Cosmopolitan Fictions

Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee

Katherine Stanton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135492434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Participating in the reframing of literary studies, Cosmopolitan Fictions identifies, as "cosmopolitan fiction", a genre of global literature that investigates the ethics and politics of complex and multiple belonging.

The fictions studied by Katherine Stanton represent and revise the global histories of the past and present, including the "indigenous or native" narratives that are, in Homi Bhabha's words, "internal to" national identity itself.

The works take as their subjects:

* European unification
* the human rights movement
* the AIDS epidemic
* the new South Africa.

And they test the infinite demands for justice against the shifting borders of the nation, rethinking habits of feeling, modes of belonging and practices of citizenship for the global future.

Scholars, teachers and students of global literary and cultural studies, Cosmopolitan Fictions is a book to want on your reading list.

Chapter One
Foreign Feeling: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and the New Europe

Critics of Kazuo Ishiguro's bulky fourth novel, The Unconsoled, were quick to point out this work was only apparently different from his earlier efforts, the tight, taut novels for which he is celebrated¹. Seemingly surreal, the novel opens with the arrival of Ryder, an internationally renowned pianist, at the gloomy hotel lobby in an unnamed European city. Initially unrecognized, he is quickly assured by the hotel clerk that Mr. Hoffman, the hotel manager, is hard at work on preparations for Thursday night; without understanding what this means, Ryder becomes aware of the sounds of a piano over the muffled noise of city traffic: "Someone was playing a single short phrase—it was from the second movement of Mullery's Verticality—over and over in a slow, preoccupied manner" (1995, p. 4). "Nightmare Hotel," "Sleepless Nights," and "Anxious in Dreamland"²—the titles of the reviews of the novel describe its unsettled mood. Listening to the porter Gustav narrate his entire professional history during an overly long ascent in the hotel elevator up to Ryder's room, Ryder realizes that they are not alone; turning, he discovers a neatly dressed young woman standing in the corner. Introducing herself as Hilde Stratmann, "a humble employee of the Civic Arts Institute" (p. 10), she alerts him to his many scheduled appointments that he cannot remember. Unable to recall the basic details about his visit to this city, Ryder encounters at every turn a person who makes new demands on him. "... I found myself troubled once more by a sense that much was expected of me here," he soon concludes, "and yet that things were at present on a far from satisfactory footing" (p. 26).

"Finds himself" is the verb construction The Unconsoled uses with regularity to describe Ryder, suggesting a belated self-recognition that is familiar in Ishiguro's first-person narrators. That Ishiguro's characters serve as shorthand for emotional repression is nowhere more evident than in a recent book review, which compares the limited emotional range of the autistic child in Mark Haddon's recent novel to that of Stevens in The Remains of the Day³ (Ishiguro, 1993). Despite Ishiguro's turn in "ambiance" from the Jamesian to the Kafkaesque, as Richard Rorty puts it in his review (1995, p. 13), The Unconsoled, it would seem, returns us to a dominant theme in Ishiguro's fiction: the sacrifice of an emotional life to a sense of professional duty. In its darkest turn, the novel suggests that Ryder, who spends his life on musical tour, in "[h]otel room after hotel room" (Ishiguro, 1995, p. 38), can no longer recognize his own home or family. The novel registers this grim fact in an early scene, when Ryder agrees to talk to Gustav's despondent daughter, Sophie. Venturing into the city's Old Town to look for her, Ryder encounters a woman who appears to know him. After Sophie introduces him, somewhat formally, to her young son—'"This is Mr. Ryder, Boris. . . . He's a special friend"' (p. 32)—Ryder hesitantly realizes that they have been making long-term plans—that they are planning, in fact, to buy a house together.

She began to give me more details about the house. I remained silent, but only partly because of my uncertainty as to how I should respond. For the fact was, as we had been sitting together, Sophie's face had come to seem steadily more familiar to me until now I thought I could even remember vaguely some earlier discussions about buying just such a house in the woods, (p. 34)

Listening to her voice, he faintly recalls a series of arguments between them; while Sophie urges him to give up touring—'"Before you know it, Boris will be grown up. No one can expect you to keep on like this'" (p, 37)—he insists he must continue: "'You don't know what you're saying! Some of these places I visit, the people don't know a thing. They don't understand the first thing about modern music and if you leave them to themselves, it's obvious, they'll just get deeper and deeper into trouble. I'm needed, why can't you see that? I'm needed out here!"' (p. 37).

