Warning: contains spoilers for Wonderful Everyday (also known as Subarashiki Hibi or Subahibi) and the Alice in Wonderland stories.
“This entire sky… this entire universe is all in our heads. It’s so, so amazing.”
Wonderful Everyday ~Discontinuous Existence~
When she told me that, I looked up at the sky once again. This beautiful sky is in the world inside my head. Of course, that makes perfect sense. But once I arrived at that thought, my feelings changed to fear. All of it is just my own world. Anyone would be overwhelmed if they were faced with the realization that such an expansive, starry sky was all within their own head.
Landscapes and points of view
The work of the contemporary-style artist Keiji Usami would not typically be described as landscape painting. Rather than depicting any particular vistas that can be found out in the world, his repeated motif was a group of four abstract human silhouettes. To preempt the point before we reach it, rather than seeking to depict a landscape in the traditional sense, he sought to fill it—to replace the landscape. Take, for example, this work which is titled Ghost Plan No. 1:
According to Usami, this image creates a “system to replace ‘homogenous space and its scenographic expressions’ by the network of symbol relation.” Now, I am sure the vast majority of readers are even more confused after reading that than they were when simply looking at the painting. What does this string of buzzwords mean? And what did I mean by “filling” a landscape? For that, let us return to Usami again, this time describing the foundational logic of European landscape painting:
Position, as established by [European] principles, is the totality of what can be apprehended by a single person with a fixed point of vision. The relationships between all the things that can be apprehended from this point of view at one instant in time are determined objectively on a grid of coordinates. These are the laws of perspective which have conditioned the modern visual sensibility.
In other words, the European notion of a landscape attempts to depict an objective reality, fixed in time and place. Rather than depicting a segmented, particular piece of reality, it tries to depict realism in its totality, without any subjective bias towards a particular constituent object within that reality. Certainly, in this sense, Usami’s work does not constitute a landscape, since a landscape is meant to be equivalent to reality itself. In other words, a landscape is an attempt at creating a snapshot of the universal reality that we all perceive.
I do not have the qualifications nor the interest to pontificate on the value of certain kinds of visual art, so I cannot judge the worth of the kinds of paintings that depict reality in this manner. However, it goes without saying that any art movement will have its critics, and looking to them might reveal some of the deeper nuances of this style of art. French poet and art critic Paul Valéry, for example, said of the trend towards landscape painting that emerged in his lifetime:
Within a few years, painting was inundated by images of a world without human beings. Viewers were content with the ocean, the forests, the fields … Since our eyes were far less familiar with trees and field than with animals, painting came to offer greater scope for the arbitrary; even gross distortions were acceptable. We would be shocked at the sight of an arm or a leg depicted in the same way that a branch might be in these paintings.
While his searing criticism might seem over the top, it does hit on a very important analytical point about the nature of landscape painting: There is a fundamental difference between reality and a depiction of reality. While Valéry’s criticism here centres on the skill with which an artist re-creates reality, this distinction extends to even include the concept of realism itself. Even a photograph that perfectly re-creates any landscape that exists in reality is still ultimately just a depiction. Or, as Usami put it, a position; a fixed point of view that contains the “reality” of a particular moment, totalised beyond any single constituent part.
Of particular interest is the trend towards depicting a space without human beings. As Valéry highlighted, despite the attempt at realism inherent to landscape, the unknowable complexity of human beings is precisely what makes them a challenging subject for the depiction of realism in art. It is exactly those things that are unfamiliar to us that can most easily evoke the sensation of realism—those things that are familiar, in contrast, evoke something closer to the effect of the uncanny valley. Regular readers might notice the conceptual similarities between this concept and that of the Russian formalist notion of literary defamiliarisation, which is the attempt in literature to create a sense of reality through the use of unfamiliar and poetic language.
Let us return to the work of Keiji Usami. Previously, I threw out a bizarre string of buzzwords which were likely incomprehensible. Well, perhaps it is time to revisit this string in light of one of his sequel artworks. Usami said of Ghost Plan No. 1 that he was “creating a system to replace ‘homogenous space and its scenographic expressions’ by the network of symbol relation.” Here is Ghost Plan No. 2:
While the particulars are distinct, it is clearly a conceptual follow-up to the previous work. And so, let us examine these shared concepts in light of the notion of landscape that we have established thus far. A landscape refers to the attempt to depict a point of view which represents reality in its totality, instead of any of its constituent parts. Any piece of the world on its own is inherently defined by the lack of everything else in the world. To apply a slightly structuralist lens to this concept for a moment, depicting any isolated element of reality by its nature creates a symbol that represents its particular features in contrast to the entire system of reality. For example, a depiction of a chair takes on the meaning of a chair because it does not depict reality beyond that symbolic chair. This is, in essence, what Usami means by the “symbol relation” he wished to create in Ghost Plan.
