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.

At least she has clothes in this one...

As you’re probably already aware, I’m blogging my way through Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism.  I already had an idea for an actual anime post, and I’ve only read the introduction.  Even though this was inspired by Frye, I probably won’t reference him too much.  Really, this is just my obligatory Kannagi post.  Everyone’s doing one, and who am I to argue with the crowd?  Well, I do it all the time, but never mind that now.

I’m not the best at keeping up with the otaku-rhombus, but I’m getting the impression that a lot of people are upset with Kannagi‘s ending.  I can say on a personal level that episode twelve irritated me somewhat, but thirteen seemed a natural progression, bringing the suddenly disparate elements back together.  Could it have been better?  Sure, but so could the Mona Lisa.  And here’s the part that concerns Northrop Frye:  I’m not here to talk about whether or not it was good.  That doesn’t matter.  I enjoyed it well enough to want to post about it, and since criticism is fun, I’m going to enjoy this no matter how much you wanted the show to end with teh pr0n.

It’s hard to find a lot of contemporary stuff to compare Shinto gods with.  If you know anything about Celtic animism, they’re pretty similar, at least in the idea that everything has a soul, including trees, wells, and maybe even rocks.  I’m sure there are loads of differences as well, but I’m not going to do much with that comparison, so we’ll just let it slide for now.  What did strike me, today, is the similarities between the Shinto gods and the ancient Greek Titans.  The Greek gods are, well, what a westerner expects gods to be:  mighty, demanding, and just a little inhuman.  But in-between these gods and the humans, who were still human for all their heroic traits, lie the Titans.  The Titans were really a kind of first-god-race, but most of the time they’re viewed as half-human, half-god (never mind that Greek mythology had plenty of characters who could claim that pedigree literally).  The Titans were not human, not at all, but they were weaker than the Olympians and, from what I remember, often tied to a place.  Prometheus was chained in the Caucasus until Herakles freed him; Atlas was believed to stand, holding up the heavens, at the world’s western edge, or, later, somewhere around the Atlas Mountains.  I mention this because Shinto gods are typically tied to places, like sacred trees or caves, maybe a waterfall or river.  [One must wonder if the civilization that the Greeks swept in and conquered / absorbed were animist, with beliefs like the Celts or the Shinto religion, as subordinated beings in conglomerated myths are often the remnants of the gods of the older, defeated religion -- hence all the saints in Christian mythology derived from gods and goddesses, such as Saint Bridget.  Not that this speculation is helpful to the essay at hand.]

The Titans acted almost as intermediaries between the humans and the gods.  We all know the story of Prometheus stealing fire from the Sun, but he also tricked the gods into choosing the useless, non-nutritive parts of sacrifices so the humans could keep the food and burn the bones and fat in honor of the gods, thus worshipping them in the way Zeus selected but staying alive longer.  So far as I know the Shinto gods aren’t intermediaries in the same way, but I think we could look at them as go-betweens for the earth itself and the humans who live on it.  This is important because I wonder if some people are misinterpreting Nagi’s status.  She is a god, this hypothetical reasoning could go, so why all these strange problems — the inability to properly destroy impurities, the memory loss, the weakness in power.  But unlike a Greek god, who just has power, the Shinto gods are just sort-of around, almost like a higher grouping of priests (there were cults to Prometheus, even though he couldn’t god-magic anything).  Nagi’s home has been effectively destroyed.  In mythic thinking, like in dream-logic, things often have more than one identity at the same time; that is, Nagi was both the goddess of the countryside and the tree in which the god was housed — there was no difference between the two.  Destroying the tree was akin to destroying the goddess, except she got a loophole:  Jin’s recreation of her using her body.  Technically she’s still made of wood, as they discuss early on — particularly when Zange’s father talks to her midway through the series.

The idea of a god needing worship has been familiar to me ever since I read Sir Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods.  This show deals with much the same thing.

If this is all true, the more astute of you might be wondering, why the shift into screwball comedy?  I would posit to you that the show’s genre is a fully-blended admixture of contemporary fantasy and said comedy.  Even its much-contested meta-humor helps support the theme; what else would a show about a goddess dealing with mortals have, but humor about the nature of the humor inherent in the relationship between them?  The blending means it’s something different than one borrowing elements of the other.  The portions of the show concerning Nagi’s status as a goddess, serious and angsty as they end up being, are absolutely necessary.  Contemporary fantasies are often concerned with a re-imagining of the crisis of faith (I’m thinking particularly of Charles de Lint’s Forests of the Heart.)  Without constructing the world in which Jin, who has lived his life pursuing this goddess, is suddenly, through the comedy, confronted with how mundane this magical presence can be, the contemporary fantasy’s drama can’t function.  And without the underlying drama the humor can’t work, either, as it relies on Nagi secretly being on a different level from the others.  She is comprised of certain elements, but they are synthesized by her status as a god, or mystical being of some sort, weak but not mortal-weak.  She is a bit of a Cloud Cuckoo Lander, but only through virtue of her being not human.  Once or twice she, like God in the old, sadly-cancelled NBC series God, the Devil, and Bob, appreciates the things these humans have come up with (God really appreciated Pop-Tarts and twist-off beer bottle caps, if you’re curious).

