Very busy just now: Globalization and harriedness in Ishiguro's The Unconsoled

One of a series of locals who obstruct the global hero's progress through his visit by politely demanding small but increasingly burdensome favors for themselves or their loved ones, Gustav wants Ryder to use his upcoming speech to say a word on behalf of porters. From Ryder's point of view, these demands become nightmarishly irritating. The porter who takes portering too seriously is clearly offered as a comic parallel to the overserious professionalism of Ryder himself, a musician who is so rarely at home that when he gets there it looks like just another stop-some of the faces and places vaguely familiar, others not-on his endless tour of concerts and lectures. The idea that this foreign city may after all be his home is one of the novel's darkest and longest-running jokes. Perhaps Gustav's daughter, with whom the porter asks him to undertake a sort of diplomatic mission, is actually his own wife? Surely he has seen her somewhere before?

At the end of the novel Gustav's death will cement this side of the plot. It is immediately after his death-brought on, it is suggested, by voluntary overwork -that Ryder is expelled from his perhaps-family by his perhaps-wife. The expulsion is aimed both at his professionalism and at his cosmopolitanism. He is "outside of our grief," Sophie says, just as he was always "outside of our love" "`Leave him be, Boris. Let him go around the world, giving out his expertise and wisdom"' (532).

Like Gustav, it seems, Ryder is killing himself for his job while not addressing either his own real emotional needs or those of his loved ones. As Iyer puts it: "in honoring little obligations, [he] has missed out on the biggest ones ... he has cheated himself out of a life" (p. 22). Professionalism, or belief in the redemptive value of our work, is thus (to quote Michael Wood) one of "the stories we tell ourselves to keep other stories away" (p. 18). It is a delusion, as we see again in the anticlimactic ending, where Ryder never gets either to lecture or even to play. When he finally gets on stage, after so many distractions and interruptions, there's no audience left, and even the seats have been removed from the auditorium. Yet the fact that he hasn't performed isn't even noticed by the community, which has somehow re-formed itself happily around the night's other, no doubt locally more significant, events. So all his sacrifice of the personal has been for nothing.

If so, the moral again seems disappointingly simplistic. Louis Menand writes that Ishiguro's "single insight into the human condition is that people need love but continually spoil their chances of getting it, a piece of wisdom slightly below the level of Dr.Joyce Brothers" (7). With respect to professionalism, this wisdom is worse than merely advice-column dumb. Contrasting the family's real emotional needs to the empty show of professional performance is a piece of ideological privatism that excludes from the real such things as the need for respect and connection to the larger community. It makes the real into the private, the public into the false. This moral seems strangely out of sync with a novel of such formidable scale and virtuosity. But I would suggest that it is in fact overturned by the very premise of metaphysical harriedness that is the novel's real center. Consider: if this is Ryder's home after all, then he is right to listen respectfully to the endless disquisition of Gustav on porters, if for no other reason than that this is not an anonymous porter he will never see again but his wife's father. If the man carrying your bags turns out to have a daughter who turns out possibly to be your wife, then any stranger may turn out to be a member of your family and should thus be treated as such. Any porter deserves the kind of patient, respectful, even utopian attention that hotel guests are not in the habit of extending to hotel personnel.