Counter-representing the self in the postmodern: Anti-representational poetics in the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, Sandra Cisneros, Ishmael Reed, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Haruki Murakami

This study examines the imbrication of representation and the self in contemporary literature, especially in the context of a postmodernity that gives force to the sense of identity/difference, which in turn leads to the reconsideration of identity/alterity politics in a globalized world. Discussion focuses on literary works of two distinct late-capitalist societies, the United States and Japan: Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street (1986), Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1992), and Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-95).; Postmodernist prose fiction refuses to offer a totalized, centered world of patterning and order by problematizing the representation and universalization of the self. Yet, it frustrates itself through its own aporia of anti-representing the self, which seems to lead the reader to the very starting point of the discussion---the act of distinguishing the modernist epistemological endeavor from the postmodernist ontological one. Postmodernist prose fiction resists any simple dichotomy between the modern and the postmodern as a discursive tool for achieving its own identity politics. The postmodernist aporia originates from doubt about literature's long-running obsession with the notion of the mind (interiority) as a mirror of reality---namely, the notion of representation. The political implication of postmodernist prose fiction is that the represented self comes to function as an ideological device of the dominant values, being easily linked to the tyranny of reason in the modern, which can be used not only for emancipatory ends but also for fascist, racist, and imperialist ends.; Emphasizing the creation of a heterogeneous space, postmodernist prose fiction suggests that we need to start with a recognition that representing the self involves an aporia which originates from a face-to-face ethical relation with the radical other that cannot be subsumed into a totality. In embracing the other within the self and preventing the erasure of its difference, the texts examined here exemplify the possibility of reconstructing an ethical relation with the other, beyond the monologic interiority of the self in the representational frame of the modern.