Essays: Interpretation

[branchandroot]

"I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth."
--Ursula K. LeGuin

All right, ladies and gentlemen, I've seen too many pages stridently claiming to tell the one true story of fill-in-the-blank-anime-show. Since I've already written a page suggesting that people turn down the stridency level and be polite, I'm now adding to my collection a page asking people to be a bit more professional as well. I realize the problems inherent in asking a community that is, by definition, amateur (including me, in this part of my webspace) to be professional, but I really think this is necessary to prevent the web equivalent of road-rage and foster useful analysis. So, here we go.

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The One Truth

This concept has caused more grief than any other I can think of right off the bat. Can we say Crusades? Can we say Fascism? Fortunately, few of the versions I've seen on anime pages go that far, but there is a distressing trend in some parts toward positivism. I use this term with a specific connotation; positivism as a philosophy merely states that sense perceptions are the only admissible basis of knowledge and reasoning. I can work with that, as long as we allow for speculation based on present knowledge. As a doctrine, however, positivism has fallen into the rut of seeing the world all in binary, if-not-yes-then-no terms. A sad fate for a perfectly reasonable initial premise. I use the term, here, in its doctrinaire sense. This brand of positivism has not proven a useful tool in any branch of inquiry, despite its attractiveness to those looking for simple, stable answers. I realize that, in some cases, it's just a matter of habit. After all, how many of you had early math teachers who bothered to explain that the order of precedence (first do the exponentials, then multiply and divide, then add and subtract) is as arbitrary as driving on the left side of the road? Ever mess around with that? You get different answers if you do the functions in a different order. Of course, all they told you was that the answer you got was wrong. But it isn't wrong, numerically, at all; it's the answer you get using a different system. Many of us never learned this, because the explanation was judged too unwieldy; instead we got the shortcut answer of "wrong". What we need to remember is that "wrong" is just a shortcut, here, and that one order of functions is just as right as another in a purely numerical sense. So let's start this page off with a model that already encompasses flexible thinking. This is more like quantum physics, complete with the observer effect. Part of what creates a story is the audience's reading of it. Those readings can vary as widely as the people making them... indeed, they do so in direct proportion to that variation. Most honest authors will admit that, too. If I can cite one of my favorite authors, Lois McMaster Bujold:

I've had a bit of occasion lately to reflect upon the meaning of the term "literary merit." It seems to have a most slippery definition. My suspicion that it might indeed be so subjective as to have no discernible meaning at all began with two early rejection slips of mine, both for the same story. Let me quote: "Some of the writing is clumsy, especially at the front, but this is overall a striking story." And the second: "Although it is nicely written, I really don't think you have much of a story here." And I said, "Huh?" Well, the story eventually sold. The tale is still one of my personal favorites. But what made the difference in the responses of my two editor-readers? They both read exactly the same words. We see a similar phenomenon in responses to cover art and other illustrations. "But it doesn't look like the character!" is the typical wail. We see it again in varyingly violent arguments over what constitutes a "good" book. We even see it in viewer responses to television. Now you'd think the visual media would be far more objective than the written word. It's easy to see how everyone reads a slightly different book, but surely everyone sees the same thing when they look at the movie or TV screen. Don't they? I first had this blinding insight while watching a Star Trek rerun a while back. Now, you must understand, I was an ST fan back before Trekkies were ever invented, when it was all brand new and nothing like it had ever been seen on TV before. I was in high school, the perfect age for a strong emotional response to escape literature. (I used to read a lot of history about WWII prison camps about that time too, as I recall.) So, anyway, I and about six of my girlfriends would gather every Thursday evening for what my parents called 'the prayer meeting,' and we would enjoy the show vociferously. My parents were baffled, and it was only lately, watching the show in very cold blood, that I have realized why. They thought that what they were seeing on the screen, the plot and effects and dialogue, was all there was. They had no conception of how much work our willing brains were doing on the initial stimulus after our senses took it in. We took the show in and fixed it, and it was to this fixed-up version that we gave our passionate response. It's increasingly clear to me that the reader and the viewer--the active reader or viewer--does a lot more than he or she is ever given credit for. They fill in the blanks. From hope and charity, they explain away the plot holes to their own satisfaction. They add background from the slimmest of clues. They work. ("The Unsung Collaborator" Dreamweaver's Dilemma)

