Breaking into the super robot genre has proven difficult for me, so I asked the wise OGT to point me toward a few shows that might help. Among other things, he recommended Gunbuster (aka Top wo Nerae!) — you may already know this, given all the fanboying I did over the show and its sequel. Gunbuster was probably just the sort of thing I needed, tempered as it is by enough drama and pain to sustain my interest through the genuinely awesome moments, which I can in fact enjoy on the level of genuine awesome if I stay interested long enough.

Diebuster, though.

You want to put it into words. You really try. But the last episode explodes your mind, and you’re left with assorted pieces, slightly charred, floating through space. You could leave it at that, but these pieces practically beg to be reassembled, and I’m nothing if not tenacious when it comes to weaving my webs.

So this is a post about Diebuster, ostensibly. But where to begin? “At the beginning,” some would no doubt suggest, but that’s part of the problem: the story’s structure resists that sensible impulse. It’s vexing now that I’m trying to put my thoughts in order, but it’s not something a first-time viewer would notice early on — the beginning seems just fine, and it is, in more ways than are evident from the beginning.

If that makes little sense, you can blame Diebuster’s unusual structure. Things we see in the beginning are parts of larger things that aren’t evident until later; crucially relevant information is withheld. Open an image in your favorite image editor, zoom in as far as you can, and then zoom out slowly, and you’ll get the idea. We could call it “revelation,” but it’s more ubiquitous than a series of run-of-the-mill reveals — plot, characters, setting, et al. (or, specifically, our perception of them, which is what matters anyway) are affected across the board, enmeshed as they are in a structure that’s heavily reliant on strategic obscurity and the unexpected.

It’s atypical, perhaps, but not unique, or even especially new; eighty or so years earlier, the same technique saw use by (you guessed it) James Joyce, particularly in Ulysses¹. Joyce scholar Fritz Senn calls it “circumdation:”

In [Ulysses's] first chapter we will figure out, not in the conventional, expositional order, but by circumstantial links, the setting on top of a historical tower, somewhere near Dublin, at a certain time. The last two chapters, “Ithaca” and “Penelope,” above all put much of what we had taken for granted into a different light. Adjustment takes patience and circumspection, many retracings in an Odyssean progression of trial and error… As often as not we may still be waiting for the final, redeeming “circumdet” that makes everything fall into line.²

It must be said that Diebuster is more comprehensible the first time through than Ulysses. Still, if you compared the point-by-point, beginning-to-end analyses of a first-time viewer and a second-time viewer, you may not find much middle ground. I’ve watched bits and pieces of earlier episodes after finishing the show, and the experience was quite different the second time around, relatively speaking; given how much we learn about Nono, the Topless, the space monsters, and the universe itself along the way, and how much of that information is the sort that’s probably evident to the characters all along even if we aren’t aware of it, the second viewing produces constructs of meaning vastly different from the first. Many stories (maybe all stories) have this quality to some degree, but Diebuster has it in spades — again, it shapes the story’s very momentum.

Since I’ve ended up on the topic of second viewing anyway, consider the first episode on rewatch. We know of Nono’s identity; much of what she does makes a new sort of sense, or assumes altered significance. We know that Lal’c, with all of her baggage (of which we also know), is responsible for the brief voice-over during the opening moments, and we’ve heard the complementary voice-over in episode 6. We know the basis of Tycho’s attitude toward Lal’c. We know more about the antagonists, about the setting, about practically everything. It seems, to me at least, a more profound change in experience than that brought about by simply knowing what will happen in future episodes.

With that said, circumdation isn’t specifically a process that takes place between viewings; it happens all along, and forces us to question our assumptions even during the first viewing. We’re kept on our toes, made to disassemble initial conclusions, insert new information, and reconstruct them as best we can, all while processing plot developments which, in six episodes, don’t have time to pause and give us a breather. It results in a very active, almost hectic reading process — I enjoy it, usually, though I wonder if this would be a basis of complaint for some viewers.

The effect is most evident in later episodes, when revelatory events invoke broad re-imaginings — episode four in particular comes to mind, and the sixth episode affirms that Diebuster’s circumdative nature can reach even Gunbuster, if we let it. Being a matter of basic structure, however, it’s present all along. In the first episode, for example, we aren’t even certain of the setting (that is, Mars) until the latter third or so, when it’s announced outright. Consider the screencaps above, both from the beginning; the predominance of blue, the snow, and the rustic nature of the houses are all deceptive. As the episode progresses, yellow and red come to dominate the palette, technology becomes more evident, and we might, if we’re perceptive, “figure out” (as Senn says) “not in the conventional, expositional order, but by circumstantial links, the setting.” Appropriately enough, the reveal itself takes the form of a literal zoom-out.

