So with my break in full swing, tons of work to do, and crappy weather all around, I decided to finally start Aria.  I thought I would include my thoughts on it here, at least until I have enough thoughts for a proper post on the subject (re: I’m writing a paper and full-length SF.c posts are kinda rough right now).

ep1:

My first thought as pigtails comes flying into the city — this was Mars, once.  Now it’s just gentrified.  Terraforming is a destructive process — see Star Trek II.

Stealth customer! 

Oh, that’s a bad callback to a Delany book…  Someone stows away in a boat in City of a Thousand Suns…  But the grenade…  Yeah…  Bad thoughts.

Creative networking skills.  Blackmail is probably a better tool than we know.  Wait, Kare Kano.  So we knew about it already.  Done.

So, you can’t cook your own food back on Earth?  Hmmm…  Tension in the setting.  It’s interesting that a very old-world setting (Venice) has been transposed into the place of the new-world “frontier” (not in the wild west sense, but in the boundless possibility sense — I guess not so much “new world” as “1800-early 1900s America).

It’s also interesting to be watching a show about terraforming Mars now — as there’s speculation cropping up that the last Mars lander might have destroyed evidence of microbiological life when it landed.

This terraforming job would be immense.  I read Red Mars, I know the speculative effort that would have gone into it.  The sky’s blue, even, just like Earth.

POTATO NOM!

Sigh.  It’s pretty typical in anime, but I dislike it when someone puts in a lot of effort, would succeed, and some random happenstance puts the better, more awesome (supposedly) person in the position to invalidate all the effort.  

Also, yay for moralizing? 

endnotes:  interesting.  the first episode introduces characters, the setting, and a lot of uncomfortable glosses about the planet that hints at a disconcerting underbelly.  Unfortunately, I know from Pontifus’ posts they won’t go too far into that directly.  Oh well.

ep2:

Oh god no, the windmills!  They’ll destroy us all!

I think, traditionally, this super-high tide is due to both the sun and the moon pulling in the same place?  The sun’s impact on the tides is minimal, given its distance, but it does stack with the moon’s pull.  

On second thought, of course, no.  That should happen once a day.  My Achilles Heel, when it comes to astronomy, is that I have trouble visualizing things.  Also, I ran into what Scalzi described at D*C as the “math wall.”

Sailor hats make everything better.

Okay, not everything.

And the foot fetishists explode.  BOOOOM!

I will never remember anyone’s name…  they all sound the same.  Assonance for the…  uh…  ?

There’s something generally interesting about watching people do their stuff.  What I mean by that is, at a job that’s not quite mundane — as compared to office clerk, fry jockey — we derive a kind of pleasure from seeing a skilled or learning person go about their job.  It’s usually much more interesting than writing about writers, or filming actors.  Curious, as I certainly don’t aspire to be an oarsman anywhere.  

Though my GF is currently wafting down a river on her way to dry dock her family’s barge.  Huh.  Guess this was a good day to start Aria.

Yesterday I experimented, and came up with the best teriyaki pork…  damn it was good.  I learned recently that meat, in the cooling process, will absorb fluid surrounding it, as the cells swell up again.  Good time to add the teriyaki.  SCIENCE!

“Orange Planet?”  Venus?  

That’s good old fashioned family sexism.  

Also:  character development is DEVELOPING.

It’s interesting that Aika’s (I guess) motivation is to better herself, but she’s not going off to school, or reading philosophy.  She’s learning a job that fits with what she’s looking for.  I mean, the whole show’s a bildungs-roman to begin with, but still, it’s neat.

Aika’s faces please me.

Much better end on this one.

endnotes:  Fun times.  The theme of altered settings reflecting altered behavior calls back to the change in scenery both Akari and Ai went through in coming to Aqua, as well as the changed scenery/behavior of the terraforming itself.  

Dunno if I’ll do more of these blow-by-blow posts.  I’ll probably come up with something in the next handful of days — at any rate, I think I’m a few days away from finishing my paper, at least.

Now that I’ve challenged the heterosexuality of your pure, innocent gondoliers, let’s explore the gritty underbelly of the planet they gondolier upon. Not that the underbelly is really very gritty; normally it’s just pleasantly soft and susceptible to the application of stimuli, like that of a cat. It isn’t perfect, no, but it’d be boring if it was.

Months ago, I noted:

It’s likely that Aqua has its share of problems, and often we must infer these from the view we’re given through Akari’s rose-tinted glasses. Consider Akatsuki’s borrowing money from his brother; could this mean that the people who control the weather are underpaid? That’s an important job, and such a situation wouldn’t say much in favor of Aqua’s economy. Perhaps Akari has the luxury of introspection because Aqua’s economy is a one-trick pony, and the tourism industry, spearheaded by the undines, brings in all the money.

We learn in Aqua that Akatsuki is an apprentice himself, which, combined with his personality, explains his lack of money. So much for the imagined economic apocalypse I tossed in Aqua’s general direction. Not that Aqua makes its eponymous setting seem perfect, for it also drops this intriguing factoid:

Is that some sexism? Why, yes, I believe it is. I have nothing to say about sex/gender discrimination that hasn’t been said already (do I look like a gender critic to you?), other than perhaps this: in this case, is it really such a bad thing?

Lest I seem porcine in my misogyny, let me explain. I don’t mean to suggest that discrimination of any kind can ever be a good thing, but I can only resent it so much here when it pigeonholed Akari into a position that lets her shower her optimism upon as many willing or unwilling showerees as possible. What sort of franchise would Aria have been if Akari was, I don’t know, a mailwoman? Not a bad one, necessarily, but Aqua’s tourism industry would’ve lost one of its most valuable members to a delivery service. I prefer Akari the rosy lens over Akari the overlooked infrastructure cog, anyway. In analytical terms, the workforce discrimination provides implicit characterization for Akari and company, tying them to the setting both by giving them a possible motive for being undines in the first place and making them seem like the sort of people who concern themselves more with making the best of what is than worrying about what could be — which is, after all, Akari’s apparent purpose in life.

