Lynda Barry's Graphic Novel, "One Hundred Demons"

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Originally presented at the Beijing Asian American Literature Conference in China.

To be published as a chapter for a book about graphic novels. Graphic novels or comic books are now examined as serious literature in academia. Lynda Barry's "One Hundred Demon" has gained much critical acclaim.

Intro: "Autobifictionalography"

Lynda Barry tries to define her work as "autobifictionalography, " a multi-genre text. It is interesting to note how she combined words to create a new word with multiple meanings. Not only is the book non-conventional, but her multi-racial construct is also non-conventional. Constructs like Asian American don't seem to work. Other multiracial people have similar problems. For example, on the Oprah show, Tiger Woods whose one parent is African American (Black/Indian/White) and the other is Asian American (Chinese/Thai) called himself "Cablinasian," a mixture of Caucasian-Black-Indian-Asian. African Americans were quick to point out that the White majority only sees him as Black.

Hakuin Ekaku's Zen Paintings

Lynda Barry introduces the innovative narrative device for her text: the zen painting exercise called "One Hundred Demons," developed by the Japanese monk, Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769). Lynda Barry mentions the source of her discovery of this artist: Stephen Addiss' The Art of Zen (1989). Hakuin painted "One Hundred Demons" as a way to face his demons. Stories or art can be used to fight against the demons of life. The adult as artist can best fight the demons of one's youth, allowing a sort of distancing and objectivity. Buddhist epistemology and Filipino folklore can help deconstruct and decode the Aswang of the binary opposites between Asian and American polarities as represented in the generational conflicts between mother and daughter and even grandmother.

Western society has already culturally invaded other nationalist realms through our products and entertainment like Coke and Disney. As one folklore critic complains, Filipino students are more aware of Western fairly tales and myths than their own (Jocano ix). The Philippines , with its long history of being colonized first by the Spaniards and then by Americans, is a land quite acclimated to Western traditions. But stories of the Aswang help the Filipinos to keep non-Western traditions, and Filipino immigrants do bring their superstitions and culture to America. Thus, Lynda Barry's "One Hundred Demons" shows us how to use illusion to fight the delusions or demons maintained by social, familial and personal attachments, all competing for our attention.

Part I. The Hunted: Defense Against our Multicultural Vampires

Aswang: Filipino Vampires

The "Aswang" tale by Lynda Barry explores the relationship between mothers and daughters. Lynda is not close to her mother, but neither is her mother close to her own mother (Lynda's grandmother). The grandmother explains to the young Lynda, "When your Mommy first arrive in this country, she thought the Aswang did not follow her. Too much ocean! But the Aswang don't care about the Ocean!" (92). Her mother is not free from the tales of Aswang that Lynda's grandmother had told her and the grandmother reminds her of this. Her mother is still haunted by the Aswang in America , especially since she brought her mother to live with her. Lynda Barry's grandmother seems to joyfully taunt her daughter with the horrors of the Aswang tales.

Influences of Hollywood Vampires

Lynda is influenced by such Hollywood vampires when she thinks, "The history of vampires and people are not so different, really. How many of us can honestly see our own reflection?" (94). According to Filipino folklore Maximo Ramirez, mirrors are not one of the original tests used to show who is a vampire in traditional Filipino lore. This is not to say that some of the Western traits such as the mirror testing have not already been acclimated into Filipino Aswang folklore.

One of the differences lies cultural intentionality because one of the purposes of the Aswang tale is to warn about consequences like unwanted pregnancies just as the tale of the "No Name Aunt" in Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior. Filipino women warn girls about the hiya (shame) that can occur because of being a female. Though Aswangs can be males, Aswangs are more often women, who attack pregnant women, sucking the blood of the unborn. Women are taught to fear Aswangs. In the Philippines , "Parents prefer to marry off their offspring into families that they have known rather well because in early times there was fear that a handsome stranger might be a vampire" (Aswang Sycrasy Ramos 3). With some 7000 thousand islands and 85 languages, fear of strangers is real (2).

