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.

Maka says, Read a book! Or she'll take your soul.

It’s been quite a while since I posted anything worthwhile.  I suppose it’s possible that will continue after today, but whatever.  This is a little different from most of the AiC entries, as I’m going to post a piece I wrote for my SF literature class.  It is much in the vein of the AiC posts, sort-of; that is, when he gave us grad. students the assignment (we’re crashing an undergrad. course), he said it was a completely arbitrary assignment that would never be published anywhere.  We’re meant simply to respond to two critical essays he gave us.  I riffed on them in the way I will, sometimes, and have no idea if it’s what he wants to see.  I’m turning it in tomorrow, so we’ll see.  But I just wrote the last paragraph and I’d talked to Pontifus about posting it when it was finished.  It is.  So, uh, woo.  The essays are “On the Origins of Genre” by Paul Kincaid and “Science Fiction and Literature — or, the Conscience of the King” by Samuel Delany.  (Kincaid’s most recent book is up for a non-fiction Hugo this year, by the way.)

In “On the Origins of Genre” Paul Kincaid tracks the movement of science-fiction across its evolution, ultimately coming to the conclusion that the genre has no beginning or end of any significance, and because of that, “science fiction is what we point to when we say ‘science fiction’” (52). We have no single way to identify the genre; there is no fingerprint or DNA matching, only a kind of familial resemblance one might expect from an essay titled after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Kincaid begins the essay by providing a good overview of attempts to define “science fiction,” with entries from critic Darko Suvin to The Oxford Companion to English Literature. He comes to the conclusion that science fiction is too broad and diverse to admit of a definition that would both cover everything readily acknowledged as science fiction and be limiting enough to be of use as a definition. Kincaid ultimately says the act of creating a hard definition will not work.

Similarly John Frow, in his book Genre, suggests that genres provide readers with a “horizon of expectations;” genres use a system of commonly-understood tropes to provide readers with ideas about the work drawn from a kind of pool that already exists (69-70). A work may violate the expectations without becoming another genre. “Genres,” he claims, “are neither self-identical nor self-contained” (71). This process is quite different from using a hard and fast definition (or even one that is not so fast). Frow’s conception of genre is fluid, which in turn allows the text to remain fluid and still use the genre markers it needs to make its meaning. Kincaid and Frow seem to agree on the generic system which draws from a source larger than any one text. I have to wonder if the tradition of attempting to define science fiction is, at least in part, a way to legitimize a genre that still meets occasional resistance from more staid academic circles.

Kincaid also soundly repudiates another habit I have seen in commentators on science fiction: the attempt to find an original science fiction text. On the idea of an “urtext” he says “there is no such thing” (51), unequivocally stating that it is impossible to find a single textual source for the origin of science fiction. I feel this is true of more genres than science fiction. The Gothic genre is often traced directly back to Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. It’s certainly not wrong to do so, just as it is not wrong for Brian Aldiss to trace science fiction back to Frankenstein, but the Gothic was created both before and after Walpole’s novel. Before in the sense that he willfully drew from medieval romances for many of his elements; after in the sense that the Gothic could not be a genre until enough texts existed to group together and form the pool I alluded to above, the one from which readers draw their expectations for a new work participating in the genre. A genre is always made up of more elements than any single work; attempts to get every genre identifier into a work leads to “kitchen sink” stories that almost never read well. Given the inability of any one text to participate in every identifier of a genre (Castle of Otranto can’t even do it, and it is the first Gothic text for all practical purposes), it seems as though the search for an urtext is essentially futile. Kincaid deals with the problem in a relativistic way by claiming, that tracing the “family resemblances” of science fiction elements “does lead, rather, to a series of urtexts” (51). He goes on to claim that individual threads (tropes) could be traced back in this way, and those may originate in individual texts (52), such as the mad scientist, which can be drawn back to Frankenstein, even though Frankenstein cannot serve as an “urtext” for the genre as a whole. Examining elements rather than either the whole genre or the whole text is more useful, as it provides methods for critics and readers to, in turn, examine the themes and issues within the genre and the texts, which strikes me as much more important.

Samuel Delany’s “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’ – or, The Conscience of the King,” in contrast, attempts to grapple with what people do in that process; it is how people of different sorts make meaning when reading. He primarily focuses on the differences between science fiction and what he terms “literature,” or academically-accepted mainstream fiction. The essay suffers an ambivalence that makes it difficult for a reader to understand, at first, who Delany is criticizing. He refers to not knowing important information about the SF field as “certain academic blind spots” right after summing up an episode wherein a well-respected SF editor he knew had no idea what the Hugo awards were (100-101). He also provides examples of academics failing to know important information about SF, but I am left wondering why he believes it is specifically an academic problem when, by his own admission, it is no such thing.

