Ceci n'est pas un auteur

NOTE: I noticed this in my queue just now, having apparently having thrown it together a while back and then leaving it to be finished another time. When I first wrote it, like a month and a half ago, I must have been going somewhere with it. Now, I have no idea where that might be. So, that being the case, I'll just throw it up here as is.

I've mentioned earlier that, often times, Murakami doesn't know where he's going when he starts. Now, I don't think that's a literary sin in and of itself. Check this out, from an interview here:

Your protagonist Kafka discovers a song, "Kafka on the Shore," and wonders if the woman who wrote it knew what the lyrics meant. Another character says, "Not necessarily. Symbolism and meaning are two separate things." Since your novel and the song share a title, how much does this statement say about the the novel itself? Do its symbols point to a larger meaning? 

I don't know a whole lot about symbolism. There seems to me to be a potential danger in symbolism. I feel more comfortable with metaphors and similes. I don't really know what the lyrics of the song mean, or whether they even have any meaning in the first place. It might be much easier to understand if someone set the lyrics to music and sang it.

What does Murakami mean? Is he getting at a sort of ceci n'est pas une pipe type of semiotic thing? If so, he's flying way over my head. What I think he's getting at, though, is that you can't just dissect his novels, you have to read them as a whole, that not any single part but the entirety of the novel is what he means, especially when he says, later in the same interview,

Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren't any solutions provided. Instead several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution. It's hard to explain, but that's the kind of novel I set out to write. 

The question that lingers in the back of my mind after reading this is whether or not this kind of idea can be applied to his body of work as a whole. 


And that's a question to which I really have no answer.