Freudian Interpretation of Dreams in The Strange Library

Using Freudian psychoanalysis of dreams, I will interpret the meanings of significant elements in The Strange Library. The whole dreamlike story may be the protagonist’s subconscious attempt to reconcile a traumatic loss and consequent mental illness. The big black dog that the boy is afraid of (which attacked him at a young age and reappears again) represents something that the boy is afraid or ashamed of or a trauma connected to his shadow self. The color black also often represents depression and suicidality, which the boy may have been struggling with after experiencing a traumatic loss. Referencing my previous blog post, the boy’s repressed shadow self is the old man, who imprisons him in an attempt to overcome the repression of the shadow self and to exert control over his conscious, dominant self. The shadow self represents everything negative that the boy has repressed, including shame and fear that could be linked to his trauma.

The dog may be a representation of trauma that the boy experienced at a young age, which continues to represent a hurdle to his self-growth and healing, often reappearing at times of distress, like when the boy attempts to escape the labyrinth but is thwarted by the old man, the dog at his side. The starling, which ultimately saves the boy from the dog, often represents positive guidance, hopes, and dreams. The sheep man and the girl may also represent people in the boy’s life who have been support systems for the boy - cooking, consoling, and ultimately helping him escape from the cell in which he is trapped. In this context, it’s possible that the boy is able to overcome a traumatic episode and severe depression through positive guidance, the support of others, and the hope that things will get better and that he will survive to see better days.

Thus, with the help of the starling, sheep man, and girl, the boy is able to escape the old man and the dog and leave the library, which represents his intrapersonal conflict. However, after the boy escapes, he learns that his starling, the old man, and the girl are gone, and his mother has passed away, leaving him alone. The current sources of positivity in the boy’s life have disappeared. This may represent the idea that healing is not linear, and trauma recovery and mental illness cannot be simply “cured.” These are not things you can simply escape or run away from, but rather a lifelong, difficult process, which can be exacerbated by additional losses or traumatic experiences, leading to compounded trauma. The Strange Library shows that while it is possible to overcome difficult experiences, you must accept the reality of traumatic loss and experience and deal with them, rather than trying to escape. While you can absolutely survive this emotional pain and perhaps even grow stronger because of it by relying on others and your own hopes, dreams, and resilience, it may be something you will contend with for the rest of your life, and it’s okay if your healing and grieving process are not linear.

- Christa

Psychoanalysis of The Strange Library

After our last class, I’ve been thinking a lot about The Strange Library through a psychological lens, especially considering the characters in relation to Jung’s theories.

To me, the labyrinth represents the collective unconscious. Many people can access it but are fragmented in time, on their own journeys, and cannot control when they can access it. Everyone wants to access it to gain more knowledge but don’t always know how or why they want knowledge, just as the boy when he wandered into the library.

The library is literally a well of collective knowledge, exactly like Jung’s collective unconscious. The boy’s descension into the dark labyrinth below the library symbolizes his descent into the collective unconscious. It is there he enters a dreamlike state, not questioning or judging anything, but rather engaging in what Jung calls “sensing and intuiting,” through which one accepts experiences but does not judge or evaluate them. Thus begins the individuation process in which all of the selves comprising the boy’s conscious and unconscious encounter one another.

While delving into his own subconscious and tapping into the collective unconscious, the boy encounters the parts of himself: his shadow, his anima, and his animus. Jung explains that through individuation, there is a danger of what Jung describes as “falling victim to the shadow...the black shadow which everybody carries with him, the inferior and therefore hidden aspect of the personality."

Shadows are traditionally the parts of oneself that are negative and repressed by the consciousness. Your shadow often appears in dreams as a person who is the same gender as you. The old man represents the boy’s “shadow” (also known as id), which represents all of the parts of the boy’s self that his consciousness is unaware of. The old man is aggressive, violent, and cannibalistic, as he forces the boy into a jail cell and says that he will eat his brains after he learns how to read three massive tomes. In Freudian psychoanalysis, the concept of cannibalizing another can mean that the “cannibal” wants to exert power over and subdue over the person they “consume.” In this case, since the old man wants to eat the boy’s brain, it means he wants to control the boy by feeding off of his energy and knowledge.

Essentially, the shadow, which has been repressed by the boy’s conscious self, attempts to forcibly assimilate with the boy to gain more power over his conscious self. In psychoanalytic terms, the old man represents the boy’s unconscious aggression, jealousy toward others, and need for control, which attempts to dominate the boy’s ego, or rational, conscious self (which lost control when he descended into his subconscious, leading to such intense intrapersonal conflict).

