Norwegian Wood

August 29, 2013

Norwegian Wood (1)

World Literature

12v1 Ho In Hee

Literature is a portrayal of reality. Regardless of its genre, a piece of literature reflects reality. Not necessarily that the plot is something likely to happen in the real world, but “reflecting reality” is more of capturing pieces of the reality. Only then it can evoke sympathy from the readers. Unfortunately, Murakami Haruki’s novel did not appear to be reflecting reality at a first glance. As I turn the pages of this book over, Toru Watanabe have an emotion-revealing conversation with a Stewardess he just met, Naoko let Watanabe be disconcerted as she gushes out her ludicrous worries, and Storm Trooper exhibits every eccentric behavior he can have. All the characters in were so different and so unique to portray the normal people of the normal world. But in making such hasty judgment, I overlooked a very important truth: that no one is normal.

Naoko is a character tied down by the past wound. She is a friend (or girlfriend) of Watanabe. Their relationship is not clearly defined- it is somewhere in between friends and lovers. But this indefinite relation between Naoko and Watanabe does not seem to be due to the absence of love between them. It is apparent that Watanabe loves Naoko. But Naoko also seems to have a feeling towards Watanabe. Naoko is depicted as a stand-off type of person who does not favor interacting with anyone. Her self-isolation bears an exception for Watanabe. She makes attempts to share her ideas with. The reason for their ambiguous relation seems to lie not on the absence of affection between the two but rather on Naoko’s not being ready to accept a new relationship. Since the death of her ex-boyfriend Kizuki, Naoko closes her from the world. She remains open to Watanabe, but even with Watanabe, Naoko often becomes neurotic on the subject of “eternity”. She does not doubt so much about Watanabe’s feeling of her, but does doubt strongly that such feeling would last long. This indicates that Naoko is still not free from the painful memory of Kizuki.

Unlike Naoko who is very delicate and vulnerable, Watanabe’s dorm roommate Storm Trooper is a self-determined man. He pursues nothing but his fascination. He does not bother to make any friends who do not understand him. Storm Trooper and Naoko have point of sameness in that they both refuse to associate with others. But if Naoko’s isolation is rooted in fear, Storm Trooper’s rests in that he does not find any friend necessary. Storm Trooper is disturbed by no one around him. While Watanabe shows small irritation at him from time to time, he realizes Storm Trooper’s pure interest in his career is reasonable. Same thing – finding Storm Trooper’s peculiar behaviors funny but realizing parts of him appealing – may be happening to Naoko when she laughs at Watanabe’s stories of his roommate.

Nagasawa is another very interesting character. He is a utilitarianist who does not refuse anything that is beneficial to him. He does not see any problem with his womanizing habit since it is something done under mutual consent. When womanizing, he allows nothing but physical intercourse. He also looks down at people. To Nagasawa, all the residents of the dorm are “idiots” who never read profound books from more than 30 years ago. Consequently, Nagasawa’s relations with others are very superficial.

The three characters show three different ways of reacting to confusion of the “Norwegian Wood”. Personally, I buy Naoko’s most captivating. I look forward to see how the three peculiar yet normal characters adopt to the confusion, and how they influence Watanabe in three remaining quarters of the book.

Metafiction - Student

June 23^rd, 2013

Metafiction – Student

Mr. Garrioch / World Lit

12v1 111150 Ho In Hee

        A lonely desert. Yes, definitely a lonely desert where red sands repeat themselves over and over vast space. North, south, west, and east all filled with sands - red sands that distract my consciousness. . I am just standing there, not knowing what to do like an extraterrestrial that accidentally landed on Earth. The earth under my feet belches out the heat into the red desert’s dry air. But I do not feel the heat. As if I do not exist in this desert. As if I do not exist at all.

        The sight fades out. The teacher is doing his presentation with all the lights off. The PowerPoint slide is stopped on its fourth page for several minutes. He knows that his voice tortures every part of us. He is just displaying extreme sadism by taking his time explaining every small detail of his PowerPoint slides. Time seems to be stuck. Students’ heads are moveless, all headed to the table. The teacher displays no sign of pausing. The only thing moving in the classroom is a little fly. The fly throws itself across the space, making a parabolic motion.

        My mind begins to blur. With the decrescendo of the buzzing of the fly and murmuring of the teacher, I lost consciousness. All the noises ceased. I existed and did not simultaneously, with my mind drifting off to where the zephyr carried me. I travel further and further away from the classroom, from the lecturer, from the world. I let my eyelids drop. A faint wind brushes through my ear. The sandyish wind is rough but gentle. And I am alone again in the desolate desert, under the burning sun. I look ahead at whatever is there. The desert throws up a weak breeze somewhere, blowing out its dry sand. The red sand ripples. I stretch my arms into the hazy dust. But nothing is caught, and my hands are lost. My shirt flutters in the wind. I begin to walk.

