This shit is pretty unambiguously pretentious and I don’t like it. But I don’t really hold it against the show. It isn’t just the creators jerking off. Opinionated metafiction is one convention in a set of conventions that Bebop calls upon, then shows us through the eyes of a cast that doesn’t hail from the same set of conventions — this technique is a large part of why I like the way Bebop does references so much.

The aforementioned set of conventions is, despite the year in which Bebop came into being, modernism, and it’s easy to understand why the show feels so modernist. Many of Bebop’s references and remembrances hail from the early 20th century, modernism’s heyday. I don’t intend to do a lecture on modernism here — probably we’ve done that already, and you’re sure to find it in the archives. I mean to talk about one general trend within modernism that, though it’s been present in Bebop since the beginning, began to stand out to me at about the midway point.

It’s funny, actually, to find this trend in a show like Bebop. A good deal of science fiction is, as William Gibson put it once, agnostic with regard to technology. The fictional future isn’t unambiguously good or bad — in fact, because it has people in it, it remains entirely ambiguous. Not so much in Cowboy Bebop, whose characters are indeed complex, but whose future is pretty grim. We’ve got a ruined Earth and a sequence of colonies afflicted by relative squalor. If I remember correctly, the only characters we’ve seen wearing expensive clothes have been criminals and warp gate CEOs.

The modernists, too, were nostalgic. Eventually the postmodernists would come along and dispel that, would claim that the past was never any fuller or richer than the present and we only pretended it was, but sometimes Bebop doesn’t acknowledge this. It’s funny because Bebop is nostalgic for a better past that hasn’t happened yet, but it evokes the mood of modernist works so well that it almost has to be.

tl;dr: Bebop’s present sucks and its past was better. I’ll review how each episode from 12 to 19 either reinforces or riffs upon this. Some episodes do both.

Sessions 12-13 (“Jupiter Jazz”)

Setting: a grungy city in which there are only men. These episodes are fairly straightforward, as there’s a lot of Spike angsting over his lost girlfriend and confronting his friend-turned-nemesis. Whenever Spike gets an opportunity to chase after his past, he takes it, consequences be damned.

Interestingly, it’s here that Cowboy Bebop (in all its Americana) chooses to nod toward war fiction.

When war fiction’s nostalgic, it tends to pine for the time before the war in question became inevitable, the time before the world went mad. For obvious reasons, I suppose.

Not so, in this case. Instead we get a character who seems not to mind having been shot at, as it meant he could participate in the camaraderie he holds in such high regard. He thinks of the past as better, though his is a past that might have killed him. It’s not the same, certainly, but it’s a little reminiscent of war propaganda, quite a lot of which coincided with the modernist days (because, you know, imperialism and World Wars). We don’t really see the opposition, nor do we get any political background; we see one group of soldiers shooting at nothing, dodging explosions with relative ease, and kicking back in camp. It’s creepy, and, while Gren does maintain the nostalgia thing in an odd way, he’s creepy as a consequence.

Session 14 (“Bohemian Rhapsody”)

This episode does and doesn’t invert the trend. On one hand, Hex was at the top of his game in his youth. He was a genius programmer and a chess prodigy, and now he’s a senile old man. On the other hand, the entire episode relates the much-delayed resolution of Hex’s striking back at the sorts of things he had to worry about when at the forefront of space innovation. He may well be happier in his senility. His biggest concern now is losing at chess. And death, maybe, though he doesn’t seem the sort to ruminate upon his own mortality. His happiness may be of an empty or involuntary variety, but that doesn’t seem to bother him any.

Session 15 (“My Funny Valentine”)

A strange episode for the purposes of this post, as Faye has no past, in a way. She remembers only the grim universe of the present, in which twenty-year-old amnesiac women are played for all they’re worth, even when they don’t own the clothes on their backs. And yet she retains a certain affection toward Whitney. Con man though he may be, he was briefly a part of her life, and she feels she owes him something for that.

Or we could think of it this way: Whitney was always lying to Faye, but she experienced a brief period of happiness, and that was his doing. This doesn’t let him off the hook, by any means; he’s still an asshole. But she was happy. But…this is complicated.

Session 16 (“Black Dog Serenade”)

This episode is more postmodern (maybe the last was, too). Yes, Jet was happier in the past, and now he’s something of a lonely old man. We learn here that some of his fond memories depend upon fabrications, that in fact his partner was responsible for the loss of his arm. Like Faye, any nostalgia he might express for a past happiness dependent upon his limited point of view or his lack of information would feel somewhat inauthentic. This sort of story cuts to the heart of nostalgia, and I appreciate that Bebop takes the time to do this even while weaving about itself a distinctly modernist vibe.

Session 17 (“Mushroom Samba”)

I can’t decide whether this episode isn’t terribly relevant to my present purposes, or whether it’s so relevant that I experienced an initial sensory overload that led me to conclude that it isn’t terribly relevant.

It continues an occasional, distinctly un-nostalgic theme, a general disdain for the drug culture of the 60s and 70s. Users of traditionally illegal drugs in Bebop aren’t terrible people, necessarily, but they’re depicted as pretty ridiculous. We saw this back in episode 14, too. It’s a stronger indictment if you choose to include all the Red Eye stuff as part of this.

It nods toward colonialism. See the screencap above; “Western World Development” makes me think of nothing so much as Manifest Destiny.

Giant flying blonde white woman bringing the light of pastoralism to the brown-skinned peoples of the frontier! Except instead of a giant flying blonde white woman it was a bunch of white dudes with guns and smallpox, and instead of bringing the “light” of pastoralism they just killed a lot of people. It’d be hard to sympathize with anyone who felt particularly nostalgic about this.

In “Mushroom Samba,” though, space-Kansas is where two or three blaxploitation movies collide. I thought there’d be something to say about this (sub)genre having been removed from its usual urban setting — nostalgia for the city, in other words — but, as it turns out, there’s a western (sub-)subgenre within. Suffice to say that the space-frontier isn’t wholly dominated by white people.

I guess this episode is an inversion, if it’s anything.

Session 18 (“Speak Like a Child”)

If not for the crazy space shuttle business of the following episode, I would’ve ended this post here, as, after a whole handful of variations, it brings the earnest nostalgia back. For all intents and purposes, our heroes spend the entire episode (hilariously) chasing after the means of unlocking Faye’s past, the time when she was happy. Because, remember, her present troubles began only a short while after she awoke from suspended animation. Arguably they began immediately after she awoke, or a little earlier, as she was the victim of a scam all along. And, again, that’s all she knows. She’s lost the good times completely and irrevocably.

We also get a 20th-century-tech otaku. Nice.

Session 19 (“Wild Horses”)

Easy. The space shuttle, one of the earliest reusable spacecraft, saves the day! And with an old man at the helm, no less.

Coda

Nothing in Bebop is simple — clearly, as it took me over a thousand words to justify the statement “Cowboy Bebop is nostalgic,” and to try to finesse my way through those instances in which it doesn’t entirely apply. The variations are the point, though. I’m happy to have discovered that the sense of nostalgia about the show doesn’t come across as an accident or a reference to a bygone movement simply for the sake of reference. What we get instead is a kind of dialogue between the time in which the show was made and the period that it nods toward so often — another example of Bebop’s catechismal quality, its talking to itself.

I offer you a quote from Ghostlightning, whose ongoing effort to engage with Cowboy Bebop’s love-remembering elements is one of the most meticulous and goddamn heroic blog activities I’ve ever seen:

We won’t find anything in Cowboy Bebop that has a reference that figures so significantly in the narrative so as to be the primary source of meaning and value. Cowboy Bebop can be fully enjoyed not knowing a single reference or allusion the show is making.

“A Masterpiece of Remembering Love: Cowboy Bebop; Episode 01 ‘Asteroid Blues’”

I’m certain that’s true. I’m enjoying Cowboy Bebop quite a lot despite being lazy about music and film (as mentioned before). I might be intimidated by the prospect of doing a series like this at the same time as Ghostlightning — walking in the shadows of giants and all, though he of all bloggers wouldn’t want anyone to feel that way — if not for my being reasonably confident that I won’t cover too much of the same ground. This is my first viewing of the show, for one thing. And, where GL’s Bebop posts are love songs to the act of remembering love, I like to write about and fangasm over structural points of interest and masterful acts of manipulation moments of emotional resonance.

Good thing, too. For someone like me, Cowboy Bebop is downright meaty.

As I began, I remembered a time when cartoons from Japan were exciting and alluring and new. A very specific time, I mean. I was in the fourth grade — this was before Cowboy Bebop existed, incidentally — and somehow or another I’d managed to acquire the first few episodes of the Record of Lodoss War OVA from the local video rental place. What I remember most from that viewing isn’t Lodoss War itself (which I had to rewatch to recall in any detail), but the trailers preceding it, complete with cheesy narrator (“This isn’t animation…it’s JAPANAMATION!”). I can’t remember what specifically was previewed. Things like Bubblegum Crisis and Project A-Ko, I guess. But I remember that these trailers must have sampled the most stylish, violent and/or sexy scenes from their respective shows or movies. I was nine or ten years old and infinitely impressed. I interpreted the trailers as a promise.

Then, some years later, I finally did get into anime, and my tastes leaned well away from the realities of the kinds of shows previewed on the Lodoss War VHS tapes. But there was still that promise. Cowboy Bebop seems to have remembered it. In many ways it’s the un-show I constructed to illustrate “anime” in my mental dictionary.

The second thing I noticed was the pacing.

The pacing is weird, which is to say that it’s a little atypical of anime. Often you’re lulled into believing that you’re watching a movie, and you’re surprised when the ending theme kicks in after 22 minutes. Speaking purely practically, it’s a damn effective way of getting people to keep watching.

But it can be disorienting if you come in with expectations. You aren’t always watching people talk or fight or otherwise interact. Sometimes there are no people onscreen, and during many of these scenes the characters don’t bother interjecting via voice-over. There may not even be any music.

The first episode especially shows us a lot of space.

I found myself wondering about the point of it all. It reminded me of the first Star Trek movie — you know, the one in which there’s about ten minutes of plot and 300 hours of pretty lights and spaceships moving really slowly.

That might be an unfair comparison, but I don’t mean it as a criticism. The spaceships-moving-slowly thing works so much better in Bebop. It doesn’t take up that much time, in the grand 26-episode scheme. And it occurs to me that, when I said that Bebop shows us space, I probably should’ve said that it shows us spaces.

