Is the protagonist of Whisper of the Heart
suffering from 'trans-contextual syndromes'?
Contents
◆ What is trans-contextual? The tendency to double take
In his article “The Double Bind, 1969,” included in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson reflecting on the misleading nature of his earlier article, as if the double bind could be counted, introduced the term “trans-contextual” anew. Bateson describes it as:
It seems that both those whose life is enriched by transcontextual gifts and those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions are alike in one respect: for them there is always or often a “double take.” A falling leaf, the greeting of a friend, or a “primrose by the river’s brim” is not “just that and nothing more.” Exogenous experience may be framed in the contexts of dream, and internal thought may be profected into the contexts of the external world. And so on. For all this, we seek a partial explanation in learning and experience.
from “Double Bind, 1969” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
I guess that “trans-contextual” means ‘easily shifting between contexts.’
According to Bateson, the stronger the trans-contextual syndrome, the more time one spends living in multiple contexts, and the more likely one is to slide from one context to another.
For Bateson, “those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions” are the people who suffer from the double bind or develop schizophrenia as a result. There have been several criticisms of his double-bind theory as the etiology of schizophrenia, one of which is that schizophrenia is a hereditary disease.
One of the reasons he created this concept of “trans-contextual” was to reconcile it with the genetic theory of schizophrenia. He wrote that “trans-contextual syndrome” as an attitude toward the world might be genetic rather than schizophrenia itself is hereditary.
In the article, he says that creative people may be “trans-contextual.” Both schizophrenic and creative people share the same sense of “double take,” and both can say to be “trans-contextual.”
When I read this, I wondered what exactly the “trans-contextual” syndrome was. And then, one day, it occurred to me that the behavior of the main character, Shizuku Tsukishima, in Studio Ghibli’s Whisper of the Heart might be exactly like this. (Of course, this work is fictional.)
Shizuku Tsukishima is a junior high school girl. Which of the behavior that Shizuku does indicate her “trans-contextual” syndrome?
◆ Shizuku's Behavior From Daily Life to Story
For example, there is a scene where Shizuku goes to the library. Shizuku loves to read books and uses the library daily, and her father works as a librarian. That day, Shizuku is on her way to the library, and at the same time, she is carrying a lunchbox to deliver to her father. Shizuku takes the train and finds a cat in the car. The cat sits quietly next to Shizuku, and Shizuku talks to the cat. And when she sees the cat getting off at the same station as her, she starts to chase after it.
The reason why she chases the cat is that she thinks that “a story has begun.” The story is a fantasy story that she likes, and it seems to be one in which she is the protagonist. It is shown in various ways throughout the work that Shizuku always wants to experience a fantasy-like story for herself. Besides, she took the extraordinary experience of meeting a cat on the train as the story’s very beginning.
This action is genuinely “trans-contextual.” This is because Shizuku herself actively and easily slipped from the daily life context of going to the library to the context of the story she created.
Shizuku follows the cat to a hill where she has never been before. She sees the cat walk into a store. When Shizuku entered the mysterious antique shop, she was fascinated by the things displayed in the shop, which she had never seen before. It is the perfect place for Shizuku’s fantasy story.
She encounters the feline doll Baron, the antique shop owner, and an old clock depicting the tragic love between a dwarf and a fairy. And she “wakes up” when she sees the hands of the clock. She remembers that she has to go to the library and give a lunchbox to her father. From the context of the story, she quickly returns to the context of daily life.
So far, we know a few things.
First of all, Shizuku’s behavior is somewhat strange when she meets the cat on the train. Shizuku talks to the cat in a public place, on a train, and I wonder if Shizuku’s friends, Yuko or Sugimura, would speak to the cat in the same way.
◆ Context Marker Comparison with the original manga
Bateson also created the concept of “context marker.” He writes that markers everywhere indicate what the context of the here and now is for the organism. Hospitals, for example, are easy to understand. Hospital is a place where people who are sick are first examined. The examination requires “a person to examine” and “a person to be examined.”
Of course, the patient is the one being examined. In the case of a patient who has come to the hospital of their own volition, the various people and instruments in the hospital will tell the patient they are in what kind of context. The nurse’s presence is probably the most obvious example, as is other patients’ presence. The various instruments and devices in the examination room also eloquently tell them that they are in what context.
Once it is understood that it is in the context of a “medical examination,” ordinarily rebellious people will become quiet. And they will dress in ways in front of a doctor that they would usually be too embarrassed to do. The same words and actions can have different meanings depending on the context. In the context of a “medical examination,” taking off one’s clothes is a necessary task, and it does not imply that it is shameful, which is why it can be done.
The context of the story she created also has some markers for Shizuku. Moreover, she is looking for something that can be a suitable marker for that context. In this case, it is the cat. The cat exists in both the context of daily life and the story, and it has a certain meaning in each for Shizuku, who tends to “double take.” Therefore, the cat’s presence helps her slide from daily life to the story. At this point, Shizuku is “taking the world double.”
