Sillages critiques
25 | 2018
Esthétiques de l’absence
Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
“A Strange and Sometimes Sadness” by Kazuo Ishiguro
Enora Lessinger
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Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
“A Strange and Sometimes Sadness” by Kazuo Ishiguro
Enora Lessinger
1
In spite of an undeniable variety in form and style, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels all bear
certain common features characteristic of the author’s writing strategy. The ways of
coming to terms with painful or even traumatic events in one’s past are a recurrent
theme, while in terms of narrative technique Ishiguro frequently resorts to unreliable
narration to shed light on his protagonists’ coping mechanisms. His first published short
stories as a young author, written in the course of his MA in Creative Writing in 1980,
clearly bear the mark of what were yet to become the defining features of Ishiguro’s
writing.
2
I will focus here on one of these early short stories: “A Strange and Sometimes Sadness” (
Ishiguro 1981), from here on referred to as “Strange”, published in 1981 in Faber and
Faber’s Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers. The story is set in England, where Ishiguro
lived almost all his life, but for the most part the narrator is reminiscing about her time
in Nagasaki during the war, before the atomic bomb was dropped.
3
“Strange” starts with the first-person narrator, Michiko, evoking the recent visit of her
daughter Yasuko. This visit prompts her to think of another Yasuko that she used to
know, the woman she named her daughter after. The majority of the short story is told
through seemingly random memories from the time of her friendship with Yasuko and
with Yasuko’s father Kinoshita. The anecdotes paint a portrait of daily life in Japan during
wartime. Several of them revolve around Yasuko’s fiancé, Nakamura, who is stationed in
the Pacific. It rapidly transpires that the narrator is in love with her friend’s fiancé,
though the subject is never openly broached. At the end of the story, Michiko remembers
the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and Yasuko and her father died as a
result. We also learn that Nakamura was killed around the same period. The story ends
with mundane remarks by the narrator on her daily life in England, where she moved
after the war. Indeed, throughout “Strange”, the superficially peaceful atmosphere and
the deceivingly detached tone of the narration form a stark contrast with the themes
dealt with – war and destruction, unrequited love, guilt, and mourning.
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Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
4
This article aims to show that the writing strategy at work in this early short story
revolves around a poetics of silence, which operates on several levels at once. I argue here
that this writing strategy clearly prefigures Ishiguro’s style and writing technique in his
work as a whole.
5
First, I will focus on silence as a stylistic tool, and operating at the level of the diegesis: I
will look at silences in the story (literal silences) and then at the silences of the story
(what the story does not say). Finally, I will argue that silence also functions here as a
narrative strategy. I will focus in particular on the narrator’s unreliability and its
implications for the narrative pact and the reader’s involvement in the text, while
showing how this narrative strategy relates to Ishiguro’s subsequent work.
Silences in the Story
In many ways, “Strange” can be seen as a study for Pale View of Hills, Ishiguro’s first novel.
In both, the majority of the textual space is occupied by the reminiscences of a firstperson narrator on her life in post-bomb Nagasaki, and on her friendship with a woman
whose memory is coloured by the narrator’s haunting sense of guilt. This underlying
feeling of guilt manifests itself, among other things, through the growing omnipresence
of silence at the level of the diegesis: both “Strange” and A Pale View of Hills are replete
with unfinished sentences, interrupted dialogues, unanswered questions and things left
unsaid, which work as clues for the reader that there is more to the story than meets the
eye.The first lines of both works provide a good sample of their similarity in this regard,
as well as in terms of plot.
