Types of Literary Rebellion, Part 1

When I first began studying literature seriously in college in the early 1970s, I was drawn to the most openly rebellious voices. I loved the Beat Generation, the Surrealists, D.H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, William Blake, and the poets of the Black Arts Movement like my undergraduate mentor June Jordan. I still love them.

William Blake

During the period when I was a student, the New Left was at its peak. It was also the era when the movements against the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement flourished in the United States. The doctrine of many revolutionaries at that time was that anything less than total revolt was irrelevant and self-defeating: “Ceux qui font des révolutions à moitié n’ont fait que se creuser un tombeau.”—“Those who make revolutions halfway have only dug their own graves.” I first encountered those words of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, the French revolutionary from the period of the Terror, when Jean-Luc Godard quoted them in a movie. Godard was my artistic idol at the time. That quote embodied much of what my friends and I were thinking then about politics and art.

But the New Left, with its stir fry of Maoism, Trotskyism, and anarchism, never came close to becoming a majority movement in the United States. Maybe that’s because the U.S. is generally allergic to isms. I came to realize that it was those who make revolutions all the way who only dig their own graves.

But what does all this have to do with literature? Well, the writers who openly declared themselves in revolt against the artistic and political establishment were clearly rebels to my adolescent or post-adolescent mind. Those were the writers whose stances I admired when I began my own literary attempts.

I’m not sure how I came to realize that there were actually many ways to express rebellion, dissent, and innovative ideas in literature, some of them bravely open, and some more subtle.

Maybe it was by reading the work of feminist writers, who often didn’t stand on a soapbox and declare their political viewpoints, writers such as Virginia Woolf. The slogan of the feminist writers of the 1980s, “The personal is political,” leant itself to a more nuanced aesthetic. If even the small moments in life have larger social significance, then a writer doesn’t have to scribble a manifesto to make a strong point. Understanding what is political in a poem by Sharon Olds isn’t like understanding the ideas of Mayakovsky or Amiri Baraka, where the writer is clearly waving a red flag.

Learning what is revolutionary about the more subtle rebels has been a lifelong study for me. In the next couple of blogs, I’ll talk about a couple of the writers where the social change implications of their work have only become clearer to me as I’ve read more.

Types of Literary Rebellion, Part 2: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Haruki Murakami and Globalization

I just finished listening to the audiobook of Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, a novel that takes place in the space of only seven hours in Tokyo. The plot follows four main characters and several minor characters from midnight to dawn of one day in the grungy downtown entertainment district. I didn’t like the novel as much as Murakami’s stellar The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, or his short stories in The Elephant Vanishes, but After Dark does have a couple of classic Murakami scenes where he is at his best, and those scenes alone make the novel worthwhile.

Haruki Murakami with jazz records

Murakami is a master at creating a situation where two characters encounter one another by chance and start talking deeply, and suddenly their hearts and thoughts spring open up in a way that is extraordinary and reveals surprising truths.

I love Murakami's writing, so I was quite surprised when I heard him taken to task at an international symposium on literature I attended a few years ago. At the Third Seoul International Forum for Literature in 2011, eminent Korean scholar Yu Jong-ho, professor emeritus at Yonsei University, criticized Murakami at a session where I also spoke on “The Globalizing World and the Human Community.” Though his criticisms of Murakami didn’t focus on the globalization of literature per se, Professor Yu’s comments appeared to me to be prompted in part by the Westernized cultural references in Murakami’s fiction.

After Dark is a prime example. Though the novel takes place in Tokyo, it begins in a Denny’s Restaurant. There are numerous discussions of music in the book, partly because one of the main characters, Takahashi Tetsyta, is an aspiring jazz trombonist. Almost all the music referred to in Murakami’s novel is from the U.S.A. or the U.K. All the food the characters eat is Western, from chicken salad (there are some hilarious bits about Denny’s chicken salad!) to tuna sandwiches to a fluffy omelet (which, like the love that develops between the two protagonists, is never actually indulged in).

One of the only things in the novel that is distinctively Japanese is a love hotel, not exactly what you’d call classic East Asian culture. Even the love hotel is named for a Jean-Luc Godard movie, Alphaville (sometimes After Dark seems to take place in the futuristic world of Godard’s Alphaville).

So, is this a problem that Murakami’s characters seem to move in a world where Japanese culture, so rich and venerable, no longer seems to exist? The references that Murakami’s characters make to vintage jazz tunes, which he knows extremely well (he once ran a jazz club in Tokyo), are fascinating to me, and they make his characters appealing and endearing, from my standpoint. I’m a huge jazz fan myself. I would never want Murakami to feature Japanese culture in a way that would Orientalize or exoticize his own country. Nor would I want to see Murakami respond in an extremely nationalistic and negative way to Westernization, in the manner of Yukio Mishima, for instance, perhaps the other best known Japanese novelist of the last three generations.

Maybe that’s part of why Murakami has immersed himself so deeply in Western culture, as an antidote to his country’s militaristic nationalism and to the conformist culture of the “salaryman” that has dug so deeply into Japanese life. But I can’t help but wonder why Murakami sees no precedents for his own rebellion within Japanese literary and artistic culture. What of the great poet Yosano Akiko, for instance, who defied expectations that she would continue to run the family business and fled to Tokyo from a provincial town in order to elope with her lover, the poet Yosano Tekkan? She was also a foe of the status quo. What of the poets of the Arechi or Waste Land movement in post-World War II Japanese poetry, such as the wonderful Tamura Ryuichi? Why doesn’t Murakami see his legacy through these and other Japanese writers? Has he become infatuated with the culture of the U.S.A. to the point where he can no longer see the strengths of his country’s own legacy?

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka