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Fugal Tempo in The Unconsoled

Le tempo de la fugue dans The Unconsoled
Dominique Vinet

Résumés

Cet article tente tout d’abord d’identifier les intersections de différents espaces-temps qui offrent au lecteur de fugitifs instants de révélation, puis les différentes versions du thème principal d’une fugue dont la musique à trois temps scande le jeu des métaphores interchangeables de triangles oedipiens qui ne cessent d’échanger leurs rôles en un contrepoint confondant que Ryder ne parvient pas à maîtriser. Les personnages de The Unconsoled peuvent être interprétés comme des figures de son désir inassouvi jouant une tragédie oedipienne sur toutes les portées de la partition, comme s’ils jouaient, sur une scène multiple ou pivotante, différentes versions simultanées de la même pièce pour un public condamné à manquer l’essentiel mais qui renoue les fils de l’histoire dans l’apparente stéréo-conscience du narrateur qui donne une mélodie au sens tandis que les instruments de l’orchestre jouent le thème principal ad libitum et guident le lecteur intrigué à travers le labyrinthe de la cité et les errements de Ryder.

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Texte intégral

  • 1 Garrett Rowlan,The waking dream’, The Café Irreal (Irreal [re]views).
  • 2 Ibid.

1Reading The Unconsoled is undoubtedly a surreal experience, like being inside a waking dream, as Garrett Rowland suggests.1 Yet, unlike Kafka’s depiction of paranoid semi-consciousness trapping the characters in the web of absurdity, or Doctor Watkins’s schizophrenic and mythological re-reading of a guilt-laden existential nihilism in Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell, or even Will Self’s alternative chimpanzee-like form of humanity in Great Apes, Ishiguro’s novel does not rely on a specular representation of reality that would allow the reader to measure the distance between ordinary-looking Ryder and himself. Ishiguro describes his novel as follows:We take a zig-zaggy path through things. We are just kind of blown around by chance, by opportunities that close. The Unconsoled was an attempt for me to try and put into a novel what I felt was the actual structure of life.’2

2As in every novel by Ishiguro, the intradiegetic narrator is unreliable but the psychotope reflecting the tragedy being played in his unconscious is not peopled with characters obeying the rules of classical narrative as is the case in The Remains of the Day or When We Were Orphans. Each character in The Unconsoled is a reflection of one or several others and ail play a part that is not limited to the identity they assume in the space-time where they meet and that they get in and out of seemingly at random.

3The object of this paper is first to identify the different space-time planes intersecting for an occasional moment of revelation, and next, the different versions of the main theme of a fugue and the three-four time of the music scanning the shifting metaphoric roles of the Oedipal trios which keep exchanging roles in a confusing counterpoint that Ryder fails to master. Characters in The Unconsoled can be identified as metaphors of his own thwarted desire playing an Oedipal tragedy on every stave of the score but they seem to be performing on different stages or on a revolving stage showing several different versions of a play at a time to an audience that will miss most of each but will catch up with meaning through the apparent stereo-consciousness of the narrator conducting the orchestra of understanding while the different instruments play the main theme ad libitum, leading the puzzled reader through the city’s labyrinthine landscape and Ryder’sslippery sense of place.’3

4Unlike Stevens’s journey to the West Country which was six days long and carefully mapped both in time and space, Ryder’s is limited to three days with a clearly defined deadline on Thursday night, when he is supposed to give a concert and relieve the musical-metaphysical burden of the city. Each day corresponds to one of the first three parts of the novel; then part four comes to break the chronological order and starts with Ryder realizing that he will be late for the concert, and he will never come to terms with his psychosis.

5Although Ryder refers to a strictly planned schedule that he remembers reading on the plane on the way to the city, but bas completely forgotten, time seems to start stretching out as soon as he arrives, on Tuesday afternoon. The reader is left to imagine what time of day it is since the hotel manager, Hoffman, keeps waking him up and rebuking him for sleeping when there is so much to be done. Night clearly appears to be of another quality than a time for good citizens to rest as traffic gets busy again after a lull at sunset, when Ryder and Boris meet Saunders on their way back from Ryder’s first meeting with Sophie on day one. Then Ryder notes that the shops and restaurants are open in the middle of the night as he is dragged out of bis bed by Hoffman after the death of Brodsky’s dog. Finally, to cut a long story short, the concert held on Thursday night, although curtailed by Brodsky’s scandalous attitude and Ryder’s inability to appear on stage, ends up at dawn with breakfast for ail but Ryder, who seems as translucent as a ghost to the waiters.

