🤖 AI Translation Notice: This article was originally written in Chinese and translated to English by AI. The original Chinese version is available here. Some nuances may differ from human translation.

📝 Article Type: Literary Analysis

For Bartleby Kapp — Light of my life, fire of my loins

Introduction

"Mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they multiply the number of men." — Bioy Casares's imaginary or tampered entry in the Anglo-American Encyclopedia

The Metamorphosis-and-Transformation Motif in Abe Kōbō's Oeuvre, as Seen Through Crab Cactus

In August 1949, the short story Crab Cactus (Kani), marking the beginning of Abe Kōbō's early surrealist period, was published in the magazine Hyōgen ("Expression"). This work can be regarded as a precursor to The Crime of S. Karuma (S. Karuma-shi no Hanzai), the story that won him the Akuta gawa Prize and brought him to fame. The most fundamental technique of metamorphosis and transformation within it can be seen as the immanent prototype for all his subsequent works. By tracing Abe Kōbō's creative trajectory in this section, we shall come to better understand The Box Man, the representative masterpiece of the author's later career.

Synopsis of Crab Cactus

Common-kun was kicking a stone by the roadside one early morning when he suddenly felt a fit of abstraction; in an instant his cheeks turned inside out and he was transformed into a strange plant. Over the following year he underwent several further metamorphoses, throughout which he continuously resisted the irresistible transformations: first with helplessness and self-deception, then with all his might turning his inverted face back to front, only — upon hearing a radio broadcast about the government's greening program ("Plants will bring harmony to our devastated souls, making our streets clean and beautiful") — to surrender himself, thoroughly wearied, to the transformation from human into plant. Common was discovered by K, the director of the Botanical Garden H, who named him "Crab Cactus." He chanced to regain his body of flesh and blood. After a bout of ideological struggle between the two, Common finally abandoned his resistance and, like many others who had fallen into the same predicament, was permanently transformed into a plant in the greenhouse of the Botanical Garden H, leaving the director to hang a placard reading "Crab Cactus" upon his trunk.

Analysis of Crab Cactus

The Significance of the Face:

The face is the boundary line between human consciousness and objective reality; at the same time it is a "filter of originary being." The individual requires the face's function of obstruction and filtration in order to process external phenomena through consciousness. That is to say, the face, which performs such a function, is by no means the mere tool or neutral "medium" that it appears to be — it is reality itself, as we can perceive it.

The Inverted Face — Metamorphosis and Transformation:

Regarding the physical ultimate metamorphosis: in Abe Kōbō's early work Crab Cactus, what we see is a critique of the "inverted face" and its consequence, "the transformation from a living individual into a listless plant." On the one hand, Common-kun, who was in such a hurry to hide himself as an unremarkable (common) member of the crowd, had already become a plant-like, alienated, inhuman existence before anything went wrong in his life; and the attitude of escaping from reality and abandoning resistance, materialized as the "inverted face," was precisely the crucial factor in the ultimate metamorphosis. On the other hand, the omnipresent brainwashing policies of the postwar government (specifically referring to GHQ) found throughout the text — for instance, Common, who had still intended to continue fighting the "plant disease," was brainwashed by the radio broadcast of the government's greening program and willingly allowed himself to fall into such a predicament — were also a factor that cannot be ignored in explaining why people were transforming into plants one after another.

Preamble and supplement for what follows: Many domestic critics habitually and overly simplify the comparison between Abe Kōbō and Kafka, indiscriminately using terms such as "metamorphosis," "absurdity," or "nightmare" to analyze Abe Kōbō, an extremely creative writer who left his name in the history of the second half of the twentieth century. This must be said to be a colossal error. Setting aside the error in the very concept of observing solely from the so-called "authoritative" and "objective" perspective of literary history, arbitrarily starting from the genealogical relationship between certain writers (and even going so far as to deny the value of the later figure in that relationship), while being unable to analyze each work comprehensively and unable to reflect even a trace of the critic's own creativity — let us begin instead by looking at the experiences of the two masters. Born in the declining Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka lived his entire life in a nearly congealed upheaval that had nothing to do with himself; he was completely indifferent to the politics of the first half of the twentieth century, including the First World War. It was truly a case of "hearing nothing of the outside world, focusing entirely on burrowing into his own hole" to launch his assault on a sublime art beyond the comprehension of ordinary people. Kafka was a man without a homeland: a member of the Czech nation, he nevertheless received a German-language education from childhood. While it would not be accurate to say he was rootless — according to Brod's account, Kafka later took the initiative to learn Czech culture and history on his own — in stark contrast, Abe Kōbō was born in Manchukuo and lost his homeland with Japan's defeat, a loss he could never make peace with throughout his life. The tracing of reality, which could only be perceived by maintaining an "everted face," was moreover the very wellspring of his creativity. In the late 1940s he was influenced by the Japanese avant-garde art collective "Yoru no Kai" ("Night Society"), encountering materialist and communist thought; in 1950 he formally joined the Japanese Communist Party. Analyzing Kafka, the pure artist who created the outer world from the inner心灵, and analyzing Abe Kōbō, the literary avant-gardist who changed reality itself by distorting and reproducing the quotidian, requires discarding old and outmoded preconceptions. For the latter in particular, attention must be paid to the relationship between the "downward force" (directed straight at the real world) and the "upward force" (concerning the individual心灵) within his works. This point will be elaborated in detail below.

Regarding the relationship between spiritual transformation and physical metamorphosis: Previous critics, when analyzing the metamorphosis technique in Abe Kōbō's fiction, have already honed a methodology. It consists of linking the characters' physical metamorphosis with their simple psychological mapping, then following the vine downward to find the real-world prototypes of the two, while also making a show of uttering a few elevated terms such as "human alienation" and "capitalism" to assuage the doubts of many those without independent judgment (for instance, when analyzing The Red Cocaka (Akai Mayu), linking the protagonist who turns into a red cocoon with the representative mentality of urban drifters, thereby opening a lesson in modern Japanese history far exceeding the scope of literary analysis itself). This formulaic mode might still have served adequately when applied to Abe Kōbō's works of the 1940s and 1950s, but to take it and apply it to the Urban Missing Trilogy and the subsequent postmodern literary works of sharply increasing complexity represented by The Box Man is bound to produce distortion. The reason is that it does not truly take into account the internal structure and the space of polysemy of the works. Or rather, this ubiquitous analytical method only treats literature and any fictional work born of a medium as vehicles for a highly monolithic worldview. In Guy Debord's words, this is what belongs to the so-called "concentrated spectacle" of bureaucratic capitalism, and where the concentrated spectacle reigns, so too does order.[1] Abe Kōbō's fiction (particularly his middle and late-period works) is by no means any sort of inflammatory political manifesto, but rather a layer of time-space created by means of fiction that runs parallel to reality and nurtures the power to subvert it. If one is to enter through the interstices of the text and unfold a structural cognition representing the "upward force," then the independence of fictional plot must be recognized. This is precisely why one must distinguish in detail between the two concepts of "spiritual transformation" and "physical metamorphosis." Their relationship can be summarized as follows: on the one hand, the "upward force" represented by the former is independent of the "downward force" of the latter; on the other hand, it is precisely because the "upward force" of the former exists that the "downward force" can be born from contradiction, and the two thereby achieve self-consistency. From this perspective, Abe Kōbō's middle and late-period works are precisely a dialectical existence.

