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Kshithi Bhanu Singh MA English Semester I ES418E English Novel - I Course Instructor: Professor Saugata Bhaduri. November 24, 2011 The Rise of Manga and Manga as an extension of the Novel form.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines Novel as an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an extensive range of types and styles: picaresque, epistolary, gothic, romantic, realist, historical-to name only some of the important ones. The Novel as a genre has a history that is easily traceable, going back to Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur, (written circa 1470, published 1485). The term novel refers back to the creation of short stories that remained part of a European oral culture of storytelling into the late 19th century. Fairy tales, jokes, little funny stories designed to make a point in a conversation, the exemplum a priest would insert in a sermon belong into this tradition. Written collections of such stories circulated in a wide range of products from practical compilations of examples designed for the use of clerics to such poetic cycles as Boccaccio's Decameron (1354) and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury

Tales (13861400). The Graphic Novel and its definition on the other hand is debatable and difficult to trace. Roughly speaking one can define a graphic novel as a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design

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or in a traditional comics format The term is employed in a broad manner, encompassing non-fiction works and thematically linked short stories as well as fictional stories across a number of genres. As the exact definition of graphic novel is arguable, the origins of the artform itself lie open to interpretation. Cave paintings may have told stories, and artists and artisans beginning in the Middle Ages produced tapestries and illuminated manuscripts that told or helped to tell narratives. The first Western artist who interlocked lengthy writing with specific images was most likely William Blake (17571826). Blake created several books in which the pictures and the "storyline" are inseparable, such as Marriage of Heaven and Hell (if one were to consider it a writing of prose fiction). The Graphic Novel brought together the genre of novel and of the early printed books. The Japanese Manga takes the already present graphicality of the novel to the next level in the sense that it is not just a comic book but also a narrative. The graphicality of the manga is not the only distinguishing feature. Its a narrative as well, and a very similar one to the novel at that. The beginnings of Manga can be traced back to the scrolls form 12th Century Japan, although whether these scrolls are actually manga is a debatable argument amongst most historians but these scrolls did establish the right-to-left reading style of the present manga. Manga is said to also have originated not as a writing style but as an art form around the beginning of the 13th Century when pictures began to be drawn on temple walls, depicting images of the afterlife and of animals. These pictures were crude and deliberately exaggerated representations, and bear a remarkable similarity to modern manga. This phenomenon continued over hundreds of years, branching out to include numerous other subjects, although the style remained the same. Around the start of the 1600s these pictures were made attractions in themselves for the first time, they were not drawn on temple walls but on wood blocks. These were known as Edo, and the subject was less religious, often graphically erotic, although they branched out once again to include various other subjects,

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particularly buildings and satire. At around this time the word manga was first used to describe the artistic style. The pictures were by now generally composed in monochrome, with simple outlines and rudimentary blocks of colour which forewent shading. The subject took precedence over the method of representing it. Manga as we know it today has origins that date closer to the 18th Century and the term manga which in the western world has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan literally means whimsical drawings. The characters that are used to write the word manga are Chinese characters and they first came into common usage in the late 18th Century with the publication of such works as Sant Ky den's picturebook Shiji no yukikai (1798), and in the early 19th century with such works as Aikawa Minwa's Manga hyakujo (1814) and the celebrated Hokusai Manga books (18141834) containing assorted drawings from the sketchbooks of the famous ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. Rakuten Kitazawa (18761955) first used the word "manga" in the modern sense. The development of manga as a genre has been divided into two broad and complementary processes by historians and manga critics. The Pre World War II and Post World War II views. Takashi Murakami who is an internationally prolific contemporary Japanese artist sees Japan's staggering defeat and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as having created long-lasting scars on the Japanese artistic psyche, which, in this view, lost its previously virile confidence in itself and sought solace in harmless and cute (kawaii) images.1 Takayumi Tatsumi, however sees a special role for a transpacific economic and cultural transnationalism that created a postmodern and shared international youth culture of cartooning, film, television, music, and related popular arts, which was, for Tatsumi the crucible in which modern manga have developed.2 For Murakami and Tatsumi, transnationalism (or globalization) refers specifically to the flow of cultural and subcultural material from one nation to another. In their usage, the term does not refer to international

