Borges and Murakami: Philosophy in Fiction

Borges and Murakami

Philosophy in fiction has had a long and storied history, from the mythology of Ancient Greece to existential fiction of the 19th and 20th centuries, but in more recent times there have been two authors that have stood out to me, not because they are philosophers writing a philosophical treatise in the form of fiction, like Sartre or Camus, but because they are authors who seamlessly weave philosophical problems into their stories. Their tales are fictional, of course, but the thoughts they leave you with reverberate around the inside of your skull in a way that some of the world’s greatest philosophers can only manage through dense academic prose. One of the these authors is Jorge Luis Borges, the other is Haruki Murakami.

Upon first inspection there seems to be very few similarities between these two: Murakami, a literary superstar who is a regular at top of the bestsellers lists, often writes lengthy books in startlingly simplistic prose. His longest being 2011s 1Q84, which is comprised of three parts totaling 928 pages. Borges on the other hand is renowned for his conservative, minimalist style. He is possibly the only writer in history with the ability to encapsulate the idea of infinity in the space of a few lines. Take for example Borges’ beautifully short piece of prose poetry A Dream; an infinite paradox captured within the space of 7 lines of text. The longest Borges story I’m aware of is Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the tale of a world of pure idealism that reaches a whopping -wait for it- 20 pages!

Whereas a Borges story plunges you face first into the depths of the universe, Murakami writes pages upon pages of prose which unassumingly carry you away like a stream drifting into the deepest corners of the author’s mind. Despite their completely opposite literary styles the two of them take places 1 and 2 on my GoodReads top authors list. I’ve now read 7 of Borges’ works, and 5 of Murakami’s and their similarities and influences are becoming increasingly clear to me.

Dreams

Murakami’s works tend to engage in a form existential meditation, often incorporating elements of the surreal and fantastic. Yet where Murakami’s real strength as an author lies is in his exposition dreams and the unconscious mind, the ideas of Psychoanalysis, in particular Carl Jung, play a major role in Murakami’s work. The Hero’s Journey as described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With Thousand Faces being the foundation of many of his books, each of which contain a series of reoccurring archetypal images: water, wells, shadows, cats, and libraries, for example. As he states in this interview with the Japan Times:

I think that perhaps, in a way, my novels run parallel to the phenomenon of “the diffusion of logic.” When I write a novel, I place more importance on the subconscious world than the conscious world. The conscious world is the world of logic. What I’m pursuing is the world beneath logic.

Borges, on the other hand, was often very critical of psychoanalytic methods of interpretation arguing that ‘the secret of the success of psychoanalysis resides in people’s vanity’, however he was nevertheless also interested in the work of Carl Jung. Much like Murakami, we see in Borges a repetition of a specific set of archetypal tropes that appear throughout his works: books, mirrors, labyrinths, libraries, and yet again, dreams, being just a few.

This fascination with dreams is undoubtedly one that both authors share; they both, in their own way, use dreams as a literary device through which they can attempt to express the inexpressible. For Murakami, dreams give us access to the conceptual realm separate from our day to day existence, a realm that exists inside every one of us. The line that divides waking and dreaming is being constantly rubbed out and redrawn to produce a world of subconscious imagery in which fiction and fact seem to merge effortlessly together.

Although this blending of dreams and reality is in itself extremely Borgesian, Borges tends to favour the metaphysical over the surreal, with many stories incorporating philosophical puzzles and paradoxes. Borges’ story The Circular Ruins depicts an infinite paradox of a man who, at the end of the tale, comes to the revelation that his whole life ‘was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.’

Philosophical Influences

Both Borges and Murakami’s influences are wide and impossibly varied. Borges was influenced by a great many literary writers throughout history including Cervantes, Shakespeare, Swedenborg and Stevenson, yet philosophically speaking he was probably most greatly indebted to Arthur Schopenhauer. Borges would often cite Schopenhauer’s proposition that life and dreams are pages of the same book, reading them in order is to live a waking life, picking pages as random is to dream. Dreams, for Borges are not an inferior dimension of reality, but the only place in which we can formulate accurately the enigmas of living. One of which is the essential multiplicity of our writing, reading and experiencing selves.

A typical Murakami book on the other hand might draw on influences ranging from Kafka to Hegel, Vonnegut to Bergson, or Franz Liszt to The Beatles. Murakami himself has mentioned that in one of his most famous books (and my personal favourite) Kafka on the Shore he incorporates elements of Hegelian dialectic into the story, a fact that is subtly hinted at towards the end of the book by a beautiful prostitute-come-philosopher:

“Hegel believed that a person is not merely conscious of self and object as separate entities, but through the projection of the self via the meditation of the object is volitionally able to gain a deeper understanding of the self. All of which constitutes self-consciousness”

Later in the same scene we’re treated to a short lesson on Bergson’s Matter and Memory:

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Hoshino looked up, mouth half open, and gazed at her face. “What’s that?” “Henri Bergson,” she replied … “Mame Mo Mamelay. You ever read it?”

Murakami (perhaps knowingly, perhaps unknowingly) also draws parallels with some of the more contemporary theories of philosophy of mind. In chapter 25 of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World we are given an exposition of the mind which is strikingly similar to the functionalist models of the 20th century (i.e. the idea of mind as a product a functional algorithm produced by the brain) infused with elements of Freud:

‘The cognitive system arisin’ from the aggregate memories of that individual’s past experiences. The layman’s version for this is the mind.’ 

Murakami by no means presents a strict philosophical treatise but he selectively chooses to adorn his work with gems of brilliance in a way which will really get your brain cogs whirring.

Borges’ Influence

Whereas Murakami picks and chooses snippets of philosophy to bring out the underlying subconscious elements of his fiction, Borges, in his own right, was, unintentionally, a huge influence for many of the most important post-modern philosophers of the 20th century. Giants of philosophy such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze have both cited Borges as a reference in their works. Foucault famously tips his hat to Borges at the beginning of his book The Order of Things:

This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought … breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.

Furthermore, Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, cites the Borges story in which Pierre Menard reproduces the exact text of Don Quixote as a quintessential repetition: the repetition of Cervantes in Menard takes on a magical quality by virtue of its translation into a different time and place. Art, to Deleuze, is often a source of repetition because no artistic use of an element is ever truly equivalent to other uses. Similarly Deleuze often likes to cite Borges’s famous story, The Garden of the Forking Paths, in which a ‘virtual world’ is described in the labyrinthine book of a Chinese philosopher named Ts’ui Pên:

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives, he chooses one at the expense of others. In the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pên, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them… In Ts’ui Pên’s work, all the possible solutions occur, each one being the point of departure for other bifurcations.

And finally Borges’ influence can be seen just as evidently in Murakami who claims Borges as one of his own literary heroes. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World many of the characters and settings seem to be drawn out with Borges pen: Libraries, dreams and mythical creatures all take center stage throughout the book. In fact there is a reference to Borges’ wonderful Book of Imaginary Beings in which the protagonist tries to understand the meaning of a unicorn skull through an analysis Borges’ classic bestiary.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

To conclude, I think nothing sums up the philosophical and literary connection between my two favourite authors better than The Carnegie Library’s statement that we should

Think of Borges as the “heads” to Murakami’s “tails” on the post-modern literary “coin”; or, preferably, don’t think of either as either.

Both writers are brilliant in their own way, and both writers are completely different in their own way, but they nonetheless share the same love for the importance of philosophical ideas and how they can be used to influence and shape the literary world.