The Shape of Meaning: Spirals in Art, Literature and Life

Freed from wisdom and from the teaching that organized it, the image begins to gravitate about its own madness.
Paradoxically, this liberation derives from a proliferation of meaning, from a self-multiplication of significance, weaving relationships so numerous, so intertwined, so rich, that they can no longer be deciphered except in the esoterism of knowledge. Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself; between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens. It is free for the dream. . . . Thus the image is burdened with supplementary meanings, and forced to express them. And dreams, madness, the unreasonable can also slip into this excess of meaning.
- Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization (18-19)

Here, the philosopher Michel Foucault has recognized what I will argue is the natural way in which meaning expands, changes, intertwines, and otherwise moves, “gravitates,” as he so evocatively suggests, into ever more complex associations through the visual metaphor of the spiral. Foucault correctly recognizes the potentials, the metamorphoses, and the possible insanities this notion of ever-connected and ever-proliferating meaning can conjure as well as the ways in which it permits an interplay of meaning amongst literature, art, dreams, and life. Although the spiral can lead to madness, it can also lead to meaning. To explore this territory, we must travel in the manner in which this meaning is created, we must gravitate about our own madness.

The spiral is central to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the very shape of our galaxy; it is responsible for the patterns we find in daisies, pine cones, snails, snakes, spider webs, and ram’s horns, as well as hurricanes, tornados, whirlpools, and black holes. It can be found in finger prints, the shape of the inner ear, and our very DNA. We use the natural properties of spiraling energy to run clocks and to throw clay on a spinning wheel to create pottery. The complex creative and destructive powers of the spiral are just one set of its inherent contradictions which allow the spiral to suggest near-infinite layers and variations of meaning. Just as a phone cord is spiral in shape so that it can expand and contract, images and archetypes in literature can be both simple and complex, both literal and metaphorical at the same time, containing a discrete meaning and infinite layers and webs of meaning simultaneously. If one were to say that the phone cord is both two feet and four feet in length, this would not be a contradiction; neither statement would be false; both would be true, neither less so than the other due to its spiral nature. This shape is created through a process of the repetition of a roughly circular shape in successive, and thus different, spatial and temporal incarnations which are all connected. Repetition with variation is the essence of the spiral, and, thus, through continual accretion and reincarnation, spiral is the shape of meaning; it is a visual manifestation of archetype.

For this theory of meaning and archetype it is particularly instructive to view the spiral as a three dimensional figure. From this perspective, time’s work can more readily be seen in the spiral than in a flat version. One layer or ring of the spiral depends for its identity on its placement in relation to the others, and rings from the “present” end of the spiral are predicated on the existence and can draw on the existence of the previous rings for their meaning. A later segment of the spiral does not abolish anything before it, even if it is in direct opposition to previous segments or leads the spiral in new directions; thus, multiple meanings coexist simultaneously. The spiral does not lend itself to the reduction of meaning often found in binaries. Because it can move and change to hold all possible compass points (and all points are theoretically possible), it is never entirely stable so no fixed meaning is ever implied. One can thus move forwards and backwards, in and out of the spiral, in an orderly or leaping fashion, swiftly or slowly. One can also choose from a myriad of perspectives on and in it, each of which will present different configurations of analogies and associations. While any person’s knowledge of any spiral may only be in small measure, one’s knowledge and depth of association can always grow through linkage, moving from one loop of the spiral to others and from one spiral to others.

Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University, in his recent book I Am a Strange Loop, posits the theory that human construction of self, or “I”-ness is the result of a strange loop,
not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive ‘upward’ shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. . . . In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop. (102)
This depends on the mind not merely receiving successively nested images, as a video feedback loop does, but truly perceiving them. This requires many levels of perception which loop back to each other to create essentially a spiraling shape of meaning containing infinite self-reflecting items (thoughts, symbols, concepts, ideas, images) which gain their significance in their interrelationships represented most readily by the spiral. By continually bouncing from the receptor (self) to the received, perceiving this new information and changing accordingly in virtually infinite repetition, this process allows the I its multi-faceted existence and its ability to change by taking new stimuli into account. This continual back and forth repetition with variation forms Hofstadter’s strange loop, which because each loop is connected to the previous ones and so on ad infinitem, this image, this construction of meaning for the self becomes a spiral. Not only is this similar to the relationship between spirals and labyrinths, but if human consciousness exists in this spiraling strange loop, then it is only reasonable to see the meanings our minds perceive and attribute to other phenomena, including literary archetypes, must also function in a similarly spiraling and reflecting manner.

Also, according to Hofstadter, not all subsets of associations need be triggered when we think of something, and some concepts may lie just under the surface while others break out into the forefront. We can also keep combining concepts so that a nested concept (with all its associations in there somewhere) can be combined with another unconnected idea to create a new, even more complex concept which takes all associations of each item into account, but which may still be selective in what we actually choose to recognize as associations (Hofstadter 85). This is what I would call the interplay of multiple spirals of meaning.