Perhaps to Yuko or Sugimura, a cat is just a cat, but to Shizuku, it’s not. While Shizuku lives in the context of daily life, she is almost always preparing another context of her creation.
One might wonder if there are people who “take the world double.” However, there are moments when a cat can mean more than just a cat, and they are probably closer than you think. It is “when a black cat crossed.” It’s a superstition that something bad will happen if a black cat crosses in front of you. (I know it varies from country to country.) You may not have thought anything of it when a spotted cat crossed in front of you. But if you are thrilled once you see a black cat cross your path, then the cat means more than just a cat. At that moment, you are in the daily life context, but you are also momentarily stepping into another context.
Rather, our experience like this is what makes Shizuku’s actions secretly persuasive to us.
On the other hand, it can be inferred that neither the father nor the lunchbox existed in the story’s context created by Shizuku. It could say that Shizuku was simply in a hurry when she left the lunchbox at the antique shop, but perhaps the lunchbox never existed in the story’s context in the first place.
The cat, a common yet mysterious animal, was appropriate for the story’s context, but the father’s lunchbox was not. It is difficult to create a story with a strong sense of fantasy that includes “father’s lunchbox” as an element. In fact, the paper bag containing her father’s lunchbox has been mishandled while Shizuku is madly chasing the cat. Rather, it was a marker that brought her back to the daily life context. Shizuku remained buoyant about the story until Seiji returned the lunchbox to her.
Incidentally, in the original manga of Whisper of the Heart (Mimi wo Sumaseba), there is a scene in which Shizuku chases after a cat she met on the train and is led away to the antique shop. Still, she does not have her father’s lunchbox. The scene where Shizuku brings the lunchbox to her father, who works at the library, comes before that. Hayao Miyazaki wrote the screenplay and storyboard for Ghibli’s animated version of Whisper of the Heart. It means that Miyazaki adapted the scene where Shizuku visits the antique shop with the lunchbox.
It makes the trigger for Shizuku to “trance between contexts” clearer. The script was designed so that the cat would be a context marker when sliding from daily life to the story context, just as in the original manga, and the lunchbox would function as a marker when returning from the story to the daily life context.
from『耳をすませば Mimi wo sumaseba』
Aoi Hiiragi ©NEKONOTE-DO
“Trans-contextual syndrome” has a multilayered meaning for Gregory Bateson, as he writes, “those whose life is enriched by transcontextual gifts and those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions.” The tendency to “double take the world” can be both pathological and creative. In this sense, Whisper of the Heart is a story about a person who tries to use this tendency creatively. However, in trying to do so, the protagonist creates conflicts, especially within her family.
◆ Shizuku's Decision Creating Context
Shizuku decides to write a story, although she is a student preparing for an exam, and she does it. Maybe that’s why her grades at school plummet, and her mother is called to the school. Eventually, Shizuku finishes writing a story. She realizes that she needs to study harder to become a writer and devote herself to her studies with the people’s encouragement. She can do this because she could find some meaning in being an examinee to make her future dream come true.
The ‘context’ seems to be a keyword here again. If she is a writer in the future, her present self and her future self are in the same context. Here is an important thing to realize. For Shizuku, having the dream of becoming a writer in the future itself is creating a new context.
Throughout the first half of the work, it has not been shown that the protagonist seems to have a desire to “become a writer.” Shizuku was supposed to be a person who “wanted to live a story with herself as the protagonist.” Then, Shizuku would have replaced one desire with another through a series of experiences. She turned her desire to live a story with herself as the protagonist into a desire to become a writer of stories.
It may be nothing but a “substitute behavior” at worst. It can call giving up because she cannot fulfill one desire, so she decides to fulfill another. But at best, it should be “sublimation.” Suppose Shizuku remains a person who wants to live a story with herself as the protagonist with a strong fantasy sense. In that case, she may not be able to give any meaning that she is currently taking an exam or continuing to be a student or work in society. She may become a person who lives without a deep sense of meaning in real life. However, suppose she has a dream to become a writer of stories in the future. In that case, she can give some positive meaning to the reality of taking an exam. And the tendency to dream, or in Shizuku’s case, the tendency to “double take the world,” can be utilized positively.
Moreover, while the previous Shizuku maintained separate daily life and story contexts, she can unify them in a newly created context. In simple terms, this will make Shizuku more mentally stable and much “stronger.”
It seems that Shizuku was not satisfied with the act of creation in the sense of writing a story. But in fact, she had created a new context in which she aimed to become a writer, a story in which she was the protagonist.
The visual representation in the animation clearly shows that a person living in a state of “floating” from reality has “landed.” For this reason, a city with an elevation difference is used as a “location.” (The real town Seiseki-Sakuragaoka is a model for the setting of this work.)
In that sense, this may be a story about the end of the main character’s fun-filled childhood and the beginning of her life as a “boring adult.” It may be a story about the end of a dreaming era and the beginning of an adult’s life who has to live with reality. However, the protagonist is not forced by the adults around her to end her childhood but by her own decision. The adults around her, especially her father and the antique shop owner, watch over Shizuku with warm eyes. On the contrary, Shizuku might not have taken on the “challenge” of writing a story without the antique shop owner’s presence. It can say that Shizuku’s sense of security that he will accept her even if she fails made her take on the challenge. Shizuku gets courage from Seiji, who goes to Italy for his future dream despite being in the middle of a semester, and peace of mind from his grandfather, the antique shop owner.
