Caressing the wound: modalities of trauma in Kazuo Ishiguro's<i>The Unconsoled</i>

At center stage in Kazuo Ishiguro's work is the figure of the nonactor: a character type that confronts us time and again with scenarios in which action is devalued. This essay shows that, despite finding themselves in situations that mandate action, Ishiguro's characters opt instead for risk-averse and mechanical-like behaviors that are antonymous to change. This, however, is not a solely aesthetic phenomenon, and the essay examines the figure of the nonactor in Ishiguro's novels as part of a broader turn toward nonaction. It does so by considering this figure in relation to a distinctly twentieth-century context within which, as Hannah Arendt has it, human action came to be seen as more dangerous than ever before. Ishiguro's nonactors can be seen as the legacy, but also as the mutations, of this understanding in our own era and in the contemporary novel. This legacy, the essay demonstrates, reveals an underexamined aspect of the neoliberal mind-set that dominates the post–Cold War world. Rather than promote the worthiness of individual, self-serving action, Ishiguro's novels bring to the forefront something different though no less pernicious: a wholescale devaluation of the individual's capacity to act.

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The Extremities of Literature: Traumatic Memory in Two Novels by Kazuo Ishiguro

Trimarco

2023

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Drawing on Michel Foucault’s description of literature as being from the outside, Catherine Malabou explains that only literature can give us access to the inconceivable space occupied by traumatic experiences. How a literary text opens such a space, one on the extremity of experience and literature itself, involves an understanding of trauma as a neurobiological wound. In this essay I will argue that what Malabou refers to as neuro-literature and her plastic reading of texts provide useful additions to current critical approaches to two of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels that address traumatic memories. Literary critics have approached the theme of traumatic memory in Ishiguro’s work from psychological positionalities. Using psychology, like neurobiology, already suggests that a literary work can give us access to traumatic experiences. A fuller understanding of traumatic memories as manifested by Ishiguro’s writing is here viewed through the lens of neurobiology which considers the plasticity of the brain and a plastic reading of these literary texts. This paper explores two narratives driven by traumatic memories: Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and When We Were Orphans (2000), both of which address the long-term effects brought on by the trauma of war and loss.

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Caressing the wound: modalities of trauma in Kazuo Ishiguro'sThe Unconsoled

Cited by 3 publications

References 3 publications

Ryder Meets Bourriaud. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and the Contradictions of “Creative Capitalism”

Ryder Meets Bourriaud. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and the Contradictions of “Creative Capitalism”

Kazuo Ishiguro's Nonactors

The Extremities of Literature: Traumatic Memory in Two Novels by Kazuo Ishiguro

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