Sarah Epp
Adolfo Bioy-Casares’s 1940 fiction novella, The Invention of Morel, tells the story of a fugitive, an unnamed narrator, who lives on a deserted island and falls in love with a visiting woman, Faustine, who repeatedly shows no acknowledgment of his advances. Later, the narrator learns that Faustine and her group visiting the island are merely projections of previously recorded images, the result of an invention made by Faustine’s friend, Morel, who records the group without their knowledge. The narrator spends the entire story stalking Faustine, both before and after learning she is an image. In 1993, 53 years later, Haruki Murakami published “The Kangaroo Communiqué,” a fictitious short story of a man, also an unnamed narrator, who works at a department store, receives a written complaint from a woman, and then proceeds to respond to her complaint by writing a letter via a recording, created outside her front door, telling her how her letter arouses him. Both texts highlight male, first-person narrators who are stalkers of females, with one caveat–neither females are actually real victims. In the novella, the woman is a projection of an image. In the short story, the woman is never formally introduced; she is only represented via a written complaint to a department store. In both stories, Bioy-Casares and Murakami deviate from a stereotypical stalker narrative, in which a person is stalked, labeled a victim, and threatened by a stalker. Instead, both authors flip the traditional stalker narrative on its head, making the stalker the protagonist. In these narratives, perpetrators are not infatuated with women in any true danger, providing readers with the opportunity to view these stalkers in a more nuanced light. The narrators’ infatuation is prompted by mediums rather than humans, with real victims omitted from the narrative; this not only reveals the disturbed state and desperation of the perpetrators, but allows readers to view the stalkers charitably, with sympathy.
Whereas Bioy-Casares and Murakami portray their stalkers as protagonists, Abigail Lee Six, professor of Modern Languages, develops a theory surrounding a stereotypical stalker narrative in which the victim is the protagonist, with the stalker being villainized. Six explores the stalker narrative as portrayed in Carmen de Burgos’s 1917 short story, “El Perseguidor” (655). In Burgos’s fiction, the narrative officially begins once the victim is aware she is being followed. Lee Six argues that the stalker’s act highlights typical features of the victim in stalker narratives, including threats to women and limitations to women’s freedom. In common stalker narratives, the stalker is and should be villainized because there is a tangible threat to real victims. However, when victims are removed from the narrative, we are given the opportunity to look deeper into the condition of the perpetrators. While stalker narratives in literary history begin and end with the experience of the victim, thus reinforcing a victim blaming mindset, Bioy-Casares removes the victim’s reality entirely, as Faustine is a mere image. Murakami too, according to Yeung, “subverts many of the narrative conventions and gender roles of the Japanese ‘I’-novel and the popular formulaic romance” (7). In other words, Murakami often deviates from what is expected of narratives and gender roles in his fiction. This is particularly apparent in “The Kangaroo Communiqué,” as the woman the first person narrator is infatuated with is a mere letter. If these stories are not stereotypical stalker narratives, and are not crime fiction–because there is no true crime–what type of narratives are they? Normally, stalkers would be appropriately villainized in narratives, but here, they are the protagonists, as victims do not exist. Therefore, the conclusion can be made that these narratives are actually sympathetic stories about perpetrators. Due to these unique narrative approaches, space is created to focus on the condition of the stalkers, evaluating stalking from its source instead of its recipient, ultimately transforming the way we normally discuss victims and perpetrators in relation to stalking.
While stalking is an important motif in these authors’ fiction, critics seek to answer questions beyond this motif when reading these texts apart, a helpful foundation to consider in reading these texts together, as this essay does. Cavalliri reads The Invention of Morel in terms of representation, arguing that the invention represents the visitors to the island, and the novella as a whole represents the narrator’s diary he uses to tell his story. Micu describes image theory and real humans’ ability to interact with imaginary worlds as the central themes of Bioy-Casares’s novella. Snook argues that the protagonists in Bioy-Casares’s stories often succumb to dependency, with the narrator in The Intention of Morel having no relational boundaries or individual identity. Yeung argues that Murakami’s fiction uses music and gender to prompt action. Lo explores Murakami’s Western references and themes of masculinity and cultural identity. However, in framing “The Kangaroo Communiqué” with The Invention of Morel, we learn more as to why stalkers choose to stalk mediums over people, what this choice reveals about the stalkers’ complex condition, and why their condition causes us to read them charitably, with sympathy, in ways readers might not if the stalkers were truly harming others.