Now, I should point out that I am not in favor of really extreme Reader Response criticism, which says more or less that if you see a meaning, any meaning, then it's there. This is very good psychology, but not such good critical practice. On the other hand, I'm also not in favor of Formalism's answer, which is that any artistic text has a single meaning which can be determined solely by reference to the details of that text itself with no outside (extrinsic) information. I was hugely relieved that the Formalists were roundly repudiated by the time I got to college, but they are still the school of choice in teaching high school. I suspect this is precisely because it's such a deterministic, one-positive-answer approach. After all, what do school boards want K-12 teachers prepare us for? Flexible, critical thinking? No! They want us prepared for tests. Most teachers I know think this is a seriously bum deal, but they're also stuck with it. A correspondent with whom I was discussing methods of interpretation pointed out "[p]eople say poetry means to you whatever you want it to mean, but if you take the AP Literature test and analyze a poem based on your predisposition, you're not going to get a good score" (personal email, quoted by permission, from Zapenstap). This is entirely true. The trick is that, on a test like the AP test or the competency tests or, later on, comprehensives and GREs, the evaluators aren't interested in whether you can do brilliant interpretation. They want to know, at the most fundamental level, whether you paid attention in class--whether you can remember what the mainstream interpretation was. These are the entry bars. You have to prove that you're a good little drone who can recite the old party lines. Then, of course, you arrive in college or, even moreso, in grad school and find that everyone wants you to learn how to disprove and alter the old party lines. It's rather disconcerting. This is why I have sympathy for students who land in my classes and just want me to tell them what the right answer is, already! It can be hard explaining that I can't give them the "right" answer because it would be a lie.

You see, what gives weight and strength to an interpretation is how much support you can gather for it. Often more than one interpretation, even contradictory interpretations, will have roughly equal support. This does not mean that we have to flip a coin and choose one at random just so we can have a single "right" answer. It means there's more than one answer. Even if one or two particular interpretations have significantly more support than another three or four, that doesn't mean the three or four are wrong. It means they're smaller parts of the story. A story is a complicated creation and most of them gesture in more than one direction. A story extends beyond its words and pictures, after all, into our memories, into the future, into imagination. Those are places with a lot of different truths to offer. The most common maneuver of the most successful professionals of interpretation (of stories, of religions, of experimental results) is inclusion. They weave all the interpretations together. Even the contradictory ones. In my profession, simply disproving what the last generation thought began to reach the point of diminishing returns a good two generations ago. Current scholars of literature are more likely to take the approach that, while Soandso produced a good analysis they missed Something and that adding that Something will make Suchandsuch changes in the previous reading. The result has been a growth of useful interpretations, replacing the pendulum swing back and forth from one moderately useful but extremely limited interpretation to another. What I would like the anime community to do is take similar action to stop a similar pendulum.

I should point out, here, that totally aside from its lack of utility, I also oppose doctrinaire positivism because it's dangerous. Anyone who claims to know the "true" meaning of a story, uninfluenced by such ephemera as her or his own point of view, engages in one of the most insidious maneuvers of power politics: denying that her or his own point of view is a point of view. Instead, our hypothetical individual is claiming that the reading produced by her or his own point of view is a self-evident truth. This may not be the intention; indeed, many instances I see of this are simply the way the person in question has been taught to couch her or his readings. But lack of intention doesn't make it any less pernicious. I would like to point out that only a privileged position has the luxury of making itself invisible. Consider: if I, a white person, am describing a new friend to another white person I am very unlikely to identify the new friend's race unless she or he is not white. White is the default assumption--white is invisible. If I don't specify a race, my listener will assume white. It's black or Asian or Indian, etc., that gets identified in this country. A distressingly large number of the interpretations that are still being passed along in intro or survey level lit classes are, in fact, the products of a very specific point of view (white, male, Protestant, propertied, straight, able), but are never defined as such because that's a privileged and thus invisible position here and has been for a long time. The default. And once people learn to think of stories in terms of self-evident truths, they export that blindness to position and perpetuate it. Think first, people. Think about what lies underneath your assumptions. Our cultural love affair with objective scientific method has led us to feel that it is invariably a good thing to be able to say that a result doesn't depend on the tester. After all, that's the point of scientific method, right? That a given experiment be repeatable and have the same results no matter who's performing it. And yet, that assumption blocks our awareness of a larger question. Why is this person performing that experiment? What does she or he hope to demonstrate--to what end? It always matters. These are humans like you and me we're talking about, here, and all humans have motivations, even if it's as mundane as to get a passing grade in Chemistry. Don't ever believe that your own situatedness makes no difference to your actions, your readings, your beliefs. To do so is to deny your own responsibility, and that is an act any human should feel ashamed of no matter how small the scale. Be aware of your own motives and reasons.

