lidia vianu desperado age

8/6/2019 Lidia Vianu Desperado Age

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LIDIA VIANU, THE DESPERADO AGE, vezi KazuoIshiguro la p. 16

There are two major directions in 20th centuryliterature: the stream of consciousness and the Post-stream of consciousness, the latter being known asPostmodernism (Post-Postmodernism and the rest).Considering that any trend has its posterity, post-

movements or post-trends have been known to exist aslong as literature has existed. Those which had a clearmeaning attached to them also acquired a name thatstayed with us. Quite a number of critics have tried toformulate one Postmodern theory or another, and the

so-called Postmodernist movement has struggled for itslife for a number of decades. At present, all the

numberless opinions slowly dismember.The specific feature of the period 1950-2004 in

literature, maybe not only literature, in fact, is auctorial

individualism, the denial of group psychology. The wordis each for himself, everybody their own trend. This

time of utmost literary solitude and bravery, ofeveryone creating what and how they please and

taking the audience their hostage, keeping the readerat their mercy, I have called the DESPERADO AGE.

4

I will try to outline the essential features of Desperadoliterature, dividing them into nine sections, but this will

be in no way an attempt at exhausting the field.1. Plot (in all genres, but mainly fiction)

The Desperado writer comes back to the story,focusses on plot again, relies heavily on suspense. After

Joyce and Virginia Woolf had flooded fiction with

lyricism and imposed the rule of the word, reducing plotto the adventures of the word or the lyrical trips into

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the self that remembers according to subconsciousassociations, another generation follows. Alasdair Gray,

Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, JohnFowles and many other writers understand that the

novel was about to die, and reinstate story-telling. HadJoyce continued the path - 8 - LiterNet Publishing

House,opened by Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the novelwould not have survived long. Terrified, LawrenceDurrell made a passionate comeback to exciting

incidents. The breathtaking story is back, but it must beadded that the Desperado suspense is much more thanmere suspense: it is an emotional and intellectual grip

that leaves the reader helpless. The Desperado suspense has a peculiar nature,

springing from the fact that the plot is fragmentary andthe pattern is not to be found. The plot, the story, is nolonger a classical sequence of past, present and future.This story is not even, as it used to be for the stream of

consciousness, an amalgamated knot of events. Likeeverything Desperado, plot itself is a puzzle: as we go

along, we find fragments of time, and we have to makethem fit together in a larger image, unknown,

unsuspected at first. From the first words, the workexhales its own expectations, which, as far as time is

concerned, could be named the confusion of

chronology. 4 Whether the narrative is in the first or the third

person, the story inevitably slips into the biography of acharacter who narrates. Repeatedly, in Doris Lessing,

David Lodge, Martin Amis, the story relies on thepattern of one life. Not several equally important lives,

as in Galsworthys impressive architecture, as in

Dickens even. Just one life, which swallows everythingelse. The peculiarity of the Desperado hero, the hold of

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plot on the reader resides in the individualizingnarrative. Incidents flow into the basket of one herosbiography, and all the rest are mere pretexts for the

show to go on. Although the incidents that make up the plot reachour consciousness in a disorderly manner, there is a

sense of chronology and we cannot ignore it. Theauthor does not basically violate chronology, he merelyignores its traditional representation, the progress from

past to future. The time sequence no longer is thesupport of causality, it no longer rules the plot,

imposing its logic on incidents and characters, on thereaders perception of

- 9 chronology. The main hero, the only one we are

expected to understand this effort is no lesser justbecause there is only one important hero, it is actually

more intense , thinks according to rules his mindmakes, and these rules destroy all pre-existing

patterns, all order, all attempts at clarification or finalexplanation by means of ordering the flasheschronologically or according to any other law.

The Desperado plot always has an open end. Theauthor refuses to have any say as to where theinteraction book-reader should stop. He stops

provisionally, having exhausted one set of incidents,

unwilling to go on for now. All Desperado novels end ina last indecisive page: some poetic symbol induces a

meditative mood, the reader may be overwhelmed withdoubt as to the real meaning of what he has read, or an

abrupt ending cuts expectation short and actuallyheightens the desire to go on reading, sharing the

newly found universe of the book. Whatever the case

may be, the open ending, by hook or by crook, is aninsurance policy of the text, which survives in

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rereading. The Desperado author makes sure thereaders will never forget, because they will never leave

the text. Creation becomes a timeless trap.4

The universe the author imagines is graduallyrevealed. The reader is educated in the spirit of

growing patience. The author imposes an asceticreading. Joyce, Woolf, T.S. Eliot were elliptical, refused

to explain, made a deliberate plan to require the readerto piece up the work using its fragments. The stream of

consciousness mechanically did away with allconnecting words and thoughts, but coherence and

order survived underground. A Desperado is a writer forwhom order is meaningless. The reader no longer feeds

on the creators plan, he no longer reorders planneddisorder. Desperado literature bars the reader fromexperiencing the joy of discovering at the very last alogical, coherent whole. The Desperado denies the

tyranny of logic and lives in alogicality.