“A Strange and Sometimes Sadness”:
It was the year after we came to England that I gave birth to Yasuko. [...] I began
telling my daughter about that first Yasuko, but was quickly interrupted. ‘You’ve
told me before’, she said, impatiently. ‘You named me after her. The one who was
killed by the bomb.’ […] I saw she had little interest in hearing about the first
Yasuko, so I let the matter drop. (1981:14)
A Pale View of Hills:
Niki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, is not an abbreviation [...] She
did not mention Keiko until the second day. […] Perhaps it was not just the quiet
that drove my daughter back to London. For although we never dwelt long on the
subject of Keiko’s death, it was never far away, hovering over us whenever we
talked. (1982:21)
6
Both works start in medias res with a mention of the narrator’s daughter, with whom the
narrator is both eager and loath to broach the subject of a dead woman who was dear to
her: in A Pale View of Hills, this woman is the narrator’s elder daughter, who has recently
committed suicide, and in “Strange” she is her dead friend, after whom she named her
own daughter. In both cases the daughter shows a certain reluctance to respond; in
“Strange” she even cuts her mother off: “[I] was quickly interrupted” (1981:14). This
interruption causes the narrator to take refuge in her memories: from the direct speech
of this mother-daughter dialogue, the narration moves to Michiko’s reminiscences in free
indirect speech.
7
This silencing on the part of Yasuko suggests to the readers that something is going on in
this exchange that they do not have access to. Yasuko’s reaction could mean that she has
heard the story many times and that she is tired of her mother’s fixation on the past; the
use of the adverb “impatiently” tends to confirm this first interpretation. It could also
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Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
mean that the subject of Yasuko, or more generally of Michiko’s past life in Nagasaki, is
usually taboo between mother and daughter, and that Michiko’s breaking of the taboo
puts Yasuko ill-at-ease. This reading is supported by the incipit of A Pale View of Hills,
which, as shown above, is clearly the counterpart of the incipit of “Strange”. In this
incipit, Keiko’s death is more explicitly described as taboo between the two women,
central as it may be in their thoughts. As always in Ishiguro’s writing, there is no way to
decide between the different readings, but from the very beginning the reader of either
work is encouraged to pay attention to the permanent tension in the text between
speaking out and remaining silent.
8
Thus, at the level of the diegesis, silence is omnipresent: the string of anecdotes that form
the bulk of “Strange” is punctuated by moments of silence which become more and more
frequent as the story progresses. These blanks are one of many clues that there is more to
the story than meets the eye.
9
However, even though in this passage of “Strange” silence is forced upon the narrator by
her daughter, in the rest of the story silence generally results either from self-restraint or
from estrangement between the characters.In particular, silence keeps growing between
the narrator Michiko and her friend Yasuko as the story progresses. There is a turning
point close to the end of the short story, when the two friends come close to quarrelling
about the delicate subject of Michiko’s fiancé, Nakamura:
It never developed into an open quarrel, but remained with us for some weeks,
somewhere just beneath the surface of things, and it had an uncomfortable way of
colouring almost everything we said to each other.” (1981:21)
10
This image of some undefinable and elusive feeling, subtly altering the significance of
every word, forms part of the text’s self-reflexivity. Indeed, it works as a mise-en-abyme
of the poetics of the entire short story: just as in Michiko’s description, what is at stake in
“Strange” is never clearly presented as such. Throughout the story, the interpretive work
is largely left to the reader, who has to go beyond the narrator’s seemingly detached
account in order to understand the emotional significance of the events reported. Brian
W. Shaffer points out the relevance of the parallel between the expression and Ishiguro’s
writing strategy: “What unites [the] three Japanese stories, and indeed Ishiguro’s first
three novels, is thus their shared focus on the unsaid, on matters that lie ‘somewhere just
beneath the surface of things’.” (Shaffer 10).
11
After this key episode, silence and reserve seem to take over the two friends’ relationship,
as they become progressively more estranged:
Yasuko fell silent then. We walked to the bottom of the hill without speaking.
(1981:22)
[O]ur next few meetings had a reserve about them quite foreign to us. We did not
openly discuss the matter of her marriage for a long time. (1981:22)
Yasuko sat there quietly, and I thought she would say nothing more of the incident.
(1981:23)
I did not reply. I think I was searching for something suitable to say. (1981:23)
We sat there silently while the evening grew darker. (1981:24)
12
This presence of literal silence in the story also contributes to the text’s self-reflexivity:
these silences described in the narration mirror what the narration itself is doing, so that
literal silence in the diegesis sheds light on the silences of the story.
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Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
Silences of the Story
13
By ‘silences of the story’, I mean all the facts that the narrator fails to provide, so that the
reader must either make do without them or find out about them without direct help
from the narrator.