It will first be helpful to unpack some of the meanings latent in the concepts of spirals and labyrinths and the complex relationships between the two. Ideas of paradox and pattern are central to Hofstadter’s thesis just as they are to the complex meanings found when examining the nature and role of spirals and labyrinths in life and literature. The essence of the spiral is in its curling shape, whether near repetitive, as in a bed spring, logarithmic, as in a nautilus shell, or wildly varying and unpredictable, as many man-made designs are; the variation will guide the interpretation, although, because spiral, as the shape of archetype, is a complex variable, all interpretation is possible all of the time[1]. In one instance the spiral can provide be the comfort of repetition which allows space and time for reflection; in another, it may be a path leading one into the dark underworld where chaos reigns; in yet another, it may be the shape of the quest which one must go on to be a conquering hero.

The spiral is an abstraction from nature codified by the labyrinth. While the labyrinth and the spiral, as images, as types, are intimately related and interconnected, each has occurrences and connotations, elements which the other does not share and may even be in direct opposition to. The spiral is the natural-world precursor of the labyrinth, and the labyrinth can be seen as a flattened spiral, operating in two dimensions rather than three or more. Strictly speaking, a labyrinth is a man-made structure which often resembles a spiral, and so it is no surprise that spirals and labyrinths share many qualities. But it is not a necessarily simple or straightforward relationship, for neither element is simple or straightforward in and of itself. Ovid describes the labyrinth on Crete as a place
where blind
and complicated corridors entwine.
The famous builder, Daedalus, designs
and then constructs this maze. He tricks the eye
with many twisting paths that double back –
one’s left without a point of reference.
As in the Phyrgian fields, the clear Meander
delights in flowing back and forth, a course
that is ambiguous; it doubles back
and so beholds its waves before they go
and come; and now it faces its own source,
and now the open sea; and so its waves
are never sure that they’ve not gone astray;
just so did Daedalus, within his maze,
along the endless ways disseminate
uncertainty; in fact the artifex
himself could scarcely trace the proper path
back to the gate – it was that intricate. (253)

And thus, we confront much of what we have already ascribed to the nature of spirals and loops, the ambiguities and contradictions, the entwinings and the loss of perspective, the ordered chaos, designed by a brilliant mind but difficult even for its creator to safely traverse.

In spite of these convergences, some aspects of labyrinths are in direct opposition to their spiral counterparts some of the time. For example, both are formed around a center, but while the core of the spiral is often associated with the calm eye of the storm or the centering absence of motion (stability), the labyrinth becomes most dangerous when the hero encounters the beast at its focal point. Additionally, while the existence of the minotaur (as in Crete) or sphinx (as in Harry Potter) is expected in the labyrinth, the spiral is its own monster as can be seen in the sea which holds spiraling vortexes, leading victims to the watery depths. The labyrinth can also metaphorically function as a beast which the hero must attempt to conquer. The literary critic Edward Said writes “Society, then, is a true labyrinth of incarnations . . . the richness of which it is possible to suggest in written language. A ‘labyrinth’ because of a complexity that has no discernible end or beginning ” (12). Thus, Said brings the labyrinth analogy to bear on both the human constructions of society and writing, and thus any created meaning, to demonstrate the complexity of each individually and the even greater complexity of their relationships to each other, forming yet another example of layering labyrinths to create a spiral with its back and forth reflection. While we can suggest this richness, we can never fully represent it, thus the descriptions of labyrinths and spirals here will not be able to contain all permutations or all interrelations, but will only be a suggestive sampling.

While the spiral is often portrayed as a relatively predictable pattern and the labyrinth is determinedly mysterious in its wendings, the predictability of the spiral is still often associated with the idea of spiraling down into madness, chaos, fear, and uncontrollability, and the unmapped (for the journeyer) paths of the labyrinth suggest that somewhere in them lies a definitive goal, a stopping place, the reaching of a reachable objective, thus implying order and linearity. Illogically, the form of each is the antithesis of its actual or connotative meanings and conclusions. That spirals can be both predictable and not, that labyrinths can be both knowable and mysterious is important to an understanding of their functions in literature.
So, in a sense, the spiral and the labyrinth are the same, while simultaneously, they often appear or work as opposites. According the Northrop Frye’s discussion of archetypes in Anatomy of Criticism, this is not problematic; in fact, this complexity, multiplicity, and even contradictoriness is necessary for archetypes, which Frye says, “are associate clusters, and differ from signs in being complex variables” (102). Therein lies the beauty, for they hold limitless meaning and are created anew in each instance while still carrying the weight of centuries of association. While context may give clues as to some useful meanings, many more are waiting under the surface, implicit in the very usage of a spiral or labyrinth, literally, conceptually, or metaphorically. When we follow one ring of the spiral to its many connected sister rings, we become like Alice descending to an underworld full of apparently (though rarely actually) contradictory meaning and rife with a sense of loss and disorientation.