Another difference between the Western vampire and the Aswangs is dental in nature. Aswangs do not use their teeth to bite. Instead, they use the tip of their long tubular tongue like a mosquito to suck blood. They can land on top of a building and lower their tongue down through a crack to find the victim. The best way to kill one is with the sharpened object, but not through the heart. The end of a bamboo stick in the back will work just fine (4). Like their Western counterparts, they also fear light.

The Aswang as Shapeshifting Being

In Lynda Barry's story of the Aswang, the grandmother explains that in the daytime, the Aswang can also appear as another animal like a dog, with their rear legs being longer than their front legs. But when night comes, they segment into two halves. While the feet are left behind, the head sprouts wings and flies away looking for a victim. In one sense, the Aswang stories helps protect girls from gossip caused by being a bad girl. Stay nice and obey: the Aswang will not harm you. But deviate from the norm and beware. The Aswang is coming.

Though one can kill an Aswang, one cannot kill gossip or the fear of gossip. Lynda learned not to communicate the truth with her mother. The less her mother knew, the better. Lynda's mother "didn't know about my secret life. She would have screamed at me. It would have been violent (164). This seems to be normal perhaps for most teenagers who do not communicate with their parents. However, this can be even more intense for Filipino children of immigrants. As one sociologist noted, "Instead of the empathy, understanding, support and love that they had hoped for, they received a lecture, anger, disappointment or emotional punishment" (Wolf 468).

Whenever the mother appears in the book, in some 22 out of 162 panels, she is either calling someone a name, usually Lynda, screaming at Lynda, or both scream and called Lynda a name. Only once does the mother ever smile or seem positive, it is when she speaks about her own grandmother (94). The cycle of avoidance maternal relationships is sealed.

For the most part, yelling at Lynda was the norm. On one occasion, Lynda's mother would scream and remind her to fear one thing: ". . . she couldn't wait until I had children so I would know what hell was like" (95). It seems that Lynda Barry avoided hell because she had no children. It is not that Lynda avoided hell intentionally by not having children. It just happened that way. However, Lynda did have dogs. If you ask dog owners if their dogs are their children, they would probably say yes. In some ways, dogs are more childlike, never growing up and leaving, staying obedient even as they age. In one of the few stories that does not examine the demons of her childhood, Lynda as an adult explores the demon of raising dogs (170-180).

Lynda is married and they decide to save a dog, Ooola, who was badly beaten and wounded from the shelter. She decides to treat the wounded dog the same way she was treated growing up in an effort to make the dog strong and to teach it who is boss. She has read some books that support that stance. She began to abuse the dog, much like her mother abused her. The turning point is that the dog retaliated and bites her. It is interesting to note that at this point, the adult Lynda now looks like her mother with her hair tied up in a bun and wearing glasses.

This bite from the dog parallels an incident in Lynda's childhood when she bit her mother in retaliation for not talking about her stuffed bear in a respectful fashion. Unfortunately, Lynda, the child would often beat and abuse her beloved stuffed blue bear, copying how her mother treated her. She would also beat and abuse the pet dog she grew up with. Thus, these learned and conditioned habits she finally faced as a married adult, bitten by a beaten dog.

The husband and wife started to spoil the dog and gave it a second chance. This worked. The angry dog changed and became a "good" dog. The last panel of the chapter states: "All she needed was to find the right home. But that's true for all of us, isn't it?" Below that, we see the dog sleeping on the bed (180). The curse or prophecy that her mother made about children being hell is broken. The hells that mothers experience are of their own creation. Ooola is not an Aswang waiting for the night to segment into two pieces, to fly off, and to find another victim sleeping in bed, sucking up the nutritious inner organs for sustenance. Instead, Ooola is trusted to sleep on the bed in peace. It is critical to note that Ooola is female.