- 10 - LiterNet Publishing House, 2006 Paul Valry used to say, An obstacle is a sun! TheDesperado author finds his sun, his joy of creation, inusing all known conventions till they are exhausted.The novel smashes happy-ends, romance, emotional

involvement in the story, even accessibility, to a certaindegree. Subconsciously, the text means to outsmart

already used devices, but that is not always possible.This kind of suicidal story, which kills its own reasons tosurvive, makes the reader despair, but also gives himthe strength to struggle and find out the source and

flow of this Desperado plot, which, as most interviewswith the authors themselves state, only means to

entertain, although it actually intrigues.

2. Character

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After the stream of consciousness had smashedcharacters into tiny words (keeping them painfully

alive, all the same), splinters of thought, reflex gesturesand cultured meditation, Desperado literature bringspalpable characters back into the story. The authorimagines somebody in flesh and blood. It does not

matter that the imagined person behaves oddly, has anintimidating past, entertains such tangled thoughts thatnobody in the text or outside it can order them. Tragicor funny, more or less energetic, the odd hero is verymuch alive, too, apparently coherent, in fact all themore appealing as its enigmatic side keeps growing

and growing.4

The Desperado author rejects explicit psychologicalanalysis, possibly because it was the major discovery ofHenry James and then of the stream of consciousness.

More than thoughts, which are there all right, it isactions that speak. The hero is incident addicted. His

inner monologue is rich, but it evolves from act to actmore than from one idea to another. Caught in the webof the plot, this one hero, since one is enough for a plot,appears as a magnified memory. Inert and all puzzled,he is the ultimate witness. His inner and outer life areone. Life happens to him, and he endures far beyond

what his being can take. Reality devours him. Thought

is his last resort.- 11

Characterization relies heavily upon rememoration.The Desperado author repeatedly uses certain essential

moods: disarray, alogicality (or logic abandoned),abolished (un)happiness, false resignation

accompanied by existential malaise, irritation, in short

all sorts of suffering. The hero himself exposes hisprivate life, or allows it to be exposed, almost

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masochistically. Compared to the flamboyant love oflife of a James Joyce, the emblematic experience of the

Desperado hero, whether joking or in earnest, isexistence as an ordeal, not as joy.

3. Style The style of Henry James, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, the

style of the stream of consciousness was heavy withlyricism, exasperating readers with its elliptical secrecy.

The readers major concern was to find the literalmeaning first, and the symbols were investigated onlyafter the text had been clarified. The Desperado style

blinds us with colloquial clarity. Julian Barnes andAlasdair Gray, for instance, state that all they want is to

make themselves understood. This shows us thatDesperado authors have learnt the lesson of the stream

of consciousness, they have learnt from previousdisastrous experience that the reader comes first, that

creation should focus on reading. The Desperadoauthor affords a comfortable reading experience,

although meaning is far from obvious. The readerscomfort is a consequence of the more than accessible

language the writer uses, a language that rejectssophistication, welcomes familiarity, cleans words fromfar-fetched associations or encoded symbols. Encoding,

ambiguity have lost the ground they had gained andkept for several decades. Difficulty is not lost. We find it

in a complicated order of detail, which is actually partof the plot, but is mirrored in style too, in the fact that

apparently understanding is free and easy, when in factit is greatly slowed down by the imperative need to

remember whatever is written on the page. Every littleword will sometime come in handy. To a large extent,

the

4- 12 -

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Desperado author creates the mnemotechnical reading.The Desperado novel trains our ability to activate wordswe thought insignificant at a first reading, words which,a chapter later, turn out to be the key to an otherwise

inexplicable incident. Some authors plunge into lyrical effusion, poetry,reverie, sympathetic mood, and push the reader intoemotion. Desperado fiction may convey tenderness,nostalgia, compassion. This tender text is vulnerable,the best prey for the sensibility of a reader exhausted

by mysteries, ingenious demonstrations and intellectualtriumphs. Ishiguro is such a hypersensitive author.

Ironical Barnes himself has one emotional novel. Theexcellent narrator Graham Swift dives on and off intothe soul of his hero and compels us to feel with him.These trips into the turmoil of the soul are a sign that

distant narration, blank fiction, mocking fiction (poetry)have had the revelation that reading is complex and,

just as it happens in life, it has its moments of

sweetness. 4 The Desperado authors are is quite fond of four-letter

words. They rebelliously rend shyness, defying theprevious bravery, upgrading it, so to say. Beyond the

analysis of a mind in progress, Desperadoesinstinctively slip into a public confession of the darkest

secrets. Whether we are faced with taboo thoughts

which are unveiled with masochistic brutality, orphysical life is so bluntly conveyed that it borders on

vulgarity, utter honesty is a Desperado manner. Inorder to shatter and rape the readers understanding,

the author breaks all interdictions. The shameless stylemakes for sharpness of the text. Without an aesthetic

motivation, shamelessness might turn into

pornography. As it is, the result of deliberate freedomfrom shyness leads to a firm text, which reaches

