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How to Have Done with Words: Virtuoso Performance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

Quand faire, c'est beaucoup dire: jeux de virtuoses dans The Unconsoled.
Claire Pégon

Résumés

Cet article se propose d’analyser les jeux narratifs très innovateurs dans The Unconsoled, reliant la performativité narrative à la référence musicale. Il convient d’abord de poser la musique comme cliché romantique: mode transcendant d’expression qui promet un accès au sens affranchi des défaillances du verbe. La musique figure à la fois comme expression de l’ineffable, comme clef herméneutique qui pourra résoudre le malaise sociale en restaurant l’harmonie une fois que les bons accords seront trouvés, et comme rhétorique impénétrable en dehors de la logique qui prévaut dans cette ville inconnue. Mais si ‘faire, c'est beaucoup dire’, c'est aussi en raison de la prolixité du narrateur, lequel s’empare des pouvoirs habituellement réservés à l’instance narrative omnisciente (usurpation scandaleuse aux termes de la narratologie); ainsi Ryder orne son récit d’un arrière-plan dont il était théoriquement exclu. Plus étonnant encore, le narrateur sait absorber les récits d’autrui pour en faire sa propre histoire. Exercice de phagocytose qui sert moins à décrire le réel qu'à narrer l’avoir lieu du langage, cette technique narrative emprunte à la fois à l’art des troubadours et à l’audition extempore.

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  • 1 Ali quotations from the text will henceforth be followed by the page number in the edition I have u (...)

1‘A meticulous attention to detail. Precision in performance. The tight contrai of dynamics’ (136). The rousing exordium is of course not mine, but that of Ryder, the hapless narrator of The Unconsoled.1 His opening gambit is noteworthy for more reasons than one. It is in fact one of two preambles that Ryder toys with before rising to speak at the Countess’s reception, this being the ‘mock pompous’ one, the alternative being ‘obviously farcical’: ‘Collapsing curtain rails. Poisoned rodents. Misprinted score sheets’ (136). His hesitation is understandable, for bath have a certain appeal. Bath speak indirectly not just about Ryder’s tours in the past but of his present adventure and the navel itself: meticulous, precise and controlled but also undercut by the most astounding elements of farce: the splendid valedictory ride around town of a dog with rigor mortis, a dressing gown falling open to expose ail to an attentive audience, the amputation of a wooden leg, the examples are Iegion. On a more structural note, this speech takes its place alongside other rehearsals in the novel before events that fail to happen: recitals that don’t corne about, tea parties that never get started, concerts that fail to begin before precipitately being over, scenes that Ryder runs through in his mind but which systematically flounder when it cornes to the real thing, or quite simply get forgotten.

  • 2 Arthur Schopenhauer, La Musique et l’ineffable, quoted by J.-L. Pauchot, La Musique oubliée, 17.
  • 3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for thePhilosophical Investigation (...)

2Yet while, from a referential point of view, Ryder would seem to be bungling a critical juncture in his career, in the more obscure logic of the navel, there is no need for concern. His thwarted performances one day are nevertheless hailed as masterpieces the next, the local population going so far as to repeat among themselves the wittier quotations from his discourses. He cornes to the city as a sort of messenger if nota messiah, promising an answer to local strife and consolation to the meek, but while the message never seems to be pronouncedand it is not even clear in which medium it should find expression, since what is initially announced as a concert finally develops into a question-and-answer session with an electronic scoreboard—its impress would seem to be unquestionable. There is, bafflingly enough, now illocutionary intention and perlocutionary potential, but no locution in between, now only locution, devoid or emptied of illocution and perlocution. These are the apparent paradoxes that I wish to examine here. What exactly does Ryder’s performance entai!? How is the balance between words and music achieved? What precisely is the nature of the musical reference in the text, veering as it does between radical formalism and obscure symbolism? I shall start by looking at the silences of the text, whether pregnant, golden or quite simply wordless. I shall then listen to what music has to say, as both romantic metaphor and either euphemism or apophansis, in the sense that Schopenhauer suggested when he said,Il y a dans la musique quelque chose d’ineffable et d’intime.’2 To conclude, I shall consider the musical sentence in Ryder’s adventure. This is not to imply a fuzzy analogy between musicality and euphonious expression but to suggest a novel slant in Wittgenstein’s notion thatunderstanding a sentence has a much greater similarity to understanding a musical theme than we might be inclined to think’.3

