S e l f-R e f l e x i v i t y w i t h i nHu ma nS t r a n g e n e s s i nN o c t u r n e s

李厥云

（山东工艺美术学院,山东 济南 250014）

The everyday boredom of these protagonists'life has been unfolded through their reluctance to face the frustrated ideals or dreams of being talented musicians,which becomes some kind of allegory of the emotional experiences of human beings.All the stories of Nocturnes mainly focus on the linking theme of unrealized potential or talent,imbued with some elements of regret,in which the narratives have been “contrived by the author to make coherent sense on the ‘literal,'or primary,level of signification,and at the same time to signify a second,correlated order of signification” (Abrams,2004：5).For most of the main characters in Nocturnes,music has always been representing “an ideal self that has little to do with reality[…]most binds these stories：the conflict between what music promises and what life delivers”(Fleming,2009).

1 An Elegiac Allegory of Human Images

As the title Nocturnes indicates,each story of the collection has concentrated on its music and musicians,together with nightfall as its background,which nevertheless contributes to a heartbreaking“story circle”of similar manners and behaviors.Like his other novels,Ishiguro re-exhibits such a predicament these groaning protagonists really intend to forget,only to escape into such kind of pathetic music which“has been refined and developed so that it provides an enhanced mode of communication beyond the petty power of words-spoken or written”(Gilroy,1993：76).As we've always expected,this book continues the narration of unreliable first-person viewpoint which is tensely controlled by the narrators'psychological reality,through which the similar tone or atmosphere of empathy has been created because of the recurring characters and unnamed circumstances.Besides the first-person narration,the narratee of these stories is assumed to have shared the similar identities with the implied author,which betokens the attributes of the allegory “about how to make a particular setting actually take off into the realm of metaphors so that people don't think it is just about Japan or Britain,but also give it that sort of ability to take off as metaphor and parable” (Shaffer and Wong,2008：75).

Through the continuity of his ever unreliable memories and firstperson narration,this collection Nocturnes presents Ishiguro's thematic concerns about people's poverty of humanistic dignity,and becomes“a figurative narrative or description,conveying a veiled moral meaning”(Drabble,2005：18).Despite the bittersweet or comic undertones in“Come Rain or Come Shine” and “Nocturne”,the main fundamental emotion that it reveals betokens the author's basic concerns about common humanity,such as this virtuosic American woman Eloise McCormack in “Cellists”,who has chosen never to realise her music potential,instead of tarnishing her talent with professional imperfection.Whether you agree or not,Ishiguro continues his similar exploration of universal theme,through which this allegory of human life has been foregrounded as such stories reveal his concerns about“some little pride or dignity […]the human capacity to accept what must seem like a limited and cruel fate”(Moore,2009).

What surprises us readers is that such musicians like Tony Gardner,Tilo and Sonja present their reluctance to accept their humble destinies which indicate the obvious difference between gifted “them” and mediocre “us”.That is to say,such frustrated musicians in this book have always been expected to achieve their potential goals they have set up for themselves,which properly demonstrates what de Man defines the performance of rhetoric that “radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration” (De Man,1979：10).However,these stories have been developed through the first-person narrators conversing with the counterpart narratee who is also a fellow of talented musicians or one relying on music to escape.Despite some elements of absurdity or surrealism,the story “Nocturne” goes on with the sensitive and croony nostalgia music,in which the narrator Steve,a frustrated but gifted saxophonist,recounts his ludicrous experience with Lindy Gardner who has suffered three facial surgeries to become much more marketable.In fact,the anxiety they have both suffered exists in the human condition of missed opportunities and even regret,which turns out to be“an act of understanding,which is always accompanied by a stateof-mind,or,in other words,which has a mood” (Heidegger,1996：296)

