You knew she'd show up eventually.

After over two months away — two months of thesis writing and so on — my Adventures in Criticism return.  If you recall from last time, we tackled Frye’s first essay, the “Theory of Modes.”  Or rather, one third of it.  I’m going through the second third now.  

There are only two main points from this section that bear heavy-duty attention.  There are also a few bits and pieces here and there…

“The hero [of New Comedy] is seldom a very interesting person:  in conformity with low mimetic decorum, he is ordinary in his virtues, but socially attractive” (44, emphasis mine).  I immediately thought of the typical male anime protagonist; at least, from the “comedies.”  The males from Kanon and Air aren’t exactly ordinary, at least according to the social values espoused by their settings — both could be considered odd, rude, too vocal, and smart-asses.  This is why we love them so.  However, they’re also not comic figures; they’re tragic heroes (most of the time, at least — I’m not convinced the relatively “yay” ending of Kanon qualifies it as a comedy, though perhaps calling it a tragedy isn’t the best plan.  Bear with me here).  The typical male lead heads up a comedy, most times.  Frye points out how, in New Comedy, a new society “crystallizes” around the man and his bride.  This is sometimes literal and sometimes just a shift in perspective, but it’s usually there.  I would say the best shows with the “boring” male leads do this, such as Love Hina, Ai Yori Aoshi, and Tenchi Muyo!  The “new society” is a world in which the “ordinary” virtues are rewarded, whereas in the low-mimetic/ironic world of the beginning, they are punished. 

Frye also defines “melodrama” as “self-righteous” (47).  I don’t think that’s how the term is typically used today, but I would support shifting the definition back if I thought it were possible.  A melodrama, according to Frye, fully supports the moral, ethical, &c viewpoints it supposes the viewer to have, never challenging, and in fact becoming self-righteous at the thought of anything else.  Think of any American soap opera — we’re clearly supposed to think the bad people are bad and the good people are good; they rarely try to convince us to do more than sypathize, never to consider that they might be doing the “right thing.”  Melodrama as pitched around by readers and writers today generally means “out of the ordinary events,” which even my obsessed-with-quotidian professor from last semester could see some of that is necessary.  He pointed out, quite rightly, that Shakespeare wrote it.  However, it was never self-righteous in the sense Frye means — and neither is a lot of the modern genre fiction generally labeled “melodramatic” because it isn’t about four people, all artists, sitting in a room and thinking about sex.

According to Frye, comedy typically tackles problems that are “immoral” but not threatening to the society as a whole (48).  I can see that, and indeed think it would at least be productive to examine anything we would usually call a comedy, but that tackles a problem that threatens a whole society, as something else.  Remember that traditionally comedies are about integrating people back into society, rather than fixing the society itself.

Here’s one of the two important points:  the genre signifiers (my term, not his) of a piece can shift and change depending on one’s perspective.  Frye puts it in this way:

The tonality of Antony and Cleopatra is high mimetic, the story of the fall of a great leader.  But it is easy to look at Mark Antony ironically, as a man enslaved by passion; it is easy to recognize his common humanity with ourselves; it is easy to see in him a romantic adventurer of prodigious courage and endurance betrayed by a witch; there are even hints of a superhuman being whose legs bestrid the ocean and whose downfall is a conspiracy of fate, explicable only to a soothsayer.  To leave out any of these would oversimplify and belittle the play.  Through such an analysis we may come to realize that the two essential facts about a work of art, that it is contemporary with its own time and that it is contemporary with ours, are not opposed but complementary facts.  (51)

I think this has a great deal of significance, in general and specifically applied.  The way one can view something can shift, sometimes easily, and all the readings, as they are readings of the same thing from different places (like Monet’s paintings of the same building in different light) are just as accurate, and indeed in some sense should be considered together for a complete picture of the thing itself (I’m glad I read this, it has to do with something I’m thinking of doing for class).  Also, Frye makes the point that this shifting view explains how a work of art can be of its own time and of ours, which at first blush seems paradoxical at best and antithetical at worst.  We simply view the art from our point of view, and understand its contemporaries viewed it from theirs.  My “specific” application I mentioned earlier is instructive for fans of anime and manga — as a member of the otaku-rhombus, that is, non-Japanese fans of anime creating works with roots in aforementioned anime, I view the art from my point of view, which is just as accurate as the native Japanese person’s.  I’m thinking particularly of a recent thing I read (through lelangir’s anitations, so I don’t know who originally said it), which defended the weeaboo’s tendency to insist on using the word “seiyuu” when “voice actor” can suffice.  The general rule for loanwords from other languages is that they only really work if there is no analogue — which was the argument.  I don’t agree.  I think “voice actor” can carry all the important, salient points with it.  If we must explain to someone outside our discourse that there’s a difference between the practices of American and Japanese voice actors, then that’s that.  We would have to perform the same act of footnoting by using the Japanese word, and using something in our language makes us look less like douchebags.  To get back on point — our viewpoint of examining the voice acting pursuit is just as valid, so long as we actively examine the voice acting, rather than something we have constructed to replace it.  All those descriptions of Antony come from the text and are informed by it — Frye is not describing the historical Antony as though that were what was actually in the play.

Here’s the second important one:  if you’d like, refer back to the little circle I drew for the third blog entry, linked above.  Frye refers back to his scale here, where he says that, given the historic tendency of verisimilitude to provide plausibility and “reading forward in history [...] we may think of our romantic, high mimetic and low mimetic modes as a series of displaced myths, mythoi or plot-formulas progressively moving over towards the opposite pole of verisimilitude [away from myth, which doesn't require verisimilitude], and then, with irony, beginning to move back” (52).  Even without considering the historical tendency he describes, this illustrates the movement of mythoi displacing themselves, or being displaced, away from the original, mythic scene through a series of permutations layering on additional plausibility.  It hints at why examining stories in relation to myths can be helpful:  the degree of displacement, pointed out in the text by distance markers, can help position the text for us; and it shows how the displacement continues to relate back and forth through the entire scale, which calls back to the point about Antony and Cleopatra.  

So what’s your favorite anime, and how does its displacement work?  I’ve already illustrated the mythic tendencies of one of my favorite anime (Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, predictably a “romance” on Frye’s scale), but I didn’t look too much at how it slips from romance into high mimetic.  I can see the elements of a public figure brought low, and of course the construction of a world different from the one before, that would be boring for us to watch but is a dream for those who fight in the romance-setting toward it.

Tags: air, antony and cleopatra, criticism, kanon, myth, northrop frye, tenchi muyo, theory

Thus spake Cuchlann on Monday, 9 March 2009 at 3:27 am, and Anime, Art and Culture expanded tenfold. Become privy to further discussion on the matter via RSS 2.0. You might grace us with a brilliant comment, or trackback from a distant podium.