Epiphany of Distance - Dubliners & after the quake
An essay I wrote for first year university on 'Dubliners' by James Joyce and 'after the quake' by Haruki Murakami.
The subject was Modern and Contemporary Literature (ENGL10001) at the University of Melbourne.
Theme is CITY.
From the moment the City emerges as an urban and industrialised mass, an epoch of Modernity, to its contemporary evolution in the light of late capitalism, it has come under scrutiny in both James Joyce’s Dubliners and Haruki Murakami’s after the quake. The City can be characterised, regardless of time period, by the emergence of a new world order with a fast-paced, technologically advanced and capitalistic society. As a consequence of urbanisation and the emergence of the “collectivity known as the ‘city’” (Murakami, 83) both Joyce and Murakami point towards feelings of emptiness and purposelessness pervading the individuals that live in such era. Poignantly, Joyce’s characters are concentrated within Dublin; whereas, Murakami’s collection is geographically decentralised from Kobe, the location of the earthquake, yet the protagonists are nonetheless equally haunted by such feelings. This distinction between displacement from and entrapment within the City (notion) and the city (physical location) becomes integral in the comparison of these two texts.
The drastic destabilisation caused by the emergence of the new City is initially elucidated through the short story form. The “short story genre promised… an escape” (Kiberd, 330) for both Murakami and Joyce as it better represented the fragmented state of their societies. That is, Joyce portrays Dublin as deeply disconnected from a sense of national identity and Murakami depicts characters indirectly struck by the Kobe earthquake. In this sense, the short story genre itself reflects this fragmented status as it allows the authors to escape from “the formal inappropriateness of the novel, which was calibrated to a settled society rather than one still in the settling.” (Kiberd, 330). The fissures born out of such form thus provides the means for exploration of the hollow values and fragility of the city.
Dubliners’ chronologically moves from youth to old age, moving from the young boy in ‘The Sisters’ to an old man in ‘The Dead’. Joyce similarly oscillates between genders, Polly (‘The Boarding House’) and James Duffy (‘A Painful Case’) as well as the socio-economic status, the impoverished Lenehan and Corley (‘Two Gallants’) and the affluent European drivers (‘After the Race’). What connects the short stories, however, is Dublin. In this way, each of the short stories capture a moment in the Dublin experience just as it has been destabilised by the onset of cultural globalisation and technological advancement. Therefore, despite their different backgrounds, their mutual connection to Dublin suggests that underlying their feelings of estrangement and destabilisation in the modern world is born out of or in some way culminated in the city they occupy; Joyce universalises the “paralysis” (Joyce, 3) experienced by his protagonists from within the city.
Murakami is able to achieve a similar universality in after the quake, in which his protagonists too vary across gender and occupation, but their variance is more attributable to their physical location. Murakami stories vary across Japan: from Tokyo (‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’) to Hokkaido (‘UFO in Kushiro’) and Ibaraki (‘Landscape with a Flatiron’) and even internationally to Thailand, but importantly, are never set at the centre of the shock, Kobe. What connects the characters, like the paralysis experienced by those in Dubliners, are not physical attributes, but feelings of loneliness and emptiness symptomatic of the City. Murakami suggests that their physical displacement from the city does not relieve them from the hollowness and purposelessness of the City. In this sense, unlike Dubliners, their feelings of inadequacy are not born from within the city. Therefore, the centralised nature of Dubliners and the conversely decentralised collection by Murakami begin to illuminate the changes in the City.
