1Magritte’s famous 1929 painting of a pipe with its provocatively childish subtitle, ‘ceci n’est pas une pipe,’ aptly illustrates a branch of modernist aesthetics exploring the aesthetic compromises and receptive pitfalls of realistic representation. Since I can neither stuff the bowl with tobacco nor inhale through the stem, it decidedly isn’t, I gracefully concede, a pipe; it just reminds me of one. My intention here is to consider how Ishiguro’s fictions similarly invite, but also thwart, representational and emotional identification. Emotions on the whole are noticeably lacking in the Ishiguro novel. Readers will recall Stevens’ near-proverbial credo on matters emotional, whether approving the lack of ‘unseemly demonstrativeness’ in the English landscape,1 or deploring the fact that ‘continentals are... as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race is capable of.’ (Ishiguro 1989, 43) But apparently, by wiping emotion from his thematic material, Ishiguro still ‘fed and watered the passions,’2 for most critics identify ‘undisciplined squads of emotion’ earnestly repressed beneath the texts’ surfaces.3

2This near-consensual response is based on several presuppositions: it presumes that emotions are sincere but also transpersonal, meaning that the emotion my neighbour feels can be effectively transferred to me, even if I am not in the presence of whatever triggered his spontaneous feeling. Second, it presumes, as cognitive psychology does, that our emotions lie close to our authentic selves. Third, it presupposes that absence must always be a shifting locus for what is hidden, and consequently retrievable using some interpretative mechanism that will let the lost emotion flood back to fill the gap. It is preconceptions such as these that I wish to challenge. Focusing on The Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled, I will suggest that many emotional responses to Ishiguro’s fictions have borrowed from the arena of real emotions to flesh out artistic minimalism, presuming that what looks like an emotion must necessarily be one, and that the feelings the text inspires necessarily replicate feelings the characters eschew. To do so, I will be adapting the Aristotelian divide between transitive and intransitive emotion, to distinguish between feelings of love, regret, nostalgia and so forth, emotions of life that I might perceive in a work of art, and feeling per se, reverberating through the formal levels of the aesthetic object, that is not of anything at all. The sort my piano teacher might ask me to add to a mundane rendition, say, of a Beethoven sonata, by suggesting that ‘it could do with a bit more feeling.’ From this angle, I will suggest an answer to the question indirectly posed by T. S. Eliot when he evokes, ‘what passes in our mind when we read a book and feel an emotion about it.’4

1 ‘... no trace of emotion discernible in his expression’ (Ishiguro, 1989, 65)

3In the introduction to her Plays on the Passions, Joanna Baillie observes: ‘There is, perhaps, no employment which the human mind will with so much avidity pursue, as the discovery of concealed passion.’5 Two hundred years on, the mysteries of emotional absence are still as compelling, becoming a very public space in which to construe and to construct what tantalizes by its impalpability. The more Ishiguro’s rather rigid protagonists intersperse their self-fictions with cameos resembling memories that might be theirs, the more critics rush in to seize on what lingers behind. These are, suggests Brian Shaffer, ‘protagonists who have something to hide, from themselves no less than from their readers.’6

4Clearly psychoanalysis refined the eighteenth-century game of ‘spot the passion,’ maintaining that the analyst can free emotions which, as a result of trauma and repression, have been fossilised into symptoms. On these lines, much Ishiguro criticism resembles experiential therapy, showing how ‘people’s emotional schemas have involved suppression or distortion to fit the self into some framework acceptable to others, but denying the person authenticity.’7 Katherine Wall demonstrates how for Stevens, the word ‘professional becomes either a disguise for more emotional motives or a defence for his strangely unemotional behaviour.’8 Shaffer pushes this further by condemning Stevens’ misplaced allegiances as ‘emotional fascism.’ (Shaffer 74) Reviewing The Unconsoled, Brook Allen diagnoses Ryder’s disorder when he ‘repeats the cycle of familial sickness that has blighted his own life by taking out his rage towards his parents on Sophie and little Boris.’9 Such emotion-packed responses as these (and they are legion) privilege in the act of reading the recovery of primal, traumatic material that can be reconstructed into a feasible, linear, personal history of causes and effects. In doing so, they pass rather quickly over two intriguing questions. The first recalls the dilemma underlying Pascal’s objection to realistic painting: ‘quelle vanité que la peinture qui attire l’admiration par la ressemblance de choses dont on n’admire point les originaux.’10 In other words, how is it that I find aesthetically admirable something that in real life I disdain or condemn? Second, why is the reader so eager to rush in and fill the emotional gap, ascribing guilt, shame and regret to the hapless characters?