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psychological depth by shocking propriety. AlasdairGray states in an interview that he cannot reread his

own novel because, after finishing it, he became againthe shy person he was before writing that particularnovel. Other authors are verbally very decent, but

reveal shocking moral or emotional ugliness. Whetherstylistically or emotionally, the Desperado writer is in

love with inciting, intriguing abnormality.- 13 LiterNet

Every Desperado is painfully aware that languagedefinitely cannot be an obstacle in his type of narrative,

which is not the easiest thing in the world to grasp,mainly because it resorts to the order of memory and

exaggerates, perfects what the stream ofconsciousness merely discovered. Superficial clarity is

accompanied by indirectness. Narration is far morethan story-telling. Henry James inaugurated ambiguousnarration, at the end of which the readers hardly knewwhich hero they should side with, who was to blame

and who was not. For Desperadoes, all heroes areblameless to start with, they are all indisputably right.The most concrete incidents cohere in a story of themind, the hidden mechanisms of initial thoughts are

unveiled. Unuttered feelings must be guessed at.Desperado reluctance to verbalize the soul goes handin hand with apparent verbal shamelessness. Feelings

merely hinted at show us how certainty is replaced byguessing. The author falls prey to the temptation ofhiding, because by being indirect he can complicatethings and the text glimmers with life, even if all thistakes place behind the stage of a clear style, which

becomes the only traffic sign in a maze of roads. TheDesperado paradox is born out of the despair to

complicate, associated with the determination to beaccessible, easily understood.

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44. Relationship with the critic

The Desperado author is very much interested in beingaccepted, praised, and dislikes (who doesnt?) being

found at fault, all the more so as he claims he could notcare less. Julian Barnes emphatically states it is the

easiest thing in the world to quit criticism.Sophistication of the work amounts actually to claimingthe critics attention, making sure the reader is a fan,

not an enemy. All Desperadoes are addressing aninitiated reader, who is far more than a mere relaxedreader. The Desperado writer creates the challenging

text. It is a deliberate challenge, its effects areexpected, planned, very much unlike the turmoil ofrevolt in the Stream of consciousness. The authors

- 14 - LiterNetambition is both to manipulateemotionally the common reader and make theintelligent critic surrender, exhaust his attackstrategies. This may be the reason why most

Desperado authors wish for commonsensical critics,traditional, possibly thematic, fond of depth not

deconstruction or technicalities. It is quite strange thatthe challenging Desperado text has not yet created a

Desperado critical approach. For the time being,creation has the upper hand for a while.

5. Relationship with the reader

The Desperado writer likes to think he is in closecontact with his reader, that he is welcomed by an

involved reader. All Desperado devices aim atmanipulating the readers emotions and intellect,

despite the fact that no Desperado is willing tosubscribe to this guilty intention. Quite the reverse, the

writers state with determination they hate to

manipulate their audience, the work writes itself, nopremeditation involved. Actually, they attempt a

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deliberate involvement of the reader (triggered by thecomplication of the work). Consequently, reading

Desperado literature can be, actually is, exasperating,bewitching and, more often than not, disarming.

4 The readers role is to decode. As he unravelsdevices, he becomes the authors confessor. He

accedes to the story, by means of which the authortraps him, but he is constantly intrigued, by every step

forward, every obstacle which bars a traditionalapproach. The reader has been promoted from the

passive school to the active school of reading (whichprocess was started by the stream of consciousness).

The Desperado reader is, in the end, a shock addict.When a text looks too accessible, it most certainly

hides something missed at first sight. This reader canbe defined thus: Tell me how intrigued you are, and I

will tell you if you really are a Desperado.- 15 LiterNe

A Desperado is ironical above everything else. Ironyoverwhelms plot, characters, style and readers. Without

irony, which belongs to both author and reader, theDesperado work is nothing. Irony ensures the high

quality of the text. It supports the detachment of thisauthor who complicates without getting involved, or not

directly involved, anyway. The author is discreet, he

avoids sounding personal, refuses the intimacy ofconfession, replaces it with an imaginary brotherhood.

The Desperado author has a strong imagination, behindwhich he takes shelter at all times. He hides what thereader finds out in the end, and the game is repeated

over and over again, because the Desperado work is aneternal beginning. It always leaves behind the bitter

sweet taste of inconclusiveness...7. Displacement4

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The Desperado author can be identified by hisrepeated attempt at leaving one space and moving into

another, leaving one age for another, or simply byleaving and then finding another fixed point (often

much worse than the previous, but refreshingly new).The passage, travel, departure and shipwreck, thediscovery of the island, are compulsory for these

restless writers starving for the unusual. As a consequence of the fact that the authors travel,

go on endless pilgrimages, the Desperado works arepervaded by an acute need for a home, by a feeling of

rootlessness. Some authors come to the Englishlanguage from other geographical areas (India, Japan,Africa), and their roots become inessential. The factthat they were born elsewhere entitles them to feelthey belong everywhere and nowhere at the sametime, they exist in a literary utopia, without borderssuch as space, language, time. The Desperado work

aspires at being international, although it focusses on

the haunting fear that it can find no refuge anywhere.- 16 - LiterNet Publishing House, 2006

The displaced hero complains of an inner void whichmenaces all coherence. This inner void explains andsupports the inexplicable side of his psychology, the

maze of thoughts and feelings which the reader has tocross when he tries to piece up the hero.

