[Poe] Writers with the last name Ish—.

It would seem that I have a certain proclivity for other writers with a last name starting Ish—. Thinking that Christopher Isherwood as the ubiquitous subject of poe had finally been exhausted, I came back to the beginning and stumbled upon another writer with the same first three letters in his surname, begging comparison to Isherwood and swirling about in my mind recently. This literary mind-quest starts with an account mentioned previously, a few years ago when I was sitting in the Muddy Waters and picked up a tattered copy of Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories. I acquired the book that started my passion for Isherwood’s writing, and ultimately the life he lived which informed so much of his work. Somewhere in this initial reading of Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin the old, down and out copy I had found got misplaced, prompting a trip to the library so I could finish these stories. In finding the appropriate area of the fiction section, I found a replacement copy for The Berlin Stories and learned the titles of Isherwood’s other works, yet also noticed his neighbor on the alphabetically aligned shelves: Kazuo Ishiguro.

It turns out that most libraries and bookstores conveniently arrange their books alphabetically, and with my habit of always checking out the Isherwood scene in any library or bookstore in which I find myself (having long since become a devotee of his writings), I find myself saying hello to Ishiguro as well, who is usually sitting just on Isherwood’s left (our right.)

Never having read a hint of his prose, nor having much of an impression beyond having absorbed at some point that The Remains of the Day, a common presence in the otherwise Isherwood-inspired interlude at the shelves, had been morphed into a cinematic adaptation (a process that has sparked my incredulity), I did not keep Ishiguro in mind as a writer to invest reading time in. In no way was this a negative judgment; seeing him regularly next to Isherwood took whatever place Ishiguro might otherwise have occupied on my nebulous, internal list of writings to be read.

With the affordances of a friend’s commode library of leftish magazines, I stumbled upon a review of a similar Ishiguro-to-film transference in Never Let Me Go; and I learned for the first time of the story’s nuanced sinisterness amongst the banality of English schooling. What I now see as Ishiguro’s talent for mixing tropes from across prose forms, which I have come to enjoy as I read more of his work, initially caught my attention for the mixture of science-fiction themes with the realistic and mundane setting. Often feeling satisfied with reading a review of a film over actually viewing it, I did find a place for Never Let Me Go on the grand, above-mentioned list.

Before getting to that reading, a Master’s program exploded all over my life and fully consumed my temporal assets, which allowed little if no personal reading space. However, a literature course on short stories as a global form, taken this past semester, did give me the chance to read my first Ishiguro, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (simply Nocturnes from here on out.) While not loving all of the stories in that collection, I did enjoy two in particular which shared a certain haunting weirdness I have found to be sticking with me in my thoughts, Nocturne (the singular title refers to the collection’s fourth story) and Come Rain or Come Shine. In finally getting to the public library’s copy of Never Let Me Go, I have uncovered for myself more of Ishiguro’s affinity for musical references and styling in his prose, and I feel as though I am gaining a stronger sense of him as a writer and artist. The centrality of music to his work is all the more evident in reading Never Let Me Go after Nocturnes, as they have many striking similarities. There’s a simpler level where names such as Come Rain or Come Shine and Never Let Me Go are the titles of songs which play prominently in their respective narratives. Yet a more nuanced scene is framed with Ishiguro’s twin images of ladies losing themselves in the musical moment. First, Kathy is the subject of the following from Never Let Me Go,

“Maybe the volume had been turned right up by whoever had been using it last, I don’t know. But it was much louder than I usually had it and that was probably why I didn’t hear her before I did. Or maybe I’d just got complacent by then. Anyway, what I was doing was swaying about slowly in time to the song, holding an imaginary baby to my breast. In fact, to make it all the more embarrassing, it was one of those times I’d grabbed a pillow to stand in for the baby, and I was doing this slow dance, my eyes closed, singing along softly each time those lines came around again: / ‘Oh baby, baby, never let me go…’” (Ishiguro, “Never Let Me Go” 71)

This scene is mirrored in the story Nocturne by Lindy Gardner’s moment of nonlucidness, as she processes her separation from her now ex-husband Tony and goes into a different space with the narrating protagonist actually watching, “After a while, though, I’d stopped paying much attention to the music because there was Lindy in front of me, gone into a kind of dream, dancing slowly to the [Tony’s] song” (Ishiguro, “Nocturnes” 142). Each lady is dancing slowly by herself with different levels of voyeurism going on by another presence, unknown in the first and seemingly known in the second. Both are expressing some sort of disregard for their surroundings in their absorption with their respective music, the first with the inattention to volume and the second with the blatant check out. By reading more of Ishiguro’s work I hope to encounter more of his women characters and their music, in an effort to shed more light on what he is up to with these tropes.

