Performances of Uncertainty in Spaces of Contingency: Aesthetic Confinement and Mechanisms of Silencing in Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami, and Park Chan-wook

Abstract

Different forms of connection between physical space and identity have been developed as constituents of postmodern epistemologies. Three different narratives from three different geographical and cultural contexts are brought together in this article to discuss those connections: Paul Auster's Travels in tbe Scriptorium (United States, 2006), Haruki Murakami's Sekai no owari to hadoboirudo wandarando (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and tbe End of the world) (Japan, 1985), and Park Chan-wook's Hangul (Oldboy) (South Korea, 2003). These narratives address questions of confinement, identity production, voice(less) subjectivities, and spaces of contingency in order to subvert the traditional relations between these concepts. In this article, I draw on these narratives to discuss different indicators of writings of the self and uncertainties involving subjectivity; and I underline how these converge in a (non-)place that empties subjects of any form of ontological discursivity by suppressing their ability to speak. Visual detterritorialisations are presented through the main characters of these narratives as lines of flight from their planes of consistency to produce spatialities outside themselves as complete subjects, and to write a posthuman identity.