Now, I do enjoy examining structure, probably more than I enjoy examining socio-culturo-historico-things in the usual way. But structural nuances, I must admit after a thousand-odd words about them, are not much of a starting point, which is to say that my thoughts on a story don’t begin with the specifics of its twists and turns. Customarily, I’ll try to attach broad identifiers to a thing, but Diebuster even makes that difficult — about which I am thrilled, as any excuse to combine Northrop Frye and mad speculation is a good one.

Diebuster is a mecha show, certainly. It might be postmodern, though I suspect it takes that half-step beyond that hints at postmodernism’s relevance having begun its slow death. Terms like “mecha” and “postmodern,” however, are narrower than the identifiers I have in mind — namely, Frye’s modes and mythoi. It’s possible that these terms are too restrictively Aristotelian; it’s also possible that, when these terms no longer serve our needs as-is (which isn’t necessarily the case, mind you), it’s time to play around with them, and you should know by now that nothing is sacred when I wield my Unlimited Interpretation Works.

We can say one thing with some certainty: Diebuster has irony. I don’t claim that it falls within the range of Frye’s ironic mode (I would’ve said it is ironic); it may, but I’m not yet certain of that. I simply mean that Diebuster is bursting with ironic elements, things that aren’t what they seem they normally would or should be and situations that play out in unexpected ways. Given circumdation, the very structure itself is ironic; one might say irony is its gimmick. And the characters — really, if you’ve seen Diebuster, I doubt I need to explain how the Topless are atypical super robot pilots. Consider Casio, who, despite his hanging around and offering words of wisdom where needed, essentially quit the mecha business out of fear, or Nicola, who, lacking any direction of his own, just rolls with whatever life throws at him. Tycho and Lal’c aren’t what you’d call paragons of awesome, either, until Nono teaches them how to be. And if you figured out what Nono is before the reveal in episode four, you’re probably superhuman, as it’s really just ridiculous (in a good way).

It’s possible, if we’re going with a descriptor that consists of mode and mythos (and we are, because I like to), that Diebuster is “ironic irony,” that it meets the conditions of the ironic mode (the work deals with characters presented as “below” the reader in situation or surroundings) and the ironic branch of the Mythos of Winter (the work applies myth conventions and storytelling methods new and old to realistic, recognizable situations). The latter is likely accurate; despite their capabilities and their surroundings, the Topless are all too human in their mannerisms and conflicts (perhaps it’s the effect of realism on familiar tropes that gives irony its unpredictable nature to begin with). But are they ironic characters in the modal sense? They do, after all, still have those capabilities, and they still inhabit those surroundings; the basic conditions under which their humanity takes place are unfamiliar to us. Consider the climax, during which, for a brief period, the laws of the physical universe don’t apply to Nono at all. Mode-wise, it’s almost mythological.

That in itself isn’t mind-blowing. I’ll borrow Cuchlann’s lovingly hand-crafted illustration:

It’s reasonable to imagine the modes as a cycle, and even Frye speculated in the Anatomy of Criticism that the literature of his time showed signs of moving away from irony and toward myth and romance, citing science fiction specifically. We could stick Diebuster somewhere between irony and myth, and label it transitional, and I’d be okay with that. But something deep in the untamed wilds of my mind insists that there must be more to it than that, that I shouldn’t be so quick to concede to Frye’s cycle as is. It almost feels as though we’re missing something.

Consider the relationship between contemporary “myth” and what we usually think of as myth, stories of gods and heroes and such. Both are basically myth, in Fryean terms, as both involve characters who surpass human beings in kind; whether we’re talking about Zeus or Buster Machine No. 7, we’re dealing with characters whose means fall beyond the comprehension of the humans below them. Those humans may possess the fantastical powers of the romantic mode, but they’re still human, literally speaking, and their abilities, however potent, cannot match those of the myth-figures present.

There is, however, one key difference between mythic paragons old and new. The former are made by older deities, generally, elsewise they simply are. In the beginning, there was Oceanus and Tethys, or Chronos, or Chaos, or Muspell and its guardian Surt, or God who created the heavens and the earth; these deities oversee the creation of other deities (when they allow other deities to exist), the processes of which don’t involve human beings much at all. But consider our alleged contemporary mythology. Nono is a war machine built by humans, one imbued with human-like intelligence and emotion. The Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is raw human potential made manifest. In Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos, those we see gain power over time and space are either human or human-made. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith leverages Martian wisdom with his humanity to reach his state of godliness. The difference, then: we, humans, make the gods — sometimes we are the gods. I don’t believe that’s something we can ignore.