All Desperado heroes are intensely solitary. Not evenlove can bring them together, and other feelings areapparently mere shadows of traditional passionate

turmoils. Which does not mean lack of intensity. Quitethe reverse. Intensity is exacerbated. Detached fromreality, yet handcuffed to it, inert yet crucified to the

narrative, slashed into numberless captivating

incidents, the people of these paradoxical books areparadoxical themselves, contradictory beings who are

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finally unexplained and inexplicable on the whole,incomplete circles, mouths opened to utter a last

unheard word. 4The authors are oppressed by the constant struggle

for survival. Life is a burden, more than mere joy, evenin the humorous books. The heroes long for the peaceand carelessness of childhood, they feel driven awayfrom an unknown paradise which they subconsciously

long for incessantly. The Desperado hero is restless, hisworld-wide sadness is lyrical in nature, and it projects a

meditative halo around all characters.All displaced beings go through several basic

experiences: the struggle to emulate natives, the fearof rejection or despising attitudes, the risk of never

being understood properly. These experiences result ina nightmarish atmosphere (see Kazuo Ishiguro in TheUnconsoled, Salman Rushdie in Midnights Children), anightmare of alienation. The heroes build themselves

islands of familiarity, dreams, loves, sentimentality, but

their life mostly unfurls in an inimical world, a hostileuniverse. The displaced Desperado authors experiencea subtle, incurable frustration. Irony and tragedy join

hands.- 17 LiterNet8. Dystopia

The Desperado authors favourite space is dystopia,

black, negative utopia. The long line of dystopiansactually begins with Huxley (Brave New World) and

Orwell (1984), and continues with most contemporarywriters. Dystopia is more frequent than writing poetry

in adolescence or than falling in love. Whenever aDesperado creates his own world, it inevitably turns out

to be a dystopia. Most novels since the 1950s to the

turn of the millennium have a dystopic air, which isunmistakable and must not be ignored because it is an

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essential, very significant symptom of emotionalestrangement.

The list of dystopian authors is long. It starts with thestream of consciousness, with T.S. Eliot and his Waste

Land. Beginning with Huxley, we can talk aboutDesperadoes. Besides Brave New World, Huxley also

imagined Ape and Essence. Others follow: WilliamGolding (Lord of the Flies), Anthony Burgess (A

Clockwork Orange, Honey for the Bears), Doris Lessing(The Good Terrorist, The Fifth Child, The Memoirs of a

Survivor), Malcolm Bradbury (Rates of Exchange,Mensonge), Alasdair Gray (Lanark, Poor Things), DavidLodge (Nice Work), Julian Barnes (Staring at the Sun,

The Porcupine), Peter Ackroyd (Hawksmoor, Chatterton,English Music), Kazuo Ishiguro (The Unconsoled), AlanBrownjohn (The Long Shadows), and many more. Weare not always faced with science fiction. Quite thereverse, the surroundings are most often than not

apparently common. The dystopia begins insidiously,

with a defamiliarization of the familiar. The familiarpresent, exaggerated and blackened, is projected intofuture indeterminacy. Defamiliarization is accompanied

by a maximized fear. In a nightmarish, yet very realworld, heroes live naturally. Gray even confesses that it

was his aim to see how far he could go, how hard hecould stretch the heros rationality, and he placed his

character in abnormal circumstances, boasting with thecharacters very natural reactions to the unusual.

4- 18

The basic feature of Desperado dystopias (unlikeJonathan Swift, with his country of the Houyhnhnms, for

example) is the victory of imagination, which renders

the terrifying appealing to us. Whoever reads Lanark byAlasdair Gray feels very reluctant to leave the world of

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the novel, would rather linger there after the last pagespells GOODBYE, they all go back and reread,reconsider the first time around. Lingering and

rereading are the defining particularities of Desperadodystopias.

The aim of Desperado dystopias is broader thanbefore, because traditional dystopias merely warnedthat nightmare could become reality. Contemporarydystopias are copiously inventive of non-experience.

Desperado authors imagine a wealth of details, worldsof all kinds. Desperado dystopias are: political (themost accessible and obvious), science-fictional (the

nightmare of technology, as opposed to the SF dream),moral and philosophical (human nature, teenage

violence), apocalyptic (the atomic threat), old age, thecrisis of civilization (death used as food for further life).

4 Terror has an opposite pole in Desperado dystopias:

the author uses literature in order to rehabilitate

ugliness, and he does so much more efficiently thanT.S. Eliot did in his aesthetics of the ugly, in 1922. Thewriter imagines frantically, allows himself to be carriedaway by his own imagination, and this message of the

joy of living the dystopia is that whatever theimagination can hold is alive, consequently the dystopiabecomes an apology of life, a kind of life that knows no

border between beautiful and ugly, a life in which mereexistence (it is irrelevant to call it good or bad) counts.

