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Новый филологический вестник. 2019. №2(49). --
O.A. Dzhumaylo (Rostov-on-Don) ORCID ID: 0002-002-1217-5567
'THE CONFLICT OF INTERPRETATION' IN KAZUO ISHIGURO
'NOCTURNE' (2009)
Abstract. The paper explores Kazuo Ishiguro's short story Nocturne, which is placed in the short story collection, 'Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall' (2009) and, due to its oneiric and music narrative substance, may perplex a reader. We propose a draft of various hermeneutic strategies for reading this story. These strategies address the tale from different premises, leading to coherent yet seemingly 'conflicting interpretations' (Ricoeur). By application of the mimetic approach, we dwell on Marxist criticism, as well as celebrity studies, which help to reconstruct social and cultural contexts in their relation to the imagery of the story. In the framework of an expressive approach, phenomenological, psychoanalytical, and archetypal readings are shown as supported by symbolic imagery, sets of characters and surrealistic space, and place configurations. The critical tools of an objective approach - formalism, narratology, and intermediality studies - reveal leitmotif clusters, structural patterns, and musical nocturne remediation in the textual poetics. Finally, the reader's perception of any intra-textual relations of this story with Ishiguro's oeuvre as a whole lead to one of the focal points of his writing - appraisal through mastery, through continuous rehearsing and a nocturnal strumming effect of the same intimate motives of longing for lost love and public recognition. The short story abandons the typical Ishiguro imagery easily found in his earlier novels, and can be viewed as a confessional 'self-recollection' remediation and narrative project.
Key words: interpretation; music remediation; oneiric imagery; doppelgangers; leitmotifs; Kazuo Ishiguro; Nocturne.
О.А. Джумайло (Ростов-на-Дону) ORCID ID: 0002-002-1217-5567
«Конфликт интерпретаций» в «Ноктюрне» Кадзуо Исигуро (2009)
Аннотация. Статья обращена к тексту Кадзуо Исигуро «Ноктюрн», который входит в книгу рассказов «Ноктюрны: пять рассказов о музыке и сумерках» (2009), и представляется интерпретационно неоднозначным из-за возникающих в нем амбивалентных онейрических образов и повествования, стремящегося к имитации музыки. Предлагаемый набросок нескольких герменевтических стратегий прочтения рассказа, вопреки кажущемуся «конфликту интерпретаций» (Рикер), в конечном счете нацелен на его целостную трактовку. Использование миметического подхода, в особенности современной марксистской теории и отдельных идей исследований культуры селебрити, позволяет реконструировать социальный и культурный контексты для сюжета и образности рассказа. В рамках экспрес-
сивного подхода (феноменологическое, психоаналитическое и архетипическое прочтение) текст рассматривается в единстве его символической образности, системы персонажей, специфики конфигурации пространства. Инструментарий объективного подхода (формализм, нарративные и интермедиальные исследования) выявляет лейтмотивные и структурные повторы, а также музыкальную ремедиацию ноктюрна в поэтике текста. И наконец, обнаружение интратексту-альных связей данного рассказа с другими произведениями Исигуро, известными читателю, позволяет выявить одно из центральных звеньев формально-тематической организации его текстов - признание как результат мастерства, постоянного «репетирования», повторения, настойчивого музыкального возвращения личных тем утраченной любви и публичного признания. Рассказ изобилует образами и сюжетными ситуациями, характерными для ранних романов Исигуро, и может быть прочитан как авторский проект «собирания Я» посредством музыкальной ремедиации и повествовательного конструирования.
Ключевые слова: интерпретация; музыкальная ремедиация; онейрическая образность; двойничество; лейтмотив; Кадзуо Исигуро; «Ноктюрн».
In the short story Nocturne, which is placed in the short story collection 'Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall' (2009), Kazuo Ishiguro breaks with his own habit of giving slow-paced uneventful plots, yet stays true to his meticulous art of 'concealment'. He offers a sort of textual undecidability to craft a short story in which the reader has to undermine and re-shape what is represented by the narrator as a mere report about undergoing plastic surgery into a vulnerability of existential plotting.
The story is rendered as a first person narrative of an unsuccessful jazzman, named Steve, who has obvious signs of unreliability. Steve craves for success but prefers to rehearse in his closet for any ideas which his manager suggests. The turning point in his career is about to happen, as Steve has just undergone plastic surgery to his face, which could make him more attractive to the public, and, he thinks, in such a way will help to reunite him with his former wife Helen. After the operation, in his forced isolation in the hotel he meets a celebrity individual named Lindy Gardner, who is also in bandages and who has also gone through a divorce. They have discussions and a rather surrealistic night walk along hotel corridors, during which Lindy praises Steve and offers him a just-stolen statuette of the Best Jazzman of the year, which she later hides in the body of a giant turkey, cooked for a festive occasion.