Besides, were Aqua perfect in every way, Akari’s optimism wouldn’t be so impressive. I enjoy these brief glimpses of the Aqua that exists beyond Akari-vision, as they help me appreciate the magnitude of what she does. “No rights?” says Akari. “No problem!” That’s an exaggeration, of course, but it’s still not easy to be apolitical; even James Joyce, who insisted with all his characteristic zeal that politics and art didn’t and couldn’t mix, was a socialist. And, given the concern she shows her fellow human beings, it’s not as if we’re led to believe that Akari is particularly apathetic. She’s simply not a lobbyist. There’s more than one way to contribute to social progress, after all.

Leaving aside the issue of whether Aqua’s sex-divided waterway workforce is a good or bad thing, we can probably agree that it’s a different thing — different than what most of us are used to, at least. Discrimination exists in the American workforce, it’s true, but not to the extent that men are mail carriers, women are tour guides, and that’s the end of that. Aqua’s brand of labor division feels almost pre-industrial…which makes sense, as the rest of the planet feels pre-industrial, too, never mind the constant presence of spaceships flying overhead. And it’s not accidental; we’re dealing with a setting in which motorboats are actively forbidden (if I remember correctly), making the gondolas not only pleasant, but required. Aqua is slow-paced and nature-oriented, but very deliberately so; every aspect of this nature, from weather to gravity, is controlled. It’s positively pastoral. In fact, it seems to straddle the very pinnacle of pastoral settings: its nature is not only overseen by humankind, but was built by humankind in the first place.

Note that “the very pinnacle” does not equal “perfect.” As the hideous mutant body of English literature tells us when we look at it the right way, there is no perfect pastoral; something always remains beyond human control. If we struggle with nature long enough, we can coax it into being generally hospitable, but we can never subdue it completely. Consider Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” in which the speaker propositions a nymph¹:

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle:

A gown made of the finest wool,
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold:

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning;
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

The irony of a spirit of nature being offered a position as subordinate to a subduer of nature, including access to various natural elements torn from their contexts and beaten into the shapes of clasps, studs, and beds of roses, was not lost upon Sir Walter Raleigh, who wrote “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” in response:

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall,

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten–
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last and love still breed,
Had joys no date nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.

Ooh, burned.

For our purposes, the warp and weft of it is that the nymph knows what humans, in their arrogance, do not: nature existed before the birth of humanity, and it will exist thereafter, its dauntless processes reclaiming our feeble efforts. That’s a pessimistic way of looking at it from a human standpoint, but there’s little to be gained from denying that, until we devise some way of ending the universe itself, nature is bigger than we are.

This applies to Aqua as well, terraformed or no. The salamanders and gnomes, arbiters of atmosphere and gravity respectively, wouldn’t be necessary if Aqua simply served the needs of humankind on its own. And it’s obvious enough that the undines, salamanders, sylphs, and gnomes aren’t the nymphs of Aqua; the latter two aren’t dealt with in the manga, but we learn that undines are certainly subject to the whims of the Neo-Adriatic Sea’s currents and tides, while the salamanders don’t have complete and total control over the weather precisely because Ukijima is operated by human beings and not computers.

That’s not to say that Aqua hasn’t any nymphs. They simply happen to take the form of creatures who tend to abhor the water.

And it’s appropriate that Aqua’s nymphs are creatures who abhor the water; just as water isn’t the natural environment of (most) cats, water isn’t the natural environment of Mars. The feline minor deities are just as out of place as the water itself. Nymphs they may not be, I suppose, but there’s at least something supernatural going on with the cats; I present as evidence the blue-eyed ones being regarded as good luck emblems by the undines, the goings-on of episodes four and twelve of Aria the Animation, Aqua’s fourth chapter, and the Cait Sidhe myth which somehow migrated to Italo-centric Aqua from Scotland. Given certain of those examples — the cats seem to administrate the collective memory of Aqua, after all — and the Cait Sidhe being a fairy, I don’t think it’s a stretch to identify some of Aqua’s cats as planetary deities. And when we consider that the affairs of cats are never wholly evident to the human characters, we can see that Aqua leavens its pastoral idealism with an acknowledgment of the ever-limited means of humankind.

It’s significant, no doubt, that, of all the characters with whom we become acquainted, Akari maintains the most contact with the cats and their machinations. Perhaps, as with the ancient kings of Earth and their nymph wives, Akari’s “marriage” to the Martian felines confirms her authority — but over what, I wonder? The human spirit? I may not be far enough along to know.

Endnotes

¹It’s widely accepted that the speaker speaks to a nymph, anyway; that may have been retconned in later, but literature is nothing if not a retcon-fest. Consider T. S. Eliot’s assertion that “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it,” that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (“Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001: 1093.). If it’s Raleigh’s poem that added the nymph to the web of things, then so be it. And anyway, I figure it’s a reasonable reading — at least I hope you find it reasonable, as it’s necessary for my examination.

You may recall my glut of posts on Aria the Animation, some of which ended inconclusively. Now that I’ve read Aqua, the ten-chapter beginning of the Aria manga, what is there to do but grab those loose ends that dangle annoyingly before me and tie them together with the wrath of an angry god?

Let’s start with this one, both because it proved most frustrating, and because this post promises to be fun.

Try as I might, I could not come up with a truly good reason for Aria’s noticeable and seemingly deliberate lack of romance, given that it had plenty of (what I thought were) good setups to exploit. I even diverged into absence causation, the results of which led me to the conclusion that — no, actually, I didn’t even reach a conclusion, lacking the numbers to assign to enough of the variables, so to speak. But maybe Aqua will provide the answers I seek. Let’s find out.

Aika admires Alicia — That much is obvious in the anime, and there’s nothing strange about it; Alicia is a top-class undine, as Aika aspires to be. So what if Aika’s a bit…stalker-esque? I mean-

Alright, that’s weird, but-

Oh, come on! As if it wasn’t enough to infuse Aika’s admiration for Alicia with romantic overtones, the above panel further opens the doors to speculation by having her quote Romeo and Juliet to Akari’s window!

