence on the condemned man's back, the officer- and likewise, the colonizer- rejects all that has come before, erasing the past, cultural history of the people who were born of the land and replacing it with his own discourse which, like the illegible text the machine inscribes, is only understood by the colonizer. As Fanon puts aptly, the history the colonizer writes is “not the history of the country which he plunders, but the history of his own nation in regards to all that it skims off, all that it violates and plunders”5. In the execution of this corporal punishment, the machine acts as the ultimate silencer. The bloodied inscription the machine delivers serves a two-fold purpose, 'enlightening' the guilty to the fact he is disrupting the 'grand narrative' of the colonial idea by speaking out in his native voice (for the condemned man in the story is punished solely for retorting to his superiors), as well as to enforce the existing order by serving as a deterrent,
ensuring by its physical presence this prevalent silence is maintained, and thus, the colonizer is free to exploit his acquisition to further his own ends. Inscription, as Albert Memmi states, is the medium by which a “colonial system of obedience both on the outer surface of the colonized, as upon her inmost being”6 is etched into the souls of the colonized.

The machine's harrow by which the needles of inscription are attached, thus, can be interpreted as an additional symbol of exploitation. The harrow was an agricultural tool used by farmers who toiled the soil in order to reap a source of livelihood. Likewise, the colonizer reaps the flesh of the native people by means of blood, sweat and labour. The harrow and the needles are inseparable in colonialism, for as the blood of the condemned man flows into the pit, colonialism involves the necessary shedding of the indigenous people's blood into the earth, thereby fertilizing it for the colonizer and serving for his advancement. 7 As blood transmits life, stories ensure the identity of a people is preserved. Blood, here, symbolizes the cultural history of a people transmitted by language. Similarly, the harrow can be considered a technologically inferior tool, marking the simpler agricultural lifestyle of living purely from the land, a lifestyle prevalent in many colonized nations. This contrasts with the machine's artistry, which marks a more complex system of reaping profit via the mechanics of political and military strength and supremacy. The harrow, thus, also denotes the colonizer's supreme dominance both ideologically and technologically over his colony. This supremacy, naturally, is vital in ensuring he is able to pursue his colonial goals fully without disruption.

The colonial model Kafka presents has a parallel in the actual colonial practices of King Leopold in his acquisition of the Belgian Congo. When King Leopold first invaded the Congo, he declared them 'vacant lands'. Vacant, in this sense, denotes a blank script, free for the re-writing of the colonizer's narrative. The land, subtracted from the indigenous people, is in the colonizer's eyes a piece of prime ground for the cultivation of his economy. In disregarding the voice of the natives, the colonizer rejects their language. Oral heritage, in African tribes, was an important part of their identity, functioning as a transmission of thought and vital ideas. Storytelling, rather than the written word, was tradition, the passing on, of culture and oral lore to the next generation, ensuring the inheritance of a unique cultural history and literature.8 The robbing of language its replacement with words illegible to the colonizer, thus, serves as the ultimate antagonist: the destroyer of the soul. Kafka's machine exemplifies this in etching a bloodied tattoo on the skin of the condemned, which embodies the voice of colonialism's dissenters. It is the silencing of the “No!” that cries out in opposition to this oppressive system of punishment. In other words, it is the inscribing of the colonizer’s narrative onto the blank canvas of the native land.

8 Ki-Zerbo, Joseph: "Methodology and African Prehistory", UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, James Currey Publishers, 1990; see Ch. 7; "Oral tradition and its methodology" at pages 54-61; at page 54: "Oral tradition may be defined as being a testimony transmitted verbally from one generation to another. Its special characteristics are that it is verbal and the manner in which it is transmitted."

If the machine serves as the ultimate articulation of the colonizer's system of violence, this language is also displaced to the relations between the condemned man and his superiors. Whereas the officer and his (European) contemporaries communicate sensibly in French, this does not extend to his relations with the condemned man and the soldier. When the condemned man failed to promptly to “get up every hour on the hour and salute in front of the captain's
door” (58), the captain immediately “went for his riding whip and struck him in the face”. Likewise, the officer “(takes) a clod of earth from the mound and (throws) it at the soldier” (59) when he inquisitively looks at the machine. The whip, like the chains that bind the condemned man to the soldier, serve as the instruments of colonialism by which the colonizer wields his power and 'communicates' his desires to the colonized. In the establishment of his technical superiority- for the whip, chains and the machine are technological innovations of the Western world- the colonizer is able to exercise full control over the colonized, upholding and sustaining the new order.

Similarly, as the officer and the condemned man do not communicate in any discernible language beyond that of physical violence, African chiefs were forced to sign lengthy treaties concerning the acquisition of land without any comprehension. Christian de Bonchamps, a French explorer who served Leopold in Katanga, parallels the explorer in the narrative, expressing disapproval regarding such treaties, stating the treaties “are really only serious matters for the European powers, in the event of disputes over the territories. They do not concern the black sovereign who signs them for a moment"9. The colonizing force disregards the perspectives of the colonized, only interested in his self-interests. He is concerned with the continuation of his ‘Odyssey’ 10, even if this means the sacrifice of the native's sacred narrative. Language, in this sense, is the beacon of power enforcing order, dictating what will occur. At the hands of the colonizer, it is a weapon like the whip. Kafka's machine, in its material reality,
draws together the two-fold nature of colonialism: the physicality of its invasion, as well as the psychological consequences that come with the erasing of a cultural heritage.

Moreover, there is another deeper layer that characterizes colonialism, a layer that approaches the spiritual in depth and reaches beyond material gain. This is what I will call the aesthetic motive that underpins all colonial aspirations. It is the seeking of and the surrender to an idea larger than oneself. In religious terms, it is the search for God- a Narcissus11- who will reflect, faithfully, man's own image in its ideal light. As Rey Chow states in his article “Ethics after Idealism”, “the most important sentiment involved... is not a negative but a positive one: rather than hatefulness and destruction, (it) is about love and idealism12”. In 19th century colonial reality, this was most apparent in the intellectual discourse of Social Darwinism which undercut the many aspects of social and civic life, going so far as to influencing the nature of the colonies European settlers chose to conquer13. Social Darwinism’s concept of ‘natural selection’ posited a evolutionary hierarchy of human types or races, whereby all biologically and culturally 'inferior' races were fated to be replaced by the superior race, the latter of which was, naturally, embodied by the white, civilized man14. Social Darwinism justified the European imperialist project, providing the Western imperialist with the excuse that, by the acquisition of land, he was serving the greater evolution of the human species as a whole into a nobler form by destroying the backward, barbaric man. Darwinism's 'ape', in Western colonial reality, was the black 'savage', who pervaded the lands of Africa. This overarching narrative served as the 'biblical doctrine' by which the colonizer acceded to. In this sense, the aesthetic and the religious can be united for, as Kafka's officer seeks the ultimate surrender to the image of a God-like image (the machine, here, serves as a medium of communication between him and God), the colonizer surrenders to the grand narrative of imperialism: that, in essence, it is beneficial to humanity for it serves to advance the evolution of man. Social Darwinism supports the latter theory, making the imperialist feel a sense of spiritual satisfaction that his economic and military conquests are for the greater good, and hence making him overlook easily the atrocities he commits. Similarly, the artistry of the machine highlights the aesthetic ideals that underlie all colonial enterprise: that of the furthering of the colonizer's epic narrative.

10 I am making a comparison to Homer’s epic “The Odyssey”, which represents an instance in which history has been transcribed into a form of literature providing aesthetic pleasure for the masses. The colonizer, similarly, writes his own epic in order to extend the literary history of his own people, replacing the traditional history of the colonized.

11 Narcissus is the Greek mortal who fell in love his own reflection. In making this comparison, I am making an allusion to a concept James Kirwan states in his book “Beauty” in which he describes as the search for the aesthetic ideal to be a desire for “the splendour of God shining through the body. It is a desire like that of Narcissus, that can never be satisfied” (Kirwan, pp73) Similarly, man is described as being made in the image of God in the bible, drawing a connection between the search for God and the seeking of beauty.

However, as the machine, like the intellectual discourse of Social Darwinism, is man-made, it is flawed. It is a secondary channelling inevitably coloured by human nature, acting more akin to an idol than an authentic source of divine revelation. In Kafka's text, this religious dimension is most fully articulated in the figure of the officer, who is described as a 'devotee' of the machine, religiously tending to all its operations. His attire, consisting of a “tight parade jacket, laden with epaulets and covered with braid” (55), separates him from the soldier and the condemned man, marking his superior status as guardian of the machine. Like the Judaic high priest who wore a 'Breastplate of Judgement' adorned with twelve precious stones, he is marked apart from the 'congregation' by the adornments on his garments. He does not question the preachings the machine imparts through the linguistic instrument of the needle-pen, possessing a stubborn resilience even in the face of the explorer's doubt to the practice's morality, stating verbally, “I know the machine best. Guilt is always (Amy's emphasis) beyond doubt” (57). In addition, he calls all who do not possess the same religious devotion to it as 'uninitiated', giving the machine the divine aura of a religious object. In other words, he fetishizes the machine, treating it as the authentic voice of God delivering judgement on the guilty. In addition, the ritual of pain around
the machine also possesses a religious hue. The officer, in his discourse (and as his is the only account the reader has, the reader is forced to believe him), states that under the old commandant,

“The machine was freshly cleaned and glowed... In front of hundreds of eyes—all the spectators stood on tip toe right up to the hills there—the condemned man was laid down under the Harrow by the Commandant himself. What nowadays has to be done by a common soldier was then my work as the senior judge, and it was an honour for me.” (64)

In addition, the crowds that gathered were so dense that “it was impossible to grant all the requests people made to be allowed to watch from up close” (64). Here, the reader sees the ritual in its optimal height, in a time when the doctrine preached by the old governor was fully believed. Then, the symbolic temple of colonialism gleamed, much like the machine was “freshly cleaned and glowed”. If the power of a doctrine is characterized by the devotion of its followers, the fanfare connected with the public ritual of violence can be seen as indicative of the power of belief. People appeared to devote themselves body and soul to the practising of the ritual, feeling a religious satisfaction in the delivery of judgement. Judgement, in this lens, serves as the enforcing of a holier, supreme law that presides and overpowers human judgement, the latter of which is flawed, thereby upholding the current religious order. However, the account we have of this ritual is obtained from the officer, whose voice we cannot trust, for he is a devotee of the old governor, and naturally, is blind to the reality of the actual situation in the Penal Colony- that the language of communication executed by the machine is not pure, but tainted. The picture he paints is that of the ideal image of things as he hopes they were and hence, it is indicative of a deeper resilience to the inevitable crumbling of the old system- that of which is colonialism.