Lynda Barry is from multiple worlds, where a dog in one culture can turn into a vampire and in another culture it becomes a woman's best friend. Being multiracial presents a plurality of origins. Children just want to be accepted or to just fit in without being noticed as different. In a country that stresses individuality, being different by being multiracial does not allow one simply to fit in seamlessly. Lynda knows she must face her Asian demons of ethnicity.

Part II. The Exorcist: Attacking our Spiritual Demons of Attachment

The Power of the Naive Style

Melinda Luisa de Jesus points out how the "naïve" drawings of Lynda Barry's graphic tale "complements" the narrative exploits of the young protagonist ("Of Monsters" 2); however, the same observations have been made about the graphic novel series Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi which is about a young girl growing up in Iran. In the first novel, Marjane is a small child and the visual "naïve" style does seem to complement the narrative adventures, but in the second installment, Marjane is a teenager and the style is the same. The graphic style seems to go against the protagonists desire to grow up quickly, which has the impact of showing how hard it is to escape childhood.

Interestingly, in One Hundred Demons, the adult Lynda narrates her own childhood. She becomes a character herself when Lynda Barry introduces a narrative device for her graphic novel: the zen painting exercise called "One Hundred Demons," developed by the Japanese monk, Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769). Hakuin is not just any monk practicing zen art, for he would become the quintessential zen artist. Indeed, all Japanese zen art after him returns back to Hakuin. Lynda Barry mentions the source of her discovery of this artist: Stephen Addiss' The Art of Zen (1989) which included a chapter on Hakuin Ekaku. Ekaku painted "One Hundred Demons" as a way to face his demons. Stories or art can be used to fight against the demons of life. The adult as artist can best fight the demons of one's youth.

A double narrative of oral and visual discourse occurs, allowing a sort of distancing and objectivity. Lynda, the adult, tells the story through pictures which are usually dialogues and little action, which is what she remembers or tries to recreate visually. Then above the visual narrative is an added written, "boxed" inner oral narrative, often larger in size (one third to one half of the panel size) than the visual narrative. Indeed, the quantity of text often overshadows the quantity of the picture, much like Scott McCloud's philosophical narratives do when he is trying to figure out what comics are though he will at times break the frame of the panels and try to "show" what he means. This inner narrative is the voice of the exorcist, re-examining the demons of the past in more detail. In one sense, the "internal-external dimension" of the double narrative relates to the Filipino psyche's sense of duality.

Puri: Well Being

The visual narrative of actions relates more to an external sense of puri (physical well-being) while the internal narrative of thoughts represents dangal ("knowledge of one's true worth") (Pe-Pua and Protacio-Marcelino 57). While Lynda was growing up, her own internal narrative (dagnal) was very much affected by the external reactions to the world (puri). Through art, the present mature spirit of Lynda Barry's dangal has returned to exorcise the childhood demons of damage caused to her puri. Such binaries are parallel to the concepts of yin and yang in Chinese philosophy.

From a Zen Buddhist point of view, the past, remains eternally undead like an Aswang because it will be reborn and with it, pain is reborn. Though we may temporarily feel healed and extinguish the flames of hell, death and rebirth return again as the flames re-ignite again. Demons are constantly re-born as we re-member them. The meta-process of creating "One Hundred Demons" parallels the creative process of demon birthings that we, like midwives, constantly attend.

Beginner's Mind

The "naïve" style of Lynda Barry really parallels the key aspect of zen art: the concept of beginner's mind. As Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki explains:

"To be natural means, therefore, to be like a child, though not necessarily with a child's intellectual simplicity or its emotional crudity. . . It [the child] ignores all the social devices that keep grownups decent and conventional and law bidding. It is living under no such artificial, human-made constraints. . . . When there is thus no crookedness in one's heart, we say that one is natural and childlike." (375)

It is important to keep in mind that Hakuin started painting after he was sixty and became a master zen painter, not through effort but by accepting his imperfections. In his beginner's mind, skill is not as important as spirit. Demons are ugly and dirty, so making imperfections as a beginning painter does is perfect. In a sense, one is already a master of demon painting, just as one is a master of creating demons or oni within the mind. Zen Buddhism often uses oni as symbols of evil. Monks combat against demons to gain satori or enlightenment (Wolfgram).

