Caressing the Wound
This essay (Textual Practice, volume 28, issue 3) started out as a draft chapter for a PhD thesis. I’m sure I was drawn to write about Kazoo Ishiguro’s ‘The Unconsoled’, in part, because it is fundamentally bewildering.
Critics had said of the novel that is was ‘dream-like’ or ‘ Kafkaesque’, but this seemed in the end an inadequate vocabulary to describe the particular strangenesses of Ishiguro’s fictional, mitteleuropäisch city. In the end — after half-a-dozen readings — I came to view the novel as an extravagant parable about the excesses of a culture saturated by melancholia. The novel seemed to be a kind of response to the trauma culture of the 1990s.
Cultural responses to trauma, broadly speaking, can be mapped across high and popular forms in terms of their differing attitudes to the ethics of representation, to the capacity of narrative to heal or reconvene the self, and to what might count as traumatic experience as such. Ishiguro's novel performs the ‘high' trauma aesthetic, obeying the Lyotardian ethical imperative to represent traumatic experience only through its painful repetitions, but places at the novel's aporetic centre a ‘trauma' close in character to the ‘tragic life stories' of the memoir boom. This unsettling of the modernist dichotomy between high art and popular culture draws attention to the problems of a prescriptive ‘experimental' aesthetic for the authentic expression of traumatic experience. However, rather than grafting The Unconsoled onto the existing canon of trauma fiction, I argued the novel should be understood as an active participant in the debates on trauma, moving both with and against recent cultural theories of memory.
The most salient point here was that the theory brought to bear on the novel didn’t really explicate it in any neat way; as an academic, critical practice will often be to ‘apply’ theory — which is hierarchically superior in some way — to a subject. Works of art are often imagined to be symptomatic of a moment in culture, which can be explained by a disinterested critical language. Ishiguro’s novel, I argued, moved with and against prevalent theories of trauma and temporality, refusing a position subservient to a body of theory that was supposed to account for it. But this sort of argument about status is probably about right from an academic who was about to exit university life and become a street trader, and then a furniture maker.
Years later, while writing ‘Each Eye is Haunted’, I found myself listening to Ed Dowie’s first album on repeat. It turned out he’d taken the punning title, ‘The Uncle Sold’, from a fascination with Ishiguro’s novel.