In reality, the colonizer faces many predicaments in the conquering of land. Even though the colonizer believes- for the sake of his faith- that his rituals of punishment have resonance in the colonizer, this punishment is removed from understanding. It is, like the inscription of the machine on the condemned man's back, illegible. The discourse that justifies colonialism- that it benefits the greater good- lies feeble in the reality of colonialism, as exemplified in the destruction of the machine and the figure of the officer who feebly clings on to the ideal, eventually sacrificing his body in what can be called the ultimate surrender. With the explorer's appellation of a single “No”, the officer can no longer exist, for his belief system- the spiritual dimension of the system of colonialism- has been proved false. Either his God is a 'graven image' or his doctrine of justice is innately flawed. In sacrificing himself, the officer rejects the reality the new law posited by the new governor presents. Likewise, the failure of the machine to faithfully etch a sentence on the officer and its subsequent destruction can be interpreted as a failure of the system of beliefs the whole machinery of colonialism is based upon. The grand narrative underlying colonialism has crumbled. Justice, with a capital J, falls flat on its face. Here lies the irony of colonialism: even though the colonizer aspires to serve a greater cause, he inevitably fails in the megalomaniac nature of his ideas. The foundation for colonialism is thus squashed in the face of reality. In the destruction of the machine, Kafka prescribes the fate of colonialism: that it is, due to the illegitimacy of its claims, unsustainable.

The explorer, in his role, is similar to the reader. He is an outsider to the system, and thus serves as its judge. Like much of Kafka's audience, he is European, “travelling purely with the intention of seeing things and by no means that of altering other people's legal codes” (62). However, he maintains a detached tone, standing away from the action. He merely observes, making comments when required. Like the reader, he does not or cannot physically intervene with action. However, he is able to destroy the whole old, 'barbaric' system of torture via a single verbal appellation. Kafka, thus, seems to imply that, in the reading of his story, the reader, too, has to make his own judgements regarding the legitimacy of the claims colonialism makes. The explorer's utterance of a single “no” is, thus, not only reflective of Kafka's disapproval of the ideas behind colonialism, but also Kafka's insistence that it is, in the end, up to the masses to support or to denounce a practice. As action is propelled by thought, words are the vehicle by which power is channelled. In the text, this power is given to the audience, and the reader has to make the necessary decision himself whether, after seeing the brutal consequences of colonialism in the analogy of the machine, he should remain passively silent, or actively denounce its practices. Belief holds the optimum power in the system of social and political life, propelling both the atrocities carried out, and, conversely the good that can be achieved. Kafka's novella, thus, serves ultimately as a fable or a parable, wherein the reader can step into the story, and fulfil his role in the greater drama of life.

Kafka's “In the Penal Colony” shares many parallels to the practices prevalent in actual colonialism. However, Kafka does not merely address the physical tools of colonialism, but reaches beyond, revealing the complex network of ideas that underlie colonialism and drive it toward fruition. “In the Penal Colony”, thus, is similar to a dream in its weaving of symbolic motifs heavy with meaning that need to be deciphered. Through the reaping of these symbols- the separation of the meaning from the metaphor-, one uncovers a stark portrait on the brutal nature of colonialism and the devastating effects it has on the colonized.


Works Cited

Bernault, Florence. Enfermement, prison et châtiments en Afrique du 19e siècle à nos jours. Karthala
Editions, 1999. Print.

Brunton, Deborah, ed, Medicine Transformed: Health, Disease and Society in Europe 1800-
1900. Manchester University Press, 2004, pp211-238. Print.

Chow, Rey. “Ethics after Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading Ethics after Idealism:
Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading”. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Print.

Darwin C, 1859, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of
Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray [Facsimile of 1st ed.]:
Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1964. Print.

Fanon, F. Philcoz, Richard Trans. The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, 2004, 41. Print.
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Dover Thrift Editions). Dover
Publications, 1996. pp53-75. Print.

Kirwan, James, Beauty. Manchester University Press ND, 1999. Print
Ki-Zerbo, Joseph, "Methodology and African Prehistory", UNESCO International Scientific
Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, James Currey Publishers, 1990.
Print.

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized, Becon Press, 1991
Peters, Paul. “Witness to the Execution: Kafka and Colonialism”, Monatshefte, Vol. 93, No. 4
(Winter, 2001), pp. 401-425. Web.

René de Pont-Jest, 1892, L'Expédition du Katanga, d'après les notes de voyage du marquis
Christian de Bonchamps, Edouard Charton, ed, Le Tour du Monde magazine, 2007. Web.

The Scientist and his Creation in Frankenstein and The Island of Doctor Moreau

Amy Goh
ENGL 405: Medicine and Mystery in Victorian Literature
Professor Stephanie King
18th April 2010

The Scientist and his Creation in Frankenstein and The Island of Doctor Moreau

In both The Island of Doctor Moreau and Frankenstein, the scientist, in seeking to conquer encompassing Nature by subjecting it to the reductive scientific processes, inevitably fails in the enormity of his goal. In Frankenstein, Shelley critiques this desire in the deformity of Victor’s monster; yet, the scientist of Shelley’s world is still able to- in the contemplation of the untouched element in the natural world through a retreat into the Sublime- able to obtain a degree of reprieve from the horror of his creation. However, in the post-Darwinian dystopia of Doctor Moreau where Science has succeeded in controlling all natural processes to the extent of re-creating society and human nature, the Sublime is no longer obtainable, as there is no longer anything in Nature that the scientist can seek to uncover. In the grotesqueness of the Beast People, Wells addresses the ethical issues that may arise in this mythical situation. Furthermore, in his satiric portrayal of the inhumane Moreau and the ‘Fallen Man’ in Pendrick's ‘devolution’ as the latter increasingly assimilates into the Beast People’s society, Wells addresses civilised man’s proximity to the beast within him. In this, he proposes the idea that evolution may not be a diachronistic process towards an ‘Ideal Man’, but a synchronistic process wherein the notion of ‘progress’ is ambivalent. Thus, through the use of contemporary Victorian concerns like vivisection, he essentially provides a critique, essentially, of the humanism and increasing optimism that arose with the advent of 20th century modern medicine and its subsequent promises of creating a supreme man outside Nature’s processes. Such a desire, Wells states, is contradictory as it ostensibly hands Man the divinely-ordained right at the top of the evolutionary order, as it were- neglecting to address the fact that there is no intrinsic mandate that places Man above Nature’s supreme power.

According to Burke, the Sublime is the “Astonishment” created by “the great and sublime in nature”. This Astonishment is “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (Burke). The astonishment created by beholding the great Sublime, thus, is inextricable from a profound feeling of awe and respect one feels at Man’s littleness at the threshold of the vast universe. In the scientist’s world, the admiration of Nature through the Sublime can be said to be the gateway to a solace that arrives with the knowledge that there is, ultimately, an element in Nature that is beyond human comprehension and hence, will always remain unconquerable. This knowledge extricates the scientist from some of the burden of responsibility present in scientific creation, as it attributes the greater sum of creative responsibility to the potent powers of Nature whose immutable laws set an all-encompassing standard by which the world balances on.

In Frankenstein, the scientist (re)acknowledges the supremacy of Nature’s power in his beholding of the Sublime, and in this he remains an ethical figure possessing human empathy. Even though his scientific pursuit results in the creation of a monster, the Frankenstein scientist- because he is driven by the essentially innocent desire to behold Nature’s wonder- is redeemed, no matter how briefly. Victor’s fall, in this light, can be attributed to the largeness of his dream to “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption” (Shelley 48). Such a dream questions the supremacy of Nature, and thus- in the Shelley universe wherein Science has not possessed the divine principle-, it inevitably results in madness, despair, and guilt.

Victor states that his essential goal for recreating human life is to save humanity from the pains of disease. Here, he echoes the popular sentiment of the modern scientific pursuit at that time- namely, the belief that an “elixir of life” would “banish disease from the human frame” through the realization of a new, rational science” (Ellwood 40). Thus, man could, essentially, evolve into a God-like figure, “command(ing) the thunders of heaven, mimic(king) the earthquake, and even mock(ing) the invisible world with its shadows” (Shelley 44). However, this grandiose ambition can be said to be a mere cloak for a hidden desire to rediscover- in the (re)creation of man- gratitude and affection attributed to the lost realm of his childhood, where Nature was a bounteous entity providing endless wonder and discovery. In this lost kingdom, the scientist rekindles the sensation of “a child picking up shells beside the great and unexplored ocean of truth” (38). Likewise, Victor evinces a gladness “akin to rapture” in “learning the hidden laws of nature” (36) as a child. Early on, he describes a “fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature” (37) and states he disdains “the structures of languages… the code of governments”, preferring the “inner spirit of nature and soul of man” found in the “secrets of heaven and earth” (37). The scientific curiosity he possesses is linked to his “ardent imagination” (40) and a childish desire to discover secrets hidden in Nature’s womb that would bring about an ‘Astonishment’ similar to that which an individual feels in the face of the Sublime. For example, Victor describes an experience he had when fifteen in which, through the witnessing of a “most violent and terrible thunderstorm… from behind the mountains of Jura”, he is filled with “curiosity and delight” (40). However, this childish wonder quickly dissipates when he enters the “modern system of science” (39) that university advocates and thence, is dragged away from the unbridled, innocent pursuit of knowledge in the individual sphere and domestic environment into an institutionalised, structured education. He loses the feminine influence- the realm of feeling connected to the joy of exploration and discovery- in embracing the reductive science of natural philosophy. The kingdom of ‘subliminal science’ linked to vast, insurmountable Nature is thus reduced to the rational, reductive science governed by logic, reason and numbers.

