| Description |
I will examine the "Q" of 1Q84 as an invitation for questions about authenticity that result in an acknowledgement of the necessity to interpret one's own heritage and construct meaning in one's own present context. I will use examples of 1Q84's narrative structure, especially the parallel narratives of the protagonist dyad and various examples of appropriations of Orwellian themes within, especially the example of a central organizing force in the character Leader, to show the inaccessibility of history as "archaeological authenticity." Rather, following Heidegger's Being and Time, I will argue that authenticity is achieved as one accepts the inescapable recognition that heritage is already interpreted, and one accepts the necessity of interpreting one's own context in order to situate one's being within-making authentic being a hermeneutic process, rather than an archaeological process. The realization that one's relationship with the world is necessarily a hermeneutic process of appropriating one's cultural fragments and adapting them to a new narrative of being is a process that I will call ontic writing. Ontic writing emerges from the tension of one's own struggle to situate one's being between fate (perceived as heritage or historical truth as inevitable) and free-will (as one's ability to interpret and thus inflect their lived experience) as one deliberately weaves one's own narrative out of the fragments of one's received heritage. My analysis relies heavily upon Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, with Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play" as the primary analytic framework. |
