Beneath the Curtain, Above the Stage
Shannon Li included in Research PaperShannon Li
Avital Ronell
GERM-UA 244
Oct. 12nd, 2023
Beneath the Curtain, Above the Stage
The video game Umineko When They Cry is a storytelling parody of Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None. The story is about an extremely complex family drama and an isolated island murder case, and contains quite a lot of hardcore logical reasoning. One extremely important concept in that game is magic. Magic is the key to reasoning in the game, i.e. the purpose of the reasoning is that the existence of magic needs to be disproved in order to find the truth about the secret murder case. The focus of this paper is not to market the video game, but to explore the limits of semiotics as well as hermeneutics in terms of its concept of magic and the narrative devices that contain it.
In the narrative structure in Umineko, author Ryukishi07 depicts a murder on an island. That is, a bizarre case in which all the people on the island died. The author rewrites the case many times throughout the work, i.e., he repeatedly narrates the case with different endings many times, but never informs the reader of the truth of what happened on the island in the work. The author also introduces the concept of magic several times, and witches and magic appear frequently in the story. Magic, however, is a tool used to hide the truth of the case in their narrative. In Episode 8, the author presents a short story. A mother quietly slips candy into her child’s pocket, and later tells the child that it was the witch who gifted the candy. The purpose of magic here is to conceal, but the truth itself is not altered. Whether the mother tells the child that it was the witch who gave the candy or whether the mother herself bought the candy for the child, the child gets the candy in the result. But why does it have to be magic, and why does the mother gift the child with candy through the mouth of the witch?
In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Purloined Letter, the author describes a short story. The minister took one of the queen’s letters in a dignified manner and placed it in the most conspicuous place in the whole room, causing the police to search his whole house and still not find the letter. If this story is viewed in a simple means, it can be corresponded with the game of hide and seek like. In hide-and-seek, both sides of the game are in a state of prisoner’s dilemma. They must continually go through a cycle of deducing their own ideas being seen through by the other and their own seeing through the other’s seeing through their own ideas. For example, in the first level of deduction, the policeman thinks that the minister will hide the letter. The minister naturally comes to the second level, i.e., the minister knows that the police know that the minister will hide the letter, so the minister does not hide it. Dupin, on the other hand, is at the third level, and Dupin is aware of the minister’s prejudgment, so Dupin thinks that the minister is not hiding the letter. This cycle is described as “blind” and “sees” in the Intersubjectivity chapter of Jacque Lacan’s Seminar. One of the three subjects is blind, the second knows that the first is blind and pretends not to see it. The third, on the other hand, realizes that this hiding is essentially exposure, and Lacan refers to these three identities as “blind, seer and robber” (Müller 60).
If we return to Umineko’s short story, it can have another variation. A child playing at home accidentally breaks an expensive vase and becomes very frightened. Suddenly, a witch appears, who waves her wand and fixes the vase. And after the witch leaves, one of the witch’s mischievous black cats rushes over and knocks over the vase, and the vase breaks again. The ending of the vase being broken doesn’t change in this story. Instead, it’s just that when the mother comes back and sees the crying child and asks the child what happened, the child tells the mother the story about the witch and the black cat. Although, of course, the mother knows that the so-called witch and the black cat are nothing more than excuses for the child to break the vase, no matter what she says, the child is always in the blind position. If you look at it from this point of view, the child is blind. The child refuses to see the reality of the vase he broke. If the mother gently comforts the child after hearing the story, then the mother is naturally in the seer’s position. Yet this is not the reality. Because the child is only using the witch and the black cat as an excuse, he actually knows that those magics do not exist. A lie that no one believes can be so constructed under a premise that is not necessary to explain each other.
In Poe’s story, the letters are hidden by the minister by magical means, and once his little trick is recognized, the magic becomes so ridiculous. However, blind and seer are always going to construct a lie together. The one who holds the letter is always blind, and Dupin, eager to see the scene of vengeance, does not give an inch when the minister and the queen themselves confront each other. And the minister produced the letter with Dupin’s handwriting on it. This scene, naturally, will not happen for the minister because he is bound " he will consult his cards a final time before laying them down" (Müller 61). And here, as far as Lacan is concerned, it is not the man who possesses the letter, but the letter who possesses the man." Rather than his possessing the letter, the letter possesses him" (Müller 64). The flow of the letter between subjects rather determines the subject. the one who holds the letter always becomes blind. Magic always prevents those who believe in it from seeing the truth.
