Collective Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novel The Unconsoled

Abstract

Kazuo Ishiguro’s fourth novel The Unconsoled (1995) is structured as a surrealist memoryscape of its main protagonist and narrator Ryder. Supposedly a world-renowned pianist who finds himself in an unnamed Central European city, Ryder is meant to contribute to the cultural consolidation of the local community by performing at a forthcoming concert. While his labyrinthine memories gradually emerge and narratively map onto his environment as he attempts to understand his circumstances, the community’s cultural and historical past surfaces as comparably intricate. In this paper, insights from contemporary memory studies and trauma theory are employed in the analysis of how collective memory is implicated in the construction of the community’s narrative identity in The Unconsoled and how that identity is dependent on a configuration of cultural trauma. The analysis points to Ishiguro’s subtly ironic treatment of the community’s desire for metanarratives of presence, stability, value, and progress, perceived in the discrepancy between the city’s idealistic mythologizing of its past and its reductionism of historical complexities to simple binaries. Conversely, when Ryder’s individual mechanisms of self-preservation and trauma suppression are interpreted as comparable to the collective efforts at sustaining a coherent identity through collective memory, the novel’s interpretation reveals how both individual and cultural identity are dependent on narrative configurations. Ultimately, these collective attempts at meaning-making are discerned as ambiguously complex, which precludes their strict ethical condemnation as ideological manipulation, since they emerge as intrinsic to the process of identity construction.