6Space and time share the same elastic quality. The Unconsoled abounds with magic places like the Hungarian Café which look like stage-settings allowing Ryder to shift from one space-time plane to another in defiance of conventional narrative rules. Space and time even seem to freeze when Ryder, Sophie and Boris stop for a coffee on the roadside on their way to the picture gallery: as they resume their journey, Ryder can spot the car that they had been following, still hardly a few hundred yards ahead of them as if their escape into the space-time of the café had lasted only a moment in the space-time of the journey. This prevents the mimetic effect necessary to identification from working, so that the expectant reader experiences frustration. Day and night, past and present, country and town seem to overlap and generate a sense of bewilderment both for Ryder and the reader. Ryder keeps realizing that he will be late for his commitments while allowing himself to stray away, and the reader, eager for understanding, who wishes to know more about his past and connexions with the present, is amazed—literally trapped in a mazeat the intrusion of figures shaping out of Ryder’s memorySaunders, Fiona Roberts—, dis-located, belonging to his English past and yet present in a supposedly unknown town where Ryder seems to have been living ail the time, as if a schizophrenic double of himself had been playing havoc with his semi-conscious self through anagnoresis. The ghost plotsBrodsky’s plight, the Hoffman family tragedysuggest a circular narrative which cannot develop in time and leaves the reader uncertain whether the main plot will end up anywhere.

  • 4 Susie Mackenzie,Between two worlds’, The Guardian, 25/03/2000.
  • 5 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 109.
  • 6 Burhan Tufail’s interview with Kazuo Ishiguro for Amazon.com (http://amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/fe (...)

7As Suzie Mackenzie says, this may be a re-enactment of Ishiguro’s own experience: ‘East and west; assimilated and displaced; reality and imagination; perception and projection. As [Ishiguro] says himself, it is not easy to disentangle any of these couplings. [. . .] For Ishiguro, along with Kafka, is the great bureaucratie fabulist of anxiety. Anxiety is the imaginative architecture, and it is anxiety that he imparts to his reader.’4 This quality of the narrative, always on the verge of premature discharge, of short-circuit, gives its momentum to The Unconsoled and as Peter Brooks puts it,[t]he reader experiences the fearthe excitationof the improper end, which is symmetrical tobut far more immediate and present than—the fear of endlessness.’5 There seems to be no truth in The Unconsoled since the end brings no recognition, but the re-assertion of self-delusion—which is what Ishiguro’s literary work is abouttogether with the writer’s tendency to remain in limited contral of the narrative:Writing through fictional characters you can find yourself moving towards some particular theme or territory that might be slightly dangerous for yourself. If you plan too much, you'll plan those disturbing moments out.’6

  • 7 Sophie: ‘Time is getting on’ (37); Brodsky: ‘My mind, it’s full of the future. And sometimes full o (...)
  • 8 Dominique Vinet, ‘Le deuil du Surmoi’, in Lectures d’une œuvre, The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishig (...)

8In spite of numerous references to sunset and sunrise, a rather vague consciousness of the elapsing of time,7 of the alternation of morning, afternoon and night, and the repeated allusions to a crowded time-table, it clearly appears that timing is to be measured by other units than days and hours. The switch from light to darkness and back proves a more reliable standard, in connection with spaceinside/outside, private/public places, the Hungarian Café/the Concert Hall, the hotel/Sophie’s home, etc.since intervals of gloom seem to shape the different space-time planes that he wanderswonders?across, just like the gloomy corridor reserved for the servants in the back of Darlington Hall figured the subconscious in what I called Stevens’s psychotope in a previous paper.8 In this connection, Ryder’s agenda is a counterpoint to Stevens’s staff plan. Both remain secret and unfulfilled, and metaphorize their inability to cope with time as characters inscribed in a story.

  • 9 Sheng-mei Ma,Kazuo Ishiguro’s Persistent Dream for Postethnicity’, Post ldentity 2.1, winter 1999 (...)