The labyrinth is a physical, mythical, and conceptual manifestation of the spiral as well as an archetypal element found throughout literature. The labyrinth is its own dimension, separated from the outside world, often literally underground. Once the hero enters the labyrinth, he must learn to function by its rules which include this spiraling proliferation of meaning and the inevitability of loss which, in The Dream and the Underworld, the post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman argues is an aspect of the underworld we enter in dreams (52-53). The Japanese author Haruki Murakami has the narrator of his 1982 novel A Wild Sheep Chase, whom I shall call Boku[2], function in several labyrinthine underworlds; Boku’s story can be read as a modern displacement of the myth surrounding Daedalus' labyrinth wherein the hero, Theseus, ventured to slay the Minotaur[3]. I propose to stretch the spiral of meaning and expose the layers of archetype in this text in order to demonstrate the operation of the complex relationships amongst spirals, labyrinths, mirrors, time, and loss. To do this, Northrop Frye’s conception of romance will be key as the labyrinth archetype is closely associated with this genre and as Murakami’s novel clearly fits Frye’s parameters for romance.
Murakami plays on the importance of the complexity introduced by contradictions throughout A Wild Sheep Chase. He uses them to express inexpressibility and to describe the indescribable, and for this to work, the notion of a spiral shape to meaning, the elasticity of significance, is vital. In much the same way, we can return to the seeming contradictions in the relationships between spirals and labyrinths which ultimately work to enhance the associative powers of each. That the spiral and the labyrinth are not exclusive or exact opposites but in their convergence form a whole multi-layered and multi-hued picture which, while it can be stretched to emphasize this complexity, is much more than the sum of its pieces, and as such, is impossible to completely separate the parts and still have any of them mean much of anything. In a similar manner,
Hillman argues that dreams and the items in them cannot be seen as compensatory for the dreamer’s dayworld, but are to be read wholly in and of themselves. Enigmatically he says,

Everything necessary to the situation is there, so that everything there is necessary. Each dream has its own fulcrum and balance, compensates itself, is complete as it is. Now this is the underworld perspective. It takes the image as all there is – everything else has vanished and cannot be introduced into the underworld until it becomes like the underworld. We cannot see the soul until we experience it, and we cannot understand the dream until we enter it. (80)

Similarly, the spiral is seen to convey the most meaning when viewed as a whole and does not depend upon entries outside its revolutions for interpretation, and in fact, due to the interconnectedness of meaning indicated by the spiral theory, any spiral necessarily contains all referential and connotative elements, anything which is related to the spiral is in some way a part of the spiral. Although a level of distance from the spiral seems to be indicated here, its meanings are clearest when it is entered or experienced and one becomes lost, as it were, in them, as Hillman suggests is similarly necessary to understandings of the soul and dreams. While spirals and labyrinths are not always literally represented in literature, they do exist as theoretical and interpretive space which require these kinds of full, experiential integration of the reader to more fully understand their significances to the proliferation of meaning within and among texts. Like Murakami’s sheep, they often work behind the scenes, and they greatly alter anything they infuse, whether the mind, the dream or the story. And, like the sheep, they cannot be fully comprehended without experience. Spiraling in literature often describes the experience of reading or the shape of the plot so that the reader is entwined in the experience of reading. Thus, the fullest spirals are highly complex, dense, never fully knowable (but always explorable) and even intertwined with other spirals.

In dreams and literature, appearances of labyrinths, mazes, or spirals themselves may not be as common as the sense or actuality of repetition and loss. Loss of time, loss of the sense of direction, or apparent loss of control are common expressions of the spiral, as endless twisted passages and convoluted traveling are of the labyrinth. At their very core, these images and occurrences set the stage of the underworld and convey its laws, moods, and unique logic. Unlike classical writers who blithely give their readers explicit pictures of their hells and labyrinths through detailed and unapologetic (even unquestioning) description, as a postmodern writer, Murakami can only tell us what they are not. Thus, important and possibly problematic information is wreathed in contradictions, and the incidental is minutely transcribed, prompting the reader to construct meaning from the meaningless. This lack of certainty from Murakami is suggestive of the ontological labyrinth in which his characters are operating, vividly, even frustratingly demonstrating their disorientation.

The hero of romance, as Frye explains, must go on a journey wherein he conquers a destructive force and sometimes fall himself, but from which he always returns in some manner or another (Anatomy 187). The labyrinth is perhaps the most vivid and succinct snapshot of the hero’s journey, encompassing the vagaries of others’ designs, the peril of vicious beasts, and the distress of the psyche, all requiring the hero’s utmost courage, skill, strength, and cleverness. While the hero may appear to exit the labyrinth unscathed, a sense of loss (and often some actual loss during or after the labyrinth experience) still pervades, for he has gone into the underworld and come out again through experiences which may not be comprehensible in the light of day or explainable using the logic and rules of the world outside of the labyrinth. Hillman argues that, “Loss does characterize underworld experiences, from mourning to the dream, which its peculiar feeling of incompleteness, as if there is still more to come that we didn’t get, always a concealment within it, a lost bit” (52-53). The labyrinth is a prime literary manifestation of underworld experience and the loss (of time, sanity, life, loved ones, or limb) that it demands. Entrance into it often mirrors or suggests a descent into Hades, journeying out of one world and into another. In Murakami’s novel a character known as the Sheep Professor describes life without the sheep thus: “It’s hell. A maze of subterranean hell” (219), further connecting this tale to the idea of the labyrinth.

Hillman goes on to complicate this sense of loss in a way that rings true to the often contradictory nature of spirals and labyrinths: “Loss is not the whole of it, however, because the dimension sensed as loss is actually the presence of the void. Actually, we are experiencing a different dimension, and the price of admission to it is the loss of the material viewpoint” (53). Once the hero enters the labyrinth, he is stripped of his normal “material viewpoint” and must adjust to function in this new place by its rules. Murakami’s narrator seems to have a similar philosophy on loss. On the realization that he really had lost his wife forever, Boku ruminates: “Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die. But all in all, this was hardly what you could call a tragedy” (26), and this statement, in fact, foreshadows the kinds of loss this narrator will experience throughout the novel.

