On War, Creativity, and the Nature of Literature.

Wednesday, 22 March, 2006.

**NOTE: This is a fragment; I haven't finished fleshing this out all the way.**

I'm currently reading Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" and was struck by how literature, especially good literature, boths draws us in and shows us our own world through new eyes. For example, this passage about the Japanese Army's advance into Manchuria (China) in the late 1930s:

"'I don't mind fighting,' he told me. 'I'm a soldier. And I don't mind dying in battle for my country, because that's my job. But this war we're fighting now, Lieutentant - well, it's just not right. It's not a real war, with a battle line where you face the enemy and fight to the end. We advance, and the enemy runs away without fighting. Then the Chinese soldiers take their uniforms off and mix with the civilian population, and we don't even know who the enemy is. So we kill a lot of innocent people in the name of flushing out 'renegades' or 'remnant troops', and we commandeer provisions. We have to steal their food, because the line moves forward so fast our supplies can't catch up with us. And we have to kill our prisoners, because we don't have anywhere to keep them or any food to feed them. It's wrong, Lieutenant. We did some terrible things in Nanking. My own unit did. We threw dozens of people into a well and dropped hand grenades in after them. Some things we did I can't even bring myself to talk about. I'm telling you, Lieutenant, this is one war that doesn't haveany Righteous Cause. It's just two sides killing each other. And the ones who get stepped on are the poor farmers, the ones without politics or ideology. For them, there's no Nationalist Party, no Young Marshal Zhang, no Eighth Route Army. If they can eat, they're happy. I know how these people feel: I'm the son of a poor fisherman myself. The little people slave away from morning to night, and the best they can do is keep themselves alive - barely. I can't believe that killing these people for no reason at all is going to do Japan one bit of good.'" ("The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" pg 143.)


And again, describing the Mongolian steppes:
"...When I thought about Japan, I began to feel as if I had been abandoned at the edge of the world. Why did we have to risk our lives to fight for this barren piece of earth devoid of military or industrial value, this vast land where nothing lived but wispy grass and biting insects? To protect my homeland, I too would fight and die. But it made no sense at all to sacrifice my one and only life for the sake of this desolate patch of soil from which no shaft of grain would ever spring." (Wind-up Bird, pg 146.)


(And, just for the record, Murakami's masterful description of this landscape and the characters' feeling is just that: masterful. Utterly beautiful and brutal.)


This is why I love literture; because someone of a different age, a different time, a different culture, a completely different set of circumstances, can speak directly to a feeling or situation or time that you, yourself, are feeling/in currently.

It makes you, forces you, to realize that history, people's stories, are cyclical; that there is nothing new under the sun.

And, in one aspect, that is extremely comforting: someone has gone through the same thing(s) that you yourself are going through, with minor variation. On the other hand (what a deliciously bizarre cliche), it also makes you realize that all of your original creative thoughts aren't all that original or creative.

Which really isn't all that bad; there is still a reason to say/write what you think/feel/experience: there is always someone somewhere who needs to hear that they are not alone; that somewhere in this crazy, broken, confused, painful world of ours, there is another soul who feels the same way.

To end on a Chestertonian note, as I'm known to do, I'll leave you with this:

"Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick." -from "Wisdom and the Weather"

Amen and amen.