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© by the International Comparative Literature Association. All rights reserved.
Copyright © par l’Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée. Tous droits réservés.
Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 18.35 ( Spring - Summer / printemps - ete, 2001):120-32.
Michael
Zryd
University of Western Ontario
Ruth L.
Ozeki’s Halving the Bones and My Year of Meat
Again,
I felt the warm smugness that comes over me when I know that there is another
heart-wrenching documentary moment at hand, being exquisitely recorded. (Ozeki,
Meat 175)
Half-documentarian,
half-fabulist.... Maybe sometimes you have to make things up, to tell truths
that alter outcomes. (Ozeki, Meat 360)
Your
looking is always crooked, from side of eye. (Ozeki, Meat 314)
These three
quotations from My Year of Meat1, Ruth
Ozeki's 1998 quasi-autobiographical novel, suggest the complex range of her
irony and her self-consciousness of how knowledge is constructed in nonfiction
texts, both literary and filmic. My Year of Meat follows the adventures of a
Japanese American documentary filmmaker, Jane Tagaki-Little, working as a
self-described "cultural pimp" pandering American culture for
Japanese television audiences. Growing out of Ozeki's decade of work in the
media industry - as she says, "I don't think I could have written a novel
had I not been a filmmaker first" (Conversation 12) - My Year of Meat develops
out of and expands upon the preoccupations of her independent film, Halving the
Bones, released three years earlier. Halving the Bones, which she describes as
"a documentary with fictional lapses," (Conversation 9) reverses My
Year of Meat's trajectory of cultural education, sketching aspects of Japanese
culture for her intended North American audience. What both novel and film
share and mutually illuminate is the elaboration of a basically comic universe,
dedicated to confronting realities of historical racial, gender, and
generational conflict, but also dedicated to resolutions of cultural
integration and understanding. In this way, Ozeki reverses the contemporary
tendency for irony to function as a trope of division, separating those who
"get" the irony and those excluded from it, making it, instead, an
almost utopian trope of integration and imagination.
In My Year of
Meat, Jane is a fictional documentary film producer who agrees to make episodes
of a Japanese television program, My American Wife!, sponsored by an American
meat-producer's lobbying organization. Jane's picaresque quest for
"healthy American wives" structures the novel, a quest across America
in search of women and families who, in addition to making delicious meat
recipes, have to embody the contradictory stereotypes of "authentic"
American culture so crucial to mainstream media.2
The novel's second central character, Akiko, the anorexic wife of the
television show's abusive Japanese producer John Ueno, signals the darker side
of the novel and its political concerns with industrial meat production and
dangers of additives like hormones and antibiotics. Although Jane and Akiko's
narratives enact transformations in the personal sphere, Ozeki's frame of
reference for their resistance is consistently cultural and political. Jane
returns to independent filmmaking to fight against the complacent commercial
dictates of the television and meat production industries, while Akiko leaves
her husband, rejecting the confining dictates of Japanese codes of femininity
(and masculinity). Moreover, the narrative is shot through with documentary
textures; Ozeki concludes the novel with an "Author's Note":
"Although this book is a novel, and therefore purely a work of my
imagination, as a lapsed documentarian I feel compelled to include a
bibliography" (Meat 363).