5The moral issue behind the Pascalian dilemma deserves consideration. I believe we are touching on the manifestations of an emotive criticism that is particularly striking applied to Ishiguro’s novels because of their deliberate eschewal of emotional issues. If they provoke a will to feel, they as quickly arouse a will to condemn, once the passions so recently tracked down in the protagonists are transferred to the reader. There is nothing surprising in this: it is both the base of psychoanalytical theory, and a mere twentieth-century improvement on eighteenth-century theories. Hume, for example, explains in his Treatise of Human Nature that ‘the passions are so contagious, that they pass with the greatest of facility from one person to another and produce correspondent movements in all human breasts.’ (Quoted in Pinch 3-4) A fascinating process of expansion and transfer is thus taking place. Convinced that a sustained absence of feeling must be the locus of a lasting but inadmissible emotion, the reader as emotive critic hastens to read the gaps as symptoms. He then participates in the circulation of feeling from narrating I to reader’s I, an effect resulting from ‘emotional extravagancy,’ in other words the emotions’ startling transpersonality that lets them travel from one place to another.11 The emotive critic finally condemns the passions thus aroused as another’s disease, showing he has no sympathy for such constitutional afflictions. If the Ishiguro hero is a past master in defence mechanisms, guarding him against the grimmer emotions of life, the reader too is surely quite an adept. For he it is, like Emily de Valancourt in The Mysteries of Udolpho, who has lifted the veil presumed to cover disturbing truths, only to tremble at what he thinks he sees behind.

2 ‘... simply a sentimental love story’ (Ishiguro, 1989, 167)

6It would appear necessary at this point to come back on some of my assumptions so far. First, I am evoking the emotive critic as if this concept and what it owes to theories of affect went without saying. I am also hinting that a transpersonal, epistemological theory of the emotions disserves the Ishiguro novel, without clearly stating why. From its earliest days, reader-response criticism has built on the idea that the literary text contains constitutional blanks that appeal to the reader’s affectivity. Despite the tremendous shift this implied in the nature of reading and interpretation, the question of why affective identification takes place and how the reader’s emotions are challenged has mostly been left aside in favour of cognitive rather than affective gaps. In terms of Ishiguro criticism, this has meant that the peculiar wistfulness ebbing from text to text has been set aside in favour of the racier question of what hidden feelings are not being owned up to.

7The finest example of this occurs in The Art of Fiction. Here, David Lodge shows Stevens’ past mistakes troubling the smooth surfaces of his narration by focusing on Stevens’ confusion of events and emotions as he stands outside a door hearing Miss Kenton cry. Lodge explains:

It was an evening, in fact, when he humiliated her by coldly rejecting her timid but unambiguous offer of love—that was why she was crying behind the closed door. But Stevens characteristically associates the occasion not with this private, intimate episode, but with one of Lord Darlington’s most momentous conferences. The themes of political bad faith and emotional sterility are subtly interwoven in the sad story of Stevens’ wasted life.12

8Such a confident assertion relies on a fair amount of emotional and referential padding: Stevens’ rejection of Miss Kenton is humiliating, Miss Kenton’s passions are unequivocal. Tears are shed (although Stevens only guesses Miss Kenton is crying), and there is no doubting why nor when. Lodge (it would be fairer to say, ‘the unreliability theory’) then leaps from this private dilemma to a simple moral equation: disreputable politics equal emotional laxity. This also implies that when Stevens provides a second memory of eavesdropping and possible tears, one narration must be a ‘wrong’ one, to be replaced by a reliable right one. The emotions Lodge is inviting us to share are extravagant indeed, both in the etymological sense (being transferred from A to B) and the mundane sense: he is filling the emotional gap with easy, chocolate-boxy feelings of unrequited love and unbefitting obedience. But this is not so much feeling the emotions the text hushes up, as providing substitute feelings with surrogate objects. It is quite simply slipping from an emotional plane to that of kitsch sentimentality, ‘in which emotion is directed away from its human target towards sugary stereotypes, permitting us to pay passing tribute to love and sorrow without the trouble of feeling them.’13

9It is by turning back to the aesthetic preoccupations of the modernists that I believe we can find a way out of rather complacent sentimentality figuring as compensatory emotion in Ishiguro’s fiction. Clive Bell in Art launches a provocative but persuasive attack both of artists trying to eke out ideas in facile representative shapes, and of spectators complacently admiring pictures:

But if in the artist an inclination to play upon the emotions of life is often the sign of a flickering inspiration, in the spectator a tendency to seek, behind form, the emotions of life is a sign of defective sensibility always.... For them the significance of a work of art depends on what they bring to it; no new thing is added to their lives, only the old material is stirred.14

10Not that I am taxing Lodge with defective sensibility. But he is encouraging readers to confuse novel reading and morality, to muddle dishonourable behaviour towards the woman you love and Stevens’ ambivalent feelings of awkwardness and triumph that keep welling to the surface of a repetitive self-narration. Bell does concede that it is remarkably easy to confuse our aesthetic emotion with other emotions, particularly when lured by easy referentiality:

