I see the internet, yes, as one element of this evolution to which I am pointing about anime and the canon. I have long been thinking about this whole thing, as a college English professor, focusing on film and literature. This phenomenon is going to grow simply because it is the most democratic avenue for knowledge and truth/s to take. Epistemologically speaking, truth can be clarified so quickly and to so many at one time that 'how we know what we know' is pushed aside by 'when we know what we know'. And, for me, my being sixty years old and trying to discover as a teacher how to communicate this knowledge/truth/s to students is a fundamental part of my profession. So, I suddenly find myself on a site like this, having been introduced to it by a student who is trying to make me understand how he understands a lecture on the relationship between a piece of canon literature and Jacques Derrida's Deconstruction. He sends me here to look at a piece of anime. Now, let's think about this a moment. A sixty year old Caucasian male being introduced for the first time to Japanese anime, a person who grew up with Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Unca Scrooge and Hewey, Dewey, and Louie. Now, I'm watching Ergo Proxy, and suddenly in episode four, there he is: Jacques Derrida, as a central thematic character who represents the existential underpinnings of the entire series.
What is happening is that the generation of the twenty first century is creating a brand new 'next level' of getting knowledge. This is a hugely significant paradigm shift that is the stuff of scholarly dreams. Why? Well, because I am a scholar and find myself compelled by my impulse 'to know' to keep searching for more anime that exemplifies what will come to the future as the latest additions to the canon of world literature. At any rate, that is why you find me on a site like this.
You watch.
Serialization & Great Literature, and then Manga and Anime
The 'serialization' of great literature is not a new thing, coming from our contemporary times. Serialization began with "One Thousand and One Nights", a tale about Sheherazade, the tale teller, extending her life by telling King Shahriyar tales in series so that he does not execute her in the morning after the tale is done. Each night she tells a story and then, perhaps after ten nights of the telling of the tale, she connects the tale with another tale, thus keeping the serialization going.
In the 19th century, actually about 1799, the publication of literary works began in earnest as a cheap way for publishers to attract readers to their magazines and newspaper, while at the same time providing more money to authors for their work. The longer the serial, the more money for the author. The celebrated master of such serial tales during the modern age, Charles Dickens, wrote many of his longest novels this way. And, eventually, there emerged from this process, what is called the 'pocket book' because it could be carried in a modern gentleman's breast coatpocket. These small books, hardbacks, eventually became what we (in what is now being called the "post Postmodern Age"), know as the paperback book. Great writers like the Father of the modern gothic, American detective stories as well as the short story genre itself, Edgar Allen Poe, and the incredibly talented Englishman Wilkie Collins, the Father of the English detective story, followed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his SHERLOCK HOLMES series and Edgar Rice Burroughs with TARZAN and THE WARLORD OF MARS, all had their work serialized, and all are celebrated as the finest writers of the various genres they represent in the world's canon of great literature.
Now that we have arrived along with generation X at the doorstep of the 21st century, which is ushering in the digital versions of literature, the serialization process continues to evolve. What fascinates me most is, remarkably, the dynamic behind such evolution, seems to be from the East, Japan, with its translations of its 'manga' pocket book tradition, into the digital versions we find here on Veoh and other community sites. Because the history of serialization is filled with the finest writers of their ages, the serial anime like the one being shared on this channel through the fansubs process should also be considered on the same footing as these earlier writers. This amazing publishing process, though a commercial venture in all its motivations, still is democratizing the finest of literature from around the world.
Anime goes far beyond the Disney cartoons of my generation in digging into the universal truths that fine literature, the literature of the academic world, called the Canon, attempts to discover and to explain to its readers/viewers. I've been studying this phenomenon for several years now, and the anime OTOGIZOUSHI is just one latest find that is discussing the age old contraversy about the nature of our existence, the meaning of it, and whether or not there is such a thing as FATE. The artwork is fine, the story is remarkable with its twists and turns, and perhaps in this sense could be considered a masterpiece, though to some it may appear simplistic in some of its rhetorical aspects, those things having to do with the form it takes.
Making judgments as to its being a masterpiece becomes difficult, and in the least, when one considers the very palpable difference in critical approach to Western literature as opposed to Eastern literature. The language and artistic expression of the haiku may influence some of the more simplistic language that may be used in this anime, and thus we cannot fairly, it would seem to me, to compare/contrast it the way we might Western literature. These things are for you to argue and think about while enjoying a fine piece of storytelling.
I was so glad to find it, and am thankful it was shared with me, so I'm merely passing it on to you here in a broader and more complex literary context that I hope you will all enjoy. I hope to be adding more anime like this while giving us all more to think about as to the thematic and litrariness of such remarkable work, coming from all over the world.
