Navigating the Semiosphere: Language and Selfhood in Paul Auster’s Moon Palace
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
In this article, I explore Paul Auster’s Moon Palace (1989), focusing on the protagonist Marco Stanley Fogg’s journey of self-discovery as an artist in relation to the ways in which Auster’s fictional world functions as a semiotic space that influences characters’ sense of self and their perception of reality. Based on Juri Lotman’s theory of the semiosphere, I explain the constitutive nature of Auster’s ontologically unstable fictional world – a condition stemming from the limitations of language – that confines the characters only to partial truths, subjective realities, and fragmented selves, ultimately leading to (self-imposed) confinement. In this world where language proves inadequate for expressing the self, establishing selfhood necessitates constructing one’s own subjective yet coherent semiotic system. In this regard, Fogg’s quest for selfhood signifies a semiotic becoming, in which he engages with the functions of the semiosphere’s border to forge his language, which I propose as an ordering principle of the novel. Identifying the desert as an ideological center of the novel – with its semiotic and symbolic borders embodied in physical form – I contend that crossing the desert is essential for survival in this world. By intersecting multiple layers of past and present narratives in the deserts, Auster warns of consequences awaiting the future unless one constructs their own linguistic structure within a reality saturated with infinite signs. Only through such construction can individuals avoid being lost in the ontological labyrinth and succeed in establishing selfhood. Auster’s warning remains pertinent today, an age marked by proliferating signs through media and social networks.
Abstract
In this article, I explore Paul Auster’s Moon Palace (1989), focusing on the protagonist Marco Stanley Fogg’s journey of self-discovery as an artist in relation to the ways in which Auster’s fictional world functions as a semiotic space that influences characters’ sense of self and their perception of reality. Based on Juri Lotman’s theory of the semiosphere, I explain the constitutive nature of Auster’s ontologically unstable fictional world – a condition stemming from the limitations of language – that confines the characters only to partial truths, subjective realities, and fragmented selves, ultimately leading to (self-imposed) confinement. In this world where language proves inadequate for expressing the self, establishing selfhood necessitates constructing one’s own subjective yet coherent semiotic system. In this regard, Fogg’s quest for selfhood signifies a semiotic becoming, in which he engages with the functions of the semiosphere’s border to forge his language, which I propose as an ordering principle of the novel. Identifying the desert as an ideological center of the novel – with its semiotic and symbolic borders embodied in physical form – I contend that crossing the desert is essential for survival in this world. By intersecting multiple layers of past and present narratives in the deserts, Auster warns of consequences awaiting the future unless one constructs their own linguistic structure within a reality saturated with infinite signs. Only through such construction can individuals avoid being lost in the ontological labyrinth and succeed in establishing selfhood. Auster’s warning remains pertinent today, an age marked by proliferating signs through media and social networks.