But what of those “good setups” I mentioned? Well, Aqua deals largely with the period prior to Aria the Animation, so Al is nowhere to be found. Akatsuki shows up, and he’s still mildly endearing, I suppose, but he’s little more than an annoyance in this iteration, and his “feelings” for Alicia are made obviously impure, particularly in his arguing with Aika on the subject. Because, you know, maybe Aika has a thing for Alicia, too, and there’s no doubt in my mind that Aika is set up as the one we’re supposed to sympathize with.

I can’t deny it: Aria lacks visible romance to make yuri a tantalizing possibility. Those romantic voids are gaps, if you will, or they result in gaps.

How awesome is that!?

Er, ahem. Sorry. What I meant was, this revelation makes Aria a much more robust experience for me. It’s not as if the potential for straight relations is annulled by the potential for gay relations; rather, both are possible. I suppose I should’ve gleaned as much from the anime, or from my subsequent overlong rambling about the show’s romance, but at least I realize it now.

Fortunately, my exploration of absence causation wasn’t for naught — I can bring it in now, in fact. To be brief, absence causation refers to the idea that an absence of cause can result in an event as surely as a tangible cause, though it’s less established fact and more ongoing debate; some argue that a “non-cause” isn’t an absence of cause, per se, while others claim that absence causation is impossible altogether. Given that “absence of romance” was the (non-)cause I dealt with in the previous post, and which I’ve addressed here, it seems as though the complete cause-effect relationship would look something like “if absence of romance, then yuri subtext/speculative gaps.”

But that doesn’t sound right. Remember, the absence of romance alone was not enough to reveal yuri subtext to me, and it only allowed me to see those speculative gaps seated well within my sphere of life experience — that is, as quick as I was to draw conclusions about Akari, Akatsuki, and Alicia, it didn’t occur to me to pair the women together. Only when Aqua made the yuri subtext obvious did the fog lift, which leads me to espouse a causal relationship more along the lines of “if absence of romance and yuri subtext, then [more] speculative gaps.” We can’t really apply that to the anime, with its lack of yuri subtext; in the case of Aria the Animation, it’d be more apt to say that “if absence of romance (but no yuri subtext), then less speculative gaps.” Given that yuri subtext was well and truly absent in the anime, or from my reading of it, this seems to support the view that absences — not conspicuous absences, but “true” absences — can’t serve as proper causes in narrative art. Which, in retrospect, seems pretty obvious.

Whatever their quantity, speculative gaps universally seem to be the “effect” I was searching for when I wrote about Aria’s absent romance previously. It’s interesting that, in both cases, an absence-cause resulted in or contributed to resulting in gaps, which themselves can be characterized as absences — though, in this case, they’re absences which can be filled as seen fit by readers and viewers. It’s not unreasonable to assume that the romantic ambiguity in the text becomes the speculative absences when translated by reading into a form the reader can work with, that it’s the potential of the absences and not their quantity that increases when things like yuri subtext are added — but, lest I frighten you off, I’ll leave the authorial shell out of it this time.

As we come now to the end of our twelve-day journey, my final moment feels sort of lame. I don’t have any strange metaphors for love, attempts at optimism, or in-depth analyses for you today. I don’t really have a good reason for my enthusiasm — I just have my enthusiasm, so I guess I can explain that much.

Many of you could’ve probably guessed that my final moment, like Moments the Eleventh and Eighth, would hail from Aria the Animation. My general unbridled love for the show is no secret. Said love began, in fact, with the end of the fourth episode, which stands at the top of all the very worthy anime moments I experienced this year.

It’s an impressive episode all the way through. A cat who is also a ghost, or a ghost who is also a cat, or a rather cat-like shapeshifting thing, ask Akari the existential gondolier to deliver a very old video message, which requires that she find both technology capable of handling the message’s format and a way to reach the message’s intended recipient.

The intended recipient is, we discover, long dead — perhaps a victim of old age, but more likely a victim of flooding, a sacrifice for the cause of turning Mars into Aqua.

Akari, being Akari, delivers the message anyway. It’s a message from the man’s wife (and cat…who is also a ghost…or vice-versa).

The contents of the message aren’t of earth-shattering importance; the event that occasioned the message was a wedding anniversary. There’s an account of how things are going at home. Some reminiscence. An interruption from the cat. A profession of love.

None of which Allen Honda ever received.

Initially, Aqua seems in all regards to be an idyllic setting, wholly conducive to Akari’s almost unrealistically positive outlook on life. We learn here, however, that, like a certain more familiar planet, Aqua’s foundation is laid upon tragedy, at least in part. Nothing as grand as Aqua can come to be without sacrifice. Allen Honda and his wife find themselves forced to leave their home on Earth abruptly, by the wife’s report, only for Allen to presumably die before his first wedding anniversary. And why? Because he believed in the idea of Aqua. Because he seemed to know that something as grand as a human planet can’t exist without an Atlas (whose name, interestingly enough, also starts with A, like everyone else’s in the show).

Says the wife:

I haven’t forgotten what you told me when we came to Aqua, Allen. That one day Aqua will be a world overflowing with happiness. That’s why you dig for water, you said. I believe in those words. There are a lot of tough things to deal with right now, but I’m sure that, in our children’s time, Aqua will be filled with laughter.

Aqua isn’t perfect; it can’t be. It needs people like Allen Honda, who are willing to hold it up with literal physical labor, and to satisfy its price with their lives, if need be. It needs people like Akari Mizunashi, who can endure its tragedy with a smile, who can, through sheer force of will, finish the job its scenery only starts — and that, to Akari’s great credit, is no easy task.

