Let chains three times stronger than these bind us; let all you gods and goddesses look on. Still I would sleep beside golden Aphrodite.
Translator’s note: IC, CC, and CODA refer to the visual novel’s introductory chapter, closing chapter, and final section; a “route” is a branching storyline. The essay discusses both the game and its anime adaptation, including their endings.
The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o’er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me — she
Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me for ever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could to-night’s gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
—Robert Browning, “Porphyria’s Lover”
Op.22.I So rasch wie möglich
Section One. As fast as possible.
At last, the snow began to fall.
On the day I lost what mattered most to me, this pure white scene appeared before my eyes after all.
Snow hides everything. The painful things, the sad things, and the realities we do not want to face.
Only that beautiful, snow-white landscape keeps slowly spreading, leaving us forgotten there.
…
But snow is still only snow.
When it melts, the realities it concealed and the feelings we forgot will all emerge into daylight once again.
Like that black, filthy sludge.
This is how the whole story begins: Haruki Kitahara’s anguished monologue as the plane carrying Kazusa Touma recedes into the distance.
School life takes up so much of White Album 2’s introductory chapter that readers often overlook the enormous differences between its three protagonists’ family relationships. Earlier criticism, meanwhile, has frequently dispensed with the work of sifting through these particulars, merely recounting the characters and events before arriving at this or that supposedly “self-evident” conclusion. This is far too presumptuous.
From family to individual to romantic love—which is to say, the formation of a new family—human feelings, along with human lives, are shaped and organized within the secular world. They then collide, producing conflict and compromise. Setsuna Ogiso, Kazusa Touma, and Haruki Kitahara understand this process differently, and those differences precipitate several sudden reversals in their relationship. Behind the reversals lie their repressed desires. We must dissect and psychoanalyze the underlying structures of their consciousness, so as to “recognize its existence through the barriers of its prohibitions.”1
In his monologue, Haruki speaks of the falling snow. He feels guilty about what he has done, yet is unwilling to confront it directly, allowing mourning and melancholia to spread through his psyche.
Both melancholia and mourning work through the subject’s identification with a lost object and incorporation of that object into the ego. But we must be clear that both are also tied to law. It is because ethics and morality serve as standards that repeated infidelity and hesitation produce mourning and the experience of melancholia. These feelings only begin to end when law exercises its power through sanctions and punishment. To some extent, this also explains the substance of Haruki and Setsuna’s later impasse. Their years of avoiding one another at university stem precisely from Setsuna’s refusal to complete her own mourning, leaving Haruki’s melancholia forever at the stage before punishment. This is what haunts him most—a symptom that has never been properly confronted, let alone healed.2
White Album 2 seldom mentions Haruki’s family circumstances; a few facts are repeatedly passed over in the vaguest terms. This is precisely the key. For Haruki, his father is not an object of identification, but merely an other excluded from his life. Digging further, we find only the fact and result of this exclusion, while control remains suspended: it can neither be repaired nor reversed, and it contains not the slightest element of mourning. The problem involves the phallus implicated in castration: the signifier. For Haruki, family is just such a symbolic phallus, appearing and disappearing throughout his life.
Lacan uses the phallus both to signify the mother’s desire and to stand for the enjoyment the subject loses forever by accepting the father’s law and entering the symbolic order. The phallus is a pure signifier because it has no signified at all. “Through his relationship with this signifier, the subject is deprived of something belonging to himself, to his life; this something takes on the value of that which binds him to the signifier.”
The phallus derives its particular value for the subject from the subject’s narcissism. Haruki’s careful calibration of interpersonal distance, the behavior through which he constantly wins other people’s reliance or affection, reflects precisely this feeling. In the imaginary, the phallus of family life is dismantled and reassembled, enabling it to appear in actual social life. Yet the phallus itself is a ghost, connected only to nothingness, slipping between the fingers. This also explains Haruki’s occasional attempts to evade social life. Only when the possessor of the phallus has sacrificed all his narcissistic attachments—that is, when he is mortally wounded and knows it—can he strike the phallus.3 Thus the phallic signifier of absent family life produces a deeply rooted flaw in Haruki’s character. He is always “waiting,” always suspended in the other’s time.
This is certainly not an arbitrary, strained inference that Haruki lacks initiative—that would contradict the facts. “Waiting” actually means that whenever he takes the “initiative,” he must borrow some other justification: looking after Kazusa is his duty as a class representative; reassuring Setsuna serves the fulfillment of a dream; and so on. What he really thinks beneath these excuses can be expressed only when he can delay no longer, or when someone else presses him relentlessly. What is so saddening about Haruki is that every one of his tragedies consists in the subject’s unyielding movement toward that “time of his own.”