Likewise, Victor is initiated into the realm of reductive science by “a man of great research in natural philosophy” (41) who, in explaining the grandeur of a thunderstorm in terms of the “laws of electricity”, provides Victor with the promise that the scientific pursuit can- through processing the knowledge of Nature’s processes- fulfill the curious wonder Victor felt as a child. However, Victor eventually realises that there is no place for wonder and astonishment in the rationality of his university professors’ modern science as feeling and emotion is replaced with the ‘hard’ science of numbers and deductive reasoning. Magical wonder, thus, degenerates into cold analysis as the scientific realm does not accommodate the ‘Astonishment’- when contemplating the mysteries of the cosmos- that attends the acknowledgement of what is unfathomable to mere man. The Sublime that is inherent in Nature, thus, has no normal place in the scientist’s world as he is driven to probe and reduce all of her elements to the disparateness of its parts. In this light, Victor’s act of creation can be seen as an attempt, in his seeking of “the active principle of life” (51), to rediscover the pure joy of wonderment which he recalls in his childhood desire for discovery and for knowledge before being seduced into the kingdom of rational science.

Victor’s pursuit for this ‘lost principle’ present in Nature, however, becomes intrinsically farcical, as he digs the “unhallowed damps of the grave” and “torture(s)… living animal(s)” with an ironically “supernatural enthusiasm” (51) to “animate… lifeless clay” (54) in a parody of Prometheus. He desires to theorise the creation myth itself, mistakenly thinking that the root of life comes from the grave. He becomes an ‘anti-God’, pulling together disparate parts from the recesses of churchyards. His belief that one has to “first have recourse to death” through the study of cadavers in order to “examine the causes of life” (51) cites the absence of a superstitious fear in death as an unknown, ominous, indeed unknowable entity. His studious belief that ‘wonderful man’ will have victory over death shows the delusion the scientist may be under when the scientist thinks he can master Nature with his instruments of rationality. The scientist, at close proximity to his microscope and in conquering disease, gains the false impression that the grandeurs present in all-encompassing Nature can, likewise, be tamed. Here, Shelley highlights the modern scientist’s compulsive drive to conquer Nature through knowledge and his conflicting desire to rediscover the spiritual satisfaction and childish wonder inherent in quiescent contemplation of Nature’s insurmountability. In other words, the scientist “might dissect, anatomise, and give names; but her immortal lineaments were still a wonder and a mystery… (keeping) human beings from entering the citadel of nature” (40). The failure to understand this vital truth results in a psychological regression, wherein the scientist inevitably feels an inexorable desire to ‘retreat’ into Nature’s womb to recapture the lost wonder felt when one witnesses the “most violent and terrible thunderstorm” (39).

However, in Victor’s world, the scientist is still able to retreat into the Sublime and find a degree of solace in acknowledging that there is, indeed, something ‘out there’ beyond man. After creating his monster, Victor feels such a “breathless horror and disgust” that “he rushe(s) out of (his) room and continued a long time traversing (his) bed-chamber, unable to compose (his) mind to sleep” (57). In his immense regret at the unspeakable horror of his creation, Victor acknowledges the scientist’s mistake in thinking that he can, in fact, subvert the natural laws of reproduction through the asexual creation of man. He discovers that when man attempts to wield the power of the (re)creation of the ‘life principle’, he cannot conjure the ‘Astonishment’ that Nature arouses in the Sublime, but elicits horror and disgust instead. He realises that, as mere scientist, he has trespassed into a territory of Nature that was never meant for mere man to possess. His acknowledgement of the scientist’s mistake, thus, grants him the brief reprieve he feels in the contemplating of the majesty of Nature when he journeys to the North with Clerval in a journey akin to the Romantic retreat into the Sublime. By admiring the “sight of the awful and majestic in nature” (79), he returns the rightful power of creation to Nature, understanding there are some natural laws that are immutable and thus, unable to be possessed.

However, in the Moreau universe in which Wells has created an island subscribing entirely to the Darwinian laws that govern evolution, the sublimity of Frankenstein is no longer obtainable. In the godless, mythical island of Doctor Moreau, the natural processes of divinely-ordained Nature has been replaced- in a hypothetical experiment on Wells’s part- by the man-made principles of Darwinism. The Scientist- in desiring to manipulate the natural order for the betterment of the humanity through an ethical eugenics (the kneading of the “plasticity of living forms” (Wells 222) to create a human-like race, in Moreau’s case)- puts himself at the top of the evolutionary ladder, positing himself as an ‘Ideal’ above Nature. Here, Wells criticizes not only the humanism present in the Scientist’s attempt to limit the sublimity of Nature to the confines of the body, but also his pseudo-religious belief that- as creator of Darwinism- the Scientist is, somehow, a superordinate figure with the divine purpose of creating a ‘New Man’ that is to be the ideal end and completion of all creation. The idealism embedded in the former arises from the scientist’s delusion that he can, in fact, create a body immune to the inexorable decay of Nature and independent of the regular reproductive faculty; it is, thus, similar to the optimism expressed in Frankenstein that- through a new Science- man may supplant Nature’s power in the bridling of Death. Likewise, even though Moreau successfully squelched the subliminal forces of Nature in the creation of mutable, powerful bodies that operate outside natural imperatives of pain and reproduction and the categories of species, he ultimately becomes a victim of his own science in an ironic Darwinian twist in which his creatures outstrip him and ‘kill’ him through their superior physical strength. Wells, thus, criticizes the idealism of Darwinian evolution inherent in its promise to provide man with “one inescapable rise to divinity” as “mankind (becomes) more and more noble, more and more divine, slowly rising towards perfection” (Gomel 150).

For Moreau and on his island, there is an undercurrent of perpetual conflict between Darwinian evolution and the Judeo-Christian belief that ‘God’ is, indeed, creator of the universe- in other words, that divine Nature holds sovereignty over Man. The latter concept places a divine inheritance on man, positing him as an ideal being created by an ideal God and thus, superior to Nature through an essential birthright. Moreau’s island, unlike the lab of Frankenstein, is governed by the Darwinian laws of natural selection that dictate the strongest will survive, and the weakest will perish. The island dictates its own rules, killing off the ‘weaker’ and allowing only the physically strongest to survive. Survival, in this case, depends not so much on intellectual prowess or ethics, but on one’s physical stature. This is, initially, apparent in the way the native inhabitants of the islands- the Kanakas- are gradually killed off in a series of mysterious but seemingly natural deaths by drowning, poisoning by the island’s plants, or, in the case of the last Kanaka, a death by Moreau’s ‘Thing’ (which can be seen as the epitome of the ‘superior’ body rendered in human form in being somehow beyond human and animal and thus, a step above man in the evolutionary ladder). Moreau falsely thinks that he has full control over his creatures, thinking his place as creator-‘God’ puts him one evolutionary rung above his creations- thus, he is no longer subject to the laws of natural selection that govern the Moreau island through Darwinian principles (which are, in themselves, a human creation and hence, potentially flawed). He manifests the Scientist’s paradoxical belief that- as a figure possessing the knowledge of Nature and her machinations-, he is evolutionarily superior to the apes that came before him and thus, is somehow above the laws of ‘natural selection’. Moreau describes himself as having “seen more of the ways of this world’s Maker… (having) sought his laws… all (his) life” (225) and falsely attributes some ‘divine law’ that called him to the island, stating “the place seemed waiting for me” (226). However, his pseudo-spiritual belief in a natural order dictated by God conflicts directly with his belief that “(he had) never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of existence by evolution sooner or later” (225) and also his belief that the rational, modern scientist would displace the “tyrants… criminals… breeders of horses and dogs… (and all other) kinds of untrained clumsy-handed men working for their own immediate ends” (223). In placing himself one step above men whom he judges as inadequate by virtue of perceived intellectual, physical, or moral inferiority, he bestows a divine right of creation on himself, forgetting that these unworthy, contemptible traits may exist within himself. Likewise, he describes the Beast People, initially as “fear-haunted, paint-driven things, without a spark of pugnacious energy to face torment,- they are no good for man-making” (226), alluding to his belief that Man is always the Ideal that the scientist works towards. The scientist, in this case, becomes an ironic, farcical figure in his paradoxical beliefs that he can create a creature beyond Nature, yet not succumb to the very principles that govern his created Darwinian law in which it is not ideals, but brute strength that reigns supreme. In this light, Moreau’s death can be seen as the natural outcome of his inability to recognize the scientist’s own position as existing within the limits of his own creation, suggesting the idea the scientist may not, in fact, be altogether divorced from the Frankensteinian Nature and the creationist principles that govern that world.

Likewise, even though Moreau is able to subvert the laws that govern Nature dictating that one must live, die and feel pain, he becomes an inhumane, ‘mad’ figure, despising imagination and human interaction, creating grotesque beings from the remnants of living animals. He is absolutely devoted to his craft, regarding Pendrick’s arrival as a “personal inconvenience” and reprimanding him for what he calls “youthful horrors” arising out of his “confounded imagination” (221). Moreau disregards Pendrick’s personal welfare, thus, silently tolerating his presence in so long as he is able to proceed, undisturbed, with his vivisectionist experiments. Furthermore, his criticism of Pendrick’s imagination can be seen as a blatant rejection of the initial, child-like joy Victor feels in his childhood when he delves into Nature, “seeking to penetrate (her) secrets” (Shelley 37). Imagination, in the Shelley universe, is a vital component in driving the scientific pursuit, the end of which is a spiritual fulfilment that arrives from discovery. Moreau’s goal, in contrast, is a relentless humanism to obliterate pain and pleasure through the manipulation of the potential plasticities of the living shape. Even though his is a creative goal, it is subtracted from the imagination’s realm as it rests on a totalising desire to create a stringent ‘New World’ whereby Man has complete control over natural processes, thus subjugating Nature’s ultimate power. While the creative scientific pursuit present in the Frankenstein ideal results in release and pleasure, the latter is defined by politics of power and consumption. Naturally, Moreau becomes a brazenly remorseless figure divorced from social relations and possessing an obsessive single-mindedness in his pursuits. He desires, ultimately, absolute control through creative means and it is the incongruous nature of these goals that results in Moreau’s inhumanity.

