NOTE: This is a thesis proposal submitted, in March 2001, to the Thesis Proposal Review Committee (English Department, National Central University). By the end of the same year, however, the project was abandoned. In place of it, thesis on the issues of melancholy in the works of Rimbaud, Kafka, and Borges is written. For more information, please refer to Liu's thesis page. He can be reached by e-mail (s8122008@cc.ncu.edu.tw). This page is encoded in Big-5 Chinese ("Traditional Chinese"). You may need to have Chinese fonts installed in your browser in order to see the Chinese characters in this page.
An MA Thesis Proposal by Deng Liu (Liu, Deng), English Department, National Central University. March 20, 2001.
This thesis project examines the problem of the postmodern as presented in Haruki Murakami's two fictional works, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985; Eng. trans. 1991) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994; Eng. trans. 1997). Particularly called to attention are the problem of style, the use of irony, and the strategies of resistance. By examining these issues, this thesis would like to argue against two kinds of critiques that have set up the tone for most existing readings and evaluations of Murakami's works: (1) the view that Murakami's work is merely a manifestation of a prevailing American cultural and economic order, that his language is essentially an American import and hence a style that easily finds international readership, and that with such style his works are celebratory word plays of a globalized consumerist culture, and (2) the view that Murakami's language fails to build up meanings, that his style is an empty play of merchandise signs, and that the thematic center of his works is the indulgence fashioned by a materialist fetishism. Fredric Jameson, in his famous exposition on postmodernism, urges readers to formulate a neutral (and in a way, double) view of the cultural logic of late capitalism -- a view that is neither hedonistically welcoming (as is the first view summarized above) nor moralistically judgmental (as is the second view, a view that constitutes the dominant attitude of reading Murakami in Taiwan). A detailed analysis of Murakami's two novels will demonstrate a "doubleness" that prevails in his writing. It sets out as a non-conforming gesture against Japan's modernist literary institution, but Murakami's use of irony and surreal scenes makes it difficult to categorize him according to more populist postmodern readings. Towards the end of this thesis, I will go one step further to suggest that perhaps a dialectical reading might be helpful in both understanding this "doubleness" of Murakami's writings and opening up the potential of reading that is constantly closed off by the teleological views against which I intend to argue.
The opening chapter, "Introduction: The Problem of Style and Murakami's Relation to the Japanese Modernists," begins with the problem of style in the age of postmodernism. Jameson has argued that the wide use of pastiche in contemporary art is a symptom that it is no longer possible to carve up a distinctive style or voice that is the artist's own. A probe into Murakami's works will show us that, indeed, his style is quite a patchwork of American popular genres -- the coolness of language in his early works is greatly influenced by Raymond Carver, his often-found "chase" theme a tribute to Raymond Chandler, his sci-fi framework that of William Gibson's Neuromancer, and even his brand-name stockpiling can be seen as an echo of writers like Bret-Easton Ellis or Douglas Coupland. Some critics would see Murakami's sheer "Americanness" as an indication that a globalized American culture has reached a certain universality, which results in an affinity of style and theme between American and Japanese literature (an argument based on the view that, if the material life in Tokyo is almost identical to that of New York, people in both cities would think the same and hence produce the same kind of works of art). It is easy to set out from this view and dismiss Murakami's writing as essentially an American import (i.e., one that is based on popular American genres). The problem with such a view, however, is that it fails to comprehend the stylistic features of Murakami's writing in relation to the Japanese context. Commenting on post-war Japanese literature, Masao Miyoshi has suggested that Japanese writers of the younger generation often launch an attack on the dominant institution by borrowing foreign concepts. In Murakami's case, what he intends to topple is the modernist, junbunkaku "pure literature" institution of Japan and the affluent, bubble-economy Japanese society of the 1980s. On the other hand, according to Matthew Strecher, there is another intricateness in Murakami's works: a twisted "duality" that positions his works in opposition to those of Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburô Ôe, but at the same time distances them from a more populist, celebratory stance. What the many moralist critics see as the complacency or the "mission-less" attitude of literature (in the form of an often fierce attack on Murakami's "distorted" representation of the Zenkyôdô student movements of the late 1960s), if we follow Strecher's argument, is actually a demonstration of a metonymical failure: the "sign play" in Murakami's works, especially the early ones, is a desperate but destined-to-fail attempt to build up meanings. Instead of being playful, Murakami's protagonists have painful difficulties (in the guise of coolness) figuring out the significance of the sign play that they have piled up.. All these features have made it difficult to read Murakami according to either camps -- modernist or populist -- and further investigation is called forth to explore these intricate facets.
