Conjuring Up the Dream: Three Literary Case Studies

Abstract

This claim was made by Nathaniel Hawthorne roughly 150 years prior to the publication of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995). It would be interesting to know Hawthorne’s response to this novel, in which the first-person narrator is trapped in a 500-page exploration of the maze of his own psyche. With its incongruities, discontinuities of time, place and characters as well as its single-minded protagonist taking all ‘its inconsistency, its strange transformations […] as a matter of course’, the fictional world depicted in the novel indeed resembles that of a dream: full of ‘eccentricities and aimlessness—with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole’. Accordingly, in what follows I will read Ishiguro’s novel as an extended dream narrative emerging from the mental life of one single consciousness, that of its protagonist Mr Ryder. As I will argue, The Unconsoled is an oneiric text par excellence because it ‘translates’ the dream experience into a literary narrative by imitating the single-mindedness of the dreamer and keeping the mediating and guiding role of the narrator to a minimum. Readers willing to accompany Ryder on his Kafkaesque quest are thus forced to share the autodiegetic narrator’s highly subjective and uncritical point of view, resigning themselves to the same sense of dreamlike acceptance. Thanks to this narrative technique, the reader experiences Ryder’s ‘dream’ from the inside rather than from the outside.