9The ‘uneasy Ryder—writer?—breaks Genette’s narrative rules and occasionally switches into and out of the narrative, now an extradiegetic narrator telling the story of Gustav and Sophie (13–14), now a strangely unconcerned intradiegetic one telling of journalists who talk disparagingly about him as if he were not present, then metadiegetically projecting his probe-like consciousness into Miss Collins’s house and reporting about her private talk with Stephan Hoffman. Ryder is always given a chance to make a choice and open the door of the real but whenever he gets to the place where he was expected, nobody seems to wonder at his presence, even when he attends a banquet in his dressing-gown which hangs opendisplaying the entire naked front of [his] body’ (143). Time then is annihilated, and thecorpses of timepieces no longer tell the time; they haunt it. Each of Ishiguro’s protagonists is likewise locked in the prison-house of memory, the web of which it constitutes and arrests the Self',9 trapped in the delusion of grandeur or simply existence.

  • 10 Barbara Ohno,Who is The Unconsoled? A profile of novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’, Mars Hill Review 5, Su (...)

10The dark corridors or halls or cabinets, tropes indicating a descent into the unconscious of the narrator, act as valves letting Ryder out of one level of narrative existence into another in an apparently random way. Some passages involve stepping up or down from one space-time plane to another, from one form of narrative existence to another. Ishiguro confessed to Barbara Ohno that[The Unconsoled is] more like a forest that has many possible choices at any given moment, as opposed to a certain determined path in life that is to be followed. Therefore, the notion of making correct or incorrect choices is Jess defined and harder to assume.’10

  • 11 He only admits having been influenced by the preface to Swann’s Way. He could never get beyond the (...)
  • 12 Interview of Ishiguro conducted by Nermeen Shaikh for AsiaSource, http://www.asiasource.org/news/sp (...)

11Obviously Ryder is given no realistic existence as character, even as narrator, and can be reduced to a narrative construction, a stereotype performing a stereo­ existence made up of what Ishiguro callsthe garbage and ephemera in people’s heads.’ Ishiguro, who acknowledges a Proustian influence,11 adds in the same interview:It was a real revelation that [. . .] in fact you can actually mimic the fluidity of the mind, particularly when it’s remembering, and you can just have a fragment of a scene that dovetails into a fragment from another moment that’s 30 years separated from it, and then you kind of move back into another scene, and you can have a larger scene, and then it would just go off on a tangent, before it’s finished, into something else.’12

  • 13 Paul Yeyret, ‘Faux départs et vrais vertiges’, Ebc 22, PU de Montpellier, 2002.

12The Unconsoled, as Paul Veyret puts it, certainly stages the return of the repressed13 and the setting of the drama is the mindscape of the narrator as it were in a state of fugue, which is a dissociative disorder, a syndrome in which an individual experiences a disruption in consciousness, memory, and/or identity. It is usually triggered by traumatic and stressful events, such as wartime battle, sexual abuse, accidents, earthquakes, or physical violence; yet fugue states may not occur immediately after the trauma.

13Ryder broadly fits the description. The original trauma is soberly alluded to in a very Ishigurian flashback induced by his coming across the wreck of his father’s car in a totally inadequate place. We learn about repeated rows between his parents, and his inability as a child to live up to his parents’ expectations, but there may be more to it than is said. The original trauma is typically reproduced in a fantasy pantomime by characters metaphorizing his childhood fears: they may be the fear of abandonmentBoris, the son abandoned by Sophie in chapter 4, by his father Ryder in another space-time, but who has himself abandoned his surrogate son, the football-player, Number 9, in their old fiat. It may also be the fear of inadequacyStephan who keeps dreading that he might never be able to meet his mother’s desire and who seems to be forever mislead by his father, Hoffman, himself unable to fulfil his wife’s desire, yet The Unconsoled cannot be reduced to the repetitive enactment of fantasies or the paradoxical reality of a dream-like world, where traumatic events are reproduced by a set of Russian dolls.

14The state of fugue that Ryder experiences deprives him of any clear-cut identity, which allows him to escape from the one he has assumed for some time and take on a new one while putting the blame on the closest character at hand, Sophie, the townspeople at the cemetery, Brodsky, Hoffman, etc, to refocus on his primordial mission that is to rescue the townspeople from chaos, and play in concert in the presence of his parents—an early version of Banks’ obsession in When We Were Orphans. Ryder the saviour drifts into Ryder the unworthy father then Ryder the undeserving son. Either he dozes off or simply loses interest in what is going on around, and lets down characters who most need himSophie, Boris, Gustavas he himself has been let down.

  • 14 lb Gow,A Book of Sadness and Forgetting’.

