‘What you are experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies’ Oshima tells fifteen year old Kafka in Haruki Murakami’s oddball novel, Kafka on the Shore. He’s referring to the prophecy made by the boy’s father that he would kill him and ‘be wiih’ his mother and sister; the well documented oedipus complex. There is no doubt that modern literary culture owes much to the Greeks. Just lately, however, I have being noticing more and more motifs that can be taced back to the Christian bible; some of them in unexpected places.
The latest of these is Murakami’s novel. During WW2, a teacher takes a party of schoolchildren into the hills, where they all become unconscious after seeing ‘a silver light in the sky’, moving ‘from east to west’. Surely this is a subversion of the biblical narrative of the three wise men from the east, who follow a star? Later, two thousand mackerel and sardines rain from the sky. This reminded me of Jesus’s miracle of feeding five thousand with two loaves and and five fishes. It’s followed by the surrealist image of Nakata, an ageing simpleton (the only one of the schoolchildren to be permanently afflicted), putting up his umbrella whereupon leeches rained down from the sky. This had me thinking about the plague of leeches sent when the Israelites were in Egypt. I don’t know where Murakami stands in relationship to Christianity, but he does seem to have a working knowledge of the scriptures.
I am not a great fan of Russell T Davies’s Torchwood, which has far too much gratuitous violence and sex for my taste I did, although i did watch ‘Children of Earth’, which was shown over five consecutive days. Ultimately, Captain Jack, played by John Barrowman, sacrifices his own grandson in order to save all the other children on earth. Where did this motif come from if not from the God and Father who sacrificed His only Son in order that all might have ‘eternal life’ (John 3:16). Other work of Davies’s is also imbued with religious ideas. In Dr Who, he endows the Tenth Doctor with godlike propensities.
I’m just starting an Open University course, Advanced Creative Writing, having again put off doing an MA. The MA syllabus, interestingly, includes the first three chapters of the bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Biblical motifs do seem to be surfacing, dare I say, from what Jung called the collective unconscious.
