Hard-boiled simulacra and cybernetic cartographies: other virtual worlds in the fiction of Salman Rushdie and Haruki Muakami

Abstract

The digital re-staging of the body in cybernetic spheres such as Facebook, Twitter or the online gaming world, which occurs on a daily basis in much of the developed world today, represents a biotechnological symbiosis of digital self and organic self which has materialised as the ubiquitous cultural and social norm. The result is an epistemological doubling, a duality of identity, whereby the organic body and its cybernetic other simultaneously inhabit two spaces: that of the real world, and the virtual, straddling ostensibly polarised worlds which are becoming increasingly blurred. As Haraway envisaged, ‘by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs’. This article seeks to examine how fiction has responded to such ideas and developments in late twentieth and early twentieth-century audiovisual culture. With reference to the novels Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Fury, Dance Dance Dance and Luka and the Fire of Life, it examines how Rushdie's and Murakami's fiction registers a reality which simultaneously engages with, and disrupts, spatiality through the aesthetics of virtual cartographies, and the metaphor and materiality of simulacra.