Between Crab Cactus and The Box Man: The Trajectory of Abe Kōbō's Fiction

Early surrealist and science fiction creation: from Crab Cactus (1949) to The Fourth Interglacial Period (Dai-yon Kankyōki, 1959), including also distinctive full-length novels such as The Hunger Alliance (Kiga Dōmei), The Animals Seek Their Homeland (Kemono-tachi wa Kokyō o Mezasu), and The Eye of the Stone (Ishi no Me). Hunger and The Eye of the Stone employ a distinctive multi-person narration, similar to point-of-view character writing, and are works centered on postwar Japanese society.

From April 24 to June 24, 1956, Abe Kōbō, then still a member of the Japanese Communist Party, traveled to Eastern Europe under the pretext of attending the Second Congress of Czechoslovak Writers (II. sjezd Svazu československých spisovatelů). He participated in the final five days of this seven-day conference, devoting the remainder of his time to touring Czechoslovakia and Romania, and returned home four days before the outbreak of the Poznań protests. The contemporaneous Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and the Hungarian Uprising became the major themes of his travelogues and lectures in the months that followed. This was the watershed in Abe Kōbō's thought and creative work: he was thereby reborn from the ardor of pure idealism, departing from the postwar Japanese movement to revive prewar proletarian literature launched by the "New Japanese Literary Association" (Shin Nihon Bungaku-kai).

Mid-period existentialist philosophical fiction: from The Woman in the Dunes (Suna no Onna, 1962) to The Burned Map (Mo Chizu, 1967), primarily the Urban Missing Trilogy, along with the composition of one historical novel and other science fiction works.

Late-period postmodern fiction: from The Box Man (Hako Otoko, 1973) to the unfinished posthumous work The Flying Man (O Otoko, 1994). During this period Abe Kōbō's pace of writing slowed markedly; after completing his final play in 1975, he composed primarily in the form of novels. The Box Man and The Ark Sakura (Hana-bune) were two works he spent years polishing meticulously. The latter was introduced to the mainland by the Writers Publishing House in 1988, making it one of the first of Abe Kōbō's works to be publicly published in mainland China.

On The Box Man

Synopses of the Twenty-Two Chapters Plus Two Newspaper Clippings and Their Logical Connections

Newspaper clipping: "Police Crack Down on Ueno Vagrants; 180 Arrested This Morning": Ueno police arrested 180 vagrants, all of whom returned to their original places after signing pledges promising "no more vagrancy." The Box Men are identical to the vagrants in this report: the order of modern society has no effect whatsoever upon them, and their existence does not rely on promises made to society (such as the act of signing a pledge, or personal identification — our identity in society is not only society's promise to us but also our promise to society; this is a two-way relationship, and the only thing the Box Men can sever is the latter. So if one wishes to leave the cardboard box and return to society, in fact it is the easiest thing in the world).

Chapter 1, "My Experience": The narrator is the protagonist of this book, "I" (hereafter, unless the narrator changes, this will not be specially indicated), who is writing the very book before us inside a cardboard box:

"This is an account of a Box Man. I am now in a cardboard box — a corrugated box that fits over my head and comes down precisely to my waist — beginning to write this record. At this very moment, the Box Man, which is to say myself."

That is to say, the entire content of the book derives from the Box Man's record; he possesses the dual identity of narrator and recorder. No matter what sort of descriptions we encounter later that are baffling and incredible, we must always bear this point in mind: the narrator is unreliable, and the recorder even more so.

Chapter 2, "How to Make a Cardboard Box": This chapter describes in detail the method of making a cardboard box (remarkably practical).

A Box Man refers to a group of people who put themselves inside cardboard boxes and roam about; they choose to abandon their identities in pursuit of freedom. Inside a Box Man's cardboard box, the most important design is the window, or rather the peephole, whose plastic-film curtain can block the gaze of others when the box is in an upright position, and which cracks open a gap when the box tilts slightly, allowing one to observe the outside world through it. In modern society, relationships between people have been sharply reduced to countless simplest relationships of "seeing and being seen," and the two parties in this relationship are not "persons" possessing subjectivity in each other's eyes, but rather objectified existences like buildings. Though a Box Man is unarmed, when roaming about in the representative of modern society — the city — he actually possesses a weapon that no "normal person" has, namely "peeping," or rather "voyeurism." On the one hand, he is fully capable of avoiding intrusion by the gaze of others; on the other, he can actively choose to attack others with his gaze.

The metamorphosis of the Box Man cannot be mentioned in the same breath as the metamorphosis in Crab Cactus described above; the foregoing content is only one reason, and other aspects will be elaborated below.

Chapter 3, "The Story of Box Man A": A had just moved into an apartment when he became infuriated by the gaze of a Box Man outside his window. He attacked the Box Man with an air gun and chased him away, only to find himself irresistibly yearning for this carefree way of life; covering himself in a cardboard box, he left the apartment and never returned. The content of this chapter serves as the prototype for many later episodes ("And so, one must never lightly point a gun at a Box Man"), which will be elaborated later.