2 Floating Strangers in Identity Dilemmas

Besides the sympathy this allegory has stirred,the similar plights these protagonists encounter precipitate our implied readers to reflect on their own choices of life or careers.That is to say,they seem like passively accept their fates without any grumble,which foregrounds the stoicism when facing frustrations and regrets of life.In spite of her awareness of “stupidity of this position” (NOCT,91),Sonja still claims that the young singer-songwriter in “Malvern Hills” seems “much more like Tilo.If disappointments do come,you will carry on still.You will say,just as he does,I am so lucky” (NOCT,123).Therefore,the invitationsofthe narratorslead readersup into an insufficient comprehension of such stories,which somehow brings up some kind of“slow readers,caught between our anticipations and the consequences of the signifier” (Britzman,2006：307).And then these main protagonists,such as Steve and Lindy Gardner,both reveal some passive and reluctant acceptance of their ambiguous fates,which means they almost rest their“fame and fortune” (NOCT,89)on the would-be facial surgery for their popularity of entertainment market,echoing a reminder of some readers'similar situations of pursuing their respective successes.However,this kind of discrepancy between reality and ideal has contributed a lot to the basic structure of this allegoric metaphor which is “precisely the figure that depends on a certain degree of correspondence between‘inside'and‘outside'properties” (De Man,1979：150).

Furthermore,the psychological realism Ishiguro has illustrated in his novels has always been concerned about the “wound” of narrators,which becomes“useful to look at my work as more abstract,like the work of a Beckett or a Kafka […]I've struggled to encourage people to read my books on a more metaphorical level” (Moore,2005).What moves us to tears is that Ishiguro leaves more to the perception of readers,through which we feel like holding more insights than these characters and glimpsing more patterns of their life or essence of life itself.More importantly,what represents Ishiguro's conception of who we are exists here in an “impersonal yet thoroughgoing alienation”,which nevertheless formulates“a pervasive,indeterminate anxiety,a fundamental or founding mood that Heidegger at other times also read as joy,melancholy,and profound boredom”(Krell,1992：45).

In other words,this kind of epiphany about life reality exists in people's assumption of its necessity to avoid their other-than human identities,which becomes some kind forgetting of the plight they have encountered to“persuade people to make the effort to learn and actually face what is often a difficult and complicated procedure-how to conduct human relationships and not mind getting hurt and upset-we have to be tricked to think there is a payoff” (Shaffer and Wong,2008：219).For such people like Lindy and Steve,their facial surgery can only be some way of escaping from the cruel society,in which life turns out to be “so much bigger than just loving someone […]I'm going to go out there anyway and give it a go”(NOCT,183)in order to find one between husbands.Similarly,Steve also shares the same illusion of her wife's“doing it all for me,to make it possible for me to get this surgery.And when the bandages came off,and I had a new face,she'd come back and it'd be all right” (NOCT,182).What Ishiguro seems to demonstrate is how the illusion of fulfilling happiness has somehow turned into the only approach of deserving their human dignities,which represents that such musicians like Steve have to “sweat and heave and break my balls to come up with something worthwhile,something beautiful” (NOCT,166).What unites these characters is that they have all been indulging in their own various fears and desires,which leads to their final resorting to some“class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (Freud,1955：220).That is to say,it is right the struggling of reluctantly accepting their own fates that leads these characters to forget the social reality and even makes human beings much more humanistic.

What's more,the awareness of social reality or the experience of facticity,according to Heidegger's conception,is one of human-only features which have been presented through the narration of such characters of Janeck and Steve.Just like the novel Never Let Me go,this circle of stories is also “an oblique and elegiac meditation on mortality and lost innocence：a portrait of adolescence as that hinge moment in life[…]when the shedding of childhood dreams can lead to disillusionment,rebellion,newfound resolve or an ambivalent acceptance of a preordained fate” (Kakutani,2005：1).As for Lindy Gardner who has “big plans[…]a few more dreams”(NOCT,19)since her childhood,she chooses to find out and rely on some husband who can bring her fame and wealth,which finally leads to two marriages and divorces,despite her romantic love relationship with Mr Gardner.To our surprise,Mr.and Mrs Gardner both intend to sacrifice their love and matrimony in order to continue their own dreams of pursuing either musical fame or familial fortune.Through the marriage and divorce of Tony and Lindy,Ishiguro blends his musical and literary conceptions into the integration of idealism and reality,through which readers begin to wonder whether the stardom of“looking at magazines of movie stars instead of studying […]Rich,beautiful,travelled all over the world” (NOCT,19)represents the meaning and pursuit of human life.What's more,the secular success of social individuals has unconsciously influenced such people as Emily and Charlie so that the couple is“obviously going through some sort of crisis.She must be as upset as you are” (NOCT,46),which somehow confirms further the tone and atmosphere of these nocturnes of the book.Just as Fleming states,the bittersweet memories his characters represent“make it suited to Ishiguro's style,but the air of stillness and regret,and the sense of missed opportunities,are tempered now and then by moments of farce or surrealism”(Fleming,2009).

