Actually, it’s the seventh, but I figure now’s as good a time as any to stop numbering them and just admit they’re a (semi-)regular feature. Woo!
Anyhow, this time I’m doing an essay called “Coming to Terms” by Gary K. Wolfe. It’s short, so hopefully I can get this entry done before the scourging weather wipes my house out of the valley in which it nestles.
I think this essay is especially pertinent here because the anime fandom is nearly always in a roil, the past few years, concerning what to call things. At the beginning of the essay, Wolfe quotes Everett Bleiler: ”Our terms have been muddled, imprecise, and heretical in the derivational sense of the word” (13). This sounds awfully familiar. Of course, Wolfe is talking about science fiction and fantasy, but both situations essentially stem from the same place: a kind of ghetto status, either real or imagined, in terms of acceptance within the tradition from which most literary terms come from.
If you haven’t worked it out by now from general observation, SF and fantasy are sort of “my thing.” SF and fantasy are what originally drew me to anime, even with the success of shows like Supernatural or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, American tv doesn’t have nearly as many SF or fantasy shows as Japanese anime tv does. There’s a lot to choose from. Now, obviously my interest doesn’t end there, but I’m always going to be interested in those genres. Hence the use of an SF text here.
Anyway. Much of Wolfe’s essay is in the format of a dictionary. I don’t mean to quote his definitions entirely, but I thought I would the first one, as it too has special significance to the anime community:
Academic: Used both as an adjective and a noun to describe the involvement of professional scholars and teachers in the criticism, history, theory, and teaching of science fiction. Such a meaning might seem obvious, but the term has gained a great many overtones, usually either disparaging or defensive, and has come rather imprecisely to be contrasted both with ‘fan’ or amateur scholarship in the field, and with the various ‘internal’ works of history and criticism generated by science fiction and fantasy writers themselves. In this usage, the ‘academic’ is ofted regarded as an outsider trained in traditional humanistic methodologies wich are sometimes felt to be inadequate for science fiction; interestingly, the term is seldom applied to university scientists or even social scientists, suggesting that it refers not necessarily to the academic world per se, but specifically to inhabitants of English or history departments in universities. (13-4)
Yeah, I’m not going to bother explicating that one further.
Wolfe deals with “cognitive estrangement,” lifted from the writings of Darko Suvin and defined, here, as “estranged from the naturalistic world but cognitively connected to it” (15). Now, what I wonder about this, in relation to anime, is how liberally this could be applied. It seems as though the traditional use of strange hair colors might even qualify otherwise “realistic” anime as “estranged.” Nothing’s wildly different, we don’t have trouble living within parts of the world, but there are notes within it that are not realistic, but are not considered strange. It’s become so familiar that shows such as Bleach use it as an entryway — it is odd that Ichigo’s hair is orange, and this almost acts as a gateway to dealing with the estrangement in the spiritual world intruding on the material. At least, the speculation on what that interference would mean comes across to me as better and more “realistic” than the same situation in, say, Yu Yu Hakusho.
He also cites Gene Wolfe’s term “posthistory” for far future stories so far in advance of our own that the characters aren’t connected to us any longer (19). Think of Canticle for Leibowitz — then jump further into the future. No, further. Go ahead, go farther still. Once all emotional or factual connection is gone, that’s posthistory. It appears to be made in contrast to pre-history, and both terms indicate a time actively separated from our own by distances so great as to make nearly new worlds of the timeframes involved. I’m wondering if any anime SF could qualify as posthistory; I can’t think of any right now. Any ideas out there? If there aren’t that many, I have to wonder if there’s a significance there, regarding perhaps differing views of the functioning of historical recall (or some such).
Oh, Wolfe (Gary, not Gene) mentions “sci-fi” as a neologism made up by journalists and others “outside” the genre who don’t understand it, and its widest non-pejorative acceptance within the genre is to indicate things that aren’t as complex as usually expected — Star Wars is the example cited from Elizabeth Anne Hull 20-1). Am I the only one who has never encountered this? ”Sci-fi” was just a short version of “science fiction” for me, growing up; I’ve never experienced it as pejorative at all.
Okay, this one strikes me as odd:
Wonder: Frequently invoked in definitions of fantasy but seldom defined, as in C. N. Manlove’s phrase ‘a fiction evoking wonder.’ The term is equally common in discussions of science fiction with its ‘sense of wonder,’ but it is quite possible the meaning there is somewhat different, relating to philosopohical notions of the sublime in the face of vastness. In fantasy, the term need not imply awe and terror in the face of the natural world, but rather suggests the desire and longing arising out of the promise of other worlds or states of being. (22)
Uh… I call bullshit. How does fantasy not enter into the “awe and terror in the face of the natural world?” My impression is that fantasy is much more involved in portrayals of the “natural world” than SF is. I think Wolfe means to refer back to the supposed love and idealization of physics and other “natural” descriptors within SF, but the emphasis on technology and human aspiration is generally antithetical to sublime pursuits. On the other hand, fantasy derives directly from the Gothic, in which the sublime is absolutely essential. Radcliffe wrote one of the pre-eminent essays on terror, entirely relating it to the Gothic.