Chapter 5, "Several Supplementary Notes About the Photograph Pasted to the Back Cover": (For the reader's convenience, chapters 4, 5, and 6 will be discussed in chronological order, i.e.: Chapter 5 → Chapter 4 → Chapter 6.) About ten days to a week ago, "I" was shot by a man wielding an air gun near the hospital, but in the instant of being hit, he seized the opportunity to press the camera shutter, capturing a photograph of his assailant (the Box Man pasted the photograph to the back cover of his notebook). Because of the revelation from Chapter 3, "The Story of Box Man A," "I" concluded that the assailator's purpose was to become a Box Man by attacking him. Shortly thereafter, a woman with beautiful thighs "gleaming like shards of beer bottle in the setting sun" passed by and, as if using a mailbox to post a letter, handed "I" three thousand yen through the peephole of the cardboard box, telling him to take the money and go to the hospital for treatment. Because the wound had become inflamed, "I" reluctantly took off the cardboard box, claimed to be a photographer, and entered the hospital for treatment, describing the beginning of his Box Man career to the nurse (that very "kindhearted" woman) in the third person. Upon learning that "I" knew the Box Man (it is unclear whether she actually knows that the photographer before her is that very Box Man), the nurse offered fifty thousand yen to buy the Box Man's cardboard box. Seeing "I" accept the money, she then secretly injected "I" with an anesthetic, causing him to vomit half a bellyful of sour water after returning to the bridge under which he had hidden his cardboard box.

"I"'s experience: In elementary school, because of a failed cultural performance, "I" began to fear interacting with others and nearly lost the ability to communicate with society. To overcome this anxiety, "I" chose to become a photographer, thereby reestablishing a connection with the world unilaterally through peeping — or rather voyeurism — which explains why "I" later metamorphosed into a Box Man.

The nurse's experience: Two years ago, she had an abortion at this hospital; because her body had not yet recovered, she stayed in the hospital free of charge for as long as three months. During this period she successfully became intimate with C, who was simultaneously one of the joint operators of this private clinic and the clinic's doctor, eventually replacing the previous nurse "Nana," who had resigned of her own accord during this period. According to the doctor, "Nana" was a joint operator of the clinic along with him; although she now runs a piano school in the city, she still holds partial ownership of the hospital.

Chapter 4, "Prepared for Eventualities": "I" waited at the appointed location with his cardboard box, and because he harbored suspicions — fearing this was a trap to attack him — he recorded the content of this chapter in his notebook as a precaution against mishap.

Box Men are people who have escaped the shackles of identity, but when they have already formed a widely known group in the city, "Box Man" itself has also become an identity. However, this identity does not, like the identity of vagrants, bring them a group life indistinguishable from modern society, or even the violent "excluding the different and favoring the same." Box Man is a "pseudo-identity," or rather a way of life (the distinction between survival and living must be drawn, because, as stated earlier, if one wishes to leave the cardboard box and return to society, in fact it is entirely effortless). This is precisely why their status is even lower than that of vagrants, and they are often attacked by the latter en masse.

Newspaper clipping: "Vagrant Found Dead in the Street; 100,000 People Turn a Blind Eye": In a bustling underpass, a dead middle-aged vagrant was collectively ignored by tens of thousands of passersby. What is astonishing is that less than ten meters from the scene of death there is a police box, yet the police officer on duty that day was not even aware of the vagrant's existence. This report is the first watershed in the structure of The Box Man (the second watershed is Chapter 11). It portrays the social conditions that give birth to the Box Man — namely, a state of coldness in which relationships between people have been sharply reduced to seeing and being seen, based on unavoidable and highly objectified terms. It uses a daily panorama of the social field to make us turn and consider the reasons for the formation of the Box Man group, as well as the motives of every ordinary person who voluntarily becomes a Box Man: Are they fleeing the bone-chilling gaze of others in public spaces? Are they fleeing the unbearable estrangement within intimate relationships? Or do they wish to become the dominant party in human relations and thereby regain a sense of control over the surrounding society? Chapter 3, "The Story of Box Man A," Chapter 11, "On the Unpleasant Relationship Between the I Who Writes and the I Who Is Written," and Chapter 17, "The Story of D" all explore the diversity of the Box Man group. We can also learn from the doctor, who will play an important role later, that the physical transformation of the Box Man reflected in psychological conversion is not necessarily the self-enclosed obstinacy that the "inverted face" represents in Crab Cactus and which the author regards as a kind of sin; it can also be a subjective self-liberation of people bound by modern society. However, the result toward which it ultimately moves is exactly like the protagonist Common in Crab Cactus, becoming a plant quietly rotting in the greenhouse of the botanical garden. The Abe Kōbō of the 1970s was far more desperate than the man of twenty years prior.

Chapter 6, "Later, I Dozed Off a Few Times": It is said that one need only smell the scent of the shell-grass to dream of having turned into a fish. The fake fish, in an extremely slow passage of time, gradually loses its perception of the present, yearns for the life it led before becoming a fish, only to find that the tunnel leading to the past has long since collapsed into dust. And the newborn body is not necessarily a constant sanctuary; within the illusion of self-possession it moves toward doubt. The fake fish always realizes the identity of this impostor, but dies before waking; and at this point, the dream has already detached from the dreamer, who no longer possesses the power to leave the dream. The fake fish — or rather the "pseudo-identity" of the Box Man — will continue to develop forever, no matter how he deceives himself by saying there is still a chance to emerge from the "pseudo-identity." At the end of this chapter, "I" writes: "Perhaps someone like me, who has already developed an immunity to counterfeits, does not even have the qualification to dream the shell-grass dream." Based on what happens later, we harbor deep doubts about this.

Chapter 7, "The Agreement Has Been Fulfilled. A Letter Flies Down from the Bridge and Fifty Thousand Yen for the Purchase of the Cardboard Box. Received Just Five Minutes Ago; the Letter Is Enclosed Herein": So the transaction was not a trap after all, but the buyer demands that the cardboard box be destroyed — that is, "I" virtually hands over the Box Man's "pseudo-identity" on a platter. From this we can already see that "I" is not a pure Box Man either, because his motive for metamorphosing into a Box Man is not to completely strip himself of everything connected to society (whether physical identity or the utilitarian pursuit of desire at the psychological level), but rather to reestablish a connection with society in a different way.

Chapter 8, "……": "I" is full of doubts and cannot fathom the nurse's motives at all. Although he accepted the nurse's money, he is still unwilling to give up the cardboard box lightly. For "I," the cardboard box is not the ultimate destination but a waystation in the process of self-transformation (for details, see the synopsis of Chapter 5), yet he too hesitates: "But what sort of creature will crawl out of this human chrysalis, the Box Man, I myself do not know at all." Compared to the "I" of Chapter 6, who asserted he had "developed an immunity to counterfeits," the "I" of now, like the poor soul who dreamed he had turned into a fake fish, is beginning to feel uneasy about the Box Man's "pseudo-identity."

