The Neverending Story - Some theoretical remarks on the “Zen” Tortoise, art. Nr. 5
The Neverending Story is weird. This is a continuation of a previous article as well as a part of a longer analysis of the 1984 cassette adaptation of the 1979 Die Unendliche Geschichte by German author Michael Ende. The nature of the articles will become more theoretical as more content is covered.
After travelling for a long time, Atreju eventually reaches the Horn Mountain and realises that the mountain is in fact a giant tortoise shell housing a huge tortoise called Morla. Morla is very old, almost as old as time itself and can be read as the embodiment of total knowledge within the boundaries of the horizon; while the usual subject experiences only part of that which is accessible and the otherworldly (the empress) can experience all of the horizon and beyond it, Morla has access to all of the content of "available knowledge". Quickly Atreju reaslises a peculiarity; Morla talks in third person, as if she were a spectator of herself. Furthermore, she is a cynic which becomes clear when she appears unfazed when Atreju confronts her with the possibility of her demise by the nothing, she has seen too much she says.
I want to propose a few remarks. Firstly (excuse the clumsy wording), Morla has through the total knowledge of the object of identification negated identification with it. That is to say she has through her total knowledge seized to see herself as a part of even that which inhabits the external; we could call her the Zen-tortoise although this is of course a shallow remark.
Take the proverbial egotist, cynically dismissing the public system of moral norms; as a rule, such a subject can function only if the system is “out there”, publicly recognised—that is to say, in order to be a private cynic he has to presuppose the existence of naive other(s) who “really believe”(...)
I don't want to mislead or misrepresent the quote and therefore want to highlight that it is not the content of the mechanism which I find useful here but the mechanism in itself; the external as a necessity for the existence of the private; especially in relation to the cynic who relies on this very premise for his world view. Morla is the ultimate cynic, not because of her total knowledge of everything and her timelessness, but because she has recognised even that which we would consider the self, as an external. Furthermore, it is not an externalising that we traditionally see in philosophy where the subject of the enquiry (of course to spare his sanity) can recognise the apparent self as an external but nonetheless enacts the opposite, Morla has overcome even this and talks to herself as another.
Secondly, the link that The Neverending Story establishes between the cynicism of Morla and her environment is clear; but what is the relationship precisely? We can either view the role of Morla as embodiment of total wisdom as an effect of the environment she is in (the simple observation of Morla as a tortoise in a swamp would here be sufficient), or Morla’s cynicism as the cause for the environment which she is in (this is favoured by later examples of creatures as causes for their environment instead of products of it), or the two having no correlation, although this reading is heavily unfavoured. The impossibility of a dominating force in this question as well as the absence of any synthesis which would already be present in the polarity of the issue, almost makes me want to propose a parallax gap (don't view this as a naive deployment of a complex mechanic onto a simple problem because while the concrete issue is rather simple, its abstract -that relating to the self etc- is complicated) . But I am afraid that I don't have what it takes to develop any further remark out of such a view either. To not remain in limbo, the most probable reading is that which falls in line with the semi-conservative nature of The Neverending story; namely, that the environment is an effect of Morals cynicism.
Lastly, I want to propose Morla as an object in the fictionalised-symbolic self of Bastian; in her monographic nature we can see the perfect symbol of a real which she embodies. But this complicates our understanding because it transformes Atreju into a purely fictionalised symbol of Bastian which in turn complicates our previous understanding of Atreju as the extension of the Empress. Is he both the symbolic fiction of the real and formal-symbolic actor of totality? Or is he just one of these elements? Or is he a synthesis of the two, or himself a tool of the real, used to access the total? Or the way in which the real enforces its authority over the total? The latter will be of greater relevance during the course of our analysis.
Atreju nevertheless askes Morla how the Empress can be cured and she answers that she needs a new name and that the Empress has had many names throughout time but that they were each forgotten. Lastly she tells Atreju that this name has to be given to the Empress by a human child. Something external to Fantazia which we have previously called the real.
It is time to confront the hyperfixation that the Neverending story has on names. From minute one -Bastians encounter with Mr. Koriander- to minute done -we are yet to get there- the Neverending story obsessed over names in every way it can. Firstly, every person, place and thing is assigned a name which is meticulously communicated to us even though its role as a part of the structure or other is insignificant. Secondly, with our previously developed relation between Empress and her people a simple dependence can be established, one where beings can only be as long as the Empress is. The last part of this new development comes with Morla’s insight. The Empress herself depends on the real for her persistence and by extension every being in Fantasia as well as Fantasia itself depends on the real to remain. And to apply this logic: is the way in which this dependence is formulated not the perfect element of a greater? The reliance of these beings which we know to be fictional in their relation to the real on a name as a means to exist makes it clear what they are.
Some ontological remarks
When we think of how we come to understand that which is external to us, the Kantian transcendental is not useless -although we can of course not take it too literally. The world consists of many things which in their appearance to us take on a symbolic form through our perception and we would like to see this correlation as one where some objective thing -das ding an sich- is the cause for the subsequent phenomenological experience of it. But the relation between subject and fiction is made to be different here. Namely: fiction does not have a numenal precursor to phenomenological experience but can only have a numenal through a phenomenological force. In more concrete terms, the fiction is in relation to the real an impossibility without first assigning a symbolic.
This can, however, be interrogated further. Is it not that this is what we would like the correlation to be; a clear contrast between the perception of fiction and perception of reality as such? But how can we be so sure that our symbolic understanding is in such relation to the external? We can try to imagine some numenal basis upon which we structure our symbolic perception. But this too will be symbolic and I would like to argue that there is no real difference between the fictive construction of a real and the construction of our phenomenological perception of the real. The difference between construction of fiction and perception of reality therefore has to shift from the constructive part and move towards another. I would like to propose that because fiction bases numenal on phenomena it can only be through the latter while when considering the real its numenal basis is external to the phenomenal interpretation and symbolic attribute. And it is this shift in perspective which highlights the previously mentioned relation between Bastian and his fictive counterpart; Atreju, in his symbolic form, is therefore the ultimate authority over the total, his function becoming the higher total.