His greater point, concerning the need for readers of all sorts to pay attention to the field, and not just their perception of it, finally comes clear. He claims that “the assumption of most academic critics [. . .] is that somehow the history of science fiction began precisely at the moment they began to read it” (99). while SF readers “deny all existence to the interpretive space around the SF text” and “assume a conscientiously philistine approach” to set them apart from readers of “literary” fiction (114). Both these views reduce the field of SF writing to what the reader wants. These readers do not admit of anything counter to their desires and will alter or misinterpret whatever they need to in order to maintain their views.

These “ruptures” (the term Delany uses throughout to describe these problems) are clearly bad for the interplay of intelligent discourse around SF, but I am forced to worry whether or not Delany alienates more people from his ideas than he gathers to them in this work. His attitude towards academics, those already in place to do what he asks of readers in a significant and influential way, is dismissive at best. He claims “reading literature as if it were ‘literature’ is [. . .] pretty much a waste of time” (117). This statement, while driving home his point about the proper method of reading, insults anyone who has engaged in traditional reading of literature, even if it is not meant to. Meanwhile, Delany, in summing up the views of the “philistine” SF fans, insults them in almost as bald a fashion. It doesn’t seem to me as though it’s a very helpful strategy.

Delany’s views of reading, as stated in this essay, are enormously compelling and probably the most useful portions of it, though his move to call it “reading as though a text is science fiction” perhaps, again, hobbles the effort. Delany outlines the systems mainstream and SF writing use to make meaning: both use words, but in a science fiction novel any metaphorical phrase, such as “her world exploded” could also be literal, and the reader must strive to make sense of the phrase, always keeping in mind that both the literal and the figurative are both lending meaning to the work at the same time (103-104). I agree with this entirely; his study on the ways in which we organize information in this way and the effects of it are effective and interesting.

Delany’s second major idea, that science fiction reading should overtake “literary” reading (as I referenced it before), is interesting as well, but slightly misled. Delany tells the story of a 19^th century literature scholar who began to consume more SF than mainstream fiction; upon going back to one of his favorite novels, Pride and Prejudice, he found himself enjoying it more, and using the book as a way to wonder about what sort of world it created – whereas, beforehand, he read it as an account of the world as it was when Austen wrote (116). Delany commends this method of reading, claiming it is particular to science fiction. And while I agree SF can make a reader more likely to engage in this reading, it is not that field’s particular birthright. In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien describes an alternative to Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief.” He claims that something unbelievable, such as a fantasy, creates a “secondary world” of the fiction, and within that world all the unbelievable events are just as natural as any other. There is no question of belief, as the world contains them (57-68). This idea can be expanded to all literature, not just fantasy (of which Delany’s SF is a kind). Anything read in a book is not reality, which is obvious; however, when a book is realistic most readers don’t notice. A realistic book is experienced in the same way as a fantastic one: it is read, not heard or seen or felt or smelled. The events of a realistic novel, such as Pride and Prejudice, occur in a secondary world as removed from the real world, by virtue of the way in which is is experienced, as any science fiction novel. Delany has described something very valuable, but in claiming it for SF readers he widens a gap that needs to be closed.

Works Cited

Delany, Samuel R. “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’ – or, The Conscience of the King.” Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Scarecrow Press, Inc. Maryland: 2005. 95-117.

Frow, John. Genre. Routledge. New York: 2006.

Kincaid, Paul. “On the Origins of Genre.” Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Scarecrow Press, Inc. Maryland: 2005. 41-53.

Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy Stories.” The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986. 33-99.

We’re nearing the last leg of Northrop Frye’s first essay in Anatomy of Criticism; this time we’re tackling the section called “Thematic Modes.”

Frye opens by citing Aristotle’s six aspects of poetry, and puts off three until later in the book — so the three we will be dealing with are “mythos,” “ethos,” and “dianoia” (whcih are plot, characters/setting, and “thought,” respectively).  He identifies “thought” as “theme” (52).  He points out that works may be more interested in one than another, but all works have all elements in them.   They also scale.  For example, Sense and Sensibility is strongly thematic, until compared with The Grapes of Wrath.

“All formal allegories have, ipso facto, a strong thematic interest, though it does not follow, as is often said, that any thematic criticism of a work of fiction will turn it into an allegory [...] Genuine allegory is a structural element in literature: it has to be there, and cannot be added by critical interpretation alone” (53-54).  I think this bears focus for two reasons — one is personal, in that I hate people trying to argue stories are allegories when they’re not, such as the people who claim The Lord of the Rings is an allegory of the second World War.