Chapter 9, "What Is Seen in the Mirror": "I" advances on the hospital in the form of a Box Man, peering into a bedroom through a car's rearview mirror; what he sees in the mirror gives "I" a genuine start: the nurse, stark naked, sharing a room with a doctor hiding in a cardboard box. Through careful observation, "I" immediately realizes that doctor is precisely the stranger who deliberately shot "I" with an air gun in order to become a Box Man. If so, then why spend fifty thousand yen telling "I" to destroy the cardboard box? Could they know that the photographer who appeared at the hospital to treat his wound on that day is the very "I" who is now a Box Man? Watching the Box Man in the room peering at the body of the nurse he so desires, it is as if watching another self from the third-person perspective. Unrealistically vivid memories of her being naked with "I" in some room flood into his brain, and all "I" can do is tell himself that these are but hallucinations of desire; because unlike memory, desire exists apart from "I," so even if he indulges it controlling his body, as long as it does not erode deeper, there is no need to worry that it would make the narrator-Box Man no longer a stable existence firmly controlled by the recorder-Box Man. A thought suddenly sprouts: could the doctor's real intention be to completely replace himself, to make himself the so-called impostor? Indeed, this would answer why fifty thousand yen was spent to bring about the cardboard box's demise — but whether this conjecture is truly valid is another huge question.

Unable to restrain himself from gazing at the nurse's pair of thighs that fascinate him, a question arises: "Strange, why exactly do her thighs hold such a powerful attraction for me? Is it because they hint at the genitalia?" After some reflection, the unspoken conclusion seems close at hand: "A man's legs have prominent bones, concave and wide joints, making them walking machines oriented toward utility. But her legs, no matter how carefully you examine them, show not the slightest trace of ever having supported body weight — truly a free and expansive leg shape, the kind of leg that can suddenly induce yearning in men who are weary from walking... for example, that sort of weightless... walking unfettered, as if liberated from the Earth's gravity... I am not saying her legs lack sex appeal; it's just that even reaching sex, it seems the destination has not quite been reached. Is it because I have discovered in her my ideal leg, or merely made her legs into my ideal leg?"

As bystanders, we can observe that the Box Man is now enveloped by a force possessing transcendence; this force is rooted in instinctual sexual desire, yet what it craves goes beyond even this. Whether "I" has discovered an ideal image in the nurse as the object of the gaze, or made the object into the ideal itself, its transcendence — powerful enough to change the self-enclosed present — is beyond doubt.

The nurse and the counterfeit Box Man drink beer together; their idle talk gradually washes away the sexual tension that had infinitely expanded between the two of them, but a momentary gesture from the nurse drives passion to its peak: "Suddenly, she pivoted on her heel, spun a full circle backward, then dropped to the floor, knees pressed to elbows, arching her waist high. The light from the desk lamp, shaded by the lampshade, exaggerated her body into a tactile sphere. Her torso, thighs, and upper arms formed an inverted triangle..."

Shortly afterward, however, she pulls open the door handle and disappears outside without looking back, leaving only the counterfeit Box Man to keep an empty vigil.

Chapter 10, "Three Pages of Supplement Written on Other Paper": This chapter is a third-person account with no narrator, recording a conversation between a man and a woman, in which the man, while making love to the woman, asks her in detail about the circumstances of her undressing in front of another man. At first reading this chapter is inevitably baffled: where has the narrator "I" gone to? If the woman in the dialogue is the nurse, then we can assume the object of discussion between the two is the doctor who became a Box Man, but who is this man who keeps pressing for details — could it be "I," who had almost no connection to the nurse in the preceding story? Is the content of this record true or false?

This is the first main chapter in The Box Man with an unidentified narrator. It can be regarded as a premonition of the constantly leaping narrative perspectives between Chapters 12 through 15, Chapter 17, and Chapter 19 that follow. Abe Kōbō uses this technique to constantly remind us of the unreliability of this book's episodes: all of them derive from the notes recorded by a Box Man inside a cardboard box.

Chapter 11, "On the Unpleasant Relationship Between the I Who Writes and the I Who Is Written": The longest chapter in the entire book, positioned at the structural center, and probably the most important chapter as well. At 3:18, "I" inexplicably appears on a desolate, damp beach, the nurse's body deeply engraved in his elusive memory, and the counterfeit Box Man's peeping at that sacred and inviolable body makes "I" truly recognize the baseness of his own behavior from a third-person perspective. "I"'s attachment to the cardboard box has vanished entirely, and a tremendous sense of revulsion crashes over it like waves. A memory reveals, one by one, the real questions concerning the fundamental nature of his own existence that would face him after casting off the cardboard box — that is, the uneasy experience at the very beginning of becoming a Box Man: a cardboard box discarded by Box Man B, who was no longer a Box Man, lying quietly beside a public toilet, like the shroud of Jesus risen from the dead on the third day. Only this is by no means a grand narrative that bestows upon all living beings a myth beyond this life to create order in the present world, but rather an unsettling experience each of us might have in our uneventful, water-like daily life. Those "pseudo-identities" once regarded as ultimate sanctuaries are in fact not absolutely static and congealed in an eternal present; they are a process of physical metamorphosis. No matter how unwilling you are to acknowledge the fact that they will eventually move toward their end, you cannot help but walk among the remains of those others who once chose the same path as you. For these poor souls who obtained a certain liberation through physical metamorphosis, does their disappearance (death) bring about the rebirth of the Son of God, or the self-destruction of Judas? Box Man B's legacy more or less reveals a suggestive truth: the inner walls of his cardboard box are covered in unintelligible ravings, and a completely dismembered notebook outlines a way of life for Box Man B strikingly similar to that of our protagonist — both have replaced reality with pathological fiction.