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corporate expansion, nor to international tourism, nor to cross-border international personal friendships, but to ways in which artistic, aesthetic, and intellectual traditions influence each other across national boundaries. An example of cultural trans-nationalism is the creation of Star Wars films in the United States, their transformation into manga by Japanese artists, and the marketing of Star Wars manga to the United States. However, writers like Frederik L. Schodt, Kinko Ito, and Adam L. Kern stress continuity of Japanese cultural and aesthetic traditions as central to the history of manga. Schodt points to the existence in the 13th century of illustrated picture scrolls like Ch j jinbutsu-giga that told stories in sequential images with humor and wit and also stresses continuities of aesthetic style and vision between ukiyo-e and shunga woodblock prints and modern manga. While there are disputes over whether Ch j -jinbutsu-giga or Shigisanengi was the first manga, both scrolls date back to about the same time period. Schodt also sees a particularly significant role for kamishibai, a form of street theatre where itinerant artists displayed pictures in a light box while narrating the story to audiences in the street. Richard Torrance has pointed to similarities between modern manga and the Osaka popular novel between the 1890s and 1940, and argues that the development of widespread literacy in Meiji and post-Meiji Japan helped create audiences for stories told in words and pictures. Kinko Ito also roots manga historically in aesthetic continuity with pre-Meiji art, but she sees its post-World War II history as driven in part by consumer enthusiasm for the rich imagery and narrative of the newly developing manga tradition. Ito describes how this tradition has steadily produced new genres and markets, e.g., for girls' (sh jo) manga in the late 1960s and for Ladies Comics (redisu) in the 1980s.3 Kern has suggested that kibyoshi, illustrated picture books from the late 18th century, may have been the world's first comic books. These graphical narratives share with modern manga humorous, satirical, and romantic themes. Although Kern does not believe

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that kibyoshi were a direct forerunner of manga, but the existence of kibyoshi nonetheless points to a Japanese willingness to mix words and pictures in a popular story-telling medium. The first recorded use of the term "manga" to mean "whimsical or impromptu pictures" comes from this tradition in 1798, which, Kern points out, predates Katsushika Hokusai's better known Hokusai Manga usage by several decades.4 Similarly, Inoue sees manga as being a mixture of image- and word-centred elements, each pre-dating the U.S.A. occupation of Japan. In his view, Japanese image-centred or "pictocentric" art ultimately derives from Japan's long history of engagement with Chinese graphic art, whereas wordcentred or "logocentric" art, like the novel, was stimulated by social and economic needs of Meiji and pre-War Japanese nationalism for a populace unified by a common written language. Both fuse in what Inoue sees as a symbiosis in manga.5 Thus, these scholars see the history of manga as involving historical continuities and discontinuities between the aesthetic and cultural past as it interacts with post-World War II innovation and trans-nationalism. Contemporary manga originates in the Occupation (19451952) and post-Occupation years (1952-early 1960s), when a previously militaristic and ultranationalist Japan was rebuilding its political and economic infrastructure. Although U.S. Occupation censorship policies specifically prohibited art and writing that glorified war and Japanese militarism, those policies did not prevent the publication of other kinds of material, including manga. Furthermore, the 1947 Japanese Constitution (Article 21) prohibited all forms of censorship. One result was the growth of artistic creativity in this period. Contemporary manga then traces its origins to a single genius - that of Osamu Tezuka. In 1947 Tezuka took Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island as the inspiration for a manga version entitled New Treasure Island published in book form. Despite the miserable economic conditions of the immediate postwar and the decimation of the publishing industry, this work became an

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immediate bestseller, selling 400,000 copies. At the time Tezuka was a nineteen-year-old medical student. New Treasure Island contained the germs of a new syntax for manga and had an enormous impact on a new generation of manga artists. Tezuka himself continued to produce manga until his death in 1989, authoring such popular works as Astro Boy. Tezukas Mighty Atom or Astro Boy influenced much of the future history of manga. Astro Boy was both a super-powered robot and a naive little boy. Tezuka never explained why Astro Boy had such a highly developed social conscience nor what kind of robot programming could make him so deeply affiliative. Both seem innate to Astro Boy, and represent a Japanese sociality and community-oriented masculinity differing very much from the Emperorworship and militaristic obedience enforced during the previous period of Japanese imperialism. Astro Boy quickly became (and remains) immensely popular in Japan and elsewhere as an icon and hero of a new world of peace and the renunciation of war.