For Lacan, the Oedipus complex entails aggressivity directed toward the father. In the first stage, the child senses that the mother desires something other than the child—the imaginary phallus—and identifies with that phallus, existing as an extension or appendage of the mother. In the second stage, the imaginary father intervenes. He not only frustrates the child’s attempt to become the object of the mother’s desire, but deprives the mother of her phallic object and forces her fidelity to himself. Here the child, as subject, first encounters prohibition. Then comes the third stage: the real father intervenes, demonstrating that he actually possesses the phallus. The child abandons its designs on the mother, turns toward identification with the father, and registers itself within the symbolic order through self-realization.4
Setsuna struggles in the mirror stage. To accommodate other people’s image of her as a rich young lady, she disguises herself when working her part-time job. The imaginary ego formed here in turn drives her to keep others at a distance, even to conceal her hobbies, reshaping their conjectures about her. This process essentially involves expectation and illusion. To some extent, Setsuna is quite comfortable in this state: she wants the misrecognition to continue.
Setsuna Ogiso: I really did worry about it, you know.
Haruki Kitahara: Ogiso, you said you didn’t want to attract attention, but now you’re talking as if you’re above everyone else: “The school festival will be a failure if I don’t perform.” What kind of superstar idol do you think you are?
Driven by that jubilant, excited desire, the subject remains confined within—and satisfied with—the misrecognition of a mirror image. When this identification shatters, the subject looks forward to another idealized identification: in this case, Haruki. The ego thus becomes an other, an object imagined, hoped for, alienated, distorted, and misrecognized.
These repetitions prevent Setsuna from making the normal transition to the secondary identification that resolves the Oedipus complex. Indeed, the ambiguity of her fictitious “I” causes the Oedipus complex itself to mutate, leaving the new triadic relationship—the Other, the ego, and the object—in perpetual disorder. Countless emotional entanglements follow.
If we compare Setsuna’s experiences and family circumstances with the Oedipus complex, the point of breakdown (kaputt punkt) is easy to locate. Her relations with her family are excessively harmonious. In her relationship with her father, aggressivity, attempts to win favor, and resistance have disappeared; she is excessively obedient. As for her mother… she seems a complete copy of her. When her father orders a guest out, she obeys as a conditioned reflex… In short, she remains in the pre-Oedipal phase for years. Setsuna cannot situate herself as a distinct being within the symbolic order. She is merely a blank, a nothingness, and this absence must be filled through friendship and love. She therefore incorporates Haruki and Kazusa into her Oedipus complex in its distorted form: Kazusa is the mother she desires, Haruki the father with whom she identifies. This correspondence fuses friendship, love, and possession.
Corresponding to the Oedipus myth, another disordered triadic structure exists on a different plane. In Sophocles’ Antigone, Antigone says to her younger sister Ismene, speaking of their brother Polynices:
Committing a crime in obedience to heaven’s sacred laws,
I can lie beside him,
One beloved beside another.
I shall forever please the spirits below,
Rather than seek the favor of mortals,
For there I shall lie forever.5
Hegel perceptively detected this scandal.6 The perverse entanglement of kinship and love in Antigone is almost exactly like Setsuna’s psychic complex—we might call it an “Antigone complex.”7 Because of this Antigone complex, Setsuna can never clarify her individual identity, much less achieve personal realization. Her desire has lost its way. All that remains clear is naked possession and specious moral fetters. In the end, she cannot properly and normally acquire subjectivity, cannot become a “normal person.”
Kazusa is very close to Haruki, but moves in another, more vulnerable direction.
When the subject is deprived of the signifier alienated in the process of symbolization, a particular object becomes an object of desire for that subject. Lacan calls this configuration the formula of fantasy (). Kazusa’s formula of fantasy is jointly constructed by her mother and Haruki. In the absence of any “father,” she remains with only the first stage, accomplishing self-realization through her secret love for Haruki. But when Setsuna appears between them, Haruki’s status as this “particular object” changes. Once Haruki and Setsuna establish themselves as a couple, he becomes Kazusa’s impossible object—and her desire grows stronger. Let us call the earlier and later objects the “object of lesser desire” and the “object of greater desire,” respectively, and compare them with the point at which Haruki becomes an “impossible object.” Between “impossibility” and “greater desire,” Kazusa’s avoidance of Haruki, her flight from him, and even her hints of hatred and hostility indicate that he has, for a time, become the symbol of her rejection of her own desire. “What occurs here is the destruction and loss of the object. For the subject, this object appears in the external world; the subject rejects it with the full force of his being and will not find it again before sacrificing himself. Here the object becomes the equivalent of the phallus and takes its place.”8
Haruki, the “impossible object,” is the phallus, externalized and rejected by the subject—Kazusa—as a symbol signifying life. But Haruki’s emergence as the object of greater desire means the death of Haruki as both impossible object and object of lesser desire. In human experience, another person’s death is far more unbearable than the subject’s own. One cannot experience one’s own death—it is always someone else’s affair. Only in this desperate grief does Kazusa identify with Haruki’s value and thereby with her own object a. By now, however, he/it has vanished. Precisely because it has been lost, it will remain forever with the subject—incorporated into the subject.
