The Drive to Read: Freud, Oedipus and Ishiguro's The Unconsoled
Inevitably, as readers, we encounter a text we don't fully comprehend. Consider Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, for example. This book, though lengthy, is not particularly difficult to read, and its relatively straightforward plot is easy to recount Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives at a city in crisis somewhere in central Europe, where, in a few days' time, he will give a recital upon which the future of the city depends. What the members of the audience hear on that Thursday night will either restore their faith in their aesthetic judgement, and their belief in their society as a whole, or else will reveal to them their regressive nature. Ryder, having mislaid his schedule, and afraid to lose face before those who idolize him, will bluff and brazen his way through engagements for which he is unprepared, or even misses altogether, as he is constantly diverted from his itinerary by private matters and yet, though this brief retelling of the novel suggests a fairly engaged reading, it does not necessarily mean understanding it. This is because the world of The Unconsoled is marked by a bizarrely surreal nature which disorients and unsettles. Riddled throughout with peculiarities, the text confronts the reader with three especially inexplicable characteristics, all of which are evident even in the first chapter. The first is Ryder's lack of certain knowledge, which has him entering a hotel on the book's first page knowing nothing of the details of the days ahead (though he has a faint recollection of that mislaid schedule) 1 The second remarkable feature is the apparent distortion of time and space: people appear where previously there were none, 2 and buildings many miles apart suddenly adjoin each other, or reveal themselves to be, in fact, the same building. Finally, despite the firstperson narration, Ryder often provides us with information to which he could not be expected to have access, as if seeing through disembodied eyes. 3