The contrasting representational economies of the photorealistic “furniture” and cartoonish inhabitants in Tatsumi’s Goodbye highlight the attempt of many characters to inhabit a certain fantasy, to no avail. This failure of escapist fare frames inhabits the struggle of post WWII Japan to cope with the aftermath of the bombs.
Opposition: the contrasting representational economies do not represent an effort inhabit a fantasy space in which the bombings did not occur; rather, the photorealism of the scenery is purely a means of contextualizing the various narratives that take place in the novel.
2 comments:
Honestly I find the more interesting/arguable claim in your thesis to be that the escapism failed. Define failure?
I like the thesis. I also happen to think Birney's question is an enormously interesting one, but I don't think a paper organized by the thesis here actually *needs* to answer Birney's question. I do think it would be useful for you to specify what you mean by failure (I don't think that would be hard to do, given the whole generation ground up in the cause of recovery whose tale Tatsumi is telling here), but I suspect that, if anything, going too deeply into the question -- interesting tho' it might be, grounds for another, different good paper no doubt -- would be a distraction undermining the argumentative thrust of a paper based on your thesis. Again, I think a good paper can emerge from your thesis roughly as is.
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