Silence and Understatement

3Each of the three dysfunctional family triads between whom Ryder moves has in some mysterious way fallen out of language, so to speak, and given up on verbal exchange. This of course implies taking very literally the phrasai verb I have slipped into Austin’s felicitously titled classic, How to Do Things with Words. They have had done with words. The reasons for their muteness are never quite clear. In the case of Gustav and Sophie, their silence dates back to the girl’s childhood, where, after obscure beginnings, it is ratified by the death of Ulrich, the hamster. To bridge the language gap after this would be to trivialise the tragedy, to admit words might have been spoken to bring solace. Gustav is in fact choosing to apply to the letter the famous closing statement of Wittgenstein’s Tractacus,Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, founding a silent myth. In the Hoffman family, silence is linked to the child’s miserable efforts at the keyboard, the mother finding herself lost for words at the prospect of having feckless progeny. As for Brodsky and Miss Collins, the silence grows from unspeakable inadequacies:Brodsky had been on the verge of articulating such a thought but then, remembering that it touched on the delicate topic of his recent failures, had changed his mind’ (359). In each case, they dream of an intermediary that could restore Iost harmonies. Stephan dreams of giving a performance that will reconcile his parents while his father hopes vaguely that Ryder will trigger the desired resolution; Gustav too sees Ryder as the messenger who will bring Sophie to understand that the gulf must henceforth be crossed; while Brodsky pictures now a Iittle animal, now a rousing evening concert as the guarantor of their reconciliation, but also tums to Ryder as his go-between.

  • 4 William Wordsworth,Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintem Abbey’, 1.49. Romantic Period Verse, 17 (...)
  • 5 See Roland Barthes,Écoute’ in L’Obvie et l’obtus, 21730. Barthes dwells lengthily on the specifi (...)
  • 6 Examples abound, such as Stephan’s recollections of a family party shattered when he begins to play (...)
  • 7 W. Wordsworth,Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’ (1805 version), quoted in Romantic Period Verse, 77 (...)

4Ryder’s access to these unspeakable silences is intriguing. Admittedly, the family trios all confide in him. But more subtly, his insight derives from his ability to Iisten to silences and so interpret them. In such cases, he is not unlike the romantic artist, who seesinto the Iife of things’;4 in his case, as a gifted musician, he would seem to be Iistening to the aura around words so as to gain a finer understanding. Such aurai powers are rather scandalous in narratological terms, for as a result of his very barthesian ‘écoute active’ Ryder transgresses blithely into territories habitually reserved for the heterodiegetic narrator.5 During a journey home on the first evening, he listens in from the back seat of the car to the conversation between Stephan and Miss Collins in her house, following their movements and exchanges as they wander through into a back parlour until a noise in the car interrupts his inner communion: ‘Miss Collins sipped her sherry thoughtfully. She seemed about to reply, but at this point I heard Boris shift behind me in the back of the car’ (61). Similarly, arriving at the Countess’s reception, Ryder looks around and wonders about the strained conviviality in the room. Thetruth’ of what had just happened then dawns on him, and he relates with poised shrewdness the scenes that had been taking place, reporting verbal exchanges and explaining taut relations, before slipping back quite naturally into a classic, homodiegetic posture:I was still tuming over all that had happened prior to our arrivai when I caught sight of Stephan on the other side of the room, talking to an elderly lady’ (129). There are numerous, similar instances6 of such lyrical bonding, rather Iike those described by Wordsworth as a poet enters into imaginative union with the world around him:So that it will be the wish of the poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describesnay, for short spaces of time perhaps to let himself slip into an entire delusion and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs.’7 Each time the romantic ‘delusion’ lasts until a disturbance around Ryder breaks the momentum of what is not just negative but retroprojective capability. It’s a notion I shall return to.

5It is not quite the case of silence speaking for itself, as the popular dictum would have us believe, but the world of The Unconsoled is filled with willing interpreters. Thus Stephan defends Brodsky when Miss Collins comments cynically on the conductor’s apparent stupor: ‘Silence is just as likely to indicate the most profound ideas forming, the deepest energies being summoned. In fact the other day, after a particularly long silence, Father actually went into the drawing room and there was Mr Brodsky staring down at the piano keys. After a while he looked up at Father and said: ‘The violins need to be harsh. They must sound harsh.’ That’s what he said. There may have been silence, but inside his head, there'd been a whole universe of music’ (59).

