Sight Unseen: Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve and the Politics of Recognition

Adrian Tomine's graphic novel Optic Nerve, issue #9 begins with a saccharine moment between a young, Asian American woman and her first-generation grandfather, set in the grandfather's fortune cookie factory. The young woman tells the audience that she had always felt distant from her grandfather, perhaps because of a "language barrier," but that recently her view of him has changed. As the comic book's frames progress, the chasm of generational and cultural misunderstanding is bridged by fortune cookie wisdom, and the two share a climatic, affirming hug. At this moment, the narrative's perspective pulls back and reveals that this scene is, in fact, extradiegetic and that the protagonists of the comic book--Ben Tanaka, a thirty-year-old Asian American, and his girlfriend, Miko Hayashi--are watching a film in a theater. While the largely Asian American audience around him applauds, Ben surveys the scene with a mixture of embarrassment and confusion, his hands clasped pointedly in his lap. After a few quick frames of exposition (some of them involving a character who very suspiciously resembles Maxine Hong Kingston), we learn that Miko is one of the organizers of an Asian American "Digi" (Digital) Film Festival in Oakland, California and that this sort of thing is not Ben's "cup of tea" (3). As the couple drives away from the festival, a surly Ben calls the movie "garbage" and asks, "[W]hy does everything have to be some big 'statement' about race? Don't any of these people just want to make a movie that's good?" (5). The privileged perspective of the narrative is Ben's, and the film is hackneyed and mawkish, so it is clear that the reader is meant to cringe along with Ben and to sympathize with his assessment of Asian American cultural products. By opening issue #9 in this manner and by setting his narrative within the context of Asian America but rejecting what he views as the conventions of "race statements," Tomine seems to avow that his narrative will address racial issues without relying on the cliches and conventions ("garbage") that he feels characterize Asian American cultural production. Tomine reassures his readers that this explicit treatment of race will not be "corny" (a term even Miko uses to characterize the film), an anathema in the "cool" or "edgy" world of graphic novels. Although Ben's question poses a dichotomy between the "corny" and "cool," another dichotomous opposition is present between "race statements" and "good" artwork. This dichotomy becomes clearer if we return to the argument between Ben and Miko. The argument begins when Ben expresses incredulity that the film he just watched was considered the best of the festival: "Talk about a big fish in a small pond" (3). When Miko defends the festival by pointing out that they had received more submissions than ever, Ben retorts, "Yeah ... of digital videos made by Asian Americans who happen to live around here. Didn't they also have to be left-handed?" (3). Ben ridicules the festival by focusing on the small, overly narrow pool from which it was culled. However, a different kind of "narrowness" comes into focus as the argument progresses. When Miko wonders if Ben is ashamed of being Asian American, he replies, "After a movie like that, I'm ashamed to be human" (5). The evolution of the argument between the two demonstrates that, for Ben, the film--and, by extension, "everything [that has] to be about race"--fails at the level of "the human" precisely because its racial particularity renders it overly narrow; "good" artwork appeals to a universal standard or measure outside of social or ideological contexts (5). (1) Put another way, these works are bad because they will not forego narrow racial identities in favor of broader, "human" ones. Ben's conception of "good" is analogous to David Palumbo-Liu's use of "truth and beauty" in the following claim: [L]iterature, as an exemplary rehearsal of liberal humanistic cultural activity, has been assumed to be an area wherein . …