Voyage to Eudoxia

IN A NEW NOVEL BY THE JAPANESE NOVELIST Haruki Murakami, Hard Boiled Wonderland or The End of the World, the hero discovers that a brilliant but somewhat amoral scientist has implanted a cybernetic device in his brain. The device has three parts: one controls the conscious perceptions of the hero, one the unconscious dream states, and one the stable sense of the self. As the novel progresses, the hero understands that the switches that keep these three circuits separate from one another in his head are dissolving and as a result, his world-the world as he knows it-will literally end. Interspersed with this hard-boiled narrative in alternating chapters is another thread of the novel, concerned with the hero's shadow self and his actions in the dream world. As the novel progresses, the dream-hero in the dreamland-called End of the World-and the real hero, living in Tokyo-slowly become aware of each other's existence. At the end, Murakami implies in his complex cybernetic fiction, the two worlds inevitably merge, requiring the marriage of two cognitively separate realms as well as two different methods for knowing the world. When the last barriers between ego self and the dream self dissolve, with the aid of that clever cybernetic hardware, Words and Worlds end. Murakami's scheme is a parable for the subject of this paper, the culmination of our Cybernetic Age resulting from the collapse of the barrier between two epistemologies. My thesis is this: the barriers between the rational epistemology of science and the irrational epistemology of literature are dissolving in a way already prefigured in postmodern sciences and literature. The result will be an entirely new order of discourse we can now begin to define. At least one aspect of this new order of discourse is clear: the computer will play the role of l'entremetteur for this transformation of discourse after postmodernism. My goal here is to outline the shape of this final transformation of postmodernism

Aesthetics · Art · Cybernetics · Dream · Epistemology · HERO · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Unconscious mind · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology

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