Traveller’s Comments (group member since Jan 14, 2015)

Traveller’s comments from the On Paths Unknown group.

Also, note how masterfully Poe builds tension and horror. The narrator assures us that he is completely sane, yet the content of what he says makes us feel otherwise, thereby creating cognitive dissonance in the reader. (view spoiler)[Cognitive dissonance refers to the mental conflict that occurs when a person's behaviors and beliefs do not align, and causes feelings of unease and tension. People attempt to relieve this discomfort in different ways. In the case of the story, the content of what the narrator tells us, (that he is sane) misaligns with his behavior, which is definitely not that of a sane person, and this creates unease in the reader, but the reader also realizes that the narrator is ill at ease because of the conflict in his own psyche. (hide spoiler)]

Let's deconstruct the story a little: Note that Poe creates dissonance in almost every line that he writes: you say I am mad, yet, how can I be, since I have heard "everything in heaven and hell " through my keen senses? The narrator doesn't even seem to know what 'sanity' entails. He seems to think that his fear of a delusion about an all-seeing eye, is a quite rational motive for murder. Yet, he knows killing the old man is punishable by law- maybe he even knows that it was morally wrong, since he went to great pains to hide what he had done.

By the last night, when the narrator accidentally wakes the old man, one cannot but help to picture the situation from the old man's point of view. Perhaps the old man already had an inkling by now that all is not well with the narrator, and because the reader knows by now that the narrator is delusional, one is not quite certain whether the terror in the air, the wild beating of the heart, comes from the old man or the narrator.

Pretty well-done atmosphere building, if you ask me.

Cecily wrote: "There is so much myth and symbolism bound up in blood, isn't there, especially when you look beyond the gore itself. It's a brilliantly unsettling story. It has some similarities with another short..."

I know, right? Thanks for popping in, Cecily, it's so nice to see you on the group again! :)

I'd imagine that this story is one of the forerunners of the "psychological thriller" genre, just as Poe's "Inspector Dupin" was one of the forerunners of detective mysteries which became popular first with Sherlock Holmes and later the detective fiction of Agatha Christie and others. Poe (born 1809) was certainly a hugely influential figure in all kinds of genres that we take for granted these days.

I don't think I'd actually read this particular Poe tale before, or I might have and forgotten it, so my impressions on this reread are nice and fresh.

Right off the bat we are thrown off balance by the tone of the narrator, and right off the bat, we are wondering if this -is- indeed a sane person addressing us.

In fact, on the first two pages, I was already making judgments on the narrator's state of mental health: (view spoiler)[ At first, the cold-heartedness of his planning, and that slow, creepy deliberateness made me think; "psycopath!", but that idea soon gave way to : "paranoid schizophrenia, for sure" https://www.psycom.net/paranoid-schiz... , because of the narrator's fears and paranoia. (hide spoiler)] For all we know, the old man simply had a cataract over his eye, but it becomes a symbolic focus of terror for the narrator. One of the most oft-occuring fears in paranoid disorders, is the fear of "being watched". I find it rather amazing that Poe, in 1843 already, managed to sketch such a precise description of paranoid delusions.

There seems to be several layers to the narrator's motives: Did he subconsciously covet the old man's wealth? We do not know what relation the old man bears to him - is it a relative (most likely, since he mentions that he "loves" the old man) or, perhaps, an employer?

Did the fact that he coveted the old man's wealth make him feel guilty, did he fear that the "eagle eye" would see into his own impure heart and see his covetousness there?

..and how quickly did the meticulous planner, the self-congratulatory 'master criminal' lose his nerve when his paranoia once more beset him...

Hi Saski, thanks for popping in! Short and creepy was what we were aiming for, so I'm glad we got that right! :)

Well, folks, we've been reading a lot of more contemporary works lately, so how did you feel reconnecting with Poe's more formal, yet dramatic, embellished style as was the custom in the 1800's? Just the language alone sets the stage for me to, via this story, go back in time to enter the era of the' Gothic' style of fiction.

I'll be back soon to comment more!

EDIT: You can read it for free here: https://americanenglish.state.gov/fil...

Nilanjana wrote: "Take care Traveller : ) talk once again later"

You're welcome, Nilanjana, you too. Oh yes, I agree, the ambiguity is what makes stories like these fun and interesting!

Btw, we're currently only reading short stories for a while, because most of this group's members have been very busy and don't currently have a lot of time to read. But I send out messages to the group every now and then, and you can decide if you want to join in again sometime later.

