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 be honest with you.  I am very tempted to just write about how awesomely funny episode nine, or episode ten, of Kannagi was and just leave it at that.  I’ve actually been trawling the depths of my sick-addled mind for days, trying to think of anything I could use here other than, well, what I’m going to be using here.  Because to tell you about the end of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, I have to tell you a story.  My stories are usually about plucky, unprepared people confronting enormous danger, usually involving ghosts or giant clockwork machines.  This danger is more pedestrian, but easier to relate to.  I have to tell you about my first real relationship.

I say “first real relationship” because I’d had one other, when I was nineteen and the lady involved was eighteen.  I don’t really count it.  Most of it took place over a winter break, where we didn’t see each other, and was the sort of thing most people get out of the way in high school.

Anyway.  Relationship:  six months went by pretty well.  She said there were problems for the last month, not counting the bit where I was back home before coming to visit.  She said the week I spent visiting was one of the worst in her life.  In later conversation with friends, we came to the conclusion that she may actually be ret-conning our relationship, because I don’t think I’m so dense as to miss that sort of thing.  So she called me in July and broke up with me.  The rest of the summer kind of sucked.  I recall a moment, driving to a distant town to visit a friend, over a month later, finally feeling as though I could enjoy a summer sky again, and then not for very long.  I didn’t rage or break down, but I kept going in whatever tasteless state I was in for far longer than some might expect.

I already shocked Pontifus when I mentioned I couldn’t read for a week or so afterwards.  Anything that put me alone with my thoughts was rough for a while, watching anime included.  But I got back into it.  And then I took the hint that the otaku-rhombus was giving me, and started watching Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.  You already know a little about what that was like.  What I didn’t mention was the way I used it in my own life.  It gave me energy.  For the first time since July, I felt like there was a future.

[I'll pause here to let you know that yes, I understand this isn't a unique situation.  In the grand scheme of things it's not even all that important.  I knew all that the whole time, even that moment on the phone, but it never helped recover from the emotional trauma.]

I’d been excited with friends, playing Dungeons and Dragons or Smash Bros. Brawl, but not really by myself, here in this room I’m in right now, late at night.  In fact, I stopped staying up late for a while; I was afraid of the introspection that I knew from experience really late summer nights bring me.  So that’s what TTGL started to do for me.

Then I started to take even more.  When regret would numb or blindside me, I’d grimace, I’d mutter “who the hell do you think I am?” to no one.  When I got back to Memphis it got worse again, after having gotten a little better.  Because she was at parties, in my classes.  We had three (of four) classes together this past semester.  In the apartment I first moved into (which is not the house I live in while in Memphis now), I felt terrible.  It was a dark, lonesome sort of place, even with a roommate, as she was rarely around.  I was homesick and heartsick.  So I watched TTGL.  I saw Simon beat the little armadillo man, and listened to the soundtrack as I drove to campus and unpacked my things (only to pack them again several days later).

Now fast forward to last week.  Tuesday, I think.  I was sick (I’m still sick), and almost everyone had left the house but me.  My new girlfriend was coming over in the evenings to keep me company, and honestly, take care of me — I can be a huge, whiny brat while I’m sick.  I can also be a stubborn ass; I still haven’t been to a doctor.  So Tuesday I woke up, scrabbled around for some of the over-the-counter medicine I’d been taking, and made tea with my cereal, my usual morning.  And I decided to watch an episode of TTGL.  I had five episodes left.

And a few hours later I’d finished the series.  It was tragic and hopeful, funny — well, you probably know all that.  I haven’t seen a story more palbably about loss and the way we deal with it since The Lord of the Rings.  And like in Tolkien’s work, TTGL offers us something to help move on — never to fill in the loss, but to deal with it, make it something solid in you.

I’m going to be self-indulgent for a moment here.  Several years ago I wrote a short-short called, simply enough, “How to Save the World.”  It’s in second-person.  I’m going to quote a bit of it:

 When you’re bare, fragments of yourself littering the floor, friends, allies, and confused enemies cold in the earth, slumped under salt-water, eaten by fire, then you will be ready [. . .] Lift your fragments in a shaking hand, hold the dead close in your mind, and throw rocks. Scream, and cry, and fail to be strong enough, and wrap the flaw in your shaping around your perfections, and use the poison from that wound to stop the crawling darkness.

