“Palimpsestuous” Attachments:

Framing a Manga Theory of the Global Neo-Victorian

Abstract

This essay argues that attention to the form of contemporary neo-Victorian manga (Japanese comics) can move us analogically toward a theory of the function of the neo-Victorian in our global-historical context. Through an examination of two neo-Victorian manga that adapt Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic detective Sherlock Holmes – Toboso Yana’s Kuroshitsuji (2007–) and Moto Naoko’s Dear Holmes (2006-07) – I show how these comics evoke a sense of the uncannily familiar and melancholically lost/not-lost Victorian literary object, literalising what Linda Hutcheon calls the “inherently ‘palimpsestuous’” nature of adaptations (Hutcheon 2013: 6). These manga solicit layered, and vexed, attachments from their readers by incorporating textual and graphic allusions to Doyle’s Holmes stories and by combining narrative strategies of serial publication (which themselves evoke the Victorian periodical press) with the temporal play afforded by the structure of comics itself. They manifest Thierry Groensteen’s description of the “iconic solidarity” of comics, in which “interdependent images […] present the double characteristic of being separated” and, simultaneously, “over-determined by […] their coexistence” in the shared space of the page (Groensteen 2007: 13, 17-18). These manga thus offer meditations on what it means to be part of the longue durée of a global Victorian literary tradition.