Also, and more importantly, it deals with people who refuse to believe that examination of themes in a work of art do anything other than paint another story on top of them — examining themes is not the same as attempting to overlay an allegory on the story.  I have been accused of this and (RE: my hatred of allegory in most cases) generally get irritated by it.  The comparison, as Frye illustrates with Sense and Sensibility vs. The Grapes of Wrath, alters our point of view toward the theme and the “plot,” but does not change what is actually there.

Frye illuminates an interesting dichotomy of creators, which he calls “episodic” and “encyclopaedic” (55).  These terms have to do, first, with how continuous the form of the work is (obviously “episodic” would be discontinuous).  He claims the creator communicating as an individual is episodic, while when the artist communicates “with a social function” the extended patterns of the encyclopaedic form is more useful.  Again, they’re not unrelated.

This, I think, has a lot of relevance to us in the otaku-rhombus.  First, go read Pontifus’s latest post.  We could consider the originating piece as episodic, whether it’s the first version of Arthur (whatever that is) or the first Toradora novel.  That is, the author was interested in committing the story to text rather than compiling the pieces and parts — Frye compares the encycopaedic tendency to the oracle or minstrel, who would, through his or her art, keep the stories of the entire culture (yes, any Arthur story, especially early Arthur stories, could be considered as a compilation of cultural folk stories; I’m more talking about versions by a person, shifting at least somewhat from the mythic to the romantic).

So what’s interesting to me, here, is to consider what the “encyclopaedic” artist would be in this case.  Which artist has the community in mind?  Well, critics, fanfiction writers, fan artists, doujinshi creators, they’re all likely suspects.  Here’s the typical classic example (I’m picking one I’m more familiar with):  Virgil, in The Aeneid, “re-compiles” the story of The Iliad and positions it within his culture, making it the origin of Rome — this is the minstrel using story to hold his cultural heritage in place.

The same thing seems to happen in all the forms of art I mentioned earlier.  Fanfiction isn’t just fiction based in someone else’s playground — the same is true of “shared-universe fiction,” such as the Star Wars novels.  A lot of people have wondered what separates those novels from fanfiction.  I think Frye offers us a way to figure that out — and let’s face it, there is some sort of difference.  I’ve read both.  It is the degree to which the artist keeps the community in mind.  George Lucas didn’t really, not in comparison to our other examples, when he made his movies.  The novelists keep the community in mind a little more, but so long as they follow the “Bible” (the collection of things that must be true in any work of a shared universe) they can do what they want.  Fanfiction writers, on the other hand, not only have to keep all that stuff in mind, they often have their own conventions, specific to the fanfiction writer community.  I’ve dealt with this a little in an earlier post.  That is almost pure community-focused art.

Criticism acts in the same way — most of it is community-centered.  I would argue that’s why a lot of people consider it “not art,” because we live in an era of ironic art, in which the individual artist is considered the new oracle, toughing it out on his or her own with no reference or bowing to anyone else.  Most of our culture can’t countenance an artist who makes obvious use of other sources in the art.

Herein lies, I think, our problems with adaptations.  It’s based on something else!  I’ll give you a moment to collect yourself.  It can’t be art, the ironic soul shouts, if it’s not original!  Brand new!  The artist’s pure, individual vision!  Well, wrong.  This just describes art that is primarily “episodic,” jointed only according to the artist’s needs and not the community’s.  We are left wanting to see, in a new form, the original.  Anything that drifts away from the original is violating the author’s vision.  Really, it is simply taking into account the community in which it moves, both creatively, as adaptations immediately create a community of creators (that is, author + director + actors +&c, for example), and in terms of audience (the community of television watchers have different cultural demands that the community-minded creator must keep in mind).

Frye goes on to provide a whole system of dealing with creators in the terms of the modes he set out earlier for comedy and tragedy.  I’ll spare you that, as it would nearly double this entry.  Interested parties should check out the book.

I’ll end with this bit:

[T]he poety never imitates “life” in the sense that life becomes anything more than the content of his work.  In every mode he imposes the same kind of mythical form on his content, but makes different adaptations of it.  In thematic modes, similarly, the poet never imitates thought except in the same sense of imposing a literary form on his thought.  (63)

This explains the origins, in the head of the artist, of mythic themes, according to Frye — they act as a method of structuring the stuff the artist wants to get out of his or her head.  The structure is easily adaptable to whatever it is the artist has in mind.

That’s the first essay!  Next in AiC will be, I believe, either the second essay, some of the stuff in the book I bought recently, titled Resistance to Theory (not quite what it sounds like), or some of the stuff in a book I got last month, Speculations on Speculation, which is a book of critical essays on science-fiction.  We’ll see how it goes.