How inferior is my normal state of mind at a concert.... Incapable of feeling the austere emotions of art, I begin to read into the musical forms human emotions of terror and mystery, love and hate, and spend the minutes, pleasantly enough, in a world of turbid and inferior feeling. At such times, were the grossest pieces of onomatopoeic representation—the song of a bird, the galloping of horses, the cries of children, or the laughing of demons—to be introduced into the symphony, I should not be offended. Very likely I should be pleased; they would afford new points of departure for new trains of romantic feeling or heroic thought. I know very well what has happened. I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life. I have been cutting blocks with a razor. I have tumbled from the superb peaks of aesthetic exaltation to the snug foothills of warm humanity. (Bell 32)

11The ‘snug foothill’ response to the novels obtains when the emotions of life are read into affective blanks, when contingency is imposed onto narrative circularity, and when evasiveness is countered by cognition. But is this the only reading the novels invite? While the texts may tempt us to reconstruct a feasible representation of personal inadequacy, so that we live for a while on the risk-free distresses of borrowed emotions, they also underwrite this surface representation with more subtle dissonances. The now familiar scenes of misplaced triumph start always from an idea of unnaming the emotions, just as the events which gave rise to these unaccountable feelings are systematically rewritten, ascribed to now one now another cause. Stevens has surges of ‘strange feeling’ outside various closed doors in the novel, but only sentimental preference can explain why ‘a peculiar sensation’ (Ishiguro 1989, 212) now linked to Miss Kenton’s mourning for her aunt, now to her frustration after accepting a marriage proposal, should finish as Stevens’ inner thrill after a spot of first-rate butlering. Throughout both novels, key events are reviewed, reconsidered, re-scripted, so that a witty or caustic reflection first attributed to one character can be attributed to another. Ryder lives entirely on borrowed emotions, as the dysfunctional family circles around him offer affective blueprints that he promptly tries out. A sentimental response to the novels has to ascribe logic, linearity and cause; it requires that one or more of these repeat versions must be false, covering up the real, sincere story that can in time be reconstructed. A more austere, formal reading, however, can allow for a richer textual fabric, giving aesthetic form to a narrative of familiarity and repetition, until what was and what might have been come together in a formal celebration of narrative potential.

3 ‘... the tangled knots of emotion rose languidly to the surface’15

12Just as Bell turns to music’s ‘subtleties of harmony and rhythm’ to illustrate the difference between aesthetic emotion aroused by significant form, and the emotions of life found in recognizable shapes, so I believe it is by studying their debt to musical rather than representational codes that we touch on Ishiguro’s most challenging novelty. It may also open new paths for an affective criticism working into, rather than against, formalist precepts. Two approaches can be suggested here, although one derives directly from the other as I will show. First, we have the importance of structural and thematic echoes recalling musical motifs in the texts, relying on repetitions, digressions and variations working new combinations from familiar sequences. Second, there is the appeal to musical rather than cognitive emotions, which, while they may offer a clearer understanding of the emotions of life, will not rely on a simple transfer of a specific feeling of love, hatred, revenge, from the composer, via the performer to me.

13These two lines of thought shed interesting light on the novels. Just as variation is the sine qua non condition of the musical event, both in tonal and serial composition, so too is it the structural cornerstone of Ishiguro’s fictions. Stevens certainly bases his study of banter on the mastery of inspired repetition: ‘as a variation on the same exercise, I may attempt to think of three witticisms based on the events of the past hour.’ (Ishiguro 1989, 131) More broadly, words, gestures, motifs and settings circulate through the novels in renewable but repetitive patterns. The finest examples perhaps of these performative repetitions can be found in The Unconsoled, a musical novel, but only anecdotally because of its obvious musical subject matter. Take for instance the rehearsal in a hilltop hut in chapter 25. As the ‘sublime melancholy’ of the third movement affects him, so a picture of his parents ‘with looks of solemn concentration’ takes shape in Ryder’s mind:

Oddly I did not picture them sitting in a concert hall—as I knew I would see them later in the evening—but in the living room of a neighbour in Worcestershire.... There had been a piano in one corner of her living room, which I could never remember ever having seen with the lid raised. For all I knew, it might well have been out of tune or broken. But a particular memory came back to me, of sitting quietly in that room, my cup of tea on one knee, listening to my parents chatting to Mrs Clarkson about music. In any case, for no logical reason, as I continued with the third movement of Asbestos and Fibre there in the wooden hut, I allowed myself the satisfaction of pretending I was back in that room in Mrs Clarkson’s cottage, my father, my mother and Mrs Clarkson listening with serious expressions while I played the piano in the corner, the lace curtain threatening to blow across my face in the summer breeze. (Ishiguro 1995, 357)