◆ Shizuku and Antique shop owner Resonating Stories
The existence of some bond between Shizuku and the antique shop owner, different from Shizuku and Seiji, is shown in the work.
First of all, Shizuku came to the antique shop for the first time on the very day that the clock, which the old man had repaired over three years, was fixed. And the old man is impressed with Shizuku that she knows the dwarf that the clock depicts. The two of them have a mysterious connection.
Shizuku then decides to write a story and goes to the old man to ask permission to make the Baron the main character. She is then made to promise to make the old man her first reader. Afterward, Shizuku becomes obsessed with writing a story, which worries her parents, but she still refuses to reveal the details of her “challenge” even after they question her.
On the other hand, the old man has a secret that he apparently has not told even his own family, including Seiji. This old man once promised a woman “Louise” in Germany to get a cat doll, Baron, and his partner doll. However, the war separates him from Louise, and the only Baron remains with him. After that, the old man never met Louise or the Baron’s partner.
According to Seiji’s line, he knows that the Baron is special to his grandfather, but he has not heard the specifics. The old man would not tell him that. Come to think of it, that Louise, whom the old man must have loved, was not Seiji’s “grandmother.” Then the old man told Seiji that talking about Louise was equivalent to saying that “I had a woman apart from your grandmother that I could not forget.” If that was the case, it was natural that the old man would not want to talk to Seiji about anything related to the Baron.
The old man dreams of Louise in front of the fireplace, and it is suggestive that Louise’s image overlapped with Shizuku’s image, who came into the antique shop after writing the story.
The old man tells Shizuku a memory about the Baron. It is a story that he has not even let Seiji hear. Then, Shizuku would tell the old man about the challenges that she does not even reveal to her parents, and the old man would tell Shizuku stories that he does not even talk to his grandchildren. They have a relationship with each other that they don’t even talk about with their relatives.
Shizuku didn’t know that the old man and the Baron had the above story. But the setting of the story, inspired by the “melancholic” expression of the Baron, was very similar to the one they experienced.
After reading the story, the old man tells Shizuku, “Shizuku-san has revived the Baron, who was only in my memories, into a story of hope.” This suggests that Shizuku’s story gave the old man a chance to put a new and positive meaning to his memories of Louise and the Baron. In other words, the story written by Shizuku gave the old man a new context. Perhaps this is the very reason why the old man can talk to Shizuku about memories he has not even let his grandchildren hear.
There are some “stories” in this work. Multiple stories are being told within a story. If we were to itemize them, they would include at least the following.
・A story of the tragic love between a dwarf and a fairy as depicted by a clock.
・A story of a love affair between two different identities, the craftsman who made that clock may have done it. The old man guessed that the above story was the craftsman’s way of expressing his feelings about it in the clock mechanism.
・A story experienced by the old man and the Baron.
・A story of Shizuku’s creation of herself as the protagonist.
・A first story that Shizuku wrote down on paper and created. (The title of this story is “Whisper of the heart”).
In addition to these, if we consider the relationships between characters and their changes to be part of the story, the number increases even further. In other words, this work depicts the process by which stories intertwine with each other, and then, stimulated by the stories, new stories are born, and these new stories reborn the stories that already existed. The same is true if we rephrase ‘story’ as ‘context.’
If I focus on Shizuku, I can say that this work is a story about a girl who is “trans-contextual” and “tended to double take the world,” who succeeds in unifying multiple separated contexts by creating a new context. Since context and meaning are inseparable, if I rephrase the story from the perspective of meaning, I can say it is about an adolescent who finds new meaning in her real life.
Shizuku straddles multiple stories and contexts while also creating a new and meaningful story. The fact that she can give a new context to others by doing so results from her “trans-contextual” tendency in a creative direction.
In the real world, many poets were both creative and morbid, such as Hölderlin or William Blake. It is said that Hermann Hesse was also quite unstable in his youth. They seem to be the person “whose life is enriched by transcontextual gifts.” Therefore, a person’s life with such a gift may not go as neatly as a fictional one. But at least this work, Whisper of the Heart, continues to be supported because it depicts an ideal process of an unstable adolescent becoming an adult.
I want to conclude this discussion, which began with the question of what Gregory Bateson means by a “trans-contextual syndrome.”
2021 9/22 revised
2021 10/3 revised
References
・Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology 1st (first) edition: Gregory Bateson: Amazon.com
・『耳をすませば Mimi wo sumaseba』Aoi Hiiragi
耳をすませば(集英社文庫)：Amazon.jp
The still images in this article are provided by the Ghibli official website.
・Whisper of the Heart｜STUDIO GHIBLI
※The content, text and images are prohibited to reproduce, quote or use in any way other than for correct quotation.
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