Quotidian
“Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them” – Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
Nature takes an interesting place in Cormac McCarthy’s novels – it’s not quite a powerful, living entity on its own, but does often appear to be a sentient, breathing force underlying the thematic threads of his novels. Animals, however, take precedence even over nature – if McCarthy were to construct a Great Chain of Being, animals would almost certainly come in above humans, somewhere between men and angels. They are represented, not as higher consciousness, but rather as having a closer connection to God, a kind of elemental awareness or primal rightness which men in all their scrabbling around have somehow lost. I disagree, but it’s an interesting representation, and both coherent and cohesive in all his novels.
I cannot decide what I think of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was given to me as a birthday present and is therefore required reading. It is both elusive and precise, disturbing and faintly comforting. It took me a good four chapters to pin down the literary style which it reminded me of – magical realism, which I’ve encountered most strikingly before in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s brilliant novels(which is not to say I particularly like magical realism as a literary style or form – in fact I am ambivalent about it, having both my doubts and appreciations of it). While it is is not necessarily a pure or even extreme example of that form, being grounded in a domesticity and precise character development which makes the book as much the chronicle of a marriage as the story of a series of fantastical events, it is certainly a tale in which the world we live in and its realities are loosely defined and constantly changeable. The hero, Toru Okada, an unemployed former legal assistant, is living a life made up of small details – tasks such as cooking, laundry, and taking care of the cat – which give his life order and meaning while his wife works. It is also these small things which first begin to go awry, beginning with the cat, which goes missing just previous to the book’s opening. In his search for the cat (driven by his wife’s almost frenetic concern, because for her it is a symbol of something – their marriage, perhaps), Okada comes across other odd or missing things, such as his polka-dot tie which was left at the cleaners six months before and is miraculously (and inexplicably) still there, or the macabre young woman who lives on his street and subtly entices him with her unpredictability, or the mysterious voice which calls him on the phone and invites him to phone sex. A thread running through all of this is the presence of the wind-up bird, an unseen being in the tree near their house which announces the arrival of each day by emitting sounds like a spring winding up. It is his meeting with a medium hired by his wife’s brother which serves as somewhat of a turning point in the novel, however, and from there, Okada gradually stumbles into a world in which nothing makes sense. The fantastical, the odd, and the downright ridiculous(the medium wears an outdated vinyl hat) exist side by side with the mundane and ordinary(cooking, eating, phone calls with his wife), and in that juxtaposition, Marukami builds up a constantly-increasing sense of menace. As Okada finds himself frantically searching for his wife along with the cat, his perceptions of reality and the ordinary are constantly challenged and erased, as he searched through a world grown suddenly labyrinthine. He is plagued by a sense that invisible powers beyond his control are moving him like a puppet.