No need to hurry; "I" appears at the hospital once more, launching a new round of offensives against the nurse and the counterfeit Box Man (who still remains in his cardboard box), prattling on about the story of his life at length and over three and a half pages. The gist is as follows: the "I" before becoming a Box Man had suffered from "news poisoning syndrome." Because he was afraid the world might suddenly become something he didn't understand, he spent most of each day on various so-called "major news," until an experience of spending time with a corpse that had collapsed on the street made him realize that the essence of news is merely to enable petty bourgeois in a state of absolute safety to peep at sensational events in the world from the perspective of the Other, thereby regaining a sense of security, and to make a game of it by shoveling piles of money toward the media. As for that corpse, which had spent its entire life exposed to oxygen molecules and the rumbling, blazing sunlight that fiercely bit it, the internal transformations working within it, however rapid, could never compare to the movement of the world. From the perspective of those who believe in news this is indeed the case, but those who do not believe in news would retold that since the broadcast of each piece of news heralds the predictable detonation of the next piece of news on the chain of reactions, yet the viewer of news remains in an unchanging state, so those who do not listen to news are those who do not believe in change — probably not bad people. This is one of the objectives of "I"'s coming to the hospital to confront them: although he wants to expose the doctor's plot to take his cardboard box through the nurse, he does not wish to bring about change (quite the leap).

The doctor refuses to acknowledge any such plot; he assumes an offensive posture, pointing out the fact that "I" accepted that fifty thousand yen. The latter does not directly address the question of the fifty thousand yen (because he truly cannot answer; someone like him will not admit his own hypocrisy until the last moment), and instead turns to accuse the doctor of feigning ignorance of the fact that he himself is a Box Man — after all, what was taken from the shoulder back in Chapter 5 was an air-gun pellet! As the conversation reaches a deadlock, the doctor suddenly compromises: "You don't believe at all that I would exchange roles with you and leave here. Actually, you hope for this in your heart, but you don't believe it... You be the master of this house; you can do whatever you like, and no matter what you do with her, I won't interfere. I won't obstruct or reproach you, and I won't get in your way. Only, please grant me one condition: please allow me to watch from the side." In fact, this is precisely the result "I" had hoped to obtain, and the true intention behind that long self-emphasis in his lengthy introduction that he would not bring about great change. Although he is not entirely satisfied with the doctor speaking on his behalf, he still entertains the possibility of the proposal. Just then, the nurse suddenly asks the time, and the doctor replies bluntly, "Twenty-four minutes to ten," as if mocking the Box Man's indecisiveness, but actually there is more to it than that. Please, everyone, remember this detail. As "I" ponders the possibility of the proposal, the nurse's image gradually transforms into a pure mother who embraces all that is ugly, like "I" himself. The more flawless she becomes, the more shameful "I"'s peeping behavior grows. To resolve this problem, "I" begins the attempt to rationalize "voyeurism" as a universal human desire, and points out that exhibitionism, which might be regarded as an exception, is "merely a form of voyeurism reflected in a mirror." This is crucial to understanding the second half of this book. Seeing that the Box Man has completely fallen into deep thought, the doctor then asks the nurse to strip naked, using desire to stimulate the Box Man to decide more quickly: "Every living organism has its own sphere of influence; if a foreign intruder crosses this boundary line, the organism will instinctively respond to the intruder with aggression. However, if you attack all foreign indiscriminately, copulation cannot be established. Since copulation is skin contact, one party needs to break through the other party's boundary line, or somewhere open a convenient gate for the intruder. Thus, relevant techniques emerge: the motions of courtship are in fact forms transformed from attack or threat — appearing to be attack, but actually different, employing remade movements and postures to confuse the other party's defense instinct or put them off their guard." But "I" remains unmoved, even though the doctor has spelled out the benefits of accepting the nurse with crystal clarity ("This means you have given up the qualification and the excuse to return to the cardboard box"). The Box Man still talks tough: "Didn't I say that I came after disposing of the cardboard box (on the beach)?" At this point, if the doctor wants to persuade "I" further, he can only expose the fact that he is still sitting on the beach writing notes — which would mean admitting that he too is nothing more than a fictional character in his notebook. But once again he adopts an offensive strategy: "Maybe I'm the one writing. Perhaps I'm imagining you, who is imagining me, writing all along." He produces evidence to refute the Box Man: "You're here; you should have started writing at 3:18, right? ... How come only an hour and thirty-four minutes have passed... By page count, you've written fifty-nine pages. Fifty-nine pages in an hour and thirty-four minutes... That's simply impossible, isn't it?" The Box Man plays his trump card: he reveals the existence of the photograph of the assailant taken on the day he was shot with the air gun. The doctor immediately falls into passivity and orders the nurse to search "I"'s person, but "I" immediately preempts him, using a specially made stuffed crocodile toy to beat the doctor inside the cardboard box "until a series of moans came out, all five vowels — a, i, u, e, o — deployed in turn," until he curled up completely. "I" is thick with lingering doubts: the contradiction pointed out by the doctor forces the Box Man to admit that the recorder who writes in the notebook and himself (the narrator within the notebook's episodes) do not play roles that are entirely unified. So what exactly is the necessity of "I"'s existence? This question will be addressed in the first item of the next section. In summary, the narrator "I" is the psychological extension of the recorder "I," which explains the specific reason why the narrator "I" constantly transforms into other characters.

A supplementary note: Earlier, when the Box Man and the doctor began arguing over who was writing the notes, the former once again leaped to add the assertion that "so-called civilized society is in fact nothing but a pair-of-pants society" (sometimes I really feel Abe Kōbō is just being clever by embedding his sudden brainwaves into the plot, exactly like David Foster Wallace). The gist is that civilized society, because it is run by bureaucratic institutions, always looks only at the parts and never cares about the whole — for example, someone walking on the street without pants would be considered more "improper" than someone without shoes, socks, or a shirt; a graduate of a prestigious university's medical department is more welcomed than the uncelebrated miracle-working physician Hua Tuo, and so on.

After reading the entire book, we will realize that if the Box Man had accepted the doctor's suggestion at this point, his ending might well have been very different. But this quintessential Abe Kōbō-esque character — this stubborn, self-deceiving, inwardly sensitive mediocrity — would never surrender easily (a separate section in the next part will be devoted to this).

Chapter 12, "Confession": The narrator is the doctor; this is the confession he has written. It turns out the doctor's real name is C, and he opened this clinic by assuming the identity of the military doctor who had been his direct superior during the war. Until last year, he had been living with "Nana," who simultaneously held the triple identity of his wife (not formally registered), the clinic's previous nurse, and one of its joint operators. She was also the wife of the honorable military doctor, from which it can be seen that C's act of assumption was tacitly approved and supported by the military doctor himself. However, last year "Nana" had proposed separation because C had hired a new nurse named Tobe Yoko (that very woman "I" is so deeply fascinated by, the lady who had the abortion at the clinic); she now runs a piano school in the city.

