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

Similar to the representation of dramatic irony often employed by the German Romantics, the attributes of King Haggard’s existence depicted through metafictional structure that forcibly draws dimensional composition axis of the audience/reader’s world to the one of the stage/work world they are observing, was nothing but a mirrored self-portrait of the author/world as a real entity. It is manifested as a projection of the narrator’s existence that reveals itself throughout the fictional world, as superposition of the primordial operating causes that contains all the latent forces that constitute each existence, phenomenon and personality, in the totality of the universe. (note)

note:
The premise of the universal worldview of Oneness, was the principle of mirror inversion, in which each of the actuating causes functioning as principle behind individual derivative phenomena that occurred accidentally existed as variables of each other, and that the whole that encompassed all of these was also a variable of its each part. That is why the raison d'être of the shadow world, in which thoughts and words are entities, and people and sounds are nothing more than transient semblances, must be asserted, and the real world, which constitutes itself as the superposition of form and mass, is allowed to be told in terms of a picture in which the relationship between noumenon and phenomenon is mutually overturned. Furthermore, since both memes and genes are covariant phases exhibited by elemental entity, it is also possible to assert the deconstruction of a descriptive system based on the redefinition of the entity of the meme and the idea of gene. In this way, the constant awareness that the subject and the object are to be constantly realized in the process of phase exchanges, was nothing less than the way of romantic contemplation and discourse.


The greed King Haggard embodied, was no other than one of the antifantasy manifestations of the shadow revealed by Captain Hook’s stoicism. Both Schmendrick, an incompetent magician but convinced in himself the quality of a real wizard, and Mommy Fortuna, a witch knowing that she can never attain masterhood of real magic but desperately seeks to wield her magical power that can manipulate real things, are remarkably manifesting their aspiration for the truth, in each of their form of “hunger.” This orientation for the “real” that reveals through various hierarchical orders of existence in different characters, ambivalently illuminates the integrated thoughts of the author and reader, as creator/creature, scattered throughout the work, infinitely reversed. The enigmatic villain King Haggard in The Last Unicorn, is one of the iconic heroes who is forced to belong to the reversed shadow lineage, whose coordinates are fixed on the extended axis of the heroic villain, Captain Hook. (note)

note:
King Haggard’s ironic aesthetic propensity is ideologically based on the faith in the fundamental principle that governs the universe, where efficiency and inefficiency, pleasure and pain are connected to each other, at the contact point of infinitesimal maximum and minimum, and the relationship between entity and its shadow is connected, maintaining exquisite “balance and pattern” as depicted by Ursula Le Guin, in A Wizard of Earthsea.
　In the context of an attempt to reconstruct the description mode of the existential mechanism of the universe, by means of those systems of “magic” and “prophesy,” this view, which postulates as a law that the contrapositive attributes of the ultimate truth always maintain a specular structure, as the shadow logic that governs the magic principle behind it, it is rightly aligned with the inverted assessment, the mage Nikos gained on the incompetence of his apprentice Schmendrick, as the conviction that formed the basis of his prophecy.



It will be possible to infer the dimension of the cosmological constant that determines the conditions for the existence of The Last Unicorn as a fictional world, by reconsidering the attributes of the characters’ existence and the perspective of it, contrasting them with the manifested shadow, as has been done for Peter and Wendy. There is no doubt that the enigmatic monster Red Bull must determine complementary conditions for searching the cosmological attributes of the work as the shadow of King Haggard.
Both the unicorn, who plays an important role as the protagonist to lead the story, and the harpy who appeared as her opponent in The Last Unicorn, are mythological beings that have already been familiar through various myths and legends from the ancient Greece. And the Red Bull, the arch enemy who caused the disappearance of unicorns from the world and confronts the unicorn in the climax scene, is also reminiscent of the bull described in Deuteronomy that was predicted by the Old Testament to appear at the end of the world. The bull, as written in the passage of the Book telling the scene of the end of the world, was the name used to call the being who will come from beyond when the time has ripened to rule the land, endowed with extraordinary power and ability to be the king. However, just as the unicorn was assigned with a unique property that diverged from existing legends from the beginning of the story, the Red Bull, ultimate counterpart of her, must also be equipped with a purely original property that constitutes the narrative axis in this work. But this monster, that is supposed to have both ancient and innovative elements, is also a creature of extremely obscure characteristics that does not reveal even its basic polarity. Unless the construction of this novel as an antifantasy can be properly deciphered, the Red Bull’s identity will remain hidden in enigmatic ambiguity.