6Meanwhile, if Ryder has the ability to read into the minds of those around him, furnishing the silence of the present with explanations from the past, he also has an uncanny ability to deflect the language that is being addressed to him. Thus during his encounters both with the journalists and with Parkhurst, he chooses to distance himself from the event and drift behind the handy shield of omniscient but uninvolved narration: ‘I could hear Pedro struggling to gain a few paces. Then I heard him shout:

‘I said, we seem to have got the shit convinced. I think he’s going along with it.’
‘Weil’, the journalist shouted back, ‘he’s co-operated so far, but you can never take these types for granted. So keep up the flattery. He’s corne this far up and he seems quite happy about it. But then I don’t think the fool even knows the significance of the building’. (180)

  • 8 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques IV, L’Homme Nu, 578–79.
  • 9 1 am of course playing on the ambivalent compound noun structure around the preposition ‘de’ in Fre (...)
  • 10 See Italo Calvino’s essay,Cybemetics and Ghosts’ in The Literature Machine, 19.
  • 11 Suzanne Langer, quoted by J.-J. Nattiez, Musicologie générale et sémiologie, 142.

7This is surely a case of ‘l’écoute déparle’, to misquote Barthes, where language is left in mid-air, utterance without delivery. In each case, we have language from which something has been taken away. This brings to mind Lévi­Strauss’s definition of music as the negative of language: ‘Sans doute la musique parle-t-elle aussi, mais ce ne peut être qu'en raison de son rapport négatif à la langue [. . .]. La musique, c'est le langage moins le sens.’8 It offers a first insight into the unexplained would-be symbols throughout the text, where abjects seem to have a tale to tell but within the text, these are never listened to. Rather, they just provide potentially significant forms, offered to the interpretative capacities of the reader; again, like music they areappels de sens’, both promising meaning and calling out for it.9 There is for example the legendary number nine; or Brodsky’s wound, both a lewd euphemism and an aching stand-in for something ontological, or even the ceiling of the hotel bedroom. Ali of these function assilent myth’ in Calvino’s terms whichmakes its presence felt in secular narrative and everyday words; it is a language vacuum that draws words up into its vortex and bestows form on fable’, giving a voice to ‘the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of Ianguage, removed as a result of ancient prohibition’.10 From a more musical angle, they can be seen asunconsummated symbols’.11 as Suzanne Langer says of music, full of accessible potentiality.

Language Without Meaning

  • 12 Robert Browning,Abt Vogler’ XI, ls. 87–88. Collected Poetry, 246.

8The logic pervading the unreal city to which Ryder cornes to perform is that you can do things with music, or make something happen. This obscure alchemy recalls the romantic intuitions voiced by Browning’s Abt Vogler:But God has a few ofus whom he whispers in the ear,/ The rest may reason and welcome: ’t is we usicians know’.12 It posits the musician now as the interpreter, now the purveyor, of some sort of truth. In the first case, the performer brings to the score some further insight into its intrinsic meaning and so illuminates what was otherwise unfathomable sound; in the second, he merely makes articulate and audible the message written on the stave and so releases harmony’s healing powers. As a persona) answer to misunderstanding, it is the latter role that predominates. Stephan’s anguish about choosing the right piece to perform suggests that music is directly referentialist, a global, poetic metaphor that conveys inner mysteries. It cornes down to believing he can, literally and figuratively speaking, strike the right chord. The very titles of the pieces that the various musicians and music-lovers evoke imply a directly accessible, metaphorical relation between music and meaning: the Glass Passions that Stephan hopes will offer his mother precious insight into their fragile relationship; the functional rendering of Grotesqueries that cost Christoff the city council’s approbation; an iconoclastie interpretation of Verticality that ends with Brodsky lying horizontal on the floor, half legless at that. Indeed, musical metaphor frequently fonctions as farcical euphemistic stand-in, as when Hoffman waxes tirelessly on to the future Mrs Hoffman about Ventilations, or when Ryder fails to perform Asbestos and Fibre in the mock scatological lavatory-like practice room. In each case, music is seen to be supplementing language, speaking indirectly when words are failing the protagonists, giving voice to taboos, bans and unspeakable desires.