Having in mind that Ishiguro's plots 'forestall easy conclusions about what each story is really about' [Smyth 2012, 147], is it still important to ask how can it be naturalized in a meaningful way?
Before we let ourselves get into an examination of the text, trying to avoid 'conspirational mechanisms of reading' leading to overinterpretation, an important note, which traces Ishiguro's writerly condition in general, should be made. In his interview with Sean Matthews, which ends with the words 'I'm sorry, I can't say more', Ishiguro referred to his lifelong love for music, making
it both his never-waning way of artistic performance, and his path to the right-ness of tone, inaccessible through mere words: 'I used to want to be a musician and I still play. <...> My answer is almost the answer a musician might give, 'Why did you play that solo in that way?' or, 'Why did you write that passage like that?' I can't quite give you a logical answer. I can only speak in the way a musician speaks. It sounds good to me, tonally, emotionally' [Matthews 2009, 125]. From this perspective, the choice of jazz musicians as protagonists of his stories and the musical genre of the nocturne makes the interpreter's actions counterproductive. The whole book is set against a disintegrative and decon-structive bent applied to personal experience rather than through provoking a verbal interrogation of the sources and goals of the artistic life. Still what is presented before us is a narration. '<...> The private life of the empirical author is in a certain respect more unfathomable than their texts. Between the mysterious history of a textual production and uncontrollable drift of its future readings, the text still represents a comfortable presence, the point to which we can stick' [Eco 1990, 202]
This paper proposes a draft of various hermeneutic strategies for reading this story, which address it from different premises leading to coherent yet seemingly 'conflicting interpretations' (Ricoeur). According to the French scholar, the threefold mimesis consists, first, of prefiguration; the main idea here is that living practice precedes narratives: 'the story 'happens to' someone before anyone tells it', 'a prenarrative quality of experience', '(as yet) untold stories', 'a potential story', and 'an untold story'. Narrative implicitly draws on the variety of the prenarrative resources of practice (cultural, historical, psychological, phenomenological, etc.). Second, configuration is narrative per se, as it is the constitution of narrative on the basis of practical prenarrative (composition, poetics are construction terms of formalism). Finally, refiguration is the junction where the world of the text and the world of the reader meet. The reading of narratives—both fictional and historical - is a hermeneutic operation in which the text and the reader mutually affect one another. In general, therefore, the threefold mimesis is a mediating notion, one that brings together the real world, the textual work, and the receiver [Ricoeur 1983].
By application of the mimetic approach we may address Marxist criticism, celebrity, and ethnic studies, which help to reconstruct various social and cultural contexts in their relation to the story's imagery. In the frameset of an expressive approach, phenomenological, psychoanalytical, and archetypal readings can be well supported by symbolic imagery, sets of characters and surrealistic space, and place configurations. Critical tools of an objective approach - formalism, narratology, and intermediality studies - reveal leitmotif clusters, structural patterns, and musical nocturne remediation in the textual poetics. Finally, a reader's perception of Ishiguro's texts as a whole encourage another way of considering the making of story meaning, demonstrating its almost emblematic use of the writer's leitmotifs. If the majority of Ishiguro's writing is 'united in being narrated by self-deceiving first-person protagonists who seek to hide painful memories from themselves (and from their readers) and who attempt,
unsuccessfully, to remake themselves in light of what they fear were shameful, even damning, past decisions' [Shaffer 2009, 10] then Nocturnes are more a blend of shame and aspiration for love and recognition in the form of a musical genre associated with dreamy romantic longing and intense bittersweet emotions.
At the very start of the story Steve is thinking about public recognition in a manner evoking Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'cultural capital' from his seminal work The Field of Cultural Production (1993). Spreading the power of those, 'who recognize no other criterion of legitimacy than recognition by those whom they recognize' [Bourdieu 1993, 38], is also supported by 'journalistic capital (visibility, celebrity, scandal)' [English 2002, 123] as the mediating - and transforming - force between economic and cultural capital today.
"...it has to do with image, marketability, being in magazines and on TV shows, about parties and who you ate lunch with. It all made me sick. I was a musician, why should I have to join in this game? Why couldn't just I play my music the best way I knew, and keep getting better, if only in my cubicle, and maybe some day, just maybe, genuine music lovers would hear me and appreciate what I was doing. What did I want with a plastic surgeon?" [84]
The demand for a better kind of 'visibility' for cameras and gossip columnists' [83] makes this story happen; face bandages turn out to be a sort of wrapping or straplines for a brand new artist to come. The face is no longer associated with 'individual talent' but more with a social construction of potentially recognizable artistic identity. It explains a need for a new face-making as a 'tool' for professional success: "You have a professional reason. Guy wants to be a fancy chauffeur, he goes and buys a fancy car. It's no different with you!" [83]. The whole project rejects the idea of the artist's autonomy, but at the same time provides certain opportunities for those 'serious' artists who want to enlarge the scope of their authority and to achieve greater efficacy [English 2002, 126].