This scene may not seem that fantastic. I didn’t require much page space to describe it. But, for me, all its elements — Akari, Allen, the themes of loss and sacrifice, the implications for the setting and its residents — come together to result in one of those scenes that seems to justify all the effort that goes into art. It’s one of those scenes during which the medium and the story fall away to reveal the universe hidden beneath — our universe. And, given the wild subjectivity of these things, I can almost guarantee that this scene won’t serve the same purpose for you, but you don’t need it to; after all, you have your own number one moment of 2008, whether you blogged about it or not.

The moment in question here is the first time I heard (or, maybe, comprehended via subtitles) those fateful lyrics from Aria the Animation’s opening: “I close my eyes, and can see” (目を閉じて見えてくる/me wo tojite mietekuru). I know I’ve written at length about that line before, about how it makes me think of James Joyce and, via him, Thomas Aquinas, but I didn’t settle on it as a moment because it excited my English majorish tendencies (though I suppose that helped). Its significance to me goes deeper than that: it signaled a change in my preferences, in the way I assign personal value to stories.

Rather, while the change had been creeping up on me all along, Aria’s OP first made it clear. I realized, upon hearing those lyrics, that Aria would be like nothing I’d experienced thus far — not because it was truly different on some fundamental level, but because I’d actually be able to enjoy it for what it was worth. It occurred to me that, probably thanks in large part to my involving myself in blog-based discourse, the range of stories in which I could find value was steadily increasing, and that’s never a bad thing. So, really, though hearing Aria’s OP hammered the change home, I owe this moment to all of you. Thanks.

Now that I think about it, this doesn’t have much to do with the actual content of the lyrics in question. But I suppose that’s how these things go.

Ever the community man, lelangir is keeping stock of as many Twelve Moments blogathons as he can somewhere in the recesses of his Unlimited Blog Works, so check that out. Speaking as a member of the community whose progress it chronicles, that Anitations thing is interesting in general. We need people like lelangir to offset people like me, who can’t even comment reliably on the blogs they read.

This may be the first of my Twelve Moments™ to hail from Aria the Animation, but it isn’t the last. Oh, no indeed. Unlike majordomo CCY, I allowed myself to choose as many moments from each show or manga as suited my fancy. Gluttonous? Perhaps, but before I take us too far off track (and you may know I’m very good at that), let’s talk about Athena Glory.

Athena is ostensibly the Silent Bob of the Aria crew. She has very little to say until it really counts, at which point she’s exceedingly helpful. We first get a feel for this in the sixth episode, in which Athena’s singing saves Maa the cat (soon to be President Maa) from unfortunate ejection into the cruel streets of Neo-Venezia — the subtle support characters are important, too, this episode tells us. By episode eleven, Athena’s Silent Bobitude is present in full force, and she gets in a few remarks toward the end about the nature of friendship. I could go on about that, but I won’t, as that isn’t my eleventh moment of choice. My eleventh moment occurs a bit earlier in the episode, and is, I must admit, slightly more embarrassing.

Not that Aria isn’t unapologetically packed with sappy, potentially embarrassing scenes. It even pokes fun at itself for this (“Hazukashii serifu kinshi!”). And the scene I’ve chosen as #11 isn’t even really embarrassing in itself; I’m just embarrassed that it sent me into emotional overdrive as it did. I could see it coming from a mile away, I decided it’d be necessarily cheesy but probably endurable, and, when it happened, I might’ve teared up if I had any less willpower. Aria had — nay, has — that effect on me in general, but the scene in question was particularly bad…or particularly good, I should say, as only those stories that really stir me in some way have a chance of earning a place among my favorites.

Anyhow, the eleventh episode of Aria details the apprenticeship of Alicia, Akira, and Athena, the prima undines we come to know and love throughout the preceding episodes. In particular, Alicia and Akira meet Athena, and, by virtue of her being Akira (not that there’s anything wrong with that), Akira promptly decides Athena is more or less inept. As time goes on, the would-be Water Fairies continue to practice their gondola skills together, and Athena proves to be devastatingly absent-minded…until the trio decide to work on their singing. Having lost a rousing game of rock-paper-scissors, Athena is chosen to sing first, and everyone’s perfectly content, no doubt not expecting much…

…until Athena opens her mouth.

Not content to shock the bejesus out of her gondolier comrades, Athena keeps at it until everyone within earshot stops whatever they’re doing to listen. You can almost feel the planet grind to a halt. And let me just add here that this is not as short a scene as it seems like it’s going to be. If you feel yourself losing it toward what you think is the end, and you don’t want your present company to see you cry like a newborn baby, then you’d better man up, Hoss; you’ve got a long way to go.

Lest she accidentally coax Dread Cthulhu out of the depths of the Neo-Adriatic Sea or something, Athena is forced to stop. And the world resumes its turning.

You may wonder why this particular scene got to me like it did, and, to be honest, I find myself wondering the same thing. I think it has to do with how closely I identify myself with Athena. She’s not my favorite character, by any means, but those characters who most make me think about myself rarely are. I tend to think of myself as occupying a position on Earth (or Manhome, if you prefer) similar to Athena’s place on Aqua; I come across to most people as thoroughly unremarkable, but when things get serious, I can pull myself together for epic, albeit brief, forward charges. I’m a good person to have at your back, in other words. In doing no more than exercising her talent in the eleventh episode of Aria the Animation, Athena demonstrates that, for all their flaws, people like her — people like me — are worth far more than the credit they’re given by most.

Thanks, Athena. Sometimes I really need that.

I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is, however occasionally (give me a break; I’m poor). Aria, of all things, is certainly worth it. And it’s a good thing I bought it, too, since viruses recently ate my Windows, forcing me to do a clean install of the OS, which rendered my CrystalNova-subbed AVIs somewhat nonexistent (and contributed to this post taking so long to write).

But this post isn’t about the tragic nature of somewhere in the ballpark of 200 gigs of music and video slaughtered upon the altar of Windows and Symantec Antivirus’s combined inability to do anything useful. It’s about romance (the lovesome kind) among the central characters of Aria the Animation. “What romance?” you ask, to which I reply, “Exactly.”