Op.22.II Andantino. Getragen
Section Two. Slightly brisk and solemn.
“Ah…”
At last, the snow began to fall.Ever since I arrived, the sky had looked ready to rain at any moment. Now, as though sulking, it used the icy wind to freeze the rain into snow, sending it fluttering down.
The deafening roar of the plane’s engines gradually receded.
As though to disperse that clamor, the white snow fell more and more heavily from the sky.
I looked up, searching for the source of this pure white landscape.
No. That was only an excuse.
I was really trying to escape the reality before my eyes.
…More precisely, I was trying to keep the plane that had just taken off out of my sight.
…
At last, the snow began to fall.
It snowed on the day the three of us swore we would stay together forever.
It snowed on the day two of the three of us left, too.
In this monologue before the monologue, Haruki describes the snow in detail. It seems a mere incidental touch—or, according to the analytical method taught in secondary school, a way to establish the overall tone and express a certain emotional tendency. And so, deliberately or otherwise, its enormous significance for the work as a whole is overlooked.
This opening demonstrates one of White Album 2’s methods of construction. Nature, as the setting for a performance, also acquires the right to enter the work. The method extends into CODA, where Strasbourg becomes the site of a reunion. Beauty is allegorized (Allegorie) in the settings, escaping from the story and dispersing along the blurred boundary between reality and imagination.
Through Haruki, language opens itself to the experience of meaning (expérience du sens). For Haruki as a speaking subject, the “meaning” of his language is experience and practice.
What this actually does is introduce elements from the historical or actual world as additional voices in the work. The work stands at the intersection of language (langage) and space (espace): language is thought put into practice, while space is the site where meaning manifests itself through difference. White Album 2 thereby brings together the three dimensions of poetic language—the writing subject, the reader, and external texts—and acquires polyphony. Everything in the text belongs simultaneously to Fumiaki Maruto and the reader, while also pointing toward a body of earlier or contemporaneous literary texts.
According to Maruto, White Album 2 came into being entirely because of his love for its predecessor, White Album 1. Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover,” woven into the plot of White Album 1, answers the author’s summons as an originating text, an Urtext.9
In fact, the connections between the two works extend beyond the shared title, the recurrence of songs such as “White Album” and “Sound of Destiny,” or the portrayal of “that feeling of the protagonist drifting with circumstances. Not only can he do nothing, he has no thought of resisting: an irredeemable helplessness.” On these grounds, earlier criticism has defined the two White Album works as “traumatic memory,” linking them to the oblivious indulgence of the late Shōwa bubble-economy years and the formation, during the Heisei era, of a low-desire society increasingly constituted as other.10
Strip away the protagonists’ tangled passions and multiple romantic entanglements, and White Album 2 offers a new interpretation of “Porphyria” as signifier. The signifier’s defining characteristic is also its anomaly. The work’s subject is not merely its characters’ personalities or destinies, but the moment when a subject becomes Porphyria. The character who bears this moment may continually change, but the pattern of intersubjective relations persists throughout. Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover,” woven into the plot of White Album 1, thus answers Maruto’s summons as an Urtext.
Just as the opening description of snow joins reality to the work, the earlier text of “Porphyria’s Lover” joins the spaces of White Album 1 and White Album 2. White Album 2 retains the complete structure of desire found in “Porphyria’s Lover”—or vice versa. The concealed “I” tries to possess Porphyria completely, is prevented by reality—money and status—and finally strangles her. This is the sole outcome when the contradiction between recognition and ethical life reaches its maximum. Only through death can one escape universal ethical life and suspend recognition at a level defined by the self. Porphyria has two faces at once: one of love and beauty, the other situated within the social order.
