Food for Thought

• All those who believe in psychokinesis raise my hand.
• Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
• If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
• Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
• Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.
• Drink 'til (s)he's cute, but stop before the wedding.
• Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
• If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
• A conclusion is the place where you get tired of thinking.
• Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
• He who hesitates is probably right.
• No one is listening until you make a mistake.
• Success always occurs in private, and failure in full view.
• To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.
• To succeed in politics, it is often necessary to rise above your principles.
• Two wrongs are only the beginning.
• You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.
• Monday is an awful way to spend 1/7th of your life.
• A clear conscience is usually the sign of bad memory.
  

The Fountain

At last ... at last ... I've found appropriate time to review The Fountain, the film that we saw last month in posh Paragon Cineplex. (My personal choice would naturally be Apex but this film was at the time on screen in Paragon, weirdly enough!) If there're any wrong details posted here, please blame my busy schedule, my students, my workplace, my dream for a good condo, my dysfunctional family, and my meagre salary, etc., as they drew me away from this blog. :)

Well, what should I say about this film? It's beautiful and philosophical, dwelling upon the themes of death, rebirth, and the meaning of life. Hugh Jackman plays the role of Tomas or Tom Creo and Rachel Weisz the role of Queen Isabel or Izzi Creo. With the parallel universes of the period of Spanish conquistadors and the modern-day science lab, the film makes us think about the meaning of our life. By juxtaposing the Eastern and Western systems of philosophy, the film is able to portray two distinct outlooks towards life and death. While the Western man might wish to find the elixir to extend human longevity, the Eastern counterpart may consider an alternative path, by embracing unavoidable death and considering it as a way forward.

The film seems to foster the second outlook as it points out the nullity of human struggle against death. But what I don't understand is the notion of desire that lies under everything. Tom Creo in the end chooses death so that he can live with his wife Izzi forever; desire is thus the main reason that drives him to find a way to overcome human limits. However, if we look deeply into Eastern philosophy, especially Buddhism, desire is something obnoxious and needs to be eradicated. If Tom Creo truly understands the Eastern philosophy, he should reach the point whereby the desire for Izzi no longer counts. To overcome human limits means to surpass human desire. The concept of nirvana in Buddhism is therefore usually portrayed as the state of nothingness -- no me, no you, no identity.

I've been pondering why such a conflict happens. It perhaps has something to do with form. The Fountain is basically a romance, a genre that entails the love between two people and that its ending promises the unity of the two. The elements of longing, desire, and fulfillment that belie this genre is thus in deep contrast to its philosophical messages. Perhaps Eastern religion is not essentially a romance as there's this sense of ultimate restraint from desire, emotion, and all sorts of sensibility, which are trademarks of the genre of romance.

PS. Some might say Mayan religion is not Eastern. But postcolonialism taught me that this film uses the categorisation of the West and the Rest. If Spain and the modern-day US are the West, the Mayan is naturally the Rest (i.e. the East, which is probably everywhere but Western European and North America). Believe me -- it's so obvious. Oh, by the way Tom's surname -- Creo-- is the Spanish word for 'I believe'. Hope this helps with your interpretation.

The White Castle

The White Castle is Orhan Pamuk's first novel. Part of the reason why I was interested in it was its beautiful cover. Another reason is its first page suggesting Pamuk's affinity with Kafka, Borges, and Calvino -- all of whom are my revered authors. It's a story set in the exciting Renaissance world of new knowledge and frontier transgressions. Reading this book is like enjoying good poetry -- beautiful sentiments and landscapes are conjured up.

The theme of the double is the main focus in this novel, with its Italian protagonist captured and sent to Turkey to meet his Turkish double. Both learn the culture and way of life of each other. Of course Pamuk plays upon the notions of the East and the West here with the spatial symbolism of Turkey and Italy as two distinct geographical spaces. (Of course this might remind some of Mann's Death in Venice, in which Italy is perceived as 'the Other' of the West -- so it must be emphasized here that all these geographical differences are relative, depending upon the eyes of the beholder.)

Desire, gaze, and projection all are influential and vital to the development of the main character and his double. One depends upon the other, so much so that if there's no double, one's own identity is cast into doubt. So the concept of static, unique identity which can stand on its own is severely questioned in this narrative. I read this whilst we're on Songkran holiday in Petchaburi and of course it was a good read by the beach.

Pan's Labyrinth

Pan's Labyrinth is a beautifully violent film, a perfect mix of fairy tales and the (neo-)realist war narrative. My first impression is that it's very difficult to interpret what these whole symbols of Pan, the labyrinth, the key, the moon, and the princess, actually mean. There are gaps between the wartime world of Spain's civil-war period and the magical world seen only through the eyes of Ofelia. I reckon it's a challenge if one tries to closely link the two worlds together in a parallel.

Pan himself is a mischievous character residing in the jungle, set to lure passers-by. What comes out of his mouth should not always be taken as truths, as they can be just lies engineered to make hearers feel good or fall into Pan's trap. In this way, Pan can perhaps be remotely associated with a rather sinister force that makes us become beside ourselves. It goes without saying that Pan is a close associate of Bacchus, a god of wine and merriment. Hence, this magical world can be construed as (1) an allegory of how 'evil' force wishes to lure an innocent mind (well, this certainly has a biblical ring) or as (2) a projection in the mind of Ofelia herself, as she needs to escape from the 'real' world in which she is just a forsaken daughter whose dead mother leaves at the mercy of the tyrannical step-father. Needless to say that Ofelia might remind some of Ophelia, an estranged woman left to be mad in Shakespeare's Hamlet. The ending therefore casts light on how this little girl learns to love her brother and sacrifice herself in the process. Well, this may be a poignant message for a wartime period when the Resistance needed to sacrifice themselves in order to get rid of the fascist regime.