If My Year of
Meat is a fiction arising out of nonfiction, Halving the Bones is a documentary
which uses fiction to further its investigation of Ozeki's own personal
history, the three generations of Japanese American women on her mother's side
of the family: Matsuye, Ruth's grandmother; Masako, Ruth's mother, and finally
Ruth herself. Matsuye was born in Japan but arrived in Hawaii through an
arranged marriage to a poet/photographer; there, she worked hand-tinting
photographs taken by her husband. The metaphor of photography as memory,
colored and altered by subjectivity, is evoked throughout the film. In Hawaii,
Matsuye is diagnosed with an ovarian tumor and returns to Japan for medical
treatment; it turns out she is in fact pregnant with Masako. This second
metaphor, Ruth's mother as tumor, is evoked by Ruth to understand how race is
constructed as malignancy - but a malignancy generative of ironic
consciousness. Masako, although she achieved graduate degrees in linguistics,
concentrated on "homemaking," a role whose tension and ambivalence is
pondered by Ozeki in the film. Several years before Halving the Bones begins,
grandmother Matsuye dies in an old-age home in Japan. Only Ruth goes to the
funeral; Masako claims that her arthritic knees would have prevented her from
kneeling and thus from properly participating in the funeral. Ruth is skeptical
of this excuse. While there, she is given several of her grandmother's bones to
give to the absent Masako as a "nice gesture" from the Japanese
relatives. Ruth's quest in the film is finally to deliver the bones to her
estranged mother, and, in so doing, to reconnect with her mother and understand
her own cultural and generational history. As a narrator in Halving the Bones
explains at the start of the film:
Five years after
her Japanese grandmother dies, she still had her bones... to give to her
mother.... Now Ruth has decided that something must be done about the bones.
The idea of her grandmother, fragmented and ignored, has begun to bother her.
Structurally, the
film is divided into roughly two sections. The first is highly layered and
formally textured. It lays out this family history mediated by a range of
voices and evidential sources, including "fake documentaries" of
her grandmother's and mother's past. The second part of the film is more stylistically
homogenous, using cinema verité style to observe Ruth's cagey confrontation
with her mother and the hand-over of the bones. It turns out that while Ruth
is interested in nostalgically investigating the past, in the "exploration
of self," her mother lives in the present and could care less about the
bones. Ozeki uses this generational gap to undercut both her own quest and
her mother's evasiveness in confronting history. Examining three generations
of women in her family, she positions the film persona of Ruth as a sharp-eyed
but ultimately gentle and self-ironic commentator on the choices, compromises,
and courage these women demonstrate in the face of (at least) two national
cultures' constrictions of femininity and race.
Rachel Rosen, in
Film Comment, reviewed the film at its 1996 Sundance Film Festival screening,
calling it "stylistically adventurous" and "artfully
executed" but ultimately a "modest" film (53). While seeming
perhaps to damn it with faint praise, this evaluation is, I think, an important
insight into this comic universe and the quality of the irony Ozeki brings to
the film and to her writing. Anti-monumental, suspicious of the grand
pronouncement, her irony rhetorically seeks complexity, sometimes at the
expense of satisfyingly clear judgment and action. The "modest irony"
of the film, aware of its own perspectival limitations, is key to the appeal of
Ozeki's character in the film and novel and finally crucial to the ethical
power and cultural inclusivity to which she aspires.
Irony, indeed, is
central to Ozeki's central characters Jane and Ruth, mediating their sense of
racial and national identity, grounding their agency and imagination, and
finally, allowing Ozeki to conceive of identity as a dialectic of cultural
construction, both given and made. In My Year of Meat, Jane's mother observes,
"Your looking is always crooked, from side of eye" (314), echoing an
earlier statement by Jane that she is "always speaking out of both sides
of my mouth" (176). Although Ozeki acknowledges the dangers of ambivalence
and prevarication that attend "sideways" looking and speaking, this
indirection is largely seen as a strength, especial-ly for multi-perspectival
cultural observation and analysis. Ozeki has discussed her embrace of irony's
multi-perspectivalism, the power to say one thing and mean another, to open the
text to be seen as saying many things at once (Lounsbury, Interview). This
multiperspectivalism is also explicitly linked to her "polyracial,
perverse" subject position: "being racially 'half' - neither here nor
there"(Ozeki, Meat 9). Hyphenated cultural identity invites, for Ozeki, a
structural, even embodied ironic perspective. Furthermore, the multiple modes
of irony, from attacking sarcasm to self-irony to complex open irony, construct
a voice appropriate to her sophisticated meditations on cultural identity,
political commentary, and documentary ethics.
