Blog 4 - postmodernism

For this blog post, I wanted to discuss postmodernism and the idea of Murakami being a postmodernist writer. In many of the readings we’ve done recently, the interpretation of Murakami as a postmodernist has resonated with me. In the article we read by Dr. Mary Klages on postmodernism, she explains that postmodernism tends to reject grand narratives and instead views the world as a less cohesive place, celebrating fragmentation and lack of any inherent meaning. These themes are present in many of the works we’ve read, most notably A Wild Sheep Chase, where most of things that happen seem a bit absurd and surreal, as they define expectations and traditional narrative conventions. 

More recently, the two ‘Bakery Attack’ short stories seemed to fit this definition of postmodernism especially well. The main characters in these stories don’t act logically and their motives defy our expectations. In the first story, when the protagonists attack the bakery and the baker offers them bread for free, they refuse by suggesting that some exchange must take place. This defiance to receiving the bread for free doesn’t seem to make much sense, and it seems like Murakami wrote it this way to exaggerate and mock commodification. The attackers are offered the bread for free, but this breaks down their entire understanding and experience of exchange, in which some sort of currency is necessary to mediate exchange. Funnily enough, the form of currency they end up using is the ‘appreciation of Wagner.’ The role of Wagner in the story also has a postmodernist function in its own right. The baker is a Communist, yet he loves listening to Wagner, a known favorite of the Nazis, who are also the mortal enemy of  Communists. This is a way of poking fun at political ideologies that utilize grand narratives, as a Communist can enjoy music that is heavily associated with the Nazis. Wagner is used as a ‘floating signifier’ in this story, meaning that its referents, associations, and meanings are malleable and arbitrary, as demonstrated by its ability to be enjoyed by both Nazis and Communists, as Murakami’s story suggests. It exposes the arbitrariness of the cultural baggage that comes with different pieces of art and language more generally, which is an important theme in postmodernist theory.

- Max Dahlstrom