Conjuring Up the Dream: Three Literary Case Studies
This claim was made by Nathaniel Hawthorne roughly 150 years prior to the publication of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995). It would be interesting to know Hawthorne’s response to this novel, in which the first-person narrator is trapped in a 500-pag
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Writing a Dream: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995) To write a dream, which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its strange transformations, which are all taken as a matter of course, its eccentricities and aimlessness—with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such thing ever has been written.1
This claim was made by Nathaniel Hawthorne roughly 150 years prior to the publication of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995). It would be interesting to know Hawthorne’s response to this novel, in which the first-person narrator is trapped in a 500-page exploration of the maze of his own psyche. With its incongruities, discontinuities of time, place and characters as well as its single-minded protagonist taking all ‘its inconsistency, its strange transformations […] as a matter of course’, the fictional world depicted in the novel indeed resembles that of a dream: full of ‘eccentricities and aimlessness—with nevertheless a leading idea running 1
Hawthorne, American Notebooks, 99.
© The Author(s) 2016 M. Schrage-Früh, Philosophy, Dreaming and the Literary Imagination, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40724-1_5
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Philosophy, Dreaming and the Literary Imagination
through the whole’. Accordingly, in what follows I will read Ishiguro’s novel as an extended dream narrative emerging from the mental life of one single consciousness, that of its protagonist Mr Ryder. As I will argue, The Unconsoled is an oneiric text par excellence because it ‘translates’ the dream experience into a literary narrative by imitating the singlemindedness of the dreamer and keeping the mediating and guiding role of the narrator to a minimum. Readers willing to accompany Ryder on his Kafkaesque quest are thus forced to share the autodiegetic narrator’s highly subjective and uncritical point of view, resigning themselves to the same sense of dreamlike acceptance.2 Thanks to this narrative technique, the reader experiences Ryder’s ‘dream’ from the inside rather than from the outside. The novel is set in an unnamed city, with the locals’ names suggesting a German-speaking country, possibly Austria. However, the precise setting is left deliberately open and the description of the city is kept unspecific, providing only a few pointers such as ‘the Old Town’, the ‘Hungarian Café’ or the ‘medieval chapel’. As Richard Robinson rightly points out: ‘Ishiguro’s attempt to elude geographical (and thus, political, cultural, and historical) fixity is successful: it is clear that the city is not only unidentified but unidentifiable’.3 This observation ties in with my reading of The Unconsoled as an oneiric fiction in which the setting is primarily a landscape of the mind rather than an actual place. What is more, the novel starts out in medias res and thus in the same way a dream begins: There cannot be a consciously experienced beginning since we always find ourselves right in the middle of the dream events. More specifically, Ryder enters a hotel lobby, accompanied by a ta
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