Moreover, as the ‘Nature’ present in the Moreau island is not the divinely-ordained entity of Frankenstein but one governed by the human-created laws of Darwinian evolution, grotesqueness results, alluding to the assertion that, when the “immutable laws” (Shelley 40) that govern the world are handed to Man, he inevitably creates the grotesque, rather than the beautiful. The creatures are described as “grotesque caricatures of humanity” (Wells 214) that wriggle, gabble, and whistle with a deformed animality. They are ‘Things’ and ‘lumps’, “crooked creature(s)” without faces and possessing “strange red eyes” (247). M’ling, likewise, is described as a “misshapen man, short, broad, and clumsy, with a crooked back, a hairy neck” (180). His face protrudes like “a muzzle… (with a) huge half-open mouth showed as big white teeth as (Pendrick) had ever seen in a human mouth” (180). In the creation of a new creature outside the Creationist principle, thus, natural congruency inherent in the forms of animals can possess is exchanged for monstrosity, as the conglomeration of human and animal inevitably results in a deformity that can only be described as grotesque. Like Victor, who seeks to re(create) man from “minuteness of parts” (Shelley 53) as he digs the “unhallowed damps of the grave”, Moreau- in his tearing apart of the natural shapes of animals to create the Beast People- themselves creatures existing beyond Nature and thus, containing an excess- creates a grotesque creation.

In both novels, the scientific creation is seen to be in conflict with the principles of Nature, deforming, rather than perfecting it. However, the absence of the Nature principle in Wells’s universe makes redemption for the scientist impossible. As the Darwinian, rather than natural, law presides over all, there is no longer anything on the island that has not been rightfully conquered by Man in terms of Science and Nature. Thus, there is no longer the wonderment Man may feel in the contemplation of an untouched element hidden in Nature. In Wells’s bleak portrait of a world successfully conquered by rational principles where deformity reigns as the only code of ‘beauty’, he criticises the rationalism embedded in Darwinism science’s humanism.
Furthermore, Pendrick’s fall and his descent into animalism, as he spends increasing time amongst the Beast People and their created society, can be seen as a further critique of Darwinism’s humanism implicit in the notion that man is in fact, the ideal result at the end of the evolutionary chain. Just as Moreau’s inhumane nature alludes to the potential bestiality man can possess when divorced from society’s ‘taming’ effects, Pendrick’s ‘devolution’ into a savage state can be seen as revealing Man’s proximity to the beast within him. As Montgomery, Moreau and the House of Pain disappear, Pendrick “under(goes) strange changes” (263). His clothes start to “(hang) about (him) as yellow rags”, his hair grows long and his eyes “(acquires) a strange brightness, a swift alertness of movement” (263). He forges a friendship with one of the ‘things’, calling it his “St. Bernard Dog Man” (261), acknowledging, in addressing it as a pseudo-equal, its similarity to him. Likewise, when he is rescued, he states he “felt no desire to return to mankind” (266) as society grows increasingly bestial in his eyes. Pendrick states he “could not persuade (himself) that the men and women (he) met were not also another Beast People, animals half wrought in the outward image of human souls… that they would presently begin to revert,-- to show first this bestial mark then that” (267). Multiple times, he sees the ‘bestial mark’ present in his fellow men, as his preacher ‘gibbers’ “Big Thinks, even as the Ape-man had done” (268). The narrative, ultimately, ends with Richard concluding that- with his newfound knowledge that the ‘beast’ lies not above, but inside man, his only solace is that “whatever is more than animal within” (268) will continue to be ‘tamed’ by the societal cultivation of morality and ethics. In the Darwinian universe wherein the divine principle is obliterated and man stands at the top of the evolutionary ladder, the ‘beast’ within re-emerges in the scientific creation, ironically displacing man’s better nature. The replacement of the divinity of Nature present in the Frankensteinian Sublime with the ‘Biological Sublime’ of man’s creation through Darwinian science, thus, results in a sacrifice by which the scientist, if not dead in the hands of his creation, becomes as grotesque as his monstrous creations. Thus, Wells presents the impossibility of a universe in which Science presides over all present in the humanistic idea that medicine will obliterate disease in humanity through a taming of natural processes with the tools of reason.

Both Frankenstein and The Island of Doctor Moreau address eminent concerns that arose with the advent of modern medicine at the turn of the 20th century. While Frankenstein addresses the possible outcomes that may result when the scientist fails to acknowledge his subordinacy and smallness in the face of imperious Nature, The Island of Doctor Moreau paints a bleak fable of the ultimate fulfilment of the scientific aspiration wherein Darwinian principles have fully conquered Nature, and hence, the logic of Science reigns pre-eminent, making the Sublime unobtainable. In the farcical painting of the ‘mad scientist’ and the grotesqueness of his created race of beings, Wells criticises the humanism in the notion that evolutionary science governed by reason can provide the ultimate elixir to mankind’s problems, positing the idea that the powers of Nature present in concepts of the Sublime cannot be so easily put aside without horrific consequences. Furthermore, in the characters of Pendrick, Moreau and Montgomery and their interactions with the Beast People, he suggests that the bestial nature may lurk within Man rather than below him. Thus, the scientist’s dream of creating an ‘Ideal Man’ independent of Nature becomes intrinsically flawed in its notion that- through a naturally ordained supremacy-, Man has an assumed place at the top of the evolutionary ladder.

Works Cited

"Burke, Edmund. 1909. 14. On the Sublime and Beautiful. Vol. 24, Part 2. The Harvard Classics." Bartleby.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2010.

Ellwood, Robert, ‘Myth, Gnosis, and Modernity,’ from The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell (SUNY Press, 2004), 1-35. Print.

Gomel, Elana. Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject (The Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series). Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. Print.

Shelley, Mary. Making Humans (New Riverside Editions). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002. Print.

For a New Poetics of Cinema: Women of the Dunes

Amy Goh
EAST 467: Politics, Experiments, and Theory: Japanese Cinema of the 1960s
Professor Yuriko Furuhata
20th April 2010

For a New Poetics of Cinema: Women of the Dunes

Women of the Dunes opens up a new way of relating to the film with the opening of an expressive space within durational time. With the manipulation of scale, and by combining the affective charges of close-ups with the optical effects of long shots, Teshigahara takes advantage of what Laura Marks calls the ‘optical vision’ to generate knowledge, and the potential of ‘haptic vision’1 to create a new positionality to the filmic material whereby he can engage with it not as an object to be mastered by the forces of intellect, but as an equal ‘Other’2 to be understood empathetically. Through the dynamics of sound, movement and space in the close-up, Teshigahara brings the viewer outside of the narrative time and space of normal filmic experience, and draws him within his inner consciousness and visceral experiences. Here, the nuances, the ‘poetics’, what Walter Benjamin calls the ‘optical unconscious’ can re-surface. Thus, in his combining of the close-up and the long shot to expand the diegesis, he proposes a new kind of relational ‘poetics’ to the cinematic medium wherein ‘infertile’ affective4 charges5, combined with the objective, intellectual way of viewing in ‘optical vision’ free the viewer from the confines of the fatalistic system of representational meanings present in cinema’s “impression of reality” (Allen 2) without compromising his own subjectivity or the subjectivity of the object portrayed.

1 Harvey’s ‘haptic’ vision refers to the ‘feeling with one’s eyes’ of the image; ‘the optical vision’, conversely, refers to the thinking out of the object through the perception process. While the former invokes the sensory organs, the latter utilises the cognitive process. This concept will be explained in greater detail later in the essay.

2 I refer to Lacan’s definition of the “The Other” wherein the Other constitutes as the persons or objects outside the capsule of the self.

3 According to Walter Benjamin, the close-up has the potential to reveal the facets of daily life usually left unseen. Similarly, the creation of poetry depends intrinsically on the magnification of the nuances of life to elicit feeling.

4 To ‘affect’ involves feeling, while to ‘effect’ involves an acting upon, whether of belief, feeling, or emotion.

In the creation of this new dimension, the film product evades the power dynamics of the directorial and editorial process, freeing itself from the confines of its materiality using techniques usually analogous to painting, modern poetry and music, mediums of which have the ability to exist ‘outside time’ in the space of the senses. Thus, a new kind of ‘avant-garde’ outside traditional reactionary politics and ideologies is created wherein distinct feeling, emotion, and tactile ‘haptic’ effects produce a personalised and involved film viewing experience. Furthermore, in the new poetic relationality he creates, the narrative serves to build mutuality, rather than distance between spectator and filmic object.6 Thus, neither object nor spectator is compromised in the film viewing experience.

According to Lyotard, cinematography is “the writing of movements” (350); it is the inscribing of an overall script- the ‘doctrine’ of the director- upon the viewer. Thus, the viewer invests belief not by virtue of choice, but in favour of sympathy and identification with the projected reality and its central protagonist. In order to participate and engage in the plot and story, the viewer has to subscribe to the specific reality- that which is inevitably embedded with the director’s ideology through selecting of camera angles7- the director chooses to show. This reality projected by the filmic product, however, is not a faithful reproduction of reality, but a subjective perspective that erases the nuances of physical reality by the erasure of minute differences through editing, shooting and directing. In this constructed dimension of sound, space and time to where a credible ‘impression of reality’ is created, there is no space for personal viewer participation through a dialectical confrontation with the filmic material- what can be called the reactionary movement.

5 ‘Fertile charges’ would correspond to Lyotard’s idea of “fertile motion” that refers to any movement that contributes to the illusion of reality the film seeks to show.