Yet what is most
striking about her work is that, while grounded in irony, it shares none of the
cynicism, flippancy, or epistemological laziness in which much contemporary
ironic discourse indulges. Where certain uses of irony can encourage a deferral
of meaning and a distancing attitude of quietism, Ozeki's irony maintains an
ethics of inquiry into truth, an ethics grounded in documentary film's
traditional social mission: as Jane says, "I became a documentarian partly
in order to correct cultural misunderstandings" (88-9). She is a
self-described "absolute relativist" who, while obviously sceptical
of the claims of "Truth," demonstrates nonetheless in both novel and
film a commitment to what I can only call an ethics of fairness in relation to
both her subjects and her audience. Remarkably, Ozeki is devoted to both the
indirection of irony - the crooked look - and a rhetoric of full disclosure.
The protagonist
of My Year of Meat discusses the evolution of her understanding of truth and
the way it is inflected by her understanding of race and identity as constantly
changing and shifting categories:
in the next
millennium, the idea of an indigenous person or plant or culture will just seem
quaint.
Being half, I am evidence that race, too, will become relic. Eventually we're
all going to be brown, sort of. Somedays, when I'm feeling grand, I feel
brand-new - like a prototype.... Now, oddly, I straddle this blessed,
ever-shrinking world. (15)
This optimism in
a future free of the divisive nature of racial categories is nonetheless
grounded in an understanding of the history of racial and cultural conflict, an
understanding which motivates Jane's work as a documentary filmmaker in My Year
of Meat:
I had spent so
many years, in both Japan and America, floundering in a miasma of
misinformation about culture and race, I was determined to use this window into
mainstream network television to educate. Perhaps it was naive, but I believed,
honestly, that I could use wives to sell meat in the service of a Larger Truth.
(27)
While questioning
the idea of a "Larger Truth," the epistemological imperative is not
ignored, and neither is the ethical responsibility of the documentary filmmaker
to represent her subjects fairly. In this extended passage, Ozeki eloquently
describes the tension inherent in the process of constructing
"characters" out of the images and sounds of the real people who are
the subjects of documentary filmmaking, a tension she had explored earlier in
Halving the Bones.
I was not always
so cavalier with my wives as I sometimes sound. To some extent, the pretense
was necessary in order to keep up with our production schedule and get the
programs out. But the fact is, I did care, and at the same time I couldn't
afford to care and these two contrary states lived side by side like twins,
wrapped in a numbing cocoon that enabled me to get the work done. Psychiatrists
call this "doubling." Here's
another example. I wanted to make programs with documentary integrity, and at
first I believed in a truth that existed-singular, empirical, absolute. But
slowly, as my skills improved and I learned about editing and camera angles and
the effect that music can have on meaning I realized that truth was like race
and could be measured only in ever-diminishing approximations. Still, as a documentarian,
you must strive for the truth and believe in it wholeheartedly. Halved as I am,
I was born doubled. By the time I wrote the pitch for My American Wife my
talent for speaking out of both sides of my mouth was already honed. (175-6)
The ethical
conflict inherent in representation between serving one's own agenda and
serving the integrity of one's subjects creates a "doubling" for
Jane. This ethical doubling in turn becomes an epistemological doubling, a
wholehearted search for truth which must nonetheless take into account the ways
in which truths are constructed and manipulated, and indeed, derive from
multiple perspectives on the world. Jane and Ozeki use their liminal racial
identity - "Halved as I am" - as a basis for a search for a small-t truth,
more complex, multiple, and analytical. In particular, Ozeki understands that
truth is less "found" than constructed, analyzed, and synthesized, a
process she describes in a section of the novel entitled, "Editing
Room":
Truth lies in
layers, each of them thin and barely opaque, like skin, resisting the tug to be
told. As a documentarian, I think about this a lot. In the edit, timing is
everything. There is time to peel back. (Ozeki, Meat 175)
The delicacy of
this metaphor, that the search for truth is as fine and sensitive and painful
as peeling layers of skin, and requires patience and timing, is further evoked
by Ozeki in an interview statement that her investigations of cultural
relativism derive from what she describes as "Buddhist values of precision
and compassion." Relativism, although it is usually understood as inimical
to truth (if everything is relative to subjective standpoints, how can there be
a stable truth?) is, for Ozeki, a gesture of respect for the validity of
subjective standpoints. Most importantly, relativism can encourage compassion,
the ability to imagine another's perspective and sympathize with their values,
feelings, and perceptions. However, without what Ozeki terms
"precision," compassion can simply become projection, the imposition
of one's own subjective values, feelings, and perceptions. Her articulation of
truths as layered, interconnected, intersubjective, and constructed
propositions undergirds the optimistic and "constructive" sensibility
which is expressed in her literary and film work: "Half-documentarian,
half-fabulist.... Maybe sometimes you have to make things up, to tell truths
that alter outcomes" (Ozeki, Meat 360).