The sheep man and the beautiful girl represent the boy’s animus and anima, respectively. In this case, the animus represents the boy’s masculine, “logical” side, while the girl represents his feminine, “emotional” side. The sheep man attempts to reason with the boy, explaining why he cannot set the boy free because of the punishments he will receive. He also thinks of a concrete, realistic plan to escape, but only after he is sure it is feasible. On the other hand, the girl is gentle, encouraging, and appeals to the boy’s emotions, giving him hope and encouragement to escape (even though he and the Sheep Man didn’t believe it to be possible). These selves all act independently and only sometimes interact. For example, the boy says to the girl, “our worlds are all jumbled together - your world, my world, the sheep man’s world. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don’t. That’s what you mean, right?”

While the boy has no trouble communicating with the girl, she is unable to talk. This symbolizes Jung’s belief that men repress their “opposite” feminine self and instead favor their masculine side. The girl does not have a voice because that which she represents the positive, "feminine" aspects of the boy that he has been taught by society to silence.

Ultimately, it is only by drawing upon knowledge found in the collective unconscious and uniting with his two selves that the boy may overcome his intrapersonal conflict with his shadow and escape the labyrinth of his subconscious.

- Christa

Comments on The Strange Library

 When I first purchased my copy of The Strange Library, I thought we would read a comic book that somehow had to do with Murakami. Well, in class, we learned that Murakami first wrote a short novel in 1983, and it was more than two decades later when an illustrated edition came out in Japan. I am not sure if Murakami himself commissioned the illustrations. I am leaning towards a "no," and even if he did commission the Japanese graphics, the British and German versions probably were done by other people since the illustrations were drastically different. Hence I consider the (different) graphic adaptations to be in the realm of excellent "fan fiction". I particularly adore the British version, not just because that is the copy I own but also for two other reasons. One, the German graphics were too dark, yet the Japanese graphics were too light. In my mind, neither depicted our subconsciousness (if we were to accept that reading) as well as the exaggerated, perplexing, and memorable British illustrations did. Also, I guess I just really like the art. The collections of pictures and paintings were visually pleasing to view and created a stream of consciousness that shadowed the plot. For example, when the girl appeared, the book supplemented pictures of birds and feathers. When the dog emerged in conversation, there was a page of bulldogs. When the sheep man spoke of donuts, there was a nice assortment of donuts that I can see myself getting in a box from Dunks. The echo resembled how our mind functions when we think of an object (or a concept?), and I think the British edition was ingeniously done. 

-- Marshal

The Strange Library: Boku's Heroic Journey of Committing Matricide(?)

I found an article that discusses Carl Jung's mother archetype and here's the link to it: https://ejop.psychopen.eu/index.php/ejop/article/view/401/html

To summarize, Jung's mother archetype can be both loving and nurturing, and also absorbing and manipulative. According to the article, Jung argues that men must tear themselves loose from their mothers or "kill" their mothers to fully mature, and that "the transition from unconscious life to conscious life in the development of humanity and the individual is mirrored in the separation of the child from the mother." Jung also proposes that “the first creative act of liberation [of the unconscious] is matricide."

I found the story of The Strange Library resembles Jung's theory of achieving maturity through "matricide" in many aspects.

I would like to first argue that the library (contaning its employees) is the mother figure in Boku's unconscious mind. On the surface level, Boku's mother and the library both nurture  and restrict him. While Boku's mother takes delicate care of him but gives him strict rules to follow, the library provides him great knowledge but locks him in a confinement. At the beginning of the story, Boku was directed to see the old man by a female librarian, and just like how he always obeyed his mother, he didn't question the librarian's word even though he wasn't so sure of the existence of a basement. He was wearing a pair of new leather shoes gifted by his mother that made "hard, dry sound" that he was not used to, and when he escaped from the library, he left the shoes behind in his cell. In a way, wearing shoes is like putting one's feet in confinement, and similarly, the old man in the library also ordered objects to be attached to Boku's feet, which he also broke away from when he escaped the library. Boku's mother considered the starling to be very noisy, so the starling-girl did not have a voice inside the library. Boku worried that his starling would starve to death if he doesn't feed her, which suggests that his mother was unable to recognize the need of the starling, and that also parallels to how the starling-girl was not seen by others in the library until the very end.