9On a municipal Ievel, it is Jess the intrinsic truths of the repertoire but the indeterminacy of musical signification that appears to be at the heart of local tumult.

10In this case, it is the definitive interpretation that the citizens are hearkening after, and Ryder’s role in this instance is to explain once and for ail the finer truths of modem forms. Seen from outside the closed diegetic world, his task is no enviable one:

‘Mr Ryder, Mr Ryder, is it truly the case that pigmented triads have intrinsic emotional value regardless of context?’ (197)
‘Mr Ryder, please tell us (. . .). Let’s get to the bottom of it. Is Henri right in believing we can’t at any cost abandon the circular dynamic in Kazan?’ (201)

  • 13 Theodore Adorno, ‘On the Social Situation of Music’, quoted by Hendrik Birus, ‘Adomo’s Negative Aes (...)

11These are no longer cases of musical nominalism but suggest a sort of obscure structuralism, where each musical phenomenon would have some social equivalence that, once identified, could ensure local harmony. Here, Ryder’s role is messianic indeed, converting the word of the ineffable into almost pathological truths. The negative mysticism that reigns, grotesque as it may seem, resembles a rather exaggerated application of Adorno’s aesthetic theory: ‘At present, music can do nothing other than represent social antinomies in its own structure [. . .] Music will be that much better the more profoundly it is able to formulate the power of those contradictions and the necessity of overcoming them socially, that much better the more purely it gives expression through the antinomies of its own forms to the plight of society, thus calling for change through the cryptic language of suffering.’13

12Cryptic language indeed, but the citizens of the city are doing no more than quite reasonably demanding that the abstruse, asymptotic forms of music be deciphered. If music has meaning, why can they not have it?

13But these symbols too remain unconsummated: we never fully understand what the ‘crushed cadence’, the ‘struck motif', the ‘fractured time signature’ and the ‘vented rest’ might mean to the community. If Ryder can give the audience intuitions of the truth, he cannot bring about the definitive transfer of metaphorical truths into everyday life. There would seem to be several reasons for this. First, the citizens are demanding that he reveal some sort of lasting truth-value in music, except that he would have to do soin language, in other words, indirectly. While if he gives the definitive performance of musical truths, these will not last, and at the closing chords, the city will remain yearning for some indefinable bridge between sounds and sense. He is thus condemned to confirming that music has extra-musical signification that cannot be reached outside the performance. Another reason for this ‘unconsummation’ is that, the repertoire in the novel being entirely fictional, there is no musical construct onto which the reader can transfer the linguistic approximations. Inversely, it is never actually settled once and for ail whether apparently musical metaphors are not actually litera) musical conventions and not metaphoric at all. Are they standing in for some inexpressible other attainable only as aposiopesis or parable, or do they mean no more than they say? Either way, the only access to musical understanding would seem to be via language.

  • 14 l am thinking in particular of Kafka’s short piece,On Parables’ which provides a fascinating angl (...)
  • 15 See Giorgio Agamben, L’Enfance et la mort, for a penetrating analysis of how mute fable can expIain(...)
  • 16 C. Lévi-Strauss develops this argument at length in both Le Cuit et le Cru and L’Homme Nu. The foll (...)
  • 17 The incompatibility of music and truth is illustrated by Pierre Boulez, when he reworks de Schloeze (...)