Dystopia is the result of the Desperado instinct tointrigue and shock the reader at all costs. From

defamiliarization, through imagination, the readercomes to accept a multitude of alien worlds. The

message is not fear or despair; the reader learns to

adapt himself to the dystopic world, whatever that maybe, and his mind - 19 - LiterNet Publishing House, 2006

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across despair (despair of existence, or creation),towards hope. A Desperado never despairs of anything.A Desperado hunts the unusual (and not only), he is amind in progress, ceaselessly discovering new literary

and even existential modes.9. The hybridization of literary genres

The mixture of literary genres became a major literarymode with the stream of consciousness, at thebeginning of the 20th century. It was the great

invention of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot,alongside with the cultured text (intertextuality). TheDesperado writes poetic novels and fictional poems,

contaminated with drama, essay, literary criticism andliterary history. Any technique is good, all techniquesmust be combined, as many as possible in the same

text, no matter what age they belong to or what literarygenre. Desperado literature is a merry-go-round of

techniques: realism, oneirism, symbolism, stream ofconsciousness, absurd. The word is handled with an eye

wide open to preserving clarity, but to the one aim ofmaking it proof of personality. A sum total of all trends,devices he knows (whatever age they belong to), the

author who could qualify for the Desperado communityflatly refuses being enrolled in any collectivity, group,movement, because he feels utterly different from all

the rest, so he proclaims himself his own trend.

4A Desperado text is a composite text, a text within a

text within a text, a multitude of texts in one. Thecultured text is also very pragmatic at the same time.Contraries meet. The Desperado rewrites all literature.

He deals with literature according to his own laws,doing everything in his power to go against the grain. If

he makes the law, he is his own and only ruler. Whatmakes us discuss a contemporary Desperado

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community is that, true enough, birds of a feather flocktogether: they are all unbelievably similar in their

despair to be dissimilar.- 20

I/2. THE DESPERADO FREEDOMI. Previous bondage to previous conventions

The stream of consciousness, which precedes theDesperado age (starting in the early 1950s) in time,

was an illusion of freedom. The desire to struggle freefrom 19th century realism, from traditional

omniscience, from the order of the predictable plot andcharacters, ended in a frenzy of defiance. The characterwas no longer a story for Joyce, Woolf, Conrad: he wasa stream (of thoughts, emotions, memories). VirginiaWoolfs famous essay on Modern Fiction was an act ofrejection. She turned her back on Galsworthy, Bennett

and Wells, but she was not really prepared for asubstantial change. Many critics have noticed that she

discovered denial, nothing else. I should say shereplaced the old convention of predictability, the old

horizon of strong expectations, by a new convention ofdefiance. If readers had grown too addicted andaccustomed to peaceful, gratifying reading, shedecided to wake them up: she used symmetrical

opposition and came up with the imperious need for

unpredictability. The stream of consciousness novel iswhat we do not expect to see on page, whether it is in

point of structure (plot, character, chronology, allshattered, reshuffled, different from what centuries ofliterature had made them into), or, more confusing, inpoint of style. If plot, character and chronology had a

gift of rearranging themselves in the readers mind

according to old patterns once he had done reading,the style slipped dangerously into lyricism, made

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understanding arduous, and we can safely say that thenovel suffered for fifty years from the malady of the

word.4

The features of a novel such as Ulysses or Mrs.Dalloway are: complicated architecture of memories,

emotions and verbal associations, supported by ahidden intention, a concealed plan, the compression of

all meanings by means of a language which left thepurpose of mere communication, straying into poetry.

The- 23 - LiterNet Publishing House, 2006

encoded style led to an encoded meaning, and on thewhole, the stream of consciousness text refusesaccessibility. This refusal began as an absence of

incident, which was replaced by emotion and thought.More emotion with Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, morethought (etymology included, as a philosophy of the

word) in James Joyce. The destiny of heroes is no longer

a body which Woolf noisily refused but a mind inprogress. If there is no story, then there is no sense of

closure either. The reader who finishes a stream ofconsciousness novel is left afloat in an open space ofthe soul. Reading is threatened, it will soon have to

change. Briefly, in Woolfs own terms, love interest hasto die. I must say she proclaims this but never manages

to kill it right in her novels. Once the reader has comeout of the text, love and story are back in his mind, andhe remembers characters who are very much in love.

Yet it is now, with Joyce, Woolf and Eliot that the idea ofthe couple, of family and loving/ loveless endingsbegins to fade. The horizon of expectation has to

change, to accommodate these new, defiant novels,

apparently deprived of what was the basic food ofliterature for at least nineteen centuries. We used to

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form an intimacy with the hero as we read his story andexpected the suspense, the absolute end. We are no

longer supposed to expect anything. We form anintimacy with the author, who baffles us and confuses

the text. If the novel used to be a statement, it is aquestion mark now, and it is the reader who must find

his own answers or stay forever displeased.4

20th century realism (Galsworthy is the bestrepresentative) still hopes to please the reader. Forsyte

Saga is a consummate architecture of conventionaldevices, from perfect chronology to plot and character.