Hyaku Monogatari: 100 Ghost Tales

By painting pictures of demons, one starts to face one's own demons. Barry faces 17 demons of her childhood, one chapter at a time. The tradition of painting one hundred demons goes far back in Japan . Originally the demons were part of a parade called "hyakki yako," which goes back to the Heian period (794-1185) and became a popular art form (Deguchi 15). It later evolved into hyaku monogatari, a game of telling one hundred ghost stories. Participants would light one hundred candles and share one hundred ghost stories and then turn out the lights tale by tale, waiting for something to happen (Deguchi 18-19). This game became quite popular in Hakuin Ekaku's time. Eventually, the idea of the game would be lost, but the term of one hundred tales would be associated with telling or listening to a series of ghost stories. One Hundred Demons functions as a hyaku monogatari.

A playfulness of games also occurs when creating art. In an interview with Edward Jenkson, when asked about her creative process, Lynda Barry replied:

" . . . when I work, mostly because I'm not really THINKING when I work. That is to say, I'm not really aware of any message in my work while I'm creating it. For me it's much more like playing. The element (people, situations, etc.) come up as I move the pen or brush on the paper and not until then I never have anything in mind when I sit down to make a story. "(64)

Art becomes not escape but a play of enlightenment as a way to experience the art of living. Demons are merely entertaining dark characters on the stage of illustrations.

Hakuin Ekaku was attracted to the original visual narrative of painting one hundred demons. But his purpose was to use it to teach Zen. Hakuin rejected his mother's Nichiren Buddhism that he grew up with, a more popular type of Buddhism in Japan. He grew up fearing the stories of hell he heard associated with Nichiren Buddhism. Hakuin entered the Rinzai school of Zen , which was basically dying in popularity. Even today it is not the most popular form of Buddhism in Japan . He revitalized the school and made Zen popular. Indeed, most the Zen monks today follow their lineage directly to him. He liked to use koans and his most famous koan, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" is often repeated around the world as the most popular koan ever.

Examine the Living, Not the Dead

A famous saying of Zen is "Examine the living words, not the dead ones" (Suzuki 7). Extending this to painting oni, "Examine the living demons, not the dead ones." Lynda Barry knows that her mature mind is not as clear on things as it once was, for the past is dissipating. In the story, she remembers, "Back then I knew a lot more about Monsters than I did about people. Monsters were understandable. They usually had a reason for being the way they were" (92). She understands the potential that the zen exercise has. It is the potential of art itself.

Conclusion to a Parade of Demons and Vampires

Metaprocesses

The metaprocess of creating the graphic novel simultaneously functions as way for the author to exit the labyrinth or the wheel of samsara, the death and rebirth of self within haunting, mental memories or demons. This also has an effect on the reader: "it is rhizomatically reborn, and it lives in the reader's imagination" ("Of Monsters" de Jesus 12). As D.T. Suzuki further explains:

The artist's world is one of free creation, and this can come only from intuitions directly and immediately rising from the isness of things, unhampered by senses and intellect. He creates forms and sounds out of formlessness and soundlessness. To this extent, the artist's world coincides with that of Zen. (17)

"Myo": The "Isness" of Being

As Zen enthusiast and author Frederick Franck explains, D.T. Suzuki's "isness" is known as myo. Myo is an artistic zen essence where binaries deconstructs. Buddhism is a non-binary system, where nirvana, as enlightenment, means to exit the wheel of binaries of death and rebirth. Zen as art is about enlightenment or satori. Why paint demons to be enlightened especially if demons are illusion of the self and the differences between subject and object? To Frederick Franck the artist has a problem because there is a split between the subject and the object. He became obsessed with the seventh century Chinese Zen master, Hui Neng, who stated, "The meaning of life is to see." Franck became convinces that one of the best ways to see was to draw: "Seeing/drawing is . . . about life in its fullness, about learning to see again and thereby be totally alive and fully aware" (xvii). By seeing/drawing, the subject and the object are no longer separated.

