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.