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.

We’ve gotten increasingly critical here at Super Fanicom, which I think is no problem at all.  Though I do want to do an actual, you know, anime post pretty soon, to help cleanse the pallet a bit.  I’m afraid I can’t do that yet, though, and am even proposing starting a series of posts on theory.  In defense of this little project of mine, I think these will be relatively short.  Here’s the skinny:  I’m finally getting around to reading the whole of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism.  I’ve read parts before now, but never the whole thing, or in anything approaching linear order.  I thought as I read I would post along with thoughts for each section.  This is the “Polemical Introduction,” pt. 1.

Let’s start this shindig.  Frye begins by arguing criticism is not a form of parasitic work.  He mentions the history of the idea, saying it had its heyday in the nineteenth century, but it’s still sort-of around.  Given that’s still how most people view it now, I think Frye might have been understating things.  He sums the idea up like this:  ”art based on pre-existing art” (3).

Here’s one  I dislike pretty hard:

The attempt to reach the public directly through “popular” art assumes that criticism is artificial and public tastes natural.  Behind this is a further assumption about natural taste which goes back through Tolstoy to Romantic theories of a spontaneously creative “folk.”  (4)

This sounds an awful lot like he’s dismissing pop. lit., and he does go on, further along, to basically dismiss popular criticism.  Aside from apparently conflating reviewers and popular critics, he says the pop. critic just uses critical language to push his or her personal taste.  I don’t think that must necessarily be true (outside of how I think it’s probably true of all forms of criticism — it would be no more true for pop. critics).  For what I would consider an example of pop. critics, uh, look right here.  Super Fanicom.  Duh.

I think he fucks this next part up.  He claims the critic is the “pioneer” of education, making it sound like the critic bears the weight of deciding what our culture will hold up as “good” forever more.  ”Whatever popularity Shakespeare and Keats have now is equally the result of the publicity of criticism.  A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory” (4).  Uh…  So, how is that not dependent on popular opinion?  It’s long been a widely- (but not universally-) held belief that Shakespeare’s fame as the great playwright is due to happenstance, but usually no one gets any juice out of claiming it was the critics who did that.  I generally hear it was because people kept putting on his plays until everyone knew them.

Here’s a really weird one.  ”There is another reason why criticism has to exist.  Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb” (4).  Now, I agree that “arts are dumb.”  That is, they can’t speak, they simply are.  However, this claim implies criticism isn’t art — if it were, it couldn’t talk either.  And I’m going with that idea, not Frye’s, here.  Criticism simply is as well, and the reader interprets it just like a novel or a tv show.  Why else would literary criticism have a veritable cottage industry of writing about criticism, trying to figure out what Derridian criticism is, really, or why the New Critics mattered so much and don’t any longer?

Just a great line, supporting the last point:  ”The artist, as John Stuart Mill saw in a wonderful flash of critical insight, is not heard but overheard” (5).

Same page, Frye mentions that a writer who writes about his or her own writing is simply another critic at that point, and no better off than anyone else when interpreting.  Which I have said already.

Frye does say an artist can’t actually be a good critic by the way (6).  My marginal note is, verbatim:  ”the artist cannot be critic?  Bullshit, say I.”

He suggests criticism be organized scientifically; that is, he wants it to be systematic.  Hilariously, he says it’s not a “pure” science, but “these phrases belong to a nineteenth century cosmology which is no longer with us” (7).  Had Frye never met a physicist talking about psychology?  I mean, I know physicists think they know fucking everything that’s important in the world, but they’re not the only ones still obsessed with “pure” science.

He sets up a good comparison that involves physics, though.  He points out that the study of physics has, as its object, not physics but nature.  That is, physics describe nature.  In the same way, one can’t study literature; one studies criticism, which has, as its object, literature (11).

Frye claims it’s not enough to simply steal, wholesale, theoretical structures from other disciplines and apply them to criticism.  ”Hence the prominence of the Archimedes fallacy mentioned above:  the notion that if we plant our feet solidly enough in Christian or democratic or Marxist values we shall be able to lift the whole of criticism at once with a dialectic crowbar” (12).  I guess I’m as “guilty” of this as anyone else — Campbell’s myth-criticism comes through Freud and Jung before arriving at literature.  I’m not how sure I am it’s “guilt” I’m suffering from though, hence the rather arch quotation marks.  I do agree, though, that trying to lever the whole study up on the external fulcrum isn’t the way to go.