Both stalkers suffer from loneliness and isolation, which provides an explanation for their infatuation with mediums over people. Cavallari helps us see the motive behind desire and why we can read the stalker in the novella charitably by arguing that he is in a metaphorical, endless exile, given that he is a fugitive on a deserted island. Albuquerque describes the island as a prison, but also as a place for the fugitive to flee punishment and social constructs, to seek order and genuine connection, causing readers to view him with compassion. Before discovering Faustine is an image, the narrator acknowledges that his stalking is a result of his isolation. “I told myself that all this was vulgar: like any recluse who had been alone too long, I was falling in love with a woman who was nothing but a gypsy” (Bioy-Casares 25). The narrator believes his stalking to be wrong, and attributes it to his extended time in solitude, as he tells himself Faustine is merely a traveler passing through. In Murakami’s short story, the plot begins with the narrator paying a call to kangaroos at a zoo, revealing his isolation and desire for companionship (52). He comments on his loneliness and how it affects his will. “[M]y singularity hampers . . . desire” (Murakami 64). The narrator in Murakami’s short story is unhappy being in endless exile, similar to the fugitive in Bioy-Casares’s novella. Murakami’s narrator shares in his recorded letter to the woman that talking to a recording device is challenging, acknowledging that he is only speaking to a medium. “Who’d have thought talking into a microphone without any script or plan would be so hard? . . . No visible sign of anything, not one thing to cling to. That’s why all this time I’ve been talking to the VU meters . . . they’re the only things showing any reaction to my ranting” (Murakami 58). Talking to the microphone reveals this narrator’s lack of someone to cling to, and he has conversations with inanimate objects, further revealing his need for relationship. It would seem no one appreciates his jokes as he does, revealing that he is a loner in his sense of humor. “I’m always doubling over laughing to myself when something strikes me as funny, but try to tell someone else and it falls flat, a dud” (Murakami 59). The narrator’s laughter is not matched by others, a signal of his lack of social skills and loneliness, which makes him a sympathetic character. Kwai-Cheung Lo, in an article on Murakami’s fiction, argues that “It is always true to say that one can only find oneself by encountering the other. The self needs the other as the locus of its revelation” (264). Both Bioy-Casares’s narrator and Murakami’s narrator can be interpreted by this description Lo provides. The narrators encounter the women, even though they are mediums, in an attempt to find themselves, further revealing why these stalkers demand our sympathy; they are searching for who they are.
In addition to their loneliness, the narrators’ disturbed states are evident in their purposelessness. Once the fugitive learns that Faustine is an image, he compares his life to hers, calling his life aimless. “Now that I have grown accustomed to seeing a life that is repeated, I find my own irreparably haphazard” (Bioy-Casares 85). Repeated scenes from Faustine’s projected life provide order to his unordered life on the deserted island, where he has nothing to live for. Seegert argues that Bioy-Casares’s “narrator represents the virtual not as shadowy or insubstantial, but rather as pure durability that makes the ‘actual’ world seem flimsy by comparison” (202). Faustine’s image actually makes the narrator question the haphazardness of his own, real world, and he reflects positively on her symbolic, predictable immortality. “A rotating eternity may seem atrocious to an observer, but it is quite acceptable to those who dwell there. Free from bad news and disease, they live forever as if each thing were happening for the first time” (Bioy-Casares 85). Here, he reflects on Faustine’s condition as an image, believing her to be eternally present in the moments that were filmed, without an awareness of the past, and this idea is attractive to him. Murakami’s narrator has a less dramatic setting, working a casual job, yet his purposelessness is just as apparent. “I am twenty-six years old and work in the product control section of a department store. The job–as I’m sure you can easily imagine–is terribly boring . . . the real heart of our work . . . is responding to customer complaints” (Murakami 53-54). The narrator’s department store position interests him little, and his main responsibility is responding to negative criticism, further contextualizing his disturbed state. Loughman argues the following of Murakami’s characters: “[They] are adrift . . . a cliché of the existential condition. Lonely, fragmented, unable to communicate, they live a mechanical, purposeless existence. They have become merely their functions . . . they sense that something is missing in their lives. Some . . . have