Halving the Bones
furnishes a critical perspective on two contemporary documentary film genres: the
popular ironic documentary and the Asian American autobiographical documentary.
The rise of irony in documentary film over the 1990's parallels the rise of
first person and directly commentative documentary address since the 1960's.
Since Michael Moore's Roger and Me (1989) demonstrated for the media market
that documentary could be funny and entertaining (and to a certain extent
commercially viable), popular documentary (theatrically released, cable and
broadcast television, and the cult film) has increasingly turned to irony as a
mode of address. At worst, this has led to increasingly sensational subject
matter, a focus on the "subject as freak," and dominant attitudes of
cynicism, mocking superiority, and cruelty. The proliferation of the "fake
documentary," which parodies documentary form itself, and the increased
acceptability of reconstructions in documentary, have both contributed to
skepticism of documentary's truth-telling ability. This is in part salutary -
but just as documentaries should not be believed just because they are
documentaries, neither should documentaries be distrusted simply because they
are documentaries and aspire to tell some kind of truth.
Another recent
development in popular ironic documentary is the cultivation of documentary
"personalities" who function as the rhetorical epicentres of the
film: Michael Moore, Nick Broomfield, Marcel Ophuls, and Andrei Codrescu are
examples. Aristotle, for one, preferred the character of the eiron to his
opponent, the self-assured alazon, whose lack of self-consciousness made him
dangerous in his certainty-and of course an easy target for the ironist. While
Moore, Broomfield, and Ophuls all use self-irony to some extent, their ethos,
as their careers progressed, has increasingly taken on some of the
self-importance of the alazon. The modest self-irony of Ozeki refreshingly
undercuts this hyperbolic personality (and its self-assured and often
unreflective masculinist privilege). This modest irony is also salutary in
preserving what almost all irony secretly retains: sincerity, which is clear in
Ozeki's clear-eyed, judgmental, but also loving and sympathetic attitude toward
her subjects.
Halving the Bones
also fits into the genre of Asian American personal autobiographical
documentary, a genre which often specifically examines the relation of the
filmmaker to family through the thematics of loss. Ruth states towards the end
of Halving the Bones that it is "an attempt to come to terms with my
mother and her past." The genre has a number of common tropes: first
person address, a therapeutic motivation regarding family integration and
understanding, and a thematization of memory as unreliable, traumatic,
characterized as much by silence and erasure as presence and clarity. Japanese
American autobiographical films like Halving the Bones, Lisa Yasui's A Family
Gathering (1990), Janice Tanaka's Who's Going to Pay For These Donuts Anyway?
(1993), and Rea Tajiri's influential History and Memory: For Akiko and
Takashige (1991) are all concerned to different degrees with the central
historical event of the WWII internment camps, and the dilemma that the legacy
of the camps presents for contemporary hybrid Japanese Americans. What is the
proper relationship to an American culture which both inflicted this experience
on one's ancestors and lives in denial of its violations and hypocrisies? All
these films challenge the sentimentality and comfortable confidence of
empirical oral history through reflexive formal gestures. But where films in
this genre tend to emphasize the melancholic inevitability of loss, Halving the
Bones uses irony - often seen as a hollow trope of critique - to fill in the
gaps left by loss.