Let me preface by saying that I haven’t experienced any branch of the Aria franchise other than the Animation (and deliberately so), so I’m not sure how what happens in the Animation relates to later seasons or the source manga; I’m looking at the show as an independent, self-contained entity, at least plot-wise. And I’m aware that the show gives us enough building blocks to interpret romance if we want to — in fact, I want to begin by addressing the most obvious of said building blocks. First, we’ve got this situation:

Why not Akatsuki and Alicia, when the former so frequently voices his alleged infatuation with the latter? If you’ve seen the show, think back to the number of scenes in which both Alicia and Akatsuki are present, and compare that to the number of scenes in which Akatsuki and Akari are present. I’d wager that Akatsuki has more screen time alone with Akari than he has with Alicia in the presence of third, fourth, and fifth wheels. I like to think Akatsuki uses Alicia as an excuse to get to Akari, being too inelegant for a more direct approach, and the beauty of the explicit situation is that it neither confirms nor denies this, allowing overenthusiastic fans such as myself to interpret things in whatever way makes them happy.

Whether you’d rather see Akatsuki with Akari or Alicia, the notable thing here is that his relationships with both are so thoroughly Victorian that romance never seems to cross the characters’ minds. This is not the case with Aika, who apparently has what we might call a thing for diminutive Harry Potter lookalike Al.

The notable thing about Aika x Al (Alka, if you will — though I won’t) is that it only comes to the foreground in the last episode, and only briefly. It shows up earlier, but at that point most of us are probably too distracted by President Aria as a superhero to pay much attention; it’s relegated to the periphery in favor of the second half of the eighth episode’s predominant comedy. Al may be a far more explicit object of affection than Akatsuki (who doesn’t seem to be an object of affection at all), but he has far less screen time to make up for it.

And with that, we’ve touched on pretty much every situation of potential romance involving the central characters¹. Not that two situations necessarily comprise a paltry representation of romance in a thirteen-episode series, but one hardly involves enough romance to justify calling it romantic, and the other probably gets less attention than half the show’s unnamed minor characters.

One might argue that it’s difficult to slice life and come away with so little romance, but I’m not trying to question Aria’s slice of life credentials. It’s enough for me that the show indicates a budding romantic situation with Aika and Al, even if it promptly refuses to delve into said situation. It’s there, whether we see it or not, and I don’t particularly need to see it; that’s what extrapolation and imagination are for. What I’m interested in is the very fact that we don’t see any more romance in Aria than we do.

This is one of those cases in which I’d like to provide possible explanations by deferring to people more intelligent than I am. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be hordes upon hordes of critics (or anibloggers, for that matter — correct me if I’m wrong) writing about the absence of romance in literature or film, so I’m left with my own speculation and what insight can be gleaned from distant but potentially related topics.

It’s possible that what I’ve been branding a seemingly deliberate absence of romance isn’t an absence at all; perhaps it’s Aria’s way of portraying the uncertainty of romantic love in the hands of the young and inexperienced. I have to admit that the technique of leaving romance up for debate in some cases and dangling it around the periphery in others seems more palatable to me these days than…well, the usual:

(Unprecedented Clannad spoilers ahead…spoilers are a given in these parts, I know, but this is a post about an entirely unrelated show, so consider yourself warned.)

Not that Clannad isn’t a good show in its own right. I quite enjoy it, in fact. But after 32 episodes (that full-of-concentrated-win Tomoyo divergence excluded, of course), Nagisa and Tomoya still have such a hard time holding hands — no, not even that; they have such a hard time saying nice things to each other? In keeping with the theme of hard times, I’m having a hard time buying it at this point, especially considering that Nagisa and Tomoya have been officially boyfriend/girlfriend (um, reverse-respectively) since the end of the first season. I’ll take Al, Akari, and/or Alicia’s obliviousness, Aika’s tsunderiffic reticence, and Akatsuki’s dubious tactics over an entire cast that demonstrates symptoms of Shrinking Violitis wherever romance rears its sometimes-ugly head.

Of course, that’s a matter of preference. Your mileage may vary (I’ll spare you the TV Tropes link this time), and besides, my first inclination was to call the state of romance in Aria a lack, so let’s get back to that. I’ve got one last maneuver to pull on that front before retreating. I’m not at all confident in my ability to make a coherent point out of it, though, if it’s even relevant at all, so let me lay it out for you and we’ll see what happens.

What I’m referring to here is absence causation, the idea that absence can be the cause to an effect. The Stanford website elaborates in this convenient resource:

Absences are said to be transcendent entities. They are nothings, non-occurrences, and hence are not in the world. Thus Mellor says, “For the ‘C’ and ‘E’ in a true causal ‘E because C’ need not assert the existence of particulars. They may deny it… They are negative existential statements, made true by the non-existence of such particulars,…” (1995, p. 132) Here Mellor is arguing that, in the case where rock-climbing Don does not die because he does not fall, Don’s non-falling and non-dying are causally related, without there being any events or other immanent entities to relate.

Makes sense, I suppose, but you may wonder what all that has to do with Aria. Let’s assume that our cause is Aria’s general absence of romantic development among the central characters. We’re not saying that there aren’t romantic situations in Aria (since there are), but that we don’t see much of the obvious one, that the other one may have nothing to do with romance, and that we aren’t privy to much forward motion on either front. Aria the text lacks romance even if it lets on that Aqua the setting doesn’t. The effect, then, would be some invocation of feeling or thought in the viewer…which, on second thought, is pretty obvious, so let’s also consider the related effect of character development.

The aforelinked source continues:

…The first [response to absence causation] is to deny that absences can be causal. In this vein, Armstrong claims: “Omissions and so forth are not part of the real driving force in nature. Every causal situation develops as it does as a result of the presence of positive factors alone.” (1999, p. 177; see also Beebee 2004a) The theorist who denies absence causation may add some conciliatory codicil to the effect that absences stand in cause-like relations. Thus Dowe (2000, 2001) develops an account of ersatz causation (causation*) to explain away our intuitions that absences can be genuinely causal.