That’s about it.
Work Cited:
Wolfe, Gary K. “Coming to Terms.” Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria, eds. Scarecrow Press, Inc.: Lanham, MD. 2005.
Pontifus
kaiserpingvin
cuchlann
Shance
TheKittymeister
r042
Pontifus
/ 14 June 2009Same. In fact, growing up, I never heard “SF” at all, and though it may be more “proper,” or indicate a more proper kind of narrative, it now seems a little unusual to me, or antiquated at least. Granted, I was always (and am still, I guess) more a fan of fantasy, and I’d be lying if I said I was immersed in the dialogue of science fiction from an early age.
So, escapism? Or, well, that’s more narrow than what I’m going for. Is this suggesting that “wonder” in fantasy comes from the contrast between the fantasy world and ours? If so, those are the grounds on which I’d be inclined to disagree. In my experience, fantasy (like all kinds of stories, really) is pretty self-contained, and if the fantasy world in question includes frequent giant magical explosions and, I don’t know, flying asexual unicorns, those things aren’t going to invoke in me what I’d call wonder, at least not for very long. I’d think that fantastical wonder has more to do with execution. I wonder at how characters in fantasy stories deal with situations the likes of which 1. realistically could never be, but 2. strike me as startlingly familiar and human, possibly because I’m drawn to stories whose fantasy elements stem from the exploration of humanity anyway. Or, rather, I express wonder in the face of the situations themselves. Hell, for all I know, fantasy itself has its roots in the desire to bend, twist, and otherwise test human beings in ways realistic fiction (and nonfiction, for that matter) could never manage, due to those meddling laws of the natural universe, but I’m not prepared to commit to that position. Not today, at any rate.
What I’m getting at is that wonder in fantasy comes not directly from things like magic, but from how those things shape and affect the characters who are privy to them. So I’m with you in saying that “awe and terror in the face of the natural world” would be a part of it. “Desire and longing arising out of the promise of other worlds or states of being” sounds almost like religion; I strongly doubt that fantasy makes such a promise.
If I’m understanding it correctly, I think I apply it pretty liberally. I doubt that something like literary realism could be accomplished by anime simply because the medium of animation itself represents such a remove from reality. Not that literature or any medium reproduces the real world exactly, as that’s impossible, but literature (and I suppose live-action film) can offer a view of reality that’s less…abstracted, maybe, than animation. Maybe this is a separate concern from cognitive estrangement, though.
ghostlightning
/ 14 June 2009With regards to strange hair colors, the suspense of disbelief now comes from an understanding of the need to distinguish characters from each other.
I wonder about this when reading manga, where most of the time the images are black and white. Strange hair colors are ‘short cuts’ in characterizations at the most superficial level, but don’t take that as a pejorative, at least from me.
While I am aware of the stricter distinctions of fantasy, practically I still end up using Dungeons and Dragons as my touchstone; only taking into account the stricter definition when I find myself already in a fantasy experience of a text that I did not consciously expect to be so.
Similarly, Sci-Fi = Star Wars is the case for me, only discovering SF when I took an elective on Science Fiction back at uni. SF now = Asimov, Herbert, Heinlein, Le Guin LOL.
What I’m trying to share is that I am intellectual about my business in consuming these kinds of texts, and yet I am largely illiterate of the great expanse of texts within these genres. Not to put myself as a complete layman, but I think I’m close ergo, elucidations from posts like this are, or should be of service to people like me.
TheKittymeister
/ 15 June 2009Altho it’s an old PC game, I think Loom could qualify as “post-history.” It’s set after the year 8000; of course, therein lies the problem. I tend to think of it as our world in a future where guilds & the Church have the most power, but there’s not very much in their reality that ties them to ours (other than the use of music from Swan Lake, which doesn’t really count), & references to past eras that might have been similar to ours are lacking. So it could be post-history, or a fantasy story that happens to be set in the year 8000.
& I don’t particularly agree either, but escapism in a narrow sense actually sounds like the perfect term for what Wolfe deems as the ‘wonder’ of fantasy. His emphasis on it as “desire and longing arising out of the promise of other worlds or states of being” almost sounds like it would fit right into an episode of ‘Illegal Drugs & How They Got That Way.’ A bit flippant, but it seems that to him, fantasy’s wonder is all about wishing & promises, with no comment on achieving _some_ kind of satisfaction.
Cuchlann
/ 16 June 2009@Pontifus: YES.
Though I would claim that literature is *more* abstracted, even than anime, because you’re experiencing at least one thing — seeing the characters — in the same way you would in real life. But in literature you don’t even see them, you read descriptions.
@ghostlightning: It’s personal, but I loathe the concept of “suspension of disbelief.” Yes, Coleridge, great, all that, but I fall in line more with Tolkien’s conception of a “secondary world,” within which all the stuff is simply true. Because we never actually suspend our disbelief, or else we would think the Ancient Mariner really did kill an albatross and speak to Chance and Death.