Happy reading!

Nilanjana wrote: "The concept of 'metafiction' you explained so very well, Traveller : )

I am very grateful!"

Hi, Nilanjana, metafiction is of course not restricted to postmodernism, - we have an example as far back as 1392 with Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, where the back story is someone telling a story of a bunch of travelers traveling together and each of them tells a story and so forth.

When there are, like with Canterbury Tales, many 'frames' of storyteller upon storyteller, it's called a 'nested narrative' or nested metatext. (Being a story someone is telling about a story that someone else told him about a story that someone else told him). Another good example of the latter is Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, which has three narrator levels. (The governess who wrote the story, Douglas, and Douglas's friend who is telling us the story).

In the case of the Charlie Parker story, it's not a nested story, since there is only one narrator, but there is ambiguity about where the reality of the author ends and where the reality of the character in the story who also seems to be a writer starts and ends, and this is where writers of metafiction in a postmodern context can come out and be playful. After all, we don't really believe that, as described in the story, such a "Charlie Parker" record actually appeared in a New York record shop... (view spoiler)[ ...or do we? ;) (hide spoiler)]

Nilanjana wrote: "Traveller, I am curious....

Do you think that there is an element of 'auto fiction' in this chapter we are discussing here?"

Hi Nilanjana, certainly, a very large amount of fiction would qualify to fall under "autofiction" since autofiction is basically autobiographical elements intermixed with fiction. For example, Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu is an example of autobiographical events from the author's life intermixed with fiction. We usually don't know which parts are fiction and which aren't. What would give us clues, would be that one would assume that events that can be corroborated via external sources are prima facie true, whereas fantastical elements such as a talking monkey, would most likely be fiction. Certain elements of the genre "magical realism", for example, is hard to pin into either the one side or the other, where use of omens and exaggerated events take place, especially when the events are subjective.

When talking about the collection of short stories "First Person Singular", I would say there's a good mix of fiction, autobiography and autofiction, with most of the stories falling into the autofiction area. For example, the titular story seems to me to be autofiction, whereas, for example, the "Yakult Swallows" story, seems to be, for all that I could verify, to be completely autobiographical. All the events in that story, therefore, (as far as I could research them) seem to be as close to true that one could call it autobiography.

The Charlie Parker story I personally took as pure fiction, but if it can be verified that Murakami actually did write a prank fictional review on Charlie Parker when he was a student, then I suppose it would qualify as autofiction, since at least some of the elements in the story would then be true.

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "Wow we are really doing opposite week here, you and I. I really loved this story. I did manage to get this checked out from the library yesterday, so after I can get my head out of work I will try ..."

Well, whaddayaknow! I think I probably approached this one with a negative bias, because I find baseball (and cricket's even worse) boring. Too slow for me in the inbetween bits where you have to wait. I don't mind watching a fast active sport for a short time, but frankly I'd rather participate than watch.

I know, I know, it's about going with your friends and the atmosphere, and all, and that part is nice, I have to admit. But then at a stadium, not on TV. But Haruki doesn't mention friends, he seems to have gone alone.

Now I'm quite curious to see how you felt about First Person Singular.

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "No doghouse for you Traveller! ..."

Phew, what a relief... I guess the monkey-house will have to do for now, then! :D

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "And ultimately you can have both: the monkey can be someone tragic who needed and deserved better from the world, but also a thief or stalker or (as I see him still) a kind of rapist. ..."

Oh, I think monkeys are thieving scoundrels anyway! We were once in a place were monkeys roamed free (it might have been Sri Lanka) and I was strolling along, just having started to eat a nice apple, and down swooped a monkey, grabbed my apple right out of my hand, and there he went, to the top of a tree, where he proceeded to eat my apple with thorough enjoyment while jibing at me with a sort of jittering- yes, I'm 100% sure the little $%^&* was laughing at me!

I was not impressed.
So, you don't need much to convince me of monkey's thieving proclivities, in fact, you'd be preaching to the choir!

Re First Person Singular
In this story I feel he's playing with the concept of identity - before the woman spoke to him, he did look in the mirror several times and mentioned that he didn't feel like it was himself that he saw.

Then it is also quite ironic that it is when he is dressed up and feeling 'smart' that he is accosted and reviled, not when he is dressed more casually. I'm sure there's a message in there about that, but my brain isn't functioning at optimum today, so whatever the message is, it's sort of hovering at the edge of my consciousness. :\

Just btw, there was a similar instance of a character's dissociative feelings and not recognizing herself in a mirror, in the Shirley Jackson "Lottery" collection. (The story "Tooth".)