a deep need for meaning and self-fulfillment (2). Loughman points out how the narrator in Murakami’s short story is lost and adrift, experiencing an existential condition. This narrator, like the fugitive, has an uninteresting role in life, revealing emptiness, a desire for something meaningful, but neither narrator can find it within their isolated states alone. Lo argues that Murakami’s characters “are structured around a certain kind of void” (259). In other words, their worlds are consumed with the idea they must search for something inside that they are missing. Murakami’s narrator thinks little of himself, causing readers to view him with charity. “Up to now, I’ve hardly said a word about myself. Like, there’s really not that much to say. And even if I did, probably nobody would find it terribly interesting” (Murakami 63). This narrator does not share about himself because he believes he is disinteresting, and he has little self-esteem, causing us to feel sorry for him. “Actually, I’m extremely dissatisfied with being who I am. It’s nothing to do with my looks or abilities or status or any of that. It simply has to do with being me. The situation strikes me as grossly unfair” (Murakami 64). The narrator is dissatisfied with being himself and finds who he is to be a point of contention. Yeung states that Murakami’s characters are often first-person narrators who are incomplete, passive, and prompted by women to act, a profile that accurately describes the narrator in this short story. Yeung argues that the “incompleteness of substance is actually the guarantee of . . . identity’” for Murakami’s characters (3). This summary of Murakami’s work describes the narrator in “The Kangaroo Communiqué”; his incompleteness is his identity, making him charitable to readers.
Along the same lines, the disturbed state of each narrator is also revealed via their psychological suffering, which causes their infatuation of mediums over people. We can attribute their psychological suffering to melancholia, using Sigmund Freud’s definition. “The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self . . . [which] culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (Freud 244). As Freud describes melancholia, we see our narrators, who are dejected and depressed, not interested in their worlds, unable to love humans, inactive, and self-deprecating, perhaps due to troubled pasts, which we learn little about but are alluded to. In choosing to love mediums over humans, they punish themselves, preventing themselves from actual, human connection. The narrators live this way, but readers can choose to not punish them, but instead, read them with charity, given their conditions. Freud goes on to describe how “[i]n mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless” (246). To mourn is to view the world as empty, but to be melancholic is to view the self as empty, or worthless, truly fitting our narrators and making their situations sympathetic. “[T]he melancholic . . . has lost his self-respect and he must have good reason for this . . . a loss in regard to his ego” (Freud 246). In other words, the melancholic lack self-worth for particular and explainable reasons, causing a loss of a sense of self. Our narrators have pasts not fully known to readers, but it is clear that these narrators match Freud’s definition of melancholia, and their psychological suffering is why they fall for mediums instead of people.
For example, the narrator in Bioy-Casares’s novella, before learning that Faustine is an image, still manages to convince himself that she is all that matters, despite never having a conversation with her. His obsession negatively affects his psychological equilibrium, causing violent thoughts when she does not return his advances and apathy around avoiding arrest when she suddenly disappears–revealing his lost instinct of self-control and self-preservation. “I think I shall kill her, or go mad, if this continues any longer . . . If the intruders come to get me, I shall not surrender; I shall not try to escape” (Bioy-Casares 37-38). The fugitive’s willingness to kill the woman he believes he is in love with, his feeling he might go mad, and his ability to give himself up all demonstrate how he can be labeled as melancholic. Lee Six describes the stalker in Burgos’s story as “a shadow self that threatens the protagonist’s psychological equilibrium,” meaning stalkers negatively affects a victim’s psyche (655). Here, however, the fugitive is both stalker and protagonist, threatening his own psychological equilibrium instead of a real victim’s. The fugitive even commits suicide by allowing himself to be recorded by Morel’s machine to insert himself eternally beside Faustine’s image. Freud argues that “the ego can kill itself only if . . . it can treat itself as an object,” further demonstrating the fugitive’s melancholia (252). The fugitive is not only infatuated with an object, but now sees himself as one, and he is willing to die to be united with the literal object of his affections.