Addiss examines this contradiction of why zen monks might paint demons:

"The one-eyed goblins, the demons of musical instruments, the reptilian and the bird-beak ogers, and all the assorted weird creatures—are they not ourselves? Their battles and their fears are our own; the dawn from which they hide is enlightenment. When its call comes, all that remains is laughter." (Zen 115)

Unexplored Territory

When "myo: is experienced, transcendence occurs. Note the word "happiness" appears in the last panel of the last chapter of Barry's graphic album, called "Lost and Found" (216). In the second panel of a "One Hundred Demon" chapter called " Unexplored Territory " that did not make it into the book, but was published online in Salon, Lynda Barry states: "When you're walking you can't delete the landscape around you. The unexpected stays. When I write with a brush, I see so much more. The back of my mind unreels an unexpected world one letter at a time" (3).

Like hungry ghosts, these beasts, especially her mother, have forever fed on her psychic memory. Instead of just being haunted again and again by such feeding frenzies, the graphic narrative functions as a sort of labyrinth or psychic wound where the author relives these stories over and over again, chapter by chapter.

By telling of the story, using words to fight words and using visual illusions to fight delusion, she breaks the spell of the Aswang, just as Hakuin broke the spell of hell he grew up with through cultivating zen by painting pictures of Hell. Art is salvation. Liberation means to be free from attachment, to be free from the tongue that sucks one's soul dry: vampires or mothers. At the end of the book in the "Outro section, Lynda Barry gives specific instructions on how we can paint our own demons. Do we dare?

Works Cited

Addiss, Stephen. The Art of Zen: Paintings and Calligraphy by Japanese Monks. New York : A Times Mirror Company, 1989.

---. Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Art of the Supernatural. New York : George Braziller, Inc, 1985.

Barry, Lynda. "Unexplored Territory." One Hundred Demons 10 May 2001.

Deguchi, Midori. "One Hundred Demons and One Hundred Supernatural Tales." Edited by Addiss, Stephen. Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Art of the Supernatural. New York : George Braziller, Inc, 1985. Print.

de Jesus, Melinda. "Of Monsters and Mothers: Filipina American Identity and Maternal Legacies in Lynda's Barry's One Hundred Demons." Meridians 5.1 (2004): 1-26.

Franck, Frederick . Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing: Meditation in Action. New York : Bantam Books, 1993. Print.

Jenkinson, Edward. "Will You Climb Up to the Heavens that Enclose Us Above: A Talk with Lynda Barry –2000." Seattle Review. January 2001. 60+.

Jocano, F. Landa. "Forward." Ramos, Maximo D. The Aswang Syncrasy in Philippine Folklore. Philippine: Philippine Folklore Society, 1971. Print.

McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form. New York : Harper Collins, 2000. Print.

Miyazaki , Hayao. "The Purpose of the Film." trans by Tokuma Shoten 2001. <http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/sen/proposal.html >.

Ramos, Maximo D. The Aswang Complex in Philippine Folklore. Quezon City : Phoenix Publishing House, 1990. Print.

---. The Aswang Syncrasy in Philippine Folklore. Philippine: Philippine Folklore Society, 1971. Print.

Pe-Pua, Rogelia and Elizabeth Protacio-Marcelino. "Sikolohiyand Pilipino (Filipino Psychology): A Legacy of Virgilio G. Enriquez." Asian Journal of Social Psychology. 3 (2000) 49-71.

Suzuki, D.T. Zen and Japanese Culture. New York : Pantheon Books, 1965. Print.

Wolf. Diane L. "Family Secrets: Transnational Struggles among Children of Filipino Immigrants. Sociological Perspectives. 40.3 (1997): 457-485.

Wolfgram, Juliann. "Oni: The Japanese Demon." from Addiss, Stephen. Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Art of the Supernatural. New York : George Braziller, Inc, 1985. Print.

Originally published at Medium> > >