Other aspects of loss are explored by Frye in The Secular Scripture, where he argues that loss is necessary in romance in order to separate the hero from his world and its comfortable accoutrements that he may go on his journey and return changed. Frye writes, “But the structural core [of the beginning of Romance] is the individual loss or confusion or break in the continuity of identity, and this has analogies to falling asleep and entering a dream world” (104). This is a necessary loss which is also associated with moving from one world to another. Murakami’s narrator describes his return from the labyrinthine underworld of his adventure thus: “One way or another, I’d made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre it might be, this was my world” (348). Descent into other worlds causes inevitable fundamental changes in the journeyer which Frye labels as metamorphoses (105), something Murakami’s characters vividly experience and discuss throughout the narrative.

The essence of Murakami’s novel is the quest that the narrator goes on to find a “sheep that by all rights should not exist” (131) which has been entering people in order to use them for its nefarious and shadowy purposes[4] (223). This, at least, is the premise. Actually, the narrator has no personal interest in finding the sheep other than that it seems to have a connection to his old friend, the Rat, and Boku is at a point in his life where he is lost; he has lost his wife, his business, his partner, his twenties, his childhood home, and his friend, the Rat (175); eventually, he loses his new girlfriend and, for awhile, even his cat. He has lost control of the direction of his life; Boku is an extraordinarily passive character who has even lost the will to act. As this journey begins its spiral momentum, the hero is accompanied by other characters and motives which at first drive the story but which gradually fall away, leaving him alone and in a state of reflection and purification which is the essence of his true quest: lost time and his lost self[5] which has been encumbered with all of the meaningless trivia of modern life and is floating directionless in a sea of empty ritual. This state of abandonment by the previously active forces around him compels Boku to examine his current state and then finally to act based on his own will. The narrator ultimately discovers that while he cannot go home again, and he cannot turn back clocks, he can, in a way, take some control of the spiral and shape it like a potter shapes clay to create new meaning. He decides to abandon passivity and become an active element in the larger spirals of life and the surrounding world.

Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase has resonances from the mythologies, archetypes, and legends of ancient and modern Japan, ancient Greece, Christianity, and the detective story, whose spirals merge and play off each other throughout this novel. In this respect, Murakami becomes a truly global author[6], deftly weaving elements from many traditions to create an entry in all of these spirals that enriches both that which he appropriates and that which he has created by this interplay.

Thus, their interplay creates spiraling layers in much the same way that Umberto Eco argues repetition turns the seemingly simple Charlie Brown cast into three dimensional characters. In “Innovation & Repetition: Between Modern and Postmodern Aesthetics,” Eco uses the spiral to discuss the phenomenon of literature and other forms of storytelling whereby repetition results in character development. He states that “The spiral is another variation of the series. In the stories of Charlie Brown, apparently nothing happens, and any character is obsessively repeating his/ her standard performance. And yet in every strip the character of Charlie Brown or Snoopy is enriched and deepened” (196). The character may seem to cover the same ground constantly, but the spiral insists that it is not really true repetition for, even if the revolutions match up in space, they are yet different, occurring in successive times. And thus later parts of the spiral build on earlier layers. The nuanced nature of the spiral is thus a useful means of subtle change and accumulated connotations which lead to the kinds of packed meaning Joyce’s portmanteau words are renowned for. As Eco recognized, spiraling repetition and variation have almost mystical creative and evocative powers which it would be a shame to leave underused and underappreciated as I believe they currently are.

In Dreams, Myths, and Fairy Tales in Japan, the depth psychologist Hayao Kawai argues that, in Japanese mythology, in the center of a mass of repetitive contradictions and warring gods is the Moon God, “highly valued, but carrying out the paradoxical role of standing at the center of the pantheon and doing nothing” (77), in marked contrast to the Greek Zeus or the Christian Almighty God. This concept is highly provocative for the postulation of meaning as a spiral for the nature of a spiral suggests an empty center around which all the loops gravitate. A similar structure can be seen in A Wild Sheep Chase where we have Boku, notorious for inaction, at the center and surrounded by multiple opposing forces who are active but whose actions require Boku’s existence in the narrative for value. The subtly varying repetition of themes, narrative detail (and lack thereof), rituals of eating, drinking, sex, and travel circulate around Boku creating a spiral where details mentioned early slowly accrue more and more meaning throughout the narrative until these minutiae take on mythic significances. They start in the more random spiral of general knowledge; we are all familiar with the seemingly slow motion of time in uncomfortable circumstances, as Murakami shows us when the Secretary comes to visit Boku’s partner and is required to wait for thirty minutes as the receptionist anxiously watches the clock (60-63). But by the end of the novel, time and clocks are fraught with many more levels of significance distinct to this work which have slowly been deposited like sediment until they form a streambed whose layers tell its history; thus when the grandfather clock is introduced in the description of the Rat’s old family vacation home, its significance cannot be ignored. So, spiraling accretion is not only descriptive of the shape of archetype as it is found across texts, but this method is also suggestive of the inner workings of individual narratives. Murakami’s focus on time has initial, exterior to the novel, connotations as well as the interior associations he builds through this spiraling of repetition with variation.