14
Just as in A Pale View of Hills, we know nothing of the period between the narrator’s life in
Nagasaki and her new life in England. The phrasing of the first sentence, “It was the year
after we came to England that I gave birth to Yasuko” (1981:13), suggests that the reader
already knows of the narrator’s move to England and of Yasuko’s identity: the only
element introduced as new is the time of her birth. Similarly, Michiko’s marital situation
is only mentioned in passing at the beginning of the story: “She was married four years
ago, not long before my husband’s death.” (1981:14). The existence and subsequent death
of the said nameless husband are presented as familiar information, mentioned only by
chance in order to situate another event in the general timeline of the story – here, her
elder daughter’s wedding. Thus from the very start, the reader is placed in an awkward
position, expected to know more than s/he does and compelled to infer information from
context.
15
Significantly, Yasuko’s fiancé Nakamura is also introduced in this off-hand and seemingly
casual manner: “And her agony had to continue, for her fiancé had been stationed in the
Pacific” (1981:3). However, though he never appears in person in the story, Nakamura
quickly appears to be one of the story’s absent centres: in spite of this literal absence, he
is at the centre of all attentions.
16
His name first appears several pages in, at the end of a long description of the setting of a
conversation between the narrator and her friend Yasuko’s father, Kinoshita:
I remember clearly, for instance, that conversation with Yasuko’s father one
morning on my way to work. There was a small bridge leading out of Nakagawa
where each morning he and I and several others would wait for the tram that would
take us into the city. Before the war, Kinoshita-San had been a civil servant, but
now he too worked in a factory, one not far from mine. Each morning he would be
there on the bridge before me, a small briefcase from his office days clutched under
one arm. He had become quite thin by then and his increasing years made him
stoop a little. That particular morning, he greeted me with his usual bow and smile,
then told me Yasuko had at last received a letter from Nakamura. (1981:16)
17
The abundance of details on the surroundings creates a contrast with the absence of
narrative comment on the subject that is nevertheless at the heart of the episode:
Michiko’s secret love for Nakamura. Kinoshita is the one who brings up the subject of
Nakamura, hinting several times at these hidden feelings:
“You were always very fond of Nakamura-San.”
“Yes, I’m fond of him. But mainly I worry for Yasuko’s sake.” […]
“We both of us must worry selflessly, isn’t that so, Michiko-San?”
Perhaps I coloured slightly then. “I’m not sure what you mean, Kinoshita-San.” […]
“Of course you wished Nakamura-San to choose Yasuko. But another part of you
wished them to remain apart, isn’t that so?”
I cannot recall if I found the words of denial. I suspect not. (1981:17)
18
The central piece of information of Michiko’s love for her best friend’s fiancé is thus
provided to the reader by indirect means, through Kinoshita’s discourse. By focusing
exclusively on her answer, Michiko indirectly confirms the truth of Kinoshita’s
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Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
insinuation. In his choice to convey the information indirectly, not only does Ishiguro
encourage his readers to use their faculties of deduction, he also draws their attention to
the information in question: paradoxically, the narrator’s reluctance to revealing her love
emphasises its very importance for her. The perceptible tension between the desire to
hide and the urge to reveal, mirrored in the narrator’s failed attempt to tell her daughter
about Yasuko at the very beginning, is the expression of the narrator’s pain and feeling of
guilt when it comes to Nakamura.
19
This technique of introducing crucial information that is painful for the narrator through
direct discourse, in a dialogue between the narrator and another character, is typical of
Ishiguro’s writing. The best-known example takes place at the end of The Remains of the
Day, when Miss Kenton mentions the feelings she and Stevens have for each other,
feelings left unsaid up to that point of the narration:
“For instance, I get to thinking about a life I might have had with you, Mr Stevens.’
[…]
I do not think I responded immediately. […] Indeed – why should I not admit it? – at
that moment, my heart was breaking.” (1996: 239)
Here again, the central piece of information is provided by another character in direct
reported speech, and even though it is obvious that these words have struck a chord, the
narrator fails to report his answer, or even if there was one at all.
20
Nakamura’s central role in the story is hinted at again in the description of the nearquarrel between the two friends, which focuses on the subject of Nakamura himself.