Boku on the outside perfectly fits Jung's description of "the persona" as the "conformity archetype." He did not seem to have his own judgements and simply made decisions because his mother/the old man said so or because he didn't want others to feel bad. When he returned Memoirs of a Shepherd, he compared himself to a shepherd who sticks to his schedules so his sheep don't go "completely bananas," which suggests that the sheepman in the story is likely "the shadow." The shadow is the animal side that has both creative and destructive energies, and this duality is also reflected in the sheep man who worked for the old man and locked Boku in his cell but also cooked for Boku and unlocked him in the end. Boku's "anima," the starling-girl, is a beautiful and courageous female figure who defied the rules and constraints in the library and helped Boku and the sheep man escape. Although the girl did not have a voice, Boku can still hear her in his mind, which suggests that she is part of him. After Boku left the library, both the girl and the sheep man disappeared because they were internal entities within him and not actual beings in the world.

After Boku the persona, his shadow and his anima teamed up and helped Boku break free from the library, his mother passed away from a mysterious illness and he was truly alone in the world. According to Jung's theory, his loneliness can also mark his independence as a fully matured individual who has committed matricide. It is said in the story that all libraries have similar cells and kidnap children in a similar fashion. Boku in the end also chose to not report the library, even though he knew other children will undergo a similar awful experience, perhaps because it's necessary for other children to cut their ties from their library by themselves and it's an internal process that takes place in the mind and cannot be intervened by any outside forces.

Crystal

The Strange Library

By far the strangest story I have read. After reading this story, there was a lot to digest. I am curious about who the voiceless girl was supposed to represent as well as the sheepman. 

After discussing in class, we can see the labyrinth under the library to be Boku's mind. The psyche is always a dark and cold place. The fact that he was going through a labyrinth made sense for it to represent his mind because the mind consists of many complex things such as memories and thoughts. 

During class, we mentioned how the old man could have represented the abusive dad that he might have had when he was younger. Is there a chance the voiceless girl might have been his mother? Boku did not have any sexual intentions when the girl came (based on assumption) but he felt a sense of ease when he talks to the girl. If the girl represented as his mother, maybe the reason why she was voiceless was that she might not have been able to speak up and save Boku when he was a child from his father? The voiceless girl wanted to save him from the old man and wanted to keep him from danger just like his mother in real life. Also, I felt like there was a link between the voiceless girl and the mother because of how they left the world and how close the timing was from when Boku was at the library until his mother's death.

I think the sheepman could have represented as younger Boku in his own mind because he was afraid to disobey the old man and will do everything he can to not displease the man. In the scene when the voiceless girl came in, the sheep man did not know who she was but it was mentioned how Boku had to connect the two together and align the worlds in order for them to meet. 

I am probably going on a tangent but I think it feels like a memory that Boku has that he needed to face in some way to save himself. The idea of an abusive father is a possibility and I was just also trying to find a way to make sense of the sheepman and the voiceless girl that fits with this scenario.

 

Caroline

Theory: the Strange Library is a dream of an abused child

 The "Strange Library" by Haruki Murakami lives up to its name, as it portrays a dream-like event in the story, starting with the Boku having to go downstairs in the library, and entering a labyrinth-like structure. I believe that Boku going downstairs represents him going deep into his subconsciousness, representing the story to be a dream. As dreams are where the subconscious mind takes over and projects itself strongly. Every character he meets after he goes downstairs is significant in his life that has rooted themselves deeply into his consciousness. The mother passes away at the end of the story, but I think that the real story actually begins. I believe that the old man represents an abusive relative that took Boku in, as it is evident in his forcefulness in him getting Boku to do things with the threat of violence, but also has a very father-like tone when talking to him. I think the whole story of the "Strange Library" is the dream of Boku who is facing the harsh reality of domestic violence. I believe that the starling is a pet bird that Boku saw as his only friend in his abusive family, someone that he can only rely on, as the starling takes the form of a little girl and takes care of him in the story, and ultimately defeats the big black dog who bit Boku years ago. The sheepman, who is too scared to escape and defy the old man represents his fear for the abusive relative, as Boku had to ultimately convince the sheepman to finally escape the old man.

Zion

The Secret Library

    The Strange Library is an interesting story with magical realism and eerieness throughout the story. It felt like an attempt by Murakami to write a horror story mixed with the usual topics that he likes to address within his stories. The artistic visuals of the book remind me of a children's book. The visuals are abstract in the version released to the United States while the ones in the Japanese version are cartoonish and child-like. I wanted to talk about the idea that the story is about an abused child comprehending his emotions. I feel that the images from the Japanese version fit that idea better because it makes it feel like a child had put together those drawings in order to sort their emotion on the situation they are going through. 