15The reader’s impression is that Ryder’s forgetfulness and general unconcern for what appears to be the main motif of the novel, his helplessness as a father and husband, is that of premature discharge, as Peter Brooks puts it, and we forever feel as if important things happen just outside our field of vision, so that we are only mildly surprised when minor characters congratulate Ryder for forceful declarations that he is supposed to have made at the moment when we had switched with him to another space-time plane after he had failed to honour his commitments. Strangely enough, any success that he is reported to have achieved seems to have occurred behind the scenes or, as Ib Gow notes, it seems thatcharacters and places exist only when the spotlight is on them; when they are in darkness they are in a limbo of non­ existence. The single consciousness which unites these characters is not Ryder the character, but Ryder the narrator.’14

16Darkness can also be interpreted as silence or a change in pitch, a transition to the next theme or set of variations in a fugue. It is like music played in the background, inaudible yet subliminally perceptible, as if the narrative voice sustaining the melody switched from one instrument to another either for a repetition of the motif or for a catch-up effect on the dominant allowing a new character­ instrument to develop the motif.

17Fugue is at the heart of the novel, not only as a dissociative disorder but also as a structural device allowing Ishiguro to bridge the gap between his early dream of becoming a musician and the present experience of writing. A fugue always starts with the subject played by the first voice, then by a second voice in another musical mode. Typically, the first voice enters on the tonic or dominant note of the fugue’s key, and the other voices answer on the dominant or tonic respectively. This is called an introduction. The fugue then enters into an exposition where the subject is continuously played in various contrapuntal modes, inversions, retrogrades or occasional bridges—when the main subject is not heard—and the final stage is the ‘recapitulation’ where the subject is repeated in the manner it was introduced.

18The first theme is Ryder’s arrival in the city where he introduces himself as a star, only slightly surprised at not being welcomed as such. The first answer comes with Gustav the porter, an avatar of Stevens the butler, who stubbornly carries heavy suitcases as one would carry the burden of past sins, and finds pride and solace in the strict compliance with rules of his own making, rambling about the art of being a porter. The irony of the second motif is that, as a stereotype, Gustav is a metaphor for the main theme of self-delusion, who will re-appear like a Shakespearean ghost, to show Ryder the way to where he belongshis hotel room, Sophie’shis ex-(?) wife—, then the way to the concert hall. Gustav also stands as a metaphor for incommunicabilitywith his daughter, and acts as bass continuo sounding in the background of the melody played by Ryder. Ishiguro seems to start his novel as a learner will be given the bass written on the score to write a fugue from.

19The double main theme of incommunicability and self-delusion sketched with the character of Gustav splits into several sub-themes: quibbling about trivial matters, the cult of personality turning the heroes of the day into lame ducks, the nostalgia of an overwhelming past, the myth of usefulness, etc.

20Chapter one of the book, corresponds to the introduction of the themes and their different variations, or motifs, all of which are introduced in the form of a metalepsis, a second-degree narrative with Ryder acting as extradiegetic narrator. The second theme is family relationships. Ryder starts with a first motif, Gustav’s plight, involving a vertical relationshipGrand-father, mother, sonmatching the music played in the background by Brodsky: Mullary’s Verticality. No sooner has Ryder started to doze off in his room which happens to be the very room he had when he was a child at his aunt’s, than the second motif is introduced, Ryder’s recollection of a row breaking out on the ground-floor below his room and the tom patch in the mat where he would play with his plastic soldiers and which suddenly appeared as an opportunity for play, the fantastical transfer of the trauma onto the tom patch in the mat clearly metaphorised as a crypt:the blemish that had always threatened to undermine my imaginary world could in fact be incorporated into it’ (16).

21The decentred counterpoint of the blemish, the original trauma, later echoed by Brodsky’s wound and Boris’s broken fetish Number 9, is brought in at a the leisurely pace of apparently harmless childhood memory slowly corning up for air, and ends up in silence with Ryder going to sleep, a theme which is further developed when discovering his parents’ old wreck of a car, a blemish in the art gallery’s garden that he holdsin a virtual embrace’ (262), but kicks to keep face as people are staring; then he says after squeezing in:I allowed my eyes to close for a moment’ (263).

22As he drifts off into reminiscence, tension becomes palpable in the hyperbolic style of the story of the old lady who was selling a second-hand bicycle and was wrongly persuaded that his was an exemplary family, a secondary motif which is echoed in the last part when Brodsky’s wooden leg is caught in his bicycle pedals and must be sawn off, echoing the maimed football player that is central to Boris’s relation to his father: ‘I had become convinced that at any second some sign, perhaps even some smell, would cause the old woman to realise the enormity of her error, and I had watched with dread for the moment she would suddenly freeze in horror before us’ (264).

