The Frame

Final Notes on Cosmopolis

As a follow-up to my weak post on DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, I want to provide some highlights from an excellent review of the book by The American Prospect’s Mark Greif.

In my last post, I was trying to put my finger on why DeLillo’s musings on the supermarket in White Noise succeeded, but why his musings on hip-hop in Cosmopolis failed. According to Greif:

DeLillo’s strength in the past came from his ability to show the limitations of people trying to hold on to the patterns they craved. He stood characters on the pivot between sense and senselessness. There is a moment in White Noise (1985) when Jack Gladney, exposed to vapors from a toxic cloud, has his chances of survival calculated by an infallible computer. It concludes he’s already dead. That moment captured what it feels like to live enmeshed in numbers, patterns, algorithms — and still be able to look down at your two hands and see nothing changed. DeLillo wanted to know what it was like to be a statistical person, or a historical personage (as in Libra or Underworld), and still a living person.

In Cosmopolis, the patterns Eric finds in hip-hop are not essential but superfluous. Eric does not “hold on” to hip-hop, or “crave” it. And hip-hop is such a flamboyant system that it hardly holds the same allure as one undiscovered, a pattern not yet traced.

The best part, according to Greif:

The texture of the novel is its most interesting feature. Characters appear and disappear. Eric’s route isn’t mapped and the chronology isn’t altered. Only one aspect of space-time is affected: The narration starts to take apart our experience of interior, of private spaces. Eric’s apartment unfolds, revealing a fantastic existence. We discover its expansion, as details grow like crabgrass: A rotating room erupts here, a shark tank there, and the apartment itself has “forty-eight rooms.” Eric’s limousine perfects this strangeness. Visitors stand up and leave it as if it were a bedroom. The floor is made of marble. The space contracts and widens.

And the worst:

As for the politics of the novel, don’t even bother. You can’t doubt that DeLillo’s heart is in the right place. In the mouth of Eric’s “chief of theory,” however, a semi-academic named Vija Kinski, the book repeats watery versions of the stupidest analyses of the present, which are so unmindful of real conditions as to be neither of the left nor the right.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: The Problem of Evil

Amazon reviewer Kevin Salfen goes deeper:

In a sense, then, “Wind-up Bird” is a classic love triangle, but it has been made archetypal: the defiled is fought over between the defiler and the purifier. Because of its reduction to the archetypal, all defiled characters are functionally the same, and all defilers are functionally the same.

In my last post on the Wind-Up Bird, I sketched the novel in broad terms, observing its circular structure. There is plenty more to this book, including, as Salfen observes, the problem of evil.

While I would usually resist lumping characters together in broad categories, as Salfen has done, it makes sense in The Wind-Up Bird given its similarities between characters. ‘Archetype’ is an accurate word for the broad, shared existence of the characters both present and past.

Something else that needs to be covered is how these archetypes determine the characters’ behavior. At one point in the novel, Nutmeg describes the lack of control she has over her own life this way:

“I feel as if my every move is being controlled by some kind of incredibly long arm that’s reaching out from somewhere far away, and that my life has been nothing more than a convenient passageway for all these things moving throught it” (503).

But that’s for another day—or the comment section.

Book Notes: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Here are a few rough thoughts about the novel:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the first book I have read by Haruki Murakami. I can say that it was the fastest 600+ book I have ever read. I appreciated its combination of entertaining plot points and ambiguous literary scenes.

If I had to sum up the book in a sentence, I would say it is a series of circles. I felt like I was reading the same story over and over (although the book was not monotonous at all—which speaks to Murakami’s mastery of the subtle). But I was never able to predict what would happen next—but after something happened, I often thought, “Of course!”

What I mean by a series of circles is that many of the novel’s characters live the same existence—not that they share experiences, but that they encounter the same psychological and emotional challenges: three of the characters spend time in the bottom of a well; multiple characters describe themselves as somehow “defiled”; multiple characters carry out violence via baseball bat; multiple characters have blue patches on their cheeks, see the wind-up bird (and describe it in those words) and dress well. It’s a novel of endless repetition. In the words of the novel, “the world [is] like a revolving door…which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to fall” (411). There is a connection between the ‘unreal’ world of the unconscious—both individual and collective—and the physical world.

The rotating door of the novel passes through the real and the unreal. Characters make the jump from the physical to the non-physical world and it becomes harder to distinguish between the two. The novel’s use of Okada’s wet dreams are a great illustration of this conflation: Okada’s wet dreams, like anyone’s, blur the lines between the dream world and the physical. The stimulus is emotional or psychological, but the response is in the physical world, and Okada takes a shower.

Okada, stating his intention to get his wife back (who left him), combines the physical with the figurative. Claiming that “With [his] own hands, pull her back into this world.” (338). The word “world” is a good term to use in describing the different levels of reality—it’s the word the novel uses endlessly. I was actually surprised that Murakami came right out with this idea. Multiple characters end up speaking the same way and using the same words. While this similarity bothers some, accusing Murakami of carelessness, I think it contributes to the idea that every character is living the same existence.

In one of my favorite passages, on page 444, Nutmeg is discussing Cinammon’s loss of speech: “His words were swallowed up by the world of stories. Something that came out of those stories snatched his tongue away. And a few years later, the same thing killed my husband” (444). Here, the figurative world of the story, of the myth, is something physically dangerous. Just as the wet dream prompts a response in the physical world, the narrative prompts an equally visceral response. In the end, Okada’s imagined reality is just as important—if not more—than the physical reality.