The second chapter, "On Irony: No Escape from State-Designed Virtual Retreat," is a close-up reading of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of World, Murakami's only work to date that features sci-fi themes. Featuring a schizoid protagonist who works for the government ("the System") as a human data encryptor ("shuffler"), the novel is divided into two parts. In one of it, the story unfolds upon the recurrent motif of state conspiracy; in the other, the protagonist seems to have found a peaceful retreat, a land where memory is released to vaporize. The narration, weaved with Murakami's symbolic techniques, emits an atmosphere that hints the existence of an all-knowing, half-Big Brother, half-yakuza-like state power, but no one is able to precisely decipher or even "pinpoint" where the power center is. An uncanny atmosphere keeps creeping into everywhere the protagonist goes, even in his dream. Hard-Boiled Wonderland ends in a powerless yet fierce protest: the melt-down of the protagonist's conscious core and hence a retreat into a unconscious dreamland "where you'll once agan find everything that has been lost." As Dostoyevskian as it may sound, here lies the irony of the whole work: that even this reclusive unconscious realm, presumably a place where "nothing is decided without my say in it," is the result of a mistake in the implant in the protagonist that enables him to function as a "shuffler." In this respect, Hard-Boiled Wonderland actually manifests what Jameson sees as what happens to the human mind in the late stage of capitalism: the colonization of the unconscious. Interestingly, Jameson sees the prevailing theme of conspiracy theories in popular genres as an attempt (though a flawed one) to understand and map-out totality (of history, space, or state), and Murakami's use of irony here seems to be poking fun at exactly such flawed understanding. Dostoyevskian death becomes that of Mishima's: a hero's protest of a system he could not change (and into which he is hurled without even his consent) becomes the black tragicomedy of an antihero -- and even such antiheroic act is a part of that system. Read in this way, Hard-Boiled Wonderland becomes a constant negation of the dominant order (presumably an existentialist one that aims at a just understanding of this world), but then it turns up against itself, resulting in an ironic toppling (perhaps a nihilistic one in the face of the unshakable System) of such negation. With such twisted relationship, a simple assessment that Murakami's work is simply a sign play would have missed much of the point.
Following the above-mentioned delineation, I would like to suggest that in certain aspects, this "no way out" tinge puts Murakami in direct correspondence with the allegorical quality of Kafka's more enigmatic stories. The recently revived attention on Kafka is partly attributed to this allegorical quality, which, according to John Lechte, more or less makes Kafka an avant la lettre postmodernist: his works evokes something, but never describes it. Murakami's unremitting evocation of the System, the Unknown, the Unbearable, and the Darkness never offer his readers exactly what those big words are. One step closer to the thing, and the world suddenly becomes a surreal one. In the last chapter, "On Escape: The Circumvention around the Thing and the Make-Do Strategy," I will first try to establish a link between the surreal themes of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and the surrealist/magic realist strategies, a link first established by Matthew Strecher. Yet, quite unlike the surrealists of Kafka's like, who more or less demonstrate a certain "fatal strategy" (after Walter Benjamin's use of this term) that is the characteristic divide between the Avant-gardist and the modernists, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle seems to take a drastic turn in its strategies of resistance -- a turn that perhaps has much to do with Murakami's recent re-engagement into the history of the making of modern Japan. The protagonist and many other characters no longer take a heroic dive that functions in the narration as a fatal protest, but instead make use of chance and the very mundane strategies -- they become rich, have luck suddenly call upon them, for example. They become situationists, and I would like to suggest that this strategic turn from the aesthetically heroic can be understood under the concept of bricolage -- "make-do" -- an idea formulated by French sociologist Michel de Certeau. The use of bricolage would not sever Murakami's characters completely from the System, but that is exactly because it is what people do in a system they can't have a say in it: they are the people who make and utilize "grammatical errors" within a ever-constraining system and who dwell on the leak of that system. Whether with such a strong inclination towards "ordinariness" Murakami is drifting further away from the junbunkaku institution and sides with the populist camp remains to be seen, but with his recent engagement into the horrible recent history of Japan, the probability does not seem high. On the other hand, Murakami may resist the idea that by offering (or at least suggesting or evoking) a strategy of resistance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle will now bear a new telos, giving all his previous works an found-at-last mission - and hence making him again in accordance with the modernist agenda. As a tentative conclusion, I would suggest that faced with the intricate doubleness of Murakami's works, a dialectical reading -- applying Jameson's idea, albeit loosely -- would yield a more comprehensive picture of such multitude, which should in turn be considered in terms of history. Read in this way, Murakami's works may be understood as a desperate, though not totally hopeless, need to patch up a holistic picture of the world or, using Jameson's term again, a "cognitive map" of the relation between one's isolated retreat and what is beyond it.
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Last updated: June 2, 2004.