It is interesting how Ishiguro plays with the idea of art placement in today's reality, making problematic a dreamy field of total public estrangement the only space left for the true artist.
'"What are you, if you're a jazz player?" He says. But only in innermost dreams am I still a jazz player. In the real world - when I don't have my face entirely wrapped in bandages the way I do now - I'm just a jobbing tenor man <...> R&B? Fine. Car commercials, the walk-on theme for a talk show, I'll do it. I'm a jazz player these days only when I'm inside my cubicle"' [82]
Professional and personal identities have to correspond with public demands for tabloid event-making which exploits the consumer's interest for 'the right love affairs, the right marriages, the right divorces' [87]. The references to notorious places like the Chateau Marmont and Beverly Hills hotel where
the character finds himself after his operation turn out to be 'the right' setting. Moreover, they manifest a controversial craving for social identity transformation; a quest for moving to the top. The hotel performs as a social metaphor (floors and penthouse) for total appraisal in the public sphere. Apart from that it is a heterotopian space obviously opposed to the Romantic social isolation of the Artist in the space of private authenticity (here it's Steve's cubicle). From this perspective the night walk, during which Steve and Lindy are passing the halls prepared for prize-giving ceremonies of 'The Simon and Westbury Music Awards' and which make Steve literally exposed to the lights whilst carrying the stolen statuette for Jazz Musician of the Year, shows the wish-fulfillment of publicity, and evaluation by the public. The character's 'in repair' state correlates with the vision of the presidential suite at the top of the building: 'This place used to be a real mess. But look at it now. It's taking shape. It's gonna be gross" [107]. The poetics of the names mentioned in the story adds to this idea - among the fictitious names there are many names of genuine celebs (George Clooney, De Niro, Chet Baker, Stephen King, Meg Ryan, etc.).
The 'romantic artist's' criticism of 'vacuous celebrity' [88] is almost lost in the glamorous lights of neoliberal society, which fosters 'star quality' management (with its charismatic media look included), and a proper 'wrapping' (prizes and media attention). Plastic surgery encapsulates the questionable idea of perfection for the public, a social reworking of the artist's personality, which makes Steve feel increasingly moody and almost driven to the point of emotional collapse. Notably, being asked about his artistic performance for and in public, Ishiguro says: 'It stops authors becoming too introverted, it reminds us that we're writing for real human beings, but even that has a more problematic side <...> unless you are careful, you lose all sense of your own identity. You might actually even lose contact with your own language' [Matthews 2009, 114-115]. (Let us just mention about the possibility of applying ethnic studies here: Is there any possibility for a migrant (with a migrant's face) to achieve a huge success? Ironically and happily Ishiguro himself achieved it, but the repetitive appearance of talented migrants as outcasts and potential losers is striking in his stories).
In the frameset of an expressive approach, phenomenological, psychoanalytical, and archetypal readings can be well supported by symbolic imagery, sets of characters and surrealistic space, and place configurations. The plot centered around the literal 'unveiling' [115] of Steve's new face provokes a step by step unveiling of his suppressed or delegated feelings. Going back to the title - Nocturne - it is directly associated with night and dreaming, evoking links to the Freudian interpretations of anxieties and wish-fulfillment strategies. The disorientating aspects of Steve's wandering along the hotel passages during the night recalls the Freudian 'uncanny' and hidden nature of events. The first person (unreliable) narration full of surrealistic distortions and improbable events ('like <...> in a Raymond Chandler story' [86]) imitates dreaming, has its quest-structure and its merged space configuration. The very reading of the story re-enacts Steve's experience of disorientation. Well-known Freudian
mechanisms - condensing, displacement, and representation in dreams - are quite numerous. But before we dwell on some specifics, it should be said that Steve's conscious wish to reach the 'big league' is heated by a subconscious desire to impress and gain back his wife and stop being 'a big loser'. Interestingly, the whole context and configuration of Steve's memories is connected with the unsuccessful desire to impress his ex-wife.
"I've never been much of a jogger, but I was taken by her and anxious to impress. So there we were running around the park <.. .> I could feel a pain in my foot, which wasn't so bad, but when I took off my sneaker and sock, and saw the nail in my big toe rearing up from the flesh like it was doing a Hitler style salute, I got nauseous and fainted" [84].