Its main rule is logic. The readers guide is his ownunderstanding, which passively travels across the

incidents, all connected and meaningfully built into apyramid longing for an attainable future. The horizon of

expectation in such novels has been the same fortwenty centuries and more: something begins and

ends, and we see the interim. This is what the

Desperado refuses to do. He rejects both theconvention of order (traditional novel) and that of

deliberate disorder (stream of consciousness). We couldeasily sum up the main moments of a novel by Dickens,

Cervantes, Petronius (to go backwards). Thechronological sequence makes sense. The same

attempt at restoring chronology - 24

whirling incidents (because something happens in allfiction, at all times), we find ourselves in the

exhilarating world of etymological genius. Before theDesperado, fiction was always in bondage to

convention, and it accepted the artificiality. The

Desperado is the first to say, I am different and I amfree.

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II. What does it take to be a Desperado?(1) Irony is the key to writing a good Desperado book.

Joyce, Woolf and T.S. Eliot (all stream of consciousness)went as far as denying previous conventions, using

previous texts while belittling them, debunking otherworks (see The Odyssey in Ulysses and Shakespeare,among a crowd of other writers, in The Waste Land).When Alasdair Gray just one random example or

Julian Barnes resort to other texts, they destroy thosetexts with their grin, their irony tells us: Do not trustthem do not trust me, no other text but mine can betaken seriously, and even my text has to be viewed

with a smile, with the love of game in your mind. Ironyis the mother of the text as a challenging game.

(2) In interviews, Desperadoes are fond of denying thequestion. You say they love to play with their readersand they reply, I love my readers and want to impressthem, not challenge. A Desperado is always in denial:he denies statements, he denies first impressions, he

builds his always present suspense on denying thereaders horizon of expectation. He even denies denials(see Ishiguro denying the denial of love in The Remains

of the Day). A Desperado states in the negative: thebaffling hero, the confusing incident are his major

means of communication. 4- 25 -

(3) Although writing No on every page, the Desperadoexpects us to fervently welcome him with a Yes. He

needs the readers approval and courts us, whileapparently grumpy and eager to displease. The reasonfor their anxious desire to be different and take us by

surprise is to silence us into loving, amazed

acceptance.

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(4) When the plot is at its peak, it is ruthlesslysuspended and the reader is left breathlessly hopeless.The Desperado work never ends happily or unhappily,

and never even considers an open ending. It endsunexpectedly. The character in Lanark leaves no roomfor speculation, he dies, but he dies enigmatically, witha mere GOODBYE. Ishiguros painter in An Artist of the

Floating World ends the exam of his consciousness(which is the book) by merely gazing at the new

generation and shaking his head in helplessdisapproval, after he has enjoyed a certain kind of

power and fame his whole life. We would not expecthim to be that gentle. Fowles plays with his endings infull view, in The French Lieutenants Woman. Since thecouple is discarded, the future looks useless and the

end is a dead device. Its only role is to create anxiety,which it amply does.

4(5) Desperadoes pine for love, yet mistrust it as the

pillar of any story. Lessings The Golden Notebook is allabout the absence of love, while proclaiming the

freedom of women from men. Waterland is an image ofold age and faint reminiscences of the trouble caused

by young love, now all but vanished. The stream ofconsciousness discredited love theoretically, yet still

clung to it (see V. Woolf, who would not breathe without

emotion). The Desperadoes snicker when they shouldsympathize, love is a source of fun. Their irony is dry,

although they are very much concerned with thereaders emotional involvement in the work. Barnes,

Swift, Lodge, Bradbury, Amis, Gray, all of them,actually, deny their characters shared emotions. Since

the hero is ultimately and mainly alone, love is a

forbidden form of communication.- 26 - LiterNet Publishing House, 2006

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(6) A Desperado must be new at all costs. He must benew in the context of all literature, and he must also benew in relation to his previous work. Being new impliessurprising the reader, and the Desperado longs to catch

us unaware.(7) A writer who aspires to the status of a Desperado

should be advised: Be faithful to the Desperado dream,namely be one of your kind, if possible the best, rise

overnight and amaze everyone.(8) Be clear in style and devious in thought. Use the

mnemotechnic style, make readers responsible for theirown capacity of remembering each word, which may

become the key to later developments.(9) Make a clean breast of all the skeletons in your

cupboard and do not mince words about it : beshameless.

(10) Be both sympathetic and arrogant, in a mixture

known only to yourself.(11) Be alive and kicking while talking about all kinds of

mortifications.(12) Be CONTRADICTORY: argue with yourself.

(13) Be FREE from everybody elses words. Whichbrings us to: 4

I/3. THE NATURE OF FICTION IN THE DESPERADOWORK

1. TRUTH OR FICTION?Henry James used to state that a work of art must

approximate truth. Joyce, Woolf and Eliot restricted thearea to the truth of the mind. The basic contentionwould be that nobody can tell for sure what truth is.

Actually, our perception of the truth has changed so

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much that we read Dickens and do not see the life butthe

old-fashioned convention in him. Which brings onepossible answer: in literature, truth is just anotherconvention. The Desperadoes could not have been

absent, since they delight in conventions of all kinds, asmany as possible, as varied and as different.

Consequently, the Desperadoes claim today, All wewant to do is give you the truth. 4

The Desperado imagination adapts to a new nature, anew reality. It always brings about confusion, and the

reader stops and wonders: Is this a new experience, oris it just a baffling of my old way of looking at things?Defiance is in the nature of all conventions. The onlydifference is that for many centuries, since ancient

times to the realism of our own century, readers havebeen fed one pattern, that of chronological causality, ofthe couple living (un)happily ever after. The couple andthe ending are two outmoded, exhausted conventions.

