To be fair, it wasn’t that bad — Clannad provided solid entertainment all the way through, and for that it deserves credit. I’m fairly quick to drop any show that I wouldn’t rate 7 or above on MAL, after all, and I never once felt the desire to cut Clannad short. The title of this post should not by any means be taken literally (if such a ridiculous portmanteau could ever be taken literally). But Clannad could’ve been…I don’t know, something else. It is as Nazarielle said:

What I’d love to say is this: somehow the junk doll and the girl make it over to the ‘real’ world and that both revives Nagisa and Ushio. This would be ideal, but so unrealistic that I can’t really see Clannad pulling a silly trick like this. It’s basically a cop out. It completely trivializes the emotions we spent on Nagisa and Ushio.

He adds later that “all the emotions spent on the stuff that happened after Nagisa died were null and void,” and I’d agree, to a point — the emotions still happened, but the conclusion didn’t seem to follow up on them in a satisfying way.

I’m hesitant to sit here and harp on what Clannad isn’t when I could be trying to figure out what it is, but I think I can get to the latter by way of the former, so bear with me. I think it’s safe to say that Clannad is not, ultimately, tragic — it employs truckloads of tragic elements, and it managed to make me want tragedy, but it certainly isn’t tragic in the same way that Air is tragic. Air has its problems, sure, but it is a robust examination of tragedy and catharsis — it has classical/high mimetic tragedy, in the sense of great people falling from great heights; it has post-Victorian/low mimetic tragedy, which, according to some critics, focuses on the place of the average individual in society (think Death of a Salesman or The Glass Menagerie); and the whole thing is practically catharsis incarnate, considering the ending. Despite having known the Clannad visual novel’s good end for almost the entire duration of the show’s run, I had come to want a satisfying low-mimetic ending, in which Tomoya, a normal guy, suffered through the tragedies of life, and had to live with the aftereffects, as we all do. Such an end needn’t have even been wholly depressing; he would’ve lost his first wife and child, true, but his problems with his father would’ve been put to rest, he still would’ve had de facto parents in Akio and Sanae, and of course he could’ve leapt eagerly into the arms of Kyou-sensei, who was snubbed in favor of Nagisa even though she was probably the first to have feelings for Tomoya. All may not have been right with the world, but it would have been satisfying in the same way the Tomoyo Chapter OVA was satisfying, focusing on things as they are in the world rather than things as they would be, given magical other worlds and time travel.

This is very revealing of my preferences. I profess to be thrilled that the cyclical nature of Fryean modes seems to have brought us back toward myth and romance in recent decades. It’s probably safe to label Clannad romantic; it includes characters (specifically Tomoya and Ushio) who, in their otherworldly incarnations, transcend average humanity, and it employs a setting in which good deeds do not go unrewarded (Tomoya earns the magic lights by completing each character’s arc in a “good” way, after all). But, for me, there must be some anchor in the low mimetic. I prefer characters who are not several degrees greater than those around them; stories of prophesied archmagi and “chosen ones” make my skin crawl. That’s not to say that great individuals cannot be central to stories that feel true to life — relatability is, I think, independent of Fryean mode, and more dependent on individual readers (and possibly on plain old quality of writing) — but I’m more inclined to give a story about the rabble a chance. Perhaps I’ve been influenced more by the literary establishment I claim to dislike than I care to admit to myself (though I still prefer the low mimetic over irony most of the time, and I still think postmodern fatalism is dumb)¹.

Clannad does restrict its characters to the confines of average humanity most of the time, and I like that. What I don’t like, necessarily, is the show’s giving Tomoya a life that feels authentic, albeit tragic, and then revealing in the end that the man behind the curtain wasn’t low mimetic tragedy after all — insofar as everything works out in the end, the family ends up together, etc., it was romantic comedy², from Tomoya’s perspective. Honestly, it didn’t have to be one or the other; there’s this thing called tragicomedy. Tomoya could’ve lost his family, and, through force of human will, made a new one. In that case, the other world would’ve been more a metaphor than a tangible thing, and it’d be hard to call Clannad romantic at all — I wonder if my dissatisfaction lies somewhere in a deep suspicion of romance in general, something I didn’t know I had.

You might argue that Tomoya suffered enough, that living through years of loss was adequate to render the show tragicomic, and you could make a good case for that, I think. After all, tragicomedy requires an ultimately good end, I believe. But I’m having a hard time convincing myself that Clannad is tragic at all, ultimately, when all its tragedy is erased by magic.

Endnotes

¹Frye notes that resentment toward or dissatisfaction with the previous dominant mode is common, so perhaps there’s no avoiding it.

²The city’s characterization as a family muddles things a bit; possibly it’s actually low mimetic comedy, or it’s both low mimetic and romantic. On a related note, romantic comedy is often idyllic, and one could probably argue with some success that the suburban/small city idyll has joined, if not replaced, the pastoral. The city as family may have less to do with society than with idealizing that sort of city, or both may be the case.

You knew she'd show up eventually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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