Ryan's post

 

This post will be more of a meditation than an outright thesis, but I made what I think to be a very important connection in the understanding of both The Strange Library and Pornography As a Winter Museum. In Audre Lorde’s essay (I will link it below) The Uses of the Erotic, Lorde makes a clear distinction between the “pornographic” and the “erotic.” The “pornographic,” the obscene, the relegated-to-only-sexual, the masturbatory (both physically and conceptually), and the focus of Winter Museum, is a body of content developed from society’s repression of the “erotic”: the honestly pleasurable (sexual or otherwise), fulfilling, informational, and the focus of The Strange Library. The suppression of the erotic, as you will see Lorde describe, is intrinsic to the perpetuation of the power of the conventions of our contemporary society. Commodified work, the continuation of hierarchy, and the suppression of individual thought necessary for modern labor/ transaction/ political systems all hinge on the erotic being, at the minimum, sequestered to the limited context of the bedroom and the escape of intimacy or, worst case, obscured entirely; this can push to the extremity of an individual never knowing it at all, and thus needing to rediscover it for themselves. The Winter Museum primarily (and explicitly!) orbits the pornographic; sex is cold, a collision of bodies without the effort to understand the other, a moment of possible sensate pleasure only (“like orphans hoping for warmth”). Murakami does not provide an answer to the pornographic, but instead illustrates its existence—it’s something he’s not necessarily aware of in name, but very attuned to in phenomenon, as almost all of his sexual encounters play out this way (devoid of the erotic). Winter Museum is not a thesis in and of itself, but a display of evidence supplementary to his larger canon, to his larger illustration of contemporary society as prolifically, and almost inescapably, pornographic. The short story, then, acts as a contrasting work or primary example of this problem that helps us to better understand the outcome of The Strange Library. The Boku of the story engages, before anything else, in the erotic, and seeks to live his life erotically. He wishes to consume information for the thrill of the activity, for the fulfillment of knowledge, finds honest pleasure in good food, and learns to reject the pornographic, the commodification of his effort (as harvested by the old man), the destitute prison cell, and the ball and chain—all figments representative of external society, or internalizations of expectations of internal society, at large. The sparrow/ girl is the very internal, honest, communicative urge for the erotic, a human’s desire to chase it to freedom, the impetus with which one may escape the self-destructive labyrinth of the pornographic. Also significant is Lorde’s attribution of the erotic to the feminine (not the womanly) layer of society/ the unconscious, and the female human form of the sparrow.

 

https://www.centraleurasia.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/audre_lorde_cool-beans.pdf