When I was in high school, during an evening of sharing freaky but true stories with my friends, Nancy said that she was going to tell us something she had never told anyone before. Apparently, when she was a young girl, she would periodically be visited by Little People in the middle of the night. She would know they were coming when she woke up in her bed feeling paralyzed. Her eyes were the only part of her that she could move and she would scan the baseboards, knowing that that's where they would appear. First a few splinters would fall away, and then a hole would be visible, through which numerous small, gnome-like figures would materialise. Without fail, one would jump up on her bed, climb onto her chest and begin talking to her, chattering away and, according to Nancy, making sure that she couldn't tell what the rest of them were up to. No matter how she tried, Nancy couldn't move or speak, and although the gnome on her chest seemed cheerful and friendly, she was terrified. After a time, the interlopers would finish their business, depart through the baseboard and replace the splinters so perfectly that Nancy could never find their entrance by the light of day. Neither could she ever remember what the gnome on her chest had been chatting about. This was not the strangest part of her story.
As I said, these visits only happened when Nancy was a young girl, and they had not occurred for some years at the telling of this story. However, just a couple of weeks before, her older brother had come to her with a strange story of his own. Apparently, Ron had spent the evening before at the drive-in with his friends, and as was his habit back then, he had been drinking heavily all evening-- enough so that he had fallen asleep and the friends he came with had left with other friends. Ron woke up just as the second movie was ending, and as he found himself alone in his truck, decided he might as well leave right then. When he went to reach for the key in the ignition, he discovered that his arm was paralyzed, soon realising that the only parts of his body he could move were his eyes. As he scanned the interior of the truck, movement caught his attention, and there, on the dash in front of him, was a small, gnome-like creature. It smiled and laughed and starting telling him that he'd be a fool to drive home in his condition. Struck with fear, he tried to agree, grunting and blinking, and the gnome disappeared. Ron was suddenly able to move again, and, seeing someone he knew in the car next to him, he was able to get a safe ride home.
Obviously, the rest of us were covered in goose bumps as Nancy told this story. She assured us that she had never once told her brother about the visits she had received from the Little People, and although the rest of us found the whole story to be more than a little terrifying, Nancy had a different view: she now believed that the gnome that had visited her brother had likely saved his life, and looking back, she couldn't ascribe any malevolent purpose to her night-time visitors; that it was all a matter of interpretation, of perspective.
This is still not the strangest part of the story, to me.
Within about six months, the movie Cat's Eye came out, and I saw it in the theater with the same group of friends. The movie is made up of three short stories by Stephen King, and in the third story, a story written specifically for the movie and not previously released in any collection, a small gnome-like ogre creature enters the room of a sleeping girl, through the baseboards. First, the wood splinters and then a hole is visible. This nasty creature enters the room, climbs onto the bed, perches on the sleeping girl's chest, and attempts to suck the breath out of her. She is only saved by the stray cat that she has been trying to convince her mother to let her keep.
I can't describe the feeling of worlds colliding that this caused; the overlapping of fantasy and reality and not quite being able to distinguish between fiction and nonfiction. My skin crawled, my heart raced, my vision narrowed. And after the movie, Nancy didn't want to talk about it. If I reacted so strongly, I can't even imagine how she felt.
Oh yeah, I just checked and Cat's Eye came out in 1985. That means that Nancy likely told us this story in 1984, or 1Q84, and that brings me to the book.
I started reading this without really knowing what it was going to be about, but having read Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I figured it would be a bit of a mindbender. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the first time Tengo mentioned the Little People. My skin crawled, my heart raced, my vision narrowed. Even before anything had been described about their appearance or actions, I thought of Nancy and her night-time visitors, and whether they climb out of a dead goat's mouth or bust through the baseboards, I believe they're all the same thing. I know I have said before that I don't have much time for Magical Realism as a genre, but that doesn't mean that I don't believe that a type of magic might be real; that there are events going on beneath the surface of our everyday lives that can't be explained by science or math or logic. There's so much Jungian imagery in this book, and even though I know little about what Jung taught, I'm left believing that the Little People must be from our collective unconscious; that they represent some archetype as I understand them.
"Ho ho," called the keeper of the beat. "Ho ho," the other six joined in.Those words filled me with an ambiguous sense of dread; like the characters in 1Q84 , I have no way of knowing if the Little People are good or evil or something else; something predating man and god and time. I know this book has some seriously mixed reviews, averaging out to being regarded as a steaming pile of staggering genius, but I wonder if the readers' experiences are mostly informed by their consciousness of the archetypes. As Tengo's father says, "If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation." Without an explanation, I believe I understood this book viscerally; it started with the Little People, but everything from the town of cats to a sky with two moons seemed reasonable and somehow both ancient and timeless.
For those who don't connect to the details of the story, Murakami sprinkles several metafictional comments throughout the book, acting as a pre-emptive counterargument to his critics, such as:
One reviewer concluded his piece, "As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way and it carries the reader along to the very end, but when it comes to the question of what is an air chrysalis, or who are the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks. This may well be the author's intention, but the readers are likely to take this lack of clarification as a sign of 'authorial laziness'…"
Tengo cocked his head in puzzlement. If an author succeeded in writing a story "put together in an exceptionally interesting way" that "carries the reader along to the very end", who could possibly call such a writer "lazy"?To get back to Jung and archetypes and synchronicity, when I finished this novel I sat quietly turning it over in my mind for several minutes, and then stretched and got off the couch, overdue for going to bed. I glanced at the clock and it read 11:11…
But that would be a true story for another time.