6 The “filmic object” can refer to the protagonist, the subject matter of the film, or the reality the film draws from.


Several elements are required in the creation of the director’s vision in the fictive space of the narrative duration. Firstly, the construction of a temporal continuity through the creating of a logical beginning, middle and end that the viewer can follow; secondly, a regime of steady referents that are, in turn, recognisable to the reality of the viewer and thirdly, a regulation of filmic space through the selection of perspectives that contribute to the emotions that the film tries to elicit. An added soundtrack, furthermore, serves in generating the atmosphere that the film seeks to represent to its ideological ends. Out of this regimented process of structuring, slicing and piecing together, the filmic entity rises from the incongruous litter of individual ‘slices’ of reality to give the illusion of a homogenous whole. From the filmic unconscious, thus, a logical diegesis unfolds in sequential time, invariably hiding the material conditions that govern its creation. The integrity of the organic whole- the illusion of seamlessness- is vital in creating continuity, ensuring the viewer is able to follow the actions, motions and drama of the protagonist. This is essential for the process of identification and the production of sympathy. Furthermore, structuring of the selectively screened reality creates selective emotions during viewer identification; this controlling of libidinal drives serves to impose the director’s overall ideology upon the viewer, making the film viewing experience less of a subjective, individual one. In Lyotard’s “Acinema”, he calls this the sterile motion that film produces, by which each movement in cinematography “sends back to something else, is inscribed as a plus or minus… is valuable because it returns to something else” (350). The simulacrum- the representation of reality- in cinema inevitably contributes to the affective charges the director seeks to produce in identification. Thus, it is inevitably locked to the director’s vision of what the viewer should feel, think and identify with. As Lyotard states, “all movement”- all the nuances of distinct reality the film tears from to create a coherent fictive actuality- “which would escape identification, recognition, and the mnemic fixation” (Lyotard 355) are erased in favour of the director’s vision.

7 Camera angles enforce perspectives, which are in effect the image seen by a single eye. Thus, they are invariably inextricable from the director’s personal ‘impression of reality’.



Traditionally, the Japanese avant-garde movement of the ‘60s8 has tried to confront this problematic inseparable from the materiality of film production by a defamiliarisation of the viewer’s habitual perceptions via a variety of techniques. Such techniques, ultimately, attempt to break the illusion of filmic reality through the abrupt halting of spectator identification. Through the revealing of the filmic process (most evident in Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses), viewer reflexivity, deconstructive techniques, or the creating of a fracturing of distance 9, the viewer is pulled away from the identification process in the darkness of the theatre to his own experience of film viewing. Inevitably, all these reactionary movements seek to combat the fascist regulating of pleasure (the libidinal movements that generate emotions and sympathy) and the production of ideology (in other words, the fictive reality of the director’s vision) through the re-surfacing of the subconscious experience into the conscious realm of immediate reality, thus breaking the illusion of film as reality. However, due to the inherently violent nature of these anti-illusionist techniques, the director unavoidably imposes his own ideology- his ‘impression’ of what reality should contain- on the viewer, serving to enforce yet another perspective, instead of subverting its previous ideology. In other words, the process of breaking the ‘impression of reality’ conventional narrative film projects always involves a brutality committed towards the film material itself and thus, is done at the expense of the filmic object; as a result, the director invariably exchanges one way of subjugation for another. Consequently he always ends up re-affirming the power dynamics implicit in the play of power within filmic production.

8 I refer to directors such as Oshima Nagisa, Matsumoto Toshio, Terayama Shûji and others of this group.

9 I use the Brechtian understanding of this term in which the film creates a distance between spectator and protagonist, breaking the process of identification and allowing for a self-reflective stage.


In Women of the Dunes, however, Teshigahara creates- through a tapestry of tactile sound, close-ups and long shots- a construction of reality that evades both the policing techniques in narrative cinema, as well as the brutality of anti-illusionist techniques in avant-garde cinema. He does this by the freeing of an expressive dimension wherein sensory experience reigns supreme. In the space and time of the narrative, a dimension opens up wherein temporality ceases and the viewer is released into the expansive horizon of visceral experience wherein his existence is re-affirmed. The ‘ideology’ of this new expressive space is unique in its ability to collapse “detail and totality, part and whole, microcosm and macrocosm, the miniature and the gigantic” (Doanne 107). It is confined by no spatial-temporal ratios and operates by no internal logic. It has the ability to magnify and collapse reality, reveal the nuances of life while contributing to the totality of the narrative, in addition to amplifying feeling without sacrificing viewer subjectivity. Through the insertion of close-up sequences, reality becomes amplified as the viewer unconsciously constructs- in the corporeality of his own being- the fictive experience of the film’s protagonist in the space of a highly sensitised ‘silent soliloquy’10 wherein sterile libidinal forces11 can overflow.

Firstly, this expressive space freed up by the close-up is not a ‘detail’ that is part of the overall ‘scene’, but a totality in itself, containing its own existence. As such, even though it magnifies reality through a manipulation of scale and thus erases the peripheral portion of details in a scene, it also reveals the individual nuances in reality that may be sacrificed in slicing of shots during the editing process. The use of close-ups, in this case, returns unity to the film product through the abstracting of a piece of individual reality “from the scene… body, (and) the spatiotemporal coordinates of the narrative” (Doanne 90). Furthermore, the revealing of the intricate details of reality- what can be said to constitute the poetics of daily life- serve to enhance the viewer’s experience by revealing the “hidden parts in our polyphonous life… (teaching) us to see the intricate visual details of life as one reads an orchestral score” (Balázs 118).


Furthermore, this space- like that of melody-, “do(es) not belong to the dimension of (durational) time” (Balázs 121). As a result, the viewer ‘feels’ through his own senses- rather than ‘thinking out’ through a process of assimilation- the narrative unfolding. The viewing process, thus, becomes a subjective experience wherein the viewer does not have to invest ‘belief’ in the reality projected through the intellectual process of thinking. Therefore, the viewer is able to, in effect, ‘write his own script’ within the film through a personalised, subjective viewing experience. Spectatorial space, thus, is salvaged as the viewer is able to construct his own viewer experience independent from, yet within, the filmic plot. Consequently, instead of generating ideologies, Teshigahara generates emotions and feelings in which the viewer- in addition to relating to the protagonist- takes his place in a subjective experience of filmic reality. Hence, empathy- personal, individualised active involvement with the protagonist-, rather than sympathy- the passive position which enforces blind identification-, is produced. As such, the “corporeality of the classically disembodied spectator” (Doanne 108) is resurrected in the constructing of a visceral experience. The close-up, thus, closes and opens up a distance, and re-affirms the viewer’s existence without sacrificing the generation of sympathy integral to the viewer’s personal enjoyment of and engagement with the plot and protagonist. Rather than blindly subscribing to the reality the film projects, the viewer interacts with it emphatically as a homogenous entity.

10 The metaphor of the ‘silent soliloquy’, here, can refer to the internal monologue the viewer constructs out of his imagination. It is, thus, like the film viewing experience Teshigahara suggests in Women of the Dunes in its fictional and personal nature, as well as its ability to affect the soul through an expressive poetics.

11 Lyotard calls this the ‘sterile’ production of pleasure the “motion of pleasure... split from the motion of the propagation of the species, would be… that motion which in going beyond the point of no return spills the libidinal forces outside the whole, at the expense of the whole” (Lyotard 351)

Correspondingly, this space is characterised by the haptic way of experiencing, as opposed to the optical way of film viewing. According to Laura Marks, the optical vision is characterised by “a separation between the viewing subject and the object” (Marks 162) in order to comprehend it that inevitably involves a master-slave dynamic. The haptic vision, on the other hand, is able to close this distance in its tactile materiality and imperative to the present. While optical vision depends on the possessing of the knowledge of the object, haptic vision seeks to ‘know’ the object through a mutual encounter whereby the eyes ‘seek’ and ‘feel’ its textures in order to understand it. Likewise, the former depends on the object’s relation to a representational reality and engages the cognitive processes, while the latter is defined by abstractness and the sensory way of experiencing. As such, optical vision is predicated on thought processes happening in real time, while the haptic vision relies on the viewer’s own sensory engagement with the object on screen and thus, takes place outside time in the subjective space of the viewer’s body.

Teshigahara continually employs jumping between the haptic way of seeing in the close-up to an optical vision in the long shot and back again, enhancing the viewing experience by making it possible to know the same event, person or object in different ways. With a switch from the sensory way of knowing wherein one ‘knows’ through his body in haptic vision, to the objective mode of perceiving in optical vision, the distance between the spectator and the protagonist closes as the viewer experiences the diegesis intellectually and personally, enabling for an empathy and mutuality, rather than sympathy and mastery. As a result, in the expressive space Teshigahara opens, the viewer is able to interact on a level basis with the film object in a haptic, intimate way, discovering it with the “the skin of (his) eyes” (Marks 126). Thus, the power dynamics involved in the politics of vision (by which the object perceived is always ‘possessed’ by the perceiver through the intellectual process of ‘knowing’) is inverted, as, through a mutual meeting, the viewer comes to terms with the filmic object without compromising his subjectivity or the film’s integrity.

