This is the beginning of a series of short essays I've been throwing around in my head for quite some time. I figured that I might as well use this space to exercise my critical eye - especially since the little snippets and quotations I was posting garnered very little feedback. Yes, this is my writing, as derivative as it may be. I'd appreciate any comments whatsoever - on style and content - and keep in mind that this is part of some larger picture:
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Roland Barthes’ essay “The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat” is a wonderful short, critical essay on the work of Jules Verne. The essay is a structuralist analysis of The Mysterious Island, the second and final installment of Captain Nemo’s adventures aboard the Nautilus. With a bit of sarcasm, Barthes calls it an “almost perfect novel,” submitting it as the epitome of a type of childlike delight. The most interesting aspect of Barthes’ criticism, however, is the fact that the subject of his essays is never the real topic of discussion. Rather than merely cast judgment on Verne’s credibility as an author, Barthes resuscitates Verne as a symptom of larger cultural epoch.
The Nautilus comes to signify an infantile desire for the finite. He writes:Ships in Jules Verne are perfect cubby-holes, and the vastness of their circumnavigation further increases the bliss of their closure… The Nautilus, in this regard is the most desirable of all caves: the enjoyment of being enclosed reaches its paroxysm when from the bosom of this unbroken inwardness, it is possible to watch, through a large window-pane, the outside vagueness of the waters, and thus define, in a single act, the inside by means of its opposite.
The Nautilus is the ultimate exploration vessel. The ship represents the technological impalement of nature. The threat of the unknown is neutralized via cartography - the determined classification of each and every hidden crevasse of the earth. We emphasize the dual idea of penetration and enclosure with some risk. A knowable universe would indeed constitute a return to the womb, but the intention here is not to diagnose Verne with some sort of private neurosis. More specific than any thesis of human nature, the Nautilus characterizes a lingering, yet transformed, Enlightment ideology that quite possibly continues to this day. The mold should be quite familiar still: an insatiable thirst for quick answers, for mysteries solved with theatrical flair and conclusiveness, all wrapped up into a rapidly consumable package.
School's out; people have lot's of shit on their plate it seems. Death and destruction.
Sorry about your buddy, David: it must feel terrible.
I'm on the Patch now. Chewing gum and chugging bottled water. Sick to my stomach. Insomnia. ...Awesome.
Marie is out-of-town, so I'm trying to keep myself busy and distracted. Reading intensely. Writing and drawing too. Might even have my own artwork to post this summer.
Stay in touch.
The world of literature is probably 85 percent feeling and desire, things that transcend differences of race or language or gender … I suspect that when people say “There’s no way an American can understand Japanese literature”, they’re just revealing a complex. It’s my belief that Japanese literature has to open itself much more broadly than it does now to the scrutiny of the world at large.In Murakami there are no kimonos or samurai swords or even kamakazi pilots. His Tokyo is the Tokyo of today: popmusic and mass-media; Sony executives and Ginza call-girls; everybody, even grandma’s riding bicycle; Japanese teenagers working part-time at Disneyland or at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. Murakami is a writer of the global era for the global era.
1) review some of Murakami’s early work, namely the short story entitled “The Dancing Dwarf”
2) introduce the methods of Jungian psychology, and…
3)
comment briefly on The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Murakami’s role in contemporary world literature.
A dwarf came into my dream and asked me to dance.I knew this was a dream, but I was just as tired in my dream as in real life at the time. So, very politely, I declined. The Dwarf was not offended but danced alone instead.
I washed my face with great care, shaved, put some bread in the toaster, and boiled water for coffee. I fed the cat, changed its litter, put on a necktie, and tied my shoes. Then I took a bus to the elephant factory.The Elephant Factory? The sudden turnabout makes us pause in disbelief. Reality and dream have suddenly traded places, juxtaposed in magical confusion. Our nameless hero really does work at an “elephant factory” where living elephants are literally mass-produced through detailed industrial process:
We don’t make elephants from nothing, of course. Properly speaking, we reconstitute them. First we saw a single elephant into six distinct parts: ears trunk head abdomen, legs, and tail. These we then recombine to make five elephants, which means that each new elephant is in fact only one-fifth genuine and four fifths imitation. This is not obvious to the naked eye, nor is the elephant itself aware of it. We’re that good.