14It is interesting at this point to recall that for many late-nineteenth century commentators and composers, the romantic powers of music would enable music to say something about the world without compromising its independence and purity as a musical medium. They defended this thesis by maintaining that music spoke in Aesopian language, imposing an epistemological barrier between pure, abstract sound expressive only of musical constructs, and programme music expressing an extra-musical idea. Fable, we might remember, is classed among the instrumental narratives, not in any immediately musical sense but more as a grammatical instrumental, because, along with parable and myth, it denotes the way to a means, a form of indirect clause. We are therefore caught up in an inextricable, rather Kafkaesque bind.14 If the city, condemned to various forms of muteness, can hope only to speak through music, music can only say that it cannot say the ineffable, or make constant appeals back to language to put into words what it is expressively trying to voice. In other words, the romantic, metaphoric relation between language and music is circulating through and being undercut by a more distant metonymy where both modes of expression are turning distraughtly around the need and the impossibility to reunify experience and knowledge. In this respect, music is, for ail its organised sound patterns, another fabula muta: music speaks where man falls silent, but falls silent in its turn when man speaks.15 It is worth remembering that for Lévi-Strauss, instrumental music was born from the splitting of the myth, music taking its forms, the nove) taking its language and stories.16 According to the anthropologist, this explains why music Jeans fatally towards once lost expressiveness, while the novel pines after plurality and inner form. Whether the theory really stands up to analysis is beyond the scope of our preoccupations here, but as a fable it is eloquent indeed, particularly applied to this novel. The elusive mission Ryder is trying to carry through includes reuniting two halves of a severed myth, to give words back to music, and vice versa, to reconcile the literal and the figural. We cannot say he fails, nor does he succeed; but there is an intermediate stage. Music, like verbal performatives, is not after ail about truth and falsity but about getting somewhere.17 While the ultimate diagnosis of musical strife never gets pronounced, while Stephan gets nowhere with Glass Passions, Brodsky passes out during Verticality, and Ryder doesn’t get to the fourth movement of Fibre despite frequent visits to small cubicles, something does happen to leave the characters in a state of passing felicity. There have been performances, even during the rehearsals, and it to these that we shall now turn.

Pictures and Sentences.

  • 18 Roland Barthes, ‘Rasch’, L’Obvie et l’obtus. It is during his analysis of Schumann’s music, and the(...)
  • 19 Roger Sruton,Notes on the meaning of music’ in Michael Krausz, The Interpretation of Music, 201.
  • 20 Ibid., 202

15It is becoming clear that the world of The Unconsoled is constantly on the move, pieces are being performed but are rarely completed, intentions cogently put into action soon dwindle away, much time and energy is spent changing places, but no sooner do you arrive somewhere than you are already being late for the next appointment. The progressive aspect of the verb, ‘being late’ is operative, suggesting the perpetual dynamics of musical movement, like an intermezzo18 that never links up to anything. It partakes of a neo-Kantian, constructionist theory of music that Roger Scruton summarises as follows:Music, like every art, exists in and derives its life from, a continuous culture. [. . .] Whenever we hear these details we are drawn by them into the little fragments of human life that they suggest. Yet we are drawn there by the music. And if it is worth anything, the music does not leave us there, but leads us on, through its own powers of development. As we move with these elements, therefore, we are led by our sympathies into a whole new musical totality: a musical bridge is created, spanning distant regions of human life [. . .].’19 In Scruton’s terms, listening to musicwe are made to rehearse, in our extended sympathies, a particular movement of the soul’.20 The notion is worth pondering over. In its musical sense, the rehearsal takes place prior to the concert, one of the only times in French whenrépétition’ cornes before and not after the event. Scruton suggests music can inspire rehearsals as both memory and discovery. Of course, this is rehearsal in its discursive sense meaning to relate, to give an account of, situating itself on the other side of experience. I would suggest that in The Unconsoled, rehearsing embraces both. Events that may seem not to have taken place are constantly being rehearsed in the musical sense, which, by passing througt language then stand as rehearsals in the discursive sense. Musical bridges thus repeatedly span the breach between before and after, between memory and desire. Language rehearsals are constantly taking place, every character daims to be performing. No matter how often you miss the great events, you cannot actually evade performance if you speak. Stories once told ring familiar bells, words heard become memories of events. Examples abound: Brodsky’s name means nothing on page 4 but by page 15,I had the distinct impression I had either heard or read about it in the not so distant past’. Even music is not heard till spoken about:And listen to him now! Still hard at it, working things out by himself.” [. . .] Only then did I become aware that a piano was being played somewhere in the building’ (4).