        There is no sign of a living creature in this vast desert. The hot sand that covers my ankle each time I take a step forward does not tell me where to go. I sink on the lonely desert, breathing in the hot air. I look back, and there it is, my staggering footprints. The footprints are the only evidence of anything alive. Sighing, I hear a familiar buzzing in my ears. I prick my ears up. There is the fly in my sight. I start to run after the fly. I run until I am out of breath, as if I am aiming somewhere. When the fly is near as I can reach, it vanishes. And there is a camel instead, The fly must have brought me to this camel. The camel looks at me and blinks its eyes slowly just as it is telling me to ride on it. I leap on it. And instead of the camel’s swollen back, there is..

        My hips, splat on the floor, are tingling. The teacher tells me to stand up. His eyes are fixed on me, and their firmness awakes me from my haziness. It is time to use reasonable deduction to predict the reason behind the lecturer’s judgment. What in me caused him to stare at me so fiercely? Or more precisely, Or more precisely, what angered him? Is it that important to beam at me that he should even stop talking? Then the bell rang, and I began to pack my bag. He told me to stay. The camel dim on the edge of my mind disappears into the red sand. And I am alone again in the trackless desert, all by myself.

+) The dozing (or dreaming? illusioned?) part is gray. Plus, I find the images attached not so pleasurable (especially the fly one), but they were inevitably put since they are the images used in the story.

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

March 30^th, 2013

Gabriel Marquez – A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Mr. Garrioch / World Lit

12v1 111150 Ho In Hee

     “It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality.” –Gabriel Marquez

     Gabriel Marquez is an eminent Latin American writer largely known for his magic realism pieces. Magic realism, also known as magical realism, is a literary movement in which the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts. (Luis Leal, Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature. Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris) Though he used many apparently unrealistic and magical elements, Marquez had certain realistic issues he wanted to portray via his stories. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, one of his famous short stories, also takes real problems of the world.

     The story illustrates how people judge the supernatural. The old man with wings is a stranger to the town. No one of the townspeople can assure who the man is. The neighbor woman of Pelayo claims the man is an angel. But the man, with “a few faded hairs left on his bald skull, and a very few teeth in his mouth”, and “huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked”, in no sense accords with the angel they imagine, with a pure white dress and silky blonde hair. Thus they start treating the angel more like an animal than a holy creature. Moreover, Father Gonzaga doubts the man being an angel because in his measure, angel should speak Latin. Whereas humans are not omniscient and might not be able to fully understand the supernatural, the people in A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings appraise the angel on their worldly and imperfect criteria.

     Readers can further get a sense of people’s superiority they feel over the old man. When Pelayo and Elisenda first find the old man with the wings, he regards the man as a “nightmare”. Even after they hear from a neighbor woman that the man is an angel, Pelayo “drags him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop.” That night, when Pelayo’s child wakes up without a fever, he feels “magnanimous” and “decides to put the angel on a raft for three days.” If the angel were a human being, Pelayo would not let that man on a raft and regard that as a behavior of magnanimity. Nor would Pelayo let the angel whom he truly regards as angel sleep on a raft when he feels magnanimous. Such decision to put the angel on a raft is driven not from Pelayo’s respect for the angel.

     Yet Pelayo is not the only one to regard the angel as a weak inferior. At the end of the story, when the angel loses his popularity but still does not leave the house, Elisenda gets “exasperated and unhinged”. The whole neighborhood has fun with the angel “without the slightest reverence”, as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal. Later on, the neighborhood and hundreds of people from distance away come to see this unusual being, as if it is a zoo animal. Elisenda takes benefit by charging five cents admission to see the angel. Every single character in the story does not show, as the author writes, the “slightest reverence” to this injured and aged winged man but rather a superiority we feel over animals.

     But the old man is not the only supernatural being presented in the story. Numerous people from faraway all visit Pelayo’s house to see the caged angel. The popularity of this angel seems like it would last for a while until the spider woman appears. The spider woman claims that she turned into a tarantula for not obeying her parents. This woman, who clearly knows (or assures she knows) how she became a tarantula, quickly fascinates the majority much more than the unidentified and wordless old angel does and the man is soon forgotten. But the people desire for a great lesson from the tarantula girl – such as to never disobey parents’ words. It is rather plausible to say that they are chasing anything unusual and surprising, just like a group of reporters running after hot issues for eye-catching headline. Marquez himself received public’s attention after publishing his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. This novel won him many prestigious awards such as Noble Prize and Romulo Garllegos Prize as well as great popularity and critics’ acclaims. However, Marquez goes to live in Spain. He said that his book was not worthy of such attention and he knew the vain of such popularity. In this sense, the old angel in his book may be a portrayal of himself who is overburdened by the unwanted public attention.

     There are certain words that are hard to juxtapose with each other. ‘Magic’ and ‘Realism’ are some very typical ones. ‘Magic’, as Merriam-Webster defines, is the ‘use of means believed to have supernatural power over natural forces’, whereas ‘Realism’ is a literary movement basically focusing on replicating the true nature of reality. But this seemingly self-contradicting word has been used for decades to characterize a renowned novelist named Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As in A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, Marquez effectively conveys realistic themes through unrealistic characters.

+) I tried hard to not go over 900 words. The journal is solely about our second story only- and perhaps I should post another one about the handsomest drowned man later?