Ironically, in this episode, the narrator is actually encouraging her friend to overcome
her feeling of guilt for leaving her father, and to go ahead with her plan of marrying
Nakamura after the war. In retrospect, the narrator comments that “It is odd to think
now that I felt so involved. After all, it had little to do with me.” (1981:21)
21
The discrepancy between the narrator’s indirect confession of her feelings a few pages
earlier and her feigned detachment here is a clue for the reader that the narrator is not
fully reliable. Here, Phelan’s typology of unreliable narrators (Phelan, James 34-37) can
lead us to conclude that Michiko’s unreliability lies not in her underreporting, but rather in
her misinterpreting of what she reports. Indeed, she does confess to emotional
involvement in the subject of Yasuko and Nakamura’s wedding but fails to provide an
adequate explanation for the significance of this feeling, expressing instead a surprise
that the readers cannot share, knowing as they do of her love for Nakamura.
22
It is no coincidence that the other absent centre in “Strange” is the atomic bomb that was
dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. Indeed, Nakamura and the bomb are linked by the feeling of
guilt they provoke in the narrator, for having coveted her friend’s fiancé on the one hand,
and for having survived the bomb that killed Yasuko on the other. We can see a parallel
between the story’s poetics of silence and the work of annihilation of the bomb itself: in
“Strange”, as well as in A Pale View of Hills, the bomb’s literal destruction of the narrator’s
friends and of her city is reflected in the text, as the narrator creates a different form of
erasure by attempting to talk around the traumatic losses at the basis of the story.
23
Thus in the case of the bomb, the most crucial piece of information is again provided by
another character: the fact that the bomb killed Michiko’s friend is made clear at the
beginning of the story by the narrator’s daughter, Yasuko’s namesake:
“You’ve told me before”, she said impatiently. “You named me after her. The one
who was killed by the bomb.” (1981:13)
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Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
24
This sharpness of tone contrasts with the characteristically detached, matter-of-fact
manner in which the narrator describes the event herself, at the very end of the story:
“The next day, the bomb fell. The sky was strange, the clouds were huge, and there was
fire everywhere. Yasuko died and so did her father.” (1981:25)
25
However, even though the bomb is rarely explicitly mentioned, it is clearly central in the
narrator’s preoccupation, and in her telling of the story. As with Nakamura, the narrator
seems to fight contrary urges to tell the reader about the bomb and to keep her memories
to herself, a tension that can be better understood in the light of literary trauma theory.
26
Indeed, as pointed out by Cathy Caruth, “trauma stands outside representation,
altogether” (Caruth 17), which explains Michiko’s inability to give a straightforward
account of what is at the heart of her preoccupations. However, recounting her
experience, painful though it may be, is also a way for Michiko to cope with the traumatic
events that lie in her past and with her sense of guilt: “trauma is only known through
repetitive flashbacks that literally re-enact the event because the mind cannot represent
it otherwise. [...] [T]his concept of trauma perceives responses as fundamentally
pathologic and privileges the act of speaking or narration as the primary avenue to
recovery.” (Balaev 150)
27
We find a good illustration of the way Michiko uses narration to deal with her trauma in
the episode that takes place the day before Yasuko’s death. While the two friends are
strolling in a park, Michiko suddenly catches a ghastly expression on her friend’s face:
I saw Yasuko staring towards me with an expression so ghastly it completely
distorted her face. The eyes were staring so frantically they trembled with the
tension. Her jaw was quivering, her teeth starting to bare.” (1981:23-24)
28
This frantic expression could be a literal illustration of the “speechless fright” described
by Balaev: “[a] central claim of contemporary literary trauma theory asserts that trauma
creates a speechless fright that divides or destroys identity” (Caruth 17). Here, describing
Yasuko’s facial expression is a means for the narrator to exteriorise her own unspeakable
feeling of horror while distancing herself from it at the same time, by attributing it to her
friend and describing only a silent manifestation of it, rather than the feeling itself.
Rather than a straightforward account of events, her somewhat biased narration is a
therapeutic tool: “memories of the traumatic experience are revised and actively
rearranged according to the needs of the individual at a particular moment” (Caruth 164).