There are a few things I marked because they apply so well to this proposed project we Super Fanicom people have now, of an anime taxonomy.  I almost imagine them as randomized quotations at the top of the pages, like we have now with the anime and game lines.  Here they are.

It is all very well for Blake to say that to generalize is to be an idiot, but when we find ourselves in the cultural situation of savages who have words for ash and willow and no word for tree, we wonder if there is not such a thing as being too deficient in the capacity to generalize. . .

We discover that the critical theory of genres is stuck precisely where Aristotle left it. . .

Thanks to the Greeks, we can distinguish tragedy from comedy in drama, and so we still tend to assume that each is the half of drama that is not the other half.  When we come to deal with such forms as the masque, opera, movie, ballet, puppet-play, mystery-play, morality, commedia dell’arte, and Zauberspiel, we find ourselves in the position of the Renaissance doctors who refused to treat syphilis because Galen said nothing about it.  (13)

And that’s all for now.  I was clearly full of shit when I said I thought these would be short, because I’m only one-third of the way through the “Polemical Introduction.”  Maybe I’ll get better at cutting down what I reference in the posts.  Oh well.

All references, unless otherwise noted, taken from Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1990.

First, I had a response to lelangir’s thoughts on the otaku-rhombus’s blogging teams.  He speculated on grouping similar-minded people together and bringing in like-minded readers, so on.  I happened to think a little while ago that this phenomenon isn’t exactly strange.  It’s magazines.  When a reader picks up a magazine, certain things are going to be set in — if we’re talking short fiction magazines (which is what I’m most familiar with), there’s an editor who decides what does and does not go in — and besides looking at “quality,” editors have a vision for what sort of content the magazine should have, what focus it should use.  One of my professors, who used to edit for a few different magazines, always told us that if an editor thinks the piece you’ve submitted isn’t right for them, that’s what they mean, they’re not trying to veil comments about your piece sucking.  My point is that, as a reading people, we collate things into groups that make sense to us.  It’s not strange that group blogs do the same thing.  This doesn’t mean everyone involved is exactly the same — any given issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction will have humor, near-horror, drama, (obviously) fantasy and sci-fi, so on, so forth.  There’s variety, just a basic guiding direction in the background.  I’ve stopped sending my parodies of epic fantasies to them, for example.  Of course, since Blood, Blade, and Thruster closed, I’ve stopped sending those out altogether.  Hm.

Anyway.  That’s my thought on the process lelangir describes.  The internet makes getting things easier, but I don’t really think it will change content all that much, save where content is at least partially defined by delivery method (please note that provides for things like Zero Punctuation, where the delivery method defines the content quite sharply).  

With that out of the way, let’s get to Stanley Fish.  If you’re not aware, Fish is a big name in reader-response criticism, a school of criticism that, according to my copy of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Fish said, is concerned with the “analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time” (1373).  Now, I have one problem with the reader-response critics:  they only regard the responses of readers who have the “correct” backgrounds to read the text.  I was told by a professor that Fish finally broke down and admitted, once, that yes, you had to be basically like the reader-response critics to read “correctly.”  (That is, one does not have to buy into their theory, but have the same background, inclinations, and ways of thinking.)  

Anyway.  Fish also wrote about a bunch of odd stuff, and I found, through JSTOR, an article he wrote for The Yale Law Journal titled “Dennis Martinez and the Uses of Theory.”  I found this article when I thought the reader-response critics would be useful to that Gothic in Video Games paper I keep mentioning.  Fish describes this scene where a sports reporter spotted Martinez, a pitcher, after a game and asked him what the coach said to him on the mound at this one critical juncture in the game.  Martinez responded [and I'm paraphrasing here] by claiming he said, “throw strikes.”  The reporter was looking for critical advice, but, as Fish argues, at that moment critical thought wasn’t required, and would have gummed up the works.  He mentions another story concerning a similar situation where engineers were trying to improve a prototype of a synthetic brush, and could only, after the fact, describe cricitally the process they had gone through to do so.  

Fish goes on to apply this to law practice, but I think it’s useful (not necessarily analogous, but useful) in dealing with writing — and keep in mind, no matter what they say on Fox News, that blogging is writing.  Well, most of it.  Fish, in capitulating his anecdotes with his proposed topic, says

First, what they [the examples] together suggest is that performing an activity — engaging in a practice — is one thing and discoursing on that practice another.  Second, the practice of discoursing on practice does not stand in a relationship of superiority or governance to the practice that is its object.  (1777-8)