Assuming this position to be correct lets us throw together a few hypotheses to explain how absent romance works here as a unit of meaning. “Ersatz causation” or no, if it’s given that “every causal situation develops as it does as a result of the presence of positive factors alone,” and that Aria’s romantic visual cliff is a negative factor, then the romantic absence cannot be a cause, and therefore there cannot be an effect. That sounds a little suspicious, as the absence in question at least prompted me to think all this through and write this post (which, incidentally, is one of those that keeps growing longer than intended), but that can be explained precisely by the absence’s inability to cause.

I’m starting to think this is all a matter of sematics, but hear me out anyway. Consider the second effect, that of character development. In the general absence of romance, Akari and the gang cannot develop on the romantic front; what few hints the show gives us leave the option of romantic development open, but the show doesn’t delve any further than that. As a result, more screen time is spent on other issues — friendship, for example, or mentorship and sibling-like relationships — at the expense of romantic love. Ultimately, it wasn’t the absence of romance that prompted me to think; it was the uneven distribution of screen time in Aria, a tangible thing, a “positive factor.”

I’m highly suspicious of that approach. Actually, I’m inclined to stab it in the face with Occam’s razor and credit the absence as piquing my interest, as I did in the beginning. But it does bring me to my next point.

The second response to the absence argument is to deny that absences are transcendent. One way to do this would be to accept the existence of negative properties, and think of absences as events in which an object instantiates a negative property. Thus Don’s instantiating non-falling at t0 might be counted an immanent event, and a cause of the further immanent event of his instantiating non-dying at t1.

If that’s to be believed, Aria doesn’t give us an absence of romance, it gives us a tangible “non-romance.” We might say that romance is to non-romance as 1 is to -1, while romance is to the absence of romance as 1 is to 0. I don’t know about all this; it seems unnecessarily complicated. Besides, I don’t think non-romance is a good way of describing what amounts to Aria’s simply not delving into romance.

A second way to deny that absences are transcendent would be to take absence claims as merely a way to describe occurrences, as Hart and Honore recommend: “The corrective here is to realize that negative statements like ‘he did not pull the signal’ are ways of describing the world, just as affirmative statements are, but they describe it by contrast not by comparison as affirmative statements do.” (1985, p. 38) Thus Don’s not falling at t0 may be identified with his clinging to the rock at t0, and Don’s not dying at t1 may be identified with his surviving at t1, which events are indeed causally related.

While this makes it seem like ours is indeed an issue of semantics, I don’t think that’s necessarily the case; I think this simply goes to show that the arguments against absence causation are not as useful in describing the causal relationships in question as absence causation itself. We can’t, after all, say that “absence of romance” and “abundance of everything else” mean the same thing; it’s difficult to have a superficial argument of semantics in a field in which every difference in meaning, however minuscule, changes the game completely.

In retrospect, this absence causation business may not be very useful at all. It’s all very theoretical, and I haven’t used it as a springboard to delve into something practical; maybe I’ll be able to do so in the future. Sometimes it helps, though — or it helps my understanding, anyway — to apply as many concepts and as much terminology to the basic functions of something as possible. And, if nothing else, I think I’ve successfully demonstrated here Aria’s potential to make one think.

Endnotes

¹I realize that there are at least two married couples in the show, but what I’m looking at here is romance as an indicator of character development in the native Aquans we come to know and love. Besides, the couple in episode 7 probably wouldn’t be described as amorous, and we never even see Ai’s sister’s husband in person (though I suppose the baby is evidence enough of their…efficacy).

I mentioned last time, after extended namedropping of Joyce and Aquinas, that Aqua is a powerful setting. We can assume as much from the first episode of Aria (that’s the Animation, you’ll recall), and from speculative and animated settings wielding the de facto thought-provocation that they do (more on this later), but the fourth episode doesn’t let us forget it (never mind that the above screen capture is from episode twelve). The mysterious girl in the alley, the too-late video message and its contents — all elements seem bent toward drawing our attention to Aqua’s owing its existence and nature to human beings. Here, Aria provides another way of looking at both itself and the ever-ridiculous species that produced it, albeit one more obvious than the “shut your eyes and see” business of the first episode. But to what end?

So that people like me can write series of blog posts about it, of course. Why else?

Let’s look at that term — “hand-made planet.” Akari seems pleased with the distinction when she mentions it at the bridge during the twelfth episode, but that may not say much; Akari is pleased with everything. In itself, it’s not a positive (or negative) value judgment. In fact, Aria provides two examples of planets impacted by humans: Aqua, the planet formerly known as Mars, made habitable and tranquil by force of human effort, and Earth…I mean, Manhome, which, by all reports, is polluted well beyond the point of unpleasantness. One might argue that Aqua is more hand-made than Manhome, which I suppose holds to scrutiny, but it isn’t really more hand-made by much; consider that, in the Aria-verse, water existed below the surface of Mars, simply waiting for enterprising humans to dig it up. The planet met its “makers” halfway.

It’s really the attitude of a place that determines how hand-made it is. Were Aqua terraformed and left as unpopulated wilderness, I doubt Akari would be going on about how it’s a hand-made planet — hell, she wouldn’t even be present to make the comment, more likely than not. Consider the gravity of a handcrafted object — say, a desk built by your great-grandfather. It may not function any better than a mass-produced Wal-Mart desk, but it has a personally relevant history that spans from its creation to its current user and use, including every family member into whose hands it passed in the meantime, perhaps rendering it more desirable to have around than just any old desk. We might also elaborate by saying that the desk’s history exists because of its place in human memory; if not for that, it would be just any old desk, at least for all intents and purposes. It’s the remembered human impact, the lingering “ghosts,” that contribute to the desk’s emotional value.

Aqua has its own ghosts — literally.