What?
Let’s pause for a moment to discuss Murakami’s style. Three important considerations:
1) automatic writing – Murakami does not plan his stories in a traditional way; he writes things as they come. He describes writing as a very physical process, since writing this way is very difficult.
2) frame narrative – Murakami uses and abuses multi-linear storytelling techniques, by introducing newspaper clippings, stories the narrator hears second-hand, and, above all, dreams. Murakami creates several interweaving “rivers of narrative.”
3) Magical Realism – Murakami’s writing genre is called “magical realism,” the most famous example of which is Garcia Marquez. By Mixing a very realistic and detailed, everyday world with the magical, Murakami begins with a very believable story, and makes it impossibly absurd, or at times, sinister – a moment Freud calls the “Uncanny” or in Lacan, the Real.
A short summary: the dancing dwarf appears to the narrator in a dream. Somehow the young man’s dream coincides with reality. The narrator becomes interested with a mysterous new girl at the factory, and he goes to ask her out. She will only give him a date, if, coincidentally, he can impress her with his dancing. The dwarf appears to him in one more dream. He offers a bargain, “I’ll make you a deal. If I enter your body, you’ll become the best dancer in the world. That way you’ll be able to seduce her, or anyone for that matter. But whatever you do, you can’t say a word. If you do, then your body is mine, forever.” The young man agrees to the bargain. He goes to the dance hall and is finally able to impress the new girl. The whole time, he manages to get by without saying as much as a word. The story ends, and I won’t say how exactly, with the image of the new girls’ corpes, decomposed and covered with maggots. The narrator magically brings her back to life.
The Jungian method in literature, based in the theories of psychologist Carl Jung, is a mostly synchronic, comparative technique that uses motifs from world mythology. These lietmotifs are called archetypes, or “eternal symbols.” Archetypes are related to the unconscious and, more specifically, a theory of the mind called the collective unconsious. By treating the story as if it were a dream, we raise the elements to the same plane of time and examine the structural interactions, disregarding the elements’ chronological place in the narrative.
I my paper, I compare “The Dancing Dwarf” to two ancient Japanese stories, the fairytale called “Urashima Taro” and the story of Izanami and Izanagi from the Japanese creation myth. The legend of Izanami and Izanagi is from the Kojiki, the Japanese “record of ancient matters.”
Izanagi and Izanami are the first parents in Japanese myth. The goddess Izanami gives birth to everything in the world. Finally, by giving birth to fire, she is burned and dies. Her husband, Izanagi, laments and visits the underworld to find his dead wife. She asks him to wait, saying “Whatever you do, don’t look at me.” It is completely dark, so he can see nothing. However, the god cannot wait any longer and makes a fire. He sees his wife in a terrible state of disintegration; maggots are squirming and roaring on the corpse. Hereupon he is awestruck and flees. The goddess says, “He has shamed me!” and pursues him with the hags of the underworld.
The legend is related to the Sumerian myth of Ishtar and the Greek myth of Orpheus.
Returning to the “The Dancing Dwarf:” The plot is essentially driven forward by a simultaneous, dialectical conflict with the narrator’s shadow alter-ego, the dwarf, and with the femine Other. As in the tale of Urashima, the hero must leave his everyday world to meet with the mysterious female. The common motif is the motif of two parallel worlds: the underworld or the nighttime world of dream and the unconsious, and the daytime world of everyday life. In most ways, we can consider “The Dancing Dwarf,” structurally, as a microcosm of Murakami’s major works. Because of its mythological structure, and since, like much of Murakami’s fiction, it parodies or inverses the logic of modern concepts such as linear time, the division between wakefulness and dream, and industrial mass-production - I call “The Dancing Dwarf” a “postmodern fairytale.”