The central reason for Lacan’s analysis of the story is that he realizes the decisive role of the signifier for the subject. He speaks of “the decisive orientation which the subject receives from the itinerary of a signifier” (Müller 57). The flow of the letter between subjects thus determines the subject, and whoever holds it or is held by it necessarily becomes blind. However, in the entirety of Poe’s story, he makes no mention of what the content of the letter actually is. The content of the letter is never revealed, and it is this that makes Lacan see it as a metaphor. Is the letter a signifier? Or is the letter a metaphor for the signifier? Why is “letter” a metaphor for “signifier”? And what is Lacan’s signifier?
In the linguistic signifier, a signifier is something that characterizes the subject for another signifier. In fact, this sentence does not state any valuable information. If the only function of a signifier is to express a subject for another thing, then there is nothing in a signifier. If in order to express A one needs to refer to signifier B, and in order to understand signifier B one needs to use signifier C, the repetition is endless. This leads to the bizarre conclusion that all signified are signifiers, and the one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified that Saussure asserted does not exist. If the signifier does not need to be inherently signified in order to characterize the subject for another signifier, then is this the very truth that The Purloined Letter is a metaphor for. The letter in Poe’s story determines those holders of it precisely without the need for its content.
In Umineko’s story, “magic,” as a concept throughout the story, acts as a signifier in the same way as the letter in Poe’s story. However, the magic in Umineko’s story is a more violent mode of control over the subject. At the point where the mother lends the hand of the witch to put the candy in the child’s pocket, it is the mother who must lend the hand of the witch. The specific form of the magic is secondary to the fact that the magic must exist is primary. Magic as a signifier never needs to point to a specific thing, because it exists in itself in the most false way. But it is this floating signifier that captures both mother and child. They both must sustain the lie in order to legitimize their chain of signifiers. It is the signifier, an empty floating signifier that controls the subject and compels the subject to function under symbolic order.
This is a compulsion, a repetition compulsion, for which the two purposes of the symptom are to replace and to retrieve, and in the story of the witch’s candy, the mother, with the help of the Witch, transfers the candy from herself as the subject of the action to the Witch as the subject of the action. She uses the floating magic as a signifier to replace the action, but to retain the action itself. No matter how the magic takes effect, the reality of the matter is always below the curtain, but always presented on the stage. In the case of The Purloined Letter, the letter itself as a floating signifier essentially contains nothing. So much so that it no longer matters whether the letter itself is a letter or not; rather, the letter must exist. Rather, the letter must exist. the sliding of the signifier allows it to be any signifier, since the signifier itself is not uniquely signified. the signifier’s correspondence to the signified is the subject’s speech, not a property possessed by the signified itself. Naturally, all those involved in the contest over the letter, whether ministers or Dupin, take the letter to be a signifier beyond the letter, a desire for the supreme phallus.
Now, if we revisit Umineko’s story, we can see that there is a hidden layer of narrative in the author’s narrative; Umineko’s story is, in short, the annual family meeting of a large family on an isolated island, where they are at each other’s throats over the one hundred thousand tons of gold that the oldest of the family’s grandfathers has stashed away on the island. The story begins with a fiction writer who claims to have picked up a couple of drift bottles in the middle of publishing a book, and the novel is dominated by the multiple versions of the story of the families fighting amongst themselves on the island recorded in the drift bottles. In fact, even by the end of Umineko’s story, the reader doesn’t know what exactly happened on the island that led to everyone’s strange deaths. This is similar to Poe’s concealment of the contents of the letter. And for its narrative, it repeats itself over and over again. The drift bottle writes multiple versions of the story by repeating real events on the island. The writer of the novel repeats the story of the drift bottle by repeating the story of the drift bottle, and writes additional stories in the writer’s mind. Umineko’s repetition refers to the repetition of its narrative. The facts of the island, like the contents of Poe’s letter, are completely hidden. However, Umineko has made one small change. The facts of the murders on the island are hidden, but multiple fictional stories adapting the facts of the island are presented.