29
Michiko’s projection of her own feelings onto Yasuko is even more explicit in the last
page of the story, when the narrator mentions the episode again:
I often recollect her face, the way I saw it that night, and I think perhaps it was a
premonition not just of the atomic bomb, but that Yasuko had seen something at
that moment – something in my own face.” (1981:26)
30
Michiko’s unspoken feeling of guilt translates textually in her conviction that Yasuko’s
distorted face reflects her somewhat supernatural knowledge of both the Michiko’s secret
love and the impending bomb. As for the idea that Yasuko’s reaction might have had a
premonitory dimension, it is likely to be a manifestation of Michiko’s reconstruction of
the past. The trauma of the bomb and the loss of her friend colour all her memories, just
as the two friends’ quarrel coloured everything they said afterwards.
31
In A Pale View of Hills, the narrator entertains the idea of having had a similar premonitory
feeling of her daughter’s suicide by hanging, at a time when she was still pregnant with
her:
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Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
I find it tempting to persuade myself it was a premonition I experienced that
afternoon. [...] In all possibility, it was nothing so remarkable. The tragedy of a little
girl found hanging from a tree. (1983:156)
32
The narrator of A Pale View of Hills, like that of “Strange”, is affected by a post-bomb
trauma doubled by a more personal one, her daughter’s death. Just as in “Strange”, her
reminiscences are altered by her sense of guilt and recomposed temporally to match her
present feelings that she should have seen the tragedy coming, and is therefore guilty for
failing to prevent it. Both traumas function as absent centres in the novel, and in her
work of reconstructing the past the narrator adopts a similar strategy to Michiko’s:
avoidance and displacement of the underlying focus of the story. Just as the bomb erased
Yasuko from Michiko’s life but not the mark she made on her, unreliable narration in
“Strange” shows, in counterpoint, Michiko’s continuing feeling of guilt and distress.
Silence as a Narrative Strategy
33
According to Balaev, “[t]he narrative strategy of silence may create a ‘gap’ in time or
feeling that allows the reader to imagine what might or could have happened to the
protagonist, thereby broadening the meaning and effects of the experience” (Caruth 159).
This is the case in “Strange”, where the narration goes back and forth between present
and past, which subtly inform each other in the narrator’s perception, and where
Michiko’s feelings are always expressed indirectly, thereby requiring the reader’s active
involvement.
34
In my analysis of unreliable narration in “Strange”, I follow Gaby Allrath’s division of
textual signals of narrative unreliability into three groups: unreliability on the story
level, discourse level and structural level (Allrath 22).
35
On the story level, “signals of narrative unreliability often take the form of various
inconsistencies in the narrator’s account” (Fonioková 49). “Strange” contains several
episodes in which we find such an example of story-level contradiction, where the
attentive reader can detect an inconsistency between Michiko’s tale and other characters’
reactions.
36
In the scene where the narrator describes her friend’s face as distorted by a frantic
expression, for instance, there is clearly a discrepancy between Michiko’s account and
Yasuko’s reaction:
A cry of alarm escaped me and I grasped her shoulders. Perhaps I shook her quite
roughly.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘Michiko, what’s wrong?’
And when I looked again, apart from a puzzled look, the face was gentle, beautiful,
Yasuko’s face once more. (1981:23)
37
These two sets of contradictory accounts confirm the idea that the narrator’s telling of
the story is a distorted one, and that the knowledge of present-time Michiko is tainting
her memories of past events.
38
On the level of discourse, textual signals of unreliability function as metanarrative alerts.
These alerts encourage the reader to keep an eye out for clues of the narrator’s biased or
even dishonest account of the story – in particular, on her keeping key information from
the reader (Fonioková 53-57).
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Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
39
The first subtype of textual signal on the discourse level consists of metanarrative
comments on the narrator’s limitations. In “Strange”, comments on the limits of the
narrator’s memory abound:
Of course these things are in the past now and there must be much I have forgotten.
(1981:15)
I cannot remember their precise places in time. (1981:15)
I cannot recall if I found the words of denial. I suspect not. (1981:17)
Perhaps we discussed things of importance, I do not remember. (1981:25)
Etc.
