In Pursuit of Mediocrity
A Structuralist Consideration of Sophrosyne in Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase
There is a scene that occurs a third of the way through Haruki Murakami’s novel A Wild Sheep Chase, in which the unnamed narrator is brought to speak to the “black-suited secretary” of the Boss to discuss the particulars of his impending journey. The men’s subsequent conversation includes explicit and metaphoric references to the notion of mediocrity, in terms of both human volition and its relation to larger forms of social organization. It is an especially interesting concept to consider within a structuralist framework, precisely because it seems to both mandate and negate its definition through opposites – “mediocrity,” within Murakami’s novel, stands as both the culmination of humanity and as its complete absence, as a conceptual counter-attack to the totalizing nihilism of discourse grounded in absolutes. By employing a set of embedded binary oppositions to discuss the contradictions inherent to the notion of mediocrity, Murakami references both the Platonic notion of sophrosyne, or temperance, and the attendant difficulties of reconciling such a mindset in (alternately) competitive and cooperative systems. I will dedicate the remainder of this essay to exploring these contradictions, employing Claude Levi-Strauss’s notion of the “structure of relations” to identify the synchronic and diachronic relationships of mediocrity in the text and to suggest a possible reading of this mytheme as it works within Murakami’s novel.
In the course of the two men’s conversation, the idea of mediocrity is referenced first as it relates to the narrator’s publishing business: it is neither particularly successful nor unsuccessful, and depends on the maintenance of good relations with customers to ensure its survival. Yet contained within this uncertainty is the freedom of autonomy – the narrator is, after all, free to ignore his work if he so chooses (as both the owner and employee of his own firm). Therefore his employment occupies somewhat of a middle space, in which the firm’s mediocrity is at once repressive (beholden to the consumer, limited in scope and influence) and libratory (flexible hours, increased connection between work and product of labor, complete commercial autonomy). Yet his beckoning to the Boss’s estate marks a departure from this autonomy, wherein the narrator is forced into making an unpleasant yet fairly simple choice: either accept the quest, and the promise of economic security if successful (and the correlated ruin if proved unsuccessful) or reject it, and be financially ruined in any event. There is little pretense of choice, as the man in the suit makes perfectly clear: “By the time I am through talking, the options left open to you will have become extremely limited…Quite simply, you are raising the stakes. Are we agreed?” To which the narrator responds in the only manner appropriate: “What choice have I?”
