What Makes It Art?
Based on Haruki Murakami’s ‘Dance Dance Dance’ (1988)
‘Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.’
As part of a writing course I’m taking, I was asked to list my favourite ten novels and think of what they have in common. The exercise is meant to reveal what are the sort of themes, character types, you care most about and which are likely to influence your own writing. I enjoyed the exercise and the list did take me by surprise. To start with, none of Murakami’s novels were in there. Peculiar, since I started writing this newsletter with the ambition of studying each of them in turn. It made me wonder, do I even like Murakami? And if I only ‘sort of’ do, then why the hell am I spending so much time on his work?
None of his books, in fairness, have ever struck me as my favourite reads. Yet, his body of work as a whole has always left me impressed. Plus, the objective of reading one prolific author start to finish was to learn more about their growth, technique and approach to writing (more about it here). It had less to do with how individually brilliant his novels are. My personal motivation rather has something to do with a ‘feeling’, something strange, formless, that creeps on me every time I read his novels. This emotion is what I’d like to write about today.
Dance Dance Dance is another novel I ‘sort of’ enjoyed and which realistically gets lost among the better of Murakami’s reads. If you read far and wide on what the novel is about, you get many opinions and few facts, which only serves to show that either nobody really knows or there’s nothing really to know. Some claim that it’s a meditation on connectedness, others that it’s a detective story, while others label it plainly as yet another piece in a string of disappointing Murakami fiction. Murakami might be among the few to feel differently. He claims he enjoyed writing this novel the most1, as a healing act following the unexpected boom of Norwegian Wood’s publication (read about it here).
Dance Dance Dance is Murakami’s sixth novel and the unofficial fourth in his Trilogy of the Rat (about the other three here and here). The story has at its centre the same unnamed narrator from A Wild Sheep Chase, now living off as a commercial writer. Below is a short synopsis from the reputable source Wikipedia (no spoilers):
The novel follows the surreal misadventures of an unnamed protagonist who makes a living as a commercial writer. He is compelled to return to the Dolphin Hotel, a seedy establishment where he once stayed with a woman he loved, despite the fact he never even knew her real name. She has since disappeared without a trace and the Dolphin Hotel has been purchased by a large corporation and converted into a slick, fashionable, Western-style hotel.
The protagonist experiences dreams in which this woman and the Sheep Man—a strange individual dressed in an old sheep skin—appear to him and lead him to uncover two mysteries. The first is metaphysical in nature—how to survive the unsurvivable. The second is the murder of a call girl in which an old school friend of the protagonist, now a famous film actor, is involved circumstantially. Along the way, the protagonist meets a clairvoyant and troubled thirteen-year-old girl, her equally troubled parents, a one-armed poet, and a sympathetic receptionist who shares some of his disturbingly real visions.
If the synopsis sounds confusing, then you’re likely not going to feel any different about the book. It doesn’t have an arc that it follows, nor a clear plot, gradually building up to a climax. Like most of Murakami’s novels (with some exceptions) it’s completely unplanned and unplotted. Things just happen. Major characters are introduced mid-way through the story. New narrative threads are started and then left open. The ending of the novel does not clarify what happened with the rest of the characters. It does not give the sort of closure one would expect.
Perhaps the book is about nothing in particular, it’s just a story, it does not seek to issue a lesson for the reader. If anything, it seeks to disrupt the expectations the average reader would have from a story, like the expectation of plot or that of intrinsic meaning. Is it good though? If novels like these represent the bulk of Murakami’s writing, then how come he is regarded as such a successful writer?
Let’s leave this for a moment. Let’s think instead of the last time you were in a museum. If you’re anything like me, you’ve been walking around for an hour or so, stopping randomly at one painting or another, reading the brief description on the side and then moving on. Then at some point you move on to a painting that seems to be on the surface like any other painting. In fact, it might look worse than other paintings, like it doesn’t really belong there. Perhaps, it’s such an average painting that with a bit of training and a whole summer to spare, you could paint it yourself. You wonder, why is that painting there? And yet, as you watch it, as you stand in front of it, something reaches at you. It could be a sort of emptiness growing in your stomach, or your eyelids feeling heavier. Perhaps your eyes need to squint as if shielding from a blinding light. Perhaps you remember something. And slowly, deep down, you recognize a feeling, an emotion, and that is why that painting is there, why it’s considered art.
Lev Tolstoy wrote a book called What Is Art? towards the end of the 19th century. In it, he looks critically at his own work, that of his contemporaries and some of the old masters, across different art forms. He dismisses theories that use beauty in qualifying art (aesthetic theory), or the appreciation of the technical skill, or art that serves an educational purpose. Instead, he comes to the conclusion that what makes great art is its ability to communicate emotion, to stir in us a feeling. Anything that effectively does that, can qualify as art.
For instance, years ago, in a gallery in Cape Town, I walked into a room filled with cow skins. The room was large and of such a perfect white one could not see the corners. The skins were beautiful, stretched and whole. Some were brown while others were spotted white and black. They appeared well preserved, yet they all curled up at the end like dry apple shavings. There was no foul smell in the room and for a few seconds it was only me, the skins and the white walls. A few of the hides rotated as they hung off a thread from the ceiling. An emotion took form in me, the way anxiety would, like a distinct rumble.
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It made me think of death. Others might’ve read the exhibit as an environmental protest. Or perhaps as a vegan manifesto. To me, it was about death, about how what is left over in the absence of life can also appear clean and pure in a space like this. The scene left its imprint on me. I think of it often. That makes it art. For me.
Dance Dance Dance works on a similar pattern. The story is loose, surprising at times, boring at times, very Murakami at times. But in the end, it leaves us feeling the emptiness of the character, his suffocating sense of loss. He is alone and he manages it well, even as he’s growing lonelier. The few people that inhabit his life, especially those that appear to make it better, soon disappear. He is searching for them, but on the way he ends up losing more. Dance dance dance is what the nameless protagonist must do to survive the ennui that fills his life and move beyond the death of everyone that means anything to him. At the end, he is the same man, with little solved, little changed. Perhaps he’s just a bit more on his own.
While Dance Dance Dance might not be Murakami’s best novel in my opinion, it’s one of those pieces of writing that can provide a mirror. It’s so open that you see in it what you want to see. That is a benefit in its own right. Not only are you reading a story, you are reflecting your emotions onto that story. And if all of a sudden, reading the novel late at night you are suddenly overcome by emotion, then perhaps Tolstoy was right - it’s enough to call it art.
Jay Rubin. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. Vintage, 2005