In CODA, if Haruki chooses Kazusa, he must betray all his friends and sever every social tie. If he chooses Setsuna, he will inevitably lose—in whatever form that loss takes—the Kazusa he loves. We might regard the two women as opposing forms of death. On one side is the end of genuine feeling, biological death; on the other, a symbolic treatment of actual life—exclusion from the symbolic community, a farewell to everything in the past. The sublime beauty that survives between these two deaths is Porphyria—Haruki himself. He becomes the Thing (das Ding), representing certain traumatic elements that are at once within the subject and profoundly alien.11
When the focus shifts to Mari Kazaoka and Koharu Sugiura, everything suddenly becomes uninteresting. The key is that their egos can attain self-identification only by being reflected in another person, who supplies them with an image of wholeness. The white-collar woman who finds fulfillment through work and others’ assessments, and the high-school girl whose attachment to friendship traps her in a vicious cycle of psychological collapse, both exist as embodiments of the mirror stage. We might even call this an extension of the master–slave dialectic.
In the section on self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel introduces the dialectic of mastery and slavery. One consciousness is independent, its essence being-for-itself; the other is dependent, its essence living or existing for the other. The former is the master, the latter the slave. This is precisely the situation in Haruki’s relationships with Koharu and Mari. “The master is consciousness existing for itself, but no longer merely the concept of being-for-itself. The master cannot dispense with the slave, whose essence is bound to an independent existence, to thinghood in general.” In fact, the positions of master and slave continually shift in both relationships. As Haruki’s superior, Mari controls him at work, but in their romantic relationship he holds the initiative. Koharu is always guided by Haruki, yet responsibility ultimately binds him. “Here the slave sublates his own being-for-itself or independence, but accomplishes what the master himself wished to accomplish. The slave becomes a purely negative power. The master’s consciousness, by contrast, is not independent; the certainty he attains does not have being-for-itself as its truth. The slave’s consciousness, rather, is independent consciousness. It forces itself back into its own consciousness and transforms itself into true independence.”12
In terms of the work’s construction, Koharu and Mari are actually modeled along lines similar to Haruki and Kazusa. This is a larger master–slave dialectic. Unconsciously, they are wary of the shadows cast by the “masters” they resemble. Service to the master forces the slave to restrain her particular wishes. Yet this gradually frees them from dependence on and subordination to natural existence. They achieve a free confirmation and lasting affirmation of their own self-consciousness, gaining a self-consciousness nobler than the master’s, along with wisdom and liberation. “In service to the master, the slave exhausts his personal will and stubborn self-will, cancels the inner immediacy of desire, and in this renunciation and fear of the master reaches the beginning of wisdom—the transition to universal self-consciousness.”13
It is striking that Haruki’s relationships with Koharu and Mari involve the most frenzied and perverse sexual relations. “Life and pure self-consciousness… are equally essential.”14 Through sexual relations, subject and object become one. The slave sees herself in pleasure and thereby rises to a perception of herself in existence, becoming conscious of her independent, self-sufficient subjectivity. She returns to herself from foreign ground, existing for herself even as she exists for another—the master. “Only when (subjective) certainty takes the form of (objective) truth, and (objective) truth becomes self-certainty, can we speak of reason, of universal self-consciousness.”15
Chiaki Izumi is the most complex character in all of White Album 2. Her relationship, as a fictional figure, to literary history, her two faces as author/actor and ordinary person, and the genuine feeling within her countless lies all make her immensely compelling.
To put it briefly, Chiaki is an “author” seeking a breakthrough. She directly connects her own real life with fictional stories, hoping to work the people around her into her creation. The story of Haruki, Setsuna, and Kazusa is her material. To obtain it, she deliberately approaches Haruki, even pretending to fall in love. Eventually, she herself begins to wonder: is she simply willing to do anything to perfect her work, or has she really fallen for him?
This figure comes from Kan Kikuchi’s play Tōjūrō’s Love, reaching Maruto by way of Takashi Atoda’s “Remembering Awei” (Huainian Awei, 怀念阿娓).16
In the original story, Tōjūrō drives the woman to suicide but must suppress his grief and act as though nothing has happened. Awei, meanwhile, dies young of illness. Chiaki rejects a similarly tragic ending, offering an answer and interpretation of her own:
Yukine Hatsushiba:
I won’t give up. I’ll fight for all of it. I’ll try with everything I have.
I chased my love desperately, and somewhere along the way I seized my chance.
But… I don’t regret it. Only after I had it did I realize that it was my own dream.
I really, truly love Kazuki! That feeling alone is real. I swear!
In the ending that belongs to her, this answer is precisely what makes Haruki forgive her earlier lies and accept both her and her somewhat misshapen yet genuine love.
Chiaki Izumi’s performance as “Yukine Hatsushiba” is wholly a parody of Kazusa or Setsuna. In modern society, parody ordinarily obscures the theatrical dimension and dissolves the dialectic of a revolution in meaning, thereby consolidating the rules. Yet Chiaki’s imitation is not simple parody: neither comedy nor tragedy alone, but a serious combination of both. This performance, like her life, is the other of conventional ethical rules.