The stalker in “The Kangaroo Communiqué” is no exception to melancholic tendencies, also making him a sympathetic character. His work, fielding department complaints, while less dramatic than the fugitive’s abandoned island, is still monotonous and depressing. He shares in his letter that “the number of complaints–the sheer number–is enough to dampen anyone’s spirits,” alluding to his work being mundane and draining (Murakami 54). Strecher also analyzes Murakami’s fiction through a psychoanalytic lens, pulling from Jacques Lacan’s theories surrounding desire and the object of desire. Specifically, Strecher discusses how Murakami’s fiction often highlights themes of neurosis, obsession, symbolic objects equated with desire, lifeless and antisocial characters, and objectification–all themes found in relation to the narrator in “The Kangaroo Communiqué”. Straus argues that Murakami’s characters are often detached from reality, void of direction and will, and experiencing “psychological and ethical fatigue,” supporting the argument that the narrator is psychologically suffering; his melancholic state causes readers alarm, viewing him with charity (4).
While the psychological states of Bioy-Casares and Murakami’s narrators contribute to their obsession with mediums, these narrators are also aroused by mediums because objects, unlike people, can be controlled, and both men are desperate for connection, but only connection within their control–even if it is not real reconnection. Laura Mulvey, femininst film theorist, helps us understand further this male desire for control of female objects. Mulvey defines the male gaze, the “pleasure in looking [that] has been split between active/male and passive/female,” particularly a female in film (9). The male gaze “continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object . . . it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs . . . whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other” (Mulvey 8). In other words, males find pleasure in looking at females who are passive objects; this act produces obsessive stalkers who are satisfied by watching alone, not needing their gaze reciprocated. On the surface, Bioy-Casares and Murakami’s narrators are objectifying a female other, yet their females are not present. One narrator is looking at a projected image while the other is aroused by the medium of a written review rather than an image. Both narrators find erotic pleasure in infatuation with mediums over people. In this sense, they are objectifying women who are already objects. These men demonstrate obsessive stalking as Mulvey outlines, and their satisfaction truly does come from watching alone, because their infatuation will never be reciprocated. This allows them both to be stalkers who are not only active, but in control. When Faustine’s image, along with the other images of visitors on the island, disappears, the fugitive is deeply concerned, as he is no longer able to view, and hence, control, the object, Faustine. “The ship was gone. My sadness was profound: it made me decide to kill myself” (Bioy-Casares 74). The narrator’s overwhelming sadness and longing for death are negative effects of the male gaze. Ryden argues that “[T]he gazer, in a sense, controls. As much as he fears the gaze of others, he desires it because it is in the gaze that one lives . . . existence can only be made meaningful through a gaze” (201). Gazing at objects gives both narrators a sense of control, and they fantasize that their objects are actually living, giving their objects metaphorical existence without the actual power or unpredictability that comes with humans. The fugitive loves this sense of control so much that he commits suicide to remain in the image with Faustine, making “an eternity out of what might be termed ‘chronic voyeurism’” (Seegert 208-209). Seegert acknowledges that the fugitive’s desire to be immortal is fueled by a desire to eternally stalk Faustine, even if Faustine is a medium. While the fugitive’s stalking might be interpreted as unethical by some critics, I would argue that knowingly stalking a medium makes the fugitive both desperate and worthy of sympathy, as he is really only harming himself.
While desperation and the desire for control certainly provide context for the fugitive’s infatuation with mediums, we see similar negative effects of the male gaze in Murakami’s short story. While there are no images attached to this narrator’s infatuation, there is an active male addressing a passive or nonexistent female other. The narrator shares with the woman how he is aroused and fascinated by her letter, in particular:
Your letter was, honestly, quite fascinating. Your choice of words, the handwriting,
punctuation, spacing between lines, rhetoric–everything was perfect . . . Every month, I
read over five hundred letters, and frankly, yours was the first letter that ever moved me.