For the first time, the Desperadoes defy the very basisof traditional fiction. The defiance is stronger than the

stream of consciousness hybridization of literarygenres. Joyce, Woolf, Eliot merely played with the

existing conventions, and kept them whole, actually.Literature became a game. Desperadoes find this gameand all they can think of is to smash it to pieces. They

claim they want truth, not just a game, but their truth isdesperately confusing. It is very hard to create a new

convention when you start by smashing all componentsthat could have been useful. Imagination works hard,

and here we are in front of a question which is in fact asold as the hills: Truth or fiction?

- 30 - LiterNet Publishing

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It is quite obvious that what the stream ofconsciousness claimed to do, which was adjustingliterature to the truth, making it more capable ofrendering life, was just another illusion of truth.

Desperadoes no longer claim to mirror life. They aremore drastic, and their literature mirrors no truth, it just

is life, truth, reality, whatever we experience daily,outside the written page. Desperado literature takes a

trip out of itself. The author steps into unfamiliarsurroundings and starts building a new house of fiction.No harm done, as long as the reader keeps in mind thatthis will be a house, too, in the long run, not a forest or

a meadow, no wild nature, but an artificial shelter.The author is very much aware of two things: first, thathe wants to be truer than anyone before him; second,that, being a Desperado, he must make his own law ashe goes along. The first thing that must be secured is

the readers emotional involvement. Most Desperadoesconfess in interviews that they want to be friends with

the reader, they want the reader on their side, and verymuch pleased by the work. They mean to say that they

need this reader to hold their hand, to trust andbelieve, wile they baffle, even ruin all his expectations.They claim this is the immediacy of life, that they do

not offer fiction but nature, and we must bear with thetext, because the war with old conventions is long and

hard. The Desperado reader, steeped in intertextualityand other such fine tricks, trots along the new book,

disabused and snubbed, till suddenly a miracle happensand he changes. Reading is no longer mere

involvement. The reader learns defiance from theauthor, and Desperado reading is essentially

incredulous (is the truth in the work?) and dissatisfied.

The critic is more easily silenced. The contention thatthe work is the truth and not a mere image of it leads

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to the idea that, since the truth cannot be changed, thework is above argument. Julian Barnes confesses he has

quit criticism. Other Desperadoes surrender andaccept criticism, claiming that anyone can see in the

text what they please. If the author does not even fightfor copyright of his fiction, it is easy to understand whythe critic is so cautious to approach the mine hidden in

the Desperado text. 4- 31

The mechanism of Desperado fiction relies on untruth,in fact, because the definition of a Desperado text isanti. If truth is tradition, untruth is innovation, so it

must be explored. This is how the favourite Desperadospace is created, that of dystopia. The text outsmartsthe familiar, it defamiliarizes, and instead of a place,

which is a traditional approximation of nature, itdisplaces, it shows the way out of nature, the departure

from all known space. Untruth does not deny, it

exaggerates all realities and feelings, ending up inmaximized fears. A text that defamiliarizes, displaces

and maximizes fears can only be grim, grudging,oppressive. Its only hope is inventivity, so the only hope

of untruth is fiction. No reader would linger in suchscary places of the mind unless they knew they were

not for real.

Fiction it is, then. Fiction which does not mean toplease, not in the way Jane Austen or Galsworthy

pleased the reader. Fiction which pushes the reader tothe limit, making him a Desperado displaced reader of

a dystopia. This Desperado work has two extremes in it:on the one hand, it has peace, since truth is in it; on the

other hand, it is haunted by impatience, since what it

does with the truth is fiction, and this fiction is the mostambitious so far.

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42. DIARY MAYBE?

The shape of Desperado fiction is varied, yet moreoften than not it has a diary-like quality. It records

incidents in the first or third person. The incidents aredisparate and the author keeps them short, like daily

entries. The Desperado novel rarely has more than onemain hero, so the book is easily seen as this one heros

self-revelation. The order of incidents is apparentlydictated by hazard. In fact the hero postpones theembarrassing, hides the key of our disapproval.

Dickens, the Brontes, Galsworthy, had positive andnegative characters. There is no such thing for a

Desperado author. The one hero he offers us is goodand bad at once,- 32

likable and unlikable, we had better suspend judgmentand go along. We shall be surprised yet, when we grow

to like the grumpiest, most arrogant beings ever.

Desperadoes always court the displeasing.These heroes have a haunting need to confess, yet

confession is forbidden as such. The only thing they cando is remember in a certain order, which order

suggests to us what they feel, what they most want tohide. They keep recreating past presents. The feeling ofa permanent present invades memory, the past. These

characters are finally forbidden to hide anything: thetext becomes a forceful revelation. They have the inner

strength to reveal the embarrassing at last, and thisstrength is rooted in the authors hatred for romance:the Desperado will go to any lengths in order to erase

soap opera expectations, he will offer severalsimultaneous endings, no ending, blank pages, a mere

GOODBYE. He will discredit the future to the best ofhis abilities.