What remains to
be discussed is Ozeki's elaboration of multiple voices in Halving the Bones,
and the way she modulates these voices to three rhetorical outcomes: first, a
move of disclosure which grounds her voice's ethical centre; second, an attack
on American WWII anti-Japanese propaganda; and third, a decision to refuse the
position of passive victim of American racism in favor of comic integration, a
choice to renegotiate hyphenated identity, precisely through the ironic embrace
of that which has been constructed as marginal and malignant.
A series of
playful and unstable voices opens Halving the Bones, starting with the title
credit, phrased as a question: "making a family album?" The first
voice we hear is a woman speaking Japanese, and then a voice giving the heavy
accented English translation. For a non-Japanese audience, the foreign voice
and then the broken English one suggest an exotic perspective; notably, these
voices speak in the omniscient third person. Then a third voice-over, that of a
woman with an American accent, enters to speak in the first person: "My
name is Ruth, but I don't like it. It's not a good name for a young person. I
don't know why my mother chose it. My mother is Japanese, and Japanese people
can't pronounce 'r' or 'th.'" This voice is set off from the first two,
suggesting an alienation from "Japanese people" and acknowledging a
common Western joke about Japanese pronunciation of English. She notes that the
name translates into Japanese as "Not at home" or "She is
absent," a metaphor which will serve to evoke Ruth's lack of clear, marked
identity-at least in relation to the national sites of Japan and America.
The
Japanese-accented English voice-over returns to narrate a section of the film
titled "Grandma Matsuye's Story." Under plaintive "exotic"
flute, illustrated by standard documentary types of evidence (photographs,
maps, documents), we hear the grandmother's story in first person. The
voice-over, though obviously not read by the real (and of course, dead)
grandmother, narrates an autobiographical story. The voice speaks in idealistic
terms of meeting her husband and discovering "love at first sight"
despite being shipped off to an arranged marriage. Ruth's voice-over
immediately interjects, "My grandmother says it was love at first sight,
but this appears to be an out and out lie." Ruth's voice is baldly
skeptical; its function in relation to the interaction of the grandmother's and
her own voice is to undercut the sentimental conventionality of the immigrant
saga so familiar to the autobiographical family documentary genre.
In fact, all of
the voices in the film thus far are spoken by Ozeki herself, who invites the
viewer into a web of absent or siteless identities. But then a new voice enters
the film in the person of Ruth's mother, Masako. She speaks without a script in
a much more conversational and direct tone, and, as Ozeki has said, pulls the
film out of its "mess" (Lounsbury, Address). She functions as yet
another sceptical perspective to qualify both the grand-mother's idealized
autobiography and Ruth's contemplative but studied narration. Her first words,
spoken to camera in talking-head interview style, are "Can I start? I'm
Masako, Matsuye's daughter, and Ruth's mother, and I'm not a tumor." She
offers a skeptical metacommentary on the film's oral family history
methodology: "I don't think you can talk about accuracy in memory....
Without realizing it, you want to color it... make it somehow to your
advantage." One admirable quality of Ozeki's self-irony is that it serves,
in part, to strengthen the voice of her mother. Documentary subjects have much
less control over their filmic presentation than the filmmaker does, a power
imbalance Ozeki respects.
About twenty
minutes into the film, Ruth's voice-over reappears over footage of herself
driving; with a knowing glance at the camera through the rear view mirror, underscoring
her rhetorical presence, she confesses:
This is Ruth
again. I want to explain my plan [to return the bones to her mother] but first
there's something I have to say. Up to now, I haven't been 100% accurate. There
were a couple of things that I made up. Like my grandmother's autobiography,
for example. She didn't write it so it was made up from family stories. I did
the same thing with the home movies. I've seen a photo of my grandfather
holding a movie camera, so I know he really did make movies. But his camera and
films were confiscated after Pearl Harbor. I made up these things but I never
really knew my grandparents and now they're dead and I didn't have very much to
go on. I thought I would understand them better if I just pretended to be them.
Anyway, I just wanted to set the record straight. Even though I made up the way
I represented them, the facts of their lives were all true.