The spiral is often associated with the nature of time; in its evocation of movement, the spiral must necessarily involve both time and space. In dreams, one often feels as if one were repeating an action or journey in a timeless world. While the labyrinth may or may not be physically repetitive, its psychological effect is to make every turn feel like every other one in a disorienting and unsettling manner. Because the other world of the labyrinth is so disconnected with that of the outside, time in the labyrinth is also similarly distorted, seeming to slow down, speed up, or have no existence, leaving the hero essentially outside of time while he is in the labyrinth. He is in a lost time, for while there, he cannot participate in that which exists outside his labyrinthine quest. Significantly, when the Rat’s ghost comes to visit Boku in the form he had in life, he insists on stopping the aforementioned grandfather clock, literally. At this point, Murakami writes, “All sound, all time, vanished” (332).

Time is also the great agent of change. Over time, people and places change, evolving and devolving, and the hero of the labyrinth is fundamentally changed by his experiences there. His entry into it is a kind of death, and his successful return to the “real” world above ground is a rebirth. He has been challenged and regenerated; he has entered the revolutions of the spiral in one way and exited them in another. Murakami’s narrator has twice remembered his ex-wife’s comments that, due to cellular regeneration, the person one was last month is physically, fundamentally not the same person one is now, and thus, living things are always in this constant state of change (Murakami 197, 325). This also complicates the loss of connection between people and the theoretical impossibility of human relationships for one can never know another person, even on the basest level, for an individual is not even the same from moment to moment. Time creates the familiar and the unfamiliar. Something is recognizable because it has been seen in another time, but because time is a primary agent of change, that which was familiar now becomes unfamiliar.

The Irish poet W. B. Yeats used the image of the gyre, which is variably interpreted as another word for spiral or as a closely related variation on the spiral, to illustrate his cyclical theory of time and history in “The Second Coming.” Frye sees this theory involving, particularly, dominant historical eras and the prevailing philosophies of each (Secular 90). The spiral suggests an unceasing movement of time, although, particularly as Yeats suggests, this time may not always move at the same speed or in the same direction; as the gyre waxes and wanes, it may be usurped, superseded, or overtaken by a faster moving or more powerful motion which then becomes the ascendant era. While it creates the repetitive cycle of the gyre, it vacillates between diminishing and accelerating, almost like a rollercoaster. Yeats writes:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, . . .
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. (60)

This continual movement seems to have frustrated communication as perhaps the called and the caller (or the text and the reader) now exist in separate turns of the gyre, or the message has been lost in the unavoidable movement around them. So, not only is time implicated in these lines, but the very thing poets depend upon, the successful transmission of meaning through language, has been frustrated; communication has proved more complex than first thought and is represented as being in a period of disintegration. But this should not lead to despair for Yeats’ speaker sees that as one gyre reaches the point at which it loses its meaning and power, another reincarnation begins to take shape which brings with it “some revelation.” The idea of the “Second Coming” itself, whether it refers to Christ, a philosophy, an era, or some other re-manifestation, suggests that this cyclicality is responsible for the creation of new meanings predicated on previous incarnations, bringing new life to something old by resurrecting it in new form.

Yeats’ poem, then, displays intricate intimations of the spiral theory of meaning. Hillman channels Yeats when he suggests that,

The circular states of repetitiveness, turning and turning in the gyres of our own conditions, force us to recognize that these conditions are our very essence and that the soul’s circular motion (which is its native motion, according to Plotinus) cannot be distinguished from blind fate. It is as if the soul frees itself not from blindness but by its continuing turning in it. (162)

I would argue that Hillman’s psychological description of the human condition as concocting meaning from its “circular states of repetitiveness,” although vague and even mystical, is the same theory that can be seen in Hofstadter’s more empirical or logic-based exploration of what it is to have a soul, to be an “I.” Again, one is confronted with the notion of the spiral as inherent in “our very essence”; thus, it should not be surprising that meaning itself takes this multiply-signifying and creating shape.

In the novella, Hardboiled, Banana Yoshimoto suggests that the spiraling nature of time can be restricting, leading towards a center or a goal, or it can be expanding, leading to more possibilities and endless, changing destinations. She writes, “Time expands and contracts. When it expands, it’s like pitch: it folds people in its arms and holds them forever in its embrace. It doesn’t let us go very easily. Sometimes you go back again to the place you’ve just come from, stop and close your eyes, and realize that not a second has passed, and time just leaves you there, stranded in the darkness” (24). Murakami’s narrator is caught by time in similar ways. When he returns to his hometown, he attempts to recapture some intangible element from his past by visiting J’s Bar and walking in the dark where the shoreline had been (99-109). Both had significantly changed since his youth, but still seemed to hold some promise of time past interacting with time present. Of a text of Japanese myths, Kawai writes, “As I was reading the stories in the USM, I began to feel the people of that time believed that reality had many layers, and that its appearance differed greatly according to the layer being seen” (19), perhaps relative to the many layers Boku discovers in his understanding of the nature of time and of what had seemed his simple urban life and self.

