The good wound: memory and community in The Unconsoled.(Critical essay)

Among the initial reviews of The Unconsoled, many of which struck a note of lukewarm perplexity, few failed to point out the novel's stylistic evocation of Kafka. Ryder, a world-class pianist and self-defined "outsider," has been invited to intercede in the affairs of a city "close to crisis." (1) Apparently beset by an amnesia he barely acknowledges, Ryder narrates with a baldly implausible omniscience the life stories and problems of citizens he has only just met. As he bumbles through the nameless city in which buildings miles apart are somehow adjoined, he fails to meet any number of small demands made of him by strangers whose lives are somehow already entangled with his own. Nor does Ryder deliver the speech and performance that are to inaugurate a new epoch in the city's history: it is not yet time. By the end, unable to reclaim the city or themselves through music, both pianist and citizens fold their most recent failure into the habitual, consoling patter with which they meet all exigencies, private and public; in any case, it is always too late. As in Kafka, the mundane and the fantastic are confounded.

Amit Chaudhuri, however, has detailed what is decidedly unlike Kafka in The Unconsoled. For him, Kazuo Ishiguro's "strangely ahistorical book" lacks "any discernible cultural, social or historical determinants (surely fatal to any novel)": "What is unKafkaesque about Ishiguro's Kafkaesque novel," he charges, "is its refusal to allow its allegory to be engaged, in any lively way, with the social shape of our age." (2) If it is unclear why anyone but Franz Kafka, if even he, is obliged to be Kafkaesque, Chaudhuri nonetheless seems to describe accurately the nearly eviscerated world of Ishiguro's novel. It is not easy, after all, to discern what might have shaped the nebulous malaise with which the citizens diagnose their anonymous city. "It's too late. We've lost it.... Let's just be a cold modern city and be done with it," a drunken citizen suggests in the most precise statement one will find in the novel concerning the nature of the imminent "crisis" (107). This posthistorical bravado resonates with the nostalgia it would condemn, for if it calls for the abandonment of a future predicated on the hopes of the past, it is yet unable to disengage itself from the "social shape" of an age oriented, not simply toward a lost origin, but toward the very idea of original loss.

Ishiguro has proposed that writing issues from just such a traumatic rupture, from a "wound" that has come and gone and to which "the best writers" return with the knowledge that it is "too late" in order to create consoling versions of what no longer exists. (3) But if such a poetics of the wound seems to echo the cynical politics of the drunken citizen, there is a distinction to be made between abandoning the present and abandoning oneself to its possibility. In The Unconsoled, Ishiguro produces rivaling discourses of the "wound": the wound figures as both traumatic rupture and as the site where finite beings are exposed to one another at what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the "limit of community." The limit of community occurs where the myth of total community, either lost or to come, is interrupted. Called to an experience of what lies outside us, we refuse to "make operational" community as a work or work that would prescribe fulfillment in some destiny. Through the pianist Ryder and the composer Brodsky, who have been called together to save the city by commencing a new epoch through aesthetic production, Ishiguro opposes the time of melancholic repetition to that of interruption. Like Ryder, the disconsolate city's pursuit of "the very happy community" it "once" was seeks to recover an immemorial totality believed to be lost to the upheavals of history (97). (4) Where Ryder withholds the work of art by simultaneously relegating the time of its happening to a past that has been irretrievably lost and to a future that never arrives, Brodsky attempts to abandon himself and his work at the moment of interruption, at the limit where community "makes and unmakes its own figure and example." (5) The Unconsoled fitfully interrogates the idea of a founding traumatic rupture by rethinking the relation between the memory and promise that structure any present.

I have attempted to situate Ishiguro in the context of contemporary literary production where he is consistently read as an accomplished realist as well as a hybrid cosmopolitan writer, and to articulate his resistance to these somewhat incompatible readings. In his own desire to be "cosmopolitan," Ishiguro struggles to achieve a universality that abandons not only national but historical determination in favor of a cultural unity that resides in memory. But in divorcing what he calls The Unconsoled's "landscape of the imagination" from any national or historical context, and in substituting for an historical perspective a "cosmopolitan" memory that is at once fantastically outsized and perversely limited, Ishiguro takes to task both his own vision of the universal and those proposed by certain cosmopolitical stances. His privileging of memory and denial of historical authority are, I will suggest, a rejoinder to the cultural spokesmanship he has been critically and popularly appointed as well as a response to rather specific national and historical circumstances that in fact do inform his "landscape of the imagination." These circumstances are not so much veiled by as made explicit in the novel's ostensible featurelessness. The fantastic world Ryder creates is isolated and provincial, yet in its anonymity and seamlessness it is much akin to a "global" one in which time, distance, and difference are, to varying degrees, already overcome. (6) As a response to the acceleration of history by which the past is increasingly abandoned, forgotten or lost, Ryder's "amnesiac" relation to his own past may be, like his abolition of space, less than fantastic.

Through motivated and synchronized elisions and breaks, Ryder seeks to maintain a stability where all is at once near and distant, the same and different, imminent and belated--he attempts to inhabit, in other words, a zone outside the paroxysms of late modernity. So too, the city that seeks to reassert its international relevance through a return to the past as well as through appeal to otherness, maintains its tenuous stability in the face of chronically imminent crisis. The crisis-prone city suggests a particular national scene, permeated by a sense of a fall from history and of an eroded national identity and diminished cultural autonomy, where hopes for restoration are ambivalently placed in the mediatorial capacity of those "outside" elements that are believed to have threatened its identity and autonomy in the first place.

Ishiguro's motivation for "writing community" in memory finds conflicted expression in the figure of Brodsky, who rages beyond the resentment and nostalgia for an absolute community. Brodsky's failure, or refusal, to call the citizens to a future predicated on past glory gestures toward a community without communion and without example, one that is oriented only to its common finitude where singular beings are both shared and divided. The Unconsoled is not simply an allegory of failure, nor is it a failed allegory. It is very much engaged with "the social shape of our age"; the pressure of its informing determinants is felt most keenly at the moment of their deliberate erasure. It is the novel's world, and not the novel itself, that is strangely--and impossibly--ahistorical, and it is finally not only the narrator's but a larger and equally selective "amnesia" that shapes the singular destiny of the unconsoled.

I. Fabulized Memory and Unbelonging