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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endnotes

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

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

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.

There’s not much introduction to do.  Anatomy of Criticism, being a book, continues.  Here’s part one of my reading of the first essay, “Historical Criticism:  Theory of Modes.”  I’ve broken this up into two parts partly because I’m really tired and I’m not sure if I’m processing very well today, and partly because the essay is broken into sections on tragedy and comedy, making my tired-decision easier to make.

Here’s a very simple breakdown of the modes Frye delineates in this essay:

Yes, I drew it myself. With a pen, not a photoshop.

He sets it up as a vertical scale, but claims the scale does not imply value.  I feel it’s easier to visualize it without the valuation in a circle, rather than a scale.  He does come to the conclusion, in the end, that it’s a cycle, so no worries there.  Start at “myth,” which involves characters greater than humans in kind and surroundings, they’re gods, divine.  Romance features characters greater in degree and surroundings, they’re traditional heroes, like Arthur.  ”High” mimetic (the term refers to that vertical scale, and again, is not supposed to imply virtue) has characters greater than humans in degree but not surroundings — so they’re leaders of men, basically.  ”Low” mimetic has characters equal to humans in every way.  Irony features characters lesser in degree or surroundings, putting the reader at a vantage above them to watch — even if the character is a regular Joe, the reader is placed above, like the story of Job.  He considers these variations to be differences in the hero’s “power of action,” or ability to do stuff.

He claims storytelling has gone down the scale, or clockwise from myth, through history, and in his current time most writing was in the ironic mode.  I think the historical tendency may be a scale as well, since there’s this push toward fantasy and sci-fi again in literature through all the striations of form and prestige, even if the old guard of literature and creative writing don’t want to admit it.

The first section applies this to tragedy.  He marks tragedy as the form in which the hero ends up being isolated from society.  I wondered if that would, necessarily, mark Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann as a tragedy, according to Frye, as Simon ends up wandering, alone, at the show’s end.  I’m not arguing it’s a tragedy, just wondering.  There are other mitigating factors, even in Frye’s classifications, to say otherwise.  Just a thought.

Frye points out the reflection of the hero’s suffering in nature is generally a romantic motif — like the deaths of gods occuring in Autumn (or, more mythically, causing Autumn).  He engages in a pretty good example of how this sort of taxonomy has a practical use:

The use of “solemn sympathy” in a piece of more realistic fiction indicates that the author is trying to give his hero some of the overtones of the mythical mode.  Ruskin’s example of a pathetic fallacy is “the cruel, crawling foam” from Kingsley’s ballad about a girl drowned in the tide.  But the fact that the foam is so described gives to Kingsley’s Mary a faint coloring of the myth of Andromeda.  (36).

Tragic romance, Frye claims, is about a spirit passing out of nature, and about loss as inevitable — and removed from its social context (that’s reserved for the mimetic modes).  The Lord of the Rings suits this description well, which he even names “elegiac.”

“Low” mimetic tragedy concerns the exclusion of a character like us from society — he marks one of the prototypical figures of this as a kind of pretender to something he or she is not, and mentions the obsessive as one type.  He then goes on to say the figure is popular in Gothic “thrillers,” but claims they’re not tragedy, but melodrama.  He either forgets about Frankenstein or considers it something else.  It seems a great lack, to me, as he mentions the type as also featuring in the “popular” trope of the mad scientist.

Interesting note for the theory of creative writing:  Frye mentions the technique of saying little and implying much as an ironic one, tied specifically to the mode, which he has already set up as one that passes into and out of popularity through time.  What is taken as an absolute in writing classes — that “less is more” — is quite specifically linked to a time, and will eventually be out of fashion again.  I think, with the rise of writers like Susanna Clarke, who actively hearken back to writers like Austen, the change is already occuring.

One of the key types of ironic figures is the “pharmakos,” the Greek term for the scapegoat.  This guy is just boned — he didn’t do anything, or didn’t do anything nearly as bad as the punishment he receives.  I immediately thought of the poor bastard who’s the main character of Air.  What the fuck did he do?  Puppet-shows.  And his metamorphosis lends weight to Frye’s claim that irony tends toward the mythic, that read as mimetic, the happenstance of irony that persecutes the individual makes no sense, but read as myth it falls into place.  His example was James’s The Altar of the Dead.  In tragedy, ironic modes generally indicate a level of complicit guilt simply for being human, rather than an individual guilt.  Everyone is isolate, the ironic tragedy says.

I will swiftly run out of images of girls reading, but for now...