To adapt Hegel’s somewhat male-chauvinist pronouncement that woman is the eternal irony of the community, Chiaki is likewise the eternal irony of White Album. She approaches Haruki by… feigning an intimacy unlike that offered by the other women, playing a composite of Kazusa and Setsuna. Chiaki’s own image, however, is the moon in water, flowers in a mirror. Her eventual “rescue” of Haruki from the cycle of painful memories likewise depends on her internalizing a language and then using it to resist its original speaker. In presenting herself, she enters into intertextual relations with the other women in Haruki’s life. Yet right up to the last moment, her heart has never entered any structure, and still has always been somewhere within it. This brings us to a further point: “love” itself moves backstage to become the big Other manipulating everything. The subject—here, “Chiaki Izumi”—becomes alienated within the symbolic order, the universal ethics of love. She does not speak; she is spoken through a part of the symbolic order—her imitation of Kazusa or Setsuna. The big Other represents that which prevents the subject from fully mastering the consequences of her actions. Because of it, the consequences always differ from what she intended or originally predicted. Separation occurs when the subject notices that the big Other is already inconsistent and lacking within itself—“barred,” in Lacan’s terms. Her uncontrollable feelings of love and doubts about them are just such a case: the big Other does not possess what the subject lacks. In separation, the subject experiences her lack in relation to the big Other as already the lack that affects the big Other itself.17
Op.22.III Scherzo. Sehr rasch und markiert
Section Three. Scherzo. Very fast and emphatic.
By tracing the structures of the three protagonists’ consciousness, we gradually clarify the development of their relationships. Along with this, the nature of desire itself changes. Desire becomes a desire for recognition: an otherness both accepted and denied by the other, a desire caught between fearing that one will become the other and fearing that one will be captured by the other. It is no longer enough to harbor love; one must go further and pledge it. As Hegel argues in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the conscious individual discovers that recognition cannot be found in the other; recognition comes from outside the conscious individual, and recognition is itself the other. Recognition is no longer a simple dissolution or negation of otherness. It is an unsettling drive that makes the subject seek the self in the other, in order to establish whether this self is a reference back to oneself or a loss of self. Precisely this impulse toward “recognition” causes the greatest harm. Setsuna confesses to Haruki despite knowing that he and Kazusa secretly love one another; Kazusa breaks down, asking, “Why are you so good at this?”; at the airport, Haruki cannot stop himself from embracing and kissing Kazusa in front of Setsuna. All begin in an attempt to obtain “recognition,” before other factors catalyze them into tragedy.
Setsuna’s stealing a march on Kazusa is inseparable from her Antigone complex. Enlightenment “releases human beings from their self-incurred immaturity—the inability to use their understanding without another’s guidance.”18 Setsuna’s failure to form subjectivity successfully means that enlightenment is absent from her understanding. This points not only to the identities and forms of address she so excessively bestows on Haruki and Kazusa, but to something else as well.
Setsuna’s reason “presents all valid objective entities and forms, without exception, as mere veils over chaotic matter, and condemns matter’s influence on human motives as enslavement, until the subject, according to its own concept, becomes the sole, untrammeled, empty authority.”19 This explains her preemptive confession very well. Reason concerned only with rules and universality, acutely insensitive to particular feelings for its object, is precisely the abstraction at work when Setsuna pursues the nominal establishment of a “romantic relationship” without seriously considering Haruki’s state of mind. It sustains Setsuna’s self-deceiving, self-hypnotizing indifference (desinteressiert) to love for Kazusa. Even though she makes a show of asking, she knows the truth and pretends not to see it, persuading herself to believe the lie she has constructed.
Compared with the coldness of avoiding the whole thing from the outset, this seems even crueler—and more consistent with that “reason.”
Kazusa’s heartbroken monologue belongs to another dimension of recognition. Here the unknown force of language incites action, revealing a certain performativity and even bringing grave consequences. Does Haruki not, because of that long declaration of love, disregard every ethical consideration and embrace and kiss her, unable to contain his feelings? Language takes place and operates as an illocutionary act. When Kazusa says that they now “know everything about each other,” a series of actions is triggered. Her shock after the kiss—“Why are you so good at this? How many times have you kissed Setsuna?”—is unquestionably an accusation. The accusation repeats Haruki’s “crime” in words, rubbing salt into his wound… “By taking hold of the sensuous body, words become indirectly actual; words in tragedy are wholly actual (tödlichfaktisch), because they actually take hold of the murderer’s body.”20 Kazusa’s words do not merely shatter Haruki linguistically and psychologically—he collapses to the ground, lets her leave, and misses his date with Setsuna. The words in his lyrics for “Todokanai Koi” have also acknowledged his desire for Kazusa from the beginning, impelling him to act regardless of the consequences. Kazusa’s accusation and declaration are inciting acts: their temporality extends beyond the moment of utterance, and they continually repeat. They drive any recognition faithful only to desire itself toward fatal fact: language draws it out of the psyche and exposes it to the air. This forces the two to break with morality and follow their own desires. Without that heartbroken “accusation,” nothing that follows could possibly happen.