I secretly took your letter home with me and read it over and over again. Then I analyzed
your letter thoroughly . . . I’m simply moved by it. Enthralled . . . Every part of your
letter–down to each ink smear–everything set me off, everything shook me. Why? Well,
the long and the short of it is that there’s no you in the whole piece of writing. Oh, there’s
a story to it, all right . . . The only thing that was there . . . was the story. Really and truly,
you had me wondering.” (Murakami 60)
Here, the narrator directly confronts the fact that his infatuation is prompted by the medium of the letter. The words, handwriting, punctuation, and spacing–not the woman–are what he describes as fascinating. He reads more than 6,000 letters per year, but he says her letter is the “first letter” to ever move him (Murakami 60). He brings the letter home to continually and obsessively read and dissect. The letter enthralls him, sets him off, and shakes him. All of these phrases signal infatuation and sound like he is describing a person, but he is actually describing a medium. When saying, “there’s no you in the whole piece of writing,” the narrator is particularly calling out that the woman is not present; the medium is what activates his fascination and arouses him (Murakami 60). The stalker desires to read a story to be inspired, and is interested in mystery over reality–a fantasy over the real thing, because he is afraid of intimacy, which I argue further reveals his desperation, or rather, his lack–yet it simultaneously does not threaten the woman, allowing us to question the significance of the stalker’s disturbed state. We should view the narrator with sympathy because he would rather live life in a fantasy than be with a woman in real life. Loughman states that “Murakami's characters live exterior lives that are efficient, predictable, and mechanical to create the illusion of purpose and meaning . . . [they] often escape into their interior worlds of fantasy and dream, where imagination runs free” (4). Loughman’s description of Murakami’s characters gives us insight into Murakami’s narrator in this short story, a man working a predictable job that gives him a false sense of stability, purpose, and meaning. He escapes into this letter because it is a fantasy, a place where his imagination can be free to dream about human connection, without the risk of making a real, human connection. This desire for a fantasy over real life shows that he is not seeking to harm a woman in any way, causing readers to view his situation charitably.
The same predicament is true in Bioy-Casares’s novella, where the narrator creates the illusion of connection with Faustine, by recording his image next to hers, an image that is actually no more than a fantasy. “I have almost forgotten that it [his image] was added later; anyone would surely believe we were in love and completely dependent on each other” (Bioy-Casares 103). The fugitive chooses to forget that his image is just an image, a fantasy of a life with Faustine he never had. His delusion makes readers view him with sympathy, as he settles for a medium out of desperation. The fugitive convinces himself that Faustine deserves to be made into an image, that this medium is a tribute to her, further revealing his delusion. “Faustine’s beauty deserves that madness, that tribute, that crime . . . And now I see Morel's act as something sublime” (Bioy-Casares 100). The narrator ignores the fact that in being recorded, Faustine has been killed, and instead, he dwells on his infatuation with the medium, which readers can view with sympathy, as he was not the one to kill Faustine, but was himself a victim of Morel’s machine and of the media that caused his male gaze, an obsession with no resolution.
The narrator in “The Kangaroo Communiqué” also possesses obsession with no resolution, but with a difference; this lack of resolution is actually his desire, proving further his desperation for control. “I’ve got your address and your name, and that’s it. Your age, income bracket, the shape of your nose, whether you’re slender or overweight, married or not–what do I know? Not that any of that really matters. It’s almost better this way . . . I prefer to keep things simple . . . I have your letter. This is all I need” (Murakami 59). The woman’s address and name, along with her letter, satisfy this narrator in and of themselves because they are uncomplicated objects tied to a person, keeping their relationship uninvolved, and therefore, simple. If the narrator knew more details about this woman, they would not matter to him, and in not knowing, he says things are better, because he can control the narrative and keep her abstract. While he cannot gaze at her as the male gaze describes (in fact, he is unconcerned with her looks), he is still obsessed with an object, a female “other”. The woman’s letter, which is all he has to go off of, arouses him by itself. While he expresses sexual desire, he qualifies it with the caveat that it is okay if this desire never matures, as her commas are enough for him. “I would like to sleep with you. But it’s all right if I don’t sleep with you . . . It’s enough that I feel your presence or see your commas swirling around me” (Murakami 62). The stalker is content to keep the woman’s presence within the letter. He is okay settling for a medium, making him a sympathetic character, as he convinces himself he is okay to be alone.