Environment (visual, aural) is important in this show in a way that it wasn’t in the Star Trek movie. A comparison with the original Star Trek TV run would be more apt (though not perfect; I’ll get to that when I talk about the cast). Place is a force or “character” here, though not in the same way as in, say, Kino’s Journey. Here it’s less immediately, directly powerful and far more talkative.

If, like me, you pay more attention to the scenes and their transitions than to the dialogue (resulting in many a rewind, let me tell you), you might get the impression that Cowboy Bebop is a show in constant conversation with itself. I don’t mean that it’s “meta” (that it talks to relevant things outside itself), which certainly it is (and does). I mean that its consistency reminds me of an active thought process or an internal monologue. It’s a little like catechism, in other words, albeit considerably cooler.

In the first seven episodes, I notice at least two distinct models for scenes in conversation. There seem to be others, but the following are the most sustained and least personal, and I can make the strongest cases for them.

Q. Does [x] have value? A. Yes.

Ghostlightning again:

I hesitate to use the term “middlebrow” because it is generally used negatively or even derisively, for people or works who “put on highbrow airs” while remaining populist and accessible. Put in a clumsier way, it’s a kind of pretentiousness. But I will use it here for Cowboy Bebop, not only because it has excellent episodes “to balance” lowbrow content as one would classify “Heavy Metal Queen” [episode seven] of being, but rather because the execution of this episode is on a high level.

“Raising the Brow: B-Movie Goodness in Cowboy Bebop 07 ‘Heavy Metal Queen’”

I sympathize quite a lot with the use of “middlebrow” as a nonjudgmental descriptor, but maybe Cowboy Bebop resists such classifications altogether. It almost has no choice but to do so. Some of the creators seem to be the sorts of people who set out to make “art,” but they’re working in a medium that gets panned in the evening news as a gathering of pornographers (and, remember, Bebop aired in 1998). Several avenues of argument are available to people in that position. They could try to topple the canon, at which point all art is low; they could try to expand the canon, at which point more art is high. They could redefine the canon, even. But the real problem is that people talk and think about art in these terms to begin with — that people are inclined to distrust any medium that isn’t 400 years old, and, when such a medium finally earns some “legitimacy,” that its practitioners insist upon rewarding themselves by setting up new divisions of their devising and under their control. The child abused by its parent responds by abusing smaller children.

Cowboy Bebop looks into the eyes of those with brows lowered and those with brows raised high. I don’t think it seeks a compromise so much as it shaves its own brows clean away.

Nowhere early in the show is this more explicit than in the fifth episode, which juxtaposes, in subsequent scenes, an opera house and a convenience store, (religious) opera and porno.

There’s much to be gleaned from the contrast here, but what interests me most is that, by the time all’s said and done at each of these locations, the lines between them have been blurred. The opera house becomes a stage for smut, location of rather messy murder and fanservice vehicle Faye Valentine (who is more than that, yes, but she is a fanservice vehicle). The convenience store with its racks of porn hosts a meeting of old friends the likes of which you might find in a Hemingway story, a brand of narrative with the cultural seal of approval. In any given story there is pondering and pandering. Cowboy Bebop doesn’t try to obscure that by arranging its brows in a particular way; it throws its trenchcoat open and invites you to look.

Oh, also: that fight in the Chartres Cathedral facsimile.

Among other things, Chartres Cathedral is an enduring example of French Gothic architecture, a demonstration of the power of symbols cited by Joseph Campbell, and a launchpad for philosophizing about art, art-making, and authority for Orson Welles and other filmmakers.

Spike Spiegel blows it up with a hand grenade.

Q. Does [x] belong to [y]? A. You’d be surprised.

Cowboy Bebop is really quite American, in the United States sense (apologies in advance if you object to the U.S. appropriation of a word that means two continents; for my purposes, it’s just convenient). You’ve got things like long-distance trucking and hitchhiking, staples of American literature and film thanks to the breadth of the country and the highway system.

You’ve got a Mexican/Tijuanan cantina, “American” by virtue of its being little more than a site of activity for people who aren’t necessarily Mexican (i.e. Asimov Solensen), as in film westerns. (Incidentally, “El Rey” is the name of a fictional town inhabited by American expatriates.)

And you’ve got the music — jazz, blues, occasionally metal. The first in particular represents a mashup of cultural traditions from throughout the world, but it’s generally thought to be distinctly American because the U.S. is where the synthesis happened.

Jet Black is a fan of jazz and blues. We can understand this. He’s (kind of) a cool guy, for one thing. He’s an adult, and he doesn’t seem to be young anymore at that. Lacking the left arm with which he was born, he’s clearly seen and done some things. We’re not surprised that this is the character who dreams about Charlie Parker quoting Goethe.

He makes a comment about singing the blues in the womb or something. But in seven eleven episodes we don’t see him act upon that. He’s lived the blues, sure, but he never gets around to playing them.

In Cowboy Bebop, this is the face of the blues:

Yep, a little white kid. He’s in the news and everything. This image is made jarring by its providing a source for the soundtrack of Spike’s weird episode-opening daydreaming, and then for Jet’s deferring to the kid’s harmonica mastery.

We learn as the sixth episode carries on that this isn’t technically a kid. He “suffers” from a peculiar kind of illness. But despite the episode’s being called “Sympathy for the Devil,” we’re never really shown how hard it is to live as he does, apart from one scene in which his parents/guardians die. Mostly he just makes life difficult for people around him — in a literal way, he is the blues, or he brings them. Being the episode’s titular devil, he might interface with the devil stuff in blues mythology, but I don’t know much about that.

It’s worth bearing in mind that, though I may be inventing a correlation between screencaps here, the whole sixth episode has to do with expectations defied. I’m not going forward without prompting.

Now, how to untangle this?

I suppose it’s partly cautionary. In other words, be careful when making assumptions about the art that a particular person might find enjoyable, applicable, or otherwise useful. Maybe the corollary is that paying attention to the art that a person actually, actively finds useful can tell you something about them, but I’m not so sure about that. Taste is slippery.

I tend to think of it as a nod toward Cowboy Bebop’s appropriating as much as it does from the U.S. and elsewhere. Art may have cultural boundaries in terms of the knowledge it requires of you, but it has no physical boundaries, especially in a setting including both the internet and FTL travel. Jazz doesn’t belong to the United States (or to cool people, or whomever), nor do trucking or hitchhiking as tropes (or as activities, really). The jazz song is an object that transcends physicality and ownership, whatever the IP barons would like you to believe. You hear it and it’s yours. It doesn’t matter if you’re Charlie Parker or a little white kid or a Japanese anime director.

Much like a Haruki Murakami novel, Cowboy Bebop exemplifies or performs this idea even when the scenes aren’t riffing off of each other to that effect. This is almost inevitably what happens as you watch; unless you’re familiar with every culture and every nuance thrown into the mix, you’re appropriating things or being asked to — and I always did appreciate stories that ask you to learn something.

You may wonder how I ended up with a sample group of seven episodes here. Post length, partly. And also because these won’t exactly be “episodic” posts — the episode progression won’t entirely determine the order in which I do things. I’ll have points to make. There will be overlap.

Next up: episodes 1-7 again, plus 8-11, and characters. I may do something about Gibsonian hackermancy, too. We’ll see.

Before we start, I’ll be frank and swift about this: Please take note that we are not trying to define or conclude anything concrete here. The analysis simply investigates and branches out a fan’s, to coin Pontifus’ term, “interpretative strategies”, in order to come up with a proper result. And because interpretations are never always the same, the majority of the basis and processes of this analysis is not concrete, which means results would still remain as an opinionated guess until tested (and, on a more daring note, proven) based on personal (in this case, your) interpretations. Or we could just do a survey and see how it works. I’m not going to go out of my way to say that this is overanalysis. We’re database animals, so feel free to question yourself about it instead. And no, I’m not really mad. Just handing out disclaimers, in case you need to say something about the writing.

Shance: Since I can’t seem to get you on Twitter ot Gtalk, I just made a Gdoc so I can ask your opinion on this Cartesian Plane I made:

Where X = The degree of openness of the fandom to outside stimuli
And Y = The affinity of the fandom in question

Pontifus: Haha, I guess I’d be open/positive, albeit not quite a mindless, rabid fan, but then the extremes are, after all, extreme.

I tend to think of elitists as equally positive and negative, as they’re as confident in the wrongness of your taste as in the rightness of their own, and generally will tell you as much. But then I don’t know what the closed/positive extreme would be. How positive can a closed-minded person be? Closed/positive seems like a weird quadrant.

Same with open/negative, actually. Unless those are people who watch things they know they won’t like. But then, there’s a certain kind of person who enjoys bad things for their being bad…maybe the most relevant part of the graph is the line from the closed/negative corner to the open/positive corner. That seems to be roughly where most people would fall.

Shance: I think I haven’t fully defined what “affinity” in the plane really represents, because affinity in fandom represents a lot of things, like liking bad stuff like porn or fetishes like guro or futanari, or being destructive in a sense like trolling other fans, bashing shows or genres, etc. That’s why I put the elitists in the positive/close quadrant, since they are not willing enough to listen to others’ opinion unless it coincides to their own, or it proves something wrong in the ideals they believe in. The trolls on closed/negative quadrant on the other hand simply just do anything negative like bash shows and disregard opinion just for the hell of it.

But yeah, we could just disregard those two and form the line. Question is, who represents what? Any ideas on that?

Pontifus: Well, I was thinking of something like this:

I mean, I do think that closed/positive people exist. These would probably be the hardcore nostalgiafags –people who really, really like what they like, and aren’t really interested in telling you that what you like is dumb, but what they like is 20 years old and they aren’t really open to anything more recent than that. They aren’t really elitists because they aren’t interested in invalidating what they don’t like; it just isn’t for them. On the other hand, the elitist fans (or film snob fans, as I tend to call them) see themselves as arbiters of good taste, and that job requires equal parts elevating things they think are great and tearing down things they think aren’t so great. These would probably fall toward the center of the y-axis.

The open/negative quadrant still eludes me, though. Are these maybe those people who get great enjoyment out of watching “bad” things while still thinking they’re bad?

Speaking of good/bad, I think this graph has to function independent of any value judgment paradigm. Or, that is, it needs to take into account how fans themselves judge things, without relying upon concrete assumptions about quality. I’ve been assuming that that’s what the y-axis is for; a positive fan likes what they like more than they dislike what they dislike (as suggested by their contribution to fandom discussion/rhetoric), and vice versa for negative fans.

Shance: If we are to go by your definition of elitist fans, doesn’t that make every genre-specific fan fall under this category? Based on observation, mecha fans in particular do this a lot, and so do the moeblob lovers. However some genre-specific fans do have some preferences that are outside the main interest, like fetishes for example. How would you interpret this?

