Unacknowledged Virtue of The Last Unicorn: New Movement of Reevaluation of The Last Unicorn continued

Schmendrick the magician, who joined the unicorn’s quest to find her lost friends spoke as below, when he heard of Prince Lir, the son of the villainous King Haggard.

“The hero has to make a prophesy come true, and the villain is the one who has to stop him -- though in another kind of story, it’s more often the other way around. And a hero has to be in trouble from the moment of his birth, or he’s not a real hero. It’s a great relief to find out about Prince Lir. I’ve been waiting for this tale to turn up a leading man.”



note:
Quotes from The Last Unicorn are appended to the relevant page of the Annotated Last Unicorn, a commentary book on The Last Unicorn, edited by the author.

One of the characters in the fiction is clearly aware of the fact that he is a fictional existence himself, and predicts the development of the plot as a story from the reader’s point of view. Unlike the triviality of the real world, which is full of mediocre impurities, it is precisely because it is a rambling “story” that heroes and noble truths are allowed to be manifested. The introduction of such metafictional function is a peculiar antifantasy strategy that works effectively in estimating the phase of the “fictional” that represents an ontological phase in contrast to the “real”, but actually it has also been a vital principle of traditional “story” itself. A hero is not simply a term applied for someone who wins a battle or achieves conquest, but rather it denotes a central entity that makes sense of myths and legends, and has been born with a fateful mission to play a special role. Naturally, there can be no authentic “hero” in the real world. Schmendrick the magician tells the unicorn, who has been transformed into a human girl by his magic power.

“... You’re in the story with the rest of us now, and you must go with it, whether you will or not. If you want to find your people, if you want to become a unicorn again, then you must follow the fairy tale to King Haggard’s castle, and wherever else it chooses to take you. The story cannot end without the princess.



It is a part that forms a typical metafictional mechanism as the dialogue of the characters who represent a fictional world that is aware of its fictionality. Both the wizard himself and Princess Amalthea, who is a unicorn transformed into a human form, are incorporated into the semantic mechanism (perspective) required by the story on the condition that they are humans.

note: perspective
Often used in the art world as a drawing technic to express the three-dimensional impression of height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other when viewed from a particular point, this predicate is also used in English contexts to refer to the background extension of the fictional world. When considering the fantasy as one of the possible worlds, the use of this predicate, which implies “depth” and suggests the concept of “correlational equation”, was discussed by Eric S. Rabkin’s study of fantasy, The Fantastic in Literature (1977). Following this example of the use of the term as an important concept reflecting the possible global semantic construction axis in fictionality study, the author developed the notion arguing in his study “Ambivalence in Make Believe and Conventions”, (2002), which is included in Fantasy as Antifantasy, (2005). In addition, in “The Annihilation of Genre Axes in Madlax: Amorphous Fiction of Dislocated Perspectives and Archetypes / Fictional Reality 2, Bulletin of Wayo Women’s University, (2017), the argument is developed around this term as a good example of the presentation method of the fictional world itself, playing a fundamental role in the construction of the subject.


In the same way, awakened by seeing the figure of Lady Amalthea and transformed from a homely prince to a true hero, Prince Lir, following this quality he has acquired, tells on the purpose of their quest journey to Lady Amalthea, who is now about to become a human and forget her mission.

“I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches, and of knowing poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons have, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock at the witch’s door when she is away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophesies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”


Like magic, “heroes” are created so that the world should be maintained as it should be. As defenders of fundamental principles, there are “heroes” and “wizards” who should exemplify the orientation of universal truths. But the typical ideological aspects of fantasy literature are presented here through an external glimpse on this characteristic. The repeated manipulation of perspective disruptions itself forms the central perspective of the story.