This is the
clearest expression of Ozeki's ethics of disclosure, and within the context of
contemporary fake documentary practice, it is a remarkable gesture. She
"comes clean" not through a disclaimer or a surprise ending, but
midway through the film as a way to give the audience a chance. As she says,
Ozeki wants to be inclusive, presenting the secret knowledge that comes with
irony but letting the audience in on it (Lounsbury, Interview).
This disclosure
also suggests the film's overlap of fictional and ironic frames. A fictional
frame is now explicitly put around the mode of the grandmother's story, though
not around - Ozeki claims - the "facts" of the story. This fiction
and its unreliable narrator have already been questioned by an ironic framing
set up via Ruth's questioning voice-over. But these fictional and ironic frames
create neither epistemological confusion nor meaninglessness. Rather, the
authority of Ruth's voice is deepened by her setting the record straight: not
only does she seem to value honesty and fairness as ethical values (which gets
attached to her ethos), but she gains the authority of irony as well: she
accrues the authority of a critical outlook on her family history, and a
complex evaluative edge which undercuts the traps of the sincere
autobiographical family documentary. Oral history is tested by Ruth's
authoritative voice. Self-irony increases authority through controlled
self-critique. The flexibility of this voice, finally, allows her
simultaneously to question her mother (Ruth is suspicious of her mother's later
claims that Ruth's grandfather didn't resent the internment camps) and to understand
her mother's denials (that Matsuye said she "understood" the
internment policy). Although Ruth implies that the camps in fact broke the
spirit of her grandfather, who returned to Japan in 1960, she allows for
ambiguities and aporias and "understands" her mother's need for her
fiction. She acknowledges but evades the impossible desire to completely
comprehend her family and their relation to their history.
Ozeki questions
yet another voice of the film: the voice of American culture which, during
World War II, demonized and interned Japanese American citizens. This voice
first appears during a section entitled "Mom's Story." Ozeki inserts
an excerpt from a WWII propaganda film directed to American factory workers: a
booming male voice asks, "Have you killed a Jap soldier today?" The
factory workers, insisting on their patriotism, protest, "This isn't Guam.
This isn't the Philippines. This is America!" Ruth's voice quietly
rejoins, as the image track cuts to a contemporary tracking shot of suburban
homes (where Ruth's mother lives): "This is Connecticut. There weren't any
Japanese soldiers here when I was growing up. Except Mom." The segue
suggests that the propaganda film's attempt to take the war home, to argue that
the home front was also helping defeat and kill the Japanese, was internalized
by Japanese Americans caught between nat-ions.
Ruth further
articulates how the propaganda constructed Japaneseness as malignancy. When her
grandmother Matsuye used her pregnancy as an excuse to return to Japan by claiming
that she had a cancerous lump in her belly, Ruth analyses how her mother is
metaphorically cast as a cancer: "The metaphor contains something that I
recognize: a deeply rooted conflation of sickness and race." Images of
other American propaganda films (including the infamous cartoon Tokyo Jokio)
are later intercut with images of her mother preparing a turkey for baking (an
American holiday ritual she reluctantly adopts). Ruth reflects on the voice of
American culture that constructed her own and her mother's ambivalence to
Japanese culture:
The Yellow Peril,
the malignant Japanese who had to be excised, the inscrutable Japanese who
couldn't be trusted. I'd seen the images all my life and I believed them.
Anyway, this was old history, but even so I knew I shared it. Mine was
different from everyone else's in Connecticut, and obviously it was because of
Mom. Her genes in my body had prevailed. So you see, it was this Eurocentric
and primitive understanding of history and genetics that left me susceptible to
a metaphoric confusion about my mother's origins. She'd started life as a
tumor, and, cancerous, she'd spread. I was her offspring and hardly benign.
