As someone who suffers from PTSD, I have experienced various degrees of social isolation throughout my life, much of it by choice. My one constant connection with the rest of humanity has been great literature. The power of story-telling is such that parables have been utilized by virtually every religion to reach people through their physical senses, as well as identification with their positions within social power structures. Some authors’ command of language is so deft and powerful that they are able to both subvert and simultaneously employ religion for political purposes, Ayn Rand being a prime example of this kind of writing.
Having been a fan of her work in my youth, largely because it invites its readers to imagine themselves as members of an intellectual and moral elite, I have since learned to question literature. Like journalism, I now consider who paid for a literary work to be written and why when evaluating the validity of the persuasive arguments within it. The purpose for which something has been written is as important as the writing itself, and indeed, often shapes it. Some have argued that Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was not a literary success. For example, Leslie Fiedler, called Steinbeck a “middlebrow author for middlebrow critics" .
Such a statement exemplifies the role of literature in maintaining the status quo, which includes literary elitism based on the opinions of critics accepted by the reigning literary branch of the class system. The potential influence of writers who have dared expose society’s hypocrisies has always been feared, and often punished. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is an example of this. However, he is also an example of how the work of authors is appropriated for political purposes. His ability to write so vividly about daily life within a gulag made his work influential enough to be used for propaganda purposes that were contrary to the author’s own purpose.
The most influential and socially valuable writers are those that enable us to experience life through the senses and thoughts of the characters they create. In this context, I am defining “social value” as that which serves to improve the living conditions of humanity as a whole. Truly great literature ultimately transcends the nation-state in that it offers readers a genuine view of other societies and of the humanity that we all share. In this way, we are able to more fully understand the motivations of others, and by so doing, often gain a greater understanding of our own.
I consider Haruki Murakami perhaps the most important author of our generation. I say perhaps only because I’ve not yet read all of those considered by others to hold that position. I am not alone in this assertion, since he is the most widely read author in Japan, his country of origin. While I’ve read many of his works, including The Windup Bird Chronicles, Norwegian Wood, and IQ84, and found each to contain a different type of brilliance, the work that has personally moved me the most is his collection of short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.
I’ve asked myself whether it might be because my PTSD is partially the result of my father’s deployment as a Marine to Vietnam, and then, as a reward, to Japan. This of course left me with a fractured view of Japanese society experienced through the eyes of low- level members of a conquering military. This view consisted of a combination of custom tailors, geishas and jewelry box makers, all busily at work amidst the ghostly wanderings of disfigured atomic bomb survivors. I won’t go into the view of VietNam I inherited from my father here. Suffice it to say that these views, little more than glimpses of the resulting horrors of religion and state, contributed to my becoming an atheist as well as a global citizen.
Murakami’s writing has offered me the comfort of a new religion. It is a worldview based on cultural education, keenly alive observation, and detailed reporting of a universal imperative at work, an imperative manifested in coincidence. Its goal is to heal humanity’s self-inflicted wounds of separation, caused by personal ego as well as religion and the nation-state’s cooperative efforts to sustain the existence of slavery. As such, it is an imperative towards freedom as well as the survival of mankind. There is no higher purpose that a writer could possibly have than this. I applaud not only his purpose, but his verbal skills and the painstaking attention to physical and emotional detail that breathes life into his characters and their environments.
From a personal perspective, I offer him my gratitude for the restoration of hope in an often seemingly hopeless world.
Having been a fan of her work in my youth, largely because it invites its readers to imagine themselves as members of an intellectual and moral elite, I have since learned to question literature. Like journalism, I now consider who paid for a literary work to be written and why when evaluating the validity of the persuasive arguments within it. The purpose for which something has been written is as important as the writing itself, and indeed, often shapes it. Some have argued that Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was not a literary success. For example, Leslie Fiedler, called Steinbeck a “middlebrow author for middlebrow critics" .
Such a statement exemplifies the role of literature in maintaining the status quo, which includes literary elitism based on the opinions of critics accepted by the reigning literary branch of the class system. The potential influence of writers who have dared expose society’s hypocrisies has always been feared, and often punished. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is an example of this. However, he is also an example of how the work of authors is appropriated for political purposes. His ability to write so vividly about daily life within a gulag made his work influential enough to be used for propaganda purposes that were contrary to the author’s own purpose.
The most influential and socially valuable writers are those that enable us to experience life through the senses and thoughts of the characters they create. In this context, I am defining “social value” as that which serves to improve the living conditions of humanity as a whole. Truly great literature ultimately transcends the nation-state in that it offers readers a genuine view of other societies and of the humanity that we all share. In this way, we are able to more fully understand the motivations of others, and by so doing, often gain a greater understanding of our own.
I consider Haruki Murakami perhaps the most important author of our generation. I say perhaps only because I’ve not yet read all of those considered by others to hold that position. I am not alone in this assertion, since he is the most widely read author in Japan, his country of origin. While I’ve read many of his works, including The Windup Bird Chronicles, Norwegian Wood, and IQ84, and found each to contain a different type of brilliance, the work that has personally moved me the most is his collection of short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.
I’ve asked myself whether it might be because my PTSD is partially the result of my father’s deployment as a Marine to Vietnam, and then, as a reward, to Japan. This of course left me with a fractured view of Japanese society experienced through the eyes of low- level members of a conquering military. This view consisted of a combination of custom tailors, geishas and jewelry box makers, all busily at work amidst the ghostly wanderings of disfigured atomic bomb survivors. I won’t go into the view of VietNam I inherited from my father here. Suffice it to say that these views, little more than glimpses of the resulting horrors of religion and state, contributed to my becoming an atheist as well as a global citizen.
Murakami’s writing has offered me the comfort of a new religion. It is a worldview based on cultural education, keenly alive observation, and detailed reporting of a universal imperative at work, an imperative manifested in coincidence. Its goal is to heal humanity’s self-inflicted wounds of separation, caused by personal ego as well as religion and the nation-state’s cooperative efforts to sustain the existence of slavery. As such, it is an imperative towards freedom as well as the survival of mankind. There is no higher purpose that a writer could possibly have than this. I applaud not only his purpose, but his verbal skills and the painstaking attention to physical and emotional detail that breathes life into his characters and their environments.
From a personal perspective, I offer him my gratitude for the restoration of hope in an often seemingly hopeless world.
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