The most baffling and also the most shattering scene in White Album 2’s introductory chapter is surely the farewell at the airport, when Haruki embraces and kisses Kazusa in front of his girlfriend, Setsuna. So unexpected yet emotionally intelligible is this scene that anime, comics, and games (ACG) fandom has jokingly dubbed it a “world-famous painting.” It has become one of the work’s biggest and best-known memes.
Ordinary understanding associates such a scene with remorse and guilt. Whatever Haruki is thinking at this moment, he should at least consider his girlfriend’s feelings—even if she already knows what has happened—and suppress his impulse. He should certainly not allow the floodgates of emotion to open and produce this situation.
Since this is the ordinary understanding, it undoubtedly derives from the discipline imposed by universal ethical life. Ethical life is constituted by ethical consciousness (Sittlichkeit). Deeply influenced by history and society, this consciousness becomes a set of collectively acknowledged norms.21 For Haruki, fulfilling his duties as a boyfriend and remaining faithful to the relationship accord with universal ethical life. The Haruki who acts and resists ethics is “only an unreal shadow,” because “he exists only within the self that can have universality.” In other words, anyone who acts as he does is guilty. Through crime, the individual loses his individual characteristics and becomes anyone at all—or evokes the empathy of any spectator. Everyone confronts the conflict between universal ethics and personal desire: “The individual can act only according to one of the principles, and in doing so necessarily violates the other law.” In Haruki’s case, this naturally amounts to choosing between Setsuna and Kazusa. Yet a gap remains between this account and the act itself. The entire logic rests on the concept of a “sense of guilt”: why, at that moment, did he “have to do this”?
For Hegel, the individual’s sense of guilt arises in the moment of acting on what is said, through the experience of “violating” other laws—that is, “catching the agent in the act.” Haruki’s action is not simply passion out of control. It also has the dimension of experiencing the crime itself. He knows that Setsuna will use all manner of devices and rhetoric to “correct” the facts until they accord with universal ethics, then treat that corrected version as fact. Haruki’s “unconscious and self-consciousness conspire,” leaving him no choice but to make his crime public and await judgment. The more complete his ethical consciousness, the more fully he understands that the individual’s crime is unforgivable.22
Although Haruki’s conduct has become more extreme, he still cannot become the conventional prodigal son who repents through crime and ethical consciousness. He goes beyond crime and confession, accepts solitude, evasion, and numbness, and takes all of this with him into life.
The much-discussed “concert option” contains an implicit contradiction in its status as symptom and sublime object. In CC, after a succession of blows in his personal life, Haruki tries to choose between “Go to the concert” and “Visit the shrine for New Year.” Yet “Go to the concert” is permanently disabled: it cannot be clicked. We later learn that, had he gone to the concert, Kazusa would have appeared beside him.23
The cruelty of the concert option is that it offers the possibility of reunion while never allowing that possibility to become an actuality. Like a symptom, it is a particular element that subverts its own universal foundation. Haruki’s monotonous life could fall apart at the concert, because the moment he arrived he would discover Kazusa in the seat beside him. Yet this is an “unselectable” option. If it could be selected, it would no longer constitute a symptom. For a symptom disappears when the subject confronts it directly: the emperor’s new clothes definitively cease to exist when someone points out that they do not exist.
The concert as symptom creates a paradox. The scene confronting the subject—here, Haruki—contains the past he wants to change and intervene in. Strangely, it is the option of “not going” that enables him to change certain things, to make the past scene become what it originally was. His intervention was included in it from the beginning. The illusion of transference experienced both by Haruki and by the spectators who witness the entire process resides in their forgetting. In Lacanian terms, transference is an illusion, but one cannot evade it and easily obtain truth: truth is constituted through the illusion peculiar to transference—“truth arises from misrecognition.” They forget that they themselves are included in the concert scene, overlooking the fact that the symptom’s repressed content returns from the future, not the past. The same logic governs Kazusa and Haruki’s inability, at the beginning, to perceive one another’s feelings. Their two-way failure and mutual misrecognition constitute the structure of a double movement of communication, in which each subject receives from the other a message in inverted form.