16A tale of childish bravado and make-believe on page 36 becomes a fully­ fledged, scripted memory several chapters later, from page 218 to 222. When Boris first mentions no 9, the reference means nothing to Ryder. But Boris repeats the words a few times, so that soon,Number nine had rung a distant bell for me’. Various characters thus have the ability to perform on Ryder, speaking him into memory. Miss Collins’s invitation to drop in for a session of psychotherapy summons up irresistible pictures in his mind, as if he had already been there:As she was speaking, the image of her drawing room-the low cosy light, the worn velvet drapes, the crumbling furniture-had drifted before me, and for a brief moment the thought of reclining on one of her couches, far from the pressures of life, seemed peculiarly enticing’ (147). Likewise, he thrills to Hoffman’s evocation of the concert night with the scoreboard question session so willingly that the event almost takes place in his mind: ‘As Hoffman had been talking, an ail too vivid picture of the evening ahead had started to form in my mind. I could hear the applause, the buzz of the electronic scoreboard above my head. I saw myself performing the little shrug, then moving into the blinding lights towards the edge of the stage’ (383). When Miss Stratmann wants to console him for the absence of his parents at the non-event of the concert, she conjures up a former visit to the town that, like a rehearsal, both precedes and dissolves the need for a real event:the hotel your parents stayed in was nowhere near traffic. It was an idyllic hotel. It doesn ’t exist any more, but if I can show you a picture of it’ (514–15). In moments such as these, language, like music, is making something happen, not recalling factual, real events but presenting plausible constructions that can be adopted as memories once the willing listener has played them through a few times in his mind.

17Inversely, as I mentioned earlier, Ryder has the ability to deflect language he wishes not to picture: this can be seen when Parkhurst’s rather callous remarks, through a sort of contrastive negation, actually summon up pictures of gentle well­being in Ryder’s mind. This brings me back to the Wittgensteinian pictures evoked in the introduction. Wittgenstein argued that the picture theory of understanding language is misleading. To take the content of the sentence as a picture of some pre­ existent reality beyond is to veil the fact that the sentence is essentially a construct of verbal elements. Whereas with music, in Wittgenstein’s theory, we break away from picturing and listen to the relation between notes, harmonies and rhythms as our knowledge of conventions conveys them to us. Here, a different sort of picture theory is being performed: the pictures that keep being summoned up are quite brazenly baseless, but they are what leap to mind, just as in music, pictures can spring to the listener’s mind that have no daim to any truth value, but which inspire or console. It is thus that the novel can end on a picture of lyrical contentment as Ryder, now on his way again for another intermezzo, rehearses the genial conversation that he could have with the electrician on the bus. He so makes it happen, as the tentative ‘would’ of hypothetic rehearsal becomes the iterative ‘would’ of past narration:As I did so, I began to picture to myself, already back in my seat, exchanging pleasant talk with the electrician, glancing out between mouthfuls at the early-morning streets. [. . .] We would go on sitting there together, eating, exchanging views on football or whatever else took our fancy, while outside the sun rose higher and higher in the sky’ (534–35).

18This is a remarkably literai realisation of Scruton’s constructionist perception of music where the listener constructs aesthetic enjoyment by hearing his own experience. But there is more literai still to corne. Such is Ryder’sécoute active’ that any word once pronounced is likely to have a familiar ring about it and so be adopted as Ryder’s picture of his own experience. He arrives in the city as an empty stave and a willing performer, with no memories, but he will rapidly begin to confection a picture of the past made of linguistic cast-offs. I referred above to his retroprojective capabilities during his transgressive incursions into heterodiegesis. It is a very literai case of him projecting himself intolittle fragments of lives’. Once Sophie evokes their past life together, he will remember it and so recall that she might be his companion; hotel rooms will become places from childhood, an abandoned wreck will become the old family car and instantly be filled with memories. Even stories that are confided to him will describe a convenient persona! narrative: once Stephan has explained his tortuous family set-up, Ryder will project himself into the tale and ‘remember’ his own, similar infant experiences; once Stephan evokes how his parents fail to listen to him, so Ryder too will construct his own anguish about parental absence. Nor does he stop at appropriating tales of being ignored, but he sets to ignoring Boris, and intriguingly enough, Boris does not call him Papa until Ryder has adopted the familial sickness of silence. Language can thus stand in not only for events but for past history, meaning that having done with words is no longer a phrasai verb but just a past infinitive, letting Ryder absorb into himself others’ discourses, or transfer upon others the selves he no longer requires. He transfers to Stephan for example the thrill of a successful but misunderstood performance while reserving for himself the ultimate, unsurpassable musical event.

  • 21 R. Browning,Abt Vogler’ IX, 65–6, 72, Collected Poems, 245.
  • 22 lbid., V, 39–40, 245.
  • 23 G. Agam ben, Language and Death, 69.