Chapter 14, "Confession: Continuation": The narrator is still the doctor. In the final year of the war, C was assigned to the military doctor, who was devoted to the research topic of "extracting sugar from wood." The latter fell gravely ill and took to his bed during this period; because he regularly consumed narcotics, by the time of defeat he had become addicted and could no longer practice medicine. Perhaps to make a living, perhaps for a continuous supply of narcotics, the military doctor reached an agreement with C: the doctor would provide the identification necessary to open the clinic and would compel C to marry "Nana," who held all the clinic's account books, in order to strengthen his control over C and ensure that he would not be abandoned. At the same time, C not only needed to handle the treatment of patients almost entirely on his own, but also had to provide the military doctor with narcotics on a long-term basis. Interestingly, after more than twenty years of study and practice, the confidence of the counterfeit doctor C in his medical skills had reached the point where he felt he did not even need a medical license, while the military doctor, who depended on long-term care, had become the genuine counterfeit.

According to C's account, the military doctor, probably because he had already lost his social identity by the end of his life, began roaming the city inside a cardboard box; it was under these circumstances that his body was discovered on the beach of the seaside park. But C claims this has nothing to do with himself. We harbor deep doubts about this.

Both confessions revolve around the death of the military doctor, which has become an established fact in C's mind. In Chapter 13, which has yet to be discussed, he can even accurately write down the time of the military doctor's death, which cannot help but make us suspect his motive for writing the confession, and makes us even more curious about to whom this confession is written — after all, according to the narrative of Chapter 13, no law enforcement agencies are involved; there is only the doctor, alone in an unfamiliar room, writing.

Chapter 15, "The Executioner Is Innocent": The narrator is the military doctor. The military doctor sits up in bed in the clinic's morgue, writing feverishly, waiting for C's arrival; in fact, he had long foreseen his inevitable death. The military doctor plans to pretend to be asleep when C enters, in order to lighten the executioner's sense of guilt — although he also knows full well that the other party knows he is feigning sleep. It seems the military doctor's death is itself an agreement reached by the two in silent understanding. To prevent the police from harboring suspicions, the military doctor also plans to write a few words of final testament in the notebook, and then proceeds to describe, in meticulous detail, the death scene as he imagines it, enumerating the precautions to be taken when fabricating the death scene. The notebook then stops short; the military doctor's identity is completely seized by the counterfeit doctor — this is simply identical to C's later act of once again snatching away the Box Man's "pseudo-identity."

Chapter 13, "The Story of C": The narrator is "I," who is describing the process of "you" writing the confession. If the confession "you" writes is precisely the content of Chapters 12 and 14, then we can confirm that the "you" in this chapter refers to the doctor who had just gained the upper hand in Chapter 12.

The layout of the room is worth noting: it is neither the front line of the three-person struggle, described earlier as "the doctor's study-cum-bedroom," nor the morgue of Chapter 15, but rather a dark, cramped, unfamiliar space furnished with a "mobile cardboard-box dwelling modeled after a Box Man."

"You" opens a notebook identical to "I"'s, and writes a stunning passage upon it:

"This is an account of a Box Man. I am now in a cardboard box — a corrugated box that fits over my head and comes down precisely to my waist — beginning to write this record. At this very moment, the Box Man, which is to say myself."

All those prolix and leaping chapters within the story vanish in this instant. It turns out that doctor C, who contended with "I" over the "pseudo-identity"; the nurse, whom "I" regarded as the ideal woman; and every character from this point onward are nothing more than fictional entities written inside a cardboard box. For a schizophrenic Box Man, would this be torment or salvation? Think carefully — is not the Box Man himself also a fictional character written by Abe Kōbō?

"You"'s work continues; the confession has reached the part about the body discovered at the seaside park. The doctor carefully lies to the judge in his heart, yet accurately states the time of the body's death as approximately thirty hours prior — an act that draws mockery from "I": "If everything goes according to your plan, this thing is useless; if it fails, no amount of pretty talk will be of any use." At this moment, the "you" who is immersed in fantasy and near-despair is the direct embodiment of the protagonist "I"'s existential situation all along; he has sunk too deep inside the cardboard box, "poisoned by what is after all merely a tool, the cardboard box."

Chapter 16, "Here Again, and for the Last Time, an Inserted Record": The narrator is "I," but this "I" cannot be equated with the narrator-Box Man who previously struggled with the doctor; he is the recorder-Box Man, that is, the recorder of the notes. This chapter relates three aspects concerning the Box Man: the significance of the Box Man, the Box Man's process of metamorphosis, and the Box Man's uniqueness. It is of crucial importance for exploring the book's overarching theme, because it emphasizes the fundamental nature of this game: "Perhaps you will not believe it, but everything written above is entirely real; even though it is a product of imagination, it is by no means a lie. A lie is meant to confuse the other party and lead them away from the truth, whereas imagination can be said to be a shortcut that leads the other party closer to the truth."

First, the image of the Box Man is redefined: before the increasingly powerful institutions scattered throughout the interior of the modern state, people, for the sake of the promises these institutions make (namely convenience), become increasingly unconcerned with concealing their personal identities; the Box Man, who goes against the tide, thus becomes an existence akin to an urban guerrilla fighter. Next, "I" depicts the "coming-of-age ceremony" that makes a Box Man a Box Man — enduring the sweat and grime that the cardboard box brings during the sweltering heat, and when after a few days the skin has adapted to such conditions, the cardboard box becomes the accolade bestowed upon a hero. To highlight the Box Man's uniqueness, there is also written a certain type of "medal vagrant," covered all over with badges, brooches, and toy medals, their caps stuck with little rising-sun flags like birthday-cake candles — remnants of old Japanese fanatics. Apart from this passage, they do not appear anywhere else in this book, and carry no satirical or critical significance that goes deep into the theme; they seem entirely an impromptu creation of "I"'s (looking somewhat like a predecessor to the "broom squad" in The Ark Sakura).

At the end, "I" seems to have reached the limit of endurance and blurts out: "Just think about it — who, after all, is not a Box Man? Who has not had the chance to become one?" It can be said that the content of this chapter is the struggle of "I," who has already fallen into dire straits: he must tell people about the nobility of the Box Man's identity, and must make readers believe that his own timid attitude toward the world is entirely without problem, in order to continue deceiving himself.