There are two good things and one caveat that we must discover to do anything with this.  First, the second part of his statement is absolutely true — criticism is not superior to the original act it uses as a springboard (that statement, that criticism uses the act as a springboard, is of course contentious, not universally believed, and counter to what Fish is claiming here).  There is a perhaps mythic story of a scholar presenting on some topic, let us say a theme present in a novel.  In the audience is the novel’s author, and he or she stands during the question and answer period, then says he or she never put any of that in the book, it was never in his or her mind.  The scholar responded that he or she understood the book better than the author, that it was the scholar’s job to do so, and the author had no real business in the discussion.  Now, as true as this is in many senses — if you haven’t figured out by now, I usually hate the Word of God — the sense of superiority is misplaced.  If the author shows up, he or she has just as much right to discourse about the book as anyone else.  A local Memphis author came to visit one of my classes, and revealed that he wrote his book with the sense that the characters were people, and as such he didn’t quite wrap up every plot line, because he didn’t know what had happened to some of them; at a reading a woman asked why one character had killed another, and he was stunned to find out that was precisely what had happened, but he hadn’t known it until then.  So authors can discourse, but I don’t believe they necessarily have any extra clout in the conversation — at least, not when the conversation concerns interpretation.  

Now for the first part of Fish’s statement.  It seems obvious — talking about something is not, in fact, doing it.  And the act of criticism takes a different skillset than the act of creating — whether it’s an anime or a novel we’re talking about here.  However, Fish’s apparent attitude that the act of criticism is something else entirely is false for our discussion here.  It’s prevalent to view criticism in this way, and this attitude is basically what I’m here to try to counter.  Because while talking about baseball isn’t at all like playing baseball — imagine how much more fun those terrible ESPN analysis shows would be if the critics had to throw their critiques — writing criticism about writing is still writing.  And narrative subjects are, ultimately, writing; at least, read them as the same if I switch the words around.  

Simply, someone had to write that episode of Kannagi you want to write a blog post about, and your act of blogging it is similar to the originating act of creation behind the episode.  The difference is in method and execution rather than kind.  When we’re dealing with prose writing, of course, there is almost no difference at all.  There is, supposedly, an originating “spark” of inspiration that drives creative work that is, also supposedly, not present in critical work.  However, as Harold Bloom recognizes, even though he claims it’s not so good, all creative work is colored by what he calls “the anxiety of influence.”  Michael Chabon is more to my liking — in an essay in Maps & Legends he directly responds to Bloom, claiming he is comforted by the reach of influence, that all writers are, essentially, responding to other writing.  Clarifying that makes it sound a lot like criticism, in that criticism is accepted to be writing responding to other writing.  

What I think the real trick here is — we ought to extrapolate and really get to some awesome conclusions.  If writing is like criticism, then criticism is like writing.  Hopefully I’ve at least provided enough of a groundwork for you to accept that long enough to drive forward to the end here.  

So, the two arts here (criticism and writing) have similar methods, similar inspirations, and similar forms.  Should it not be true, then, that they would have similar goals?  I’ll refer to Chabon again, here, as he puts this very succinctly.  In the first essay of Maps & Legends, after claiming that he reads and writes for no other reason, ever, than entertainment, he says, “I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature” (14).  Glorious.  I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating (like a Freudian compulsion):  criticism is entertainment.  It stimulates the brain.  The audience of criticism enjoys thinking over things in the way criticism does, and makes the audience do.  As Fish said, it’s not better, but it’s not worse either.  It’s fun.  Not all kinds of fun are for all kinds of people.  Don’t like criticism?  Don’t read it.  Don’t like shounen?  Don’t watch it.  Simple.  

The point of criticism, its goal, is simple:  to entertain a group of people who are entertained by criticism.  That is, it has the same goal as every other kind of art.

I’ll start by getting something important out of the way that likely might not come up later.  That is, people used to accuse Northrop Frye of not distinguishing between good and bad writing.  He cheerfully responded that his critics were right, he didn’t.  I like this about him.

[I'll be getting all my stuff from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism] unless I let you know differently.]

It’s also been said “that Frye strips away the historical and political meanings from texts” (1443).  Much to the horror of certain other bloggers on this site, I like this about him as well.  In fact, I’m not very well suited to be a critic in the current theoretical climate in the academy.  That is, I’m not a New Historicist, a gender critic, or a Post-Colonial / political theorist.  I’m simply interested in the text. 

And yes, I accept that in some ways those concerns can’t be removed from a text.  However, I am, basically, interested in the text for whatever reason the author was — or I’m not.  So if the text is obviously (to my mind) meant to deal with gender issues I’ll discuss them, but otherwise I usually don’t bother, as I’m not catching any overtones from the author (and by that I don’t mean the person who penned / typed the text, but more on Barthes later).  