19In many ways, Ryder strikingly resembles a secular version of Browning’s Abt Vogler, a brilliant extemporiser, an unequalled performer but who creates only fleeting pictures, none of which will last. Ryder of course cannot enjoy the consolations Vogler pictures to himself, that is a doser relationship with God, the only architect of etemally lasting constructions:Therefore to whom tum I but to thee, the ineffable Name? /Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!/ [. . .] On the earth the broken arcs, in the heaven, a perfect round.’21 He can only move on along broken tangents, from city to city, from performance to performance, gleaning elements of others’ stories that he can weave, albeit fugitively, into his own narration:What never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon;/ And what is,-shall I say, matched both? For I was made perfect too.’22 But extemporizing is certainly a key to his performance, both outside time (which is remarkably plastic in the novel, and can apparently be extended at will) and on the spur of the moment, more glorious than a mere improvisation, and Jess amateur too (an extempore speech is one delivered without notes). His performance has to be left unfinished, imperfect, hardly begun even while he works towards a truly final cadence. A travelling musician, putting into words and melody the staries of others, Ryder is not just a fabulous extemporizer, he owes much to the medieval troubadours, who toured southem Europe bringing music and biography together. According to Agamben, the troubadours, whose name derives back through tropes musical and rhetorical to trobare, to find, were singing about the advent of love, not as it appeared before them as a mere imitation of the real, but as it takes place in the advent of language: ‘the lived is invented or found on the basis of the poetic and not vice versa.’23 This, I suggest, is what Ryder’s performance too is ail about. He is not just missing his mark and stumbling on, but is launched on an impossible journey to reconcile stories’ meanings and music’s structures; he is not just telling, but tirelessly performing a fable about the taking place of language. His trajectory is asymptotic, he can only miss his mark, but as his arching, parabolic path approaches the closed circle of dislocated communities, so they ail perceive, indirectly, intuitively, a glimpse of the truth that they have been yearning for. There can of course be no final coinciding of music and message, of fictions and structures, for the myth has broken up, leaving its two despondent halves seeking for, and repelling each other. But he can, during the course of his performances, reveal through an instrumental fable what it is the community desires. This is Ryder’s fabulous destiny: fable,fabulare, it is full of fables, unhistorical, legendary and celebrated in fable, and most of ail it can take place only in the telling. It is a packed programme and quite a performance, and for this, Ryder deserves applause.

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Bibliographie

Primary works

Ishiguro, Kazuo, The Unconsoled, London: Faber and Faber, 1995. BROWNING, Robert, Collected Poetry, ed. James F. Loucks, Ney York: Norton Critical Edition, 1979.

Kafka, Franz, The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works (1921–24), tr.
Malcolm Paisley, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.

McGann, Jerome J. (ed.), New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1993.

Critical works

Agamben, Giorgio, wnguage and Death: the place of negativity, tr. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (1982), Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991.

Agamben, Giorgio, Enfance et Histoire, tr. Yves Hersant (1978), Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2000.

Austin, John L., How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Barthes, Roland, L’Obvie et l’obtus: essais critiques Ill, Paris: Seuil, 1982.

Calvino, Italo, The Literature Machine, tr. Patrick Creagh (1982), London: Picador, 1987.

Iser, Wolfgang & Sanford Budick (eds), wnguages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.

Krausz, Michael (ed.), The Interpretation of Music, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Mythologiques II, Le Cru et le cuit, Paris: Pion, 1964.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Mythologiques IV, L’homme nu, Paris: Pion 1971.

Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, Musicologie générale et sémiologie, Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1987.

Pautrot, Jean-Louis, w Musique oubliée, Paris: Droz, 1994.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (1933–35), Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958.

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Notes

1 Ali quotations from the text will henceforth be followed by the page number in the edition I have used: Faber and Faber paperback (1996).

2 Arthur Schopenhauer, La Musique et l’ineffable, quoted by J.-L. Pauchot, La Musique oubliée, 17.

3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for thePhilosophical Investigations’, 167.

4 William Wordsworth,Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintem Abbey’, 1.49. Romantic Period Verse, 179.

5 See Roland Barthes,Écoute’ in L’Obvie et l’obtus, 21730. Barthes dwells lengthily on the specifically ‘active’ ear lent to a verbal production; one particularly appropriate definition in terms of this essay is the following:l’écoute cesse d’être pure surveillance pour devenir création’, 220.