Alright, that one might technically be a cat. But it’s a cat which, by all rights, should be long dead, so it’s probably a ghost (or some kind of cat-fairy, maybe). Either way, the cats in Aria serve as connections to Aqua’s past. I’m using “ghost” here in a broad sense anyway; in episodes twelve and thirteen, we see that Aqua even harbors ghosts of itself, and I don’t know how to account for that in the common definition of ghosthood. The point is that Aqua’s “hand-madeness” is important in part because it began the imposition of human meaning upon Aqua — or, rather, upon Aqua as such; Mars existed previously, of course, but, given the apparent weight of names in Aria, we can probably grant that Aqua and Mars have partially separate identities simply due to the disparity of their nomenclature.

Simply by watching Aria, we can observe the results of Aqua’s being hand-made: it’s a setting that seems conducive to introspection and self-discovery, if the way the central characters (and Akari in particular) use Aqua is any indication. But consider why it serves this purpose for Akari and others. That Aqua was terraformed and made habitable by human beings ultimately doesn’t seem to have much to do with it; rather, Akari’s positive attitude toward the past and present of the place allows her to seek herself among the planet’s nuances. Sure, Aqua is hand-made in the sense that humans “made” it out of Mars, but it’s filled with philosophical import by Akari herself, who knows where and how to look to get what she wants out of the place. It’s an existential conundrum of sorts: one cannot love a place because it feels like home, one must love a place in order for it to feel like home. Ultimately, Akari’s hands make Aqua into the setting we see when we watch Aria — consider that the strange ghostly encounters and strategic time travel only happen when she’s present.

It is with such things in mind that we compare Aqua to our own experience on Earth — and, as I said, Aqua’s being both science-fictional and animated urges us to make that comparison. Interpretive settings, reliant as they are on the human creative machine, tend to work that way, I think. It’s a very potent comparison, with weighty questions inherent: If I like my home, is it because I’m approaching it as Akari approaches Aqua? If I don’t, is it because I’m not? Am I incapable of liking my home — not because there’s anything wrong with the place, but because there’s something wrong with my way of thinking?

After all, that’s what it comes down to. We have our Earth, and we can do with it what we will. Should we approach our places of residence with Akari’s “love first, ask questions later” angle, should we hand-make of our surroundings something useful, we may get as much out of our locales as she does.

But wait! There’s more!

Let’s not oversimplify. It’s likely that Aqua has its share of problems, and often we must infer these from the view we’re given through Akari’s rose-tinted glasses. Consider Akatsuki’s borrowing money from his brother; could this mean that the people who control the weather are underpaid? That’s an important job, and such a situation wouldn’t say much in favor of Aqua’s economy. Perhaps Akari has the luxury of introspection because Aqua’s economy is a one-trick pony, and the tourism industry, spearheaded by the undines, brings in all the money. It’s hard to be sure, but, at the very least, we can probably conclude that it’s best not to blind oneself to reality while appreciating one’s surroundings, that balance is key — balance such as that which exists between Akari, Aika, and Alice. But that, good reader, is a topic for a later post.

Aria the Animation — just typing its name gives me a sense of peace, both because of its predominant themes, and because there exist human beings capable of producing something like this, which means there must be hope for our species after all. I wanted to sum this one up in a single post, but I realized around the end of the fourth episode that a mere one post would not be enough, could not possibly be enough by any stretch of the imagination, so consider this the first in a series of indeterminate length. And the funny thing is, I probably wouldn’t have liked Aria at all a few months ago, back when I was writing off Lucky Star and Hidamari Sketch, or at least I probably wouldn’t have liked it enough to see past my dislike and run it through my infernal criticism machine.

Granted, I might be jumping the gun saying I wouldn’t have liked Aria a few months ago. It isn’t an unreasonable assumption — my tastes have been tumultuous this year, for some reason — but it’s only one of two possibilities, as I see it. On the one hand, I may have enjoyed Aria so much because my tastes have changed recently; on the other, I may have enjoyed Aria because Aria subtly changed my tastes. Just as a budding illegal drug enthusiast probably shouldn’t jump straight into heroin before working through marijuana, it’s likely that delving unprepared into hard slice of life was an ill-conceived plan on my part. I suspect that Aria might serve as a gateway drug of sorts, a gradual introduction, given how it snared my attention in the first place.

It all began with the aforementioned line from the opening: “I close my eyes, and can see the direction the wind is taking.” As you might glean from the title of this post, I’m interested primarily in the former half of the quotation; as you might glean from my Joyceophilia, it grabbed me immediately with its conceptual similarity to the beginning of “Proteus,” the third chapter of Ulysses:

INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a’.

Won’t you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.

Believe me, I’m thrilled to be able to tie Ulysses into the fabulous world of anime at long last — but not as thrilled as you are to read a passage from Ulysses in a blog post about anime, I’m sure!

I’m not about to annotate the entire passage. That would be a — forgive me — Ulyssean feat, and it’s not necessary; just bear in mind that it consists mostly of allusions to philosophers and literature that don’t have much to do with Aria. Our primary concern here is that Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s literary alter ego and modern-day Telemachus, walks along the beach at about ten in the morning, contemplates the nature of existence, and reaches a hasty sort of conclusion on the matter. In applying Stephen’s thought process, we can move toward the idea (or one idea) suggested by Aria’s first episode¹.

Let’s begin where Stephen begins, with the “ineluctable modality of the visible.” Modality is tricky here; it’s something of a pun, as it can refer to a primary physical sense, as the sense of vision. Given that “mode” can be taken to mean an essential, underlying quality of something, we can also interpret “modality” as quidditas — a slightly younger Stephen describes this in the fifth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as “the whatness of a thing,” and, as it originated with Aristotle, it no doubt has its roots in Plato’s eidos, that underlying form shared by all things of one kind, continually sought by Socrates in his dialogues. Thus, it seems most likely that Stephen is contemplating the unavoidable “visibleness” of the visible.