The decade following the war saw the emergence of a great number of manga artists in addition to Tezuka, bringing about a veritable manga boom. Nonetheless, manga were still identified as a genre for children. But those who grew up reading manga were not able to kick the habit after reaching adulthood. This was the postwar generation, the manga generation. In their estimation of manga, the members of this generation came to experience a virtually irreparable rift with their elders. By the late 1960s the manga generation had become university students and contemporary manga met with a crucial turning point. It was at this time that one began to see manga which met the demands of university students for entertainment and art. The rising student movement enthusiastically embraced this newly emergent media and in the process, Japanese contemporary manga came into its own. Around 1980 manga techniques began to show an even greater degree of refinement and manga magazines acquired the breadth and diversity they still maintain today. Today's manga have emerged as a virtually omnipotent visual media, encompassing forms of entertainment from

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joke-books to melodrama to sci-fi, literary works from novels to travelogues, and manuals for educational and didactic purposes. As such, they have come to be enjoyed by people in all walks of life

The Novel as a genre too has an emergent history that is similar to that of the manga. The popularity of the novel form began in the 18th Century. A number of causes aided its development and popularity. Some of the theories that have come up are Rise of realism and the novel as an effect of the Enlightenment which states that after the start of the Scientific Revolution, people began applying the newfangled deductive method to all sorts of social concerns. Specifically, Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke and Rene Descartes proposed that individuals could discern important truths about life through careful observation of details, and no longer had to rely upon the establishment for their intellectual enrichment. Writers picked up on this trend and penned a new genre that focused on realism-books that had believable plots and believable characterizations--and a public already primed on realistic fare such as biographies, memoirs and personal journals eagerly embraced the English novel. The second theory is that of Rise of the middle class and the novel as an offshoot of capitalism, wherein it is described that while the populace was busy looking for new ways to educate itself about the world, Britain was busy becoming the worlds first capitalist economy. As a result, the countrys middle classes expanded, and they became obsessed with ways of increasing their income and social standing. And for the first time in British history, a subject's social standing did not depend upon inheritance, but upon ambition. Authors catered to this potential reading public by writing works about love and marriageworks in which the main characters married up the social ladder. (Previously, novelists had been patronized by rich benefactors and confined their serious pieces to classical concerns.) Still, one vestige of Britain's fading feudal system was its paternalistic tradition that the ruling classes should provide for societys poorer members. This tradition

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translated into an early English novel convention of producing stories with happy endings; stories in which virtuous working women were absorbed into their libidinous masters' aristocratic homes. (Samuel Richardson's Pamela is a good example of this convention, in which a servant girl marries a master who had pressured her to become his mistress.) At any rate, if the elites didn't mind marrying down, the uppity middle classes seemed to consider it taboo--see the illustration from Punch magazine below, which shares a popular sentiment from England's industrial age: snubbing your own kin.