We might call this strategic use of the unexpected, irony in the vein of this ironic age. Or we might not; I’m not sure that it’s expected or unexpected, if that makes any sense. It’s simply a fictional truth that continues to appear in the fiction (especially the science fiction) I consume. It’s not even especially surprising; irony has primed me and others to accept that God is dead, disinterested, or irrelevant, that there is no concrete meaning of life, and that, subsequently, we’re free to fill the meaning-void with whatever meaning we choose, as soon as we stop moping about there being no meaning in the first place (did I mention I usually don’t like postmodernism?). We are creators, in that sense; Heinlein’s aforementioned Stranger in a Strange Land presents that idea with little distillation. It’s as if we’ve been getting it wrong all along — rather than products of gods, we are fledgling gods ourselves. Thou art God, as it were. Please continue being a Messiah.

I’m not claiming that’s a fact of the natural universe, or even that the idea’s increasing presence in narrative art is evidence of some deep awareness of the idea on our collective part (realistically I might suggest the latter, but that’d make this post much longer than it is already, and I don’t want that). I am claiming that what Frye had in mind when he outlined the mythic mode…

If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men, the hero is a divine being, and the story about him will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god. Such stories have an important place in literature, but are as a rule found outside the normal literary categories.³

…may not describe satisfyingly or with suitable accuracy our new mythology, which, given that, may not be mythology at all. It is at the very least a mythology informed by our having written our way through the entirety of Frye’s cycle and emerged from irony intact, one which acknowledges that, even when gods grow beyond our ability to control, they wouldn’t exist at all if not for us — even from works in which gods exist literally, such as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, and (since this is basically an anime blog, after all) Kannagi, we often get the sense that a god’s power depends in whole or large part on the devotion of its followers. Either we are gods, or we inflict them upon the universe — the two may be basically the same thing. Perhaps, if we’re going to keep the cycle of modes, we should accommodate expansion, turn it into a spiral whose size reflects the experience we accumulate as we travel the modes.

Or perhaps we must acknowledge that the cycle is a result of our oversimplification of an amalgam of modes with no clear demarcations between them. “Fictions,” says Frye, “may be classified…by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same⁴” — but what if, in fiction, our power of action knows no bounds, or if an apparently mythic hero’s power of action is no more or less than what we “mere” humans decide it is? Perhaps we haven’t come full circle, so to speak, but have integrated all modes known thus far into our understanding, in a linear progression — and if that’s the case, what undiscovered modes lie ahead? What happens when self-aware gods write stories about themselves?

Endnotes

¹Not that Joyce invented it singlehandedly, but, to my knowledge, he refined it into something like what we experience in Diebuster. Even very old literature relies on the withholding of information from the audience, but, in this case (and in the case of Ulysses), it’s synonymous with the narrative structure itself, which offers understanding slowly as a series of junctures which broaden setting and characters in steps.

²Senn, Fritz. “Anagnostic Probes.” Joyce, Modernity, and Its Mediation. Ed. Christine van Boheemen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989: 40, 44.

³Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000: 33.

⁴Ibid.

What is art?

Yeah, I went there. Trepidatiously, maybe, but it’s not as if we haven’t talked about it before. Besides, it’s bound to be fun if we pull relevant examples from the reader communities to which we belong. So strap yourselves in, my magnificent comrades; you’re in for some unusual posts.

Each post in this series will begin with a question, and this one seems as good a starting point as any: can an object with a use, such as a tool or a piece of furniture, be considered art?

In the 11,001-word opus I linked above, Cuchlann describes art thus:

A crafted chair can be beautifully wrought, but ultimately it is a tool. … And as such, eventually even the most sensitive person will view it as a chair, to be sat upon. … But art, with no use but to be art, to be “beautiful,” can never be written off as anything else.

And here’s the relevant bit from Oscar Wilde’s introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray:

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

I have a hard time accepting Wilde’s suggestion that a useful thing isn’t worthy of admiration, or at least artistic admiration, by virtue of being useful. Cuchlann’s take is easier for me to digest, as it seems to allow that a tool can evoke an artistic or art-like experience, even if its utilitarian origins are bound to creep in. I get caught up on the question of whether this creeping-in of utilitarian origins weakens or annuls the artistic experience; my immediate, visceral response is no, not necessarily, but then I don’t spend all my time looking at chairs and ornate screwdrivers and such, and I do question the artistic viability of beautifully-wrought weapons, given that a weapon’s most basic purpose is the harming of a living thing. In short, I’m all over the place on this issue.