As for the open/negative quadrant, yes, those kinds of people are included. They would love illegal and unethical things like rape, harem, incest, and loliconism, but I think we can disregard if they even think of it as good or bad in any way.

Lastly, do you have a better interpretation for the judgement paradigms? Do we need to include only the important ones, or should we remove everything completely?

Pontifus: Genre-specific fans would be another example of positive/closed people who I wouldn’t call “elitists” — at least, as long as they’re more concerned with liking what they like than disliking what they don’t like (hence positive). To me, an elitist is someone as likely to deprecate things as to appreciate them. I don’t think they’re remarkably positive.

What I’m saying about value judgment is that I don’t think that we should, for the purposes of making the graph, think of anything in terms of legality or ethics. For our purposes, lolicon or rape or whatever is just a thing someone might like or dislike, or be open or closed to. Legality and ethics should have no bearing on the graph; they’re simply too variable. “Negativity” to me would refer to spending more time with one’s dislikes than with one’s likes — say, writing more negative, defamatory blog posts than positive, celebratory posts, regardless of what those posts actually celebrate or defame. It’s all very specific to the individual. The actual, particular objects of fandom shouldn’t matter, at least if we want the graph to be broadly applicable. I’m not saying that we should throw up our hands and approve of people who like toddlercon or whatever; I’m just saying that the graph should function as independently of our opinions as is possible. We open a can of worms when we start passing judgment on what people are into, and I don’t think that’d help anything here.

Shance: I guess the graph needs a major revision:

If we are to denote a certain population for the open/negative quadrant, do you think it’s for people who consume content because they think it’s bad while looking for a reason to like it or call it good? Considering our current outlook on the past seasons and years, this seems to be the case.

And since I don’t have any credible reason as to why the hell I put Trolls on this Cartesian Plane in the first place, I’m taking it out. We’ll have to find a demographic for the closed/negative quadrant, though.

Pontifus: I actually think “trolls” is a pretty good descriptor for the extreme members of that quadrant. I don’t even think they’re all bad, those trolls. Some of them are just mean, I guess, but otherwise they’re the tricksters of the Internet, and tricksters have their uses.

I agree that open/negative people are those who purposefully and systematically consume what they’d call “bad” media, but I’d think that someone who puts effort into trying to like something is more positive than negative. The open/negative person watches Mars of Destruction or Garzey’s Wing because they’re hilariously awful; they find value in those things precisely because they’re “bad.”

For example, the Terribad group of SSCSAV is an entirely open/negative undertaking. They make the “bad” judgment, hence negative, but they still watch a lot of things, hence open.

Shance: Well, for one those guys aren’t really trying to do anything else from those shows, so I guess that’s acceptable.

Time to get a little touchy, then. Since we dodged porn for a bit, I’m going to go back into discussing its part in the plane. If we are to include the perverts and all the tag-frenzied hentai-loving communities in the graph, where would you put it? I initially think they’re negative/positive, but after our discussions I now think they fit in the positive/neutral category (we can’t really say quadrant on this one, can we?). They like their porn, hence positive, but they can be open or closed about it, preference-wise. Of course, preference meaning fetishes and all of the similar sort.

Speaking of which, have you ever thought of a demographic that can actually fit in the center of the graph, i.e. neutral in both affinity and judgment?

Pontifus: Totally agree with you re: porn consumers. That’d be a good characterization of the average viewer who uses porn as porn, anyway.

I don’t know if there’s a distinct demographic I’d peg as perfectly centrist or moderate. Those people probably exist in all the groups we’ve talked about — they’re just less extreme than the really vocal members.

Shance: I guess if we can’t peg a demographic in it we might as well settle with the majority line.

Interestingly, I thought of another demographic during our talk about the open/negative quadrant: Redeemers. They’re people who initially think a show is bad, then watches it to find any factor that would make people think it’s good or passable, hence “redeeming” the show that was watched. I think I’ll add it in here, too.

Anyways, this probably means the graph is good. For now. We’ll just have to wait for further changes. I just hope we’re still around when it happens.

There’s a constant kerfluffle in the otaku-rhombus, and everywhere in nerddom, actually, concerning criticism. Specifically, many nerds want it kept out of their entertainment — despite the fact they engage in it constantly. Academics have similar kerfluffles, honestly; many’s the time I’ve heard a professor complain about “jargon.” Inevitably only the schools of thought they dislike use “jargon;” their preferred schools of thought don’t engage in it. Anyway, this is the first in a series of entries meant to extend an olive branch in the best way a scholar knows how: through teaching and learning together. In this series, we’ll be describing different “schools” of critical thought, how they work, where they came from, what they do, how they’re useful, and so on. We’ll even apply a bit of the theory to familiar texts to illustrate how this is supposed to work from a literary point of view — and remember, literature is just entertainment, so criticism is simply thinking about entertainment. Why? To be further entertained! This post specifically is part of that most dreaded (as most [un]familiar) world, the post-something-or-other. This time, post-structuralism.

Carl Sagan once posited that many Americans (he not having a lot of experience being a citizen of any other countries) distrust science because it requires background reading. To engage in science one must do the up-front work. Literary criticism is similar: many people avoid it simply because they don’t want to do the background reading to know which post-structuralist said what and what we people think of it now. Of course, really, criticism is simply careful and loving thought about something you love, but the background reading provides a platform of similarity from which everyone can begin.

That paragraph serves to introduce this paragraph, specifically, structuralism. As the name implies, post-structuralism is a response to structuralism (these names are awkward yes, but at this point they’ve stuck). So. Ferdinand de Saussure was a French linguist who lectured on the nature of language. If you only take one thing away from Saussure, it must be this: language is arbitrary.

For us, in the year of our flying spaghetti monster 2010, that seems obvious, perhaps even trite. We’ve likely all had that moment of realization, that a word only means something because we decided it does. If you’ve studied a language not native to you, you almost certainly understood this at some level. However, back in the early 1900s this was a little revolutionary. Linguistics was a branch of history, studying where a word came from — all the way back to Latin or Greek if it’s a respectable word. Most people thought of language worked in the way that’s sometimes called the “Adam” principle. That is, Adam named the beasts and the bird and the seas. So a thing’s name was a part of the thing. Think of any fantasy you’ve read or seen where someone’s true name is a handle to the person. It’s the same principle. Saussure described the system of thought on language that, which, with modification, rules today.

Specifically, language is arbitrary. But also specific. Language isn’t simply “made up” in the way nonsense words are. Language is arbitrary, but at the same time everyone must agree on the arbitrary decisions. Imagine a game where a move counts for three points in player A’s rules, but five points in player B’s. A and B can’t play a game until they agree on one common system.

Saussure used a famous diagram that, as a whole, represents a sign — a sign is a language unit, basically. The signified is the thing to which the word is applied, like a tree. The signifier is the word applied to it, such as “tree” or “ki” or “arbor.” Both together actually make the sign, because when we hear the word we designate as appropriate, we think of a tree. Not some Platonic ideal tree, but a tree, maybe one we’ve seen every day, or a special tree (maybe the one you climbed in as a child, or the one that was blasted by lightning in your back yard).

That’s how an individual sign works. All of them work in a system, where each one means something because it doesn’t mean anything else.

That’ s a little weird, but think on it for a moment. “Tree” means a plant with bark and leaves because it does not mean an animal with four legs that chases cars. Without contrasting words, a single word would be useless, as it could expand to be everything. In fact, that’s why we have so many binaries. “Everything” itself is what isn’t “nothing.”

Now, the sign is fine, as far as it goes. But poststructuralist theorists focus their magnifying lenses upon the signifier in particular, assuming in part that signifiers are all we can really work with. This may sound like an almost existentialist argument, but, in “…That Dangerous Supplement…” (or, more affectionately, “…That Highbrow Essay About Masturbation…” or “…That Essay Titled Kind Of Like an Aria Episode…”), Derrida turns it into a matter of “mere” linguistic mechanics.

The basic idea here is that, in attaching a signifier to a signified, or a sound-image to a concept, or what have you, we’re doing two things: 1. creating a relationship between ourselves and the signified, which can only exist via the supplementary signifier, and 2. creating another “terminal” signified, to which we can only relate with another signifier. Of course, your mileage may vary regarding how “basic” an idea this is, but it’s really not that wild, and we can apply it to many fandom concepts with which we’re already familiar.

Consider, for example, one binary that anime often approaches: life/death. Many of us have encountered the idea that death gives meaning to life, and while the idea as it shows up in anime probably has more to do with Eastern philosophy than with Derrida, it’s a good example of what Derrida means by supplementation. A deconstructionist might tell you that death gives meaning to life precisely due to the arrangement of the two words-and-or-ideas in the life/death binary: life happens for a while, and then death substitutes for (absent) life.

We might lament death as the absence of life (as we might lament writing as the absence of speech, or masturbation as the absence of sex, or absence as the absence of presence). But death is useful insofar as it allows us to conceive of life as a thing with certain qualities; sans death, life simply is, but, in light of death, life is z, y, z, etc. As Derrida puts it, when presence becomes absence, the quality and worth of the absent presence becomes apparent. We often say that people lead good or bad lives, but we can only make such judgments — we can only conceive of such a thing as “a life” — with death in mind. This, I imagine, has much to do with the explorations of mortality conducted by such things as Casshern Sins and Bokurano.

So far the territory we’ve crossed hasn’t gotten too thorny. In fact, this all seems like an extension of Saussure — i.e. things “mean” relative to one another. But here’s the strange part: as absence fulfills its role as absence, it becomes another presence. Simply put, death describes the state of a thing as does life. The problem with death specifically is that we can’t exactly substitute something for it — there is no “post-death” at the end of death — and so it’s hard to say anything about death as such other than that it simply is.

Fortunately the hypothetical world of fiction gives us such things as undeath; we might say of a zombie that it had a foreshortened or interrupted death, a death that wasn’t peaceful. And there’s always religious afterlife, I guess. But I digress, and I really shouldn’t in a post that will be long enough anyway. What we end up with is a great chain of supplementation:

This convenient model can be applied to all kinds of things, and it gets particularly interesting when there’s more than one person doing the conceptualizing. Consider translation:

And, as implied however many hundred words ago, this process bears upon Saussure’s basic signified/signifier model, which is, in a sense, a variation on the presence/absence binary. The thing signified is our idea of a “presence” in the world, and we discuss these presences-as-conceived via signifiers, symbols that imply the “absence” of the signified in collective discursive space. Working with signifiers may be about all we can do, but that’s not the whole of it; we also have to consider that the very existence of the signifier gives us a sense of the “form” of the signified — hence the poststructuralist interest in the signifier.