In Women of the Dunes, Teshigahara utilises the ability of the close-up to create haptic effects, but takes this a step further through the sudden, disconcerting insertion of long shots in-between close-up sequences. In this way, Teshigahara plays with the disparity in scale to create an amplified, sensory experience. In a particular sequence, the cut from a long shot to a close up, accentuated by sound, creates a tangible experience of thirst in the viewer. Here, the viewer is shown a disparate shot of a glacier of sand falling like waves, backed by the shrilling strings of dissonant violins melting into the clangour of an orchestra of cymbals. The long shot of the desert, here, creates a fracturing of distance between spectator and filmic material, as the viewer engages with the material through the ‘optical vision’. However, this is followed by a sudden, momentary silence wherein the viewer hears the gentle susurration of sand falling as the camera cuts to a close-up of the woman’s skin, highlighting the minute, gritty particles that encrust her lips and throat. The camera moves slowly and seductively down the bottom half of her face to the gentle reverberating movements of the woman’s throat, as it pulsates gently up and down. The lack of facial features, in this shot, only serve to accentuate the tactility of the filmic material as the gritty hairs and grains achieve an almost touchable quality. A sensuous engagement with the textures of her skin occurs, as the camera serves to mimic the viewer’s desire to ‘touch’, experience and identify with the woman. With the annihilation of depth in the close-up of the woman’s skin, the viewer is, thus, plunged into “an illusionistic depth” wherein it becomes imperative not so much “to distinguish form so much as to discern texture” (Marks 162). The film, here, becomes the threshold to another world both of sensory space and relational knowing. Thus, the close-up, here, serves to create empathy with the woman, wherein the viewer comprehends her thirst through the ‘skin of his eyes’ by mimetically feeling it through his body12.

In addition, the sudden cut from the long shot to the close-up serves as a disconcerting experience, pulling the viewer into the intimacy of the screen. In the long shot of the desert cliffs cascading down like water that precedes the close-up, sand achieves an almost water-like consistency. Thus, the sudden juxtaposing of the following close-up of minute particles of sand on the woman’s skin provides a closing of distance between viewer and filmic object as viewer- through disparity of scale- is forced into the immediacy of the fictive space within the screen in a violent movement. Here, there is a dialectical movement between depth and surface, optical and haptic vision, three-dimensional to two-dimensional space, and distance to a disarming closeness. Due to the disjunctive difference in distance and the resultant annihilation of depth created from this jump, the viewer is pulled into the shot abruptly in order to identify- through the senses rather than intellect- with the woman’s predicament: that she is dehydrated and needs water. However, this identification is unlike the identification that takes place in Marks ‘optical cinema’ as it is “predicated on closeness”- the viewer’s ability to personally engage- “rather than on the distance that allows the beholder to imaginatively project onto the object” (Marks 188). The switch from these two different ways of viewing, here, serves not to create a distance between the object and the spectatorial space, but to close it, as the viewer is able to engage with the ‘Other’ within the film on an equal basis without undermining it through the politics of power inevitable in the traditional, objective mode of perceiving in the long shot. The long shot, to the contrary, serves to reveal the intensity woman’s thirst in the immensity of the desert, amplifying the feeling of empathy that follows as the viewer approaches the subject mutually in the following close-up. Both the viewer and the woman are confronted, here, with the immensity of the desert and the feeling of thirst it can elicit, and are forced- in a participatory, intimate moment- to come to terms with it.

12 Laura Marks mentions in her book The Skin of the Film that the haptic way of knowing is characterised by an “embodied and mimetic intelligence” (190).

Similarly, the magnification that takes place in the close-up shot serves to reveal the minute details- the particles of sand- that line her throat, serving to magnify the feeling of thirst. A tactile realism, thus, is created. The use of the close-up, here, serves to uncover the nuances present in experience through the revealing of the minute details of reality. Although her body is obliterated from the shot, the haptic quality that the sand acquires on her skin creates a feeling of aridness in the viewer. In the expressive space opened through the close-up here, the realism produced is not mediated by a representational referent, as the viewer is not shown, but personally feels the woman’s thirst through his body in a haptic mode of engagement. The intensity of the woman’s thirst, here, acquires a disconcertingly realistic quality as the viewer’s senses become amplified and highly sensitised to the minute granulations that stroke the filmic strip and likewise, the woman's experience of thirst. The macro-lens that the close-up provides therefore creates a new, nuanced realism, serving to amplify the reality projected in the fictive space of the diegesis (in turn, unfolded in the long shot) enabling the viewer to not so much as sympathise- the process which typically involves an assumed superiority-, but empathise with the woman’s predicament. Although the reality projected in this shot is abstract and ‘unrealistic’ as it cuts off most of the woman’s body, it serves to provide a more faithful rendition of reality as we know it than traditional realism as it privileges the expressive over blind mimesis 13, calling on a ‘poetics’14 as opposed to a narrative.

Likewise, the director’s manipulation of scale, here, provides an imaginal metaphor to the experience of thirst. However, unlike metaphors present in the narrative medium that invariably create a distance between the object signified and the signifier, the viewer feels the experience the woman feels through an emotive experience that bypasses the intellectual processes. Instead of being told that ‘the woman was so thirsty the desert provided an hallucination, disintegrating in her eyes like a cascading waterfall in a parody of her thirst’ in narration, or shown through in the ‘acting out’ of the protagonist in the unfolding diegesis, the viewer- through the movement of the camera that mimic a caress- feels her thirst undulating like waves in his own throat. Thus, camera movement serves as the ‘bridge’ between subject matter in the film and the spectator, enabling the viewer to- instead of ‘reading’ the film (the process by which always involves a mediator)- experience it through his senses.

13 Traditional Realism was conceived in the 19th century, and seeks to portray an object in its actuality. Even though the image created corresponds to reality as we know it in its visual verisimilitude, it is ultimately a fictive rendition of reality that attempts to hide its status as mimesis in its faithfulness to depicted reality with the use of steady of referents. Likewise, perspectival realism in conventional cinema relies on the use of camera angles to create to create an ‘impression of reality’ that is believable. Even though this reality corresponds to a perception enforced by the use of perspectives, this fact is hidden under the facade of realism in the product’s similarity to the viewer’s reality.

14 Poetics always seek to magnify the minute to create emotion, whereas narratives seek to distance the object in order to produce logical meaning.

In this sequence, thus, Teshigahara is able to create in the viewer a magnification of the feeling of thirst through the weaving of imaginal metaphors, sound, and the use of scale in the intermingling of close-ups with a long shot. The viewer, thus, called upon to use his own imagination to construct his position to the film by an active engagement with the film material and subject.

Furthermore, Teshigahara complicates the haptic effects in this sequence by using the potential of sound and dialogue, creating sensual textures that the viewer feels in his body. The shrill sounds in the long shot represent the woman’s predicament at being torn from all sources of water- that which can be said to constitute the ‘macrocosm’ of her thirst and the corresponding issues it entails in the narrative. The intrinsic violence of the sound used in this shot jolts the viewer’s body, so the viewer feels as upon his own self the violence inflicted upon the woman through water deprivation. The corresponding sound of sand seepage in the close-up, conversely, reveals the woman’s individual position in relation to the overall towering issue of thirst by magnifying the intensity of her experience- what would be the ‘microcosm’ or immediate imperative of her problem. The use of gentle, susurration of sand creates a pleasing sensation in the viewer’s body alike the languor that comes from fatigue, causing the viewer to feel the same strained tiredness the woman feels from being dehydrated. Thus, with the use of sound, Teshigahara again plays with the issue of ‘scale’ in regards to the intensity of the experience of thirst and the magnitude of the issue of thirst, enabling the viewer to comprehend both sensually and intellectually the significance of the woman’s thirst in an empathetic manner. In a similar corresponding sequence, the camera moves horizontally sideways up and down the grainy particles of the woman’s fingers intimately while she explains, in an exhausted, strained voice, that the only way they can get water is if they start working again. The movement of the dialogue, here, serves as an extension of the camera. Just as her voice is strained at almost at the brink of exhaustion, the camera moves lethargically sideways with a weary languor across the skin of her fingers to her dirt-encrusted fingertips. The cadences of syllables, likewise, mimic the seeping of sand in the earlier shot, creating the same strained, lethargy in the viewer. The viewer, thus, ‘feels’ in his own interiority the despair that results in the intensity of thirst the previous shots have already highlighted. Here, dialogue and sound is used in a similar manner as visuality to create a haptic effect in the viewer’s body, enabling the viewer to experience the woman’s predicament for himself.

The next few shots, likewise, accentuate the woman and Jumpei’s thirst, juxtaposing the issue of thirst against the background of their overall predicament in being trapped within the village. Through another manipulation of scale, the intensity of Jumpei’s thirst is put in the backdrop of the overall intensity of Jumpei’s predicament. After being shown a long shot of Jumpei kick-boxing the air futilely, the viewer is given a close-up of his hand moving a water dish in a dejected, circular motion. Both movements serve to engage the imperative reality of Jumpei’s situation on the macro and micro-level, allowing for two different ways of experiencing and comprehending Jumpei’s problem of being- in essence- trapped against his will to a futile task of shovelling sand nightly. While the image of him kick-boxing the air serves as a farcical portrait- a kind of metaphor- to his predicament, the close-up serves to engage the spectator viscerally as the water acquires a swollen, pregnant quality next to the dry sand and thus, the viewer feels a thirst echoing that of Jumpei. While the long shot of Jumpei boxing the air serves to allow the viewer to comprehend, at a distance, the narrative implications of his predicament in connection to the overall diegesis, the close-up serves to allow the viewer to empathise with Jumpei’s predicament through haptic touch, having known what is at stake.

Lastly, Teshigahara abruptly inserts a metaphor in between all these shots, stating “the sand can swallow up cities if it wants”. This final poetic line serves to encompass the overall helplessness of Jumpei and the woman’s situation that had already been expressed in the former shots through the sensory and intellectual way of engagement. Thus, the viewer feels a sense of catharsis that is both pleasant and painful with the falling of these final syllables. As such, a nuanced poignancy is created, as the viewer feels the fatigue of Jumpei and the woman in the body as a delicious languor. Engagement, thus, takes on an erotic hue, as through the process of empathy created with the production of haptic effects, the viewer gives over to the pleasure that lies in understanding the Other- whether in film, or in reality- on a mutual basis. As Levinas states, the viewer obtains “a delight in the resistant alterity of the erotic other” (Marks 184). Likewise, in his shifting from the intellectual mode of perceiving to the sensory mode of feeling, “the image points to its own asymptotic, caressing relation to the real, and to the same relation between perception and linage” (Marks 192).