Thanks for the input, BJ, and yes, it is nice to have multiple perspectives on writing, isn't it? :)

BJ wrote: "I do think that the monkey's interactions with the narrator show that he is not doomed to isolation;..."

However, the story seems to make it clear that this was an exception - the narrator was careful to state that the monkey found it a rare treat, and that he was usually reviled by humans, and forced to stay out of sight. I suppose the fact that he was allowed to speak to the narrator is a bit of a plothole. Maybe it's just that people never invite him for drinks...

I can't help feeling that we should see the story as a bit of a myth, in the vein of a fairy tale. Terrible things happen to people in fairy tales, after all...

In any case, on to First Person Singular - let me do that in a new post.

Well, I'll be honest, the Yakult Swallows recounting (I hesitate to call it a 'story'), certainly does seem to be autobiographical - all the details square up with Murakami's real life, and it is also one of the most boring pieces of reading I have ever had to do. Boring to read the empty preening of an old peacock, ugh.

I think Linda and other posters (Cordelia et al) were quite correct in implying that the publisher asked for something to print, and Murakami had run dry and was scraping the very rock-bottom of the barrel. Some of the stories in the collection have merit, certainly, but I wish I could have the few minutes in time back that it took me to read this particular piece of writing.

'Nuff said, let me move on and waste no more time on it.

That's just me though. Apologies to baseball lovers who found it interesting.

Oh well, at least now I know of the existence of his first novel (Hear The Wind Sing), so I suppose it was not an ENTIRE waste....

Hi Cordelia! Just the push I needed to get back to this! :)

I know this is not easy reading, both because of the style and the content, but this enormous epic 'poem' has already pushed me to do a lot of interesting research as to what had led GGM to write it. I'll be back here soon!

Warning: this is not a pleasant read, but it was born out of something very unpleasant. The style is very loud, expressionist, in-your-face, I had a feeling sometimes of TMI, so you might not be able to handle listening to it for very long stretches of time, which is also ok.

Am I in the dogbox now? :P I hope I haven't defended poor monkey too ardently there. I was trying to create a balance between what had already been said about the stalkerishness and the creepiness - which I don't disagree with - and other things that I think the author was also conveying.

In other words, I'm not disagreeing with what y'all were saying, just trying to flesh it out and round it out a bit - add an additional perspective, so to speak.
You all are quite welcome to disagree with anything I've said. :)

Nilanjana wrote: "I didn’t fully get the ending of the Charlie Parker story. Why was it insisting that the dream had happened ?!"

Hi Nilanjana! It looks like the writer is playing several games with the reader here, something that often happens in a genre/movement/style called "postmodern" fiction. Postmodernism is a 'style' that is still currently occurring, and is mainly a reaction to the literary movement "modernism", which started occuring in the very early 1900's and went on until around the 1960's.

In postmodernist fiction, the writer will often make use of things like playfulness, mixing of genres, pastiche (which imitates famous pieces of writing or art) and metafiction, (which is a style of prose narrative in which attention is directed at the process of it's own writing).
The most obvious example of a metafictive work is a novel about a novelist writing a novel, with the protagonist often sharing the name of the writer, and this story under discussion contains this kind of metafiction, can you see it? (A character (in this case, the narrator, the person who is telling us the story) in the story that we are reading, wrote a story in the story). That doesn't mean that the story is necessarily true, and having the readers guess about what is truth and what is not truth, is part of the playful character of postmodern fiction.
So the bottom line there, is that although it is very easy to confuse the narrator (the person telling the story) with the author in postmodern metafiction, one must keep in mind that this feeling is part and parcel of the metafictive style, it's an illusion created by the author, and that such narrators can often be what we call an "unreliable" narrator - meaning, that the author is making the reader wonder (and rightly so) about the veracity of what the narrator is telling us.

As for the dream, even if it was true that the narrator had this dream, it's not necessarily true that the actual Charlie Parker came to play just for the narrator, but I think it's the narrator's (& author's?) playful way of saying that if Charlie Parker could have seen how much the narrator loved him and his work, if Charlie could have, from beyond the shadow of death have seen that the narrator had written all this fiction framing Charlie's talent and his music, Charlie would have wanted to thank the narrator/author.

I think he's also saying that even when creative people die, they often still live on in the minds of those who love their works, via the music or artwork or writing etc, that they had created while still alive.