Of course, one of Derrida’s strangest ideas is about the space between the signifier and the signified. Derrida, in his “Différance,” described what one could describe as what Saussure didn’t bother with: how signs work. That is, the actual mechanism of them.

Essentially, différance is that line in the signifier/signified diagram. Here’s the deal: the word différance combines the words “differ” and “defer.” All words both differ and defer, and in doing so they create meaning.

A word differs because, as we saw earlier, a dog is a dog because it’s not a cat. We have lots and lots of different words for things because that’s part of how language works — each signifier is different from every other signifier. That’s the simple part.

A word defers as it sends you both away and back. When you hear the word “dog” you think of a dog, but a dog is not actually summoned into the room with you. You are thrown back in your memory and call up an image of a dog — perhaps a particular dog, perhaps an amalgamation of many dogs — that is in the past, because it is a memory. At the same time, save in rare occasions, the dog(s) you’re thinking of were not in the room you’re in when you hear the word “dog,” so you’re also deferred out to somewhere else.

Now. It is a joke among academics that only two people ever understood deconstruction (the literary lens that grew out of Derridian post-structuralism): Derrida and Cixous (his wife). This is a common joke because Deconstruction is pretty wild, and we’re never sure if we’re doing it the way it was originally meant to be done. But really it doesn’t matter. So.

You may be able to see already how différance is useful when reading a text. A sign in a text, most often a metaphor, symbol, or such-like, works the same way a Derridian sign does. It both differs and defers. I think first of the famous traffic lights and road signs in anime — my favorite examples are from Kare Kano. They are literally things: a traffic light flashing yellow. It is also a representation of a thing, a signifier, as the thing is actually a real traffic light, the thing we’re seeing actually being a series of drawings of a light, and not the light itself. So we’re being sent out and back to traffic lights in our past, and what that meant to us (to slow down). Slowing down, or the need to, is also the import of the sign on the symbolic level, and so we’re being deferred through our deferral into another signified: danger/caution. But the show uses that series of deferments instead of another. We’re constantly sliding back out of the show into our own lives. Coupled with various other elements in the show, such as the shifting art style, the music, the painstakingly realized (and only mildly cliché-ridden) school setting, we can see the show as something that constantly pushes us farther away, with its method, even as it draws us closer with the story and the characters. We’re positioned always as viewers, never as fellows of the characters. There is, in fact, one possible implication in the way the show slides us, defers us, with the sorts of signs and signifiers it chooses: the show could be implying that we are beyond the problems and the timeframe that the characters live in. We can think of other examples of shows that behave as though they’re for one audience and really deal with another (Nanoha springs to mind). Kare Kano acts as though high schoolers are the entire world it deals with, but the signs are both more complex than usual (the art style) and defer us to places that are out of character for high schoolers (traffic lights only mean something that powerful to us when we’re driving, and the typical high schooler hasn’t driven much).

ALL signs, according to Derrida, function with différance within them — fortunately for Roland Barthes, who, for a while, made a living analyzing the signs of day-to-day French life. Barthes did literature, too — he wrote “The Death of the Author,” for one thing — but his Mythologies is founded largely upon such miscellanea as advertising campaigns and strippers. This may be notable in itself, as it demonstrates that (post)structural practices have applicability beyond strictly-defined art; we might analyze as symbols or signs such things as vendor booths at conventions, anime-related clothing, and yes, even anime blogs.

But this notion isn’t particularly poststructural. Barthes is, in fact, something of a transitional figure; he became more poststructural with every essay (which, really, may just mean that his position became more nuanced — if we reduce it to its essence, poststructuralism is more like an extension of structuralism than a radical reaction). The post- begins to come into play when Barthes points out the contradictions inherent to things.

You may have surmised at this point that, thanks in large part to Derrida, poststructuralism concerns itself with contradiction and paradox in ways that structuralism did not. We see this in such concepts as différance, which, again, relies upon levels of separation, but we might also call contradiction the motive of the poststructuralist — in short, if the meaning-values of things come from the ways that binaries function, we may as well reveal and scrutinize relevant binaries.

Barthes, for example, demonstrated that the striptease is a fundamentally chaste act, reinforcing the distance between erotic dancer and viewer. And this isn’t in spite of the particular features of the act — it’s a direct result of them. Everything from the layout of the typical gentlemen’s club to the final article of clothing that the dancer does not remove suggests separation (or suggested as much to Barthes in mid-20th-century France). Such elements as partial nudity and the sexualization of the dancer may imply intimacy, but there’s more to consider beyond what seems most obvious.

We might say that striptease demonstrates a structural contradiction, that it is, perhaps, the binary of intimacy/separation in action. And, if we’re Derridean about it, these contradictions are fundamental to everything — they are, as we’ve seen, the reason things are able to mean, so to speak.

But what good does that do us? The life of the fan is, of course, as rife with contradiction as any other sort of life; these contradictions seem to turn up in practically any sustained examination of the fandom, Azuma’s Otaku being a prime example. Azuma (who, by the way, made a name for himself as a Derrida scholar) deals with how fiction can feel more real than reality; he explains how pornographic visual novels really aren’t about sexual gratification; he investigates different parallel ways of engaging with different parts of texts; he even brings up the topic of otaku sexuality, pointing out the gulf between crazy 2D fetishes and relative 3D conservatism. And yet another contradiction emerges in Otaku that the book doesn’t deal with explicitly: the very idea of the postmodern database seems strange when postmodernism is evidently all about doing away with such all-encompassing structures. We could do this all day, really, but the point is that fandom, as anything, is made of binaries — reality/fiction being perhaps the biggest and most visible — and, in revealing and examining these binaries, we stand to learn something about ourselves.

Well then! With poststructuralism out of the way, we’ve handily dealt with the vagaries of mid-to-late-20th-century literary and cultural theory. Haven’t we?

No. No we haven’t. You know we haven’t. For, alas! there’s another feared and reviled body of critical work to consider, one that may prove even more difficult to wrangle than poststructuralism, insofar as it’s considerably vaguer.

I’m speaking, of course, of postmodernism.

…つづく!

I found Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals at the university library — seven or so months ago. And, what do you know, it’s due back. Overdue, probably. So I suppose I should annotate this thing at long last, for your benefit and mine.

It’s a short book, but I won’t be entirely exhaustive here. I’ll omit basic overviews of things many of us would find intuitive anyway, and some of the more extreme postmodern/poststructural business, in the assumption that you’ll read the book yourself if you’re looking for that sort of thing. It must be said, though, that, while Azuma got his start as a Derrida scholar, Otaku is very readable even if you aren’t so familiar with Baudrillard, Lacan, and their ilk — and, that being the case, I suppose I ought to make this post more or less readable, too.

For the sake of getting the “proper” citation out of the way (and thereby making myself feel better), it is thus:

• Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Azuma’s thesis here is “that the essence of our era (postmodernity) is extremely well disclosed in the structure of otaku culture” (6). He put this thesis forth during a talk in 2001, the essay-ified version of which he makes available for free on his website; you may want to check that out if you want a more extensive overview of Azuma’s position from the man himself.

…[O]taku, who usually display an air of anti-authoritarianism, distrust any method that is not otaku-like and do not welcome discussion on anime and video games initiated by anyone other than an otaku. … In other words, some people refuse to even recognize otaku, while others believe only a designated group possesses the right to speak about them. It has been extremely difficult to take a position that does not adhere to either of these stances. (5)

Tell me about it, Azuma! I’m not at all surprised that this phenomenon isn’t limited to our English-language sphere of anime blogs, where many of us have encountered it in one form or another. Azuma calls it a “dysfunctionality,” and claims that his work here amounts in part to an effort to circumvent (if not remedy) the factionalism of fans and non-fans (5). The degree to which the book succeeds at this will probably vary somewhat widely from reader to reader, but I didn’t feel at any time that Azuma stacked things entirely in favor of either cultural theory or fandom — he is in turns accepting and critical of both.

The history of otaku culture is one of adaptation — of how to “domesticate” American culture. This process also perfectly epitomizes the ideology of Japan during the period of high economic growth. Therefore, if at this time we perceive a Japanese aesthetic in the composition of anime and special effects, it is also necessary to recall that neither anime nor special effects existed in Japan prior to a few decades ago and that their process of becoming “Japanese” is rather convoluted. Otaku may well be heirs to Edo culture, but the two are by no means connected by a continuous line. Between the otaku and Japan lies the United States. (11)

Japanese history, etc. That otaku artifacts are, on some level, dependent on both technology originally imported from America and “the complex yearning to produce a pseudo-Japan…after the destruction of the ‘good old Japan’ through the defeat in World War II” makes me wonder about the position of the American fan relative to this complex interplay of traditions (13). That is, I don’t think American fans are so interested in the construction of a pseudo-Japan — or, if they are, I doubt it’s out of a desire to “overturn the overwhelmingly inferior status of postwar Japan with respect to the United States,” and more out of an interest in fictitious pseudo-Japan as an object of entertainment (13). It’s likely that postmodern Americans are as likely as postmodern Japanese to turn to narrative fandoms in an effort to make sense of the present world — Azuma notes at several points that his broader theories are not meant to be exclusive to Japanese otaku culture — but certainly the westerner’s relation to the east/west convolution that is anime is distinct, not least because we’re re-importing products dependent to some degree on our cultural exports.

At what point do the cultural distinctions inherent to anime break down? At what point does anime become something akin to what Timothy S. Murphy identifies as a “literature of globalization?”¹ Azuma seems to suggest that the otaku arts aren’t quite there yet, but, insofar as “the impact of otaku culture now reaches far beyond Japan” — a fact of day-to-day life for me and, if you’re reading this, probably you, too — the germination of a truly global genre within anime and manga seems at least remotely possible.

We also have to wonder what will happen when American creators claim significant stake in anime projects, as in the case of Heroman and the other Marvel collaborations. If anime is to some extent and in some cases a reaction to the American cultural elements it appropriates, who is appropriating and reacting to whom in Heroman? Is this an example of the smoothing-over of cultural boundaries, or — in the most extreme case — evidence of American capitalistic imperialism?

At any rate, the notion that acts of adaptation mark the beginning of otaku culture seems significant, given the multimedia adaptation processes at work in the anime/manga industry. Azuma attributes the proliferation of adaptations and derivative works to the postmodern fall of the metanarrative and the death of definitive authority, but if the birth of anime was, in a sense, an act of adaptation to begin with, perhaps a culture of derivation was simply a likely technical and logistical outcome.