Chapter 17, "The Story of D": A third-person account with the narrator absent. The young boy D, in order to obtain a sense of power over others, becomes enamored of the vice of peeping. He makes a multi-angle periscope out of plywood, thick paper, and mirrors (just like "I" in Chapter 9, who relied on a scavenged car rearview mirror to peep inside the hospital — sufficient to show that the role of the young boy D, like the doctor, the military doctor, and the nurse, is entirely a product of imagination). After tasting success effortlessly, his audacity swells daily; he decides to peep into the toilet of the next-door neighbor — a female middle-school gymnastics teacher who likes to play the piano — only to be discovered and captured by her. The female teacher decides to punish him, and as she speaks she strikes up a Chopin piece on the piano keys; it stirs the hazy desire of this adolescent boy, and now incinerates this侥幸 love into ashes ("He held a vague sense of hope; he felt that peeping was a cautious, introverted declaration of love, and that in no case should it be severely condemned.") — turning it into boundless shame. The young boy D is forced to strip naked and is subjected to the nurse's peeping from beyond the door through the keyhole; in that elusive and irresistible gaze, he gradually loses tangible perception of his flesh and becomes an object unable to resist. In the end, he gets an erection and, stumbling, ejaculates...

This chapter is the most important component exploring the theme of the gaze; to understand what it seeks to illuminate is to understand the core of this book. Beyond that, it also embodies the slow process of "I"'s loss of control — the subsequent Chapter 19 also serves a function similar to this one, externalizing the protagonist's existential anxiety.

Chapter 18, "……": The narrator is "I." "I" goes to the hospital, which is closed for consultation; upon entering, however, he seems to have assumed the identity of the counterfeit Box Man (or counterfeit doctor) and receives a warm welcome from the nurse. "I" explains that he is the photographer who kept the appointment under the bridge yesterday; the nurse is greatly startled upon hearing this, and we are as astonished as she: So the chaotic episodes beginning from Chapter 11 were, after all, fictionalized by "I"? So he had all along been sitting naked on the damp beach writing notes?

The nurse — both the nurse as a character in "I"'s notebook and the nurse as a component of the episodes in Abe Kōbō's plot — asks the Box Man, who has just come from the beach wrapped in his cardboard box, to come out of the box. To rescue a lamb that has gone astray, she ushers "I" inside without the slightest hesitation, yet "I" still demands that she give him a pair of pants, not at all as brave as he told the readers in his earlier lies. Instead, he begs for the包容 and acceptance of civilized society, which "is in fact a 'pair-of-pants society,'" but the nurse, brimming with maternal love, directly strips off her own clothing and invites "I" to treat others with his true self, as she does. At this moment, the Box Man seems to have been thoroughly moved; as he pulls off his boots, he confesses: "To tell you the truth, I'm actually a counterfeit." But the nurse pays this no mind: "Don't say anything more..."

In the nurse we see the hope of the Box Man's self-salvation — a hope that does not come from omnipotent civilized society or from any other Other, but precisely from the innate human desire to shed one's mask. The Box Man was born precisely from this desire, yet they inevitably sank into perdition. Now the power that can save them is also this desire: this two-way communication, which has renounced self-deception and renounced the one-way "voyeurism" that objectifies others, is the very root from which hope is born out of despair. However, our protagonist does not choose this ending, which is easier said than done...

Chapter 19, "In the Dream, the Box Man Also Walks Out of the Cardboard Box. Is What He Dreams the Life Before Entering the Box, or the Life After Walking Out...": The narrator is Chopin, continuing "I"'s anxiety that cannot be comforted by the nurse. The protagonist of this chapter suddenly changes to Chopin — not Chopin the musician, but Chopin who bears the shame of the young boy D in Chapter 17. Compared to that, however, this abrupt insertion of plot appears even more chaotic; it seems the Box Man is gradually losing his grip on himself.

Chopin goes to a small city to propose marriage; his father pulls a cart along inside a cardboard box, because they can neither afford a carriage nor wish to embarrass the bride. Chopin gets down to relieve himself, only to be encountered by the bride he has never met before; on the grounds that "a man with exhibitionism is unfit for marriage," he is forced to abandon the wedding — although he keeps insisting he has no such inclination, his father nonetheless persuades him to give up the thought. Although the carriage has been discarded, the father still refuses to leave the cardboard box, because "half the responsibility for this matter lies with him."

Combined with the assertion from Chapter 11 ("exhibitionism is merely a form of voyeurism reflected in a mirror"), we can draw the following conclusion: due to the lack of an equal and two-way mode of interaction between Chopin ("I") and the bride (the nurse), plus the "voyeurism" that shatters the possibility of human交往, the originally hopeful future ceases to exist. And the socialized aspect within the mind (that is, the father — I believe Chopin's father and Chopin are the result of the Box Man split in two) must then seek another channel for escape and venting, and thus the Box Man is born.

Arriving in the big city, Chopin's family rents an attic with a piano, but this Chopin possesses no skill in playing music; he merely uses the piano as a desk, again and again tracing on paper the image of his beloved as remembered. The father says in a Lynchian tone: "...You know, our purses are not exactly flush. So, let's discuss it — could you draw a bit smaller, to save a bit of paper..." As the size of the drawings shrinks, Chopin's name becomes a household word as the issuer and maker of the world's first postage stamp, but this has nothing to do with him; he merely numbly traces the memories of the past. Whenever he thinks of how, after the long passage of years, she can no longer match his memory, tears fall in torrents, and the father, to prevent the drawing paper from being ruined, always extends a handkerchief from inside the cardboard box to press beneath his eyes at just the right moment. With the development of the postal service and the gradual implementation of nationalization, Chopin again becomes widely known as the maker of counterfeit stamps; no post office will hang his portrait, and only the color red — his father's lifelong favorite, the color of the cardboard box — has become the color of oil drums.

Chapter 20, "Five Minutes Before the Curtain Rises": This chapter is a baffling conversation between "I" and the nurse — the final tenderness before a cruel finale. At the chapter's end, "I" says: "Compared to the you in my heart, the me in your heart is nothing but an insignificant existence... The moment I lightly touch your skin, time will congeal, and eternity will descend. Because within this agony of hot wind, I will be subjected to a physical metamorphosis spell that will not vanish until death..."