Hi guys, back to defend my stance and the monkey. Linda is the first person who shows something that I had felt: compassion for the monkey.

In the initial stages of the story, for me the monkey exemplifies the extremely marginalized who are rejected by society through no fault of their own. The monkey can't help that he's a monkey, and he is rejected by his own as well as by human society. And psychologically speaking, humans and monkeys all need a sense of belonging even more than they need love and affection, which they also need as well, of course.

So as I see it, the poor monkey has managed to adapt as best he can – he has a shitty job where he has to stay out of sight. He has nobody to talk to, nobody to hold – he could almost as well be in an isolation cell in a prison.

So seen from that perspective, his creative workaround at getting a tiny feeling of belonging, of internalizing the names and a piece of the essence of those that he loves (admires, finds attractive) from afar, seems to be the least harmful outcome that he can possibly manage. Note that he himself doesn’t even have a name - so no sense of identity – people usually at least give their pets names, but he hasn’t even been granted that much acceptance and sense of belonging and sense of self that one gets from your name.

Also note that when he steals their names, he's stealing only a tiny bit of it - a whiff of their essence, so to speak. Yes, it's creepy and invasive, and of course I'm not saying it's ok. But it's also inventive and understandable under the circumstances. The monkey's suffering is far worse than the discomfort the women feel because of now and then forgetting their names.

Hence, I think, Murakami’s repeated accent on “extreme loneliness, extreme love”. Humans, no matter how ugly or unattractive, at least have some chance of being accepted, through positive behaviour. This monkey, being socially, culturally and genetically a taboo creature for humans to accept as their own, but also rejected by monkey-kind as unlike themselves, has absolutely no chance, no matter what he does.

Linda Abhors the New GR Design wrote: " The fact that it began with him being introduced to an ugly girl through friends, and then he felt as though he had to call her.."

Yes, kind of like mercy attention. Look at me, I'm not a shallow guy, I even date 'ugly' girls whom I have nothing in common with, just out of kindness. As if it is such a terrible thing to be with a less attractive woman.

It's as if he just can't get past the 'looks' aspect. Like with newly "woke" people who feel uncomfortable socializing with people of other races/creeds/gender orientation and make everybody uncomfortable because they're so self-conscious about it.

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "Traveller wrote: "Horrifying? Now I'm curious! Waa.... tell, tell!"

[spoilers removed] I think of it as the "yes all men" story of the collection."

Welll - in the sense that it is without the women's consent, yes I suppose so. But for me, it speaks more to the more romantic side of romantic infatuation, in the sense that one person longs for the essence of another, the essence of who they are, their identity.

For me, the antithesis of having sex as an expression of love is to have sex simply for the sake of sex, with anybody who is the closest and most convenient, simply to satisfy the ever-gnawing biological urge, which is equivalent to what men basically do when they visit a brothel.

Worse, for me, would be to do it as an expression of power over another individual, and as opposed to that, for me the most romantic aspect of it, would be that it is the (consensual of course) merging of two selves.

But you are completely right from the point of view that it must be consensual, of course. But then also note that (view spoiler)[ the monkey does not force any of his own essence onto or into the woman, he simply steals a piece of -her- essence. But you are right, it is a theft.

However, rape is the forcing of one person into another person against the second person's will. The biggest horribleness is being invaded by an unwanted other. At least the monkey was not doing anything like that. Sigh, but trust blooming Murakami not to even see the wrongness of it, because he is clearly looking at it from the monkey's point of view, and not from the women's POV. (hide spoiler)]

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "I do recall that my thoughts at the time were that he drove her death and was absolutely culpable, but I really need to reread to discuss that. ..."

I felt as if the narrator sort of left it an open question, but a disturbing possibility, that he had been the reason for her death, yes. But put in a subtlish hint sort of way.

...and Akutagawa's suicidal story sort of forebodes it.

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "I found "Confessions" absolutely horrifying! (I'm laughing that we have such different responses to different stories in this collection, Traveller.) But I too will wait until everyone gets there."

Horrifying? Now I'm curious! Waa.... tell, tell!
...and re the different responses- I think that is excellent! I am learning form every different person on these discussion's viewpoints, and I'm loving it - after all, we're not here to be in an echo-chamber. ;)

Re Carnival: I suppose this is Murakami's attempt at redeeming himself from the accusations of how shallow his approach to women is, but I don't think he really succeeded. In fact, out of everything I've read of his so far, this story actually feels like the most insulting of them all. Just a feeling, maybe I'm being full of BS.