On Death, Injustice, Insanity, and Love: Viewing the Modern Man through the Eyes of Mann, Kafka, Le Clézio, and Murakami (Part 2)

Insanity is never too far away when the modern man discovers to his shock and horror that the forces of the universe are never on his side. He may attempt to reconcile himself to this harrowing fact, but with every botched attempt he loses a piece of his sanity, up until that point of absolute inevitability where things must fall apart because the centre cannot hold.

The French Nobel Prize winner of 2008, J.M.G. Le Clézio, shows us exactly how insanity and the failure of communication go hand in hand in the impressionistic The Interrogation (Les Procès-Verbal, 1963). Following in the footsteps of the other French giants, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Le Clézio created a resonant piece about a man, aptly named Adam, who has lost his sanity and attempts to re-interpret the world on his own terms. Adam's world view is fragmented and irrational (to everyone but him); it is one that is predominated by destruction and death, by godlessness. He envisions a world where people live side by side and NOT see each other – the invalidation of human interaction. The only time people connect is when there has been a death. In a key passage where a crowd has formed on a beach around a drowned man, Adam gravely philosophises:

They couldn't tear themselves away. The last memory of the man who had lain dead before their eyes and who still haunted the spot a little, was keeping them together, exposed to the rain. It was their human memory that gave them a fellow-feeling even without love, and made them dread the long, lonely journey over the abyss even more than death or pain. This would go on until the day when – in a month, a week, or less – one of them would refer to the incident for the very last time (120).

He laments that human memory, ironically, gives us a “fellow-feeling even without love,” and that life is a long stretch of solitariness into a terrain empty of meaning and purpose.

Adam is later arrested for causing public unrest with his philosophical ramblings. He is placed in an asylum, and it is there that he undergoes the interrogation that gives the novel its title. The psychiatry students who “interrogate” him are determined to analyse Adam according to the academic theories that are the underpinnings of their discipline, and this creates a solid barrier between them and the “mystical” Adam. When asked why mysticism interests him so much, Adam shoots back:

You haven’t understood. Not in the very least. It’s not God that interests me, you see … It’s like this discussion. It doesn’t interest me for what it is, for what it appears to be. Only because it fills a vacuum. A terrible, unbearable vacuum. Between two levels of life … Between two stages, two periods, you see what I mean? (229).

Another student asks him what good “all this mystical stuff” does. Adam replies: “None at all. Absolutely none. It’s as though you were talking to me in a language I don’t understand…” (229). This further underlines Adam’s failure to connect and communicate with those around him. To society at large, Adam may be medically insane; but to Adam, his failure to render his vision clear to the world is a universal condition that cripples all of mankind.

Le Clézio's message is just as urgent now as it was back in the 60s, when The Interrogation was first published. In the world of 2012, how many of us can truly say we are thoroughly understood by our fellow brothers? If anything, the problem of communication breakdown is now a pandemic – the consequence of our complacency regarding the use of language.

Like language, Love also has a certain quality of the mirage. Love eludes us because we as a human race have romanticised it and shaped it to conform to an image of near-divine perfection. We preach to one another that Love is the ultimate salvation, that it is simplicity and purity personified, the Ideal. That this is not the case in reality most of us have realised, but to see it lyrically and eloquently portrayed, as in Haruki Murakami's debut Norwegian Wood (ノルウェイの森,1987), is a revelation of a different kind.

The novel's protagonist, Toru Watanabe, recalls the time when he was a university student and best friends with Kizuki and Naoko, a couple. When Kizuki committed suicide at the age of seventeen, Naoko was devastated, and would not have survived herself had it not been for Toru's devotion to her. The two mourned Kizuki's death by consummating their relationship, but soon Naoko had to leave for a sanatorium for she feared her sanity was at stake. It did not take long for Toru to find himself in the embrace of another girl – Midori. Their love for each other flowered during Naoko's absence, but as soon as Toru visited Naoko at the sanatorium his old feelings resurfaced and dampened his love for Midori. Derailed by confusion, he kept away from both Naoko and Midori, until he was confronted by a tragic turn of events in the form of Naoko's suicide. By this time Toru was lost, and he sought out Reiko, Naoko's companion at the sanatorium, and had sex with her. Reiko was a realistic older woman with no delusions about Love. She advised Toru:

If you feel some kind of pain with regard to Naoko’s death, I would advise you to keep on feeling that pain for the rest of your life. And if there’s something you can learn from it, you should do that, too. But quite aside from that, you should be happy with Midori. Your pain has nothing to do with your relationship with her (379).

It was only after this meeting with Reiko that Toru finally realised perhaps, just perhaps, happiness could be found with Midori. He phoned her up and told her he wanted “the two of [them] to begin everything from the beginning." When Midori asked him where he was, he could think of no answer. The novel ends on an ambiguous note, with Toru thinking: “Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place” (386).

Murakami cunningly leaves things unresolved. That is because Love itself is an arbitrary phenomenon. It follows no rules, obeys no wishes, and arrests the heart when it suits its whims. In spite of its wily nature, we seek salvation in it when the dark hours are long. Toru's encounters with Love are opaque and charged with conflicting undertones; to him, Love often serves as a means of survival, a way to keep breathing when life suddenly becomes a murderous vacuum.

The modern man living in the Age of Isolation should have no trouble identifying with Aschenbach, K., Adam, and Toru – four protagonists who have to slash their way through the disorientating forest of life. Their (fictional) fates are also the modern man’s, and he will do well to examine each case closely, if only he is to come away with the knowledge that he is not alone in his everyday struggles. As the Chorus-leader says in Agamemnon: “Man must suffer to be wise.”

Le Clézio, J.M.G. The Interrogation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009 ed.

Murakami, Haruki. Norwegian Wood. London: Vintage, 2003 ed.