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I do not side with James Wood, who once wrote that Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 novel The Unconsoled “invented its own category of badness,” but it definitely is a strange book. It has frequently been compared to a dream, and that is, indeed, what it most resembles. As in dreams, the protagonist suddenly “remembers” convenient bits of information that help move things along. As in dreams, the protagonist seems to be both the center of and nothing but an observer in the world he inhabits. The spatial relationship of objects is in constant disarray. Strange logic prevails throughout the book. At one point the protagonist struggles to articulate just a single word at a critical juncture (we’ve all had that dream, haven’t we?). He addresses a crowd in his underwear.
But I’m not very interested in reading The Unconsoled as a dream. I’m not precisely sure how to read it (that will have to wait for another day), but viewing it as a dream would probably be among the less interesting readings of this book. At any rate, what I’d like to talk about here is not what is being enacted in these pages but the strange dynamics of the book’s plot.
The Unconsoled has an extremely–an extremely–digressive plot. In fact, the plot is so digressive that it would not be wrong to describe the book as nothing more than the continued repetition of delayed gratification. To put it plainly, the protagonist never finishes a single thing he sets out to do. Each time Ishiguro starts to lead us down the garden path of plot, the protagonist is interrupted and pulled off into something else. And this keeps happening, again, and again, and again, for over 500 pages. This is the single most salient aspect of The Unconsoled’s architecture: continual sequestration. It is what gives the book its highly atypical form, its odd feel of impatience and elliptical circularity.
This permanent digressiveness makes for a strange kind of plot. Because the protagonist is so dependably interrupted by things that feel both very artificial and very random, the bulk of the plot feels unnecessary. It’s like when a cartoon character suddenly reaches off-screen to grab a rocket to shoot at his friend. Why not a ray gun instead? Why not an anvil to drop on his head? It would be just as good, and, within the confines of a cartoon, just as believable. This is the same as in The Unconsoled. Why interrupt the protagonist now for this? Why not for interrupt him for that instead? Or: why not have interrupted him for this 50 pages back? There’s no good answer to any of these questions, because there’s very little reason why anything in this book needs to happen in the order or manner that it does.
It’s because nothing in The Unconsoled feels particularly necessary, nor particularly more correct than a host of alternatives that might have easily been chosen, that I titled this post the annihilation of plot. Plot as you typically tend to think of it in the novel simply does not exist in The Unconsoled. The book feels perfectly arbitrary, as though I could have skipped 100 pages right in the middle of it and more or less had as worthwhile an experience of the book’s plot as if I had read those 100 pages.
I’m not quite sure how I feel about this at the moment. It’s clear that this is what makes The Unconsoled such a strange book, although I’m not sure if this makes The Unconsoled a strangely good or a strangely bad book.
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I have Unconsoled sitting in my TBR pile. Your review has just moved it up the list. I’m very curios to find out what the strangeness is all about. Thanks,
Personally, The Unconsoled was my introduction to Ishiguro’s works and it raptured and captured my imagination at once. I think I read it at the right time of my life though; I needed a book like it so it felt “right” that it felt so wrong. I just think that your appreciation of the novel will largely depend on your capacity for achieving an essential solitude of mind, and on your ability to enjoy being simultaneously bored and frustrated with no visible pay-off. Endurance is also a major aspect. I wrote a review for the book a year or so ago here http://insiteronline.com/culture/books/the-unconsoled-kazuo-ishiguro/
But you’ve got to admit that “invented its own category of badness” is pretty funny….
Henceforth there will be books we’ll want to read because we have been reading Scott’s criticism. Literary criticism isn’t exactly the sexiest things going, but it can get hot. It’s not just recommendation, praise and/or judgment. It’s a Janus-faced activity, looking outward at the flow of publications,and inward at the unstable forces at work in all subjective response to fiction. We are not always privy to this double vision, but it occurs often enough on this site to be considered the bedrock of everything happening here, day in and day out — all the news and banter that on other blogs is all you get.
So yes,me too, I’ll be reading The Unconsoled. Because the post above is a stroke of the sword, a vertible hatchet-job on the novel, and it’s about as violent a judgment as anyone could possibly write. Such an occurence, once uncovered and refined, is as strong a motivating force for embarking on a reading of the condemned object as any kind of praise.
This post was published in the weeks leading up to the group read of The Last Samurai. I was directed to it in haphazard fashion, just before or just after reading the condemnation of Franzen in a post called “On Taste and Lists and The Corrections.” It was all about literary criticism and aesthetic judgment. I highly recommend it — it was posted on 19 October 2009. Scott writes of his path or way out of the trap of the rush of pleasure and satisfaction we sometimes get out of a first reading of a novel. Although this rush is rare, and precious, it has to be resisted. You need a little perspective on the book and on yourself. You have to take take a deep breath, and remind yourself that this has happened before with other books and other authors, perhaps better than this one. In order to judge the book you’re reading, and your reactions to it, you have to be sober; you have to fall out of love with the book, you have to strangle your feelings and not be afraid of being hard and cold. After this work at a distance from the original enthusiastic reading, the true work of criticism can begin. In October 2009, it issued in a categorical rejection of Franzen’s THE CORRECTIONS, and in a rectification of all the emotional stuff around the first reading.
I find this description forthright and Samurai-like. It’s about learning, in time, patiently and implacably, to wield the sword of judgment. It’s a practice of the critical self in gestation. We’re in the presence, not of an unreliable narrator, but of a critic changing his mind in the face of unreliable emotions, and giving himself the time and the space needed to let this process play itself out.
A year later we have this equally strange and equally biolent post on THE UNCONSOLED. Here the emotions on first reading are largely negative, but once again we shall have to give some time to time: for Scott an aesthetic judgment cannot be formulated on the sole basis of a first reading. Not only will the book have to withstand the test of time, but so will the interior state of the critic!
Scott has taken the sword to this novel, and drawn blood. The annihilation of plot feels a lot like the beheading of an author. No author could survive reading that there was no necessity to the constant flow of pages of his novel, but only authorial whim and arbitrariness. True to form we are once again placed on hold: this plotless, headless novel will not be condemned outright. The sword has fallen, but the pen says that it’ll be back with a decision as to whether this is good or bad. How could anyone resist reading this novel in such taught and tense conditions of expectation?
Hey Tom:
Thanks for the charming comment! More people should explain how they came to find a particular post on my site–it’s intriguing to know how your reading of this post was conditioned by prior posts.
I can see why you feel that I was hard on this book, although other comments here (and elsewhere) indicate that this post actually made people want to read The Unconsoled. Janus-faced, indeed. On the whole, I don’t find it Ishiguro’s strongest book. The fundamentally capricious feeling of the book is interesting . . . I’ve never really seen anything quite like it. But I’m not sure that it worked for me quite at this length. But I don’t mean to completely dis the book. Certainly parts of it worked well for me, and it was a very readable 500-page book. I have mixed feelings.