You should probably expect this from me every once in a while — that is, in this post I am going to trace some of the Gothic tropes in Shin Mazinger Z.  The Gothic is sort-of my thing — or it’s becoming so.  Seriously, though, it all makes sense.  Trust me.

Really defining “the Gothic” is kind of a rough job.  It started in 1764 when Horace Walpole published a novel called Castle of Otranto. The entire novel supposedly came from a dream Walpole had, in which he saw a giant, armored hand thrusting into a room.  That and more appear in the novel itself.   Since then the genre has become / sucked in a lot of different things.  The essentially realistic romances of Ann Radcliffe are also Gothic (in which nothing supernatural ever occurs, though characters think ghosts are appearing, until the ending proves otherwise — think an O. Henry story, but not as well done).  Others, like The Monk, reveled in violence, rape, incest, and all sorts of mean and nasty things.  The Gothic is often associated with architecture (literature originally borrowed the term from the study of Gothic churches), but even the classic ruined castle isn’t necessary:  Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others, consciously practiced the Gothic without castles.  A whole lot of the Gothic, no matter what else they did, was concerned with family lines, lineage, inheritances, and the like.  So what the hell is it?

Let me wield the power of quotation at you for a minute:

The more a work frightens, the more it edifies.  The more it humiliates, the more it uplifts.  The more it hides, the more it gives the illusion of revealing.  It is the fear one needs:  the price one pays for coming contentedly to terms with a social body based on irrationality and menace.  Who says it is escapist? (Franco Moretti, qtd in Clery, 9)

According to Moretti, the Gothic deals with a threatening world by expanding the threats, making them worse.  This argument is very common, and we’ll use it in a minute.

The Gothic novel draws its plots, its motifs, its ghostly effects from various sources :  the supernatural realm of the ballad, and all that was mysterious and eerie in epic and the drama.  The traditional lore of old, heathen Europe, the richness and splendour of its mythology and superstitions, its usages, rites, and songs, in short everything wild and extravagant, was rediscovered by scholars about he middle of the eighteenth century and was immediately recognized as  source of powerful material by contemporary writers. (Varma 24-5)

The Gothic is a kind of amalgam literature.  Again, useful in a minute.

Now comes the part you’re probably waiting for:  how does this apply to Mazinger?  There are the obvious connections:  it’s science fiction, and in some sense SF is always related to the Gothic (more or less).  Brian Aldiss makes the connection when he claims, “Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould” (8).  Historically speaking, Aldiss and others tie SF’s origins to Frankenstein, a Gothic novel by Mary Shelley where a scientist toys with strange, possibly forbidden, sciences.

Does this sound familiar?

That’s the other painfully obvious connection:  Mazinger is partially about a mad scientist, one of the prime tropes that connects the Gothic with SF.  However, connections like that wouldn’t lead me to want to devote this much time to the subject — I do love mad scientists, but that’s another post.

There are other elements, possibly more important elements, to consider.  Mazinger Z itself is a pretty good place to start.  Juuzo calls Mazinger “castle of black iron,” which he leaves to Kouji to repay him for his parents’ deaths.  So it’s a kind of inheritance, and even figuratively described as a black castle, the traditional Gothic inheritance.

Mazinger as a castle is odd, at first glance — it walks around.  Wouldn’t it be a suit of armor, or a weapon, at least?  So long as Grandpa was being poetic, he could have called it a “black sword.”  But calling Mazinger a castle is very pointed.  In both Gothic and typical medieval traditions (including the Japanese medieval era), the castle is obviously a symbol of military might and power, but also a symbol of any sort of power.  If you own a castle, you own land, and land is the power to do what you want in a medieval society.  The castle becomes a symbol of medieval power.  Shin Mazinger Z juxtaposes a very old symbol with a very new one:  the super robot.  Super robots (and various other power suits) are typically symbols of newness, of a kind of ultra-male power to conquer, like the rocket ship.  But the castle is all about the past tense.  If you have a castle, you already got that power, it’s available.  The symbolism of Mazinger as an iron castle transforms it from a weapon that can be used to gain power into a place from which already garnered power can be drawn.  Kouji has inherited power from his family, he doesn’t need to go out and get it.

There’s a lot of Gothic in the “back up singers” too.  Most of the villains fit the bill rather well.