6 Examples abound, such as Stephan’s recollections of a family party shattered when he begins to play Mullery’s Epicycloid, Brodsky’s memories of married life, Miss Collins’s remembrance of a former visit to Sternberg Garden (320–27),) etc.

7 W. Wordsworth,Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’ (1805 version), quoted in Romantic Period Verse, 777.

8 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques IV, L’Homme Nu, 578–79.

9 1 am of course playing on the ambivalent compound noun structure around the preposition ‘de’ in French, which means the appeal is either sought after or given, as in the noun phrases ‘appel de secours’ ouappel de phare’. The expression ‘appel de sens’ cornes from J.-L. Pauchot, in La Musique oubliée: ‘Mais l’avantage, pour l’écriture, d’un tel gonflement signifiant au sein d’une œuvre musicale qui, strictement parlant, ne dit rien, réside en ceci qu'il constitue un appel de sens’ (18). Pauchot, however, does not deconstruct the noun compound.

10 See Italo Calvino’s essay,Cybemetics and Ghosts’ in The Literature Machine, 19.

11 Suzanne Langer, quoted by J.-J. Nattiez, Musicologie générale et sémiologie, 142.

12 Robert Browning,Abt Vogler’ XI, ls. 87–88. Collected Poetry, 246.

13 Theodore Adorno, ‘On the Social Situation of Music’, quoted by Hendrik Birus, ‘Adomo’s Negative Aesthetics’, in Languages of the Unsayable, 144.

14 l am thinking in particular of Kafka’s short piece,On Parables’ which provides a fascinating angle of approach to lshiguro’s novel. See The Great Wall of China and Other ShortWorks, 184.

15 See Giorgio Agamben, L’Enfance et la mort, for a penetrating analysis of how mute fable can expIain the transition of the human condition through silence into history. The final chapter, ‘Fable et histoire’ is of particular interest: ‘Ainsi, tandis qu'un enchantement réduit l’homme au silence, la nature enchantée prend la parole. En échangeant de la sorte silence et parole, histoire et nature, la fable prophétise son propre désenchantement dans l’histoire’ (153).

16 C. Lévi-Strauss develops this argument at length in both Le Cuit et le Cru and L’Homme Nu. The following quotation is a decisive illustration of his theory: ‘[. . .] tout se passe comme si la musique et la littérature s’étaient partagé l’héritage du mythe. En devenant moderne avec Frescobaldi puis Bach, la musique a recueilli sa forme, tandis que le roman, né à peu près en même temps, s’emparait des résidus défomalisés du mythe, et désormais émancipé des servitudes de la symétrie, trouvait le moyen de se produire comme récit libre’ (L’Homme nu, 583).

17 The incompatibility of music and truth is illustrated by Pierre Boulez, when he reworks de Schloezer’s demonstration of aesthetics without affirmation or negation in the performance of Mass: the same music, and presumably the same musical intensity, could accompany the singing of Non credo in the place of the Credo. Boulez continues, ‘La sémantique musicale ne saurait rendre compte de la négation ou de l’affirmation en tant que telles; en revanche elle transmet la détermination qui nous pousse à l’une ou à l’autre de ces professions de foi’ (Points de repère 474).

18 Roland Barthes, ‘Rasch’, L’Obvie et l’obtus. It is during his analysis of Schumann’s music, and the significance of the indication Rasch that Barthes suggests that the intermezzo is not a mere bridge device to another passage in the work, but on the contrary the work’s raison d’être, only ever an intermezzo, straining towards an unattainable elsewhere. ‘À la limite, il n'y a que des intermezzi: ce qui est interrompu est à son tour interrompu et cela recommence’ (L’Obvie et obtus, 266). I would suggest the same can be said of The Unconsoled.

19 Roger Sruton,Notes on the meaning of music’ in Michael Krausz, The Interpretation of Music, 201.

20 Ibid., 202

21 R. Browning,Abt Vogler’ IX, 65–6, 72, Collected Poems, 245.

22 lbid., V, 39–40, 245.

23 G. Agam ben, Language and Death, 69.

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Claire Pégon, « How to Have Done with Words: Virtuoso Performance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 27 | 2004, mis en ligne le 05 septembre 2025, consulté le 25 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16756 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14z5r

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Claire Pégon

Université Aix-Marseille 1

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