    The girl that appeared in the story could be an instance of his mother because she isn't really sexualized by the character in the story, which could explain why his mother died at the end of the story because she sacrificed herself for her son. I do feel that the scene in which the starling is in the monster's dog mouth was an actual event that happened in the real-life where his abusive dad allowed his dog to eat the bird in order to punish Boku for not studying or listening to directions properly. And the reason the mother died at the end was that she had already died defending Boku from his father and the dog along with the starling, which would explain why Boku is alone at the end of the story and the fact that his father is not brought up at all. Since the library could be within Boku's mind it could just be sorting his memories and emotions of the event in a way that a child could imagine such a situation. 

- Michael L.

The Mystery of The Strange Library

    Trauma in children can lead to varying effects in development. Lifelong abandonment issues, split personalities, and more can result from events that occur during development. For the child in The Strange Library, the primary catalyst seems to be death. His mother is dying, and his pet bird has died, leaving him feeling stranded and alone. Thus, I believe that the place under the library where he is imprisoned is conjured by him, a prison for himself made by himself. 

    The library may very well be real, but that's where the line between reality and fantasy is blurred. It's obvious that his descent with the old man further into the labyrinth represents moving into the Other World, as is so common in Murakami's stories. The characters, I believe, are created by the child in order to cope with the trauma of death. The old man could be symbolic of a father figure, forcing his child to study for an important exam. The sheep man could be symbolic of a brother, feebly obeying his father and offering companionship to the child. The girl, who is part-starling, apparently, serves as a reprieve from the harsh reality that his mind has constructed. Because he has lost his pet bird and will lose his mother soon, the trauma of the events in his life force him to hide in this fantastical world.

    Other than the conjuring of familiar presences around him, his ability to read and memorize the typically boring books on Ottoman tax collection at a remarkable speed shows that he has some power over this world, further serving as evidence that he created this world in order to shelter himself away from loss. Furthermore, past trauma gets dug up in this world in the form of the dog who bit him long ago. Thus, we can conclude that this is his inner psyche manifesting former traumas and methods to cope with those traumas. The dead starling grows bigger and protects him from the dog, as he metaphorically moves on from his traumas and the world he has created to escape them. 

    As he escapes this world, his mother sets down his breakfast without mentioning how he's been gone, which to me means that he was never really gone; he was in his dream world. He questions whether that place really existed, as we often do with imaginary friends and fantasy situations. After his mother dies, he is older and fully realizes that he's all alone, without another strange library to enter.

James

Sexual Disconnect in "Pornography as the Winter Museum"

 In Murakami's Pornography as the Winter Museum, he opens with the line, "Sex, copulation, intercourse, sexual relations, and other words like this always make me fantasize about the winter museum". These two ideas are continuously compared throughout the short story and Boku's thoughts about his job at the museum seem to mimic his experience of sex. In the beginning, he describes how getting to the museum is arduous and complicated, but it eventually becomes easier with time. This connection between sex and the museum seems obvious and unobscured, but the analogy quickly runs deeper. 

There is a constant feeling of disconnect between Boku and his job. As he fetches a key from a drawer, he says "I am working at this museum, if I’m not mistaken", implying a slight uncertainty. He runs through his opening tasks at the museum meticulously, checking them off of his mental list one by one. It's possible that Boku also feels this disconnect during sex, a feeling that he's not quite sure if this is what he should be or wants to be doing, but yet he completes the actions the way he's expected to, in a distant and clinical way. He speaks of the museum without reverence or awe of the collection surrounding him, but rather with confusion, as though he doesn't understand why people would enjoy it. 

When Boku takes a break from his duty to go to the bathroom, he notices that he's sexually aroused, though he expresses no sexual interest or thoughts. His literal physical disconnect is apparent in the final paragraphs as he simply ignores this fact and leaves the bathroom to watch people filter into the museum that he is so utterly disinterested and confused by. 

- May Painter

The Idea of Freedom in The Strange Library

     The main ideas revolving around The Strange Library seem to be about trauma, with the main protagonist being traumatized in some way from his dog attack. It was this initial trauma that seemed to set him on a path of fear and obedience of others, mainly from his mother but is also reflected in his interactions with the old man and his willingness to be chained underground. It's possible that the old man represents his mother in some way, with how he complies with the old man's demands so easily like he seems to do with his mother, an example being to return home on time, and that in both cases he fears how they would react if he doesn't comply, with him fearing that the old man will get angry and verbally abuse him, and with his mother she'll become mentally unstable. 

    The main character's desire to leave the underground cell might stem from his unconscious desire to escape from his responsibilities placed on him, the desire to escape his responsibilities placed on him by the old man representing those placed by his mother, like some idea spawned from the Id. It could be his Id is represented by the sheep man and is being obedient to his Superego represented by the old man, and it might make a little visual sense since devils, a common form of the Id, can be associated with goat features, and goats are similar to sheep. The sheep man does express desire to leave the underground area and help fulfill the protagonist's wish to escape, but is too dominated by the old man, so it could be a representation that the protagonist's mind is in a state where the Superego is completely dominant.