The two parts do function together.  Without the drama, the comedy wouldn’t be as funny.  Without the comedy, the drama wouldn’t be as touching, or as humanized.  Note that no episode wholly abandons one aspect.  I know.  I felt like episode twelve had abandoned the comedy as well, but that’s merely because all the angst is concentrated in the ending.  Try to remember the bits with Jin falling out of the bathroom trying to catch a butterfly.  The karaoke episode is already near-infamous for its weapons-grade comedy, but even then the undercurrent of Zange’s possession of a human being still colors everything.

Short version:  despite what it feels like, Kannagi never actually veers too wildly from its purpose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway.  This “moment” refers to being accepted into Super Fanicom.  Yes, I actually had to apply for this job — or, given the very low rate of pay Pontifus is offering, perhaps “task” is a better word.  Anyone know the story of Sisyphus? 

It’s rough, going out into the seas of uncaring blog-readers on your own.  Even if people do read one’s posts, they might not comment.  A team-blog generally guarantees a handful of readers, as the other bloggers are (assumedly) interested in what one has to say.  Also, it expands one’s pool of friends, which is always a good thing, I hear.  

My head, it pulses like a blazar.  So huzzah for being accepted into the biggest circle-jerk this side of Oi, Hayaku!

It was this or NSFW. Damn fanart.

As Pontifus already told you, we’re diving hip-deep into the twelve moments of anime project for 2008.  However, I will warn you in advance, I’ll be “cheating” a little and doing some video game moments as well — I don’t think that’s too much of a problem, as Super Fanicom is about gaming as well.  Moving on!

As you might have gathered, my first entry into Superfanicom’s ultimate, giant Christmas extravaganza is Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu.  The trick here — the one that explains the questions you’re hurling at your screen right now — is that it isn’t the show that I’m entering here.  It’s the phenomenon.

I know things turned sour, yes.  I know the show went awry.  I know I haven’t even finished watching it, despite my maddened oath to blog every episode (I believe what I said was, “By God I’ll finish this show if it breaks me“).  But can you cast your mind back to that moment when the first episode had just come out of your local fansubber’s hot little queue?  Your cursor rested lovingly on the file icon and you prepared yourself for. . .  something.  I’m sure my following statement includes people who didn’t even watch, but it seemed as though we were all excited.  And for a few episodes it paid off.  The Akihabara episode was actually pretty great.  This is a show, we felt, about us, about the sometimes-crippling sense of alienation that we have, to greater or lesser extents, put up with.  Some of us maybe for all our lives.

Perhaps the part that hurts nerds (of all stripes) the most is that gnawing anxiety that underlies every reminder that we’re different from those around us — we chose this.  It may not actually be true, by the way.  Some people think biology determines our personalities.  If that’s true, then I have generations of other people to blame for the way I swoon when Luke turns off his targeting computer.  But unlike people discriminated against for their gender, race, or sexual preferences, most would agree that nerds, in some way, chose to be nerds.  That is, at some point I was (metaphorically) presented with a football and a lightsaber toy.

So Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu seemed promising to a lot of us.  Some otaku are still self-conscious about being nerds.  I’m not, but that’s because of my circumstances in a grad. program.  So for someone so demonstratably-popular among the “normies” to be an otaku did a lot of things.  It let the still-self-conscious feel better, because even the popular kids like moe.  All of us can identify with the social estrangement Haruka fears, and so the show, in some ways, functioned as a microcosm of our lives.

Bloggers, fans, and anime-watchers all came together to talk about this show, to wonder what was going to happen, and to be fascinated by someone’s attempt to chart the really painful moments of an otaku’s life.  Sure, we had Genshiken and Lucky Star already, but those are after the fact — sure, some people still make fun of the Genshiken, and even Konata’s friends think she’s a bit odd, but the nerds in both shows were basically in safe zones, where they could do whatever they wanted and only their actions, not their predilictions, would be judged.  Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu put its characters in the worst pit of arbitrary judgment and bias imaginable:  high school.

So that seems to me to be a great moment for this year.  Personally, at least, and this is meant to be my twelve moments.  My reasoning stands this way:  I rarely know anything about the state of the otaku-rhombus, but I was made aware of it by this show and the giddy discussions about it.  We seem to have risen up as one and said we need some kind of figure to rally behind.  And getting that many nerds to agree on anything is nothing short of a Christmas miracle.