Leaving aside the 'castration fear' from the Freudian seminal work 'The Uncanny', which can be fully applied here, we would rather interpret the torn off toe-nail as a representation of the anticipated traumatic experience with the face, an operation Steve was forced to undergo following the persuasion of his agent. The latter kept fabricating the idea of Helen's coming back to Steve after he had gone through a beautifier: 'Once you are healed up, she comes back, you're good-looking, she's hungry for your body, she can't wait to be seen with you in restaurants .'[86]. Steve hopes to reunite with his wife with the help of his new, successful, artistic look, but aspects of memory provoke doubts about the whole enterprise.
He remembers Helen's mockery of his way of going to his cubicle as if to a toilet for 'personal business' [82]. A witty example of condensing can be found here, as the artist's world literally is his personal business, denigrated by others and giving a temporary (emotional) relief. In a similar episode in The Unconsoled, another truly oneiric piece of writing about a musician looking for recognition, there is a weird image of the cupboard 'like a broom closet <...> containing a urinal or perhaps a drinking fountain' [338], curiously placed in the concert hall ceiling where the protagonist was to give his historical performance. An appraisal of the city's public in that novel was also linked with the painful desire to be reconciled with the subject's parents and the beloved. A similar chain of Freudian substitutions is repetitive in Ishiguro: a musician for a miserable man looking for intimate closeness, a recognition by the public for a repressed wish to have one's wife/parents back to oneself, and an awkward 'personal business' for public use or display.
If sexual implications, possibly associated with Steve's lack of potency, can be found in the image of empty egg-trays with which his cubicle is decorated, it is equally important to see how intimate trauma and wistful rematch is related with his recognition as a professional artist. The symbolic sexual imagery of appraisal and belonging is obvious in the episode when an awards statuette was transported inside the giant turkey served in the hotel restaurant for the honorary dinner.
"We've forgotten about the award". "I told you already. It's in that turkey"
Новый филологический вестник. 2019. №2(49). --
[109]
"An alligator? Come on! It's a pair of cute little cherubs kissing each other" [101]
The very act of prize-giving in the dream is an obvious symbolic satisfaction (wish fulfillment). It should have been officially given to Jake Marvell but it was actually passed to Steve by Lindy. Marvell and Lindy are literally suggestive names - they foreground Steve's craving for his own good looks. In the case of Marvell it again might be directed in a secondary way: to Steve's own professional and sexual recognition. "O, Jake Marvell - it's good to see any sax player getting recognition'[94].
In fact, it is very likely that extensive references to food and festive dishes served ('successful diners', 'backing trays', 'gateau', 'cookies', etc.) work in a similar fashion - to convey an achieved professional success and a very special delight in one's body. Ironically, there are two times in the story when food treats are shown as tempting but not openly accessible as covered with cellophane ('special occasion fruit basket still in cellophane' [88], 'cookies under cellophane'[105]). And finally this situation culminates in the final part with 'all the canisters, trays, cake-boxes, silver-domed platters <...> seen earlier <...> vanished" [110].
Besides, Lindy is voicing Steve's repressed speech: 'Did I say we were separated? Did I say that?' [111] - He did not, she did. 'Like all of Ishiguro's fictions of the past quarter century <.> this reveals the ways in which traumatized protagonists absorb the stories of others into their own narratives, often manipulating them beyond recognition to serve their private needs, fears, and desires' [Shaffer 2009, 19]. Doubles (doppelgangers) - Steve and Lindy - serve as a delegation for Steve's own painful and unsaid experience, and for reconsideration of his situation as the way to a new life ('Maybe Lindy's right. Maybe, like she says, I need some perspective'[115]) in the act of auto-communication. Steve as a typical Ishiguro unreliable narrator absorbs Lindy's story or even invents it to serve his own need for protection from pain of the past or a desire too bold to be true.
At the same time Lindy can easily be viewed as an essential part of a possible initiation plot, and to be performing not only as Steve's repressed voice but reenacting the role of wizard/helper with the functions appropriate for this figure: "I'm gonna take you with me some night, sweetie. I'll show you great things. The bars, the restaurants, conference rooms. Wonderful ballroom. And there's no one there, everything's just dark and empty. And I discovered the most fantastic place, a kind of penthouse, I think it's gonna be a presidential suite" [95]. The fact, that no general people are seen in this enchanted hotel/ hospital, contributes to the image of the archetypal place as an isolation site from all living people. (Perhaps there are some grounds to see an Orpheus and Euridice motif here as well). The initiation plot which takes place here is accompanied by a typical quest motif and a specific trial (surgery), during which a person goes through a ritual of death for the expected rebirth in the new qual-
ity. 'The weird bandaged monster gazing back from peephole eyes" [87] both connects body and identity and suggests an ongoing magic transformation from Monster into Beauty. Here the bandage image can be interpreted as a promise for a butterfly's appearing from a cocoon (from this perspective empty egg-trays are also suggestive). It can go well with the idea of true birth and waking from sleep, another leitmotif of the story.