Aside from the obvious Lovecraftianism at the end there, I would like to think it taps into the same vein of experience and philosophy that drives TTGL, that we’re in a lot of trouble here, as humankind and as individuals; we all have problems and we have to deal with them in some way.  TTGL gives us a very simple way to deal with ourselves and the world:

“We’re evolving more with every passing minute.”  The turn of, in Simon’s words, a drill.

Let me be simple.  The end of TTGL capitulated six months of my life that, for many different reasons (I didn’t get into the problems with my creative writing courses) were some of the hardest I’ve ever had.  It ran throughout, even though I wasn’t consistently watching episodes.  When we’re just talking about TTGL it’s easy to dwell on the GAR, on the love stories — or strange occlusion they go through — the action, or even the mythic nature of sacrifice and the unlucky few (like Gilgamesh and, now Simon) who don’t have the option of sacrificing themselves, and instead have to lose those they love.  But what’s happening, for me, as the end goes by — as Simon seems to have survived twenty years without any of his friends, so well he gives up his trademark phrase, one of the things that tied him to Kamina, because it’s better for the child — is that I’m piecing Simon’s strength into my own cracks.  Given that I still cry, sometimes, at the thought of some of the losses of fictional characters in a cartoon, Simon might say I have a long way to go.  On the other hand, while I don’t yet look at the pictures of my ex and remember the good times (mostly I have to work to hide them so I don’t stumble across them), I don’t spend as much time thinking about the past as I did.  In part that’s simply time.  But then, I know, now and until always, that we evolve more with every passing minute.

Yeah, you know what’s coming. In fact, Cuchlann beat me to the punch with this moment. Perhaps needless to say, if you haven’t seen Gurren-Lagann, and you want to, you should not read on.

But if you have seen it, let’s revisit that part again.

I was not prepared for Kamina’s death. I watched the scene with staunch disbelief. I wouldn’t believe it; I couldn’t believe it.

While the dominant reaction seems to hover somewhere between sadness and outrage, and while I was certainly upset, I felt more shock than anything. As Cuchlann said, “we as audience members can understand why a group can build so readily around him — we want to be there too, being pushed by the force of his personality.” Thus far, the show had used Kamina to propel itself forward. His initiative was responsible for practically every ounce of progress the good guys had made up until the eighth episode. What the hell was the Gurren Brigade supposed to do without him — no, what the hell were we supposed to do without him?

I was wholly prepared to accept that Kamina would survive his grievous wounds.

But then he went ahead and died anyway.

I wasn’t any more pleased at this outcome than Simon. But I’ll be honest: after a bit of thought, it seemed quite sensible, in the context of the story.

For all his charisma, Kamina always irked me. He did his best to support Simon, certainly, but that did nothing to change his being a constant factor in the way of Simon’s progress. Kamina was the unbearably awesome older brother to whom Simon was forced to live up, and, when faced with this situation, Simon seemed to take the route of accepting his subordinate position. He wouldn’t try to match Kamina; how could he? It becomes obvious that he can as the show progresses, but would he have ever felt the need to as long as Kamina was alive? In order for Simon to grow in a way that would put him at the forefront of everything post-time skip, I figure that Kamina more or less had to die. He was a necessary victim of the plot.

It’s really quite tragic, I think — especially for me. I know what it’s like for the progress of a younger brother to possibly require my getting out of the way. Take it from Otouto.

Otouto-kun: I wouldn’t call you a roadblock. You’re more of a waypoint for me. Anyway, I hate to say I wanted Kamina to die, but he really had to. Alright, maybe it doesn’t pain me too much to say it, but the point is simple: he was a roadblock for Simon.

Pontifus: But did you really want him to die? From the beginning?

Otouto-kun: Nah, I didn’t want him to die, I simply understood the importance of his death. In a way, his death wasn’t only a way for Simon to grow up, but for himself as well. You could say that while he was dying he realized it wasn’t a game. He accepted his death and sort of passed the torch on to Simon. Although I could just be insane, since I’ve started looking at everything like a growing up story lately.

Pontifus: Which isn’t unreasonable, since so much anime deals with young people. But what makes me a waypoint and Kamina a roadblock? What’s the key difference there?

Otouto-kun: Well, Kamina was a leader. He took the spotlight and pretty much inspired everyone to follow him. This pushed Simon back and forced him to try to keep up. You’re more of a teacher; you have actually sat me down and taught me things. You aren’t really standing in my way. From what I’ve gathered you are perfectly fine with standing aside and letting me go when the time is right. I’m not too good at explaining things, but are you seeing what I’m saying?