[The] prominence of derivative works is considered a postmodern characteristic because the high value otaku place on such products is extremely close to the future of the culture industry as envisioned by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard predicts that in postmodern society the distinction between original products and commodities and their copies weakens, while an interim form called the simulacrum, which is neither original nor copy, becomes dominant. The discernment of value by otaku, who consume the original and the parody with equal vigor, certainly seems to move at the level of simulacra where there are no originals and no copies. (26)

In other words, Vocaloid and Touhou. Azuma’s prime example of this is Di Gi Charat, that franchise born of a store mascot when “the stories and settings that form its world were created collectively and anonymously as a response to the market, after the character design of Digiko alone gained support” (40). And I suppose it’s very revealing of my “brand” of fandom that I can’t really get into those sprawling franchises (I mistyped that “fanchises,” and maybe I shouldn’t have corrected it) without much in the way of authorial frames of reference. I’m not hostile toward or dismissive of fan work at all, nor do I dislike Touhou and Vocaloid; I suppose I have thus far simply failed to understand those fandoms, having cut my fanboy chops on western literature and film.

In otaku culture ruled by narrative consumption, products have no independent value; they are judged by the quality of the database in the background. …

…[O]taku consumers, who are extremely sensitive to the double-layer structure of postmodernity, clearly distinguish between the surface outer layer within which dwell simulacra, i.e., the works, and the deep inner layer within which dwells the database, i.e., settings. (33)

Azuma posits the “database” of story elements — character attributes, fragments of plot, and so on — as a replacement for the “deep inner layer” that presumably guided the reading of modern (i.e. pre-postmodern) literature (32). I’m not sure to what degree I buy that; part of me asks whether we haven’t simply done away with deep layers to begin with, given how poststructuralism rendered the semiotic signified inert, absent, or simply another signifier in disguise. But it is the case that fans of anime and manga concern themselves with very specific traits disconnected from any one character or story, and that creators both professional and amateur draw from an array of these traits — we can probably agree that the database exists, whether or not we grant its status as “grand nonnarrative” or replacement metanarrative (38).

Compared with the 1980s otaku, those of the 1990s generally adhered to the data and facts of the fictional worlds and were altogether unconcerned with a meaning and message that might have been communicated. Independently and without relation to an original narrative, consumers in the 1990s consumed only such fragmentary illustrations or settings; and this different type of consumption appeared when the individual consumer empathy toward these fragments strengthened. The otaku themselves called this new consumer behavior “chara-moe” — the feeling of moe toward characters and their alluring characteristics. (36)

Here, Azuma posits the birth of moe as we know it — that’s some srs bsns, isn’t it? While “moe” as a term evidently came about in the 1980s, Azuma locates the turn away from “fictitious grand narrative” such as that constructed by UC Gundam and toward stories that served as vehicles for the data that were the true foci of fandom in the mid-90s (37). And what franchise do you suppose he suggests is the crux of this shift? That’s right, it’s Evangelion — the very show that, in the U.S., convinced a generation of casual viewers of Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon (myself included) that they were actually fans of a storytelling method capable of conveying deep, meaningful, and consistent narrative experiences. And while we were trying to explain Christian symbolism in the context of Shinji’s journey, Japanese fans were dissecting Rei Ayanami into component parts to be recomposed later (by enterprising, market-conscious creators) into Ruri Hoshino and others (42, 49). Funny how that worked out.

It’s easy to see how contemporary “cute girls doing cute things cutely” shows came to be. People may accuse K-ON! of being “empty” — but, at the end of the day, emptiness is kind of the point. K-ON! represents a distillation of narrative into a pure vehicle for characters, who are themselves constructs of tried-and-true moe elements (moe-golems, if you will), which is what new-school fans sign on for in the first place, or so Azuma claims. The author of the linked Japanator article suggests that perhaps “emptiness” is an invitation to bring one’s personal experience to the viewing (which is inevitable anyway, she says, and I agree), but, if Azuma is to be believed, emptiness as such is practically irrelevant to the target Japanese demographic, whose members aren’t really interested in metaphoricity, cultural relevance, and so on, and whose primary concerns are the core components of cuteness, the manifestations of the database they know and love, which might be disassembled and reconstructed ad infinitum.

Which is not to say that a moe show is doomed to what we might identify as shallowness. Azuma is all about Saber Marionette J as an allegory for the late-90s otaku condition (20). And I can’t help wondering what he’d think of Strike Witches, whose regard for World War II history may be more than superficial. As long as moe shows encourage creativity by making their moe elements readily available to viewers, they can’t be all bad, I figure.

All that considered, can we really hold Chinka (which I guess is for real now?) against Danny Choo? Well, maybe — but if we do, we’re probably delving into the realm of broader issues with moe itself. Should we go after Choo’s studio for being manipulative, or should we take it up with those fans who want to be fed pure, unadulterated moe elements? And if we do, are we really doing nothing more than revealing our cultural bias?

The modern Japanese novel is said to reflect reality vividly (shasei); the otaku novel reflects fiction vividly. The characters and stories that [Ryuusui Seiryouin] depict are never realistic, but they are possible in the world of comics and anime already published, and therefore the reader accepts them as real. (56)

Even the novel is subject to database modes of consumption and production, evidently because otaku readers seek consistency with previous fiction (by way of the database) rather than with reality; “the moe-elements extracted from the subculture database seem far more real than the imitation of the real world for the emergent group of consumers in the 1990s” (78). To some degree I suspect that this has always been the case for all readers; however, Azuma speaks of an extreme, a situation in which “[o]taku print culture as a whole is beginning to obey a different kind of logic, one oriented toward characters rather than individual works” (57). The otaku novel is “[n]either literature nor entertainment,” to the extent to which such a thing is possible; it concerns itself, like anime, with serving as a vehicle for database elements (58). I couldn’t tell you how staunchly I’d stand by this notion, but I can tell you that, as a fiction writer influenced by the storytelling methods of otaku media, I find myself highly conscious of character traits as elements that might anchor readers based on previous fiction consumption.

Games produced by Key are designed not to give erotic satisfaction to consumers but to provide an ideal vehicle for otaku to efficiently cry and feel moe, by a thorough combination of the moe-elements popular among otaku. For example, in Air, pornographic illustrations of all sorts are concentrated in the first half, as if to reject the premise that the goal of girl games is erotic satisfaction. The latter half of the ten-plus hours of playing time does not even contain substantial choices; the player only follows the texts as a melodrama unfolds about a heroine. Even this melodrama is rather typical and abstract, created out of a combination of moe-elements such as “incurable disease,” “fate from previous lives,” and “a lonely girl without a friend.” …

…[T]his kind of game…masterfully grasps all of the fundamentals of moe, from the types of narrative to the details of design. …

Therefore, in most cases when they say “it’s deep” or they “can cry,” the otaku are merely making a judgment on the excellence in the combination of moe-elements. In this sense, the rising interest in drama that occurred in the 1990s is not essentially different from the rising interest in cat ears and maid costumes. What is sought here is not the narrative dynamism of old, but a formula, without a worldview or a message, that effectively manipulates emotion. (78-79)

What we have here is a loaded block of text, and I’d like to tackle it from the bottom up.

You’ll notice, toward the end, that Azuma reveals his priorities as a reader here — or he finishes the revelation that began with his early consideration of Nadesico and Saber Marionette J. Azuma and his otaku subjects evidently disagree on what is “deep;” to the otaku, depth means extensive engagement with the database, while to Azuma, depth seems to amount to engagement with some set of cultural or historical conditions — which makes sense, given that Azuma is a cultural critic by trade. Perhaps Azuma is claiming that, in the database-driven world, such a thing as “depth” no longer exists, but this notion relies on a particular definition of “depth,” and depth of experience is, practically speaking, something that varies from consumer to consumer, from product to product, and from individual consumptive act to consumptive act. What I’m trying to say is that I’m a little wary about how Azuma has framed this section — but, alright, I’ll grant that what he’s ultimately saying (i.e. otaku tend to read for emotion-invoking structural elements rather than metanarrative-based meaning) makes sense.

Essentially, Azuma takes very seriously the conception of Key games as “emotion porn.” And, yeah, I doubt there’s much room for debate over whether Key takes advantage of story elements proven effective at making consumers cry. Of interest here is Azuma’s identification of such elements as components of the database, and the implication that otaku use the database to achieve emotional states or to invoke emotive effects. What “is felt as most real” to the otaku consumer is neither “reality” nor “earlier fiction,” but “the database of moe-elements” — Azuma always seems to liken the movement toward otaku culture to a search for authentic feeling (58). Perhaps needless to say, the database consists of elements that make consumers feel certain ways. As such, database-derivative art focuses not on intellectualizing and explicating metanarratives, but on bringing about emotion in its consumers.

The idea that Air discounts sex as a satisfactory or worthwhile goal may even give us some insight into the tangled mess that is otaku sexuality. But we’ll get into that a bit more momentarily.

…[C]onsumers of novel games can be characterized as having two completely different inclinations toward the surface outer layer (the drama) and toward the deep inner layer (the system) of a work. In the former they look for an effective emotional satisfaction through combinations of moe-elements. In contrast, in the latter they want to dissolve the very unit of the work that gives them such satisfaction, reduce it to a database, and create new simulacra. In other words, in otaku the desire for small narratives and the desire for database coexist separately from each other.

…[P]ostmodern individuals let the two levels, small narratives and a grand nonnarrative, coexist separately without necessarily connecting them. To put it more clearly, they learn the technique of living without connecting the deeply emotional experience of a work (a small narrative) to a worldview (a grand narrative). Borrowing from psychoanalysis, I call this schism dissociative. (84)

I’m not sure I follow Azuma here. That is, I get that consumers have moved beyond the need to connect small narratives (individual works) with some underlying metanarrative. But, again, I don’t know how much I buy that the database occupies the space left empty when metanarrative went away. Wouldn’t small narratives inevitably be connected to the database? Its elements “prove” themselves in small narratives; small narratives are picked apart, and their effective elements are entered into the database. Wouldn’t enjoyment of small narratives and enjoyment of the database have everything to do with one another? Or is Azuma just reinforcing his point that “narrative” as such isn’t really important?