The critical tools of an objective approach help to reveal 'the possibilities of art', if we use some Leavisite notions, in terms of structural patterns, and the musical nocturne's remediation in the textual poetics of the short story. (Ishiguro runs to music remediation in his writing. See [Dzhumaylo 2009] on the use of musical cadenza in The Unconsoled). But rather than consider Nocturnes to be 'a meditation on the ability of music to connect human beings via that elusive human faculty, the imagination' [Matthews and Groes 2009, 3] we will place selected instances of the playing of nocturnal music as a means of revealing emotion (romantic, intimate, hidden from daylight).
The formal elements for nocturne remediation occur in three parts of the nocturne: framing A-B-A corresponds to three parts of the story with the central episode of the oneiric experience in between conventionally realistic ones. Cadenza-like passages, when the opening theme of public recognition ('big-league' 11 times repeated) returns in the latter half of the piece, where they are supported with suggestive leitmotifs of romantic longing for lost love (playful 'big-loser' eight times repeated), and are also connected with a musical nocturne notable for its capacity to express great lyricism.
The nocturnal experience of longing is often expressed in terms of dynamics, which range from bravura-style pieces to slow melody, from tension to relief, and back from harmonic progressions to haunting dissonances. Notably, on a textual level there are many indications of emotional turmoil. Thus, on one and the same page the reader can find a flux of feelings: 'I felt exhilarated and optimistic. I felt complete confidence. <...> felt deepest ambitions. <...> felt triumphant. <...> felt depressed, lonely and cheap. <...> euphoric <...>, delight <...>, disgust <...>. Mood was on the up again <...>. I felt a tingle of excitement' [87-88].
At the center of the story there is an ekphrastic description of Steve's recorded performance of 'The Nearness of you', rendered in professional discourse ('second chorus', 'middle eight', 'the band go III-5 to VIx-9', 'high B-flat' [97]). But Steve's vulnerability at the end of the passage reveals his separation drama: 'I think there are colors there, longings and regrets, you won't come across before' [97]. The connection between professional and emotional is always poignant and even dramatic for Ishiguro's characters, yet we should stress the primacy of emotion, though reserved and suppressed. Thus, Lindy at first appreciates Steve's music for its professionalism but in time she says: 'I haven't been able to get it out of my head. No, I don't mean head, I mean heart. I haven't been able to get it out of my heart' [99].
Featuring an assortment of portamentos, cadenzas and a fioriture of make-beliefs, or the improvised embellishment of a melody, Ishiguro sweetens the
development of the main theme of alienation from the beloved with 'parallel thirds and sixths', as if keeping true to the textures of an operatic duet. The melodic line of this nocturne consists of two-note chords instead of a single line. Interestingly, in one nighttime episode, Lindy and Steve are shown with their 'arms stayed linked' [107]. Lindy performs as Steve's double, but their voices do not mimic each other. Being 'a great team' [114], the statement they use later, implies well-coordinated moves and supporting attitudes, which can also refer to an ability of good musicians hear each other with an amazing perceptiveness. Lindy keeps saying: 'You sound <...> dispirited' [92], 'You sound depressed' [92]. Her mirroring function in relation to Steve is stressed by such minor details as a 'neighbour' leitmotif, their almost similar neighboring rooms in which the characters live, their frequent position 'facing each other on matching white sofas' [88], and playing chess.
Lindy is moving in tune with Steve's improvisations, 'swaying dreamingly to [a] slow beat' [97] and later confessing her intimate pondering to the sadness of his music track 'The Nearness of You'. But it is her decisiveness and her name (Linda - from Spanish and Portuguese - beautiful), which makes her an embodiment of Steve's hopes for the future. Lindy repeats the opening theme of the piece but sounds more confident and heartfelt. Her part is done with a triumphant forte of survival after separation in comparison with Steve's very soft pianissimo. Lindy represents the way out of the crisis: she is recovering from the painful experience of divorce (her ex-husband's music is played 'at top volume' [115]), which is underlined both by her being in bandages, thus being 'wounded', and her placement in the transitional space of recovery - the hotel / hospital ward.