Dreams also feature prominently in Yoshimoto’s time-bending work, including one dream where the protagonist finds herself in a maze. She is trying to come to terms with her reaction to the death of her ex-lover, and in the process, she experiences confluence and confusion between dreams and reality, between the afterlife and this physical temporal world. Kawai notes that “the free interpenetration of this world and the dream world [is] a common feature of medieval Japanese stories concerning dreams” (15), something Sigmund Freud could relate to, but James Hillman might find problematic. I believe that this “free interpenetration” is merely a wider view of the spirals of meaning which connect this world and other worlds. The manner in which dreams work in Yoshimoto’s and Murakami’s texts suggest that this “real” world is not as uncomplicated or literal as it sometimes pretends to be and that the dream world may be just as real if equally frustrating due to its labyrinthine features. This confusion is a common effect of the spiral and is one of the intentions of the blind alleys and wrong turns pervading the labyrinth. In a spiraling moment, Yoshimoto’s narrator remarks, “I really felt as if time could run backward,” (46) and in the worlds of the spiral, the labyrinth, and the dream, it really can.

While I argue that the labyrinth is the organizing myth of A Wild Sheep Chase, and the text as a whole (and in many ways) is labyrinthine, the narrator himself embarks on multiple quests (literal, obvious, metaphorical, and hidden) with multiple beasts to slay. Though part of the quest for Boku is a return to the past, a search for lost time, an attempt to return home, he knows these things are impossible. The quests themselves are impossible without some help, and yet in the end, as with Theseus, after being guided towards the goal, the hero must slay the beast alone. Frye argues that the hero is often imbued with luck in the beginning of the tale of Romance, enticing many followers to circle around him and help him, but as he closes in upon his goal, the luck fades and the followers disappear (Secular 67). Similarly, when Theseus lands on Crete with a party of at least six other innocents slated to die in the labyrinth, fortunately, King Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, sees him from afar and is so enamoured that she chooses to betray her father and her half-brother, the Minotaur, by giving Theseus the twine he will need to find his way out of the labyrinth[7] (Ovid 254). But, ultimately, Theseus must enter the labyrinth and slay the Minotaur alone.

Similarly, Murakami’s narrator benefits from a girlfriend with a sixth sense which always seems to lead them on the right path towards the sheep, from her initial premonition of the phone call to her choice of the Dolphin Hotel. During the search for the sheep, Boku has the Rat’s letters, his partner’s background knowledge, the Sheep Professor’s unique expertise, and the additional information and pressure from the Secretary to prod him on the quest and keep him going in the right directions. Slowly these aides fall away, until Boku is left alone in the farmhouse to discover what has become of his friend the Rat and the mysterious sheep. Here, Murakami departs, for Boku’s original search is rendered void when he discovers that the Rat has already defeated the sheep; Boku then is confronted with the need to conquer the beasts of complacency and inactivity within himself; he must also use this new active and reflective self to destroy the Secretary whose Will still poses a threat to humanity (140-141; 345-347).

The sheep is important in that it suggests both the creator and the creation, both Daedalus and the Minotaur: the sheep has plans for humanity and has left clues, from the Boss to the Sheep Professor, as to its intentions and location, but at the same time, the sheep is the monster whose Will possesses men, forming creatures who are half-man and half-beast, or perhaps, half-mortal and half-divine[8]. The sheep has been manipulating mankind and must be destroyed. Yet another monster is the sheep-like nature of humanity, particularly the Japanese, in Murakami’s construction, who follow complacently and unquestioningly, who mindlessly perform the pointless rituals of modern life in the post-industrial information age. Boku is representative of this and through his own shift from inactive observer to active participant, he is able to complete the destruction of the sheep who is in part responsible for the similar imprisonment of Boku’s fellow Japanese. This also mirrors a story Kawai retells, wherein a twelfth century politician realizes that greed is responsible for much of the evil in the society around him and, lamenting that the problem is too big and too intertwined with human nature to solve, he is advised to address his own greed for then the rest of the culture would follow suit (31-32). Murakami’s narrator’s personal quest has similar wide implications, and these connections among the individual, other nearby persons, the larger society, and the world function in a spiral-like manner.

Another means of creating the sense of the spiral is the mirror. Hofstadter describes the loop created by a “mirror mirroring a mirror” (59), where the mirror is the starting point of a visual spiral. The idea of mirrors and mirroring have great significance for textual spirals as well. Perhaps the most important connotations of the mirror are the ideas of reflecting and thus reflection which create powerful convergences of meaning and are also, along with time, necessary for change. Without the true spiraling of meaning brought about by reflection, lives are merely repetitive actions (or the complacent inaction found in Murakami’s Boku). Yet when one descends deeply into such powerful reflection, one can lose the self and the dayworld in the spiraling interconnectedness recognizable through such an act. Hillman would not see this as a negative loss, for he argues that we must leave the dayworld meanings behind us and seek the metaphoric in underworld imaginings (13).

