#the postmodernism movement in general is one of my favorite literary movements

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

hi!! you recommended vonnegut a while ago, and i just read slaughterhouse five and it was incredible and i was wondering which one of his books is your favorite/which one you would recommend next?? thank you!!

oh my GOD yes yes yes I am not a normal person about kurt vonnegut. I have three options for you with pitches as to why.

Mother Night is one of my favorites out of everything he ever wrote, and it’s definitely an excellent second book. He wrote in his foreword that it’s the only book he ever wrote that he knew what the meaning of it was. Whether that’s actually true and remained true, I don’t know, but the point he makes in it is one that’s pretty profound and I’ve heard shockingly little of in media.

The book follows a former high-ranking member of the Nazi party, who was a very successful propagandist for them, which distracted from the fact that he was also the most successful wartime spy for Allied forces. It’s also one of the less weird books he’s ever written? Kurt Vonnegut really leans into absurdism, and it’s more evident in some books than others. This sort of helps with the learning curve.

That being said, Cat’s Cradle is my favorite out of all of his books, and it’s also the second I ever read, after slaughterhouse five. It’s like, 20% more weird than slaughterhouse five? So if you vibed with some of the weirder aspects of it (think like, the alien zoo subplot) then I highly recommend Cat’s Cradle. I honestly can’t figure out how to give a synopsis of this one without revealing information best revealed in the book, but it’s a commentary on the post-WWII arms race and religion. It’s insanely good.

The thing about Kurt Vonnegut is that he has a lot of different recurring themes, and I feel like everyone takes away some kind of core message from his works. That being said, I feel like The Sirens of Titan most clearly and compellingly states Vonnegut’s core message in his works, and it’s definitely a must-read out of his books. It’s not my favorite but it’s definitely fighting it out for a place at the very top of the list. It follows the richest man in the world, who has the least purpose in it, at the center of an interplanetary war between Mars and Earth.

I will say that there’s only one book that I would say you probably shouldn’t read as your second book and that’s Breakfast of Champions. There’s two reasons for this.

First, Kurt Vonnegut’s books exist in a loosely interconnected universe. He’s somewhere between Marvel and Shakespeare in how he does it. It’s not like Marvel where it’s feeding into an overarching narrative, and you don’t need to read them in some kind of particular order to understand, but he’s not like Shakespeare just alluding to his own works in different plays in the sense that these books are explicitly existing within the same universe. You have specific places (Ilium, which you saw in Slaughterhouse Five, shows up a lot) and characters that recur throughout. The protagonist of Mother Night, for example, is briefly referenced in Slaughterhouse Five, etc. They’re used primarily as a vehicle for meta commentary and it’s honestly so well executed.

Kilgore Trout makes the most appearances across the disparate novels. He’s widely regarded as a character meant to be a stand-in for Vonnegut himself, and he plays his largest role in Breakfast of Champions. You also have characters in Breakfast of Champions that are taken directly from his other books, like with the minor role the protagonist of Bluebeard plays in BoC (Bluebeard is also a banger of a book worth reading but personally my least favorite of all his books). Again, you don’t need to read Vonnegut’s books in any official order to understand them, but Breakfast of Champions has the most cameos and greatest use of meta fiction in it, so the reading experience is just overall enhanced by having a little more grounding in his other works.

The second reason is it’s really fucking weird.

In a brilliant kind of way. It’s regarded to be one of his best works, and it deserves the reputation. But the techniques he uses in this are by far the most experimental, and while those experiments absolutely pay off, I usually recommend that people get used to his particular approach to absurdism before tackling Breakfast of Champions. I highly recommend this book if you like Vonnegut, but really spend time with him as an author before reading it and you’ll get so much more out of it.

#fun fact mother night directly influenced Matt’s arc in acts of contrition and why he hasn’t returned to Jack yet #Vonnegut is also just probably the biggest influence on me as a writer overall #non-linear narratives broke my brain #I can’t go back to the normal passage of time #Bluebeard legit is a good book because everything he writes is good #probably 76% of my hate comes from his use of exclamation points in it #but out of all of his books I liked it the least #there’s a lot of books of his that are literary masterpieces but just aren’t SHOWSTOPPERS #like player piano Galapagos jailbird are all works of art but they just are up against some real heavyweights #also his short stories are really cool and creative if you get a chance to check them out #I’d do a doctoral study of vonnegut given HALF a chance #like I never did a formal study of literature for any university path #but i feel like if the multiverse theory is true in another life I did go with that career path #and funneled it right into a dissertation on vonnegut #the postmodernism movement in general is one of my favorite literary movements #and for me at least vonnegut is the best of that movement #I really like experimentalism in writing and vonnegut really pushed the bounds of the medium #also if you sent me an ask and I haven’t replied to it yet you’re not being ignored #some of the responses are on the longer end and it’s been busy #everyone is getting a reply tho

[wehadfaces]

What's your favorite literary movement?

I’m trying my best to condense all of this because I absolutely cannot narrow this down. At all. There’s no way you’re getting a single answer, I’m afraid. 

Ok so I first really fell deeply in love with Modernism, specifically Virginia Woolf, when I began to study literature. TBH, I’m one of those English majors who truly isn’t the biggest fan of reading! I have a really tough time staying focused, which is why I lean more towards essays, film, and poetry in my studies and interests, because to me those mediums are more engrossing. 

Anyway, back to Modernism: Woolf really taught me to slow down. I read “A Room of One’s Own” first, then “Mrs. Dalloway” (which is still one of my favorites!) which are both written so precisely, I think Modernism really does train the eye and mind. 