The final note of the character's relationship, marked with Lindy's advice to look for other prospects in life, is accompanied with other musical phrases, which contribute to the complexity of the nocturne. 'The Nearness of You' music track was played several times in association with the lost partners of Steve and Lindy, notably without any subsequent words, as if pauses after every listening were made to take a breath and contemplate what to say next or how to hide the turmoil of feelings. 'Ishiguro is a master at constructing narratives with subtle and uncanny parallels' [Shaffer 2009, 15], but we find that the overall dynamic of the music repetitions clearly reflects the steady movement towards the newfound ability for openness. Musical nocturnal expressiveness holds power over the character's acknowledgement of his love and loss. In the final paragraph Steve is able to say 'I love you' to his ex-wife. All in all, music remediation, musical leitmotifs, and a duet of characters push forward the idea of openness to others and the necessity to get rid of emotional bandages. (It is worthwhile to mention that in Ishuguro's novels The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans, A Pale View of Hills, and An Artist of the Floating World, music leitmotifs are used in a similar fashion).
Music remediation, sensations and reactions account for what usually happens with a typical Ishiguro character. The circular dynamic of a nocturne on a more abstract level expresses '<...> the narrator's hopeful rememberances
and anticipations that Ishiguro uses to depict his character's managing of disappointments; his focus helps to link the Nocturnes stories with achievements from his prior works.' [Wong 2015, 134]. It also encourages a demonstration of intra-textual relations with the other four stories within the collection: having the title name of the whole set, Nocturne is surely the most dynamic, emotional and dreamlike among the other pieces. 'The critical and popular success of Ishiguro's Nocturnes also supports the idea that Ishiguro can easily cross over into different genres, which he also demonstrated in his lyrics for the jazz singer Stacy Kent's album Breakfast on the Morning Tram (2007), which has a strong affiliation with his later novels. (Curiously, the final episode of Ishiguro's own The Unconsoled takes place in a tram, going on a continuous circuit, where Ryder is about to have his breakfast. It is significant that Ryder is a touring musician with no home and no family. No wonder that in the surrealistic Nocturne seemingly random detail may be interpreted as Ishiguro's signature: 'J.A. Pool. Cleansers Inc. BREAKFAST' [108]). The complex composition of the story collection as an interrelated series of works transcends the traditional singularity of the short story, bringing to mind James Joyce's Dubliners (1914), while the description of Nocturnes as an album in which specific musical motifs and themes recur seems even more apt' [Matthews, Groes 2009, 7].
The chosen repertoire of themes with variations offers the reader even more telling insights into the inextricably bound-up personal and professional/artistic identities of Ishiguro's narrators in Nocturnes. Themes of love and loss, the artist's craving for public success, problematic appraisal and belonging, true mastery for future triumphant performance - gained through everyday rehearsing, hold attraction for Ishiguro over the whole set of stories. Remarkably, all the themes mentioned find their most expressive representation in Nocturne, the story about healing the wound (face surgery as a result of professional and personal misery), which links it with one of the most powerful repetitive metaphors of Ishiguro's oeuvre. 'The wound affirms the primacy of irreducible personal experience, which can be played or replayed, talked about or kept silent, even forgotten, but never erased' [Dzhumaylo 2009, 74].
The acknowledgement of the dubious nature of personal and professional identity as a construct based on an unreliable oneiric narrative / remediated text / repressed life account proves to be especially fitting for fictive autobiography. Significantly, '<...> music has long been one of Ishiguro's preoccupations for his explorations of identity and fate. As a young man, he wrote music and songs, played some of these in the Paris Metro station and wrote the lyrics for a jazz album' [Mazullo 2012, 80].
Through decades of novel writing Ishiguro makes his characters doubt themselves in spasms of personal defeat, and forces them to flee from painful reality into a world of make-believe. He brings them (and obviously himself) back with the same shame/defeat-boomerangs but never disgraces them. There is nothing disgraceful in human defeat, in experiencing loss and vain hope, and in being genuinely aware of them. Wounds and music again and again evoke empathy and the ability to share one's personal traumatic experience either with
other characters or with the reader.
'In Nocturnes, music figures in a variety of ways to explore multitudinous themes and techniques related to Ishiguro's eхploration of human experiences, and it also signifies his persistently evolving art.' [Wong 2015, 142]. Rather than talking about evolution we prefer to relate these recognizably personal thematic and formal patterns to the idea of artistic mastery of the same themes, to Ishiguro's own rehearsing as a way towards recollection of the self. In this perspective we would like to cite from Alfred Hornung's valuable suggestion made in his paper 'Reading One/Self': '[The] act of refiguring a story from the fragments of one's art and life seems to be expressive of the latent wish of reading the unity of one self'. [Hornung 1987, 177].