The reflecting power of mirrors is also used by Murakami to bring about Boku’s moment of epiphany when he realizes that the Rat is dead, a ghost who has visited him initially in the form of the Sheep Man, and more solidly setting Boku on a path of self-reflection and the realization that his true quest was personal rather than solely for the mysterious star-marked sheep (322). After cleaning the mirror during his purification of the house (and symbolically of himself)[9], Murakami’s narrator relates:

The mirror reflected my image from head to toe, without warping, almost pristinely. I stood there and looked at myself. Nothing new. I was me, with my usual nothing-special expression. My image was unnecessarily sharp, however. I wasn’t seeing my mirror-flat mirror-image. It wasn’t myself I was seeing; on the contrary, it was as if I were the reflection of the mirror and this flat-me-of-an-image were seeing the real me. (318-319)

This is a clear example of Frye’s comment in The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance that, “When the action passes from one level to another through the recognition scene, we have a feeling of going through some sort of gyre or vortex, to use another Yeats image, a feeling we express in the phrase we so inevitably use when summarizing a romantic plot: ‘it turns out that . . .” (91). In Boku’s case, it turns out that that which he thought he was seeking was not the true goal or the transcendent result of his quest. Hillman places great value on the implications of the mirror when he writes that,

So again, entering the underworld is like entering the mode of reflection, mirroring, which suggests that we may enter the underworld by means of reflection, by reflective means: pausing, pondering, change of pace, voice, or glance, dropping levels. Such reflection is less willed and directed; it is less determinedly introspective like a heroic descent into the underworld to see what is going on here. (52)

So, not only is Murakami using this scene to bring about transformation through reflection, but he is also indicating that Boku is now entering another underworld labyrinth, the labyrinth of the self. He has dedicatedly avoided this throughout the novel as evidenced by his detached, almost apathetic, attitude and demeanor when presented with situations and information that would provoke reactions and emotions from characters who do not demand this kind of distance.

That Boku’s revelatory experience happens when he sees himself in the mirror but not the form of the Sheep Man who he can see in the room (and who leaves physical evidence of his presence in the form of a whisky glass and cigarette butts), hints at the close relationship between this spiral and madness. Boku comments, “I checked the Sheep Man in the mirror. But there wasn’t any Sheep Man in the mirror! There was nobody in the living room at all, only an empty sofa. In the mirror world, I was alone. Terror shot through my spine” (322).
In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault suggests that, “The symbol of madness will henceforth be that mirror which, without reflecting anything real, will secretly offer the man who observes himself in it the dream of his own presumption. Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive” (27). While Boku may very well be mad, this incident marks an important point in his transition from passive to active, and if it is madness, it results in a healthy self-preservation and the culmination of his quest, and thus is a madness which works in his favor, allowing him to perceive some truth about himself and his wild sheep chase. In Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, translator and critic Jay Rubin suggests another reading of this potential madness: “Whether we view Boku’s successful reunion with his deceased friend as ‘real’ or a product of delirium, it is the culmination of his quest. He has managed, if only for a few moments, to recapture his lost past – ‘the old days’” (89). Rubin then ruminates on the relationships suggested by a literal translation of the title of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, saying, “Proust’s title sounds like pure Murakami . . . ‘Searching for Lost Time’ – which is exactly what Boku has been doing” (89). Here we are confronted again with the need to recognize the centrality of notions of time to the spiral, the labyrinth, and to Murakami’s novel.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye also recognizes this moment as an association of the spiral and the labyrinth with the hero’s point of epiphany, “the symbolic presentation of the point at which the undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment” (203). Perhaps in this schema, it is actually the very contradictions and convergences between the spiral and the labyrinth which compose the epiphany. The labyrinth can be seen as the “undisplaced apocalyptic world,” and the spiral suggests the “cyclical world of nature,” and in the conversation between these elements, one is assaulted with their multiple, convergent, closely related, and yet contradictory aspects. In the act of interpretation, it is important to accept the possibility of an endless spiral of meaning circumscribed by the tall walls of the labyrinth. The point of epiphany would thus be a rare moment of alignment which allows one to see the beauty and complexity of these relationships as a manic, dynamic whole.

The variety of perspectives from which spirals of meaning can be viewed allow for even more constructions of sense than the spiral alone bears in itself, and thus, the reader’s awareness of his or her perspective is what will allow the shifting from local to global, from temporal to spatial, from within a text to among many texts, from literature to life, and back and forth among all of these views of the spiral to achieve truly epiphanic interpretive moments and revelations. Applying an understanding of the spiral construction of meaning to literary studies should allow for even more complex meanings and a denser richness of the recognition, understanding, and appreciation of the relationships among texts and archetypes as well as between elements within a text than without this mental perspective. In literary discussions, the spiral of meaning can include texts as well as critical interpretations, so that discourse on a text can be incorporated into the meanings of the text by those who are aware of the conversation but do not change the earlier part of the spiral where the text itself resides. Discussion, associations, analogies, allusions, and archetypes can all add to the spiral of meaning for any text or textual element. I also imagine that any spiral can have infinite offshoots and intersections with other spirals so that, ultimately, all meaning is connected for those who seek such connections.