Kazusa Touma: You were the one who disappeared from my sight first! You were the one who went off somewhere I couldn’t reach! You made yourself unreachable, then still wanted me to stay beside you—you were the one who dreamed up that torture… So why do I have to be blamed by you two now? Every single day you appear in front of me and tear my heart apart—is it all my fault? It’s too cruel.
Haruki Kitahara: But you never gave me any sign before… It was just me, wasting my time on my own, and still unable to give up…
Kazusa Touma: Why can’t you ever understand how I feel?
Haruki Kitahara: How am I supposed to understand if you don’t tell me?!
Kazusa Touma: I’m always like this. I act as though what happens to me doesn’t matter, always brushing things off, and I’m so stubborn, always doing the opposite of what I want… By the time I come to my senses, I’ve already lost everything.
—Anime, episode 11
But if they had sensed each other’s feelings from the outset, their story would have ended immediately with their happy romance—as in Tsukigakirei. They would have become just another happy couple. To bypass the painful detour caused by misrecognition would be to lose truth itself. Only by “completing” misrecognition are they permitted to accept the other’s true nature while overcoming their own weaknesses. In the faults each perceives in the other, each senses the falsity of his or her own subjective position, yet knows nothing of it: the other’s faults are merely the objectification of distortions in one’s own perspective.24
On another plane, the concert’s relation to Haruki resembles Haruki’s relation to everyone else. Within these relationships, both acquire the character of the Thing, yet are permeated with enjoyment. They thus become sublime objects, elevated to the impossible height of the Thing and given positive embodiment. This also explains why Haruki bears the vast majority of the audience’s criticism: “The feeling of the sublime is a feeling of displeasure arising from the inadequacy of the imagination, whose aesthetic estimation of magnitude cannot attain the estimation made by reason. Yet it is also an awakened feeling of pleasure, arising from the judgment that our greatest faculty of sense is inadequate—a judgment that accords with the ideas of reason.”25 Haruki’s existence is both pleasurable and unpleasurable: like thorns in one’s back, a bone caught in one’s throat.
Op.22.IV Rondo. Presto
Section Four. Rondo. Presto.
In classical or modern music, “dissonance” denotes a harsh interval in a work—a gap between two adjacent notes large enough for listeners to hear directly. This is not always negative. Mozart, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky boldly used dissonance to create powerfully affecting atmospheres.
We can apply the concept to tragedy: “dissonant tragedy” (just as Benjamin substitutes Trauerspiel, the mourning play, for the usual concept of Tragödie, tragedy, using a near-synonym to mark a distinction). Unquestionably, in Aristotle’s account, tragedy imitates ordinary people who are “not outstanding in moral character and justice, but whose misfortune comes not from wickedness, but from some error or weakness.” It thereby “arouses pity and fear,” bringing about the purification of emotion—catharsis.
At first glance, this entire logic holds. Haruki’s melancholia, Kazusa’s cowardice, and Setsuna’s selfishness fall far short of wickedness. These faults intertwine, tormenting them and dragging them into the mire of life… into misfortune.
We must be clear, however, that any “ordinary protagonist” in ACG has always been far removed from ordinary people. Haruki’s “unremarkable” student life includes a comfortable family background, excellent grades effortlessly obtained, adulation from his classmates, and a romance with the school idol. The rosy adolescence most people long for but cannot attain would contain, at best, one or two of these things. The norm is instead to be the person everyone uses, to fail again and again in love, to struggle through life’s trivia with an unremarkable partner. To classify the painful love triangle of a “winner at life” like Haruki and his beautiful girls as “tragedy,” taking for granted that it imitates ordinary lives, is an affront to real life however you look at it.
Precisely in this dissonant rejection of “reality,” school-romance ACG loses its heterogeneity. However the artwork and characters change, what appears at its core is the same monotonous surface of a homogeneous fictional society. Some writers try to resist this homogenization. Their attempts have no chance of succeeding from the start. These rebels either unwittingly become puppets of the discipline restraining them at the very moment they think they are resisting, or are forced into compromise for self-preservation within a production system dominated by capital. Hachiman Hikigaya in My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU ultimately falls into the “happy predicament” of choosing one girl out of many. The first season of Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend, which interrogates such works through Brechtian estrangement and Artaudian carnival, accidentally became hugely popular because consumers swallowed it whole without any thought or dialectical reflection. It bowed to the industry; by the second season, it had become increasingly mediocre.
Events in school-romance ACG unfold very unrealistically. Ironically, however, the more unrealistic their surface depictions, the more accurately and directly they reflect a latent social mechanism. Casually falling in love during secondary school with one handsome, beautiful, cute, or gentle person after another may be vanishingly unlikely. Yet has not every adolescent boy or girl dreamed of something like it? The distorted fantasies of dissonant tragedy are society’s daydream. Only in the daydream does their true reality become visible, and only there are their ordinarily repressed wishes portrayed.