Pontifus: I’m not much of a figurehead, I can tell you that much. When you go back and watch the early episodes of G-L, though, you see that Kamina was supportive of Simon all along; he always had a sense of Simon’s strengths, and seemed to rely on them. I’d agree that, in order for Simon to end up as the adult he became in the end, Kamina had to go, but I don’t think Kamina ever intended to get in the way. He genuinely seemed to want to be a good older brother figure.

Otouto-kun: You definitly speak the truth. I never saw Kamina as a bad person. The way everything played out put Simon in more of a background position though. Because of this, he was forced to try to keep up. I can understand how Simon must have felt in this situation. I think that, yes, Kamina was usually supportive of Simon, but I feel like it might have been hard for Simon to pick up on this. He probably felt kind of left out when matched up with someone like Kamina. At times I have felt, and sometimes still feel, this way about you, Aniki.

Pontifus: Simon definitely found himself in Kamina’s shadow — I think it’s safe to say that someone like Kamina casts a longer shadow than I do — but the reason this was a problem, the reason Kamina had to go, was because Simon had accepted his subordinate position. He didn’t really aspire to be anything else. And I think that Kamina even realized that Simon’s attitude wasn’t good for him, hence the “believe in you who believes in yourself” scene. Which was, incidentally, the last thing Kamina did before he died, with the exception of the Giga Drill Breaker.

The point is, we older brothers may not want to be these monolithic figures, but we really have no choice sometimes. It’s hard in a different way than being a younger sibling is hard. I have to sympathize with Kamina — I mean, it’s sad that death was literally his only option for the plot to work.

Otouto-kun: Let me just say, when you’ve lost your parents, literally or figuratively, you are going to look for the first thing that even slightly inspires you, and you’re going to follow it. When you are young, that is. Trust me. I must also say that, as a younger brother, I probably can’t truly understand the hardships of an older brother, but I feel like it’s hard for the older brother to truly understand how much his younger brother truly treasures their relationship.

It is sad that Kamina had to die, but it was because of his personality that it had to happen. If he had been more of a teacher than a role model, things may have been different.

Pontifus: The line between teacher and role model seems blurry to me. And besides, had Kamina not been Kamina, the Gurren Brigade never would’ve happened. There’s no question in my mind that Kamina had to die because of his role, but he couldn’t have been any other kind of character, either. He was doomed from the beginning, unfortunately, even if I didn’t see his death coming — I mean, I didn’t expect the show to have as much depth as it did.

You mention, though, that the older brother has a hard time understanding how the younger brother views the sibling relationship, and I think that’s probably true, but do you think Kamina’s lack of understanding was part of his “problem?”

Otouto-kun: I hate to say I’m truly sure about anything, but I feel that it was a contributing factor. I think that Kamina didn’t understand the effect his actions were having on Simon.

Pontifus: It’s the conundrum of being an older brother, I suppose. But the thing that elevates G-L beyond gar fanservice for me is that it lets people like us see the big picture. We can sit here and talk about Kamina and Simon in a way we’d never be able to manage with ourselves — we’re too close to our own situation. If I had to say Gurren-Lagann was “for” someone, I’d say it’s for us.

Otouto-kun: Well said, Aniki.

I’m not finished with Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann yet, and as readers from my personal blog might expect, I’m horribly behind, both with the newest stuff and with my own, personal schedule.

As you might guess from the title, I want to deal with GL in terms of mythology.  And, really, when is talking about Kamina a bad thing?

I am what you might call a devotée of Joseph Campbell, who claims that all stories are, at their core, myth stories.  Specifically, Campbell describes the single story of the hero as an externalization of the internal forces, pressures, and desires common to all humankind — for example, all people deal with death, and so the myth-hero will be predictably forced to deal with death in the course of his or her story.  The bits and pieces that are specific to particular cultures are like the details of a play; the director might change the actors or the costumes, but the spine, the plot, will be the same.  Myth criticism (what we’re engaged in right now) lends value to readings of texts by revealing what elements appeal to the core of the reader, and how they do so.

GL has what I would call a well-wrought action cast, and the typical seinen action show is damn close to myth anyway.  Think Bleach.  Kamina is an Achilles figure, strong, valiant, and a role model for the rest of the cast.  Maybe it’s more accurate to compare Kamina to Cuchulainn, the hero of Irish myth who defended his homeland single-handedly against an invading army and lost his life in the process.  Kamina does what needs to be done until others can get their heads in the game — the men of Ulster arrive in time to rescue Cuchulainn’s body from looting and drive back the army.