All in all, Women in the Dunes presents the viewer with a transformative way of approaching the film, wherein engagement takes forefront. Through an intimate process of sensory knowing with the ‘skin of one’s eyes’, the viewer comes to terms with the film material on a level basis through an intellectual and sensory process. Thus, film viewing becomes a re-affirmative experience by which both the viewer and the filmic object is freed from the constraints of referentiality, the binding processes of optical perception, and the enforcing of ideologies through this tactile way of ‘experiencing’. Although the woman in Women of the Dunes and Jumpei are trapped in the endless futility of their daily work of shovelling sand in order to stay alive, they eventually realise that they are, in fact, ‘free’ of the constraints they thought bound them to the desert. Similarly, the watcher- in this expressive space of film viewing- is freed from the materialism embedded in avant-garde cinema and the policing techniques in conventional narrative film through the magnification of the minute details of the moment. Likewise, the poetics of this space privileges wholeness over disruption, lending a more ‘complete’ way of understanding the film entity. Having exited the encapsulated bubble of the theatre, thus, the viewer is given the means to approach the filmic matter on his own terms, allowing for an equalising approach to the process of ‘knowing’


Works Cited

Woman of the Dunes (Suna no onna, Teshigahara Hiroshi, 1964, 123mins). DVD

Allen, Richard. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge Studies in Film). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.

Béla Balázs, “The Close-Up and The Face of Man,” The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2008), 117-126. Print.

Doane, Mary Ann. "The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema." differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.3 (2003): 89-111. Project MUSE. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 20 Apr. 2010 .

Jean-François Lyotard, “Acinema,” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen. (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 349-359. Print.

Marks, Laura U., and Laura U. Marks. "The Memory of Touch." The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. London: Duke University Press, 1999. 127-193. Print.

Lain: a point of resistance to the post-modern fatalistic ‘utopia’

Lain: a point of resistance to the post-modern fatalistic ‘utopia’

The anime Lain presents the watcher with a world at the brink of collapse at a point in which the Wired threatens to infringe upon the ‘feminine’ social realm of human interaction and feeling, engulfing it in a labyrinth of networks promising a utopian technological ‘connectedness’ or transcendence- the pseudo-'collective unconscious'1 of the Wired. At this fragile, transitory edge in history, Lain ultimately challenges the watcher with the ethical and philosophical issue of choice in the schizophrenic post-industrial world through the figure of Lain who personifies this fracturing of social consciousness. On one hand, Lain represents the social, ‘feminine’ sphere wherein one has a stable identity, but has to exist in a structured society and grapple with the realities of loss, betrayal and pain present in the intricacies of human relations. On the other hand, she- in her Wired form- embodies the aesthetic way of existence, wherein identity is characterised by “variability and brilliancy” (Dreyfus 82)2, contact is established through the ‘masculine’ 3 technologies of computers, and gratification is immediate, although continually characterised by a never ending despair and disappointment after the fulfilment of each ‘little death’4. By bringing these issues into the physical realm and taking them upon her body, Lain acts as an archetypical5 Christ-like figure, providing both the watcher and the characters with the question of choice in breaching- through a levelling in perception- the borders of the Wired and the Real World. Thus, she brings forth a point of resistance to the politics of power innate in the masculine technologies of post-modern existence by creating a new 'public' space in experiential and fictive reality much like agora of Greek tradition where a debate on the ethics of cyberspace can resume and hence, decisions can once again occur.

With the introduction of new technologies such as the media and the web in the post-industrial world, a new de-centralised space has been created where everything can be gotten at one’s fingertips, resulting in the breaking of social, political, and spatial boundaries. Hence, one is no longer encumbered by the physical and socially constructed reality of God and Man and is able to manoeuvre freely between borders of space, time, and social class. In the utopian ‘cyberspace’ of Dreyfus, everyone is equal, everything is easily obtainable and the issue of responsibility towards one’s fellow man dissolves with the efficacy of human interaction. In this mode of contact, the complexities of human interaction in typical society are exchanged for the immediacy of net-constructed identities. Likewise, the liberating realm of knowledge, the traditional 'thorn-filled path' toward wisdom, is replaced by the immediacy of obtaining information (here, treated as a new form of currency) at the click of one’s fingertips, removing the need for a mediating force. Through the creation of the Wired in Lain, thus, people are introduced to a whole new way of relating to society and reality where actions no longer have direct social consequences and hence, responsibility can be forfeited. In a variation of the moral allegory, Lain contrasts the masculine and feminine modes of ‘connecting’ present in the aesthetic sphere of existence wherein “enjoyment (is) the centre” (Dreyfus 80) of life and an existence wherein one has the intimacy of human contact, but has to grapple with the realities of “disappointment, humiliation (and) loss” (Dreyfus 80). The latter results in the risk of pain and the pangs of responsibility- as can be seen in Lain’s interactions with Alice-, whereas the former is shadowed by a despair suffered ultimately alone as each libidinal gratification of the moment only serves to temporarily alleviate the heaviness of Chronos6 time.

4 I allude to the french term for orgasm un petit mort which directly translates to ‘a little death’, pointing to the fatalistic nature of pleasure.

6 I refer to Jayamanne’s concept of “Chronos time”, in which “only the past and future subsist, and... subdivide each present, ad infinitum” (Jayamanne 194), contrasting with “Aion” time of the present, which is cyclical and infinite. The latter is ‘heavy’ in its implications for the individual as it contains the entirety of the past, present and future.

In Lain, the schizophrenia innate in the post-modern mind is articulated into a physical form. She takes the split between the Real World and the Wired upon herself in her dual personality and perceptions. Reality, for Lain, is innately flimsy. People dissolve into shadows, shadows dissolve into data, and information- written on the blackboard by her teachers- dissolve into digits. Likewise, the ‘natural’7 world of birds is replaced by the buzzing of telephone lines, signalling the omnipresence of the Wired even in the real realm of human interaction. The Wired hovers treacherously over the Real World, threatening to engulf Nature even in the physical realm. The dissolving of information into digits that Lain sees can be seen as the increasing tendency of the post-modern mind to perceive everything through a macro-lens by which ‘data’ consumption- the ‘smaller narratives’- replace the ‘grand narratives’8- of modernity. Here, the nature of post-modern perception is highlighted by the displacement of natural realities by the electronic 'streaming' of data even in the physical realm. Through Lain’s dual perceptions, the myth of a post-modern existence freed from responsibility in the real world is proved to be false, as the Wired realm is shown to subconsciously ‘seep’ into our perceptions of the real world, inevitably affecting out actions therein. Lain, thus, proposes the idea that one’s existence on the side of the Wired inevitably affects one’s physical existence in the Real World, alluding to the impossibility of a completely schizophrenic existence with two distinct and separated existences and personalities.

7 In referring to Nature as the a female principle, I am alluding to the traditional idea of Nature/the earth as an essentially female force created by, and balancing, the typically male creator.

In addition, as everyone is equal and everything is obtainable in this newly constructed ‘cyberspace’, things lose their meaning, resulting in a technological nihilism. The structural transformation of the public space of society into a utopian ‘level’ ground unfettered by spatial and social boundaries, thus, results not so much in a spiritual transcendence, but a techno-saturated ‘freedom’ whereby “everything is equal in that nothing matters enough that one would be willing to die for it” (Dreyfus 73). Instead of producing an “elite public whose critical debate determined public opinion” (Dreyfus 74), it produces an unmotivated, passive private sphere wherein pleasure replaces principles, and passion is replaced by the hopelessness of decision-making. “A passionless but reflective(ness)” public results, “compared to a passionate one”, where what is “gain(ed) in extensity… it loses in intensity” (Dreyfus 78). The post-modern self is, thus, saturated in a resultant nihilism accompanied with the ‘masculine’ answer to the essentially ‘female’ issue of needing to feel, connect and touch, disabling him from ‘acting out’ against the overwhelming structures of the Wired.

8 The term ‘grand narrative’ was coined by the French philosopher Jean--François Lyotard in his 1979 work “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge” to explain the form of thinking that shaped the modern mind. It refers to the uniting truths and worldviews people subscribe to.

The Cyberia cafe, particularly, exemplifies this idea in its levelling of public and private spaces, mirroring Lain’s nature in its liminal standing between the real world and the Wired. In this constructed space, identity is unstable, and relationships are characterised primarily by the exchange of cyber-commodities. Here, Lain, God of the Wired, is able to breach the borders of the electronic and physical and enter into the real world in order to communicate physically with its inhabitants. However, the constructed name ‘Cyberia’ is similar to the ‘siberia’ of the North, implying that the relations- the ‘connection’- that cyberspace/the Wired promises is intrinsically cold and devoid of warmth, thus contrasting starkly with the ‘warmth’ Lain experiences when she communicates physically with Alice through speech and touch. Likewise, the inhabitants who frequent the cafe drown themselves in a techno-fuelled fugue, consuming cyber ‘drugs’ like accela in order to disassociate themselves from reality. Thus, the relations that cyberspace creates between human beings is proved to be ultimately a poor replacement for the tangible, emotive quality of human contact to affect, rather than effect. Similarly, contact with the man-made god Lain- who is ultimately a technological software constructed by a patriarchal authority- only results in a series of unexplained deaths. Hence, the loss of faith present in post-modernity after the death of the God in modernity ultimately proves irreplaceable due to the overarching structures of masculine technology pervading the networks enveloping the Wired.