14While this begins as a dream-picture, it quickly becomes a memory-picture; as elsewhere in the text, words make sounds, pictures and events feel familiar, in what Wittgenstein would call indirect descriptions.16 Events pictured in his own or others’ lives ring familiar bells for Ryder; but not because they faithfully replicate some lived event. As in the example just quoted, the memory-picture is even preposterous in referential terms: a memory of playing a never-opened piano. But it reworks the motif of a family performance evoked—also as a fantasy—by another aspiring pianist some chapters before. It elaborates on a motif of parents listening to children, parents not listening to children, of performances being successfully brought off and appointments going hopelessly awry. And like Ryder, the reader too conjures up pictures from what he has read, familiar pictures that do not contradict but draw their life from variations heard before. But what has been said belongs to the past by the mere fact that once spoken words leave pictures in their wake; it is in no way a reference to some pre-verbal, pre-textual existence. In the musical text, as in music itself, there is only a perpetually performing present, for which time past is part of the performance.

15Formal, constitutional challenges to temporal and linear logic like these figure not just within any one novel, but also echo from one to another. This helps build up a very Jaussian ‘horizon of expectation’ in the reader, awakening memories and arousing expectations that have little to do with the referential immediacy of the texts, and relate far more clearly to a ‘specific emotional attitude’ that the text awakens.17 This relies on ‘knots of emotion’ which are positively Gordian; they cannot be untied, but only severed if the reader wants a single, coherent picture. But they are more usefully left working into what Milan Kundera calls a ‘polyphony of the emotions,’ superposing as onto the horizontal and vertical axes of contrapuntal composition contradictory motifs that hold together despite all linear logic.18

16Turning to my second point, the specific nature of musical emotion is a question that has long fascinated musicologists and philosophers. Most forms of art said to express emotion are also representational. Indeed how could they say anything about the nature of feelings if they cannot represent them? Music, however, which cannot represent objects nor say specific things about them, should therefore be debarred from expressing emotion, yet it is commonly held to be in some way the language of the emotions. The paradox arises from a confusion over what is emotive because it describes emotions, and what is expressive because it awakens emotion, in other words when emotion is not the cause but the result of the work. Specifically musical emotion, as various analysts have argued, derives not from a specific individual and his psychological make-up, but from the listener’s anticipation and recognition of shapes, patterns and motifs exploring their melodic and harmonic potential. And just as the thirty-third variation on a theme from Diabelli does not cancel out the thirty-two preceding ones, so too I believe that Ishiguro’s variations do not require sorting into false and true motifs of dubious moral value, but gain from perpetual reworkings around impossible matrices.

17There is a clear relation between the works’ structural variations, our very musical recognition of motifs in new harmonic arrangements and our anticipation of resolution and cadence. These are the ways Ishiguro’s fictions awaken horizons of expectation in the reader as music does, calling up an aesthetic sympathy as the reader interacts with dissonances far beyond the representational surfaces of the text or any individual subject. As in the case of Bell’s theory of significant form, this is no sterile formalism spurning human interest in the aesthetic event; on the contrary audience and art are caught in a movement of sympathy, offering insight into emotion itself. A simple illustration can make this clear. It is commonly held that Beethoven composed the last movement of his seventh symphony during a fit of anger. This may be so, and certainly as I get caught up in the impassioned sequences of the movement, I may come closer to an understanding of how anger can sever the human psyché. But this is not a transpersonal emotion: the first violinist will not assault the conductor, just as I do not feel a surge of anger towards the concert-goer next to me. Nor will I know, or care, why Beethoven was angry in the first place. It is in this way that I believe aesthetic emotion in general, and the floating forms emotion takes in Ishiguro’s fiction in particular, functions. These motifs and the way they interrelate are not objects of emotion but means of suggesting emotion. To return to my example of the piano teacher, this feeling is not transpersonal, being transferred from sonata to me, but impersonal, neither pre-existing the performance nor remaining in any tangible form afterwards. This approach seems to me the most promising way of reading beyond the clichéd stereotypes of Ishiguro’s fictions, to consider how, as I read, sympathies arise from my perception of new combinations of emotion running amok through lines of very ordinary prose.

18These are what Eliot calls structural emotions, floating feelings that have occasional affinities to recognizable forms, satisfying my need for pictures, but giving rise above all to new forms of art emotion, not expressive of, just expressive. The referential element is not denied, but seen only as an impression of familiarity, midway on the path to aesthetic satisfaction; I don’t take it as an end it itself and stop there. Which amounts to suggesting that a more formal variety of affective criticism may let the reader have his pipe and smoke it.