In the process of constant repetition, the floating signifier loses itself to the point where it can’t stand on its own. In the case of Poe’s letter, for example, the letter itself has lost its content in the process of floating. In all the struggles, everyone is not fighting for the letter, but for the letter as a floating signifier, but the letter itself contains no content. Such compulsive repetition forces the subject to repeat the unhappy thing over and over again, even if it is against the principle of pleasure. For example, a child breaks a vase, but tells his mother that the witch has fixed the vase and that the witch’s black cat has been a bit naughty. Magic rules this conversation as a signifier. The child’s words must be spoken through magic and this process is always forced. The child is compelled to use some form of magic to conceal his or her mistakes, an act that gives him or her an excuse and the mother a reason for comfort. Magic is a regressive possibility for both parties. The witch and the black cat itself, which magic holds behind it as a floating signifier, can be replaced with anything, and thus magic’s intrinsic signified is itself a lie, or it, like the letter, does not have a corresponding signified at all. this is a symptom of what it necessarily possesses as a subject of compulsion: the lack and the replace. As mentioned earlier, compulsion necessarily needs to be expressed through replace and retain. The child first deflects itself from the act by concealing it and using magic. By this means the traumatic memories of the wrongful act of breaking the vase are forgotten, and then the effects of this trauma are transferred to other objects. The child is always afraid, and the child’s compulsion must be grounded in the fact that he knows that breaking the vase is a morally wrong deed, so he replaces the subject of the behavior as the black cat through the lie of magic. But he always hates the black cat, and he complains that it was the black cat that broke the vase.
Lack is also an additional action that Dupin does when he switches the letter that the minister has hidden. The minister will inevitably look at the letter before confronting the queen with it to make sure his cards are safe. So the vengeance Dupin expects does not occur. “Thus nothing shall [have) happen[ed]-the final turn in Lacan’s theater of lack” (Müller 64). The obsessive-compulsive symptoms are repetitive, just as a child will continually scream, “It’s the black cat, it’s the black cat!” Dupin’s repetitive nature is also exposed in his bragging, always having to tell the sheriff how clear his thoughts are. But nothing happens. the revenge scene that Dupin expects doesn’t happen, and naturally, the witch that the kid expects to apologize for bringing the black cat doesn’t happen either. This lack, in turn, leads the subject into the plague of phantasies, and the object of the fantasies, the sexual fantasies of the obsessive-compulsive symptom, is always, in the words of Clinical Lacan, a “nurse” (Dor Chpt 16). The nurse is always active, caressing the “patient” who is passively receiving love in an active way. The compulsion of the compulsion comes from the lack, lacking the phallus, because the fantasy of the compulsion necessarily requires the subject to be the phallus, and this nostalgia is the result of the child’s projection of her mother’s love for her at an early age.
Compulsion is the loss of something and thus the search for a substitute. In the case of Dor’s nurse again, the nurse is the substitute for the lack of motherly love. Because of the loss, she wishes to be that phallus of the fantasized mother’s love. this kind of compulsion is caused by the decisive effect that the signifier has on the subject in the course of its flow. And the floating signifier and compulsion are hinted at in another story by Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat. In The Black Cat, the protagonist kills the black cat out of compulsion. And bizarrely, another identical black cat reappears and seduces the protagonist into murdering his wife. And this hateful black cat calls out again to lure the police to bring protagonist to justice. In the novel, the black cat is such a horrible intention. However, the reader has no way of knowing whether the black cat is really a cat or another kind of “magic”.
Whether it is the two types of magic in Umineko, or Edgar Allan Poe’s letters and the black cat, they all operate as a transcendental signifier. They always point to the name of the father, as in the case of the “nurse” mentioned earlier.
“The child necessarily experiences the passage from being to having as problematical because he has been thwarted in his phallic identification with the intruding father. identification with the intruding father…… In the very place where he would normally come up against frustration, he is the captive of satisfaction in the relationship of supplementation that he maintains with his mother” (Dor Chpt 16).
The child develops fantasies about the nurse because he fantasizes about becoming the phallus that his mother loves, but is unable to continue to make out with her after the mirror stage and has to find a similar substitute. And the reason for this is precisely the lack of a father. The father is absent during the Oedipus period of the child, so much so that the child has to be treated as a libido projection of the mother. Because of this, he cannot successfully identify with his father. He cannot commit patricide, and in this emasculated state he is constantly searching for the name of the father, for a “God”. We can see in The Black Cat that the black cat constantly haunts the protagonist, and we can see in the mother and the child that the two kinds of magic always constitute their dialog. God didn’t die, it just became such transcendent signifier, the big Other, that one keeps repeating and repeating in an empty room.