So let’s back up. If I had to give a definition (and I suppose I do, so you’ll know where I’m coming from), I’d say that art must be human-made, and that it must be capable of entertaining without actively doing anything — that is, one artistically appreciates a novel not because of its potential usefulness as a doorstop, but simply because of those things that come together to make it a novel; one appreciates the crafted form, not the use. The reader is active; the text is not.

To stick with our first example, it’s clear that there are situations in which a chair is active; it actively holds people up. Could someone sitting in the chair in question appreciate the chair as art? Arguably not; after all, the chair is active, asserting its utility to the sitter, not to mention that it’s partly obscured by the sitter’s body. But what about a spectator viewing the chair from afar? Even if the spectator thinks of the chair as a useful thing, the chair is not actively useful. Prompted by the chair’s form, the spectator draws upon knowledge and experience to give it essence; it becomes a symbol, a sign. The chair has done nothing, the spectator everything. If, then, the spectator claims to have been entertained by the experience with the chair, that’s all the proof I need to call the chair art: it’s human-wrought and capable of entertaining someone passively, whatever its alternative uses¹.

It’s possible that, in calling upon personal experience, our spectator runs into something that holds entertainment back. For example, I have a hard time accepting a weapon as art in itself because I’m bothered by its social and historical context enough so that when I look at, say, a sword, I’m generally too preoccupied with what a sword can do to a person to appreciate the craft involved. This is not to say I’m bothered by the use of swords in fiction, or even that a sword can’t be art, by my definition; if someone else can appreciate a sword artfully, it doesn’t really matter that I can’t.

Surely you have your own definition of art, and it might not agree with mine, which is fine, of course; one of the greatest things about art, I think, is that we can all disagree and still be as correct as one another (I like to be positive about it and say we’re all right, but really there is no ultimate truth value to opinions on art²). Keep your definition in mind, whatever it may be, as the connection between my central question here and the rather intriguing image above depends upon it.

Whether we think anime and manga are SRS FKN BSNS or not, I assume that most of us would agree that those staples of our fandom are art. But anime and manga are not the only objects of the fandom; our money and support feed a towering machine that churns out all manner of merchandise and derivative work, some of which surely happens to be art. We might, for example, compare figures and models to statuary. The role of fan work is up in the air, I guess, but I suppose posters, wall scrolls, and the like could serve as visual art in themselves. None of these things really serve much purpose outside of being aesthetically pleasing.

Now, what about something more ambiguous? Something like, say, a body pillow?

It is, after all, a pillow; its use is to be slept or rested upon. But can we take a few steps back and appreciate it as art? I suppose so, assuming we like the illustration thereupon. I wouldn’t know personally, not being a collector of body pillows, but it’s theoretically possible, at least as much so as for a poster. We could always separate the pillowcase from the pillow and appreciate it that way.

But wait! We can’t sum up a body pillow by saying it’s something to be slept upon and it has a pretty picture on it, can we? Look at the art on most of them; body pillows have another purpose, don’t they? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. We’ll get to that in the next post.

Endnotes

¹Speaking of chairs: in the fifth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s fictional analogue, outlines a stance on art drawn heavily from Aquinas and Aristotle. He mentions that he “found [his] theory of esthetic” by answering “questions [he] set himself,” one of which is, “Is a chair finely made tragic or comic?” It doesn’t seem to bother him that a chair is a useful thing. Interestingly, though, he tries to appreciate the chair artistically in literary terms, as literature, he says, is “the highest and most spiritual art.” You might assume that my job as The Equalizer™ (no relation) doesn’t let me agree, and you’d be right. I bring this up because James Joyce is always relevant, but also because I’ll be referring to the Portrait again in the next “What the hell is art?” post.

²The topic of good and bad craft might be exempt from this. That is, there’s certainly a wrong way (or many wrong ways) to write literature; anything that jars the reader from enjoyment is bad. But then, if the nuance in question jars some readers but not others, I’d be hesitant to call it objectively bad. Craft might be best approached from a social angle: what percentage of readers does the nuance jar?

Also, you may wonder whether the outright rejection of objectivity is a cop-out; I’ve wondered this myself, but the more research I do on the reading process, the more it makes sense. At any rate, ousting objectivity from the “literary” approach doesn’t discredit a separate (but not unrelated) sociocultural approach which values works according to the relative sizes of their fan communities, general political impact, and other people-centric factors.

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.