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Very busy just now: Globalization and harriedness in Ishiguro's The Unconsoled
Comparative Literature, Fall 2001 by Robbins, Bruce
This time pressure reflects global capital, of course, but that is not the only relation between the two terms. The word "reflects" misses the relative autonomy of the cultural from the economic-the possibility of economic damage translating, however unsatisfactorily, into some sort of cultural benefit, and even twisting back upon itself to offer purchase on or against global capital. In her book The Time Bind, Arlie Russell Hochschild observes that the cult of efficiency has been transferred from the office to the home, so that parents "increasingly find themselves in the role of `time and motion' experts" (51). Yet it is also true, she concludes, that "many women are ... joining men in a flight from the `inner city' of home to the 'suburbs' of the workplace" (247) and seeking at work the emotional satisfactions that had once seemed available to them only at home. For many women, blurring the lines between work and family is exhilarating, even something of a moral liberation. And what holds for the possibility of acting and bonding outside the family also holds for the possibility of acting and bonding outside the nation. This second possibility is discursively attached to the first and carried along with it by the fact that the family serves as common term in two parallel debates. Both the domain of work, on the one hand, and the domain of the international, on the other hand, are repeatedly defined against the family, which is asked to stand in for all the values that are supposedly sacrificed to their voracious demands. Dickens's Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House, who neglects her own children while devoting herself to a scheme for emigration to Africa, is the type (I've seen her quoted recently in two books of political theory) of an argument in which the family is mobilized against international commitments, its natural intimacy metaphorically bestowed on the vast anonymous populations of modern nation-states so as to claim correspondingly natural priority for those near-- and-dear to us at the expense of immigrants, foreign workers selling goods on American markets, and other non-nationals. From the viewpoint of the family, work is a foreign country.
But this equation can have unexpected results. Even the notorious conflict between the demands of work and family is a true dilemma in the sense that it cannot simply be resolved in favor of either side. Much will be said, will have to be said, on the side of work. And anything said on behalf of work will also resonate on behalf of the foreign. Think for example of Warren Beatty's film Reds, which made an uncharacteristically sympathetic case for American solidarity with the Bolshevik Revolution, and did so by framing its internationalist politics within a much more familiar narrative, a narrative about-of all things-the conflict between work and family, the strains of the two-career couple as lived by John Reed and Louise Bryant, Beatty and Diane Keaton. If work is a foreign country, as the film in effect suggests, if it is no more of a stretch to imagine someone giving her strongest feelings to work than to imagine someone giving her feelings to another nation's revolution, then what we've got here is something like the opposite of the anti-professional and anti-cosmopolitan logic Ishiguro seems to be laying out: making a case for work may mean making a case for internationalism. Or less ambitiously: if a case for cosmopolitanism can be made, meaning a case for some mode of global belonging that does not merely reflect global capital, but that will be necessary in order to understand and act upon global capital, such a case will perhaps only be made, or made real to us, within the shared vocabulary of everyday over-commitment, overload, harriedness.
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