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

If we compare the relationship between King Haggard and the Red Bull seen above with the relationship between the unicorn and the harpy, the difference in the phases of the diagram becomes clearer. The unicorn and the harpy embodied the existence of two poles, a sublime good (holiness) and a sublime evil (wickedness) that were distinctly separated. These are no other than double stars, intertwined sacred and evil generated as a result of the vacuum polarization of the universe, and their relationship ultimately implies infinite stability and permanence, the Ouroboros　cycle due to the continuous alternating of opposite principles. This is because, in the myth creation, the attempt to present circular, cyclical, and recursive temporality was nothing more than a desire to establish an alternation principle that encompasses infinity.
Or it may be restated that the relationship between King Haggard and the Red Bull implies a terminal situation of polarity, in which even the orderly vacuum polarization of the separation of shadows from the main body is no longer guaranteed, and the distinction between subject and object, Self and Others has been blurred by the increasing chaos and fragmentation of the world as a result of the loss of faith. This is the opposite pole implied by the principle above mentioned. The ambiguity of the outline of the events that occurred in the narrative world, which in Peter and Wendy was camouflaged as a manipulation of the narrator’s storytelling, is emphasized in The Last Unicorn as one of the more robust measures to highlight the extremely self-reflective approach to describing the modalities of beings.
In the 19th century, the shadow of the dark side of men, or the specter of the alter ego, ran rampant, and self-reflective intellectuals were uniformly forced to confront the monster hidden in themselves. But in the 20th century America, where the strict self-awareness has been lost enough to be aware of the gap between the ideal and themselves just as they are, and even the awareness of the necessity for pursuit of the meaning of the existence of the world is forgotten, the monster once prosperous of their own shadow simply disappeared, and a new fiend generated out of ignorance was swarming the world. It wasn’t until the late twentieth century that the man of culture, the successor of Hookian self-reflection and ascetic sensualism, finally revealed a new aspect of the deity of Ignorance and Blindness, behind the shadow that once threatened the modern ego of nineteenth-century man.

Alternatively, if one seeks a new example of the development of isotope attribute descriptions that should be superimposed, following the narrative description system that reflects the phase shift after the manner adopted by this novel, it may also be possible to present the following variants for the schematic diagram shown above. While the novelist James M. Barrie, who was building an innovative fantasy in the British Empire, the kingdom of profanity at the beginning of the 20th century, described the embodiment of nature and unconscious instinct just as it is, as if in ridicule of the desire for establishing pan-religion that dominated fantasy literature in the 19th century and the compelling metaphysical demand of endowing meaning on Nature by theosophist principles, (note)

note:
In the mid-19th century, educated Europeans, who were trying to break free from the spell of the Christian sublime and also from the Greek logos, succumbed to the pathology of “introspection” in its process and, as in the case of Anodos in Phantastes, were obliged to confront the shadow embodied by Nature just as it is, which was a purposeless being that does not harbor the lofty ideal of spiritual advancement. In fact, the ambivalence of despair and hope implied in the acceptance of illusionless scientific truth, which was represented by the shadow he discovered in this typically speculative fantasy, was both a holistic psychotherapy on the one hand, and an extremely radical totalitarian desire for destruction on the other. It was a dream of an annihilating operation that dismantles the segmented cosmos and reduces it to its undifferentiated initial state of chaos, attaining phase transformation of the total absurdity of the universe to a matter in the thoughts of an individual. It was not only a holistic remedy but also a desire to exterminate everything in the universe, brilliantly foreseeing the reflexive introspection capsuled in fantasy, before the appearance of Peter and Wendy.



in America, the imperial of the ignorance, which finally came to experience what seemed to be the ripeness of culture in the latter half of the twentieth century, Peter S. Beagle, an outstanding fantasy writer born in the new continent where fantasy had not taken root for a long time, adopted ignorance to describe as a shadow of the polarized intelligence, which is manifested as a new mythological being in the fantasy space. (note)

note:
If we reinterpret the concept of “manga” introduced in the previous chapter for the idea of “absurdity” or the deliberate manifestation of immateriality containing obvious logical contradictions, we are immediately reminded of the similarity to what was once embodied in America by a rare fantasy writer/critic, Edgar Allan Poe. It is well known, however, that the actual understanding and appreciation of Poe in this country, had been extremely unreliable for this overly intelligent and ironical thinker. It is also true, however, that apprehension for the prevalence of ignorance and deep-seated hypocrisy under the rule of stubborn dogmatism in the uncivilized frontier country, was rather the driving force behind the excessive absurdity that severely undermined the writer’s evaluation by the public. In any case, the birth of The Last Unicorn speaks to the fact that in the late 20th century, America had finally reached the cultural maturity to accept Poe and Romantic irony without fatal misunderstanding. American ignorance contributed to a splendid work of art, providing it with a concrete image of a new mythological figure.