　The butterfly, who was the first to afford information about the Red Bull to the unicorn, referred to the Bull as the direct cause of the disappearance of unicorns out of the world.

They passed down all the roads long ago, and the Red Bull ran close behind them and covered their footprints.


However, this butterfly seems to have quite an unreliable mouth, and mutters dubious predictions about the mysterious monster.

His firstling bull has majesty, and his horns are the horns of a wild ox. With them he shall push the peoples, all of them, to the end of the earth.


At first glance, the proclamation here gained is a faithful repetition of the words in Deuteronomy, but in fact, the content of the prophesy is subtly altered. Instead of the bull that is supposed to drive all the people to the place of judgment, the bull that the butterfly mentioned had driven the unicorns, which is supposed to be one of the constituent axes of the universe, out of the earth. The butterfly who was the first informant of the Red Bull and became the direct driver of the unicorn’s decision to embark on a quest, was an unreliable adviser who floats on the line between lie and truth. His words, which speak only half the truth, are no other than madness, and it can also be said to be the embodiment of nonsense. In the light of secular criteria, there is no room for trust in the information he provides. However, when one reconsiders the nature of fantasy and the ideological idiosyncrasies suggested by antifantasy, it is precisely the vagueness of the information that has been embodied in the butterfly and the contradictory ambiguity of his words, that will disclose the mysterious relationship between Red Bull and King Haggard, and also bring about the revelation of the secrets of the cosmic existence mechanism that underlies this speculative fantasy.
If one focuses on the the distortion of perspective that accompanies with the infinity, and on the delicate idea of irony that weaves together thoughts and statements ever in awareness of the amplitude of the coordinate axes, one can see all the idiosyncrasy and ambiguity are functioning here, coherently for providing revelation in every detail. The words spoken by the butterfly must point to the ultimate truth, unmistakably in their undulating nonsense and pulsating antinomy.
The Red Bull, the most ambiguous and enigmatic being in The Last Unicorn, is a brilliant achievement of the innovative mythological creation by the genius myth maker of our time, Peter S. Beagle, and also is the result of the most naïve way of describing the primitive representations of the archetypal existence, in a different mode than what was told in Deuteronomy. The seemingly rambling description of the relationship between King Haggard and the Red Bull correctly points to the possibility of permutations in all kinds of variations and inversions of the representation of the shadow, which is at the same time an eternal antithesis and also a solid identity as well, placed on the extension of the perimeter. For example, the unreliable information about the Red Bull given by the guards of King Haggard, indicates eloquently the full range of the matrix of complementary attributes implied by vacuum polarization, which triggers the division of the ego and the process of generation from nothing, through its inconsistency and indeterminacy of meaning.

The fourth man, who was the youngest, leaned toward Molly Grue, his pink, wet eyes suddenly eager. He said, “The Red Bull is a demon, and its reckoning for attending Haggard will one day be Haggard himself.” Another man interrupted him, insisting that the clearest evidence showed that the Bull was King Haggard’s enchanted slave, and would be until it broke the bewitchment that held it and destroyed its former lord.


And in terms of the uncertainty conveyed to the unicorn who sets out to solve the mystery of the disappearance of her people from the world, the same is true of the information given by Schmendrick, a wizard who accompanies the unicorn on her quest and becomes deeply involved in her fate, whose magic skills are not reliable in spite of his abundance of knowledge gained from hearing. The stories he narrated to the unicorn of the relationship between King Haggard and Red Bull, were unquestionably accurate in one respect, being a bundle of fragmentary information that continued to deny each other and continue to diffuse without concluding a coherent picture.

“As for the Red Bull, I know less than I have heard, for I have heard too many tales and each argues with another. The Bull is real, the Bull is a ghost, the Bull is Haggard himself when the sun goes down. The Bull was in the land before Haggard, or it came with him, or it came to him. It protects him from raids and revolutions, and saves him the expense of arming his men. It keeps him a prisoner in his own castle. It is the devil, to whom Haggard has sold his soul. It is the thing he sold his soul to possess. The Bull belongs to Haggard. Haggard belongs to the Bull.”


In a world where no one has the penetrating eyes to see unicorns, the Red Bull was the only one to be able to discern and give chase to them, though perfectly blind and never had any thirst for the sublime that unicorns embodied. The ambiguous and inexplicable relationship between the Red Bull, an enigmatic mythical being whose identity seems to remain thoroughly obscured, and the symbolic villain, King Haggard, was nothing but a typical 20th-century descriptive mode of existence, comprehensively incorporating the subtle coalescence/separation modes between the main body and its shadow, as a superposition that synchronizes with fluctuations, following the elementary principle of existence.