Part one of my grand adventure was a little strange.  After sleeping on it, I think it’s because I wussed out and posted before finishing the entire first section of the book.  I left you, the reader, with a partial view, much as Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity through a police officer’s report on his act; he protested vigorously that, to be fairly tried, the judge and jury needed to see his act directly, but his appeals were denied.  Frye, were he alive and Googling himself every few minutes, would likely protest in much the same way to my butchering of his “Polemical Introduction.”  Here’s part two of the introduction, wherein I finish it, find more that’s useful, get the seeds (already) of an anime post based on same, and find Frye apologizing for much of what seems strange.

Frye calls for a theory of criticism analogous to biology’s theory of evolution.  He claims that criticism had been too hodge-podge, dealing with works as discrete units rather than phenomenon that could be explained.  He compares the critic with no central theory to pre-evolutionary biologists, whose work, though exhaustive, served only to catalogue animals and plants, rather than deal with the issue of how they came to be the way they are (16).  I’ve often called myth- and genre-criticism an attempt to find the “universal field theory” of literature.

If the critic deals with details too fine, such as the cataloguing process above, the whole of literature will be too broad, much like (shifting analogies — my fault, not his, he uses several throughout) a mathematician writing out all the digits of a googleplex.  ”Critic and mathematician alike will have somehow to invent a less cumbersome notation” (16).  This is, I propose, the use of genres and archetypes — a “less cumbersome notation” with which to get at the central issues.  A kind of literary shorthand, much like scientific notation.

Frye claims literature would yield an “inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries” even if new work stopped being written (17).  What’s the line from Star Trek?  Endless permutations on the same theme?  Agreed, Northrop Frye, agreed.

Frye exhorts the reader not to confuse “taste,” that is, personal likes and dislikes, with criticism.  Several forms of criticism serve, he claims, only to justify personal tastes, and he mocks this idea by choosing three writers “at random” (the authors are too cunning and pertinent to the discussion for me to believe that) and goes through all the permutations of saying one is better than the others, or worse.  His three examples are Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley.  One can argue each is better, or worse, for different reasons, but he illustrates that it’s simply personal opinion and not useful to anyone, not even the person making the claim (18-23).

One of my notes to this:  the idea there (destruction of partisanship in criticism) seems to me, at first blush, to remove criticism further from the realm of art, as art is notoriously partisan.  Since he wants to make it systematic, as objective as it’s possible for it to be, this is understandable.  Not sure how much I agree with it, but it’s certainly interesting.

He does fall into Stanley Fish’s trap of reverting to relying on “cultivated readers” (19-20) to help shore up his assumption that quality will show even through objective lenses.  I’m a populist, so no.

What’s great about a critic like Frye is that he’s really enormously funny if you have the right sense of humor, even as he’s being smart and enlightening.  I just have to blockquote this, hold on…

When we examine the touchstone technique in Arnold, however, certain doubts arise about his motivation.  The line from The Tempest, “In the dark backward and abysm of time,” would do very well as a touchstone line.  One feels that the line “Yet a tailor might scratch her where’er she did itch” somehow would not do, though it is equally Shakespearean and equally essential to the same play.”  (21).

I read this as a version of Brooks’s “heresy of paraphrase,” canted specifically toward critics.  You can’t ignore one part of the play because of your social agenda, and Frye claims that Arnold had a heavy social agenda, apparently wanting to replace religion with poetics as the structuring force of social behavior in society.

Useful for me, as it helps debunk the modern frenzy for “political” readings of everything:  ”there are critics who enjoy making religous, anti-religious, or political campaigns with toy soldiers labelled ‘Milton’ or ‘Shelley’ more than they enjoy studying poetry” (24).

A little more that can help explain, from earlier, why “art is dumb.”  Criticism, Frye claims, can’t recapture the original aesthetic experience (my term, not his).  It’s like the beauty of seeing color; biology can only explain how the human eyeball works — hardly the same experience at all (his comparison, not mine).  To be actual experience, “the reading of literature should, like prayer in the Gospels, step out of the talking world of criticism into the private and secret presence of literature” (27).  If art could speak in the same way as criticism, everyone’s experience would be the same, because art would be like a solely logical argument.  It works in one way, says what it means to, and that’s what everyone gets from it.

He ends by apologizing, basically.  He says a sympathetic reader must ignore or see past “whatever strikes him as inadequate or simply wrong” (29).  He tells the reader to cherry-pick what works for him or her.  Much of it [the book], I expect, and in fact hope, may be mere scaffolding, to be knocked away when the building is in better shape” (29).

I think all my differences with the “Polemical Introduction” stem not from his theory or his methodology, but from his purpose.  He appears to view criticism as a kind of guard, even though he lambastes the traditional ideas of critics as the guards of good taste.  I view criticism merely as another form of entertainment, a different genre than poetry or fiction, but ultimately having the same goal at its core:  to amuse the audience for a while.

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.