That is the most obvious layer of meaning that I've come across. But on a deeper level, there is a certain conflict that renders the rather positive, optimistic ending problematic. Allurement is a keyword here. The little girl is tempted to go in search of the key inside the rotten tree (as in the film poster above) that reminds me of the female reproductive organs -- the vulva, the ovary, the uterus, etc. This entrance into the female world is one of trickery and danger, as it is laden with traps and temptations. Notice when the little girl can't stop herself from sampling the grapes -- doesn't that remind some of how Eve is tempted to bite the apple of knowledge before being kicked out of heaven with Adam by God. This 'magical' female world is set in contrast to the male world of wartime realism.

Such opposition should not blind us to certain similarities -- that both spaces are full of temptations and violence and that to tread in these spaces require a lot of nerves and skills. But of course there are divergences -- the little girl may fail in the male world of the Spanish civil war, but she triumphs in her own female world. But here's the rub -- this triumph at the end may be just another trickery, a lie, a hallucination on the part of the girl herself to make sense of her own downfall (and of course to make her downfall more bearable).

The reason why I feel this is the rather slippery character of Pan himself, who cannot be believed even in the last scene. He just looks too mischievous. Well, to interpret this film is like entering Pan's labyrinth itself. I'm pretty sure other people who watch it will enter a different way and come out from a different exit.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle บันทึกนกไขลาน

At last I finished reading Murakami Haruki's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the Thai version of which has seven hundred and nineteen pages. Normally methink I'm a quick reader, but in this case I couldn't help reading this in a snail's pace. Part of the reason is that I have been so busy (of course) juggling various stuff -- supervising theses, marking term papers, attending a funeral, and getting back on my Garcia Marquez's research. No stress though, which is good.

In general, I find this novel very entertaining and I got hooked towards the end of it, partly because it's written in the style of detective fiction. The usual signature motifs of Murakami -- parallel universes, the double, incest, etc. -- are here and I must say it's a pretty thought-provoking book, with a lot of issues being touched, from urban alienation to fatalism. Compared to other works of his such as Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Woods, and South of Border, West of Sun, I think this one has a lot more to offer and of course it helps establishing Murakami once and for all as a serious writer whose work has become at last a force to reckon with in contemporary Japanese literature.

The main plot is about how the search by the protagonist, Toru Okada, of his lost cat turns into an adventure into his own self and that of Kumiko Okada, his estranged wife. The journey leads him to a series of encounters with rather eccentric characters, such as Molly Kano and Creta Kano, the two sisters who agree to help him find the cat, and May Kasahara, a teenager who decides to leave school and stay at home.

It's quite difficult, if not impossible, to write a proper analysis of the whole book, given its sheer size. So I'd better limit myself to some interesting thoughts.

What I like about Murakami's work is its open-ended structure and slippery causal relation. It sometimes appears very hard to pin down who does what in his novel, part of his intention to interrogate our traditional concept of stabilised identity. Thus, it is no wonder why sometimes reading his book is a frustrating experience -- May Kasahara can be Kumiko Okada, or a mysterious woman on the phone at the beginning of the novel can also be Kumiko Okada too.

I particularly like the character of Cinnemon Akasaka, with his extreme tidiness and punctuality. He's almost like a machine, especially with his reticence and efficiency. He's the example of how urban alienation can turn one into a recluse, but a lovely one at that.

I also like its tone of detective fiction, especially the fact that Toru needs to find out who's the mastermind behind all this, who 'dehumanises' his wife and other female characters. I guess it's pretty obvious for those observant readers, but Murakami makes it more complicated by making Toru enter a possible world to find the culprit, thereby playing upon the idea that the whole scene may simply be the act of his mind -- the shadow play of his imagination. But for Murakami, what happens in the realm of imagination does have an impact on the real world, so the borders between the subjective and the objective become fussy.

One of the most memorable scenes is Toru's session in the deep well, shutting himself out from the world around him. Only darkness and nothing else. Even his own feeling of his body is alienating and disconcerting. This estrangement is closely related to the urban space of contemporary Japan. Besides Toru, almost all characters in this novel are alienated and try to find a way out from this labyrinth of angst and loneliness. With some sections of the novel set during the Second World War, such urban alienation is pitted against its similar feeling generated by war, when soldiers (no matter whether they're Japanese, Chinese, Russian, etc.) were asked to do some senseless stuff, such as killing animals in a zoo, protecting the secret at the expense of their life, and killing a hostage with a baseball bat. Such parallelism between the city and the war in engendering the feeling of angst and estrangement is distinctive and very powerfully crafted.

If there's a shortcoming, I think it's in the characterisation of Molly and Creta Kano, who seem to disappear towards the end of the novel. Their roles seem to serve some specific purposes at the beginning but towards the end they become a bit superfluous while other characters fit in the whole narrative pretty well.

All in all, a very good novel and perhaps one of the best contemporary Japanese novels.