In tune with this, let us add to 'repetition with variation, evenness of tone, the manipulation of meaning at the material level of the signifier' [Smyth 2011, 152], attributed to Ishiguro's art, some other observations. Leitmotif clusters in the story refer to particular thematic elements introduced by the materials Ishiguro prefers in almost every piece of his writing (especially in The Un-consoled), and through spatial forms he selects within his individual mental landscape. Among them: the artist figures in the plot of the artist's appraisal. One caveat should be made - the artist's appraisal is usually given through the wistful perspective of extraordinary artistic performance and through the retrieved love of close people (e.g. 'all the parents clapping', 'the audience had clapped'); often through a rather distorted vision of self in specific spaces (e.g. theatre plus hotel, hotel plus hospital, etc.); the use of repetitive imagery of private places as spaces for practicing outstanding performance (e.g. changing 'closets', cubicles', etc.); the reduced scope of realistic descriptions which still consist of particular details of festive food (for special treatment and consolation) and games of chess (for the hope of personal exchange).
Apart from this, leitmotifs also refer to particular structural and narrative choices of Ishiguro: the narrative remediation of music; an unreliable narrator, restrained and suffering from an inability to confess his true feelings; 'pairing characters [which] occurred in Ishiguro's earlier works' [Wong 2014, 135], and doubles (doppelgangers) as a means for delegation of one's own painful and unsaid experience. Even in Ishiguro's early short story Waiting for J (1981) there are doubles: 'a fantasy self, the successful, well-to-do, celebrated art scholar, [who] seeks to kill off his actual self, the impoverished, unpopular, defeated warehouse supervisor' [Shaffer 2009, 13]; the peculiar mix of real and fictional names, including well-known musicians' and writers' names, which might be both 'the full subjectivity of an inner life' [Robinson 2009, 78], and a sign of the unreliable narrator's ambivalent hiding and revealing of his true professional identity.
Various approaches towards the story provide the text with different yet not totally contradictory interpretations. The possibility to introduce a many-layered analysis is also proved by a different epistemology of the questioning about the text's meaning as such (drawing on Ricouer's prefiguration, configuration, refiguration), as well as by the employment of ambiguous textual imag-
ery and poetic means as a whole.
Through various lenses the focal traumatic episode can be perceived as simultaneously a betrayal of the romantic artist's status quo for neoliberal capitalist self-placement, and as an inability to reveal the painful truth about loss of love, a wound wrapped around but still raw. The linking element between them is a longing for appraisal and belonging and an attempt to go through a painful and somewhat healing change of identity.
The very possibility for the introduction of different interpretations is provoked by the character's unreliable way of narrating his story, dreaming motifs, which create a nocturnal and surrealistic atmosphere and which welcome various semi-identifiable imagery (condensation, displacement, and representation), although these are connected with the hidden plot, which always lies 'somewhere just beneath the surface of things' [Ishiguro 1981, 21]. All in all, it creates a slippery (floating) world of suggestive meanings and a purposeful reluctance of self-imposture so characteristic of Ishiguro's style.
If mimetic, expressive, and objective approaches were centered on the plot of the story viewed within its textual boundaries, then questioning about intra-textual relations with Ishiguro's oeuvre as a whole may lead to one of the focal points of his writing - appraisal through mastery, through continuous rehearsing and a nocturnal strumming effect of the same intimate motives. The short story abandons the typical Ishiguro imagery easily found in his earlier novels, and can be viewed as a confessional 'self-recollection' remediation and narrative project. In other words, it might suggest showing the 'true Ishiguro face' under the surgical bandages.
REFERENCES (RUSSIAN)
1. Bourdieu P. The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge, 1993.
2. Dzhumaylo O. 'Never-let-me-go' Wounds: Leitmotifs in Kazuo Ishiguro's Novels // Textual Intricacies. Essays on Structure and Intertextuality in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Fiction in English / ed. by C. Bimberg and I. Volkov. Trier, 2009. P. 73-102.
3. Dzhumaylo O. What Kathy Knew: Hidden Plot in Never Let Me Go // Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / ed. by C.F. Wong and H. Yildiz. London, 2015. P. 91-100.
4. Eco U. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge, 1990.
5. English J.F. Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art // New Literary History. 2002. Vol. 33. № 1. Winter. P. 109-135.
6. Groes S., Mattews S. 'Your Words Open Windows for Me': The Art of Kazuo Ishiguro // Kazuo Ishiguro. Contemporary Critical Perspectives / ed. by and S. Mattews and S. Groes. London, 2009. P. 1-8.
7. Hornung A. Reading One/Self: Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, John Barth, Alain Robbe-Grillet // Exploring Postmodernism / ed. by M. Calinescu and D. Fokkema. Amsterdam; Philadelphia, 1987. P. 175-198.
8. Ishuguro K. Nocturnes. New York, 2009.
HoBbiü jмnоnогицecкиü BecmHUK. 2019. №2(49). --
9. Ishuguro K. The Unconsoled. London, 1995.
10. Ishiguro K. A Strange and Sometimes Sadness // Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers. London, 1981. P. 13-27.