Is he? A synopsis of Part II, which begins when Ryder awakens on the second day of his visit, introduces us to the fullness of his days: after breakfast, he promises Boris that they will retrieve his favorite toy, left behind at his (perhaps their?) old apartment, but is waylaid by a request for an interview and photos from local journalists. Leaving Boris in a cafe with a piece of cheesecake, Ryder follows the journalists onto a tram on which he meets his old childhood friend Fiona, who tells him how disappointed she is that he didn't show up at her dinner party the night before; promising to make it up to her, he continues on his way with the journalists to the Sattler monument (more on this below). Again there is an interruption: the city's former (and now disgraced) conductor arrives at the photo-shoot, thanks Ryder for agreeing to attend a lunch meeting with local musicians, and steers him to his car. Climbing in, Ryder remembers "all at once his many other commitments for the day" (p. 187), but cannot quite extricate himself from this one. At the meeting, Ryder makes controversial pronouncements on pigmented triads and the circular dynamic in the music of Kazan; as tensions begin to flare, it occurs to him that "this café and the one in which [he] had left Boris were in fact parts of the same building" (p. 203); climbing through a narrow door into what appears to be a broom cupboard, he makes his way back to the slightly impatient child. This is not the end of the day—there is still the favorite toy to rescue, a party to attend at the Karwinsky gallery, and a dinner to eat at Sophie's apartment. But the more than fortuitous realization that he is in same café (later he will discover a dimly lit corridor that leads back from the Karwinsky Gallery to the hotel lobby) begins to reveal a psychic logic to the novel's distortedness or dreaminess; time and space, Michael Wood's reading suggests, are "governed by . . . [Ryder's] needs and worries rather than the laws of physics" (21 December 1995, p. 18). Walking with Boris back to Sophie's apartment, for instance, Ryder discovers that he and Boris can't, keep up with her: "though we increased our pace, it seemed to take an inordinate time for us to reach the corner [where she turned] ourselves" (Ishiguro, 1995, p. 40). And a few pages later:

Sophie's figure once again disappeared from our view, this time so abruptly I thought she must have gone into a doorway. . . . We soon discovered that Sophie had in fact turned down a side-alley, whose entrance was little more than a crack in the wall. It descended so steeply and appeared so narrow it did not seem possible to go down it without scraping an elbow along one or the other of the rough walls to either side. The darkness was broken only by two street lamps, one half-way down, the other at the very bottom, (p. 43)

Their evening together remains out of reach; instead, he returns to the hotel, where he believes that he "[has] one more appointment" to keep (p. 78). That these almost nightmarish dislocations are guided by his needs and worries, as Wood puts it—in this case, Ryder's anxiety about the demands of adult love—is evident in the end of Part II: after leaving dinner with Sophie rather early—'"I have a very busy morning tomorrow'" (p. 289), he tells her—he returns to his hotel room determined to fulfill his other obligations: his appointment with the mayor, his meeting with the Citizens' Mutual Support Group, and his invitation from Miss Collins to visit. "... [T]here could be no denying that I had been placed under some pressure" (pp. 289-90), he concludes. Throughout the novel, the city's expectations that he will help them make sense of modern music and various individuals' demands that he come to their aid interrupt his family time.

Making a familiar argument about Ishiguro's fiction, Pico Iyer asserts that Ryder has "cheated himself out of a life" by being "too accommodating, too dutiful to stand up for [his] own needs" (28 April 1995, p. 22). "[I]n honoring the little obligations," Iyer claims, "he has missed out on the biggest ones of all" (p. 22): unsurprisingly, those to his family and to himself. Against this interpretive strain, I want to suggest that these "little" obligations are not unimportant—or rather, that the novel is making a serious ethical point through their unimportance. In making this point, the novel, I will argue, alerts us to the pervasiveness of claims on us. But it also notifies us of the difficult necessity of deciding among our many pressing obligations. I will suggest that Ryder's hesitant and wavering response reflects the disturbances of the criteria used to respond to the demands made on him, reading the novel's action, which Rorty insists does not "take place against a background of real history" (1995, p. 13), into a newly uncertain Europe.

