This is the very first Modblogging Journal Club post!
Today: Sheng-mei Ma’s “Kazuo Ishiguro’s Persistent Dream for Postethnicity: Performance in Whiteface” (PDF) from Post Identity 2.1 (Winter 1999).
Ma announces his argument with a grenade:
Although some critics may find it devilishly inappropriate, even unprofessional, to confuse fictitious characters and the fiction writer, surely [. . .] characters could be viewed as a novelist’s projection of his or her unique conditions of existence, ethnicity being one of them. (71.)
Synopsis.
The crux: Ishiguro’s “characters’ denial of emotions parallels a minority writer’s innermost neurosis, a deep-seated anxiety over identity”; cause: a “reaction against Orientalism [that] has turned reactionary by subsuming racial characteristics”; effect: a fiction which—if I read Ma rightly—replaces substantive relationships between human characters with “a cancerous hollowness” (72, 80, 85).
Ma draws much of his textual evidence from Ishiguro’s fourth and least popular novel, The Unconsoled, reading its setting as a dreamscape that abstracts and universalizes human experience to dislocate it from ethnicity (73, 74).
But although Ishiguro expands “the repertoire of imagination for minorities of Asian descent,” his emphasis on postethnicity “does not betoken an egalitarian society” because, for minorities, passing “has historically meant a precarious passage into a semblance of power” (80).
At perhaps the heart of his argument, Ma notes that Ishiguro has never written “an Asian minority living in the West, or, to put it in unabashedly essentialist terms, [a character] in a subject-position similar to his own” (81). This eschews the literary advantages of such a subject position:
The destabilizing of race and ethnicity can indeed germinate from the sliver of space between races, a void belonging to neither, a moment pregnant with infinite possibilities. (81.)
Response.
There are a number of questions to ask about whether Ma essentializes the author position, and about whether ethical objects trump aesthetic interests, but I’m going straight for the question that hounds me: as a non-hyphenated critic with limited exposure to a multi-cultural artworld, can I fruitfully contribute to Ishiguro scholarship? Ma notes that because Ishiguro does not write from his subject position his fiction rings somewhat hollow. Does a critic who abandons his subject position offer a similarly distorted argument?
Why wouldn’t you be writing from your subject position when you write about Ishiguro? In other words, I’m not reading Ma as saying that a critic must also inhabit the same subject position as Ishiguro/his characters, but is the trend in Ishiguro scholarship that hyphenated? I guess I always assumed that treating Ishiguro as “modernist” meant, disciplinarily, that he was beyond matchy-matchy identity politics.
also, it’s hard for me to read Unconsoled as non-ethnic, since its setting seems so specifically Central European. If it’s a dreamscape, it’s the dream of someone who knows some old capitals really well.
Maybe the trouble I have in parsing Ma’s argument revolves around this whole question of the relation between the writer and his subject. If Ishiguro’s postethnic subject in some sense violates the textual richness of the hyphenated social world Ishiguro inhabits, is there a threat that my belletristic reading of Ishiguro violates some other context to which I am not privy?
I am a little more persuaded by Ma’s reading of postethnicity in Unconsoled—although that world is nominally central European, there are no language barriers and no sense of a cultural identity beyond vague allegiance to one or another school of aesthetics. If anything, the cultural homogeneity of that context feels more American than European.
By the way, I am ecstatic that you have also read The Unconsoled. I don’t know if you flipped to the end of the Ma article, but do you buy his argument that the book is “parodic” and that its “landscape has grown unrecognizable, depressingly dark” (86)?
Dark and depressing? Absolutely. In fact, I read the book over a particularly lonely summer, was both horrified and fascinated by the way time and space were stretched and condensed and relationships were correspondingly distorted, and haven’t been able to read it since. It makes me nervous. (That also means I’m basing my response on a 7-years-ago reading of the novel, so take that as you will.)
Parodic? I think I’m more comfortable with “absurdist and surrealist,” which Ma seems to use at the end somewhat interchangeably with “parodic.” Parodic to me would imply a direct correspondence with something that’s being parodied, and I’m just not sure what that object would be.
What I find interesting about Ma’s take is that it starts to ask why Ishiguro’s novels seem to demand a belletristic reading like the one you’re worried about. I think that’s an important question to keep in mind, but not one necessarily connected to a particular subject position. In other words, examining why these texts lend themselves to particular types of readings should serve alongside the readings themselves as an important component of criticism, if that makes sense. I’m not sure that directly answers the question you’re worried about, but that at least is how I’m tempted to respond.
Your reading of Ma’s meaning of “parody” is persuasive—my memory of F. Jameson’s definition of parody is a bit stale, but I recall it suggesting a sort of hollowness or irrelevance.
I’m not entirely persuaded that The Unconsoled is dark, though. Its action is occluded, certainly, but I’m not sure that its conclusions are especially grim: Ryder remains convinced of the uplifting power of art and of his presence; the town experiences a certain measure of local aesthetic accomplishment (Stephan Hoffman wows the crowd if not his parents); several storylines are resolved: the Hoffmans’ marriage; the Brodsky/Collins affair; the Gustav/Sophie mess.
Most importantly, though, I think Ishiguro leaves us with a sense that our narrow little lives are not ultimately irrelevant: whatever odd, insignificant obsessions we have are no more odd or more insignificant than those of the rest of the world. Ryder can leave the town with his mind more or less clear, because success and failure have little impact on the larger shape of his or anyone else’s existence.
On a side note, I just today began Pnin (trying to have a short Russian dessert to resolve my two-month War and Peace feast), which feels for all the world like an antecedent to The Unconsoled: incompetent artisan goes to a strange town and is waylaid many times on his way to accomplishing a comparative obscure goal.