Ashura is one of the most obvious, but all of Dr. Hell’s henchmen appear to suffer from some form of bodily abnormality.  A frightening shift in the body itself is yet another common Gothic trope, though it’s viewed as a 19th century evolution of the form.

In place of a human body stable and integral [. . .], the fin-de-siècle Gothic offers the spectacle of a body metamorphic and undifferentiated; in place of the possibility of human transcendence, the prospect of an existence circumscribed within the realities of gross corporeality; in place of a unitary and securely bounded human subjectivity, one that is both fragmented and permeable.  Within this genre one may witness the relentless destruction of ‘the human’ and the unfolding in its stead of what I will call [. . .] the ‘abhuman.’  The abhuman subject is a not-quite-human subject, characterized by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other.

This…  Yeah, this seems pertinent.  Not only Baron Ashura, but Blocken and Dr. Hell suffer from this kind of abhumanity.  Ashura is simply the best example.  Rotting in their grave, two lovers were revived by the terrible scientific knowledge of Dr. Hell, but halved and pieced together, a constant reminder of the “gross corporeality” and the fragmentation mentioned above.  Blocken’s head is off his body.  I have no real idea what is wrong with Dr. Hell yet; he’s blue.  Not only does this constant visibility of physicality underline the Gothic tendencies of Mazinger, it also highlights the primary theme of the show:  choice.

As I said, Kouji isn’t trying to find power.  He has it.  Boy, does he have it.  He does seem to be striving for a kind of socialization.  His home life was relatively happy, in the short glimpses we got of it, but he did lose his parents, apparently due to something his grandfather did, and then his grandfather was killed as well.  Kouji’s primary motive, at this early point, is simple revenge.  The choice is, of course, posed lucidly by Juuzo:  Kouji can become a god or a devil.  Both are evident in the show.  Mazinger resembles Zeus, one of the other super robots is based on Aphrodite; meanwhile, the Mechanical Beasts are terrible monsters and demons.  They are the poles of this field that Kouji’s caught in.  Juuzo didn’t care.  He had a responsibility to his family, and he fulfilled it; whatever Kouji does with his birthright is up to him (shades of the supposed objectivity of the scientist?).

Kouji is the Gothic protagonist in its fully realized form:  the Byronic hero.  A synthesis of the traditional heroes and villains, the Byronic hero has all the qualities of the villains and enough from the heroes to help us sympathize with them.  Good and evil?  What are they to the superman, the figure above humanity?  Byron’s Manfred sees the capitulation of this figure, when the eponymous character seeks to lose painful memories, and in his quest he will petition God, spirits, demons, death, and finally Satan himself, but unkneeling and proud all the while.  The Byronic hero could go either way — but usually went to the bad (or, dare I say, BAD END).  The Gothic themes surrounding Kouji help us to understand the position he’s in:  he has no real debt to society.  His castle may not be in the depths of the Apennines, but it is removed from the world all the same.  He gets his power from it and needs no other.  He is circled by the bodily world:  ruined but powerful bodies on the one hand, abhuman and devilish, and on the other hand the regular folks who are familiar, human, but powerless — even their super robots are useless against the kikaiju.  The dark undercurrents the Gothic tropes lend to the show not only help us see what’s happening, they also put into some thematic doubt the outcome.  In Kouji’s position, why bother being good?  What would come of it?  Perhaps we can assume he will come out “good” in the end (of course, if you’ve read/seen a previous iteration, maybe you wouldn’t be assuming), but the ambiguity, the question, is the place where the emotional action of the show takes place.

Further Reading:

I dealt more with Lewis’ The Monk here: [->]

E. J. Clery’s The Rise of Supernatural Fiction: 1762 – 1800: [-> google book link]

Varma, Devendra.  The Gothic Flame. [->]

Brian W. Aldiss’ Billion Year Spree: [->]

Hurley, Kelly.  The Gothic Body:  Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle: [->]

I also wrote about the Gothic villain (in relation to Crest of the Stars‘ Baron Febdash) here: [->]

Ghostlightning on Baron Ashura: [->]

Ghostlightning on some of the generic markers of “super robot” (in contrasting it with “real robot”): [->]

Tags: ann radcliffe, brian aldiss, castle of otranto, frankenstein, gothic, science fiction, shin mazinger z, super robots, the monk

Thus spake Cuchlann on Sunday, 28 June 2009 at 9:46 pm, and Anime, Literature 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.