Fantasy as Antifantasy: 12 Hookian Anti-hero and Deified Ignorance

King Haggard, the typical villain who brought barren and devastation to his kingdom in The Last Unicorn, is also not free from the constraints of the ridiculous manga narrative, peculiar to this work. This diabolical tyrant who employs his power to oppress the kingdom, is rumored by the people of the country for his absurd stingy demeanor. They say also that there are no lights in his castle, and no fires, and that he sends his men out to steal chickens, and bedseets, and pies from windowsills. Even Drinn, the mayor of the town of Hagsgate, who is ridiculously pictured as the embodiment of greed and unscrupulousness, speaks of their lord, King Haggard, who is mysteriously prophesied that he will share his fate with the town: “He walks in Hagsgate at night, not often, but now and then. Many of us have seen him — tall Haggard, gray as driftwood, prowling alone under an iron moon, picking up dropped coins, broken dishes, spoons, stones, handkerchiefs, rings, stepped-on apples; anything, everything, no reason to it.” Instead of the profound learning and delicate sensitivity Hook embodies in Peter and Wendy, which did not allow him to be defined as a mere antagonist villain, King Haggard, the iconic villain of The Last Unicorn, is always told with a shabby greed cartoonishly exaggerated. It seems that the key to unraveling the secret of this mysterious man that seems to give no easy clue to interpretation can only be found by attempting a cryptographic transformation to the manifested information system, by rendering interference with the idea of “antifantasy.” King Haggard’s following words given to Schmendrick, who is about to describe the various joys that are gained from magical powers with the aid of a wizard, aiming for the patronage of the king, afford an important clue that will give us an opportunity to unravel some of the mysteries of this work. “You are losing my interest,” the rustling voice interrupted him again, “and that is very dangerous. In a moment I will have forgotten you quite entirely, and will never be able to remember just what I did with you. What I forget not only ceases to exist, but never really existed in the first place. For King Haggard, according to his words, all things are perceived as mere memories of himself, as internal mechanisms that form sub-structure of his thoughts, and they actually exist as individual objects, even free of the direction of the time axis. It is implied in the figure of King Haggard, the principle of meta-existence that can be regarded as the shadow of the author or the alter ego of the narrator, who possesses all the privileges as the creator of the story world, omniscient and omnipotent in it, possessing the same authority as the author of Peter and Wendy did. King Haggard also spoke of flamboyant courtly pleasures Schmendrick proposed to offer, in an unapproachable callous manner. “They are nothing to me,” King Haggard said. “I have known them all, and they have not made me happy. I will keep nothing near me that does not make me happy.” King Haggard depicted here bears a striking resemblance to Captain Hook of in that he has known all pleasures and gained no fulfillment, and is always suffering from an insatiable hunger, and somehow strangely similar to Peter Pan himself in that he remains a fruitless experiencer to whom no achievement leads to any improvement or growth. 　King Haggard, who recounts all the magical achievements the outstanding wizard Mabruk has given to him, simultaneously questions the meaning of living in this world and the very existence of the world through re-evaluation of the perspective of setting a standard of a value system, for knowing and doing, experience and achievement. “But that also is nothing to me,” King Haggard went on. “In the past, you have performed whatever miracle I required of you, and all it has done has been to spoil my taste for miracles. No task is too vast for your powers — and yet, when the wonder is achieved, nothing has changed. It must be that great power cannot give me whatever it is that I really want. A master magician has not made me happy. I will see what an incompetent one can do. You may go, Mabruk.” He nodded his head to dismiss the old wizard. Whereas Hook’s stoicism ultimately had to lead to disastrous consequences of splitting of the ego and isolation that left no results, King Haggard, a direct descendant of him and a more refined evolutionary form of his existence, further amplifies the ironic aesthetic propensity to consciously adopt the playful choice to entrust the miracles to the incompetent wizard that a competent one could not accomplish. 　This propensity, embodied in King Haggard, is in line with the “manga” element pointed out earlier, and is activated as a powerful factor in plotting to overthrow even one of the existential principles of the fictional world. This moment is depicted through the eyes of Molly Grew, one of the characters in the story. For Molly Grue, the world hung motionless in that glass moment. As though she were standing on a higher tower than King Haggard’s, she looked down on a pale paring of land where a toy man and woman stared with their knitted eyes at a clay bull and a tiny ivory unicorn. Abandoned playthings — here was another doll, too, half-buried; and a sandcastle with a stick king propped up in one tilted turret. At the instance when the narrative world is about to enter the moment of ultimate tension, the perspective of Molly, one of the characters in the story, is in tune with the perspective of the narrator, who exists outside of the narrative world and at the same time reflects his shadow in everything in the narrative world. The inhabitants of the narrative world are unmistakably nothing less than imaginary beings like puppets that have been able to exist only for a short time in the author’s mind. The stigma of limitation was to be manifested all the time in the absurd cartoonish way of manga drawing, or in their caricatured form as toy insubstantiality. However, King Haggard only is not burdened with the restriction of this fictionality, which even real unicorn could not be exempted from, transcending even Molly’s momentary point of view, which was in tune with the author’s. Only King Haggard is endowed with an exceptional treatment. King Haggard may be more “real” than the unicorn, and in some ways even “older.” But King Haggard, who was quite real, fell down through the wreckage of his disenchanted castle like a knife dropped through clouds. Molly heard him laugh once, as though he had expected it. Very little ever surprised King Haggard.