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The Author

Something I see a lot of one-truth proponents in anime doing is appealing to the authors' intent for the one "right" answer. This is, to be sure, a very tempting way to close off discussion. The problem with this is that most authors will admit up front that stories and characters have a life of their own and do things the authors never did intend and certainly can't explain. An author reaches into the realm of metaphor to tell a story, and because reading a metaphor depends on culturally constructed symbolic intuition it isn't possible for anyone, even the person who wrote it, to define it conclusively. As Ursula K. LeGuin says,

"The truth against the world!"--Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!...In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane--bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?...Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number--Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then....All fiction is a metaphor....The future, in fiction, is a metaphor. A metaphor for what? If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination. ("Introduction" The Left Hand of Darkness)

When an author releases a text, any kind of text, into the public sphere, she or he loses the opportunity to totally define the meaning of that text. Stories are especially slippery things. As soon as they're out into the world people start reading them, identifying with then, denying them, comparing them to their own lives. That's when the story begins to have new meanings. That's when it begins to live. And over time, they change with their audiences. Take, for example, Shakespeare. The classic line about Shakespeare is that he's a literary great because his stories have relevance to all people over the centuries. So far, so good, but if you take a Shakespeare class and spend any time talking about historical interpretations, you will find that what these stories meant to an Elizabethan audience looks to have been very different from what they mean to us. Better yet, spend a while listening to a bunch of Shakespearean actors. And you thought anime fans could get vicious when they argued! Go find Laura Bohannan's article "Shakespeare in the Bush" (reprinted 1998 in Language: Readings in Language and Culture, eds Clark, Eschholz and Rosa) some time, and read about what Hamlet meant to some African aborigines. Well, of course Gertrude married her husband's brother, that was exactly what she was supposed to do! And Hamlet is clearly the victim of a curse. Is anyone really going to have the brass faced, culturally imperialist arrogance to tell me that wasn't a valid reading just because it never occurred to Shakespeare? To say that those readers have to think like an Elizabethan English playwright if they want to understand the story? They understood the story just fine, in fact it fit very smoothly indeed into their cultural context. Sounds like truth to me. Or take Tennyson's poem "The Lady of Shallot." I intensely doubt that Tennyson would have said this was a poem about the dire consequences of feminine domestic drudgery or how deadly the ideal of romantic love can be for women. That doesn't mean that critics reading the poem today can't handily demonstrate the presence of those implications. Tennyson wrote a poem of great symbolic detail. It's entirely possible to argue that it shows the evils of gender roles as well as that it shows a grand and sweet tragedy of love. It's even more possible to argue that it shows both at once. Tennyson described something he perceived, and that description was rich enough that it has implications which, in all probability, he never saw himself. And this doesn't even count the interpretation of the poem as a statement about art versus reality, and the despair of an artist faced with a reality she cannot translate (thanks to Emily L for this one). Would Tennyson have written a poem about art using a woman as the artist figure? Did he, perhaps, do so subconsciously? If that was the case, he certainly wouldn't have been able to confirm it for us, would he? Authorial intent is not some stable eternal referent we can go back to in order to find the "truth."