I like to think that what I’m interested in is what interests the people.  Like Frye, I would be perfectly willing to discuss a soap opera, except I am not, personally, interested in them.  They do not entertain me, so I can’t sustain a reading long enough to have anything to say.  But would I read an interesting piece of criticism about soap operas?  Oh yes, because they’re valid topics of discussion in my mind.  Everything is valid, because by the time a critic bothers to write something about it, it must have entertained enough people to prove it’s good in some way.  The asshole writer/reader in me is horrified by how popular the Twlight books are in America right now.  However, I accept they do something significant for the people reading them.  Like Anne Rice’s earlier works they deal with sex in an erotic, fantastical way that still admits to problems — more or less depending on which author we’re talking about.  I don’t really like Anne Rice either, so the entire genre isn’t really appealing for me, it seems.

Logically, I hate the concept of a “canon” of literature, in any field.  Fuck that.  If I find value in something, it’s in my canon.  I don’t care about anyone else’s.  In the end, I feel that’s all we can really do, come up with personal canons of texts we love, we refer to, so on.  This happens in every realm of entertainment.  Let me whip up a top five list for several of my fields of interest.

Anime:

• Cowboy Bebop
• Genshiken
• Tenchi Muyo!
• The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
• Slayers

Books:

• The Lord of the Rings
• Stardust
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• At the Mountains of Madness
• Nine Princes in Amber

Movies:

• Star Wars: A New Hope
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Mallrats
• Shaun of the Dead
• Fellowship of the Ring

Criticism:

• Hero with a Thousand Faces
• Tradition and Individual Talent
• The Archetypes of Literature
• Preface to “The Picture of Dorian Gray”
• Wizardry and Wild Romance

My theory has been shaped by my experiences as a creative writer.  I found recently that people in school from the lower, working classes tend to write genre fiction (that is, popular fiction), especially sci-fi / fantasy and mysteries.  This is my background and my chosen field of writing.  However, I have been forced, by schooling, to learn how to deal with realistic fiction, which, in its modern guise, holds no interest for me.  I am, then, by habit an egalitarian.  In my lists you probably noticed a strong strain of fantastical / speculative / imaginative fiction, or interest in same.  Mallrats speaks to me because it illustrates the way nerds look at the world.  

So, for various reasons, I feel everything can have value.  My actual process of criticism is very much a myth-critic’s — I usually begin by matching characters to mythic archetypes.  I then (try to) use those comparisons as a baseline to find something interesting in the text.  And that’s probably the next thing I should address, since it has a lot of cache on Superfani right now:  the purpose of criticism.  I’ve already come out as a defender of criticism as an art.  There are three things, I think, criticism could be — it exists, so it must be something.  It’s art, it’s artisanship, or it’s science.  I think most people, at least right now, would agree it’s not science.  Even the critics who claim the ground of objectivism usually don’t go that far.  They used to, so maybe they still are and I’m missing it.  But, for me, the debate seems to be between art and artisanship.  So, thus:  is criticism an art of its own, or a tool useful for viewing pieces of art?

Criticism certainly can serve as a tool — see my metaphor in my title line; it’s common to speak of criticism as a lens to view a work through.  However, I believe that’s inaccurate.  I think one person’s critical approach serves as the lens through which they view literature (of any kind).  But a work of criticism can’t be such a lens, because it’s not a transparent work.  ”There is no outside-text,” Derrida claimed (1825).  It is more commonly translated as “there is no outside of the text,” but that is misleading.  As the editor’s footnote in my text puts it, “a text is constituted by the attempt to represent what is outside it: every attempt to get outside of that ends up repeating, not transcending, the structure” (1825).  A text, any text, acts, in the beginning, to deal with or represent what it outside it — the world around the author(s), the ideas the author holds, so on.  However, the reader isn’t reading all of that — the reader reads the text.  So, a critical essay, in turn, reacts to something outside — the “original text.”  However, when a reader reads said article, they are reading only that.  Again, “there is no outside-text.”  There is, by extension, only the text one is reading at the moment.  So, in the moments a reader reads a critical essay, that is the only text that exists for that reader.  The reader responds to it, must respond to it, as a text in and of itself.  Sure, some essays are so poorly done, stylistically, that knowledge of the initial referent is essential.  I could make the same argument for books, and will do so right now:  certain classes of literary fiction require the reader to be familiar with outside texts, to greater or lesser extents.  The Inferno refers outside itself, but functions on its own.  These references are like treats, easter eggs on a dvd.  Good criticism refers outside in the same way — that is, good criticism can be read on its own.  Bad literary fiction refers outside itself and cannot function without the references.  Most allegory works that way (I should warn you now that, like Tolkien and Poe, I despise allegory).  The best example I can come up with is dangerous:  I haven’t read Finnegan’s Wake, but my impression, from others, admittedly, is that it requires knowledge of the texts Joyce referenced to understand it.  I’m sure Pontifus will correct me if I’m wrong.  The next-best example I can think of is Everyman, which requires an understanding of Christianity, and an understanding, really, from inside the religion, to work.  Now, at the time it was meant for exactly that.  Simply, Everyman was originally a work of artisanship, not art — it was meant to instruct.  

