Zeitgeist.
I recently finished Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood. The story, set in the late 1960s, has a particular sense of time and place. Characters say 'Peace' and 'Far Out' to one another, The Beatles are referenced constantly, and the 1968-1969 student protests float in and out of the private conflicts that drive the story. The novel is a kind of time capsule, the better to capture the nostalgia central to its themes. It is, fundamentally, a story about nostalgia and loss; as I read it, the story ends with the protagonist finding freedom from nostalgia, and thus uses a nostalgic staging of the 60s to create a kind of ambivalent portrait of youth.
Murakami wrote the novel at about 40 years old, in 1987, and included a heavy dose of autobiographical detail to gird the fiction and give it a kind of solidity. By that point in a man's life, I would hope he would have had enough drinks, late night swims, and slow, difficult shits to properly contemplate his late teens and early 20s. In popular culture, 60s nostalgia boomed in the 80s: Norwegian Wood was published only a few short years after Matthew Broderick Twisted and Shouted in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. A constellation of aesthetic touch points had already emerged, already a time of flesh and blood people was packaged and sold in saccharin coloured silhouettes.
It takes time for memory to ossify, and for a time to be typified. The work of nostalgia is to write memory into that typification, and so give it a valence beyond flat imagery. The ambivalence toward nostalgia in Norwegian Wood comes from a conflict between the experiences of the individual and a cultural zeitgeist through which those experiences are read. For instance, near the end of the novel the protagonist and Reiko throw a private funeral for Naoko, the protagonist's love interest, by playing as many songs in a row as they can remember. Naoko is preserved in memory through the sonic landscape of the late 60s; commercial products become forever tinged by private memory.
It is a good, worthy work. It is also the worst I've read of Murakami. Many of his other works, especially the Trilogy of the Rat, are grasping and seeking for something in present: there is not the structural symmetry granted by memory and the slow digestion of cultural theory. The 60s were known and understood, and are still known and understood; Norwegian Wood does not challenge or rewrite the 60s, but instead describes Murakami's contemporary, collective memory of the 60s.
Gertrude Stein writes that "those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical." Norwegian Wood was the first global hit of Murakami's ouevre because it was not new: the language of nostalgia and realist style assured it was accepted before it was published. The modern composition is to seek: Stein further writes that "beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating." When the writer, letting the time work through them rather than work through the time, is lost in their writing they find an honest moment. There is tension in that moment.
Zeitgeist lives apart from the author. To write something true, you must take Spicer's advice and "interfere with yourself": the thing you want to say is "the bad thing", real substance lies in "the thing that you didn't want to say in terms of your own ego, in terms of your image, in terms of your life." Kill your darlings means to write with a dead self.
The comfort and confidence of Norwegian Wood inhibits it as a book. Writing is a young man's game, or, better yet, an old young man's game. The composition already exists, and you will never know better than when you don't know how to find it.