23Chapter two presents the second theme, an œdipal tragedy, with an acceleration of the tempo. Hoffman wakes him up from his siesta for a seemingly trivial reason: having a look at his wife’s collection of press cuttings, snapshots of Ryder’s life, a metaphor for an ossified real that Ryder cannot grasp. The first motif is a variation from both Ryder’s collection of soldiers and Boris’s collection of football players, with Brodsky resuming the bass continuo in the background and Hoffman reminding Ryder of the fonctions he is to perform and adding one on his agenda, which metaphorically sounds just as essential since he asks for a signal from Ryder when he is ready to examine the press cuttings. The signal obviously refers to the conductor’s signal for the orchestra to start. Soon afterwards, Stephan Hoffman introduces himself,an anxious adolescent’ (25) and insists on Ryder’s listening to him rehearsing, which raises him to a counter-figure of the pianist.

24The second motif is presented in chapter three where Ryder meets Sophie at the Hungarian Café and she introduces him to Boris asa special friend’ (32) while anamnesia sparks off recollection:Sophie’s face had come to seem more familiar to me’ (34) and Ryder recalls an argument he had had with her on the phone about a week earlier and the only reproach he can remember is that she livesin such a small world’ (35). Just as Stephan seems eager to show his achievements to his father or a relevant father figure that could stand as an Ego Ideal, Boris seeks acknowledgement by Ryder of the progress he has made in staving off his childhood fear of falling from the swing in the park, a variant of Stephan’s fear of disappointing his parents and Brodky’s fear of disappointing Miss Collins.

25We can observe that two oedipal trios are now playing in the fugue, Ryder/Sophie/Boris and Hoffman/Christine/Stephan with Brodsky playing a solitary accompaniment to the main themes. Night falls on the first movement with Sophie wandering off Ryder’s way and leaving him alone with Boris. The main themes are then silenced and Ryder recalls Boris’s table football game and Number nine’s tendency to forget about his team, metaphorising Ryder’s inclination to let down his nearest and supposedly dearest. The third motif is still incompletely introduced and will be completed with the appearance of Miss Collins as Brodsky’s ex-wife and Ryder following metadiegetically Stephan Hoffman’s conversation with her about Brodsky. The last element of the trio, the child, is missing, but it will soon appear in the shape of Brodsky’s dog, Bruno—definitely nota dog’s name—, who will be ‘swiftly’ treated as a hero by a citizen of the town suggesting that a statue should be erected in his honouran echo of the Sattler Monument and the short-lived glory experienced by Christoff, Kanitz, and Brodsky by which yesterday’s hero is today’s foe.

26More variations on the different themes and motifs will appear in the second part of the fugue, the development. Each of the characters is doubled by avatars performing the fonctions of what appears more clearly as myths, allegories of the many-sided forms of guilt and overwhelming responsibilities leaving man, not only Ryder, unconsoled.

  • 15 Sheng-mei Ma,Kazuo Ishiguro’s Persistent Dream for Postethnicity: Performance in Whiteface’, op. (...)

27Sheng-mei Ma declares thatStevens and Ryder [. . .] come to engage in performances for the sole reason that their lives are but a series of public fonctions; they perform in order not to live, not to experience the passion and the pain of any human relationship.’15 The fonction of the characters from Ryder’s past suddenly interfering in the narrative to remind him of his real self, of his unreliability both as character and narrator is similar to the variants in the fugue, offering another approach to the main theme, Ryder repeating in the main narrative the motif of deception and self-deception of the analepses just like Brodsky, his alter ego, is reminded by Miss Collins of his ineptitude. The motifs mingle to blur the very narrative existence of Ryder, so that he finds himself speechless when time is up for him to disclose his identity to the town’s gossips; even his appearance has changed: ‘I saw that my face had become bright red and squashed into pig-like features’ (240), and he collapses on the sofa before hurrying out where he immediately recovers some form of existence in a new space-time plane.

28The tempo accelerates every time Ryder becomes aware that he will be unable to perform his compulsive duties and he flees—the meaning of fugueonly to meet the other characters in a stretto movement where voices, i.e. new characters, enter at a short distance from each other, one voice starting the theme before the last one has finished thus preventing Ryder from fulfilling any public engagement.

