Quiet and Personal, or Resoundingly Universal? An Ishiguro Crisis

Abstract

This article considers the theme of crisis throughout Ishiguro's output, to emphasise the central tensions between different binaries: the collective and the individual, the commonplace and the unique, the sensational and the (too) easily overlooked. Continuing the scholarly interest in the importance of memory to Ishiguro's narratives, the argument takes three themes: mnemonic crises and the role of memory in times of crisis; crises of time, in which an individual's ‘generation’ sits uncomfortably with changing or changed circumstances; and how crisis might be artificially calmed through euphemism. The first two themes draw on the work of memory studies in a cultural or societal sense, the latter considers Ishiguro's euphemsims in the context of how language processing can overwrite memory. In attending to Ishiguro's quietness, I focus on readerly complicity, since it is the cognitive work of the reader which reveals the full extent of a given crisis.