I play DnD and you have no idea how much that wounds me. : D I suppose if you wanted a list of heavy hitters in the genre, I would say Tolkien, Lewis, Howard, Leiber, Dunsany, and Moorcock. Of course, at this point, most contemporary fantasy fans have no idea who those people are, but they did more to shape the genre than any others (maybe not Lewis).
@TheKittymeister: Sounds neat.
Also, YES.
Pontifus
/ 17 June 2009“Abstracted” is the wrong word, on second thought. It’s literature’s lack of visual representation that makes for a more realistic experience, or makes a more realistic experience possible; we aren’t having visual data fed into us, so we can draw upon our real-life experience to fill that in. I suppose we could close our eyes and do the same with animation, or use simplified representations of people and places as stepping stones to related visual experience, but the visual representation/interpretation of some reality through a certain lens (or pen, I guess) is an integral part of the whole package, and I think its presence sets the setting of any given animated film apart from reality in a more significant way than would the most basic features of literature.
Cuchlann
/ 19 June 2009I actually view it as the reverse — I think it’s the lack of visuals that makes “literature” *less* realistic than any visual form, even the most stylized anime; I take the tack that we experience anime (for instance — any tv, movie, &c. could go here) with two of our basic senses: sight and sound. That’s two of the senses we use to take in the real world. Anything else, such as taste or smell, is symbolized, with, say, wavy lines for the aroma of a roast or tiny flies around a can of garbage. Literature, on the other hand, functions solely through symbol — we experience nothing in the way we do in the real world. Spelling this out has made me realize I draw a lot of this from _Understanding Comics_.
It’s a matter of interpretation, of course. : D
Pontifus
/ 19 June 2009Hmm…alright, I think I get you. You’re saying that the sensory input makes the experience of watching animation more life-like than reading a novel (right?), and that seems reasonable. Still, the setting of an animated production is necessarily less realistic, says I, insofar as animation imposes that visual un-reality actively, where literature doesn’t at all, and live-action film employs (usually, presumably) more realistic visual elements. That’s what I was trying to say all along, even if it’s not what I actually said, specifically :)
Cuchlann
/ 19 June 2009No, I get what you were saying, I just don’t agree. ; D I suppose it can be argued either way, it depends on how one values different things.
vendredi
/ 18 June 2009I think it’s terribly difficult to try and come up with a completely unified sort of theory behind “SF” – one backronym I’ve heard for it is “speculative fiction” – because a lot of the time, that’s the most that all science fiction and fantasy will have in common – some sort of speculative premise. I mean, just speaking of science fiction, we have works like Asimov, Dick, Heinlein, etc. which fall into their own sort of conventions. On the other hand, works like Dune, or Star Wars recall more mythic tropes and probably have much more in common with Tolkien than Asimov (perhaps?).
I think Wolfe is in a sense spot on though about “sci-fi” being a made up term; really, the only reason many books are classified as “science fiction” is just for the convenience of marketing and shelving (which brings to mind some examples such as Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” or “Oryx and Crake”. She’s a famous and well-respected author, so heaven-forbid that her books would be consigned to so ghastly a fate as being shelved in the science fiction section).
Cuchlann
/ 19 June 2009Well, “speculative fiction” was coined by Robert Heinlein in the 50s, to the genre he was writing in. It’s had a weird history since. For instance, someone I know in the Memphis MFA program, whenever I talk about SF, insists on wanting “good speculative fiction,” and when I tell her what that means, says she means it the way Margaret Atwood meant it when she made up the term. Which, uh, is not what happened, but whatever (she also has a skewed view of SF in the first place — what she considers “good” she also considers abnormal for the genre).
Which leads to your second point. That’s very common. One of my roommates not only engages in that, but he admits to it. Most of the SF (and fantasy) he enjoys he also considers not typical of the genre — like the Lord of the Rings. O_o He also doesn’t believe The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is SF, because he likes it, and because McCarthy is considered a literary writer.
If you don’t already know, The Road is a post-apocalypse novel.
A professor of mine, who is far more rational, feels the same — and went so far as to say he thinks the Mad Max movies aren’t SF. I think it comes from a belief that all SF is spaceships and ray guns. The post-apocalypse, like the alternate history, features neither of those, and so they’re both often included in “good” literature by prissy literati, who get offended when the SF fan mentions that they’re par for the course for fifteen-year-olds (the perceived fanbase of SF, according to them).
In fact, Philip Roth wrote an alternate history some ten or twenty years after Dick’s Man in the High Castle, and believed he had invented a new genre of fiction. Oops.
Kaiserpingvin
/ 22 June 2009I think I will henceforth, in defiance of this silly practice, call such fine literature as what Marquez, Homer, Vergil, Milton, and wwhoever else I can well enough argue involves speculative/fantastis elements, “fantasy”.
And I will call Plato “two-dollar sci-fi”.