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When using the Jungian method in my research, a couple of difficulties surfaced.
1) How can a symbol both universal and particular at the same time, that is, archetypal and have a specific function in Japanese literature?
2) In reference to Murakami, what is it about the unconsious that makes it so
collective?
With those questions in mind, we turn to The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Like most of Murakami’s long fiction, the story centers on a middle-aged Tokyo man who works at a boring dead-end job, and who suddenly wanders into an absolutely strange world outside of his own. The book is Murakami’s most ambitious work, combining several epic rivers of narrative. I follow a scholar named Matthew Stretcher in summarizing these various rivers into 3 simultaneous narratives:
1. A protagonist named Toru in search of his lost wife, Kumiko
2. A mother and son team, named “Nutmeg” and “Cinnimon,” who run a clinic for alternative healing
3. the historical chronicle of wartime Japan – events leading up to the World War.
Like the other stories, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle operates on the principle of ego and alter-ego. For example, I make the argument that all the main female characters may actually be the same woman, Kumiko, reincarnated if you will, behind a carnival of doppelganger masque. In order to find Kumiko, Toru navigates these various doppelganger personalities including one of his own, in what resembles an archetypal quest: like that of Orpheus or as in our Japanese myth of Izanagi.
Today, I’m mostly concerned with the connection between the stories in modern-day Tokyo and the accounts of the Japanese occupation of China during the Sino-Japanese War. A passage from Narrative 3:
[long quotation involving Japanese soldiers stationed at a Zoo. They have to “liquidate” some tigers, much like later, they have to execute some Chinese students.]
3 narratives, covering 2 distinct historical periods, united by one image: the image of the well, a tunnel into the unconsious. What makes the unconscious so collective in the Wind-up Bird Chronicle is this memory of history and violence that each of us, Japanese or otherwise, must come to face.
But science, spurred by its powerful illusion, speeds incessantly toward its limits where its optimism concealed in the essence of logic runs aground. Socratic man comes to gaze into the illuminable ... When he sees here to his horror how logic coils up at these limits and finally bites its own tail.
The cosmic symbolism of music resists any adequate treatment by language, for the simple reason that music, in referring to primordial contradiction and pain, symbolizes a sphere which is both earlier than appearance and beyond it.
We all talk about poetry so abstractly because we are all bad poets. At bottom the aesthetic phenomenon is quite simple: all one needs in order to be a poet is the ability to have a lively action going on begore one continually, to live surrounded by hosts of spirits. To be a dramatist one all one needs is the urge to transform one-self and speak out of strange bodies and souls.
Both the Apollinian and the Dionysian are marked as crossings that move beyond the everyday: to the world of beautiful images over which Apollo presides; or to the self-oblivion of the ecstatic state, as in the descent to Hades, as in crossing, in that direction, the river of Lethe.
-John Sallis, in reference to The Birth of Tragedy
Lethe, the river of forgetting, delineated the ancient boundary between the world of the dead and the world of the living. In fact – fictively speaking – Hades was surrounded by a number of rivers, one of which, the River Styx, famously encircled it nine times over. Lethe was the point of non-crossing, a limit, yet it was also the point of crossing – in short, it was the site a double-going – on both sides of which stand shades, specters, and phantoms.
Aletheia, incidentally, was the Greek word for “truth” – a-lethe-ia: “an un-forgetting.” Heidegger describes aletheia as an “unconcealment.” Truth is the process by which objects appear to us, for in revealing themselves from the concealment of undifferentiated phenomena, appearance-as-such appears in the objects’ revelation.