Whereas Ishiguro often invokes music in his writing, Isherwood takes the role of the indifferent camera, having written in his highly autobiographical Goodbye to Berlin, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed” (Isherwood 1). In this mode, we get the vivid prose portraits which Isherwood made a hallmark of his work, and about which I have written about extensively on Octopoe so will not gush over now.

While these two men diverge in their writing around whether music or photography influences their prose style, there is a strange connection to be made between Kathy in Never Let Me Go and the later events of Goodbye to Berlin when a post-abortion Sally Bowles says:

“You know, Chris, in some ways I wish I’d had that kid… It would have been rather marvellous to have had it. The last day or two, I’ve been sort of feeling what it would be like to be a mother. Do you know, last night, I sat here for a long time by myself and held this cushion in my arms and imagined it was my baby? And I felt a most marvellous sort of shut-off feeling from all the rest of the world. I imagined how it’d grow up and how I’d work for it, and how, after I’d put it to bed at nights, I’d go out and make love to filthy old men to get money to pay for its food and clothes… It’s all very well for you to grin like that, Chris… I did really!” (Isherwood 55)

Isherwood and Ishiguro provide us with two young ladies, each lost in a moment of cradling a cushion to her breast as an imaginary baby, neither of them able to have children themselves, Kathy due to her biological preconditions (no spoilers this time around) and Sally because of a metaphorical immaturity and unpreparedness to cope with the actual reality of rearing progeny. Still recovering from the operation which satisfied her desire not to have the child, Sally fickly daydreams about motherhood. She loses herself in the moment, shutting everything out as Kathy did in her own pseudo-maternal slow dance, yet follows up with a quick distancing from this personal tone by impersonalizing her own imagined offspring with the genderless pronoun it. Sally’s description of motherly life does not convey confidence that she actually knows what being a mother would be like.

These young women from the worlds of Ishiguro and Isherwood are losing themselves in the fleeting moments of music, or solitude, which might make one slow down and dance, or mutter the most delicate fantasies. Or sing out the wildest dream. I love the humanity these two writers bring to their prose, and having fallen for Isherwood hope to continue exploring Ishiguro’s works for more of the same. Distractingly, however, I feel my appreciation for Isherwood extends into a complex realm where I have found odd little commonalities between us and have read extensively of his works, crowding out other writers. I now increasingly read the work of his peers as well, namely W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Paul Bowles and Gore Vidal. Upon the release of Tom Ford’s adaptation of Isherwood’s seminal A Single Man, I braced myself emotionally for the worst. However, I absolved Mr. Ford upon seeing the film. Further processing had to occur when I was hanging out in the Park Branch public library down from my apartment on Page Street. I read an interview by The Advocate magazine of Ford, who spoke of his affinity for Isherwood and – the catalyst for crazy – spoke to an experience of having met Isherwood in southern California in his youth. Knowing that Isherwood died in 1986, I will never meet my most revered artistic predecessor. Simply, I was jealous of Ford, yet feeling this allowed for his adoption of Isherwood’s text to spark my own mental disengagement from Isherwood’s literary world, in which I had become enmeshed.

Slowly I am moving away from exclusively reading Isherwood & Friends, even if it is only down the library shelf at Ishiguro. Yet what I have read up to this point is promising, and hope that the recently checked out An Artist of the Floating World, and When We Were Orphans contribute to a new pocket of knowledge in the literary solar system in my head.

Works Cited

Isherwood, Christopher. The Berlin Stories. New York: New Directions, 1935. Print

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Print.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. New York: Vintage International, 2009. Print.

[Poe] PoMo Notes as Ishiguro Weaves Sound and Prose

[I have been meaning to get to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go for some time now, yet have not managed to get a copy in front of my eyes. However, I recently did have to read his collection of short stories, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. Not loving all of the stories, I found most of the composition brilliant for its strange amalgamation of musical reference, tender relationship shift, somber invocation of dusk, and harkening to past readings. Having read and considered Nocturnes, I hope to pick up Never Let Me Go very soon.