By focalising his investigation into the symptoms of modern society through a single city, Joyce tentatively insinuates that by investigating further into the “centre of paralysis”, the stability of a definitive truth or social purpose lost through the emergence of the City is able to be regained. Standing in diametric opposition, Murakami’s displacement of the trauma of the earthquake to other cities, suggests that a centre of the City lies not within a city but within the people. This contrast is exemplified in Joyce and Murakami’s use of epiphany. In ‘The Dead’ Gabriel Conroy experiences an epiphany: he realises that his life has been lived with a sense of death in that it lacked genuine connection in his blind devotion to routine. Annually, he makes a speech, carves the goose and engages in meaningless conversation and dancing. Yet he laments that such traditions of “of hospitality, of humour, of humanity… the new and very serious and hypereducated generation … seem to lack” (Joyce, 175). Thus, when Gretta divulges the story of her previous lover Michael Furey and the passion and devotion that defined his life and death, Gabriel realises that he has “never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love” (Joyce, 203). Gabriel’s defensive assertion that he is “sick of [his] own country” (Joyce, 172) is therefore a response to the banality of his existence; Joyce paints an arduous portrait of modern life in which empty routines birth empty people lacking purpose.
In contrast, such existential revelations are not present in after the quake where banality and purposelessness within the City is already universally acknowledged. In ‘Landscape with Flatiron’, Junko and Miyake have both left their city of origin, Tokorozawa and Kobe, and are essentially de-institutionalised. Neither Junko nor Miyake are in touch with their family, Junko leaves school, Miyake does not have a job and they have both left the city. In doing so, they not only leave the familiar metropolitan world but leave the City where all its institutions were “absolute torture” (Murakami, 29). Both Junko and Miyake, like Gabriel, ruminate on life and death, Miyake posits simply that “there’s such a thing as a way of living that’s guided by the way a person’s going to die” (Murakami, 37). Michael Furey embodies this philosophy in that he died in fervent longing for love, he “braved death” (Joyce, 202); his death and life, were passionate and fulfilling. Gabriel’s rumination on the duality of life and death is an epiphany; however, inherent within the definition of epiphany is the realisation of knowledge previously unknown to oneself. It appears therefore, that unlike Gabriel, Miyake and Junko do not experience an epiphany with respect to the nature of death itself or the emptiness they feel in their displacement from the City. This is made clear in the matter-of-fact manner of Junko’s confession Miyake’s ambivalent response:
“You know something?” she [Junko] said.
“What?”
“I’m completely empty”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” (Murakami, 38)
Her “complete empt[iness]” (Murakami, 38) is not an epiphany per se, but merely an unearthing of a suppressed truth that she has withheld from articulating. In bringing to the surface such truths, Murakami provides readers with a pseudo-epiphany, not a realisation of something previously unknown but a confirmation. This is further amplified by the solution they reach in addressing their emptiness; they begin with “getting a good night’s sleep” (Murakami, 38) and end with a casual suggestion that “we could die together” (Murakami, 39). The notion that the “snow [is] falling faintly through the universe… upon all the living and the dead” (Joyce, 204) is nothing revolutionary in Murakami’s after the quake. The epiphany of emptiness marking the termination of ‘The Dead’ in Dubliners in contrast to the banal manner in which Murakami deploys pseudo-epiphanies in ‘Landscape with Flatiron’ reflects the evolution of the City. Joyce writes in a period of deep instability of purpose and culture where his characters are confronted with harsh realisations of emptiness that he suggests is symptomatic of modern life. Conversely, Murakami faces a society in which such previously revelatory feelings of hollowness are now normalised and in fact ingrained into contemporary society; that is, regardless of the physical distance from the centre of the shock, it is inescapable.
