The Hypernatural and Supernatural in Madlax -- continued

Fictional world and perspectives
A fictional work contains various perspectives. In a typical SF they might be shown in the arrangement of the star system that provides the stage of the story, or in the physical settings such as undiscovered scientific knowledge and novelties in applied technology. In a stereotypical fantasy they can be expressed in the supernatural condition and mythical relationships linking those beings such as God, demons and sorcerers in the legendary background. As these perspectives are latent behind the story, they can take a variety of aspects. Sometimes they are extracted in the form of an aesthetic norm that defines the meaning of the whole story world as emotional judgment factor of tragedy and comedy, or as potential ethical standards to determine the good and evil of some sort of act. In a speculative notion novel, they can be revealed through the phases of peculiar physical constants and heterogeneous psychic world components, fundamentally different from the ones that regulate the real world, or through hidden variables to imply purely ideological basic axes of another possible world. (note)

note: psyche
In the original Japanese paper, the term “心霊” (shinrei) is adopted to represent the concept “psyche”, as a notion often used when one tries to consider the metaphysical phase of the subject matter of fantasy works applying the Jungian idea “archetype,” indicating the primordial mode of existence that is capable of materializing in various aspects of existence. Please refer to my “Translation and Commentary on Sue Matheson’s study, Psychic Transformation and Regeneration of Language in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn” (2010), for an example of the use of the term in the argument on the pleroma state in which both split personality and transition of personae are naturally accountable.


Readers’ concern and appreciation are not only to determine the placement of the various existences in the fictional world as a spatial disposition, but also to discover the principal mechanism that is associated with all the elements of the fictional world together with the semantic extension behind individual events. In many cases these perspectives are habitually referred to by the stereotypical term “world view”, as achieving important factors that determine the characteristics of a fictional work, but in fact, it is the peculiar metaphysical concept that can be termed “perspective”, that actually reflects the creative strategy of a fictional work and subtly dominate the essential entity of the possible world, beyond the limits of the widely accepted notion “world view”.
While the interest of reading and the evaluation of a fictional work, which is a quite different kind of possible world from the real world, should be precisely sought in the intellectual act of verification of these perspectives, on the other hand, it cannot be denied that quite a number of non-critical viewers tend to expect to have easily distinguishable perspectives offered in advance, whose directions are confirmed as a prerequisite of the act of appreciation. As a result, it seems that the act of reading which should be an interactive creation of a fictional world, has often ended in an immersive behavior in the drug atmosphere caused from the enjoyment of mere passive stimulation, bypassing the perspective validation attempt. It is not a rare case that some mind structures tend to enjoy the storyline of a fictional work as if it were their own simulated experience, accepting the fate of one of the characters exactly as their own experience relying on impulsive “empathy”. This is often pointed out as alarming tendency of typical fantasy works, but actually, genuine hard-core SF works that are usually regarded as the simulated experiments with positive scientific assurance, in which everything should be explained reasonably by the strict laws of science, differ nothing in the fact that an undesirable result is brought about that fictional world construction has been carried out lacking the reflexive awareness of verification of perspectives in the delicate procedure of constructing possible worlds. It is not at all a favorable condition that “SF” and “fantasy” are accepted as essentially such things in terms of genre concepts, when one has to attempt to capture the significance of the concept “fiction”, which should be revaluated as a factor determining the scale-balance of cosmology. Those rigid literary theories that claim “novel” and “naturalism literature” should intend to attain the completion of the picture of realistic natural phenomena confirmed by scientific worldview have entirely missed the speculative significance that is preserved in the fictional world. Truly qualitative fictional work should rather deviate from those typological genre concepts, and contain a specific self-examining vector asserting the importance of its own exceptional existence as a possible world.
A very self-reflective author who contemplates attainment of a highly autonomous fictional construction devoid of rigidly idealistic messages and non-reflective imitation of the real world, may exercise a meta-fictional strategy through a directing technique of subject-concealing presentation, barely revealing the perspectives that may determine the genre peculiarities of the work. Strictly disciplined authors deny being confined in existing stereotypical semantic frames, or being subordinated to any genre concept, promote the description of an independent possible world on the basis of the creative principle that does not confirm the described world on the existing category classification, and avoiding statements that would explicitly applicable to the existing typological concepts, scheme to construct a multi-layer structure world implementing a production of a bunch of parallel worlds retaining various background settings in the possible latency state. It is the genre deviant “fictional reality” endowed with concrete properties of its own, that is achieved by betraying the expectations of habitual audience and by dislocating the fixed patterns of specific conventions, which had been thought as implicitly constructing fictional worlds. Extremely dense, otherworldly sense of dimension is the irreplaceable nature of the “fictional reality”, which is completely different from the standardized notion that has been accepted by the majority of unaware audience. In fact, fictional reality should be attained somewhere beyond the general perception of the real world. The reader or viewer, is expected to commit in the interactive creation of the work and to accomplish further removed alternative creation, Omni-directionally verifying the scope and validity of the purely speculative hypotheses that construct the conditions of a fictional world, in order to confirm the existence of the work in his mind.
Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge called such reflective awareness to be held in the mind of a reader “willing suspension of disbelief”, and argued the nature of the principle of Romantic philosophy. But in the critical mind after the rise of fantasy literature, the idea has come to be interpreted as the act of speculation on possible worlds deployed through interaction with the thoughts of the viewer, reflecting the principle of the quantum physics’ mechanical interpretation of existence and phenomenon. Oscar Wilde argued the ontology of an artwork as a possible world generated through personal mental effects, in his essay “The Decay of Lying”, ahead of his age. But in his art theory, “art” was based on the particular perspectives that are independent from the real world, and his art was an ideological abstract world defined by definite concept axes. That is why art was deemed as a model to be followed by Nature in his art theory, and as expressed in the stunning paradox “life imitates art”, an artwork was an ideal world dominated by uniform consistency embodying pure natural laws. But along with the penetration of the 20th century knowledge of quantum mechanics theory, our life “just as it is” has come to be understood not as an orderly cosmos which is under the control of the Logos and can be described as a chain of strict causal relationship based on the rule of natural laws, but something of rather chaotic appearance showing a significant deviation from ideological consistency. It was Susan Strehl who evaluated the new act of fiction making, which is conscious of the interactive effect of the fluid and unstable “real world” to be confirmed as continuum superimposed with consciousness of the individual, introducing the appellation “actualism” in her Fiction in the quantum universe, (1992). (note)