In considering Ishiguro’s collection, I decided to dust off the web journal and tweaked the poe format slightly. Please read no further if you have not read Nocturnes, as this posting will do nothing but serve as a spoiler. If you have read the collection and have something to comment on, please do so.]

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (from here I will simply refer to the collection as Nocturnes for brevity, omitting the byline – the singular form references only the fourth story, Nocturne), we are afforded a collection of short stories to which music, and those who create and love music, are integral in creating a post-modern effect in which we are lost somewhere between music and prose. In this joining of forms, Ishiguro plays with invoking music and past traditions to give us a collection which is somber and reflective. We come to see that all of the stories are tied to the ideas of music and nightfall, which Ishiguro invokes in both a narrative style modeled on a musical composition and his characters and their circumstances. Interestingly, we also see Ishiguro reference past forms of short fiction, developing a composition which fuses prose and music in a uniquely post-modern fashion.

The overarching structure of Ishiguro’s collection is the initial reference to a musical composition, in that Ishiguro intentioned the five stories to be read as a single unit. This mimics the vinyl LP, from which the audience is intended to experience the entire album as a single auditory experience. Any individual song, and in the case of Nocturnes, any individual story, is not meant to be enjoyed singularly. As a collection, the five stories each bring a sense of musicality to the overall experience, with the stories themselves shifting in tone to create a different feeling in that musical reference. For example, a musical composition might have peaks and troughs of excitement, action, and sound, which the stories of Nocturnes mimic. Crooner starts us off slowly on an emotional note. Come Rain or Come Shine, the title itself taken from another musical composition, increases the intensity and gives us a zanier feel to match the content of the story, which we return to momentarily. Malvern Hills brings us back down to a more relaxing pace before we get the brassy, eerie feeling of the fourth story, Nocturne. Finally, we are again released from the intensity of this flow in the final story, Cellists, which takes a more closing and somber tone.

Another element which signifies the centrality of music to Ishiguro’s work is his cast of characters and the circumstances in which we find them. In considering the title of the collection, a nocturne itself is a musical piece appropriate for the night or evening, often with a dreamy or pensive character. In considering its definition, ‘nocturne’ is a highly apt title for the collection, as nightfall, or dusk, is the moment of universal transition in our day, a moment built into our consciousness. Simply, many of the stories take place during dusk or during the night, yet we catch the characters in Nocturnes in a series of awkward moments in terms of their personal relationships, with notes of transition and thoughtfulness that mirror the end of day. Tony and Lindy Gardner of Crooner are in the process of transition, each perceiving a need to move on from their seeming marriage of convenience. Janeck’s accompanying of Tony on the gondola-bound circling and then serenading of Lindy takes place at the end of day, mirroring the ultimate closing of Tony and Lindy’s marriage.

Later in the collection, Lindy still seems to be in transition, as we hear Tony’s records eerily coming through the hotel wall in Nocturne. She even loses herself for a moment with Steve in the room, “After a while, though, I’d stopped paying much attention to the music because there was Lindy in front of me, gone into a kind of dream, dancing slowly to the [Tony’s] song” (Ishiguro 142). Clearly, we could doubt that Lindy has entirely moved on, yet we might take her dreaminess to originate in the cocktail of medications she is presumably on after her plastic surgery. This note of possible drugged-dreaminess chimes throughout Nocturne. Especially in the more absurdist moments of Steve and Lindy’s nighttime adventure and conversations, “I tried again to pull the statuette out of the turkey” (Ishiguro 178),  one might wonder if the pair are inebriated, sniping in the kitchen and being caught out, on stage, turkey on hand by a cell-phoned Hollywood type. This is one element of Nocturne which demonstrates Ishiguro’s mixture of story-telling traditions to create his composition. We get an image that is truly Kafkaesque, with mundane details like heightened air-conditioning because a head swathed in bandages gets warm juxtaposed with the image of Lindy and Steve playing chess and chatting with ghost-like masks on their faces. The masks turn increasingly creepy as the two run through the vast maze of the hotel in the night, as Ishiguro invokes the Gothic tradition and the idea of the monument to create general eeriness. The large hotel, segmented into many rooms with people presumably all around, is only inhabited in our view by our ghost-faced protagonists, “She led the way down hidden stairways, along back corridors, past sauna rooms and vending machines. We didn’t see or hear a soul” (Ishiguro 162).  These moments in the story resonate with Truman Capote’s Miriam, which also featured a large monument which invoked spookiness. In that story, Capote isolated the elder Miriam within her large New York apartment building, creating the sense that she was powerless and helpless against the phantasmal younger Miriam despite being surrounded by neighbors. This blend of absurdist and Gothic tropes create a truly post-modern feeling in this particular story in Ishiguro’s composition.

