Kazuo Ishiguro
In June 2007 I delivered a paper on Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (Faber & Faber, 1995) at Livepool Hope University at a conference organised by Dr Sebastian Groes, "Kazuo Ishiguro and the International Novel." The paper examined the relationship between space, place and memory in Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995), considering the positive and negative constructions of community and its influence on subjective agency in the novel. Ishiguro’s narrators are, by his own admission, ‘ordinarily self-deceiving,’ struggling to reconcile their present situations with their memories, which appear ‘blurred at the edges, layered with all sorts of emotions, and open to manipulation’ (Book Browse). Significantly, nostalgic memories of childhood recur as a troping on his narrators’ inabilities to negotiate the frequently traumatic incursions upon their sense of identity, agency or control. Ishiguro’s narrators thus use nostalgia as a way of longing for a better world which they seem to filter through idealised recollections of childhood.
In this paper I explored the ways in which The Unconsoled reflects upon the narrative and epistemological complexities raised through issues of memory and amnesia and the difficulties of spatially locating the past. With reference to trauma studies and Bergsonian temporalities I would like to suggest that Ryder’s inability to form meaningful relationships with the people around him and his apparently traumatic recollections of childhood reconfigure the spatialisation of his past through memory, inviting us to question the coherency of his identity and his narrative control. Blurring conventional social distinctions between the normative behaviour of adults and children, Ryder’s apparently arrested emotional development is thus explored through the dialectic between the novel’s dystopian and Utopian representations of community.
Click here to view the handout which accompanied this paper.
Image by Rob under a CC BY-NC-ND license.
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
I’ll have to check out Spin and Never Let Me Go; the others are some of my faevoitrs as well. The richest Scifi novel I’ve ever read, however, is Hyperion by Dan Simmons. It’s not exactly light reading, and alludes to everything from Canterbury Tales to The Wizard of Oz, but the story and writing are magnificent.CJ: Hi Jamie, Hyperion is great and you’re right, very rich; I love Dan Simmons Ilium is another great read. Hope you enjoy Spin and Never Let Me Go if you can find them Spin is one of the best SF books I’ve read in years, and Never Let Me Go is a beautiful crossover.