The Good Wound: Memory and Community in The Unconsoled

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...