29The theme of compulsive unreliability is repeated ad libitum, Ryder failing to meet his commitments, or only just managing to, on the condition that there should be no contact and he should be caught unawares, incommunicability being the only safe way to avoid the splitting of Ryder’s schizophrenic ego. That is the rule with Gustav and Sophie as well as Brodsky and Miss Collins:such shows of indifference had still been the principal feature of any contact between them’, Ryder notes (321). That is how he finally plays music for the burial of Brodsky’s dog while he thinks he has been practising the piano in the middle of nowhere, and, declining to be present, he listens to Stephan playing behind a closed door.

30The theme of incommunicability is also repeated three times: first at the Countess’s party, where Bruno is announced dead, next in the cemetery, where he has just been buried and last at the restaurant where Christoff has brought Ryder. The extraordinary inconsistency of the topics developed by secondary characters, and the Swiftian arguments turning to rows, are reverberated in the vacuity of Ryder’s function while a hectic tempo suddenly stops short as Ryder drifts off and the main theme tweets again after the clatter of the full orchestra.

31The increasingly complex construction of the fugue superimposes variations on the motif of abandonment—Ryder deserting Sophie, Miss Collins deserting Brodsky, Mrs Hoffman deserting Stephan, Sophie deserting Borisdoubled by the extradiegetic story of Saunders’s father walking off from his family, and Kanitz’s sudden decision to live like a hermit away from his family but in the same street, an estrangement which is an echo of Ryder’s situation.

32Just as the canon form of superimposed variations creates an echo which brings home the theme of abandonment, contrapuncti develop the theme of self­ deception turned upside down. Ryder’s bold self-assertion is inverted in Stephan’s self-abasement and Brodsky’s self-destruction. His fonction as paragon of musical taste is mirrored in a mock version of the speech he is supposed to deliver in the final scene by Christoff, the former saviour putto shame, about whom the journalist Karl Pedersen says:He and everything he has come to represent must now be put away in some dark corner of our history’ (100)a dear indication of the necessary repression of harmful memories, either individual or historical.

  • 16 Ibid, 109.

33Inversion also affects Ryder’s relation with Sophie since Rosa Klenner, Christoff’s greedy wife, an avatar of Christine Hoffman and a metaphor for unfulfilled desire, is preparing to leave him, as Miss Collins did Brodsky, while Sophie is trying to restore Ryder into his fonctions as husband and father. Both women embody the risk of social failure for men who appear as instruments of the women’s desire, a desire that Ryder tries to escape by nurturing his anger against Sophie. Sexual relations between Ryder and Sophie are kept out of the field of desire and the motif is dearly inverted in the scene in which Brodsky daims in crude terms that he wants to make love to Miss Collins once more before he dies. The desire of the text, which is the desire for the text as Peter Brooks daims, then rests entirely in the middle, the development following the exposition in the fugue, which, Brooks says concerning the text,is the place of repetitions, oscillating between blindness and recognition, between origin and ending. Repetition toward recognition constitutes the truth of the narrative text.’16

  • 17 Zinck, Pascal, L’Art de laji1gue (l’aliénation dans l’œuvre de Kazuo lshiguro), thèse de doctorat, (...)

34Sustained escapism, rerouting and forgetfulness, palingenetic transitions, structure a chorus of voices into the signifier of the dysfunctional oedipal relation and the fear of castration in the three-four movement of the development. The overall theme of the novel is never fully developed through the main character with the slow coming out of the sense of waste and indignity that Stevens experiences in The Remains of the Day. There is no Freudian screen memory to be lifted off before the truth breaks out and Ryder sheds his messianic uniform to refurbish his outer self, to go by Winnicot’s standards. In The Unconsoled, the main theme develops from the very structure of the fugue, which strikes a chord with the listeners/readers. The asymptotic quality of the fugue-like novel, as Pascal Zinck notes in his doctoral thesis,17 the overlapping of motifs, the contrapuntal compound of stories, seething through different levels of consciousness converge to one half-uttered message: time is up for the symbolic murder of the father/narrator, which also entails the death of the narrative that Ryder will perform by escaping the oedipal tragedy he has been momentarily caught in.