Beyond the unwritten compact of make-believe between work and audience, White Album 2 has broken away from “universality.” Only an extremely tenuous connection remains. The work must therefore manufacture empathy through “regret” and “atonement.” At a few points in the plot, people first discover traces of their own past experiences in the characters. Memory combines with story, and feelings are projected into the characters’ aura. Once this identification forms, it will not waver at any subsequent moment, even when a character’s behavior is not entirely justifiable. People cannot so easily turn against themselves. This includes private sympathy and pity, but self-evidently excludes every positive social concept, and thus any clear thinking about order and justice.
When attention concentrates on love and ethics, everything around them becomes inconsequential. If the player chooses a romance with Koharu in CC, they go through the bullying at her school alongside her, and many people respond with righteous indignation. But if they pursue Mari or Chiaki instead, avoiding this route, they overlook or even entirely forget that bullying. From CC to CODA, work at Kaiō Publishing is likewise permeated by the familiar extraction of surplus value. Haruki is both exploited and an exploiter of others. When he returns from entertaining business contacts, lies in his lover Kazusa’s arms, and murmurs, “I’m already so tired,” this is not love rescuing someone amid life’s ups and downs. It is the torment of alienation suffered within the mechanisms of production.
This, too, is dissonance. The arousal of the audience’s feelings manufactures an illusion that removes people from actual life. The story itself thereby loses breadth and points of reference, creating a gap between private sympathy and public order. That defect must ultimately be filled by a dream composed of memories and feelings.
The whole of CODA is a dialectic of dreams. Dreams can become reality only through severe struggle, at the cost of painful self-sacrifice. If Haruki chooses Setsuna, he entirely abandons the self-sacrificing romanticism of his youth. Perhaps his feelings for Kazusa are sublime only when they do not touch reality—when they remain purely lyrical. This is to say that, even after experiencing so much of life’s reality, Haruki remains a utopian in love, pitting two things against one another: absolute love and relative responsibility. But these two different, incomparable forces create a tragicomedy—not merely dissonant, but even laughable. As the story unfolds, the relative defeats the absolute, both on the surface and in its inner substance. The most profound criticism of any feeling’s tragic possibilities is to make those possibilities real. If Haruki truly abandons everything and goes to Europe with Kazusa, will that really make him happy? By comparison, his friends’ appeals for him to compromise in love look more like the right answer. Throughout his hesitation, Haruki sacrifices himself for some end while asking, “Is it worth it?” He lays that sacrifice as an offering on the altar of an abstract ideal, then tears down the altar, denying the existence of the god for whom he sacrificed.
The absolute can triumph only with a mournful lyric accompanying the tragicomedy to its close. Haruki, who periodically wants to withdraw, alter, or reassert “the demands of the ideal,” is pitiable and laughable, with no place left for him in the world. Without lies, people cannot live. Setsuna and Kazusa open his eyes to reality, and he suffers; but the Setsuna or Kazusa who makes him face reality suffers too. They must all watch themselves transform a happiness founded on lies into a misery that feeds on that happiness. Yet they cannot change what they oppose, because it is another part of themselves. Life never conforms to ideals. The individual must struggle not to become absurd and foolish, not to produce a Don Quixote-like farce. This can lead to only two outcomes. One kind of person lives contentedly among lies, without ideals, never hoping for more than personal ability permits—Haruki’s several idealized endings in CODA. The other goes unwaveringly along their own path—and ends up wounded all over.
They feel that their instincts, the essential nature of their individuality, need recognition, yet nowhere can they find recognition from others. The power of the secular world is strong enough to destroy individuality altogether, but individuality refuses to erase itself. So Haruki forever wavers between acting and watching, caught in ceaseless conflict. The same tragicomic duality governs the relationship between ideal and reality: ideals retain enough power to strip a life without ideals of all value, while reality has shattered their ability to rule everything at will through arbitrary force, so that every victory inevitably turns into defeat at the very moment it is won.
This helplessness spreads among the audience too. Love’s meaning dissolves; ideals are not worth mentioning; life has opened its hideous jaws. Neither anime nor games can offer any consolation. Even in White Album 2, one must still witness this painful reality.
To go on living, they devised baixue—“White Album studies,” the fandom’s mock-scholarly discourse. The meaning behind White Album 2 must be erased. The psychic shock and trauma it brings must be forgotten. And so White Album 2 itself must be dissolved.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before,
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria’s love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!
Editor’s Note