Admittedly, my first suggestion, that we validate the "little" obligations, is difficult to make. This becomes especially clear in Ryder's interactions with the porter Gustav, who makes repeated claims on him. From their initial trip in the elevator, Gustav requests his help; along with asking him to console his daughter Sophie, he also asks Ryder to mention the plight of the city's porters in his remarks on Thursday night, on which, it seems, Ryder is to perform. . . . [Y]ou see, sir,' Gustav says, explaining their plight, 'there's always this idea that anyone could do this job if they took it into their heads. . . . I suppose it's because everyone in this town at some point has had the experience of carrying luggage from place to place. . . . 'I'd like to do that one of these days,' [one of the city councilors] said to me, indicating the bags. 'That's the life for me. Not a care in the world'" (Ishiguro, 1995, p. 6). Like Ryder, Gustav seems to overestimate his professional and civic importance, and the results of this overestimation seem instructive. The ridiculous Porter's Dance, in which Gustav hoists larger and heavier bags while he shuffles atop a cafe table, metaphorizes to the literal point the burden of excessive demands, not least from Gustav, that Ryder undertakes:

. . . Gustav's face remained grim with concentration, staring with enormous intensity at the strap of the golfing bag lying on the table surface. Then the elderly porter began to lower himself again, his whole body trembling under the weight of the suitcase on his shoulder, his hand grasping prematurely for the strap still some distance below him. (p. 404)

The foolishness of this undertaking seems underscored in the exhausted end of his dance, which ultimately results in his death. But Ryder does not get the point; instead, he tries to accommodate more demands around Gustav's death: to inspect the concert piano, to pick up Sophie and Boris and bring them to Gustav—"I'm sorry' I said, as I turned the car, 'but I don't know my way around here so well yet'" (1995, p. 448), he insists—to convince the Hoffmans that their son Stephan really does have musical talent, to broker a reconciliation between the rehabilitated conductor, Brodsky, and his former lover, to meet with Miss Stratmann about his parents' supposed visit for his concert, and to find a decent breakfast.

These insignificant demands give new energy to Jacques Derrida's examples from The Gift of Death, which envisions those others to whom we are responsible as not only "one other or some other persons, but also places, animals, languages" (1995, p. 71). In this work, Derrida imagines a responsibility owed equally and unconditionally to the other—including the other as our work—and to the other others. "Duty or responsibility binds me to the other, to the other as other.... I am responsible to the other as other, I answer to him and I answer for what I do before him" (p. 68); but he goes on to argue, "[t]here are also others, an infinite number of them, the innumerable generality of others to whom I should be bound by the same responsibility, a general and universal responsibility" (p. 68). In the proliferating duties that Ryder takes on, the novel hints at this tension or conflict. '"You must promise me you won't let me down . . .'" (Ishiguro, 1995, p. 178), Fiona, who wants Ryder to attend her dinner party—and every other character—insists. Even at the moment of his death, Gustav, for instance, does not let Ryder out of his commitment: '"Gustav kept asking,' one of the porters reports. 'Right to the end he kept asking [if Ryder has spoken at Thursday night's concert on their behalf], 'Any news of Mr. Ryder yet?' He kept asking that"' (p. 526). Framing ethical decisions, rather outrageously, in terms of household pets (Derrida, 1995, p. 71)—"How would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every morning for years, whereas other cats die of hunger at every instant?" he asks—Derrida makes the point that the experience of ethics as impossible is an everyday one⁴. Emphasizing the banality of Ryder's innumerable duties, we may take this as the novel's point as well. But we may also say that the novel makes a distinction between ethics as an everyday experience of the impossible and ethics as actually impossible⁵. "Justice is beyond calculation," Drucilla Cornell argues, but "the call of the Other," like Fiona or Gustav, "is concrete" (1991, p. 116). Returning us to the ethical decision, she explains: "... [W]e must always calculate and participate, if we are to meet the obligation to be just" (p. 116); even as we do so, though, "we do not presume to define justice once and for all" (p. 116). The tension the novel makes felt between the singular claim and universal duty reminds us of the disjunctions Cornell identifies, and thus of the ongoing work of doing justice.

The non-finality that the novel uncovers does not mean that there cannot be a solution to the problem of multiple demands, including the demands of work and family⁶; it means that the solution will not be a fixed or permanent one. In alerting us to this non-finality, the novel holds up for scrutiny, without rejecting, Barry Lewis's firm conclusion that "Ryder's problem is that he cannot say no" (2000, p. 116). Lewis rightly notices that Ryder, "unable to turn down the demands of the people he meets" (p. 116), "is pulled in many directions at once" (p. 121). Perhaps he should say no to certain demands; making clear that his work is suffering, Ryder tells the hotel manager, '"'Mr. Hoffman, you don't seem to appreciate the urgency of the situation. Owing to one unforeseen event after another, I haven't had a chance to touch a piano now for many days. I must insist I be allowed access to one as quickly as possible'" (Ishiguro, 1995, p. 336). Despite these exhortations, or his later realization that he has ruined his relationship with Sophie, The Unconsoled does not find that Ryder's professional or familial responsibilities mark the limits of his obligationRather⁷. these limits are precisely what the novel calls into question by making audible the dissonance that "results from heeding the Other whose face demands 'the equitable honoring of faces'" (Cornell, 1991, p. 116).