35The oedipal triangle is constantly repeated and distorted: the first instance is that of Ryder, Sophie and Boris as mentioned before. Ryder fails to play the role of depositary of the law and role mode) for his son Boris. His legitimacy as father is even questioned by Sophie who denies him fatherhood by telling him ‘He is not your own. Whatever you say, it makes a difference. You'll never feel towards him as a real father,’ (95) Then Ryder recalls a time when Boris was six or seven and he had managed to draw a supermana reference to the father as ego idealonly to scribble it unrecognizable when he found it imperfectthe symbolic murder of the father. Boris finally seems to be assuming the father’s protective role towards his motherand his father when he recurrently fantasizes about defending himwhile Sophie tries to protect her own father with a coat when she should be in charge of her son. So the son becomes the father, Sophie plays mummies to Gustav and the father figure is reduced to the role of the son.

  • 18 Stephan keeps worrying about the music his mother will like best and his concern is echoed in Ryder (...)
  • 19 The fantasy of the ox crosses his mind again page 383.
  • 20 Hoffman knows, like Christoff, that some day his wife will leave him.

36The second dysfunctional triangle is the Hoffman family in which the father does his best to avoid Stephan’s meeting the desire of his mother Christine18 who, like Sophie, does not acknowledge her husband as paterfamilias, while Stephan endeavours to convince Miss Collins to meet Brodsky, thus unwillingly opposing his father’s subconscious desire to get the old conductor to re-enact his own failure as a musician. Soon after Bruno’s death, Hoffman shows some excitement as he suddenly thinks of an ox to replace Brodsky’s dog.19 This is clearly an allusion to the castration of the one that he pretends to restore to his former position but secretly keeps at bay, and it parallels the eviction of his own son from the concert, metaphorising the castration of the son by the father. The deficiencies of the father figure lead to the destruction of the family cell20 after his deceptive nature has been discovered by Christine and played down by Hoffman as: ‘a misunderstanding of catastrophically cruel proportions.’ (347) The death of desire dissolves into psychosis expressed by Christine who has just told Ryder about her usual dream: ‘As soon as the day starts, this other thing, this force, it comes and takes over [. . .]. A sort of illness I have. [. . .] Perhaps we start to die emotionally too’ (416–17).

37The third dysfunctional triangle is that of Brodsky and Miss Collins in which the third element is missing. The son has been replaced by a dog who symbolically dies shortly after Ryder’s arrival as if to leave room for Ryder to play the protective son with the father figure presented as a drunkard painfully practising his scales when Ryder arrives at the hotel. The would-be mother stands as a counterpoint to the unpredictable Christine Hoffman: she has taken the measure of her husband’s fallibility and rejected desire. She now stands as the only clear-sighted character in the novel, the one who knows that desire is dead and appears as an analyst to Ryder: ‘for a brief moment the thought of reclining on one of her couches, far from the pressures of life, seemed peculiarly enticing’ (147). She is the one who knows, who is strong enough to resist deception and self-deception at the cost of happiness and motherhood.

38The skilful treble piece articulating the three oedipal triangles in the development enhances the unfulfilled desire of extremely demanding, castrating women who stand for representations of the only one that will stay in the crypt that Ryder has built for her: his mother whose desire is never clearly expressed by Ryder but surfaces occasionally, for instance when he finally meets Miss Stratmann in her—dark—office where she confronts him with the fantasy he has been nurturing of his parents coming to listen to him, and he complainsl’m at the height of my powers now. How much longer am I supposed to go on travelling like this?’ (512) Yet self-deception wins over and he feels fantasy is the only narrow escape: ‘It was my duty to perform on this evening at least to my usual standards. To do anything Jess—I suddenly sensed this stronglywould be to open some strange door through which I could hurtle into a dark, unknown space.’ (518)

39Oneiric realism reveals estrangement in a magical process by which space­ time planes intersect, characters hum the tune of self-delusion and dance to the music of time on a carefully written score, with the narrator riding rather than conducting the contrapuntal fugue, himself in a state of fugue until the double bar of the wall across the street marks the end of the development.

40The fugue ends with a coda, a concluding segment the fonction of which is modulatory, i.e. a return to the tonality of the introduction, with each major theme played again in a major key, the three pianists now at last in concert for a concluding narrative, with the background of the doxa staging a soporific poet droning along before a nervous audience, eager for conformism. The fugue as palindrome reflects the number of Ryder’s hotel room, 343. The revolving effect of the fugue now takes its toll and the young maestro only concerned with his parents’ opinion makes a success with the audience, while the old one, Brodsky, has his swan-song before he collapses, and Ryder, the saviour, never manages to reach the stage. He finally finds his way out but only to go adrift once more, forever self-assured, and the original state of the narrative is restored with Ryder, the self-deluded conductor, riding away in a streetcar called desire.