note:
Susan Strehl discussed the influence of the findings of quantum mechanics gained in the second half of 20th century, that brought about great deal of change in the recognition of reality, in her literary study Fiction in the Quantum Universe. Strehl proposed to establish a new genre concept “actualism”, acknowledging the revolutionary shift in worldview that quantum mechanics triggered and eventually imposed the necessity to reexamine the concept of fictionality itself. I have further discussed the relation of the era spirit and the transformation of genre concept in my research of fantasy literature in the following two volumes, Fantasy as Antifantasy and Fantasy as Antifantasy 2. For more details of the argument on the relationship between quantum theory and fictionality, refer to “Quantum logic—Paradox—Impossible worlds: Actualism and Antifantasy” and “Supernatural System Theory and Antifantasy,” included in the latter volume.


However, it seems that sufficient cognition is not gained yet as for the metaphysical function of a fictional work that may enable us to irradiate the nature of the “pleroma” state, which is supposed to lie latently behind what we call “reality”, and is expected to be materialized in myriads of different forms of possible worlds. But I propose to point out the existence of a work based on the excellent creative strategy that establishes a viewpoint to gain the clue to a speculation on the potential field, taking in its perspectives the fictionality of a fictional work itself. Anime Madlax directed by Koichi Mashimo (真下耕一) has achieved a unique method of fictional world creation provided with a splendid property that may be called “hyper-natural presentation”, by way of perspective operations to take full advantage of the chaotic aspects revealing through the real world, using them each as basic axes of the work. (note)

note: hypernatural
A new concept “hypernatural” is here proposed in order to characterize the peculiarity of a fictional world that transcends both the concept “natural” which reflects the scientific worldview and the concept “supernatural” which has been posited as an opposing concept against the norm of scientific view accepted with the term “naturalism,” reflecting the factor “impossibility” which functions as an axis notion of fantasy literature. As for the process how Newtonian mechanical view of Nature has been modified along with the penetration of the knowledge of quantum mechanics, and lead to the inception and further transformation of fantasy literature, I have tried to develop a synthetic argument in Fantasy as Antifantasy (2005) and Fantasy as Antifantasy2 (2009).



In Madlax, unspecified information that does not disclose the deployment range of the background is folded up in multi-layered condition, and the work’s characteristic elements that are to be the cornerstones supporting the meaning linkage are located in ambiguous side relationship, making it difficult for the subject of consciousness who has the authority to determine the outline of the fictional world as a definite phenomenal world, to judge the characteristics of the work. As a result, this anime has achieved a methodological playwriting skill in its representation, where casual details are piled up to function as subtle under plots that are not easily detected until reexamined afterward. It is necessary to carry out a tentative application of conceptualizing the detailed scenes that might be sometimes overlooked, and dare arbitrary interferences with the visual representations of the pleroma quality to read out the hypothetical meaning, in order to reprocess this artwork that achieved a splendid visual representation, as a specimen to be analyzed as the subject of discussion. Maybe it is based on such a demand, that quite often extremely subtle subculture works are talked with affectedly elegant expressions and treated with over-polite manner, reflecting the autistic intellectual attitude of a connoisseur.