Chapter 21, "The Curtain Has Fallen Before the Bell Rings": The narrator is "I." Over the preceding nearly two months, the two people in the hospital had lived entirely naked, except that "I" had never left the cardboard box, whether at home or going out to buy daily necessities. Time was entirely congealed within the silence of language; this once-reassuring relationship was also slowly putrefying from its constant exposure to the open air. When today he discovers that the nurse has put her clothes back on, "I" knows that everything has irretrievably fled into nothingness: "Could she be waiting for me to propose starting over from the beginning? But no matter how many times we start over, in the end it is nothing but an endless repetition in this same place, this same time." Now the nurse's figure is nowhere to be seen in the completely sealed hospital; we can almost see the four walls, shrouded in darkness, slowly shrinking and transforming, becoming the cardboard box overhead that can never be escaped.

Chapter 22, "……": The narrator is "I." At the present moment, both lies and imagination hold no meaning for "I." He still manages to lock the nurse inside the pitch-black hospital; safely taking off the cardboard box, he walks naked into her room, only to suddenly discover that the original room has become a dead-end alley near a railway station. The Box Man must find her, but cannot take a single step — it seems this place still belongs to part of the enclosed space. He can do nothing but bump about in all directions like a headless fly... In the end, "I" reveals to the readers the truth concealed by fiction: "The condition for me to come out of the cardboard box is to lock the world inside the cardboard box. Now this world must close its eyes... The most important thing when making a cardboard box is to be sure to leave enough blank space on the walls for your graffiti. No, blank space is never in short supply. No matter how much you write, you can never fill up the blank space. What often surprises me is that some of the graffiti is itself blank... In fact, a cardboard box, seen from the outside, is merely a very simple cube, but once you look out from inside, it is like a labyrinth made of hundreds of interlinked rings of wisdom... What is certain is that she, vanished without a trace, must be hiding somewhere within this labyrinth. Actually she hasn't run away; she just hasn't found where I am."

The shell-grass dream stubbornly persists, but reality has never vanished — it crashes against the four walls of the cardboard box: "The siren of the ambulance is getting closer."

This is the final sentence of the book.

Several "Atomic Transformations" That Constitute the Plot's Foundation and an Analysis of the Roles in the Relationships They Construct

To a reader who has already read The Box Man in its entirety, the ten-thousand-character passage above may seem a worthless prolixity, but it actually has an indelible function for the detailed analysis and deconstruction that follows. First, as a postmodern literary work, The Box Man presents, in its structure, confusion and complexity rooted in shifting narrators, logically unclear montage-like chapter arrangements, and absurd, bizarre plot developments. Without sorting these out, it is impossible to begin a deeper analysis. Second, because I have noticed many repetitions and correspondences within the text's structure of the original work, I have chosen to use a reductionist analytical method to disassemble, trace to its source, and categorize and correspond one by one the basic elements within the plot. Specifically, this means extracting the internal motivations of each character from the plot, thereby summarizing the prototypes of several types of relationships between characters (it is precisely these relationships that compose the entire novel's plot), and then constructing logical connections from the angle of each relationship. If one understands this book from this angle, then one will discover that it is essentially a fictional breakout performance within the Box Man's heart — the Box Man who "writes the Box Man's account inside a cardboard box" — and this performance also simultaneously nurtures the power to charge toward reality. This point will be explained in detail at the end of this section.

The Weights of Surface-Level Fictional Characters and Deep-Level Fictional Characters — Preamble and supplement for what follows: First, because this book from the very beginning is entirely the fiction of the recorder "I," all characters can be regarded as avatars of "I" (including the narrator "I," who does not maintain physical-level consistency with the recorder — because he constantly suddenly transforms into characters such as the counterfeit military doctor, the young boy D, and Chopin — but who preserves absolute identity with the recorder at the psychological level). However, these fragmented characters also differ in importance. The characters in the surface-level fiction — that is, the characters in the surface-level episodes of the novel The Box Man — are forces of inner contradiction in the heart that are not subject to "I"'s rational control. And the characters in the deep-level fiction nested within this surface-level fiction — namely, characters such as Box Men A, B, and D, the female teacher, Chopin, and Chopin's father — are characters created by "I" on the grounds of countering these forces of inner contradiction. Their importance is far inferior to that of the former, because in essence they are nothing more than mirrors of the former, dependent on the former for their existence. They are like mental patients who, to cope with trauma, actively chose to split into multiple personalities: these existences that appear to have independent personalities are nothing more than mirages of self-protection, created as fantasies dependent on the main personality that has suffered setbacks in reality.

Transformation I: A's Attack on the Box Man (Prototype) / Doctor's Attack on "I" / "I"'s Attack on the Nurse / From D's Attack on the Female Teacher (by means of voyeurism) to the Female Teacher's Attack on D (Exhibitionism and voyeurism are essentially the same) — The Transformation of Attack

"Every living organism has its own sphere of influence; if a foreign intruder crosses this boundary line, the organism will instinctively respond to the intruder with aggression. However, if you attack all foreign indiscriminately, copulation cannot be established. Since copulation is skin contact, one party needs to break through the other party's boundary line, or somewhere open a convenient gate for the intruder. Thus, relevant techniques emerge: the motions of courtship are in fact forms transformed from attack or threat — appearing to be attack, but actually different, employing remade movements and postures to confuse the other party's defense instinct or put them off their guard." This passage is adapted from the doctor's words in Chapter 12, "On the Unpleasant Relationship Between the I Who Writes and the I Who Is Written." The idea of "the transformation of attack" embodied in it is the key to understanding the several relationships described above.

The first two relationships — A's attack on the Box Man and the doctor's attack on "I" — are superficially very similar, both using the air gun as a weapon to attack, yet causing themselves to be assimilated into the Box Man. The most significant difference between these two relationships and the latter lies in the fact that the object of attack is the Box Man, who has no capacity for physical counterattack; but at the same time, the Box Man possesses a weapon that his seemingly powerful attacker does not have: the gaze (for details, see the analysis of Chapter 2 in the previous section). The power of the Box Man's gaze (or "voyeurism") lies in its ability to block the erosion of others' gazes and to actively choose when to reveal "the most vicious gaze in the world"; it has obtained absolute dominance in the most universal and fundamental relationship of modern society — namely, seeing and being seen. We can discover that this ability, which ordinary people living in the city absolutely cannot master, is something that many people actually long for deeply, no matter how they use violence to conceal the facts. This is precisely why all attacks directed at the Box Man are themselves transformed by the Box Man into a force directed against the attacker.

  1. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (La Société du spectacle, 1967). ↩︎