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Bibliographie

Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot, Cambridge (Mass): Harvard University Press, 1998 [1984].

Gow, lb, ‘A Book of Sadness and Forgetting’.

Ma, Sheng-mei, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s Persistent Dream for Postethnicity’, Post ldentity 2.1, Winter 1999.

Mackenzie, Susie,Between two worlds’, The Guardian, 25/03/2000.

0’Dea, Gregory, http://www.utc.edu/~engldept/booker/ishigurohtm

Ohno, Barbara, ‘Who is The Unconsoled? A profile of novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’, Mars Hill Review 5, Summer 1996, 138.

Rowlan, Garrett, ‘The waking dream’, The Café Irreal (Irreal [re]views).

Shaikh, Nermeen, Interview of Ishiguro conducted for AsiaSource,

Tufail, Burhan, Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro for Amazon.com,

Veyret, Paul, ‘Faux départs et vrais vertiges’, Études britanniques contemporaines 22, PU de Montpellier, 2002.

Vinet, Dominique, ‘Le deuil du Surmoi’, in lectures d’une œuvre The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Jshiguro, François Gallix ed., Paris: Éditions du Temps, 1999.

Zinck, Pascal, l’Art de la fugue (l’aliénation dans l’œuvre de Kazuo Ishiguro), thèse de doctorat, Université Paris IV, 2003.

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Notes

1 Garrett Rowlan,The waking dream’, The Café Irreal (Irreal [re]views).

2 Ibid.

3 Adapted from Dr Gregory O'Dea, http://www.utc.edu/~engldept/booker/ishiguro.htm.

4 Susie Mackenzie,Between two worlds’, The Guardian, 25/03/2000.

5 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 109.

6 Burhan Tufail’s interview with Kazuo Ishiguro for Amazon.com (http://amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/32873/026–45728l3-l 782837).

7 Sophie: ‘Time is getting on’ (37); Brodsky: ‘My mind, it’s full of the future. And sometimes full of the past’ (362); Miss Collins:Perhaps I wasn’t so aware of the speed at which time went by’ (276). Mentions of the sense of passing time are numerous but always express confusion and nostalgia for time lost and the impossibility to step back.

8 Dominique Vinet, ‘Le deuil du Surmoi’, in Lectures d’une œuvre, The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (François Gallix ed.), Paris: Éditions du Temps, 1999. The psychotope is a metaphoric topos emulating the Freudian schemas. The setting can hereby be imagined as a metaphoric place where libido, awareness, the law can become manifest to the careful reader and induce predictivity.

9 Sheng-mei Ma,Kazuo Ishiguro’s Persistent Dream for Postethnicity’, Post ldentity 2.1, winter 1999, (http://liberalarts-udmercy-edu/pi/Issue2l .htm).

10 Barbara Ohno,Who is The Unconsoled? A profile of novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’, Mars Hill Review 5, Summer 1996, 138.(http://www.marshillform.org/)

11 He only admits having been influenced by the preface to Swann’s Way. He could never get beyond the first volume and says he found most of it dull.

12 Interview of Ishiguro conducted by Nermeen Shaikh for AsiaSource, http://www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/ishiguro.cfm.

13 Paul Yeyret, ‘Faux départs et vrais vertiges’, Ebc 22, PU de Montpellier, 2002.

14 lb Gow,A Book of Sadness and Forgetting’.

15 Sheng-mei Ma,Kazuo Ishiguro’s Persistent Dream for Postethnicity: Performance in Whiteface’, op. cit.

16 Ibid, 109.

17 Zinck, Pascal, L’Art de laji1gue (l’aliénation dans l’œuvre de Kazuo lshiguro), thèse de doctorat, Paris, 2003.

18 Stephan keeps worrying about the music his mother will like best and his concern is echoed in Ryder’s recollection of his mother’s touchiness:Asbestos and Fibre. The more I thought about it, the more some recollection seemed to come back to me of my mother once expressing her irritation specifically with this composition’ (344).

19 The fantasy of the ox crosses his mind again page 383.

20 Hoffman knows, like Christoff, that some day his wife will leave him.

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Référence électronique

Dominique Vinet, « Fugal Tempo in The Unconsoled »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 27 | 2004, mis en ligne le 10 septembre 2025, consulté le 20 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16785 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14z5t

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Dominique Vinet

Université Montesquieu-Bordeaux 4

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