The Drive to Read: Freud, Oedipus and Ishiguro's The Unconsoled

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Abstract

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled (1995), this essay argues, can be understood in the context of Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex. Of particular significance is Freud’s interest in the figure of Oedipus as one who solves riddles, or reads, because The Unconsoled is a text which is concerned also with the act of reading. This essay, following Pietro Pucci’s line that Oedipus’s life as a result of the prophecy is governed by both telos and tukhê, shows that Ishiguro’s novel exposes the ways in which the narrative order in the line of the text depends on the intervention of chance to preserve its apparently natural progression towards a determined end. These interventions manifest in the novel as a series of uncanny repetitions, the textual equivalent of the crossroad where, in a chance encounter, Oedipus slays his father. The crossroad, ensuring that what is fated comes to pass, seems to serve the death-drive by guaranteeing that the authored text becomes a death sentence. However, this paper finds that, at the crossroad, not only is the fated and death-defined narrative preserved, but a twin lineage is also generated by life-giving chance, so that birth and death do not occur only “in the beginning” and at “the end” of Ishiguro’s novel. What emerges instead is a figure of the reader as one who is created and who creates. The reader is both that which is written, like Fate, and dies with the text which authors it, and that which lives to ensure that what once was written is written again.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)96-114
Number of pages19
JournalParallax
Volume22
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2 Jan 2016

Keywords

  • Sigmund Freud
  • Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Reading
  • Oedipus Complex
  • Fate

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  • Introduction: Survival of the Death Sentence

    Coughlan, D., Diakoulakis, C., Huddart, D. & Wijaya, E., 2 Jan 2016, In: Parallax. 22, 1, p. 1-4 4 p.

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

  • Survival of the Death Sentence

    Coughlan, D. (Editor), Diakoulakis, C. (Editor), Huddart, D. (Editor) & Wijaya, E. (Editor), 2016, Parallax, 22, 1, p. 1-114.

    Research output: Contribution to specialist publicationSpecial issue

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