“Revelation,” a word spoken with its mystical connotation in-tact, is appropriate. By anology we can appropriate Godamer’s aesthetic concept of in-sight: “In order to understand our experience of art, we are tempted to search the depths of mystical language for daring new words like the German Anbild [ in-sight ] – an expression that captures both the image and the viewing of it." One is surprised at the extent to which perception – or an idea of visual re-presentation carried to its mythological extreme – invades every system of communication.
Phantom: from Greek, “to make visible”Dionysos vs. the Crucified ... (the ellipses mark the struggle about to begin)
Specter: from Latin, “to appear”
Shade: from Old English, “a disembodied spirit; a ghost”
– and in Modern English –
Shade: verb, “to produce gradations of light or color, as in painting”
Shadow: noun, “one who follows, especially in secret” – the assassin has arrived. Already we can hear the echoing footfalls of the double-goer.
She realized that that crown was the same crown and always had been. Her story really was over now; Ariadne would be forever alone, prisoner of that radiant crown in the sky: Corona Boralis.
Poeto-logos does not equal nihilism. It is the yes-saying that resounds “Yes!” eternally across the heavens. (There is more than one heaven).
And there the darkness was rend by a dazzling crown. Fiery gold and Indian jewels. Dionysus offered Ariadne the crown as a gift on the occation of this their first embrace. Sign of perfection, “herald of propitious silence,” the crown was a circle of seduction. But to seduce also means “to destroy” in Greek: phtheÃrein. The crown is the perfection of deceit, it is the deceit that circles in on itself, it is that perfection which includes deceit within it.
Sing the true singing. No more cacophonic dissonance. No more of that racket-and-rattling from Californian neo-Gnostic-theo-sophistry. The divine melody is a freedom from bad Heideggerians. I imitate in order to destroy.
Just a beach lashed by thundering waves, an abstract place where only the seaweed moves. It is the island where no one lives, the place where obsession turns round and round on itself, with no way out. A constant flaunting of death.
Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo. Only when we become aware of a sudden consistency between incompatibles can we say we have crossed the threshold of myth.
Vladamir Propp suggests that märchen, or fairytales (as in the Grimm, as in Urashima and the Scottish “Rhymer”) contain the most clear expositions of the universal grammar of human narrative. If one became familiar with 100 tales, then one would begin to speak the language of mythology itself. It would be a bilinguality that extends towards both ends of the Tree - roots and branches, growing and swirling, snarling, and breathing – ascending with Icarus to the utmost heights of air, while burrowing down with Orpheus down into the deep cloak of cold, living earth. Why wait for destruction by water? Wouldn't morphology become a method of self-transformation?
Lévi-Strauss suggests that leitmotifs are like partie. Partie = French: component; match and game set; Frenchmen lined around a cedar-carved table in an improvised smoke-filled back-of-tavern casino, cards played, shuffled and reshuffled. What’s up yer’ sleeve there, cowboy? Zeus, Appollo, Shamash, Izanagi, Napoleon, Stalin, Agamemnon, Baal and Mammon.
Pythagoras believed in reincarnation. Pythagoras was a vegetarian. Pythagoras “prohibited his disciples from beans.” Some scholars suggest that perhaps he believed there were human souls there within the seeds of a plant. Other scholars suggest that Pythagoras simply hated politics. Beans were used in the demos to cast one’s vote. Black bean = no. White bean = yes. Yes!
Mystery in Crete, was made plain to all, no one tried to hide it. The “unnameable things” that abounded in Attica were laid open to everybody. But there was no sense of challenge about this, Crete, with its hundred cities and not a single defense around them, looked like a huge plaything. Only a tidal wave or dark raiders striking from the sea, could have been its doom
There is no grand artisan. There is no demiurgical-watchmaker-intellect. The maps drew themselves; there is no hand-nor-eye that dare frame thy symmetry. The blind-one was only a spectre. The cards deal themselves; they play and inter-play of their own accord. Kick the charlatans out of the casino.