    But there seems to be some wonder if escape from his situation is what the protagonist really desired, since when he does escape the cell and his mother dies, he feels a sense of loneliness, that it's like being back in that cell underground and alone. So instead of being free from his responsibilities, the protagonist could've just wanted a more relaxed and normal relationship with his mother, as she seemed too overbearing, but the reaction to completely change the situation wasn't actually the correct choice.

-David Barnes

Why the Ottoman Empire?

   After spending a while in another course writing about Genji's words on fiction from the Hotaru Chapter in The Tale of Genji, wherein regard to fiction and its usefulness Genji says "nothing is empty"(Washburn, 520 modified by Melissa McCormick) it left me wondering. If nothing is truly empty, then why did Murakami choose tax collection in the Ottoman Empire as a book topic of interest in his story The Strange Library. Although I am not convinced that there is any meaning behind it or that there needs to be, and I am fully confident he wouldn't tell us if there was, here is an argument that could be made for why he made such an outlandish decision.

     Although from my understanding, the Ottoman empire had little direct interaction with the Japanese, the vast size of the Empire made it an important link between the east and west of Asia. Through the empire, trade routes allowed many people and goods to travel. Although the empire itself was engaged in much of the trade, in this way it acted almost as a conduit for the far east and far west to trade and connect. In many ways, this is what Murakami does as well. As we have discussed in class many times, Murakami's work often lives in a weird liminal space between Japan and the west. It would not surprise me if Murakami would have some level of a personal fascination with the Ottoman Empire or something like the silk road, that would have allowed goods, services, ideas, and cultures to spread across vast areas of land. Geographically speaking, the Ottoman empire's area of direct control and its accompanying vassal states and allies changed drastically over time. The area of influence is defined by blurry lines, and this malleability and change over time, as well as blurred lines, can be seen in Murakami's work and ideas as well. Murakami blends cultures, often having various influences (such as literary influences, language influences, musical influences, familial influences, etc.) forming his characters and their spaces. None of his main characters seem to be true of one origin and in this way mirror the lack of permanence and the variability of the Ottoman empire. 

     Militaristically, I think Murakami may have drawn some connections between the Ottoman Empire and that of the Japanese around WWII. The Ottoman empire engaged in a lot of rapid expansion movements with their military power. Their Navy in particular played a key role in a lot of their expansion into Europe. This rings true with what the Japanese were doing towards the beginning of the 20th century leading into WWII. Both Empires expanded rapidly, faster than they could manage, and in many ways, this led to their downfall. I think Murakami likely linked these two militaries together by their brutality, with both being known for their mass killings of the people who they would conquer. With Murakami commenting on the Japanese military's actions in many of his works, it would not surprise me if he had linked their actions with those of the Ottoman empire. 

     I think the reasoning behind the focus on tax collection is very important to the entire argument. With the size of the Ottoman empire, a system to tax its citizens would have to be a miraculous work of planning and organization. But beyond that, it would be a way to unify and control the population at the same time. With Murakami's interest in writing about individuality (or lack thereof) in people during and following WWII and the student movements of the 60s in Japan, he is likely somewhat absorbed by how governments go about controlling their people, and how people try to deny this control.

  In The Strange Library particularly, I think that the main character being forced to read the books in the library and memorize them can be viewed as a commentary on the government of Japan following WWII. The information being controlled and censored by the US government in Japan, and not allowing for freedom of speech and thought amongst the people, mimics the main character's desire for knowledge and the control over the accessibility, when and where it can be accessed, what he is allowed to do with it, and the repercussions of wanting to access it. The old man in the library would then represent the US government's cruelty in enforcing these new systems over the people. His slurping the boy's brain in return for him being able to read the book in many ways is similar to the taxation practices of many empires, including that of the Japanese (namely in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, if I remember correctly. Where rice taxation was extremely brutal and left many people with only one option: to desert their homes and land and run from the government. Which of course, the boy has no choice but to run from the old man, leaving his shoes (family) as well as the books (land, offerings from government) behind.....)

 

     Unfortunately, I am no expert on the Ottoman empire. I barely knew anything about it until I decided to write this blog post, and still know practically nothing. I hope that my information and inferences are correct, and if not, please correct me. Either way, I think that there is quite a lot more to be said about why Murakami chose the Ottoman Empire in his story, and I would be interested in hearing any other thoughts on the matter.

Bergen