Iyer's claim that Ryder is cheating himself out of a life by honoring the "little" obligations is further shaken by Louis Menand's observation that Ishiguro's reputation as a psychological realist is "entirely undeserved" (28 April 1995, p. 7). "The characters in . . . Ishiguro's books are papier-mâché animations," he explains. "They don't have feelings; they simulate feelings . . ."⁸ (p. 7). The flatness of his characters and the flimsiness of their internal lives are evident at the moments when they are most at stake: for instance, when Ryder discovers that his parents are not, after all, coming to hear him play '"How much longer am I supposed to go on traveling like this?"' (Ishiguro, 1995, p. 512), he asks. In characteristically stilted prose, the novel describes his breakdown: "I collapsed into a chair and realized I had started to sob. As I did so, I remembered just how tenuous had been the whole possibility of my parents' coming to the town. I could not understand how I had ever been so confident about the matter . . ." (p. 512). Boris's heartbreak over his mother's final rejection of Ryder (a moment I will return to later) is similarly lifeless: '"But we've got to stay together, we've got to" (p. 532). '"He'll never be one of us,' Sophie responds. 'You've got to understand that, Boris'" (p. 532). Taking seriously Menand's claim that "we are not dealing with characters and their relations 'in the traditional novelistic sense'" (15 October 1995, p. 7), The Unconsoled, as I see it, is far more interested in ethical experimentation than in psychological realism—and far more bracing, perhaps even unconsoling, to read as such.

The assertion that Ishiguro is not a psychological realist also puts pressure on the interpretation of the dream-like manipulations of time and space as Ryder's psychic distortions. In response to this pressure, I want to suggest that we understand these distortions as a narrative, rather than as a psychological, ploy Like my earlier one, this is not an intuitive suggestion: the psychic logic of these distortions seems evident yet again when Ryder recognizes his hotel room as his childhood bedroom:

It had been recently re-plastered and re-painted, its dimensions had been enlarged, the cornices had been removed, the decorations around the light fitting had been entirely altered. But it was unmistakably the same ceiling that I had so often stared up at from my narrow creaking bed of those days. (Ishiguro, 1995, p. 16)

Staring up at the ceiling or looking down at the rug, Ryder feels "once more back in [his] old childhood sanctuary. . . . All the tensions of the day—the long flight, the confusions over my schedule, Gustav's problems—seemed to fall away . . (p. 17). Back in his childhood room, he is safe from the demands of this visit. That it is a sanctuary from more than present difficulties becomes clear as the narrative continues. As he moves through the city, Ryder recognizes old friends from his childhood in England; Geoffrey Saunders, for one, chides him for not coming to visit when he arrived in town. Talking with him, Ryder is seized with a memory of a "crisp winter's morning in England" when, standing outside a pub "deep in the Worcestershire countryside" (p. 46), he burst into tears in front of Saunders. And when Ryder meets Fiona, he recalls her taunting him as a child about his parents' continuous arguments: '"Don't you know? Don't you know why they argue all the time?'" (p. 172). During his and Boris' trip to their old apartment complex, they run into a man who complains about the family arguments in the apartment that now stands empty—an apartment whose objects bring "a poignant nudge of recognition" to Ryder (p. 214). The neighbor explains, '"Whenever we saw him he was sober, very respectful. He'd give us a quick salute, be on his way. But my wife was convinced that's what was behind it. You know, drink . . .'" (p. 215). He goes on to note that the father of the family tended '"to blame her'" (p. 215). The neighbor continues: "'Okay, he went away a lot, but from what we understood he had to, that was all part of his work. It wasn't a reason, that's what I'm saying, it wasn't a reason for her to behave in the way she did . . .'"(p. 215).

We remember that the dreamwork renders manifest, in distorted form, the latent or unconscious dream-thoughts. By means of condensation and displacement, Freud explains, the dream-thoughts are translated into the dream-content. "The consequence is that the dream-content no longer resembles the core of the dream-thoughts and that the dream gives no more than a distortion of the dream-wish which exists in the unconscious" (1958, p. 308). Suggesting the appeal of this account for literary criticism, Nicolas Rand and Maria Torok explain that "[d]ream interpretation . . . implies a form of reading that undoes distortions, expands condensations, puts displacements back in their place, and sets enigmatic visual images into comprehensible words" (1997, p. 15). Several critics uncover the secret of Ryder's childhood through this interpretive framework. Lewis concludes that Ryder, like Boris, as the above passage hints ('"it wasn't a reason for her to behave in the way she did'"), is not his father's real son (2000, p. 120); as Sophie tells Boris at the end of ...