Which brings me to… Expressionism! Rilke always takes my breath away in both the original German and the translations. Tennessee Williams was heavily influenced by Expressionism, and even Hemingway (who I have a complicated relationship with because of my job– that’s for another time though), TS Eliot, and Kafka have been associated with the movement. It’s such a departure from the Victorian and Transcendental literatures that once were at the top (which I never much cared for), so blunt, I just really connect with expressionist works. Sometimes the truth is better depicted or understood with more ease with a series of lies and artifice or extreme nuance (the contradiction!) at the least (I mean in art, not in real life. Catch me serving on a jury offering the verdict in an interpretive dance, haha). 

On that note, Postmodernism and absurdist fiction (which go hand in hand) sort of naturally fall into the lines of thinking I’ve already described. 

And of course, not surprisingly, as writer and reader, Confessional poetry (specifically Postmodern confessional, like Plath and Sexton, though there’s a forming collection of ancient confessional from Sappho and others which I’m very into lately). I think confessional anything (not just poetry, if it can be considered a movement at all?) is my favorite. Sontag and Didon, more faves, are highly confessional in even their professional, non-diary pieces.

As an archivist (sorry this is taking so many turns lol), confessional pieces are especially special because they really aren’t trying to be great. Lost diaries, confessions of confusion, how someone really felt about something outside of national headline coverage, even if they weren’t reowned. It adds deep cultural context. In history courses, you read emperor’s speeches alongside a farmer’s crop entry. While the emperor may be declaring the height of en empire, the farmers who suffer through drought and grow nothing tell the actual truth.

I apologize for this essay-length response which had little organization, too many tangents, and generally no straightfoward answer. Basically mostly anything written after 1900 lmao. 

Please tell me about yours!

#a

[bsd-bibliophile]

hey .o/ i just am not sure what murakami's works are trying to tell the reader. i read men without women, kafka on the shore and south of the border, west to the sun. while i appreciate his literary works, i really loved kafka the best but i couldnt put my finger on the other two? i may be too dumb to understand what he wanted to tell with those works... maybe he was just writing about life? is that how it should be seen? :o i really want to understand more

Don’t worry, I’m sure most people, including me, who read Haruki Murakami don’t feel like they understand the bigger picture in his works. Kafka on the Shore is one of my favorites too! Haruki Murakimi isn’t an author whose works are easy for me to describe… I tried explaining Kafka on the Shore to a couple people and they looked at me like I was insane! So, because I don’t want to mess this up, I looked for sources where they describe Haruki Murakami, the purpose of this works, and his stories.

Murakami, however, does not write to capture “the essence of the Japanese mind,” and his characters are not meant to be “a model” of any era or group.

“I fully believe it is the novelist’s job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories,” he said when accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 2009, rejecting the conventional notion of Japan as not only racially homogenous but also somehow intellectually and emotionally the same from mind to mind, from prefecture to prefecture.

- “The Essence of the Japanese Mind: Haruki Murakami and the Nobel Prize” by Amanda Lewis

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The term “postmodern” will be used in reference to the culture that subsequently developed in Japan after the decline of the countercultural movements of the 1960s. In the postmodern era the identity conflict became increasingly internal because there was no longer an outside adversary. Strecher formulates the question plaguing Murakami’s identity-lacking generation: When there is no ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ because a ‘them’ no longer exists, how is a generation to define ‘us’?  This is the existentialist question to which Murakami seeks to find the answer. He recognizes that Japan is in an existentialist crisis, similar to the one experienced in the western world after the Second World War.

The type of existentialism that is the focus here is that of Jean-Paul Sartre, who describes existentialism in this way: “‘We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterwards.’”  Although Murakami does advocate for man to first understand his existence and to encounter himself, he does differ from Sartre in that he believes there is an essence, a core identity, to every person. This essence is always there, although not always acknowledged. Murakami’s wish for each individual is to find this core identity within one’s subconscious, become acquainted with it, and own it. He is not concerned about finding solutions to global issues; rather, his concern lies in analyzing a person’s subconscious in order to see whether that person will conform or go against homogenous Japanese society.  For him, the inner self, the subconscious, is the ultimate source for one’s true self.  Susan Napier points out that in general this “other self” is seen as something positive, as long as there is a balance between the two selves.  There is a dichotomy between the physical and metaphysical; the physical being the conscious mind and the metaphysical being the unconscious mind.  In order to find this subconscious “other,” the metaphysical part that is inaccessible to the conscious self, Murakami uses the supernatural. It is the supernatural that allows the subconscious to be tangible.  Strecher indicates that Murakami differs from others writers who use magical realism because he uses it as a tool to find an identity, not confirm it.  Murakami’s characters encounter bizarre situations and seemingly impossible scenarios to get to their subconscious. Clearly, the main goal is to find one’s core identity, one that is not oppressed by the state.  

- The Existentialist World of Murakami Haruki: A Reflection of Postmodern Japanese Society” by Maria Garguilo

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There is also a very intresting interview with Haruki Murakami about his writing process and the types of characters he likes to write about done by Marta Bausells entitled “Haruki Murakami: ‘My lifetime dream is to be sitting at the bottom of a well’.” I’ll leave the first three of the interview here:

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I know that probably doesn’t help much in understanding each individual book, but I think Haruki Murakami’s intent was for us as readers to enjoy the story, watch the characters discover something new about themselves, and maybe discover something new within us as we read. Whatever his story means to you is therefore valid and the main theme of the story. 

I hope you continue to enjoy Haruki Murakami’s works! I know I’ve got at least seven of his novels sitting on my shelf waiting to be read! Thank you for the ask!

#asks #haruki murakami #murakami #fun facts #sources #links #bungo stray dogs #bungou stray dogs #bsd #he's kunikida's real life grandson!