Works Cited:
Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003.
Eco, Umberto. “Innovation & Repetition: Between Modern & Postmodern Aesthetics.”
Daedalus Fall 2005. 191-207.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.
Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage, 1973.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957.
-----. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1976.
Hillman, James. The Dream and the Underworld. New York: Harper, 1979.
Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007.
Kawai, Hayao. Dreams, Myths and Fairy Tales in Japan. Einsiedeln, Switzerland:
Daimon, 1995.
Murakami, Haruki. A Wild Sheep Chase. Originally published in Japanese unter the title
Hitsuji o meguru boken in 1982. Trans. Alfred Birnbaum (1989). New York:
Vintage, 2002.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. San Diego: Harvest, 1995.
Rubin, Jay. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. London: Vintage, 2003.
Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
2002.
Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming.” W. B. Yeats. Selected by John Kelly.
London: Phoenix Poetry, 2002.


[1] See Kawai pages 33-34, Hillman page 4 (and throughout), and Frye page 136 (and throughout).
[2] Jay Rubin, one of Murakami’s primary English translators, has adopted Boku as a referential name for Murakami’s notoriously nameless narrators, and I will do the same. In explanation, Rubin writes, “the word Murakami uses for ‘I’ throughout is boku. Although the ‘I-novel’ is a long-established fixture of serious Japanese fiction, the word most commonly used for the ‘I’ narrator has a formal tone: watakushi or watashi. Murakami chose instead the casual boku, another pronoun-like word for ‘I’, but an unpretentious one used primarily by young men in informal circumstances” (37).

[3] I shall draw from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VIII for discussion of this myth.

[5] See Rubin pages 87-89.
[6] See the conclusion, “World Enough and Time,” of David Damrosch’s What is World Literature? Damrosch suggests that the interplay of perspectives creates the situation of reading literature from a world perspective rather than defining world literature as a set canon of texts or specifications. He writes that, “Reading and studying world literature, by contrast, is inherently a more detached mode of engagement; it enters into a different kind of dialogue with the work, not one involving identification or mastery but the discipline of distance and of difference. We encounter the work not at the heart of its source culture but in the field of force generated among works that may come from very different cultures and eras” (300).
[7] Interestingly, Ariadne’s actions mirror those of Scylla whom King Minos encountered during the siege of Megara. Scylla’s tale also ended with loss.and disappointment as the man she helped continued to victory thanks to her aid and then left her.
[8] In this, the sheep also resonates with the Cretan Bull with whom Pasiphae mated (assisted by Daedalus) to produce the Minotaur just as the sheep’s union with its chosen humans creates the semi-monstrous beings they become.
[9] See Rubin page 87.

Copyright Ariana Paliobagis 2007
Of course, most of my formatting died when I pasted the text here. Maybe I'll fix that later, but you get the idea.

550: Final Poems

Living Room

Hope is not snuffed like a candle – well, at first, yes, but then it clings like a parasite –
it slowly suffocates yet again as the dawn light extinguishes a sleepless night
tearless eye and empty mind, creeping like a thug with a baseball bat. Unuttered
obscenities crawl through shaking limbs, pleading their pointless release into a cluttered
abyss. Then, giving in to primal screams an unearthly delight, a godless rite rights
the prostrate form, laid out not in a shroud and not in a shrine but on shabby carpets
in a disintegrating home, alone and writhing, scratching, writing. The sole soul
keeper of some memories, denied others, fades in a blaze of frantic being. One must
keep busy to cope and to suffer through hope.


Living Room, Part Two

At the end of the semester – well, not quite THE END, but, say, a week away – you do this dance – at least I do. Goes somethin’ like this: read a chapter & take some notes. They look so productive, marching across the yellow paper. Don’t worry that ten minutes later you can’t recall why they were important or anything else about the book between the notes. It will all come to you IN THE MOMENT. Type the heading for a paper. Now you’ve DONE something. A little gremlin called Procrastination jumps up and down in front of your face (in front of your computer) says this is the PERFECT day to vacuum behind furniture, clear out flower beds, organize unopened mail on the kitchen table. IT_ALL_MUST_BE_DONE_NOW. But being such a dedicated student – and after realizing the mail consists only of unpaid bills, it’s too early to plant anything & the vacuum cleaner died last month – you return to the computer, stare, and REALLY think for a minute: a game of solitaire is just what you need to clear your mind. Then another. & another. you just have to win ONE, then you’ll feel smart & accomplished & can really get down to work. By now you’ve forgotten what the assignment was & have to dig through stacks of books & papers to find one precious loose sheet that will answer all your questions and doubts. It says: Write a paper on any three class texts. You think, oh, that won’t be difficult; I read them all, kind of. I’ll make a list, you say. After an intense two minutes, the list has twelve vague items and fancy flaming bullets. This means you are ORGANIZED. This means you have IDEAS. Now it’s time for a sandwich & beer – you’ve earned it after all. That paper will practically write itself. Tomorrow.


The New North Side

Twelve hundred dandelions no match for one red tulip
Cats screech like babies being tortured and
Ducks fight as they bob down the creek
Sticky cottonwood seed pods invade all as
Spiders hurry through thoroughfares of dead leaves

My affluent neighbor smugly surveys his territory from the new cedar
deck on his new custom home approving the two yappy dogs
who patrol the bank opposite. Always on the phone and
gazing knowingly over here, he will march soon with bankers, brokers,
lawyers & councilmen, statutes & eminent domain. My wild paradise
his golf course utopia. Takeover is imminent. The American dream of conquest, conformity, & illusion. If it looks like a happy home, it must be one.
Such a threat my tiny rented cottage poses his tidy bloated empire.