This notion of pseudo-epiphanies further enhances the dichotomy of centralisation and decentralisation in Murakami’s denial of particular truths or realities to his characters through the use of unexplained imagery. As Rebecca Suter observes, within Murakami’s after the quake “dreams and metaphors can become real, they can affect external reality” (169), which culminates in his use of metaphors and images to distance his narrator from the core of their epiphany. In ‘Thailand’, just as Satsuki is about to divulge the secret that has “turned [her] heart into a stone” (Murakami, 78), Nimmit denies her this and tells her to “have [her] dream” (Murakami, 78). Therefore, Murakami does not provide readers with the truth of what happened when Satsuki’s “father died all of a sudden” (Murakami, 78) and offers thus no explanation for the “dream about a large snake” (Murakami, 76). This happens again in ‘UFO in Kushiro’ where it is never made clear whether the “box like the ones used for human ashes” (Murakami, 7) actually “contains the something that was inside [Komura]” (Murakami, 19), or if it was just empty, or even if it is the “something” inside him because it is empty. The title of ‘Landscape with a Flatiron’ is the name of the painting that Miyake paints. His painting is simply “a picture of an iron in a room” (Murakami, 37) but in reality he clarifies that “the iron is not an iron” and Junko questions whether it “stands for something else” (Murakami, 38), to this, Miyake can only offer a non-definitive “probably” (Murakami, 38). Readers are left with metaphors, images and symbols that Murakami sets up for epiphanic revelation but provides no further insight into. Not being physically at Kobe ironically does not assuage their pain because the centre of the City is not at the centre of the city but within them. That is to say that physical distance does not equate to emotional distance from the “intensive collectivity known as the ‘city’” (Murakami, 86). Despite this, they are still distanced from the centre of the epiphanies that Murakami creates for them; they only have elusive images that point towards the centre. Murakami hence questions the simultaneous destabilisation of traditional values and the solidification of consumerist culture which sees inhabitants of the City left with merely symbolic and anthropomorphic interpretations of their situation; they are “using a dream for [their] own spiritual salvation” (Suter, 170).
Whilst Murakami uses pseudo-epiphanies by denying his characters full enlightenment through elusive images, Joyce also provides incomplete stories in Dubliners. Michael Seidal points to Joyce’s use of the word “gnomon” (Joyce, 1) in ‘The Sisters’ to suggest that “coming to terms with the missing [from the modern city] is as important as comprehending the present” (Seidal, 46). The distinction, however, is that the incompleteness is either plot based (“a missing piece of information, an event not entirely explained, an image that does not appear whole” Seidal, 46) or is the epiphany itself (“revealing how life’s disappointments are a collection of minor gnomons” Seidal, 48). For example, in ‘The Sisters’ what drives Father Flynn to insanity is not made clear and what actually causes Kernan to fall down the stairs in ‘Grace’ in never revealed. Or as Seidal cites, ‘The Dead’ is “gnomonic to the core, Gabriel Conroy misses something in almost everything,” and aforementioned, he realises the lack of passion and devotion; however, this emptiness is not a result own action. Joyce thus insinuates that the notion of the missing is perhaps the only definitive results that can be reached, the missing is the epiphany. This difference illuminates the fundamental change that has occurred in the progression of the City: from its initial birth Joyce conveys the series of gnomons it has created in the lives of the people, to its current state where emptiness is no longer revelatory but must be dealt with through distancing images as highlighted by Murakami.
The question of centralisation and displacement is important when exploring the notion that I have defined as the City in both after the quake and Dubliners. The discrepancies between these two texts with regards to these ideas provide an indication of the evolution of the new world order formed during industrialisation and cultural globalisation defining the period in which Joyce wrote Dubliners. In particular such new world characteristics has become the core of contemporary society that Murakami writes after the quake in. Joyce aims to tackle the “centre of paralysis” itself, depicting epiphanies with no sweeping metaphors or grand narratives, Murakami indicates humanity’s subsequent emotional estrangement and displacement by returning to grand narratives and symbols, which themselves distance his protagonists from their trauma. The modern city is questioned by Joyce and Murakami as they explore the harrowing emptiness resulting from the emergence of a unified, urban mass known as the City thus providing greater clarity into the socio-economic, cultural and political world that we live in today.
Works Cited
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Vintage, 2012.
Kiberd, Declan (1996) James Joyce and Mythic Realism. In, Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (pp.327-355, 676-679). Vintage.
Murakami, Haruki. after the quake. Vintage, 2001.
Seidal, Michael (2002) Dubliners. In, Seidal, Michael. James Joyce, a short introduction (pp.41-58). Malden, Mass. : Blackwell.
Suter, Rebecca. The Japanisation of Modernity, Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States. Harvard University Asian Center, 2008.