Compulsion doesn’t stop at the level of subject, but is in fact a situation that is about the effect of the signifier on the person. It is a case of how the master makes the subject enter into such an almost desperate eternal return. such repetitions and compulsive behaviors force the subject to constantly find a solution. Rather, such compulsion is a messianic fantasy of the master. In The Purloined Letter, whoever wants to have the letter, but the content of the letter is never the point. The minister wants the letter because he sees beyond it. A way to coerce the power of the king and queen by owning the letter. The minister never cared about the content of the letter. Such a purely abstract master signifier is the source of the minister’s compulsive behavior. He fantasizes about being in the palace, strategizing and mastering the situation. He fantasizes about being the phallus that his mother loved, the position of supreme power, admired by all. Such fantasies of omnipotence are the very fantasies of his compulsion. Like the minister who thinks that he is getting closer to death in his compulsive behavior, which means that he has been captured by the letter, not that he has captured the letter, the subject of compulsion constantly produces the illusion that “God is alive”. It is as if the child who broke the vase had gone mad and said, “It was the black cat!” The slave thus constructs, through repetitive and retrospective actions, the source of his repetitive labor, the slave owner. The superego of the subject of Compulsion is such an internalized God.
Compulsion always ends up in one of two ways, a return to a pre-modern state where God is alive, or another pure nihilism. In this category, Nietzsche has found roughly a third solution, one that becomes the Overman, transcending the eternal return. Umineko’s narrative is, in itself, a kind of reincarnation. The playwright of the plot keeps writing the solution to the murder on the island based on the story of the floating bottle, and none of them touches the truth of it. The truth is hidden, and thus the most important part of the cycle is erased, and the infinite number of Eternal Returns is reduced by one. And this most important, absent reincarnation is exactly where God is. God is in a position where he does not exist. And yet, the death drive of all the people in all the stories is precisely to find this reality where God is. Umineko is repeating itself because all the characters in it want to find that solution, that truth. They are trying to grasp the overman in the midst of repetitive and compulsive behavior.
In this way, difference is revealed precisely in its repetition; repetition is the product of difference, and repetition implies the internalization of all the possibilities of the island, a result that will come to an end no matter what. Umineko’s narrative, as a parody of And Then There Were None, is a very different one. None, the narrative has a messianic quality. The end is reached in a constant repetition, the end where everyone on the island dies. But the search for that absence where God is precisely what is fundamentally impossible for Overman, whose repetition is the repetition of the strong, where the certainty of the master can be found in the strong will, that reincarnation where the truth lies. Fantasizing about being the Strongman always results in seeing the difference.
However, using an established fact as above, that is, that truth which is hidden, as semiotic order, as a target, breaking through such a return always fails to find the difference completely. For what matters is that since all possibilities written by the playwright are mere possibilities, the key to its repetition lies in its infinity. Eternal Return lies in the infinity of its reincarnation. It should be said that the repetition of compulsive behavior proceeds in a force of self-renewal. The unceasing differentiation is at the same time the unceasing homogenization. Overman does not search for the reality of God’s presence in compulsive behavior, but only then that what he sees is no longer mutilated. Completion is an immanence, not a becoming.
In this way, it is not magic or faith that brings one into the repetitive compulsive behavior, but what one finds in the repetitive compulsive behavior. Not finding a way out of the repetition, but finding the repetition itself to carry on. “A letter always reaches its destination” (Müller 82). Repetition is not pure; the difference in it should have been revealed in the repetition itself. All the time of that Eternal Return is life and will.
Work Cited
Christie, Agatha. And Then There Were None. Harper Collins, 2011.
Dor, Joel. Clinical Lacan. Other Press, LLC, 2013.
Müller, John, and William J. Richardson. “The Purloined Poe : Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading.” Johns Hopkins University Press eBooks, 1988, ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA01436457.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Purloined Letter. The Gift for 1845, 1844
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Black Cat. United States Saturday Post, 1843
Ryukishi07. Umineko When They Cry. Version Twilight of the Golden Witch, Square Enix, 2010