The goddess was always ready to dray her bow. Dionysus asks her to transfix Ariadne with an arrow. And he wants to watch too. Then time turns all to euphemism. All that will remain on the walls of Pompeii is an image of celestial love.
Abiogenesis is a cosmological impossibility. Abiogenesis is a no-saying. Time obeys only the heirogamy of celestial intercourse.
…on a votive table, an image of Hera’s mouth closing amorously around Zeus’s erect phallus … Her name was Io. In looks and dress it was Io’s duty to re-create the image of the goddess she served. She was a copy endeavoring to imitate a statue. But Zeus chose the copy … and he wanted it because it was a difference, and her because she was a copy … Zeus’s other adventures, all Hera’s other vendettas, would be nothing more than further heaves on that same wheel of necessity.”
Eros is the thaumaturgical power of blood. It is the music that animates the spheres from their crystalline slumber.
I tell thee that the self-willed pride of Zeus
Shall surely be abased; that even now
He plots a marriage that shall hurl him forth
Far out of sight of his imperial throne
And kingly dignity. Then, in that hour,
Shall be fulfilled, nor in one tittle fail,
The curse wherewith his father Chronos cursed him,
What time he fell from his majestic place
Established from of old. And such a stroke
None of the Gods save me could turn aside.
After all, dream-discourse is the signifier, and the signified is necessarily something that is uncannily meaningless.I apologize, since I have collapsed a great deal of Jungian theory as well as some later writers that I only am just beginning to read. Dreams are basically images that float up from the unconscious. Dream content is based on several factors including personal experience, collective imagery, and biology.
It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id.
Compare with Shepard Fairey - whose "Obey Giant" can be seen in most every city in the US, including Atlanta. These days, unfortunately, Shep' seems to be more concerned with merchandising than with art. Shep and Fangs both sell t-shirts on their websites. Fangs even has hand-painted Converse! (insert vomit noise...)
The juxtaposition of modernity with “the primitive,” as seen in modern painting, may initially strike us as paradoxical. This psychological collusion between the future and the past, however, constitutes the very heart of 20th century consciousness. History as we know it is the story of mastery, a narrative describing the rise of Western civilization to technological and cultural hegemony. Mastery, however, is as much an outward will to dominate as it is also a will inflicted upon the self. For as human beings must obey the will of history pushing forward to greater economic and technological heights, human beings simultaneously submit themselves to the civilizing reigns of culture and ethical labor in the name of “progress.” Modernity and the countervailing movements of the “postmodern” are in fact fundamentally united. The trends that gave rise to modernity simultaneously engendered the seeds of its own destruction. Recent history has shown in bloody, material fact that cultural plurality, fundamentalism, and irrationalism are part-and-parcel with the rationalism and material prowess of our age. 
A poet ventures to give sensible expression to rational ideas of invisible beings, the realm of the blessed, the realm of hell, eternity, creation, and so on. p. 183Blake.
Beauty is exuberance.The Sublime is monstrous. In it we find a will of nature that runs counter to our interests. Its suggestive power commands the imagination, presenting the mind with a thing that is absolutely large: the mountain, the ocean, the cosmos. But what thing could be Sublime? What thing?
For this reason, the primary target of Zoroaster’s indignant ethical rationalism was orgiastic ecstasy, particularly the intoxicating cult of the soma sacrifice, which he deemed unworthy of man and cruel to beasts. For the same reason, Moses directed his rationalized ethical attack against the orgy of the dance, just as many founders or prophets of ethical religion attacked 'whoredom'('whoredom' - that is, the female priesthood.)
For going to the extreme of explaining everything only mechanically must make reason fantasize and wander among chimeras of nature of natural powers that are quite inconceivable, just as much as a merely teleological kind of explanation that takes no account whatever of the mechanism of nature made reason rave. p. 297.The Sleep of Reason?
I see the four-fold Man, the Humanity in deadly sleep…Static eschatology.
In heavy wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which,
Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.