At the end of
this monologue, we hear the "DING!" of an oven timer, a sign of
revelation rich with bathos. This ironic sound effect underscores Ruth's darkly
ironic conclusion: despite the internalized self-marginalization engendered by
what she calls a "Eurocentric and primitive understanding of
history," a critical, "hardly benign" consciousness was forming,
capable of the analysis articulated by the film. While the racism of this voice
of American propaganda invites a justifiably outraged reaction, Ozeki insists
on an ultimately comic response, one which effectively refuses the divisiveness
and self-hatred inherent in racism in favour of a constructive evolution. Ozeki
includes another clip from a propaganda film which intones, under ominous
music, that Japan was the "land of the little people who grew to believe
that through blood and iron lay the short cut to greatness.... 'Made in Japan'
became a sentence of death.... How will it end for the little people who wanted
to enslave the earth?" Under this text Ozeki intercuts the stamp
"Made in Japan" from the propaganda text with the photographs of her
family we have seen through Halving the Bones. However, Ozeki immediately
shifts from this attacking irony to a cooler, and less self-righteous address.
The montage segues to what seems to be genuine colour home movies of a child
(Ruth?) on a tricycle with Japanese sandals: "By the time I was a kid,
'Made in Japan' wasn't such a big deal anymore. It only meant it was cheap and
nobody wanted it. But for me it was different." She goes to elaborate on
the secret pride she took in the things her grandparents sent her from Japan
after they resettled there in 1960. Eschewing the outraged ironic dismissal of
propaganda images, a familiar ironic trope that she both uses and keeps her
distance from, this quiet and casual tone strengthens the authority of her persona
while not forgetting the racism and condescension of the propaganda text.
Instead of lament - the tragic voice of loss - Ozeki shifts down to ironic
defiance: playful, critical, self-aware, perhaps equivocal, but active and
constructive.
Irony, then, is
crucial to the comic sensibility of Ozeki's universe. Her personal,
generational, and political investigations provoke proliferating and open
perspectives; as Ruth says, she "pokes around in the past to imagine a
future." As Ozeki says in relation to the self-described "happy
ending" which concludes My Year of Meat, its irony is meant to both enable
more complexity in terms of her fiction's "intellectual" work and to
encourage imagination:
As the author, I
wrote a happy ending, although, like Jane, I am suspicious of the efficacy of
doing so. But happy endings satisfy the emotions, and I wanted to provide that
type of satisfying narrative closure in the hope that it would free the
intellect to continue its trajectory beyond the story line, pondering the
issues the book raises. At the same time, by having Jane discuss the
shortcomings of happy endings right smack in the middle of one, I was hoping to
invite the reader into a more complex relationship with that ending. In
essence, I point an authorial finger at the very thing that I am writing, and
poke a hole in the seamlessness of the happy ending by making it
self-referential and reflexive. Ironic. In the end, though, it is a tribute to
the power of the imagination. You cannot make a better world unless you can
imagine it so, and the first step toward change depends on the imagination's
ability to perform this radical act of faith. (Conversation 13)
Ozeki's work is
profoundly comic, future-directed, with the promise of utopia invested in the
force of imagination.3 She takes
the hollow cynicism that characterizes much contemporary irony and transforms
it into a tool for movement, for moving on, for imagining a better world,
acknowledging the enormities of history, but refusing to be trapped by them.
Note
The stills from
Ozeki's Halving the Bones are reproduced here with the author's permission.
1 The first edition of the novel is titled My
Year of Meat; the second edition, published in the United States by Penguin
with a "Reader's Guide," is titled My Year of Meats. I have adopted
Ozeki's preferred title. Her first two films, Body of Correspondence (1994,
directed with Marina Zurkow) and Halving the Bones (1995) are listed as being
directed by Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury; her novel was released with "Ruth L. Ozeki,"
as the author, a concession to her father's family (Lounsbury) who she worried
might be offended by some of its controversial content. For the purposes of
this essay , I will refer to the filmmaker-author as "Ozeki."
2
Notably, My Year of Meat's critique of the reductive, but fascinating cultural
textures of documentary television was released several years before the
current boom in "reality" programming on television.
References
Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury, Address. Sometimes You Have to
Lie to Tell the Truth: "Fake Documentary" Panel. Margaret Mead Film
Festival, Museum of Natural History, New York, 14 Nov. 1996
___, dir. Halving the Bones. 16mm film. Women Make Movies, 1995
___, Personal interview. May 1999.
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