While landscape in the sense of paintings, photos, and literature are all depictions—or positions—of a space within reality rather than naked reality itself, the same is true of human existence. In a space of pure, totalised reality without any symbolic pieces, what we see is equivalent to a landscape: In failing to see its particular pieces, we see the totality of reality itself. This is the “homogenous space and its scenographic expressions” that Usami sought to fill with symbol relations. Usami’s primary motif, abstract human silhouettes, negates this logic of the landscape rather directly. Ghost Plan interrupts any attempt to view reality as a totalised landscape by introducing these abstract and unknowable human beings as symbols within our view. They are the most familiar thing possible to humanity—humans themselves—and this is exactly why their symbolic depiction cannot simply blend into the rest of reality as part of a landscape.
Wonderful Everyday as a case study in points of view
Koujin Karatani’s Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, which we cannot and will not summarise in its entirety, is an attempt to apply the theory of landscape, as we developed above, to the development of literature in Japan from the Meiji Restoration onwards. Karatani argues that “once a landscape has been established, its origins are repressed from memory. It takes on the appearance of an ‘object’ which has been there, outside us, from the start. An ‘object,’ however, can only be constituted within a landscape. The same may be said of the ‘subject’ or self. The philosophical standpoint which distinguishes between subject and object came into existence within what I refer to as ‘landscape.’ Rather than existing prior to landscape, subject and object emerge from within it.”
In other words, Karatani’s theory is that the landscape perspective, which sees reality as an object to be witnessed from a particular point of view, gave birth to particular historical and philosophical contingencies under which the modern assumptions of literature were formed. He seeks to do this by tracing the development of literature in Japan following the modernisation and Westernisation of its culture and institutions both during and after the Meiji Restoration. In particular, the landscape perspective dichotomises reality between the “point of view”—or subject—and the landscape that totalises reality—or object.
When a landscape perspective depicts reality, it is not satisfied with an understanding that separates reality into its various constituent parts—which can be understood as a symbolic depiction of reality. It instead attempts to “see” reality as a naked sensation from the point of view of the subject. This is not to say that all points of view, or subjects, are equivalent, complete, or unbiased. The important feature of this perspective is simply that it situates the objective landscape as something that is witnessed by the subjective point of view. In doing so, it defines reality as something apart from its constituent parts. And even further, it does the same to the point of view itself—the subject. It takes the vague and disparate phenomena of consciousness and transforms them into a singular totality known as the individual subject. For this reason, Karatani spends much of the book problematising the various manifestations of the “self” as resulting from this fixation on points of view; these being ancillary concepts such as interiority, confession, childhood, et cetera. To quote Karatani once more:
The theme of the exploration of the modern self, however diverse its articulations, dominates discussions of modern Japanese literature. Yet it is laughable to speak of this modern self as if it were purely a mental or psychological phenomenon. For this modern self is rooted in materiality and comes into existence—if I may put it this way—only by being established as a system. What I want to emphasize is the systematicity of the very “inner self” that is usually seen as challenging systems.
It is in this light that we come to Wonderful Everyday. Wonderful Everyday is a denpa horror visual novel developed by KeroQ and written by Sca-DI. The scenario uses the works of Lewis Carroll, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and the semi-biographical play Cyrano de Bergerac—written by Edmond Rostand—as recurring motifs. It then rereads (in a somewhat strained manner) the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s study of logical signification within Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) into a model for the epistemological affirmation of subjectivity. For those who have not read the visual novel, that might seem like an overwhelmingly convoluted set of intermingled influences, but these seemingly disjointed strands do have some cohesion when combined.
Those who are familiar with the works of Lewis Carroll, particularly his Alice stories, will probably have the easiest time understanding the point of view put forward by Wonderful Everyday. In much the same way as both Alice novels end with (respectively different) forms of the “it was all a dream” ending, Wonderful Everyday sends the reader spiralling into a web of layered, dream-like depictions that seek to undermine any objective notion of reality. In this sense, it might be difficult to see any “landscape” in Wonderful Everyday. However, the most stubborn feature of any ideological system, especially those based around dichotomies, is their ability to not only define themselves, but also define their negation: The particular manner in which Wonderful Everyday antagonises the “objective exterior” of the landscape is rooted in a point of view that is itself based in the “subjective interior” of the landscape.