This blending of traditions and the invocations of music and nightfall also shape Come Rain or Come Shine. In this story, we get a much more complex relationship in flux. Ray, Charlie and Emily are bound in a triangular relationship built on: past college friendship, Charlie and Emily’s marriage, and Ray and Emily’s college friendship based on a mutual love of music. Many years later they have reached new stages of their lives, and the old bonds that held them together have broken. Again, we have a completely Kafkaesque whirlwind of moments between these three characters. Charlie’s plot to reignite his marriage with Emily is absurd, being built on manipulation and lies. Ray is so passive in the face of Emily and Charlie’s constantly putting him down, we have to wonder why he remains connected to them. The events only unfold to become more absurd, with Ray’s odorous concoction brewing away on the stove as Ishiguro invokes Franz Kafka’s Samsa Gregor becoming the insect in The Metamorphosis:

“Encouraged, I knelt down, opened one of the magazines and scrunched up a page in a manner, I hoped, would find an echo when eventually Emily came across the diary. But this time the result was disappointing: too obviously the work of a human hand rather than canine teeth. I’d fallen into my earlier error again: I’d not merged sufficiently with Hendrix. / So I got down on all fours, and lowering my head towards the same magazine, sank my teeth into the pages. The taste was perfumy, and not at all unpleasant” (Ishiguro 76).

Ray has become the neighbor’s dog (whose name, most likely a reference to Jimi Hendrix, adding to the musical nature of the collection) in his ridiculous effort to cover up is earlier perceived transgression against Emily’s diary. Ray goes about his task in a practical way, adding to the silliness of the scene. Using his reasoning, he knows he must “merge” with Hendrix, and ultimately makes the move onto all fours (versus the two feet of the acceptable human mode) and bites the magazine as a dog. This exact moment of absurdity is then immediately followed by a banal observation as to the taste of the magazine, a comment which could easily have followed Ray sipping a glass of red wine with Emily. We melt back to reality when Emily eventually discovers Ray in this position, and Ishiguro switches traditions again into a more realist mode, as the pair spends the next part of their evening listening to music and negotiating their relationship through that music. Their mutual love of a particular genre of music acts to both bring them together and separate them. Emily’s incredulity at Ray’s comment that he does not listen to their music anymore shows the historical meaning it has for Emily. Charlie’s willingness to use it as a wedge between the two marks his willingness to let Ray go in order to ultimately have Emily to himself. We are left with the three in flux, the music playing, and the evening progressing. As will mark the collection, we are again left with a sense of impermanence, as though we are only catching this glimpse of this story, one bit of the song.

The other two stories in this collection, Malvern Hills and Cellists, similarly invoke the themes of transition and music. Our protagonist of Malvern Hills is himself continuously working on the bridge of a song, echoing his listless state as the bridge of a song represents a transition from one part to the next. Working on this bridge, he himself is stuck in this transitional space, somewhere between academics and adult life. This stagnancy is balanced against the transition that is going on for Tilo and Sonja, two fellow musicians whose marriage is unraveling in the company of our protagonist. Cellists also conjures references to music and change. Our two characters, the musician Tibor and the pseudo-virtuoso Eloise, are joined together for a moment in a teacher-student bond before the realities of their separate lives bring about change, with Tibor taking a job and Eloise returning from Venice to the United States.

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Throughout Nocturnes, Ishiguro manages to weave invocations of music into his stories. He does this with characters who are themselves music practitioners or lovers – music always plays a central role to their relationships in flux while their stories are littered with references to music. In keeping with the definition of a nocturne itself, Ishiguro keeps our stories in the somber mood of dusk, conjuring change and movement in each of the stories. Each is set in a transitional space as well, featuring tourists and people traveling, moving through and inhabiting spaces that evoke change. Ishiguro in effect affords us a truly post-modern fusion of sound and prose, rendering this ecphrasis while hitting the notes of realism and absurdity which add depth to his composition.

Works Cited

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. New York: Vintage International, 2009. Print.