Some criticism acts in this way, sure.  Pick up any journal of criticism — you may be particularly interested in Mechademia, the journal of anime and manga.  Most of the articles therein will require knowledge of the text it examines, like the article in Mechademia‘s first issue about Revolutionary Girl Utena.  But sprinkled in there will be pieces about the world of the text.  

Actually, easier example:  look at Superfani.  Granted, in the past few weeks we’ve all been feeling pretty meta, but there are still a few posts about particular series or episodes.  Those are works of artisanship.  This sounds incredibly self-indulgent, but other posts here are art.  I would cite Pontifus’ piece on video game theory as art.  

I may or may not have succeeded in setting up my opinion that criticism is art, but I have nothing else to say about it at this point, so let’s move on.  What is criticism doing?  As I have said earlier, in various places, at its core criticism (in my opinion, as always) is an entertainment.  If you don’t like criticism, you won’t read it.  I feel the senses of catharsis, epiphany, enlightenment, and other fancy terms writers have come up with for the emotions invoked by “good” fiction are all merely forms of enjoyment.  People enjoy texts that don’t do those things.  People enjoy texts that do, but not for that reason.  In my opinion that means it’s not a “higher” form of meaning, simply another, an equal form, as compared, say, to the primal enjoyment of watching a character you like beat the shit out of a character you hate.  I would put these forms in a sack, not on a scale.  I think if one were “better” than another then the “higher” form would be what people noticed about the text.  But some people read, for example, The Lord of the Rings and don’t notice the eucatastrophes (Tolkien’s neologism for good catastrophes) or the themes of loss, racial alliances, or moral / ethical struggles.  Some people simply enjoy it for the evocation of something different, or for the swordfights (if swordfighting is all a person gets out of LotR they’re probably watching the movie, as there’s not enough of that in the book to carry it).  Again, if one set of entertainments are “better” and “higher” than the other, everyone, I think, would necessarily latch onto them.  The fact that some people don’t says, to me, that everything’s mixed in a sack and people grab the stuff that works for them.  Like a buffet.  

Yes, I’m comparing literature to a buffet restaurant, a Ponderosa perhaps.  

Again, this is a supremely egalitarian way to view things.  Earlier, IKnight referenced the “correction of taste.”  Some people view criticism in that light, as a way to “fix” people.  Unaltered, this concept horrifies me.  It feels like 1984, to claim that some form of enjoyment is good, while another is, essentially, thoughtcrime.  Fuck that noise.  I’ll say now that IKnight, to my understanding, wasn’t pushing the “correction of taste.”  I’m not trying to equate him with Big Brother, he simply brought up the term.  

This thought explains, to some extent, why I like myth-criticism.  It, more than other fields of criticism, is equipped to handle any form of entertainment.  It’s difficult for most forms of criticism to deal with a soap opera — excepting perhaps readings of it to further a reading of the society which produces it.  That is, one could write about Days of Our Lives and what it proves about American society’s views of marriage, gender, domestic violence, whatever.  But I feel that isn’t actually reading the text, it’s using the text.  Myth-criticism, on the other hand, could conceivably examine Days of Our Lives in light of the story of Jason, Medea, and their children, and show why DoOL appeals to people — because that sort of story always has.  That’s circular, of course, and not very useful by itself.  But that equation, as I said earlier about what I try to do, could then be used as a springboard to launch into the rest of the text, illustrating why characters act the way they do, why people respond in the way they do, and so on, so forth.  Like I said, I’m not actually into soap operas, so this is hypothetical.  Maybe I’ll do a myth-critical reading of Lucky Star sometime.  

Simplified — I think criticism acts to connect two worlds, that of the thought and that of art — and the two aren’t the same.  It shows the reader a way to think about things, beginning with a particular text and ending with the world itself.  The critic reveals something about the world, and oftentimes the reader, in revealing something he or she saw in a book or movie.  

If you made it this far, just remember, this post is IKnight’s fault — he asked for it.  Don’t blame me, I’m just the piano player.

[EDIT:  I realized that I claimed, earlier, that I would get to Barthes.  I didn't.  Sorry about that.  Some other time, hopefully?]