I know what you’re probably thinking — “What the hell, Joyce?” (if not “What the hell, Pontifus?”) — but bear with me. In the first sentence of “Proteus,” a question is raised: what is the modality of the visible? What underlying qualities make it what it is and nothing else? Conveniently enough, Stephen’s thoughts immediately turn to color, nodding to the Aristotelian precept (via all that “diaphane, adiaphane” business) that what is seen is seen because it has color². The modality of the visible, then, would be color; under normal circumstances, color cannot be heard, felt, tasted, or smelled. And, as Stephen suggests, as long as one’s eyes are open and working, color is “ineluctable,” ever-present, altering (perhaps confounding) one’s perception of what is seen.

But the measure of a thing cannot be had by its color alone, as Stephen understands. His surroundings exist on planes beyond the visible, and, in his effort to read the “signatures of all things” as fully as possible, he “[shuts] his eyes and [sees].” Sound familiar? See, I am getting to a point here. Stephen spends a bit of time walking with his eyes closed, contemplating the “ineluctable modality of the audible,” of which he becomes particularly aware as soon as the modality of the visible stops ineluctably getting in the way. He ends his brief foray into the world of sound by wondering if the visible world has ceased to exist during his period of unawareness of it, and subsequently proving its existence by opening his eyes. “There all the time without you,” he tells himself, “and ever shall be, world without end.”

Through experimentation, Stephen has found that the numbing or annulling of one mode of perception removes distractions that prevent the maximum efficacy of others. That in itself isn’t mind-blowing; we see it in individuals afflicted with blindness who develop better-than-average hearing. Consider, however, that the phenomenon isn’t necessarily limited to the physical senses. Stephen seeks “signatures,” and this is likely a reference to Thomas Aquinas³, who explains the concept of signate matter in the second chapter of “On Being and Essence”:

…Only signate matter is the principle of individuation. I call signate matter matter considered under determinate dimensions. Signate matter is not included in the definition of man as man, but signate matter would be included in the definition of Socrates if Socrates had a definition. In the definition of man, however, is included non-signate matter: in the definition of man we do not include this bone and this flesh but only bone and flesh absolutely, which are the non-signate matter of man.

Hence, the essence of man and the essence of Socrates do not differ except as the signate differs from the non-signate, and so the Commentator says, in Metaphysicae VII, com. 20, “Socrates is nothing other than animality and rationality, which are his quiddity.”

Thus, while Stephen seeks the non-signate quidditas of visible things and audible things, he likewise seeks the signate haecceitas of individual things, the qualities that set them apart from others of their kind, their individualizing attributes. Consider his approach: he begins with the general visual attribute of color, explores fully the related specifics of his surroundings (“Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs”), acknowledges that vision alone has limits (“Limits of the diaphane”), steps out of the visual modality and into the audible, and begins the process anew. Of course, Stephen’s surroundings are nonliving, nonthinking objects. Aquinas’s use of Socrates as an example suggests that, where human beings are concerned, signate matter consists of more than physical qualities: we must also take into account “animality and rationality.”

Now, look at the circumstances that allow Stephen to gaze so deeply into individual objects, through multiple layers of being. No distractions prevent him from choosing things — or people, though there’s no one around when “Proteus” starts — to examine in full, and, as tends to happen (remember why I do criticism?), his examinations generally reveal more about himself than his targets of interest. It helps that he’s not in the bustling center of Dublin, with its many sensory interferences; actually, he’s here:

Not that Joyce suggests that such a soothing environment as Sandymount Strand is required to free the senses from distraction and allow the comprehensive, extra-sensory exploration of things. In the next chapter of Ulysses, we meet Leopold Bloom, who undertakes all his many contemplations in Dublin proper. The key, I think, is becoming so familiar with your environment, so used to it, that you’re practically a part of it.

Kind of like…

Being an undine — literally, a water elemental — certainly counts, I’d say. The undines are such an integral part of Aqua’s identity that people vacation to Aqua specifically to see them. It’s no wonder that Akari is so enamored with Aqua; she’s in an ideal position to use the place as a philosophical catalyst. Or, no, that’s misleading; I think that Akari is in an ideal position to use Aqua as a philosophical catalyst in part because she’s enamored with it. That brings us to Aria’s “love what you do, and you’ll always be doing what you love” theme, which I’ll get to in a later post.

For now, though, let’s extrapolate. We’ve established one reason (among many) why Aqua is such a powerful setting, but what does that have to do with Aria as a gateway into the slice of life genre? Simply put, it seems that the way Akari uses Aqua (or, rather, the way Stephen Dedalus uses Sandymount Strand) is the way we should use slice of life shows. I’m not sure whether it’s accidental or a stroke of genius on the part of the directorial staff, but it’s convenient indeed that Aria hints in its first episode at how we can most enjoy the twelve episodes to come.

In Aqua-like fashion, slice of life shows remove the ever-present concerns that commonly tie up our story-processing senses, concerns such as contiguous plot and extraordinary circumstances. Months ago, I would’ve called that a bad thing, and I knew even then that I was simply missing the point, but now, thanks in large part to Aria, I think I’ve figured out how I should approach the genre. In the absence of tumultuous plot, one should not squander the rare opportunity to reach unobstructed into the depths of what is given — namely, simple characters, their relationships, and their daily actions which, if allowed to be, are profound in their frivolity.

Of course, the last few paragraphs mean nothing if I’m wrong, if Aria really hasn’t given me the tools I need to appreciate slice of life. After all, I once thought the same of Manabi Straight!, and mistakenly so. Thus, on that note, it’s time to dust off Hidamari Sketch and put my suspicions to the test.

Endnotes

¹One might argue that what I’m doing here is using Ulysses as a critical or theoretical text — see, this is why I’m so inclined lately to say that criticism is art in and of itself. Criticism can inform our reading of literature, literature can inform our reading of literature, literature can inform our reading of criticism, and criticism can inform our reading of criticism. Likewise, both literature and criticism can inform our understanding of ourselves. That being the case, why must there exist a wall between literature and criticism?

²Thornton, Weldon. Allusions in Ulysses. UNC Press, 1968: 41-42.

³Ibid.