Simon is our growing boy-hero, of course.  He begins much as any viewer, still forming and growing.  To keep up our Irish myth comparisions, he’s like Finn, who begins as a servant and ends up forming the greatest group of fighting men to ever live in Irish lore, the Red Branch (don’t think I’m not trying to allude to the Dai-Gurren-Dan here, because I am).

Yoko is a wise fighter-woman (try to recall the beginning of the show, when she’s the only one who knows the conditions on the surface).  Scathbad was a witch-woman who taught Cuchulainn everything he knew about fighting, playing music, and writing poetry.

These points, by themselves, just form a minor myth-circle of characters, and that’s not very useful for us.  But the knowledge of the archetypes involved will, hopefully, allow us to move further in.

I’ll have to digress a bit here — come on, you expected it.  One of the common questions for myth-critics, at least in my experience, is whether or not new archetypes, in character, story, or setting, can be created, or if we managed to nail down everything, ever, thousands of years ago.  Strangely, the answer tends to be that no, whatever example you’re thinking of is likely a cultural variation on an older archetype or trope.  The source of power is an important trope for obvious reasons.  It might be a plot coupon, or it might not be.  We’re concerned with power from within, but that isn’t just a kind of generic “spirit” or “chi.”  Yes, GL makes heavy use of fighting spirit, but as we progress through the plot we learn that’s not really what’s happening — it’s Spiral Energy.  The quasi-internal power, as we might call it, is an old trope.  Achilles was invincible to all forms of attack (excepting one spot), but only because his mother dipped him in a special fountain when he was young.  Baldr was immune to all things (except mistletoe), but only because his mother, concerned for him, most beautiful and wonderful of the gods, made everything in the world (again, except for the mistletoe, oops) promise never to harm him.  These attributes aren’t from outside when the story is happening, but the protagonist wasn’t born with them.

I’m trying to set up a scale, this might help:  think of American comics.  On one end of our scale would be the mutants, who come with their powers the way an action figure comes with Kung-Fu Action Grip.  On the other end would be Iron Man, whose powers come from a suit.  Without the external aid, Tony Stark is exactly the same as everyone else.

That leaves us with a middle ground: the people who were normal, but are no longer.  Think Spider-Man.  Peter Parker was average, and then was bitten by a radioactive spider.  So he received his powers, much like Achilles.  After receiving them, he just has them, forever (barring any low-sales plotlines Marvel might throw our way).

I use Spider-Man quite purposefully here, by the way.  I’m finally approaching what might be considered the point of this entry — though if you come for typical points, at least to my entries, you might be disappointed in a general sense.  We have arrived at an important point, though it might not be immediately obvious.

Examine how these gift-powers come to each of our figures.  In our ancient examples, the parents (specifically the mothers, always traditionally more concerned with protecting their children) bequeathe these gifts.  The Greek culture was focused on the whims and powers of the gods, and so Achilles was dipped into a magical pool.  Norse culture was more animist, and so each plant, animal, and stone in the world swore, as a kind of species grouping thing, never to harm Baldr.  The gift is the archetype — what interests us is the stage-clothes.  Again, consider Spider-Man.  He’s a product of the sixties, and where did he get his powers?  Radiation.  Science, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is often the source of our “gifts” in stories.  Captain America was an experiment, Wolverine got his metal, but not his claws, from a lab, and the Fantastic Four indirectly received their powers from an experiment gone awry.

One step closer to GL: it’s not just science, but the branch of science.  If you saw the first Spider-Man movie, you may remember that the spiders weren’t irradiated — they were genetically altered.  In a post-Dolly world, genetics are the new nuclear physics.  And now, perhaps, you can see where I’m trying to go here.  GL plays with the idea of genetics and genetic-engineering like Lincoln Logs.  It uses a well-written action story, with serious sensibilities, to examine our modern culture’s obsession with genes (and that’s a global modern culture, as, you know, the show’s from Japan, and I’m not).  Simon’s power comes from his heritage, his genes that he received from his parents — who, we should note, are absent.  Orphans are common hero-figures because they effectively become the children of the town, state, world.  An orphan, by being the child of no one, becomes the child of everyone.  So Simon easily represents the progeny of the entire world.  The old king’s experiments with genetics led to the beast-men.  He figures as a kind of Frankenstein (remember, that’s Victor, the scientist, not the unnamed Creation — guess what I just read for Gothic novel class?).  Between them, they represent the poles of our feelings on genetics, on bloodlines (a much older idea that’s been recast in a modern mold).