As a consequence of the materiality innate in the aesthetic sphere of experience, likewise, a spiritual ‘gap’ is created that cannot be fulfilled through material means. This gap can be seen as a result of a longing for the lost female principle present in the feminine modes of connecting, and is continually highlighted by the various characters that get ‘addicted’ to being connected. The accela drug, for example, enables one’s consciousness to operate at the same speed of the Wired, allowing the user to experience a sped-up ‘ecstasy’ uncannily like a drug providing a high. The gratification of the Wired, thus, is likened to a drug paradoxically providing momentarily relief from pangs of existence present in Chronos time yet killing one bit by bit. In the promise for ultimate transcendence of the physical realm and a re-connection to the lost feminine realm present in the spirituality of cyberspace, a fatality dwells where one is drenched in despair. The watcher is, likewise, presented with the consequence of embracing such an existence in its totality with the figure of the Knight wannabe in the “Society” episode who wears an encumbrance of technical machinery about his body in order to ‘connect’ to the Wired reality. He mistakenly thinks that he will find his lost family and God by descending into the depths of the Wired. Flashes of his family appear to him next to mythical fantastical creatures in the Wired as he maniacally laughs that he is “attached everywhere… (and can hence) send his body anywhere”. The presence of the familial and the mythical in the electronic, here, alludes to the emotional and spiritual investment we put into materiality to provide us with a fulfilment beyond the moment. However, this promise of (re)connection ultimately proves false, as the watcher is presented the ironic, tragic image of the Knight wannabe’s dead figure at the end of the episode encumbered by steel machinery that buzz a meaningless stream of white noise, presumably dead as the result of a failure to connect. Even though he does find “God” in an encounter with the Wired Lain, this causes death, rather than redemption. The road to the higher realms of consciousness that the utopian existence of the Wired promises, thus, proves ultimately fatal, as the Knight wannabe fails to reunite with his family and the larger unit of the lost mythical realm of the feminine he desperately seeks. In the Knight Wannabe’s delusion, Lain implies that the search for a new spirituality to redeem and provide a lost ‘truth’ arrives from the desire to (re)connect to a lost feminine principle. Furthermore, in his death, Lain warns against the complete embracing of the masculine mode of connection through technology, showing the watcher such a reliance results in a regression into the feminine that can have fatal consequences.

In addition, Lain’s continuous hallucinations of her classmate’s ghost and the mingling of the ‘supernatural’ realm with the real realm that occurs as Lain increasingly figures into the hallucinations of network players in the Wired can be see as the “vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images” sent up “in dream, broad daylight or insanity” (Campbell 89). With the repression of ‘natural’ reality of the matriarchal realm and the ‘feminine’ mechanism of social interaction through contact, the supernatural- a product of the irrational, potentially destructive force of the feminine- inevitably re-emerges like the ‘unconscious fumes’ that rise from the ‘Aladdin’s cave’ of the subconscious. Lain, as the archetypical hero, is the ultimate ‘god’, not only in her existence as Lain, god of the Wired created by the Wired God, but as “the seeker and the found.. (existing) inside of a single, self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world” (Campbell 40). As Campbell states, “the great deed of the supreme hero is to come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to make it known” (40). Lain’s purpose, thus, is to- in the conflating of the Wired and the Real World through her continuous hallucinations- bring these essential psychological issues present in the post-modern consciousness into light for the audience, thus creating a new positionality where self-reflection is possible. In addition, her femininity provides a balancing counterpoint to the male God of the Wired, making her a particularly appropriate figure to address intrinsically feminine issues of the lost matriarchal realm.

Lain’s social interactions, likewise, address the social issues present in the post-modern existence. All of her relationships- with the single exception of Alice- are characterised by a coldness. In episode one, we see Lain’s father talking through a wall of computers to Lain; we do not see his eyes, and it appears the ‘faces’ of the computers have become extensions of his personality. The question of the post-modern identity also emerges as Lain constantly questions her identity as various “Lains” are woven in and out of the narrative, yet divorced ultimately from her perception of herself. Lain, thus, reveals the multiplicity of constructed identities one can accumulate in the Web results in a fracturing of identity, rather than psychological progress towards a wholeness present the Jungian concept of Individuation10. In such a way, Lain takes on the psychological issues present in the post-modern way of existence upon herself and presents them to the watcher as a question, pushing the watcher and the characters in the series to make a choice between the social and the aesthetic way of life. Naturally, the Knights see the power innate in her position in shaping the future of the Wired and how people interact with it and thus, seek to manipulate her for their own ends. They recognise that- in being hero-God of the people-, she presents a crucial turning point wherein people are forced to make the personal decision of having to choose between the atomised sphere of isolated existence and the public sphere of actual human interaction.

In the episode “Infornography”, particularly, the psychological issues present in the Wired existence are brought to the watcher in a flashback sequence reminiscent of the information overload present in the Wired. By drawing together the words ‘information’ and ‘pornography’, Lain likens the gratification of information present in the aesthetic sphere to the fatalistic pleasure- the ‘little death’- one experiences through pornography. Ironically, the viewer is brought on this journey towards the ‘Truth’ (a continual pursuit in the Lain universe) of the spirituality promised by Muchluhan’s ‘global village’11 through the technological medium of animation. The story, at this point, reaches its climax, as the borders between the Wired and the real world become increasingly fragile, eventually breaking down, thus allowing the Lain of the Wired to enter into normal human consciousness. Likewise, borders between the watcher and the anime break down, as the watcher, through the emersion of sound and image, is immersed in the ecstatic moment of Wired existence yet brought to the light to the tragedy- and resultant despair- present at its core through an experience mimicking the post-modern way of processing information through disparate flashes. Through a visceral experience wherein the borders between the senses and intellect, viewer and screen break down, the portrait of the tragedy of a completely material, technologically saturated experience wherein materiality becomes the new spirituality is brought to the watcher in a fugue-like juxtaposition of images. A complex weaving of sound, image and data flash across the viewer’s screen, and the viewer feels a surge of libidinal energy, suffering the ‘little death’ through the gratification of information. At this point, questions are explicitly brought to the forefront, as we are questioned repeatedly with the necessity of the human body through flashes of data stating “I don’t need to stay here”, “inconvenient body” and “all this talking has worn me out”. At this point, the watcher is presented with issue of choice as the warm realm of human contact present in Lain’s friendship with Alice together with the pain implicit in such relations (portrayed, here, in the pain Lain feels when she realises she shares the responsibility for the leaking of Alice’s secret) is juxtaposed next to images of the ‘siberia’-saturated ‘cybernetic’ nature of human interaction in the Wired. As the technological realm increasingly engulfs the natural sphere, we are presented with a wasteland of telephone wires swallowing the skyline wherein buzzing becomes the only sound one can hear. Henceforth, we are told in a monotonous voice that the Tachibana cooperation- the inventors of the Wired- “have mapped the human genome”, implying the heralding of the computer era and the arrival of a new public ‘cyberspace’ would bring the promise not only of democracy, but the answer to the meaning of life.

10 Jung’s concept of Individuation refers to the personal journey towards a wholeness, the end point in which one finds one’s ‘true self’. It is a Hegelian notion that posits one’s journey in life is towards a greater goal. As such, it belongs to the category of “grand narratives” forsaken in post-modern consciousness.

The promise of a utopian existence without a body wherein spiritual transcendence can be achieved, however, is proved to be innately farcical by the accompaniment of the garage-saturated sounds of whining guitars that highlight the despair implicit in the new spirituality cyberspace provides. The ultimate idea that “‘a new global mind’ (would) emerg(e) out of digital networks… a union of computer and nature- of telephones and human brains and more” (Wise 185) is proven ridiculous in its idealism, as we see a heap of Lain at the end of the sequence lying on the floor entangled in wires, mentally sucked of all energy and enthusiasm for life, and dangerously close to a ‘software overload’. Here, the masculine machinery of technology is seen as fundamentally incompatible with the female realms of connecting through emotion and feeling in its tendency to encumber rather than liberate. Thus, the vision of a ‘global village’ whereby “higher levels of spirituality leading to a new age of harmony… (compel) commitment and participation” (Wise 185) is false, as it presupposes that the ‘higher’ realms of spiritual consciousness can be achieved through the material masculine structures of networks present in Lain.

Lain, as saviour figure, thus provides the viewer with the tools for self-reflection by presenting two distinct options for survival in the post-industrial era. On one hand, she promises a utopian existence without a body in which the Wired gives ultimate spiritual transcendence and everyone is connected through a vast network of ‘collective unconsciousness’; on the other hand, she represents the fatality implicit in the reality of such an ideal. Through Lain, the ‘collective unconsciousness’ of the Wired is shown not to be that of Jung’s unified ‘collective unconsciousness’ containing the reservoir of human experience through history, but an artificial construct that divorces, divides and even causes a psychological and- potentially physical- death. Thus, the anime Lain ultimately criticises the notion of that materiality can being about spiritual transcendence by parodying the ridiculous nature of trying to access the ‘feminine’ way of connection through masculine structures, positing there is no true alternative to human contact. Furthermore, the ethics of freedom that post-modernity promises is also brought into light by the wake of deaths Lain of the Wired causes in her schizophrenic, dual existence. While the realm of the real is paved with hardship and responsibilities that come with human relations, the alternative post-modern ‘freedom’ proves to have equally incriminating consequences.

By taking on these psychological, ethical and political issues onto her body, Lain acts as a Christ-like figure suffering the consequences of both existences for the audience, bringing the viewer the knowledge- the ‘truth’- of what responsibility, ethics and freedom means in the post-modern existence. Thus, Lain acts as a point of resistance to the patriarchal structures of power inherent in the technology saturated post-modern existence by becoming the material platform by which issues of post-modernity can be discussed outside the confines of screen. The anime Lain, thus, is particularly revolutionary in its ability to subvert its own mediatic medium in its existence as a product of material relations and technological ideologies, bringing to the watcher the self-affirming tools for a true liberation towards a ‘truth’ beyond the confining structures of post-industrial reality.

Works Cited

Serial Experiments Lain - Boxed Set (Signature Series). Dir. Ryutaro Nakamura. Perf. Artist Not Provided. Geneon [Pioneer], 2001. DVD.

The Portable Jung. London: Penguin Books, 1988. Print.

Campbell, Joseph. “Prologue: The Monomyth”. Print.

Doty, William A. “Definitions and Classifications”. Print.

Dreyfus, Hubert. “Nihilism on the Information Highway.” Print.

Laleen Jayamanne. “A Slapstick Time: Mimetic Convulsion.” Print.

Leeming, David Adam. “Introduction: The Meaning of the Myth”. Print.

Wise, Richard. “The Myth of Cyberspace”. Print.