40
This is a recurrent strategy in Ishiguro’s work: we find strikingly similar comments in
each of his first three novels, respectively A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World
and The Remains of the Day:
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing: often it is heavily coloured by the
circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the
recollections I have gathered here. (1983: 156)
It is quite possible, of course, that I imagined this. (1986:128)
It is possible this is a case of hindsight colouring my memory, but I have a distinct
feeling that it was at that moment I first sensed something odd, something
duplicitous perhaps, about this apparently charming American gentleman.
(1989:90)
41
At first, such comments can paradoxically strengthen the reader’s trust. However, in
combination with other signals, they function for the experienced reader as clear
indicators of the narrator’s unreliability. These warnings are all the more suspicious as in
other places, the narrator seems to have an implausibly good memory, claiming to
picture a scene in all its minute details, and rendering whole conversations that took
place decades ago. Metanarrative comments on the limitations of the narrator’s memory
are thus interwoven with passages that would represent feats of memory, were they to be
regarded as entirely reliable.
42
The second subtype of textual signal on the discourse level is what Kathleen Wall calls the
“verbal habits” of the narrator (Wall 13). Among such characteristic verbal habits listed
by Allrath (quoted in Foniokovà 49), two are particularly relevant in the case of
“Strange”.
43
Firstly, the specific and recurrent use of certain words is a common marker of
unreliability, as such patterns of speech emphasise the constructed nature of the
discourse. In “Strange”, we observe a striking recurrence of markers of uncertainty and
of the lexical field of strangeness.
44
Examples of uncertainty markers (emphasis ours):
She seemed uninterested, perhaps a little embarrassed. (1981:13)
A lone plane, it seemed, had carried out an air-raid that evening. (1981:18)
Apparently no one had been hurt. (1981:18)
I must have made some more bewildered remarks. (1981:23)
Etc.
Examples of semantic references to strangeness (emphasis ours):
I had encountered something strange, perhaps supernatural. (1981:14)
He continued to regard me with his curious expression […]. (1981:17)
I thought it odd, but carried on working. (1981:17)
It’s like they keep falling from somewhere strange. (1981:19)
Etc.
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Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
45
Both the very recurrence of these patterns of speech and their semantic field contribute
to giving the reader a sense of distrust. Just as with comments on the limitations of her
memory, they show that the narrator is distancing herself from her own narration, and
contribute to the idea that her account might not be entirely reliable.
46
Secondly, the narrator’s great restraint also points to the fact that she keeps a lot from
the reader, both in terms of facts and feelings. In almost every scene, Michiko’s desire to
keep her thoughts and feelings from other characters manifests itself in her choice to
remain silent:
I was astonished but said nothing. (1981:21)
I resisted the urge to question him further. (1981:23)
I decided to let it drop and merely laughed again. (1981:24)
I told no one of my experience the night before in the Shingokko gardens. (1981:25)
Etc.
47
But this reserve goes beyond what the narrator shares, or rather does not share, with the
other characters. It also applies to her attitude towards the reader, of which the anecdote
of Kinoshita’s cooking offers a striking example. Michiko and Yasuko come back one
evening to find that Yasuko’s father has been cooking for them as a surprise, and they all
sit down to eat together:
I had taken but two or three mouthfuls when I noticed Yasuko looking over to me.
Then I saw her father looking suspiciously from one face to the other. Yasuko burst
into laughter, covering her mouth with a hand. The fish had been salted so much it
was impossible to eat. (1981:20)
48
Through Michiko’s passing comment, “I had taken but two or three mouthfuls when I
noticed Yasuko looking over to me”, we perceive how little responsibility she is willing to
take for her own narration: the reader can only fully understand the situation described
through other characters’ reactions. Here, only once Yasuko’s hilarity has made it
obvious that something is wrong does Michiko explain what she must have already
known, having taken several mouthfuls of the overly salted fish, and she does so without
offering any personal comment.