Nature on the other hand, is very far from having adopted [humanity] as its special darling … but has in fact spared him no more than any other animal from its destructive workings: plague, famine, flood, frost, or attacks from other animals large or small, and so on. p. 318.Kant has expelled the beauty from nature, and from his Critique, replacing it instead with the violence of conquest and despotism.
Man is indeed the only being on earth that has understanding and hence an ability to set himself purposes of his own choice, and in this respect he holds the title of lord of nature. p. 318.The ultimate purpose of nature, its telos, is the lordship en - titled exclusively to human beings for setting our own purpose, and for using nature as a means to our ends. Human beings are superior to other animals, because they are useful to us.
Around Easter time, they undertook the sacrificial slaying of a young man of irreproachable beauty. He was chosen from among the captives the previous year, and from that moment he lived like a great lord ... He went through the whole town very well dressed, with flowers in his hand … they all knew he was the image of Texcatlipoca, one of the greatest gods, and prostrated themselves before him, worshipping him wherever they met him.Kant.
Hence only culture can be the ultimate purpose that we have cause to attribute to nature with respect to the human species. p.319Kant submits that culture has two necessary aspects: the culture of skill and the culture of discipline.
Twenty Days previous to the festival they gave this youth four maidens, well prepared and educated for this purpose. During thos twenty days he had carnal intercourse with the maidens. The four girls they gave him as wives and who had been reared with special care for that purpose were given names of four goddesses.Kant. The culture of skill is purely economic. Human beings require skill to transform raw nature into raw materials, that is, into commodities with a purpose for economic use. The culture of discipline is the culture of science, education, and the arts. Art serves the purpose of making man more cultured.
The women stepped aside and left him. As he got to the place where he was to be killed, he mounted the steps by himself and on each one of these he broke on of the flutes which he had played during the year.Kant. Purposiveness is an idea that is elementally connected to utitlity, to economy, and to the commodification of the every thing, that is, the reduction of the world, both sacred and profane, into thingly-ness.
These now grabbed him and threw him onto the stone block, and holding him by fett, hands and head, thrown on his back, the priest who had the stone knife buried it with a mighty thrust in the victim’s breast and, after drawing it out, thrust one hand into the opening and tore out the heart, which he at once offered to the sun.Sacred Regicide.
Respect was shown for the young man’s body.
If the animal that has brought down its rival does not apprehend the other’s death as does a man behaving triumphantly, this is because its rival had not broken a continuity … The continuity was not called into question, but rather the identity of desires of two beings set one against the other in mortal combat.For Bataille, the animal world is a world of immanence, an embryonic experience of intimacy. “Transcendence,” Bataille says, “is nothing if it is not embryonic.” Unlike Kant, Bataille is not suggesting the superiority of human beings. It is a world that is closed to us, since the animal is in the world like “water in water.” For Bataille, the world of culture has no specific claim to mastery over the animal world – they are only different.
Utility. This is one of the most remarkable and fateful aberrations of language. … The stick digs the ground in order to ensure the growth of a plant; the plant is cultivated in order to be eater; it is eatern in order to maintain the life of the one who cultivates it … The absurdity of an endless deferral. p. 28History is irrevocably drawn towards manufacture and the simultaneous objectification of life into banality. Bataille reserves art alone, unlike other manufactured objects, from the fate of commodification. Bataille understands art as a true end, an end that exists separate from the chain of teleological tyranny. The purpose of art, and the religious sacrifices of the Aztecs, is to remove humanity from purposiveness, to annihilate the cyclical wheel within wheel of utility, establishing once again the sacred intimacy of water within water.
The world of intimacy is as antithetical to the real world as immoderation is to moderation, madness to reason, drunkenness to lucidity. There is moderation only in the object … The world of the subject is the night: that changeable, infinitely suspect night which, in the sleep of reason produces monsters. (from The Accursed Share)El Sueno de la Razon