My readers may now be wondering, if I think like this why don't I agree with the really extreme Reader Response philosophy? Well, like I said, it's good psychology, but there's a limit to how long I'm willing to follow a free-association line of analysis before I bail. Good critical practice does, I believe, need to be grounded in the text (and accouterments like author bios). I doubt I would agree, for instance, that "The Lady of Shallot" should be read as Tennyson's opinion of the French Revolution--as far as I can see, there's no evidence linking that poem to that historical happening. I would, however, be willing to read someone who thought they could demonstrate such a link, if only because the French Revolution really did have a huge impact on the Western World for many decades after it so-literally crashed and burned. The keyword here is plausibility. The question that starts off an analysis should be, is it plausible for Theme X to be present in Story Y given everything we know about Story Y's circumstances of production? If it is then it's time to go looking for the links, the pointers and parallels, the hints and symbols. If you find a few, it's a small link. If you find a lot, it's a big link. If you don't find any, it's time to look at your parameters of plausibility and maybe redefine some terms. Once you have your handful of symbols and whatnot, and have identified the scale of your link, then it's time to start laying them out in a pattern. What relation do these symbols and whatnots have to each other? Do they repeat? Is there a theme in how they're framed? How does it all hang together.? And, as my diss director was always reminding me, say what the stakes are here--why is it important that we all take note of the pattern you've found? Above all, how will you address possible objections and alternative readings (flat denial not generally being a convincing response)? When you have some answers to those questions, then you have the bones of a good analysis.

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Literature

Bujold is right; there have been arguments going on for centuries upon centuries about what constitutes literature as an art form. Go read some of Aristophanes' plays, ripping on Euripides; they're really funny. Practically speaking, based on my last nine years of observation in academia, I would have to say that literature, as a category, boils down to stories that are complex enough to support multiple interpretations. After all, a story so simple that it really does only support one reading wouldn't hold anyone's attention for very long. What keeps a story in circulation is that people keep talking about what it means. I would define literature, then, as stories that can't be reduced to a single reading. This is, of course, slightly self-serving, since it lets me argue that my favorite anime shows are also literature and, therefore, something I am justified in spending professional time on as well as hobby time. Given this perspective it fails to surprise me that the most vigorous discussions I've found cover the most ambiguous material--after all, that's where it gets fun. What disturbs me is the unproductive either-or tenor to these debates.

Take, for instance, the question raised about Season Three of Sailor Moon: who is the true Messiah? What keeps this discussion going is the fact that we don't have very clear indications in any direction. Whenever the Outers talk about the true Messiah, as opposed to the Messiah of Silence, the drawing we see is of a fairly featureless rainbow colored woman with butterfly wings. The litmus test for Messiah-hood is the ability to utilize the Grail's power. On the one hand, Uranus has two visions of Usagi looking like the drawing of the true Messiah and whenever Usagi uses the Grail for her second tier transformation she briefly manifests butterfly wings. On the other hand, she doesn't have the strength to maintain this transformation for long which leads Uranus and Neptune to conclude that she isn't the true Messiah after all. The other candidate suggested for the role is Sailor Saturn. Hotaru is certainly the host of the Messiah of Silence, Mistress Nine. The image, in the visions that Michiru and Rei share, of a woman holding the Silence Glaive lead the Outers to conclude that Sailor Saturn herself is going to be the Messiah of Silence, but this expectation is derailed by Mistress Nine overwhelming Hotaru. There would certainly be a nice poetic balance in Saturn being the true Messiah--both Messiahs in one body, duking it out. Sailor Saturn herself is never in contact with the Grail, which makes it impossible to apply the same test to her as to Usagi. Saturn does, however, manage to save the world from the approaching Silence, embodied in Pharaoh Ninety, after evicting Mistress Nine. Again, a certain balance of power seems indicated by this; if Hotaru overwhelms the Messiah of Silence, perhaps she's a Messiah too. I'm inclined to think that Usagi/Sailor Moon is the true Messiah, based on Mistress Nine's statement that the Grail is a heart crystal always at the height of emotion (love, hate, determination, etc.). She's taunting Sailor Moon, who can't transform to Super Sailor Moon since the Grail has just been destroyed to open the path for Pharaoh Ninety, that without an equally powerfully charged heart crystal she'll never be able to defeat the approaching entity. Once Sailor Saturn evicts Mistress Nine and takes off to destroy Pharaoh Ninety along with herself, however, Sailor Moon is so desperate to transform that she manages it anyway, apparently by drawing on the power of the other senshi. By my reading, this implies that Sailor Moon's heart somehow reached the same peak as the Grail, allowing her to both transform and follow Sailor Saturn to rescue her. As I say, though, this reading is based on an implication, a snippet of symbolism that can be read (like any symbol) more than one way. It's highly suggestive, but not conclusive. This is an awareness that I find lacking in an unfortunate percentage of such debates.

