The Overdetermination of Everything

It was a slow day reading today, for me. I went to Battery Park to read from the Freud Reader, because where else would you go to read Freud, and what else would you read at Battery Park? Then I went to Grand Central Station and sat in the Dining Concourse without buying anything, and read from the Marx-Engels Reader. The name of today was, evidently, Philosophers of Suspicion Day Among the Tourists. One of the things that I saw while I walked around Battery Park was the Battery Grill. The Battery Grill looks like it should be famous, in the way that particular restaurants look like they should be famous. Tavern on the Green, that one place that is blue and orange in Bryant Park...places in parks, I guess. Anyway, I saw the Battery Grill and thought, "that looks famous", and then I went home. Home, I continued reading of my philosophers of suspicion and watching the Food Network, as is my habit. And what should come up on the Food Network but the show Chopped, one of whose contestants was the executive chef of the....Battery Grill! Spit take! And, spoiler, he won. But there it was, right on the television, the place where I had been earlier in the day. What a crazy coincidence!

That's true, but whatever: the point is that, despite more or less everything I did today fitting into a pretty trim nomological account, really what I did was dick around all day, while floating in enough pieces of meaning that I could construct a trim nomological account of what I'd done. Read enough, watch enough television, go to enough places with names, and when you are called upon by yourself to give an account of what Things You Did, it looks like you did something that makes sense. The world is overdetermined with meaning; everything you do (by which I mean, of course, everything I do) is, to borrow Richard Poirier's description of Pynchon's V., "preposterously coherent". Life is preposterously coherent if you look at it the right way.

This reminds me, eventually, of Murakami: is he preposterously coherent? Certainly, coherence -- especially preposterous coherence -- is a different kettle of fish from ultimately making sense; otherwise no one would have ever said it about V. One of Murakmi's stories -- the story that I had in mind when I started to write this summing-up-of-Murakami post -- is all about this kind of preposterous coherence, the overdetermination of meaning that suggests meaninglessness. "Chance Traveler" is rife with overdetermined coincidences: the little local coincidence, that the piano tuner and the woman are drinking in the same cafe; the stranger coincidence that they are both into Dickens; the huge, huge coincidence that the woman and the piano tuner's estranged sister both have breast cancer; and even the slightly peculiar circumstance that, of all the triads of coincidence that there are in the world, this one, coincidentally, was presented, by his piano tuner to the Japanese short story writer Haruki Murakami. That, anyway, is the gabble of coincidence that makes up "Chance Traveler", and the kind of gabble that makes up, say, my days that I spend reading philosophers of suspicion at tourist places.

But it's easy to get overdetermined. What I think, in the last analysis (this being my last analysis for now, here, anyway), makes Murakami special -- why I think we should read him -- are those things that, rather than content themselves with finding meaning in the overdetermined gabble that anybody could've found, the literally quotidian meaning that I find in as dull a work of art as my own life, knock a damn hole in meaning and everything else. Better than coincidence, the ghost surfer that maybe appears in "Hanalei Bay"; better than a day that seems, eerily to make sense, the haunting private detective (working for free!) in "Where I'm Likely to Find It"; and, more splendid than damn near anything, the appearance and revelation of the title primate in "A Shinagawa Monkey". To be cleverer than either writer deserves: if Pynchon is preposterously coherent, Murakami, at his best, is coherently preposterous.

So that closes the digital book on Murakami, for us. I will write him down on the syllabus, for when the syllabus is again in need of a dusting-off (2013, probably). OUR NEXT BOOK: will be I'jaam, by Sinan Antoon. It is supposed to be quite good; it is an Iraqi prison narrative, written by a gentleman currently teaching at NYU; it was recently featured in the New Yorker's roundup of recent Arabic literature in English translation, and I am starting it tomorrow. Happy reading!