Another theory is that of Rise of commercial fiction and the novel as an affordable and available literary form in which is detailed that besides giving members of the lower classes new riches and reasons to drop their old friends, another benefit of the Industrial Revolution was bringing affordable books to the masses through the creation of commercial printing houses. As it went, after the book industry noticed the public demand for the novel, it upgraded its infrastructure and increased its output in London, Edinburgh and Dublin, on account of 18th-century technological advances in printing. Once the new presses were in place, publishers kept them profitable by persuading novelists to put out saleable works. Thus, the novel changed form from rare manuscripts circulated in rarefied circles, to the popular published form sold today. And last but not the least the theory of Rise of literacy and lending libraries and the novel as a product of Puritan values. This theory talks about how not all Britain's people prospered from industrialization--many members of the working classes still couldn't read or afford to buy novels at retail. To bridge this gap and build public education, concerned philanthropic groups established literacy programs and lending libraries. These lending libraries preferred novels that were published in three volumes, so they could spread out their titles between borrowers. As a consequence, the early English novelists wrote their works following a formula that put a cliffhanger in each volume. One

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downside to the novel's Puritan sponsorship was the accompanying Puritan censorship. In time, writers grew weary of watching their words, and of breaking their works into multiple editions after their fellow countrymen could well afford to buy their own copies. By the close of the Victorian age, then, a more prosperous and less pious reading public no longer patronized lending libraries, and the era of the serial novel came to an end.

The similarity in the origin and development of both the genre of novel and manga prove to a certain extent that one form took from the other. The similarities are not only in their developmental stages but also in the way that the both the writing forms are constructed. The novel and the manga are both narratives. And the novel has had a long history of interlocking images (graphics) with lengthy prose. In manga the plot line is given precedence via graphicality more so than prose but the prose does remain an integral part of it. The manga generation could not be satisfied with only whimsical sketches and needed a story that would drive their intellectual faculties and hence emerged the form of sutourii-man, or narrative manga as we know it now. Narrative manga then gave birth to Gekiga. Gekiga literally means "drama pictures" and refers to a form of aesthetic realism in manga. Gekiga style drawing is emotionally dark, often starkly realistic, sometimes very violent, and focuses on the day-in, day-out grim realities of life, often drawn in gritty and unpretty fashions. Gekiga arose in the late 1950s and 1960s partly from left-wing student and working class political activism and partly from the aesthetic dissatisfaction of young manga artists like Yoshihiro Tatsumi with existing manga. Manga then becomes an extension of the novel form that rose in the 18th Century England. It takes the narrative of a novel and presents it in a manner that is graphically approachable. Manga is not just comics but a collaboration of the novel form, the graphic novel and the comics. It is true that it comes closest to the

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comics but its beginnings and its history clearly show that it is an amalgamation of the aforementioned genres.

To add to the existing argument of the manga being a close representation and extension of the novel form one can look at the so-called sutourii-man, or narrative manga. These are much more developed in Japan than one-or four-frame comics, reaching a level of sophistication which has often warranted comparison with the novel form. While the main compositional element in novel is the articulation, in manga this function is fulfilled by the frame, or koma. The syntax of koma arrangement is highly sophisticated, making possible a seamless visualization of the narrative. While Western narrative comics tend to be themedriven, Japanese sutourii-man privilege character development, the way a buildungsroman novel maybe written. In Japanese manga the theme is made apparent through the words and actions of the characters, such that the reader is able to experience the theme through a process of psychological identification with the protagonists. Narrative manga are descended from picture stories known as 'e-monogatari'. In these picture stories, however, the accompanying text and not the images were the primary vehicle of the narrative. In narrative manga, however, it is the images themselves, the succession of and linkages between the frames that tell the story. The syntax of the frames is of particular importance. Tezuka's New Treasure Island made this very clear. Its appearance was like the usurpation of poetry by prose, the replacement of the chivalric romance of medieval times with the modern novel and by extension the branching off of the novel form into a genre that we now know as Manga.

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Bibliography: 1. Muramaki, Takashi (2005). Little Boy: the Arts of Japans Exploding Subculture. New York: Japan Society. 2. Tatsumi, Takayumi (2006). Full Metal Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America, NC: Duke University Press. 3. Schodt, Frederik L. (1986). Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. Tokyo: Kondansha. 4. Kern, Adam. (2006). Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyoshi of Edo Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 5. Inoue, Charles Shir . 1996. "PictocentrismChina as a source of Japanese modernity." In Sumie Jones, editor. 1996. Imaging/Reading Eros. Bloomington, IN: East Asian Studies Center, Indiana University. pp. 148-152.