A similar, if even more diffusive, debate is the one over the presence or absence of homosexuality in Gundam Wing. These are a trip to read. For one thing, there seem to be a lot of definitional lines being blurred. If sexuality indicates the portrayal or implication of sexual contact between two or more characters, then I have to say I can't find any sexuality, either homo or hetero in this story. Eroticism, now, that's something else. Appealing to the American Heritage Dictionary, let's define erotic, here, as of or pertaining to sexual desire. Desire, the key term here, is also the slipperiest one. How can we judge desire, short of outright declarations which are rare in any even slightly subtle story? Once again, we have to look at the implications. There are a number of symbolically loaded scenes that get pointed out. One of the most common, the musical duet between Quatre and Trowa, I would be less inclined to read in erotic terms if it weren't for the fact that their stance, mostly back to back, echoes the arrangement of Noin and Zechs during the canteen sword-tapping scene which is much more clearly readable as flirtatious. Swords, in and of themselves, have a great deal of sexualized symbolic freighting, in both Japanese and US culture as far as I can tell. This adds a little something, which I would also call flirtatious at least on Treize's part, to the duel between Treize and Wu Fei. The rather bizarre bathing scene is definitely readable as erotically weighted, though strangely given the distance between Une's extremely proper full uniform and Treize's naked sprawl in bubble bath. That's a sharp reversal of how the clothed/invulnerable vs. unclothed/vulnerable set is usually mapped onto masculine and feminine. All of these are certainly evocative of desire and tension, though again I'm less inclined to call it sexual desire between Trowa and Quatre. The one that really tickles me, which I have yet to see mentioned, is the scene in which Duo finds the sunken Wing, beeping toward self-destruction, and disarms it. He makes some comment about how the disarming switch is in the same place on this new suit as on his, which has the effect of drawing audience attention to where said switch is shown. It looks an awful lot like the switch, depressed with the thermal scythe no less, is in Wing's posterior. That one made me laugh. Again, though, the trick here is that none of the evidence, in any direction for any pairing or grouping is at all conclusive. It's all implications, symbols, moments of desire expressed through tension. Given this I'm not at all surprised to see people both making arguments and writing fics that connect these characters sexually, nor am I surprised to see other people just as vociferously campaigning against sexual connections either in essays or in fics. What does disturb me is the unwillingness I see on both sides to allow for more than one possible answer. Personally, I'm all for fics going in whatever direction the author wants to take it, bless her or his inventive little psyche; no one's forcing anyone to read them, after all. More precision in AU and OOC labels would be nice, to be sure. The essays...well, I'd like to see a little more analytical sophistication in the essays on all sides.

What people really seem to be missing, while they argue about the little details, is the big picture. The most interesting point for analysis is not, in my not at all humble opinion, whether the true Messiah is Sailor Moon or Sailor Saturn, or whether Heero is going to (eventually) get together with Relena or Duo. The most interesting point is that the authors didn't arrange a clear answer one way or the other. Why not? That's the question I see all too many people ignoring. What value might the authors have seen, to their stories, in leaving those questions open? Maybe there isn't a true Messiah, and what does that say about the Outers' mission or about truth or Messiahs in general? If Heero has all these vague options open and kept deliberately up in the air, ranging from no one through Trowa, Relena, Duo, Zechs, whomever, what message does that convey about relationships and fifteen year old, socially inept boys in the middle of a war? Don't just settle for one answer, that's boring, look at the details of each possibility, put them all together, and see what shape they make. Inclusion, people.

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Think Deep

The business of a scholar or a teacher of literature is to bring out all the implications, all the possibilities, to give the readers as many tools as possible with which to examine the truths of our own lives. Fans, to be sure, don't have business with the texts of anime except insofar as we put money in the producers' pockets, but we do have joy with them. Why watch, if not because these stories resonate with some part of ourselves? Why write all these many hundreds of web pages, if not in an attempt to say what that part is? I would have us work on expanding the toolbox instead of squabbling over whether a particular story calls for a screwdriver or a hammer. You use the hammer, I'll use the screwdriver, someone else will use the awl and between us we'll build something really impressive.