While the narrators in these two stories settle for mediums, the mediums are personified by the narrators as the objects of their infatuation. Critics affirm that the females in these two stories serve a particular purpose–to highlight the narrators’ disturbed and desperate states. Seegert describes Faustine as a flat character, a foil to the narrator, supporting my argument that her absence allows us to focus on the narrator’s disturbing condition (207). While one might conclude that removing real, female victims from the narrative further reinforces the negative perception of women as objects, I would argue that in removing the women from the story entirely, they are not only protected from victim blaming (an unfortunate, but common trait in modern stalker narratives), but are protected from any prospect of real danger, giving readers the ability to truly look at the complex situation that is the stalkers’ depressing situations. Seegert outlines in further detail how we should read Faustine’s character, a recorded image. “Because the character bound up in repeating loops is unable to alter its behavior in any way, the looping image becomes something stylized and idealized as a creature more (or less) than human” (Seegert 207). Seegert acknowledges that Faustine is unable to alter her behavior and that she is not human. “The Kangaroo Communiqué,” however, describes a woman who is not dead, a real woman who has written a letter, yet within this story, we only learn about the woman via this letter, and the narrator only references her in relation to the letter. “Please send no reply. If you decide you want to write me a letter, please send it care of the company in the form of a complaint. If not a complaint, then whatever you come up with. That’s about it” (Murakami 65). The narrator asks her to not respond to his letter, and if she does respond, to send a complaint to the company–nothing more. He does not wish to continue communication with her, as this one response to a letter that arouses him is enough. The victim is removed from the narrative, leaving room for readers to feel sorry for the narrator instead of worry for a victim. Murakami himself even comments on women as mediums in his writing, which Yeung analyzes in her article on Murakami’s fiction. “Murakami responds . . . to an interviewer’s question about gender archetypes in his novels: ‘in my books and stories, women are mediums, in a sense; the function of the medium is to make something happen through herself . . . The protagonist is always led somewhere by the medium and the visions that he sees are shown to him by her’” (Yeung 4). This quotation supports the argument that the woman in “The Kangaroo Communiqué” is never meant to be considered a real victim, despite being real. She is meant to be a medium, making something happen in the protagonist, leading him somewhere based on what the letter reveals to him. While our narrator does not seem to move beyond infatuation, his infatuation with the medium forces him to confront his disturbed and desperate state. If the women in these two stories were real, we could consider them victims being objectified, but Faustine is an object, and the woman behind the door never comes out; she remains a letter. Therefore, they are already objects, intended to be used to reflect the narrators’ unfortunate conditions.
Ultimately, Bioy-Casares and Murakami challenge our thinking on stalking as an issue by preemptively removing real victims from their narratives, freeing up readers to explore the stalkers’ conditions without fearing for victims’ safety. Society predominantly views the problem of stalking reactively, by addressing how to protect a victim of a crime. In these stories, however, readers are given permission to move beyond simply villainizing stalkers, as the stalkers’ disturbing behaviors are blatant, indirect cries for help. How would society positively change if we took care to analyze the lives of those lonely, grasping for control, obsessed with media over real life, or desperate for connection but too wounded to actually pursue it–before a crime was committed? The damaging effects of the male gaze for these narrators include a devastating ultimatum in suicide and a stagnant state in immobility, but readers can learn from these journeys written 27 and 80 years ago by proactively moving toward those who struggle with similar conditions today, in charity and sympathy.
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Biography
Sarah Epp is a graduate student and Teaching Associate in the Department of English, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics at California State University, Fullerton. She holds a B.A. in English and a B.S. in Music. Her research interests include gender studies, Jhumpa Lahiri, spatiality, and 20th and 21st century American literature.
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