After Dark, Days and Nights

This summer is my read-novels-only season, here are the first two I've read so far. There is no method or order to the books I have chosen to read. I am simply dictated by random book lust, sporadic book reviews I've read, and some books leading to other books.

Alfred Jarry Days and Nights
I read this book a few years ago, but I decided to read again to see if I could make any more sense of it this time around. If it was any longer than its slim 130+ pages, it would've have taken me a month to read it. This contradicts one's intuition, since, on the surface it appears easy to read. The book is broken into a number of very short chapters, but one must be aware of the style which can slacken the reader. Days and Nights is a satiristic autobiography of Jarry's Sisphyean military stint. But acquiring a linear story would be near impossible, since the novel weaves in and out of hallucination and interior streams. The point of reading it, would be to immerse yourself in Jarry's strange, word-ordered universe. It's a work that presages the non-linear, stream-of-consciouness often found in modernist writers: Joyce, Faulker, Burroughs, and etc.


Haruki Murakami After Dark
I have never read any Murakami's books, but I became obssessed with the need to read After Dark when I read a review. What struck me most is the point of view within the book. The reader is a "neutral outside witness" spoken to by a comforting, semi-omniscent speaker. We see it as though we are looking through the camera lens, swooping down on the characters' actions and conversations. Most of what we do learn about the characters are revealed by themselves in conversation. But we never really get to see or understand what motivates the character, or what is happening emotionally within. The characters are likeable, yet they remain opaque. The language is simple but not simplistic and the pacing moves ahead with out feeling rushed; Basically it's a fun to read novel: entertaining, not very thought-provoking and kind of strange.

Here are some real reviews:

After Dark-
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/books/review/Kirn-t.html?ex=1181793600&en=9bdb0c36525b565a&ei=5070

and on another blog-
http://www.themillionsblog.com/2007/05/rootless-detachment-review-of-after.html
which the reader thought more about the book than I did. I haven't read enough Murakami to agree or not, however I can see some of these points after reading this novel, and I was not really compelled to read another Murakami novel soon, if ever. I doubt I will remember much about After Dark a year from now, except I may remember that is was strange. An excerpt:

"The problem confronting Murakami's readers has always been that, despite his otherworldly talents, he has nothing to say. Nothing of any real interest or significance, at least. Although his stories often hint at a metaphysics of unreality, the books are mostly surface and, unlike one of his professed influences, Raymond Carver, seem to lack any insight into the human condition (or any other condition, really). Instead, they content themselves with cataloging the discontents of the modern age, particularly the alarmingly numerous forms of ennui, all of which, after three or four volumes, begin to bear a striking resemblance to one another.

While this was all well and good when Murakami started his career, with After Dark it seems he has become so enamored of his own abilities that he has ceased to care whether what he has chosen to show us actually matters. Or is even interesting. The more I read Murakami, the less his work resembles genius, and the more it comes to resemble a symptom of autism or obsessive compulsion. As Murakami translator Jay Rubin notes in his biography Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, around the time Murakami finished A Wild Sheep Chase, he began to obsess over his writing, fearing that he might die before finishing the book, a thought he apparently found untenable. His anxiety led to a major overhaul of his life. He quit smoking, began to exercise regularly, changed his diet. Over time, his books have come to reflect this obsession with writing and not necessarily in a positive way. As Rubin explains it, Murakami works not because he has an idea for a book, but because he feels compelled to write. It's suggested that he often sits at his desk, writing whatever comes to mind, until the glimmerings of a story appear. Those who are familiar with Murakami's novels can see this process at work. Often, the first fifty to one hundred pages of his books feature characters loafing around, looking for something to do, a reflection, perhaps, of Murakami's own mental state. The result is a presumably faithful depiction of his inner life with an ironic lack of self-awareness."



Days and Nights. by Harvey Pekar.
The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993 v13 n2 p257(2)
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1993 Review of Contemporary Fiction

When the major modernist writers are listed, Alfred Jarry is often excluded, forgotten about, and yet what a tremendous impact on modernism he had. Dadaism, surrealism, and absurdism were all derived from his work. In addition to this, much of his writing is very enjoyable and stimulating to read. Maybe that's part of the trouble: not enough people read him, a major reason being that his books are very difficult to find. Congratulations, then, are in order to Atlas for publishing so much of it recently. Many historians and critics seem to underrate Jarry as a technician and intellect. In his twenties he was already pretty well-read in several areas including science, religion, mythology, history, and contemporary politics. As a very young man he'd already been a coeditor with Remy de Gourmont of L'Ymaginiev, "which published and analyzed ... medieval and popular prints, usually of a religious nature," according to Alastair Brotchie's helpful introduction. The play Caesar Antichrist, Jarry's second book (1895), was illustrated as well as written by him. In it there is a good deal of theoretical information about the discipline or quasi-discipline he created, pataphysics. Opposites and their tendency to neutralize each other, thus, in his opinion, eventually amounting to the same thing, get considerable attention here. Caesar Antichrist claims, "I and the Christ are Janus." In the midst of abstract dialogues involving Christ, Caesar Antichrist, and Saint Peter, Jarry inserts a condensation of his humorous, earthy Ubu Roi play, which was to be performed in 1896 (it had been done with marionettes as early as 1888). This is done not only to shock, but to set up a contrast between it and other sections of the play, in accordance with Jarry's theory of opposites. Days and Nights, Jarry's first novel, appeared in 1897. An autobiographical work, it deals with his thirteen months in the army (he was drafted) and his method of securing a medical discharge so that he did not have to serve his entire three-year stretch. Jarry (he calls himself Sengle here) had a friend who showed him various ways to deceive doctors into thinking he was sicker than he was, such as sticking a thermometer under his armpit to make his temperature appear unusually high. Part of his novel is devoted to criticizing the army and military medicine; a lot of this is funny. Other chapters are devoted to his dreams and hallucinations; Jarry got high a lot on alcohol and drugs, so they are pretty vivid. Jarry comes across as a likeable character, a lot less weird than some accounts of him would lead you to believe. For one thing, his beefs about the military are pretty much like other soldiers' and can easily be identified with. His methods of getting out of work and goofing off have plenty in common with Sergeant Bilko's; that's a definite plus. Alastair Brotchie, whose introductions and notes in both books are quite astute and useful, implies that Jarry influenced James Joyce, an interesting observation. On one hand, Joyce's work can be accounted for without Jarry; he was influenced by French symbolist poetry (as was Jarry) and the pre-1900 stream-of-consciousness work of Eduard Dujardin and George Moore, plus Moore's post-1900 "melodic line" style. But Jarry at least anticipated Joyce in several ways: both employed complex symbolism, both devoted a great deal of attention to interior states, such as dreams, both used sentence fragments and free association of ideas, and both employed wordplay, including neologisms. In any event, very few writers marked twentieth-century literature as strongly as Jarry. His work should be taught in universities along with Joyce's, Eliot's and Pound's, and it should be realized that there is more to his oeuvre than the Ubu plays, as the innovative prose writing in Days and Nights, The Supermale, and Dr. Faustroll make abundantly clear.