49
This self-restraint illustrates the above-mentioned tension, fundamental in the narrative,
between the narrator’s urge to tell and her reluctance to do so. As Tamar Yacobi puts it,
in this type of narrative strategy, “incongruity arises more from the speaker’s
misfocusing than from any direct misdjudgment on his part: the issue most central or
relevant […] is passed over in silence throughout the mediator’s discourse, while sideissues receive liberal commentary.” (Yacobi in Fonioková 55). This notion of misfocus
echoes that of an absent centre. The fact that the elements at the heart of the story are
largely glossed over is emphasised by the abundance of details provided on ancillary,
safer subjects, and by the many digressions from the main storyline. For the experienced
reader, they only contribute to revealing Michiko’s true preoccupations.
50
Indeed, the poetics of silence at work in the narrative strategy of “Strange” can have one
of two effects on the readers. They are likely to either have a feeling of incomprehension,
that they are left out of the story, or – if they accept the implicit narrative pact – that
they are expected to take an active role through their interpretive faculties. In order to
understand what is at stake, they need to operate a re-focusing, to read between the lines
and fill the blanks of the story and of the narration. This alternative is introduced even
before the beginning of the story, through the title itself: “A Strange and Sometimes
Sadness” is a paratextual element that functions as a signal of unreliability on the
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Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
structural level, “[forewarning] the reader against taking the narrative at face value”
(Fonioková 57).
51
It is obvious at first glance that something is not quite right in this title: the sequence
article + adjective + ‘and’ + adverb + noun forms an enallage. This figure of speech, which is a
particular form of ellipse, refers to the substitution of the expected grammatical form by
another, incorrect one.
52
This enallage forces the reader to make an adjustment in order to make sense of the title.
Since the reader’s first impression is likely to be that a word is missing – an adjective
between “sometimes” and “sadness” – such an adjustment would precisely consist in
filling the blank. The title could then read, for instance, “A Strange and Sometimes
[Suspicious] Sadness”.
53
Another solution would be a grammatical re-categorisation of “sometimes”, making it an
adjective while staying semantically as close as possible to the original adverb – for
instance, “A Strange and [Occasional] Sadness”.
54
Yet another option would be to break down “sadness” into an adjective (sad) and a suffix
(ness), where “ness” would function semantically as a noun, meaning something general
like “thing” or “feeling”: “A Strange and Sometimes Sad [Ness]”. In this case, strange and
sad would both qualify “ness”.
55
The indeterminacy and openness of this expression results in a narrative pact of active
participation that starts as early as the title. The reader is made aware that s/he must
either adopt an active role and be ready to fill in the blanks of the text, or else be left in
incomprehension.
56
We can see a form of self-reflexivity of the short story in this alternative, which befalls
not only the reader but also the narrator herself: the trauma caused by the atomic bomb,
which forms the background of “Strange”, is unspeakable precisely because it is such an
incomprehensible event. Narration becomes for Michiko a means of expressing and
dealing with the “repetitive flashbacks that literally re-enact the event because the mind
cannot represent it otherwise” (Balaev 151).Indeed, by trying to put words on it – or
rather, around it – she makes the choice to metaphorically rebuild her life by
reconstructing the past, just like the reader who accepts the narrative pact needs to
reconstruct the story by filling its blanks. Nevertheless, even to this model reader the
story remains open. As often in Ishiguro’s fiction, there does not seem to be just one
correct underlying version of the short story; rather, it allows every reader to have their
own reading, in the same way that “[t]raumatic memory is rarely represented as an exact
recalling of events. Rather, the construction of the past includes new details with each
telling, or it is constructed from different perspectives” (Balaev 163).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allrath, Gaby. (En)gendering Unreliable Narration: A Feminist-Narratological Theory and Analysis of
Unreliability in Contemporary Women’s Novels. WVT, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2005.
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Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
Balaev, Michelle. Mosaic: “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory”. An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal,
Vol. 41, No. 2, June 2008, pp. 149-166.
Booth, Wayne Clayton. The rhetoric of fiction. University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Fonioková, Zuzana. Kazuo Ishiguro and Max Frisch: Bending Facts in Unreliable and Unnatural Narration
. P. Lang, 2015.