This awareness is directly related to the keyword “story.” The ideal form of existence is a “story.” This is one of the possible worlds that cannot be manifested in the phenomenal world, and they can only be glimpsed in “contemplation” that is considered to be the grasp of truth gained by intuition within the consciousness of individual person. As an attempt to describe the inner world of consciousness, this element is particularly interesting compared with the way Neverland was portrayed in Peter and Wendy, where the manifestation of the impossible was attempted in relation to the mental function of “make-believing.” In The Last Unicorn, elements of “make believe” are introduced in an ideological phase, even more strenuously than those depicted in Peter and Wendy. In order to make the operation of depicting truths beyond the limits of the phenomenal world as possible as naturally, a peculiar “antifantasy” element was resorted to in The Last Unicorn, utilizing seemingly ironic and cynical descriptive methods.

Prince Lir confesses his feelings towards the Lady Amalthea, who is returning to her forest, regaining her original unicorn form after her confrontation with the Red Bull.

“… I have no wish to capture her, but only to spend my life following after her -- miles, leagues, even years behind -- never seeing her, perhaps, but content. It is my right. A hero is entitled to his happy ending, when it comes at last.”


The “story” is closer to the truth than the reality is, in that the role to be played in the world is fixed and the fate appropriate for the role is definitely given. By adding this perspective, the idea of “story” is inversely related to reality and also to the impossible worlds that transcend phenomenality. A case in point is the concept of “tragedy.” By playing the character of a tragic person who pursues a lifelong desire that can never be fulfilled, the fictional world, which encompasses itself centered on the qualia entertained by the subject of consciousness, acquires a unique existential value as a medium for staging the tragedy. In the perspective of a “tragedy,” all events converge on a single axis and form a unique meaning linkage. It is the cosmological raison d’etre of “tragedy” that can be established only in fictionality.
Interestingly, in response to Prince Lir’s words, the wizard Schmendrick presents an ontological modification of the fiction theory pointed out by the prince, adding a transcendental dimension.

“…As for her, she is a story with no ending, happy or sad. She can never belong to anything mortal enough to want her.”


In this phrase spoken by Schmendrick the magician, an attempt is made to impose a transcendent definition of “truth” through the connection between the eternal attribute of the unicorn that transcends phenomenality and the keyword “story.” If one understands that the unicorn is the embodiment of human longing for truth, the magician’s indication that “She can never belong to anything mortal enough to want her.” is extremely cruel an assertion of the truth. An equivalent counter-logic was described in Peter and Wendy as Peter Pan’s mysterious ability to fly. Peter is a shadow separated from the educated Captain Hook who is affected by the pathology of melancholy, but Peter can fly freely on the condition that he does not know any melancholy. Unsatisfied thoughts arising from the thirst for truth make people slaves to gravity. This is nothing but melancholy. In order to be freed from the chronic disease of this overly serious gravity, heartlessness, an innocent lack of remorse that knows no melancholy, is indispensable. But those who are gravely tormented as to require flying, will never have the ability to fly. (note)

note:
This argument was the main subject of the author’s study of the inception and transformation of fantasy literature, focused on Peter and Wendy, as the peculiar antifantasy instance.
CF. Fantasy as Antifantasy, Kindai Bungei-sha, (2005).


The final scene of The Last Unicorn, which develops a similar metaphysical speculation centered on self-reflective fictionality, is told in the following description.

When he caught his breath again, he began to sing, and she joined with him. And this is what they sang as they went away together, out of this story and into another.


The existence of another fictional world is mentioned in the “out of this story and into another” part. But is this “next story” really a separate and independent story from the one we’re about to finish reading? Or is the “another story” told here just a “fiction in fiction” narrated within this story? What extent does “this story” that this story tells before moving on to the “next story” refer to? Isn’t there anything in this story that the “next” indicates? Is it that, this statement of the story is a false statement that is contrary to the facts?
As in the case of the verification examples obtained here, when conducting a discourse that speaks about oneself, the veracity of the testimony is subject to unexpected subtle constraints. There seems to be a fairly large gap between consciousness-leading intuition and strict absolute logic. That is why I decided that I would never make a self-reference.