11. Mattews S. 'I'm Sorry I Can't Say More': An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro // Kazuo Ishiguro. Contemporary Critical Perspectives / ed. by and S. Mattews and S. Groes. London, 2009. P. 114-125.
12. Mazullo M. Alone: Kazuo Ishiguro and the Problem of Musical Empathy // The Yale Review. 2012. Vol. 100. № 2. P. 79-98.
13. Robinson R. 'To give a Name. Is That Still to Give?': Footballers and Film Actors in Kazuo Ishiguro's the Unconsoled // Kazuo Ishiguro. Contemporary Critical Perspectives / ed. by and S. Mattews and S. Groes. London, 2009. P. 114-125.
14. Ricoeur P. Time and Narrative / trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer. Chicago, 1984.
15. Shaffer B.W. 'Somewhere Just Beneath the Surface of Things': Ka-zuo Ishiguro's Short Fiction // Kazuo Ishiguro. Contemporary Critical Perspectives / ed. by and S. Mattews and S. Groes. London, 2009. P. 9-19.
16. Smyth G. "Waiting for the Performance to Begin" // Kazuo Ishiguro's Musical Visions of the Novels / ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis. London, 2011. P. 144-156.
17. Wong C.F. Oppositional Narratives of Nocturnes // Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / ed. by C.F. Wong and H. Yildiz. London, 2015. P. 133-143.
REFERENCES (Articles from Scientific Journals)
1. English J.F. Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art. New Literary History, 2002, vol. 33, no. 1, Winter, pp. 109-135. (In English).
2. Mazullo M. Alone: Kazuo Ishiguro and the Problem of Musical Empathy. The Yale Review, 2012, vol. 100, no. 2, pp. 79-98. (In English).
(Articles from Proceedings and Collections of Research Papers)
3. Dzhumaylo O. 'Never-let-me-go' Wounds: Leitmotifs in Kazuo Ishiguro's Novels. Bimberg C., Volkov I. (eds.) Textual Intricacies. Essays on Structure andIntertextuality in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Fiction in English. Trier, 2009, pp. 73-102. (In English).
4. Dzhumaylo O. What Kathy Knew: Hidden Plot in Never Let Me Go. Wong C.F., YildizH. (eds.) Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context. London, 2015, pp. 91-100. (In English).
5. Groes S., Mattews S. 'Your Words Open Windows for Me': The Art of Kazuo Ishiguro. Mattews S., Groes S. (eds.) Kazuo Ishiguro. Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London, 2009, pp. 1-8. (In English).
6. Hornung A. Reading One/Self: Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Pe-
ter Handke, John Barth, Alain Robbe-Grillet. Calinescu M., Fokkema D. (eds.) Exploring Postmodernism. Amsterdam; Philadelphia, 1987, pp. 175-198. (In English).
7. Mattews S. 'I'm Sorry I Can't Say More': An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro. Mattews S., Groes S. (eds.) Kazuo Ishiguro. Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London, 2009, pp. 114-125. (In English).
8. Robinson R. 'To give a Name. Is That Still to Give?': Footballers and Film Actors in Kazuo Ishiguro's the Unconsoled. Mattews S., Groes S. (eds.) Kazuo Ishiguro. Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London, 2009, pp. 114125. (In English).
9. Shaffer B.W. 'Somewhere Just Beneath the Surface of Things': Kazuo Ishiguro's Short Fiction. Mattews S., Groes S. (eds.) Kazuo Ishiguro. Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London, 2009, pp. 9-19. (In English).
10. Smyth G. "Waiting for the Performance to Begin". Groes S., Lewis B. (eds.) Kazuo Ishiguro's Musical Visions of the Novels. London, 2011, pp. 144156. (In English).
11. Wong C.F. Oppositional Narratives of Nocturnes. Wong C.F., Yildiz H. (eds.) Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context. London, 2015, pp. 133-143. (In English).
(Monographs)
12. Bourdieu P. The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge, 1993. (In English).
13. Eco U. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge, 1990.(In English).
14. Ricoeur P. Time and Narrative. Chicago, 1984. (Translated from French to English by K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer).
Джумайло Ольга Анатольевна, Южный федеральный университет.
Доктор филологических наук, доцент кафедры теории и истории мировой литературы. Научные интересы: современная британская литература; исповедальность в художественной литературе и культуре; интермедиаль-ность; ремедиация.
E-mail: dzum2@yandex.ru
Olga A. Dzhumaylo, Southern Federal University.
Doctor of Philology, Associate Professor at the Department of Theory and History ofWorld Literature. Research interests: contemporary British literature; confessional writing and confessional culture; intermediality; remediation.
E-mail: dzum2@yandex.ru
