Ryder Meets Bourriaud. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and the Contradictions of “Creative Capitalism”

ABSTRACT

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995) has been interpreted from multiple perspectives, with some critics highlighting the psychoanalytical and oneiric side of the novel while others focus on spatial and social elements. Engaging with all of these approaches, in this article I argue that Ishiguro’s fourth novel is eloquent of the main shifts in 1990s esthetics and cultural production. More specifically, in Ryder, the main character of The Unconsoled, it is possible to identify a relational artist who invests in dialogical exchange and social collaboration as creative strategies. From this perspective, I relate The Unconsoled to the emergence of relational esthetics and the so-called “social turn” in contemporary art. At the same time, however, I identify in The Unconsoled an interest in questioning the principles of contemporary collaborative artistic practices, defining consolation and social engagement as the complex yet unavoidable horizon of contemporary cultural production.

Acknowledgments

The research project “Love and its Counterparts. Passion, Desire and Dominance in Sentimental Relationships through Contemporary Art. Research and Artistic Creation I” partially funded the research for this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A detailed analysis of The Unconsoled’s early critical reception can be found in Beedham (103–105).

2. An important exception is Brian Shaffer (91), who understands The Unconsoled as being “concern[ed with] the problematic position of the artist in society.”

3. “[A]n art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (Bourriaud 14).

4. It is interesting to note that Enrique Vila-Matas’s collaboration with documenta 13 in 2012 consisted of a similarly convivial act, on this occasion performed in a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of Kassel. Vila-Matas turned this participation into a novel first published in 2014, The Illogic of Kassel, which somehow continues Ishiguro’s exploration of convivial and participatory cultural practices. It would be worth asking, then, what are the consequences of approaching The Unconsoled and The Illogic of Kassel as part of a literary genealogy of art within an expanded field. This genealogy would feature key texts by a broad range of authors, including Michael Cunningham, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Orham Pamuk, Roberto Bolaño and Rita Indiana Hernández, and is the main subject of the new monograph I am preparing.

5. In this line, although limiting his focus to the individual figure of the artist, can we interpret Brian Shaffer’s argument (114) that “at bottom, The Unconsoled suggests that narcissism and masochism a self-absorbed, self-enclosed, self-hating addiction to pain and vanity rule the contemporary artist’s passions.”

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Carlos Garrido Castellano

Carlos Garrido Castellano is Lecturer in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at University College Cork. His last book is Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere (Rutgers University Press, 2019).