Take, for example, two of the key motifs of Wonderful Everyday: Firstly, declarative statement 5.632 of Wittgenstein’s TLP reads “The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.” This statement is most relevant to the worldview of Wonderful Everyday when combined with an oft-cited poem from Emily Dickinson that reads:
The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and you—beside—
The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As sponges—Buckets—do—
The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—
The epistemological inference read by Wonderful Everyday into Wittegenstein’s statement is that there is no true exterior beyond the subject. Instead, their world is limited by and equivalent to their brain. There is no objective, merely the subject and the subject’s point of view. We can see this most clearly in the Hasaki epilogue to the chapter Jabberwocky II:
In trying to deny the objective exterior, which we could also describe as the viewing of a landscape as a naked and objective reality, Wonderful Everyday begins by reformulating a new kind of totalising view of reality, akin to a landscape. However, instead of attempting to build a landscape out of the exterior, it builds its landscape within the interior of the subject. Rather than each being a composite of various pieces, it is the interior that becomes a landscape that can be viewed nakedly.
The point of view of Wonderful Everyday is the natural result of the inversion of the landscape—and this inversion was already natural to the landscape perspective itself, rather than undermining it. To quote Karatani:
According to van den Berg, the first landscape painted simply as a landscape in Europe was the “Mona Lisa,” in which for the first time the human was presented as alienated from the landscape, and vice versa. But we must be wary of the question which seeks the meaning of the Mona Lisa’s smile. We must not regard this as expressing some kind of interiority. For here, too, the case is the reverse of what we assume. It was because for the first time in the Mona Lisa the naked face, not the face as signified [as a symbol], appeared, that some kind of inner meaning expressed by this face has been incessantly posited. Interiority was not expressed here—the naked face, suddenly disclosed, began to signify interiority. This inversion took place contemporaneously to, and in the same manner as, the liberation of “pure landscape,” from the figurative.
Interiority, upon which the subjective viewpoint of Wonderful Everyday is built, is also necessarily a companion of the same pursuit of a “naked” reality that brought about the viewpoint of the landscape in the first place. A painter who paints the naked reality of a forest as though it were self-evident operates within the same ideological system as a writer who writes about the naked reality of their own self, and the world that extends from that self. In this sense, a viewpoint of the self that sees itself as natural is a kind of landscape that believes it can simply “see” the world. It is also no coincidence that the final reveal of the final chapter of Wonderful Everyday, End Sky II, centres on Lewis Carroll’s theme of the world as the dream of an individual: A landscape that sees the world as the totality of the subject is necessarily in tension with the multiplicativity of all possible subjects, and therefore must take the proposition that there is actually only one subject with extreme seriousness.
We can furthermore see the inherent roots of the interiority of Wonderful Everyday in landscape by looking to the first part of the climax of Jabberwocky II, which serves as the foundation for the philosophical raison d’être of the whole visual novel: Let’s take a look at the same passage with which we opened this post:
“This entire sky… this entire universe is all in our heads. It’s so, so amazing.”
When she told me that, I looked up at the sky once again. This beautiful sky is in the world inside my head. Of course, that makes perfect sense. But once I arrived at that thought, my feelings changed to fear. All of it is just my own world. Anyone would be overwhelmed if they were faced with the realization that such an expansive, starry sky was all within their own head.
Despite the visual novel’s emphasis on the interior of the subject, it is precisely in the exterior of the landscape that the key thematic figures of Yuki Minakami and Tomosane Mamiya find their sense of interiority. A constantly recurring motif is the End Sky—a metaphorical embodiment of the concept of interiority given form as a landscape. No matter where one looks in Wonderful Everyday, there is no escaping the pervasive importance of its landscapes. Regardless, this post has gone on for quite a while, and I am sure many of you are thinking “so what?”
Highlighting the importance of landscapes in the formation of the point of view of Wonderful Everyday situates it into a particular philosophical context, but I am not doing this in order to criticise it in some roundabout way. What is important is understanding how a work that seeks to criticise a particular ideological concept (objectivity) can itself be defined by that same ideological framework. Koujin Karatani’s Origins of Modern Japanese Literature is a study into the ways that the ideological framework of objectivity and realism define even our attempts to creative subjectivist art. The landscape is a conceptual framework that one uses to understand how viewing reality as a totality that can be “seen” can penetrate even into our concept of the self and what it means to be a human subject—especially by defining what a “subject” means. And Wonderful Everyday is an unusually blatant example of how the resultant ideology of “the self” has defined even so-called counter-cultural art, such as denpa visual novels.
To quote Koujin Karatani one final time: “That these developments took place should not be the focus of our critique. What we can criticize are contemporary modes of thought which accept these products of an inversion as natural.”