Specifically, Azuma’s talking about the disconnect between the enjoyment of a visual novel for the narrative experience it provides, and the enjoyment of a VN as a collection of images, sounds, and divergent, sometimes contradictory narrative bits. The former is what allows us to enjoy Fate’s three routes as discrete stories, and to compare them in those terms, while the latter is what compels us to play through all three arcs and achieve every possible ending systematically. Azuma gives the hypothetical example of the game that allows the player to choose to pursue a relationship with multiple women, but frames each possible relationship, in its turn, as destined: “although the protagonist is depicted as someone who experiences pure love at each juncture and encounters his ‘woman of destiny,’ actually each of the different encounters that results from the player’s choices is called ‘destiny’” (84-85). Perhaps “there is a vast discrepancy between the drama required by the characteristics of the system and the drama prepared in each scene,” but the discrepancy doesn’t result in a jarring, disjointed experience for the otaku player (85). In this sense I suppose I get where Azuma is going.

Psychiatrist Saitou Tamaki raises the following question in several occasions: Why are there very few actual perverts amongst otaku, even though the icons of otaku culture are filled with all sorts of sexual perversions? … (88)

Just as animal needs and human desires differ, so do genital needs and subjective “sexuality” differ. Many of the otaku today who consume adult comics and “girl games” probably separate these two; and their genitals simply and animalistically grew accustomed to being stimulated by perverted images. Since they were teenagers, they had been exposed to innumerable otaku sexual expressions: at some point, they were trained to be sexually stimulated by looking at illustrations of girls, cat ears, and maid outfits. However, anyone can grasp that kind of stimulation if they are similarly trained, since it is essentially a matter of nerves. In contrast, it takes an entirely different motive and opportunity to undertake pedophilia, homosexuality, or a fetish for particular attire as one’s own sexuality. … (89)

Thus, according to Azuma, getting off to hentai is something one learns. That may seem counter to the more intuitive Madaramean Principle at first, but it’s probably true, to some extent. We know at this point that gender is learned, that it is by no means wholly related to biological sex. And I don’t suppose a hentai picture would trigger sexual arousal in someone whose mind took longer to do with it what the otaku mind is trained to do in mere moments. Obviously I’m way out of my league here (and I get the impression that Azuma is, too) — have there been any psychological studies on this sort of thing?

And regarding Azuma’s pointing out the disconnect between enjoying hentai and being a pedophile — well, what can I say? I just wish people would pay more attention to professional cultural critics and less to fear-mongering news outlets (CNN, I am disappoint) and conservative commentators.

In postmodernity, the deep inner layer of the world is represented as the database, and the signs on the surface outer layer are all grasped as an interpretation (combination) of it. (103)

No, no, wait a minute. You can’t overthrow the Platonic cave only to replace it with the Platonic cave. Just saying.

…[I]n the world of simulacra, a parallel relationship (in which A, B, C, and D are all grasped as a “reading” from the same information) is preferred over a tree-like, hierarchical relationship (in which A defines B, B, defines C, and C defines D, etc.)

…For example, in otaku culture…the reality is that information belonging to different layers exists side by side, such as the individual units of work like an anime or a novel, and behind those the settings and characters in their background, and in turn behind them the moe-elements. All such information is consumed in parallel, as equivalents, as if to open different “windows.” So today’s Graphical User Interface…is a marvelous apparatus in which the world image of our time is encapsulated. (103-104)

Azuma calls this parallel mode of consumption “hyperflatness” (102). And it’s a concept that resonates with me personally — I delve into a franchise expecting to be entertained by blog posts, Twitter reactions, and things like TV Tropes as well as by the franchise’s individual works. A work consists of structural elements (in its text iterations) and readings (socially), and I like being privy to all that at the same time. Maybe that’s why I do this blogging thing in the first place.

Still, I have to wonder about how the parallel small narratives interact. Azuma describes a process of “slipping sideways” that occurs when a consumer, seeking final authority or agency (the “invisible”), brings potential candidates for this agency into view, thereby rendering them “visible” — and, in becoming visible, they become yet more small narratives lacking in authority (105-106). But that’s not really what I mean; what I’m curious about is how consumers organize small narratives. To use Azuma’s earlier example of Rei Ayanami and her many derivatives, do consumers create a “group” or “category” for quiet girls endowed with mysterious power? Does Rei hold relative authority in this group because she provided the database with those elements in a substantial way?

With words such as “postmodernity” or “otaku culture” many readers might imagine the play of simulacra cut off from social reality and self-contained in fiction, but this kind of engaged work [Yu-No] also exists. This book was written to create a moment in which great works such as this can be freely analyzed and critiqued, without distinctions such as high culture versus subculture, academism versus otaku, for adults versus for children, and art versus entertainment. (116)

Does the book succeed? Well, I don’t know; I’m not the best person to ask. I already analyze porn games and canonical literature on the same plane, using the techniques of both theory and fandom; in my case, Azuma is preaching to the converted. But I do consider the book a success insofar as it might prove useful to readers on each side of the binaries he mentions — and if the common experience of Otaku allows inter-faction discussion (something I’m hopeful but not unrealistic about), I suspect that’d be just as planned.

Endnotes

¹Murphy, Timothy S. “To Have Done with Postmodernism: A Plea (or Provocation) for Globalization Studies.” Symploke 12.1-2 (2004): 20-34. Project MUSE. Web. 30 November 2009.

That being: pornography is “violent” media.

As the article in question deals with the effects of violent media generally upon consumer aggression, let’s get this out of the way: mass media affect consumers. They affect different consumers differently, and the most dramatic effects require consistent long-term exposure, and no social scientist worth his or her weight in grant money would claim that media consumption alone is likely to turn your kids into mass murderers…

…[T]he weight of the evidence indicates that violent actions seldom result from a single cause; rather, multiple factors converging over time contribute to such behavior. Accordingly, the influence of the violent mass media is best viewed as one of the many potential factors that influence the risk for violence. No reputable researcher is suggesting that media violence is “the” cause of violent behavior. [Huesmann, L. R., & Taylor, L. D. (2006). The role of media violence in violent behavior. Annual Review of Public Health, 27, 393-415.]

…And, anyway, given that “violent media” includes such necessities as newscasts, and encompasses countless artistic works, it’s better that we adjust to it, rather than impeding our own free expression…

If you accept — and I do — that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don’t say or like or want said.

The Law is a huge blunt weapon that does not and will not make distinctions between what you find acceptable and what you don’t. This is how the Law is made. [Neil Gaiman, "Why defend freedom of icky speech?"]

…But we can at least say, with the weight of decades of evidence, that media have effects. As such, figuring out what those effects might be may prove worthwhile. Social scientists agree, and, as you may know, media violence is a pet project of many of those types.

Of course, “media violence” (or “violent media”) is about as vague a term as it could possibly be, and nearly every experimental study and literature review defines it differently. Some, it would seem, define it more loosely than others.

To quantify and analyze mass media reports of the effect of violent media on aggression and violence, we coded every newspaper and magazine article we could find on the topic. All forms of mass media were considered (e.g., television, film, music, video games, pornographic magazines, comic books). [Bushman, B. J., & Anderson, C. A. (2001). Media violence and the American public: Scientific facts versus media misinformation. American Psychologist, 56, 477-489.]

You have to wonder how poor, delicate Drs. Bushman and Anderson would feel if they encountered, by chance or fate, an issue of Comic LO. But I digress (or do I?).

The authors take care to distinguish “pornographic magazines” as a mass medium distinct from other kinds of visual print media — “comic books,” for example, or newspapers, or non-pornographic magazines — and they make sure, via opportune parenthesis and an e.g., that we’re aware that the “medium” of porn belongs beneath that most convenient of blanket terms, “violent media.” Now, I may be pulling a bit of quotational trickery here; maybe I’ve misrepresented the authors’ intentions. Maybe they’re saying that porn is potentially a violent medium, and thus worth researching for that reason. But why distinguish it so thoroughly? Why make a point of searching news databases with the queries “pornograph*” and “erotic*” if those aren’t the sorts of things that fall particularly beneath your definition of violent media, at least for the purposes of your study?

I’ll note that this article was written in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and One, and not by some radical Christian lobby. These are, as far as I’m aware, legitimate researchers. Though, granted, they’re legitimate researchers with an agenda, legitimate researchers who make a point of testifying before government panels and so on. They aren’t wholly without zeal.

Why is porn specifically violent, or, in being porn, rife with violent potential? What is it about we Americans that makes us quake in our boots whenever sex looms on the horizon? Because, whatever it is, I imagine it’s related to that impulse of ours that sends us into a panic when an innocuous nerd looks at cartoon depictions of the deed.

By “Madaramean Principle” I mean that argument made by Harunobu Madarame in the fourth chapter of Genshiken in defense of 2D porn: the human mind can make quite a lot out of very little.

Perhaps the rather simplistic character designs of Strike Witches demonstrate this in themselves. The selectively-censored disrobed Witches, with their overlarge heads and implausible builds, aren’t strictly, technically what we’d probably think of as human-looking — but they’re evocative enough of human beings that we can “read” them as such without much trouble, especially if we’re trained to do so by years of anime consumption. And, to be fair, better they look like caricatures than fall into the uncanny valley.

But there’s a particular example of how significant an impression very minor details might make on us in Strike Witches’ first episode. I’m talking about that character I’ve been calling the “moe grandma” not because she arouses those moe feelings in me, necessarily, but simply because of her character design.

It occurred to me, during this scene, that, aside from coloring and clothing (relatively ambiguous factors, in my opinion, particularly when we’re new to a show and the fictitious or fictionalized people and cultures it presents), there really wasn’t much about these characters that suggested age. Four lines, in fact. So I removed them just to see what would happen.

Not much has changed with Miyafuji’s mom, who is more “comprehensively” aged, I suppose. But I seem to have done the grandma quite a favor.

Is this an example of artistic laziness at work in contemporary moe anime? Maybe, but what does it matter, as long as those four lines work? And they do work, I’d say; perhaps surprisingly so. Rather than bemoan such art for its laziness, perhaps we should praise it for a simplicity that allows a large degree of viewer agency — if indeed it does, but it would seem to me that four well-placed lines can be as authoritative as four hundred.

So, if I may, I’ll make an effort at clearing things up a bit.

Let’s take a look at a few choice morsels from a post by Anime Vice writer Boddington.

In this writer’s opinion, I believe that though the aforementioned titles [Kodomo no Jikan, Strike Witches, Chu-Bra!!] are well beyond the limits of good taste and skirting the edge of being morally repugnant they are not criminal.

I respect Boddington’s admission of his artistic preferences here. Bias is always, always a factor — as Neil Gaiman puts it, “one person’s obscenity is another person’s art” — though obviously there’s more at work in the Handley case than what one finds fappable.

