First Person Singular (Haruki Murakami) 3: “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova”
What is the relationship between an artist and her audience? What are the guiding principles, if any, for such a relationship? And what types of outcome can we expect to arise from that relationship? In “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova,” Murakami explores these questions with an emphasis on a kind of artist-audience relationship that is deeply personal and borders on a relation among co-creators. It would be helpful to first discuss the opposite kind of relationship, the type from which Murakami tries to move away. Making Murakami’s thought more explicit, which is my aim here, we discover two fundamentally different ways of thinking about artist-audience relationships, associated with different “rules” and different consequences.
One way to think about the artist-audience relationship is to regard the “audience” as a community of fans, who can agree or disagree on a set of facts and judgements about the artist. These facts could include: The artist’s biography, her debut, her most and least popular works, her breakthroughs and setbacks, her overall style, the type of work she would potentially do, the type of work that she would not do, her intimate life, and even her political beliefs. All these could become matters discussion. Fans could debate over whether an artist would ever collaborate with another artist, and they could have heated debates over the artist’s political beliefs and their relevance to her art. These topics and discussion are based on facts, or at least they try to be or pretend to be based on facts. They also presuppose, at least in principle, the possibility of communal agreement.
Another way of thinking about the relationship between the artist and her audience is both more imaginative and more personal. If reading Murakami reminds me of an old friend I had in college, or if I like to read Murakami alongside Carl Jung, or if I don’t care about Murakami’s references to music and popular culture, I would also admit that these are not matters of debate. When I read Murakami, I am not interested in facts about his personal life or his political beliefs. Furthermore, my relationship with him always drives me to what is left out of his text, what is unsaid, his hints and silences. This is why, even though I don’t always enjoy reading him, he always inspires me to linger with his ideas, the ideas he so masterfully leaves incomplete. If I love Murakami, I love him as a writer of incomplete texts, which is another way of saying that I love him as a writer of invitations.
These invitations, however, are personal. I don’t feel the urge to convince others about the incompleteness of his stories and the way in which I imagine a movement toward their completion. What is described in “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova,” is a similar relationship between the narrator, who imagines and writes a review about a non-existent Charlie Parker album. The imagined album was published in 1963 (almost a decade after Parker’s death). If we judge his review as a prank, we are applying the rules of the first type of artist-audience relationship — in accordance with the rules of a fact-oriented community. But those rules don’t apply to a relationship that is so personal, so imaginative, and so free. The narrator sees Charlie Parker in a dream, and in that dream Charlie performs for him, and just for him, and afterwards they chat about the tragic shortness of Charlie’s life. In that same dream, Charlie Parker thanks our narrator for writing that “untruthful” review, because in a more important sense the review contained truths.
“You gave me life again, this one time. And had me play bossa nova. Nothing could make me happier. Of course being alive and actually playing would have been even more exciting. But even after dying, this was a truly wonderful experience. Since I always loved new music.”
Should our love for an artist encourage fanaticism? Or should it encourage freedom and creativity? Should our relationship with an artist maintain our attention to what is there in the work? Or should it orient us, in addition to the work, to what is missing (including what is irrevocably lost and will always be missing, as in the case of the tragic death of Charlie Parker)? The significance of this story, in my mind, is due to the responses it offers to these questions. The story portrays a relationship with an artist that is personal, imaginative, life-affirming, and creative. What it creates is a bond, a bridge, between the audience and the artist, through which the creative force of the artist can continue to subsist in the life of the audience.