Therefore,the opening story “Crooner” presents some atmosphere of melancholy,in which Janeck begins to realize the predicament the ageing American husband and wife have been facing in theirfamilial relationship.Instead of bringing happiness and matrimony back to Mrs.Gardner,Tony's serenade,which has once been the only comfort to Janeck's beleaguered single mother,now only leads to Lindy's“up there sobbing” inside her hotel room before her upcoming divorce,and “got her by the heart” (NOCT,28)through his romantic serenade.Just as Heidegger once comments,the threat of facticity does not possess“the character of a definite detrimentality which concerns what is threatened with a definite regard to a particular factical potentiality for being.What angst is about is completely indefinite” (Heidegger,1996：174).With the similar tone of other stories in Nocturnes,Janeck becomes some typical narrator of Ishiguro,recounting his autobiography and experience with the unreliable first-person narration which has let on more than his original intention.Through the foreignness and strangeness of human facticity,the ambitious and determined musicians of Nocturnes seem to formulate the question of human self-reflexivity,in which human Dasein has always been “primordially strange and foreign,we do not even know what‘man'is[…]and we remain strangers to ourselves” (Nelson,2008：137).

In other words,a reading of such realistic boredom turns out to be the reevaluation of human temporality and philosophical poverty,which is to be considered essentially human through the autobiographical selfidentification of the first-person narrators.As an allegory of human condition,these stories of Nocturnes present us the essential figures that are“thus bound up with a crisis of perception and of phenomenality,but concomitantly with a mortal danger to the subject,to the‘integrity'of its body and thus to its very identity” (Weber,2004：233).As for Raymond in “Come Rain or Come Shine”,the narrator “I” reminisces about his hopeless career of being one itinerant teacher,which involves Emily's referring him as “Prince of Whiners” (NOCT,56)and ripping out the offending page of her diary.What seems farcical and even tragic is that Raymond ridiculously impersonates a dog and concocts a properly doggy smell in order to smooth over the matrimony rift between his husbandand-wife friends.In other words,Raymond has been living a destroyed life concerning“going round in bloody circles trying to find a bloody roof to keep over your head” (NOCT,49),and desperately attempting to establish some kind of “link,however tenuous,between their lives in England and mine out here” (NOCT,41).Like Ishiguro's fiction The Remains of the Day,the narrators of Nocturnes have always questioned the identity of themselves,which means their deceiving the self-value of their talented arts perception,and finally turn out to be some“initial alienating split between the human being and his function is ultimately followed by the liberating split in the narrator,who suddenly becomes aware that his life has been a failure” (Terestchenko,2007：78).Therefore,in Nocturnes,Ishiguro has exhibited the images of his universal characters mainly from Britain or Middle Europe,and even America,through the treatment of their spiritual or psychological traumas.

3 Conclusion

Just like the artists of his novels who tend to reconstruct their subjective reality or recreate their nostalgia in order to recap the predicaments of their present,Ishiguro regards his choice of writing as“a kind of consolation or therapy[…]you can somehow recorder it or try and come to terms with it by[…]creating your own world and own version of it” (Vorda and Herzinger,1991：152),which can compensate for the misfortune of his first career choice to achieve his fame and fortune of being a singer-songwriter.Like An Artist of the Floating World(1986)and The Unconsoled (1995),this collection continues to focus on the enigmatic dilemmas of artists,which somehow echoes such protagonists as Ono and Ryder whose ambitions are to contribute to social justice or humanity.Similarly,the characters in Nocturnes inexpressively confess their ultimate fears and desires of life confronting the inconsolable realities,which betokens the repression of their past traumas and even future demands of the ideal professionalism.

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