Now, while no children are exploited in the production of hardcore lolicon manga I feel the situation is more complicated than just immediate harm to children who are used in such a way. I apologize if this comes off sounding condescending, but people often forget that all things operate on complex systems. Good and evil, black and white, toast and jam are all just far too simplistic ways to meaningfully view the world. My point here is that in the short term, while no children were victimized to make these titles, lolicon porn manga still promotes the practice of pedophilia and it’s not an immense leap to see how these titles can set the gears in motion leading to the real molestation of children. [emphasis mine]

I’ve hacked this bit into three major claims that, in my estimation, need to be addressed.

Should we consider anything more than whether children were harmed in the making of the doujins in question? Well, yes, I’d say — not that this renders irrelevant the fact that no children were harmed in the making of the doujins in question. Whether Handley’s money went into an immediately exploitative industry (or, as seems to have been the case, didn’t) makes a difference — if nothing else, we can establish with some certainty that the guy isn’t knowingly supporting child abuse. But, as Boddington observes, there are a few more things to consider.

Now, does lolicon manga “promote” the practice of pedophilia? Not really — or, I should say, not by itself.

I doubt I need to explain the degree to which opinions on media effects can be mixed, even in the fields of media studies and communications — you’ve all run across studies of varying repute on the effects of video games on children, I’m sure, some demonstrating that Grand Theft Auto will be the downfall of human civilization, others showing that violent video games don’t make much difference on child development at all. But, as I understand it, experts tend toward a more moderate position. Violent or pornographic material renders consumers more likely to think about violence and pornography. Does it prompt consumers to commit violent acts in spite of the societal norms that have shaped them since birth? No — but if the consumers in question are already predisposed toward violence, the issue becomes less clear.

Here we come to that leap, immense or no, required to demonstrate that loli doujins can result in child abuse. It’s a leap that, to my knowledge, those who sentenced Handley never bothered to make. At no point was it demonstrated that, given Handley’s psychology and background, drawings of girls under the U.S. age of consent engaged in sex acts might prompt Handley to try the depicted acts himself. Perhaps potential harm to children supersedes free speech, but, in Handley’s case, it never seemed clear that there was ever any real threat of children being harmed.

There is, I’d imagine, viable territory yet to be explored by the anti-Handleyites — the territory of the subtle effects of long-term exposure, and of psychological predispositions and their implications, and of relevant studies published in reputable communications and psychology journals — and I’d like to see these explorations, rather than the reduction of lolicon into sex offender fuel, into the unsavory side of the black/white, good/evil binaries to which Boddington objects.

But you’re not here to listen to me whine (or are you?  Maybe we’d get more hits if I just whined about things).  I’m going on an adventure through an essay by Robert Scholes called “The Roots of Science Fiction.”

So I suppose the format’s changing a bit here.  I’m using Scholes as a springboard to bounce my own thoughts from, hoping it provides a trajectory powerful enough to deliver them to you.  So:

All fiction — every book even, fiction or not — takes us out of the world we normally inhabit [. . .]  even the new representational media that have been spawned in this age cannot begin to match the speculative agility and imaginative freedom of words.  The camera can capture only what is found in front of it or made for it, but language is as swift as thought itself and can reach beyond what is, or seems. . .  (205; 212)

What’s the difference between a book and a movie, a trilogy and a miniseries?  For Scholes, it’s in the nature of the consumption of the media in question.  Film must present what’s there, while books can present anything — and, in fact, present what isn’t there even in the novel of social realism.  In more traditional media that’s pretty unarguable, I think (you may disagree), but animation changes the picture somewhat.  How much?

Animation of any sort presents what wasn’t there.  Someone invented it, first as a movie director might, and then as an illustrator does.  Animation occupies a hypothetical space between books and movies, I would say.  Hence the humor of the very first episode of Haruhi:  animation portrays what is really there very often — terrible filmmaking, with nervous actors and crappy camera work.  If one doesn’t view animation as more hypothetical than film, then there’s no humor to that juxtaposition.

However, books are more hypothetical still.  We consume animation in the same way we consume film:  with our eyes and our ears.  That is, in two-fifths of the way we consume reality.  Books aren’t consumed in the same way.  We must see the pages, but seeing them is not enough.  Whereas a certain level of film- and animation-making functions outside language and semiotics, books never do.

Let me go into detail with that last statement.  Yes, both film and animation have codes, standard signs, and the like.  I’m not denying that.  The so-called “Dutch angle” means something very particular.  But on a certain level we are watching people do things in ways similar to the ways we do them.  The semiotic (sign-making) structures may lie so thick on the screen that it’s almost impossible to separate the two levels, but I think we must all admit that there is some core, in a film, of non-signed activity.  This is different from significant activity — a low sigh in an empty room can indicate that a character is sad; that is, we’re not told directly that he is sad, we are shown.  Is that a sign or an indication?  Both?  Hard to say.

Books, on the other hand, do almost nothing outside the realm of signs.  You must be able to, presumably in this order, speak/understand the language of the book, know how to read, and read the language of the book.  The white (negative) spacing of the text affects us in a slightly less semiotic way, but that adds to the mood rather than delivers the narrative/characterization/whatever.  If you can’t read, you can’t read a book.  But you can watch a film.  Many of the filmic conventions won’t make sense to you, but you can watch it and understand the story.

Animation does a little of each.  The disconnection wrought by the unreality of the figures, their “drawn” nature, moves us toward the hypothetical realm of the book.  Their visual and aural nature, consumed like the prattle of the person next to us in line, moves animation toward the film.

Of course, animation is an umbrella that shelters anime, but how does anime specifically function in this continuity?  I am tempted to say it is slightly more hypothetical than western (or, at least, American) animation, but is that true?  Or is it really that I am so familiar with the conventions of western animation that fewer of them strike me as hypothetical?

Scholes splits “fabulation” into two major components:  dogmatic and speculative.  Dante’s Divine Comedy is dogmatic and More’s Utopia is speculative.  He ties them, very loosely, to religious and secular thought, indicating that dogmatic fabulation was more prevalent throughout history, while speculative fabulation will necessarily rise with the secularization of society.  But as time goes on, the speculative passes into dogmatic (I’m oversimplifying here).  Think of the once-avante garde SF that is now not only rear guard but conservative-reactionary.  I’m thinking of course of military hard-SF.  It was once a mode of fiction out of the norm; it is now the gold standard many use to judge others by.

The time of kings was the time of drama.  When ministers ruled and history got its “capital H,” the novel rose.  Now that we know ourselves as part of a natural pattern, inextricably tied into the world, “we are free to speculate as never before” (Scholes 208-211).

So we are not put into place, or positioned by the long flow of History.  We are part of a pattern, affected by it and affecting it.  And SF is born, essentially.  When everything is manipulable, a writer can conceive of manipulating it all, even the laws of physics themselves.

All the forms of adventure fiction, from western, to detective, to spy, to costume — have come into being in response to the movement of ‘serious’ fiction away from plot and the pleasures of fictional sublimation.  Because many human beings experience a psychological need for narration — whether cultural or biological in origin — the literary system must include works which answer to that need.  But when the dominant canonical form fails to satisfy such a basic drive, the system becomes unbalanced.  The result is that readers resort secretly and guiltily to lesser forms for that narrative fix they cannot do without.  [. . .]  Thus the vacuum left by the movement of ‘serious’ fiction away from storytelling has been filled by ‘popular’ forms with few pretensions to any virtues beyond those of narrative excitement.  But the very emptiness of these forms, as they are usually managed, has left another gap, for forms which supply readers’ needs for narration without starving their needs for intellection. The ‘letdown’ experienced after finishing many detective stories or adventure tales comes from a sense of time wasted — time in which we have deliberately suspended not merely our sense of disbelief but also far too many of our normal cognitive processes.  [. . .]  We require a fiction that satisfies our cognitive and sublimative needs together, just as we want food that tastes good and provides some nourishment.  We need suspense with intellectual consequences, in which questions are raised as well as solved, and in which our minds are expanded even while focused on the complications of a fictional plot” (212-13)

That’s a long quotation, but read all of it.  I’ll wait.

What Scholes is describing is what many people view as a bifurcation or (at worst) a disruption between the methods of our literatures (whether they be film, book, or anime).  That is, something entertains us.  We are gripped by the action and emotional drama of, say, Shinji.  Robots and monsters swarm around Neo-Tokyo, and we thrill to the action.  At the same time, the “intellection” is whetted by the moral and ethical concerns, as well as the conceptual space.  What does it mean for the Eva unit to be able to function on its own?  Does that make Shinji part of a machine?  Or has he been piloting something that isn’t really a machine?  Is it right to treat it as such?  What about the scenes where it appears to try to break through the restraints and kill the technicians?  Does it view them as torturers?

There are loads more, of course.  For all that I feel NGEvangelion should handle itself with more finesse, it introduces tons of interesting questions and themes.  So it’s doing both things that Scholes describes, having moved in to fill the gap produced by the shift of the traditional literature away from decent plot and the shift of popular literature away from decent “intellection.”  So far so good.

Except that many in the audience experience these two methods entirely separately.  Eva’s not the greatest example (it being the standard-bearer for the “anime is srs bsns” crowd for years), but think it over.  How many other shows can you think of, where both sides of Scholes’s equation are present, but the audience avoids the intellection because it ruins the fun of the sublimative (that is, the plot and emotional stuff)?

According to Scholes, both are really necessary.  I happen to agree with him, but that’s just me.  Again, springboard:  how are two experienced separately, as though, like time in Hamlet, they are out-of-joint?

I won’t quote chapter and verse here, but Michael Chabon, in an essay, pointed to culture itself.  We’re told that entertaining stuff doesn’t make us think.  Then, because we all believe that, media producers produce along that dividing line, and we get only awesome-stuffs that have no thought or mind-bending stuff with no entertainment value.  You’ve seen the typical art-house flick with no redeemable entertainment value at all, admit it.  Garden State, for me, despite all its pop-culture cache, what with Zach Braff making it and all, was that for me.  You probably have your own.

Eventually you get people over-reacting when the two finally come together, claiming that one’s peanut butter shouldn’t be in the other’s chocolate.  And if you’re a fan of Reese’s, you know that, really, it’s awesome.  If you’re also a fan of Robot Chicken, you know it’s worth killing over.