Hühn, Peter et al. The Living Handbook of Narratology. Hamburg University Press Hamburg, 2011,
http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. “A Strange and Sometimes Sadness”. Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers. Faber
and Faber, 1981.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. A Pale View of Hills. Faber and Faber, 1991.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. An Artist of the Floating World. Faber and Faber, 1983.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. Faber and Faber, 1996.
Phelan, James. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Cornell University
Press, 2005.
Shaffer, W. Brian, “Somewhere Just Beneath the Surface of Things: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Short
Fiction”. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. A&C Black, 2009, 9-19.
Wall, Kathleen. “The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration”.
The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 24, No. 1, Winter, 1994, pp. 18-42.
ABSTRACTS
The concept of a poetics of silence has acquired a central place in literary theory in recent
decades, with unreliable narration as defined by Booth (1961) playing an important part in the
conceptualisation of an aesthetics of silence. Both silence and unreliable narration are key
components of Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing strategy. I want to show that the poetics of silence that is
so constitutive of his style was already at work at the very beginning of his writing. In order to
achieve this goal, this paper studies one of Ishiguro’s first published short stories, “A Strange and
Sometimes Sadness” (1981), in which a first-person narrator evokes memories of her time in
Nagasaki during World War II. The narrator progressively turns out to be an unreliable one, due
to the unspeakability of her traumatic experience. Her reluctance to report certain facts and to
express some of her feelings is emphasised by the overabundance of details provided on safer
subjects. The implied reader is compelled to try and fill the text’s blanks, which themselves shed
light on the gap between narrator and implied author. This short story prefigures very clearly
Ishiguro’s later novels, and deals with themes dear to him: memory, family, trauma and guilt, the
atomic bomb as an absent centre. It also presents a very clear picture of the genesis of his writing
style, centred around a poetics of silence, both at the diegetic and narratorial levels.
Le concept de poétique du silence a acquis une importance centrale dans la recherche littéraire
ces dernières décennies, tandis que la narration non fiable telle que Booth l’a définie en 1961 joue
un rôle essentiel dans la conceptualisation d’une esthétique du silence. Narration non fiable et
poétique du silence sont deux éléments clés de la stratégie d’écriture de Kazuo Ishiguro. Le but de
cet article est de monter que la poétique du silence caractéristique du style d’Ishiguro était déjà à
l’œuvre au tout début de sa carrière d’écrivain. A cet effet, cet article étudie l’une des premières
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Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
nouvelles publiées d’Ishiguro, ‘A Strange and Sometimes Silence’ (1981), dans laquelle une
narratrice à la première personne évoque des souvenirs de sa vie à Nagasaki pendant la guerre.
La narratrice s’avère progressivement d’une fiabilité très limitée, du fait du caractère indicible de
son traumatisme. Sa réticence à rapporter certains faits et exprimer ses sentiments est accentuée
par la surabondance de détails qu’elle donne sur des sujets plus neutres. Le lecteur implicite est
amené à combler les blancs du texte, qui mettent en lumière l’écart entre la narratrice et l’auteur
implicite. Cette nouvelle préfigure clairement les romans plus tardifs d’Ishiguro, et aborde des
thèmes qui lui sont chers : mémoire, famille, traumatisme et culpabilité, et la bombe atomique
comme centre absent. Elle présente également un aperçu très clair de la genèse de son style,
centré autour d’une poétique du silence, aussi bien au niveau diégétique que narratologique.
INDEX
Mots-clés: silence, Kazuo Ishiguro, narration non fiable, pacte narratif, centre absent, blanc,
théorie du trauma
Keywords: silence, Kazuo Ishiguro, unreliable narration, narrative pact, absent centre, blank,
trauma theory
AUTHOR
ENORA LESSINGER
Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle (PRISMES EA 4398)
Enora Lessinger is a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. She currently works at the
École Doctorale EDEAGE - Etudes Anglophones, Germanophones et Européennes (ED 514),
Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 where she has been preparing a PhD under the
supervision of Claire Davison since September 2015.
Enora Lessinger est une ancienne élève de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure. Elle travaille actuellement au sein de
l’École Doctorale EDEAGE – Etudes Anglophones, Germanophones et Européennes (ED 514), Université de la
Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 où elle prépare, depuis Septembre 2015, une thèse sous la direction de Claire
Davison.
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