The Body as Artistic Machinery in "Sleep"

Though I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation on sleep that centered around femininity and womanhood, I also found this part towards the end of the story particularly interesting because I've been reading a bit of Marxist criticism in my literary theory class: "Huge semis roll past, shaking the ground as they head east. Those guys don't sleep at night. They sleep in the daytime and work at night for greater efficiency. What a waste. I could work day and night. I don't have to sleep" (107). I've been required to think a lot about the body as a source of living labor and the process of alienation which occurs in the worker as they become estranged from the ends of their labor. In the broad sense under capitalism, the worker is meant to reach peak performance by using their time efficiently, so I find this comparison to truck drivers (some of the most isolated laborers there are) so well-crafted because the main character of "Sleep" does not use extra hours of the day to work—she uses them to read. 

This idea first came to me because I wanted to write about the thoughts about death put forth in "Sleep," that death is more like everlasting consciousness than it is to a never-ending sleep which is posited just before the excerpt I quoted above. The way this main character discusses her body like a machine to me paints the constant endurance of physical labor to a kind of death because even though she is able to be fulfilled by reading and swimming and indulging herself, she is only able to do those things if she forgoes her biological imperatives and loses her "ground of being." Not only that, she described the sort of automated bodily responses of a laborer in an assembly line (or in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times). Cooking and shopping and laundry and mothering: What were they if not 'tendencies'? I could do them with my eyes closed. Push the button. Pull the levers. Pretty soon, reality just flows off and away. The same physical movements over and over again. Tendencies. They were consuming me, wearing me down on one side like the heel of a shoe" (99). This explanation of the severed connection between body and mind is exactly the sort of alienation that makes complete dedication of humanity to labor possible. Murakami then expands this by portraying the main character's (anti-capitalist, in a Marxist reading) rebellion against this system. She states, "I'm through with sleep! So what if I go mad? So what if I lose my 'ground of being'? I will not be consumed by my 'tendencies'," (99) thus declaring that she will not be consumed by the false impulse towards efficiency. Her lack of sleep, though it does end up destroying her in the end, allows her to use her body as more than just a mechanism for housework and utilize her mind by invigorating her intellect—the more artistic part of her brain that was shut down by the constant drudgery of motherhood.

Overall, I don't mean to assign one specific reading for this really amazing story, nor would I want to try to determine Murakami's intentions for this story either; however, I do find these ideas of automation and the mechanics of the human body compelling in this story about a woman who resists sleep as a social and physical convention. 

—Alana