But as Scholes points out, too much of one without the other strangles the audience — or, to carry his metaphor over, it gluts us.  Everyone will gladly agree that too much thinking is bad — it gets in the way of the story.  But, oddly, few people are willing to admit that too little thinking is just as bad. It leaves us wanting more, even while the “calories” pile up.  Proper entertainment must contain an admixture of the two, or why bother?  Mazinger Z seems like the ultimate entertainment-only property, but in its new iteration at least (I have yet to read the manga) it hinges its awesome robot fights on questions of morality, ethics, lineage, and obligation that really bear careful examination (I’ve tried to do so on this blog, in fact, over here and also here).

To view Scholes’s “sublimation” and “intellection” as drastically separate — even to the extent he views them — seems to me fundamentally damaging.  It implies several things:  that one can’t enjoy intellection, but requires it every so often, like a dose of castor oil or such like.  It also implies what many academics (especially MFA types) espouse regularly, that the “sublimation” is secondary, and to some degrees unimportant.  I would like to think we know better.  But to believe one essentially implies the other.

Joining them, on the other hand, sets us free.  If intellection is a form of entertainment — and what else is it, really? — then we can enjoy it.  And we can deal with the challenging parts of sublimation that often get put aside; hence, I would say, comes the interest much of us share here in revising Formalism.  We’re attempting to get a grasp on the “intellection” of “sublimation.”  How does plot do interesting things?  At the same time, we revel in a sublimative way in the joys of intellection, having nerdgasms when shows decide to let themselves be smart (see my last decent attempt at a 12 Days post, concerning the unlabored but willing intelligence of Bakemonogatari).

Work Cited:

Scholes, Robert.  ”The Roots of Science Fiction.”  Speculations on Speculation:  Theories of Science Fiction.  James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria, ed.  Lanham, MD:  The Scarecrow Press, Inc.  2005.  205-217.

Live action Tanyuu is...live action?

Like Cuchlann, I find myself mired in schoolwork and related things. It’s Thanksgiving break, yes, but it’s still difficult to blog when I know I should be writing an essay about Darwinian rhetoric in Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, or researching transversal poetics and presentism. But fortunately, my research interests being what they are, schoolwork and blog-work overlap from time to time. More often than not, maybe.

What follows is the list of notes (and a few visuals) I used to give a presentation on adaptation and all it entails — or, rather, as much of what it entails as I could fit in twenty minutes or so. My research has centered on the novel-to-film variety, but most of it seems more broadly relevant. These being personal notes more than anything, I make no guarantees as to their cohesiveness, but they should at least be legible — and, with any luck, somewhat interesting.

• I’m trying to figure out how adaptation across media works in terms of narratology and phenomenology, which sounds highly theoretical and irrelevant to actual consumers of media, but I’m trying to approach it in a way that brings in cultural factors.
• Provisionally I’ve thought of writing about Ulysses and its film adaptations, mostly because of the obvious formal changes required in adapting Ulysses to film, and also because I’ve worked with Ulysses before, but that may change, especially given that I want to come up with ideas that are applicable to adaptations of all kinds — including novel and film, but also theater, sequential art, video games, and other media gaining popularity as vehicles for adaptation (it seems like any TV show that reaches moderate popularity gets its own board game now) — so most of my research at this point has been on adaptation in general.
• Mouvance, introduced by medievalist Paul Zumthor, specifically regarding medieval oral tradition [which I've discussed previously; thanks again IKnight]
  • Zumthor uses the term “author” to refer to writers, reciters, and scribes, considering medieval authorial anonymity; the text is, in one sense, a representation of the “author’s relationships to the world;” what matters to Zumthor is not the “extratextual” author, but the author as “textual persona,” and thus he is concerned primarily with the relationship between author and world as represented in the text
  • If we understand the text in the usual way as one instance or representation of the work, the “work” with which Zumthor is concerned is not the hypothesized archetype of a stemma [in other words, the imaginary ideal manuscript -- an author's draft or fair copy, perhaps -- that each text tries or purports to reproduce]; it’s instead the composite of all related texts, and it changes with each text produced; the text achieves a degree of independence from the archetype, rather than being simply a corrupt representation thereof

Mouvance

• Mouvance is problematic as a way of dealing with medieval texts; the process of compositing texts into a work can only take place in the mind of the reader, and while this may function for contemporary readers with access to multiple manuscripts, medieval texts were often highly local, and readers would have had access to one or few; with that said, mouvance may be useful as a way of dealing with contemporary narrative production, particularly regarding adaptations of a core plot produced within a relatively short period of time for similar audiences
• I’m appropriating mouvance as a way of thinking about how a franchise or intellectual property works as a composite of its texts, particularly in terms of consumption
• Probably my central concern here is how consumers value the texts of a franchise relative to one another.
  • One popular idea is “adaptation decay,” the notion that, in the transition from original text to derivative, something will almost unavoidably be lost; this may or may not result in a perceived loss in quality [see TV Tropes]
  • There may be some merit to this; critical writing on adaptation has generally focused on the concept of fidelity to an original, whether as a means of determining the value of a derivative or in a reactionary way as a concept that critics should not weight too heavily, if at all; it depends in large part on how we conceive of form and content, but, whether we’re poststructural about it and concern ourselves mostly with form, or believe that there is some tangible transfer of “content” between related texts regardless of form, differences in form will certainly result in differences in reading
  • I’ve looked at several models of the transition from source to derivative, and I’m interested in three in particular:
    • The narratological or “genetic” model describes the thing transferred as a “deep structure,” a basic relative arrangement of signifiers; these signifiers will certainly be altered individually during the shift from one medium to another, but their relationship to one another will be recognizable from the source narrative, though rarely identical, if ever; I’m interested in this model simply as a way of describing how adaptations are made

The genetic model of adaptation

• This is related (I think) to the question of whether an adaptation is (or should attempt to be) an imitation or an entirely faithful copy of its source; the genetic model leans toward imitation, if we define “imitation” as the act of drawing enough but not too much from the source material; this seems reasonable, considering that formal differences essentially render copying impossible
• The decomposing or recomposing model describes the process by which, once consumed, adaptations are decomposed into a common pool of signs, and the boundaries between them become uncertain; essentially I’m using mouvance to suggest that, for the purposes of reading, the franchise functions as this mass of indistinct signs, to be drawn from and added to when reading any text of the franchise

The decomposing/recomposing model of adaptation

• The trumping model is concerned with which adaptation is “best;” investigating this model may reveal insight into how consumers value adaptations (a contrast to valuing fidelity to the source above all)

The trumping model of adaptation

• As I research, I’ll look for evidence of these three models operating simultaneously, as they don’t seem mutually exclusive.
• I’m also interested in how various media happen — how they’re read or consumed. So far I’ve only looked at novels and film [during this bout of research, anyway; otherwise I've had some ideas].
  • I’ve come across a few possibilities: that film and novels are both essentially visual media (which I don’t buy); that film and novels share the medium of the human consciousness, and differences in physical mechanics are of little importance (which discounts the importance of form relative to content too much, as far as I’m concerned); that, despite the apparent relative immediacy of film, the film and the novel both take place in the “present tense” during consumption (I more or less agree)
  • Any similarities in the reading process between two or more media may help me determine how one text affects another
• Ultimately, the only way to get a clear sense of how adaptations function within a franchise is to consult the responses of consumers — both academic consumers and the “lay” audience.
  • The case of Ulysses(1967)
    • Before its release, it achieved publicity as a rallying point for the cause of free speech (likening it to the novel); director Joseph Strick maintained publicly that he would not pollute Joyce’s vision with his own (possibly as an appeal to viewers who valued fidelity)
    • Film reviewers expressed concern as to whether an audience with no experience with the novel could appreciate the film (the film was, perhaps, less an autonomous adaptation than a directorial “reading” [implying a spectrum with reading at one end and adaptation at the other?])
    • Critics who valued fidelity considered the film a failure [but it's rated 6.4 on IMDb, which could certainly be worse]
• It’s probable that the relative function of related adaptations in the reading of a given consumer — that is, how great an impact each previously-experienced adaptation has on further reading in the franchise — is related closely to how the consumer assigns value to individual texts. By consulting individual consumers, we might be able to draw conclusions about the social factors associated with various ways of reading, and, with any luck, patterns indicating the underlying interaction of adaptations will make themselves evident.

References

Elliott, Kamilla. “Literary Film Adaptation and the Form/Content Dilemma.” Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004: 220-243.

Geraghty, Christine. Now a Major Motion Picture. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008.

Griffith, James. “Introduction.” Adaptations as Imitations: Films from Novels. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997: 15-75.

Zumthor, Paul. Toward a Medieval Poetics. Trans. Philip Bennett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

Images

First edition Ulysses — http://www.theworldsgreatbooks.com/ulysses_wraps.htm

Ulysses (1967) film — http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Barbara-Jefford/dp/B00004W1A9/

Mari Kusakabe has a few levels in awesome; she makes that much clear to us early on. She’s also a single mom, which is fine by me, as I think single mom heroines can have depth that your average action lady tends to lack. She has a daughter at home, and the titular earthquake happens to coincide with said daughter’s birthday, and she grapples the ordeal with a magnificent poker face, adding to the dramatic tension in a nice way. We know that her daughter could be dead, or that Mari could (hell, probably will…if she doesn’t, she’ll trump Kamina threefold as far as I’m concerned) suffer a breakdown at some point, and neither is an especially pleasant prospect.

We also learn, in episode three, that Mari is a widow. Now, it’s not certain that her husband was the father of her child; we can only assume as much from the dialogue. Nor is it certain that Mari didn’t do her fair share of gallivanting before her marriage. The point is that Mari presumably didn’t come across her child accidentally, and she isn’t a single mom due to divorce. Her situation seems to be the outcome of the most “correct” sequence of events, according to a conservative/traditional morality. I wonder, then, if she’d be such a heroine if it were otherwise — how many single mom heroines in anime and manga entered into single momhood in “questionable” ways?

The adoption/de facto adoption/non-literal parent-child relationship route seems to come into play with some frequency. I haven’t seen Seirei no Moribito, but isn’t that the case there? The protagonist of 20th Century Boys (which I just started, so go easy on the spoilers plzkthx) is, as of chapter four, a kind of righteous dad insofar as he acquired the child under his care without even the use of sex (it’s his niece). Then we’ve got widows like Mari; a recent example that comes to mind is Soyon from Kemono no Souja Erin (though I didn’t get far in that, either), and there’s…er, [classified information] from Clannad, of course. But are less “respectable” single parents often relegated to Minor Character Land? My main problem is that I can’t think of many at all. And is my perception somehow off-target to begin with?

Help me out here, O wise internets. Share your experience so that the gaps in my experience might be rendered irrelevant.

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.