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Desperado fiction always takes author, hero and readerby surprise, which explains why Desperadoes make

such an exacerbated use of suspense. The book is not acarefree diary, with a reliable past to remember,

present to describe and future to hope for. The book isa maybe diary, helpless to imagine tomorrow, but

highly skilful in playing with the past. Some authorswrite as if they were keeping a diary, and they are the

introverts (Orwell, Burgess, Lessing, Gray, Ackroyd,Swift, Ishiguro). Others talk, jump, attempt a traditionalplot which looks insufficient to a lover of tradition, andthose are the histrionic Desperadoes (Fowles, Bradbury,Lodge, Barnes, Amis). With some, lyricism softens the

narrative rage. There are all kinds of Desperadoes:bitter, mocking, compassionate. What keeps themtogether is the addiction to incident and the diary

technique, which places the plot in the indeterminacyof memory.

4

Since the fiction resulted is a diary, a day to dayprogress, the novel is inconclusive, commanding allthose who enter here to abandon all hope for happy

endings. If the diary ever stops, it is only because theauthor needs a breath of life to continue. We have herethe first real open work (opera aperta) in the history ofthe novel, which covers more than a millennium.- 33 -

I/4. THE POST-TIME OF THE DESPERADO WORKI. REAL TIME

4

Real time, the concrete time of the Desperado work,the interval during which the plot begins and ends

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(stops, rather) and the hero struggles with indecision(too little is clear and certain in such works), is the

present. Like any present, the Desperado present isunder various threats. It steals from the pockets of thenarrative or the lyrical approach of the writer a kind of

contorted, reversed and very confused chronology.Lessings heroines fall on all fours, pushed by the story

into this confusing present. Ishiguros heroes findthemselves floating up in the air, in a present thatdevours them, denies them, tears them to pieces.

Alasdair Grays Lanark realizes it is time for him to die.Graham Swifts history teacher suddenly loses his

profession, is not a history teacher any more. Ackroydsheroes are also restless, escape into other bits of time,

apparently more auspicious. The heroes of Barnes,Bradbury and Lodge feed on irony in order to forgetthat the present is elusive, that real time never lasts

long enough. No present is perceived as a lasting state.Since the Desperado work is a constant crossing of

chronological directions, which are governed as muchby now as by then, mostly ago, real time feeds

incessantly on imaginary duration, which, in its turn,breaks and- 36 - LiterNet Publishing

reforms under our own eyes. Imaginary duration makesthe past roots of the present bloom, while real time,

when the reader could try to sum up what he has been

reading, is almost suffocated. A Desperado work cannever be summarized. We can state briefly the plots

devised by Dickens, Austen, Galsworthy, even Conradat times, but we will find it impossible to utter a few

sentences about what is really going on in theDesperado present. Ishiguros butler in The Remains ofthe Day has a meager ratio of here and now, which he

does not know how to use and his powerlessnessmakes him cry. Alasdair Grays Lanark ends his race

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with the past just to die with a capitalized GOODBYE.The history teacher in Graham Swifts Waterland runs

away from his real life, from the concrete present of hishistory class, in order to unveil the mystery of his whole

life, to reveal his origins and his very substance. Thispresent of the page which we can hardly put intowords, as a matter of fact springs from what is now

past (a past that can by no means be summed up witha critical eye, but which is fertile soil for stories, authorand heroes), while the future is inconclusive, open and

never closed. The Desperado present is a ghostpresent.

If we make up our minds to find this present, all thesame, we find a time peopled by confused heroes, withconfusing stories. The doctor in Flauberts Parrot, whomJulian Barnes makes investigate Flaubert with almostdetective greed, is in fact an unhappy man, who hashelplessly witnessed his wifes death, his wife havingbeen the only woman he loved, while he was by no

means the only man in her life, which the doctor verywell knows. When interviewed, authors such as Graham

Swift, David Lodge, Alasdair Gray perform a subtlegymnastics of avoiding a clear-cut statement. In theirsubconscious, if not otherwise, these writers need thefreedom to keep changing. Their own writing present,

the same as their heroes, is chameleonic. They answer

enigmatically that life is enigmatic, that there areanswers nowhere, and therefore an author cannot

afford to state. The Desperado author guesses, fumbleswithin a present which he keeps rejecting, because hisnarrative strength lies in the past. Galsworthys heroes

were very busy knitting their present, they wereconstantly besieged by incidents. They had a past, but

this past kept changing according to what each newday might bring. Even Virginia Woolf, despite her - 37

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intense need to change the novel (adapt it to hersensibility), does not neglect the present, no matterhow often she rushes into the past. She creates a

present past. Half a century later, Desperado authorslike Peter Ackroyd, Doris Lessing, Graham Swift are

obsessed with a past present.The heros mind is a radar focussed on was. Unlike

stream of consciousness authors, Desperadoes swim inawareness. They are not so much interested in the

subconscious teeming with monsters. The Desperadoauthor writes logically, provides clear explanations,

avoids the confusion of the unuttered. If there isconfusion in his text, it is caused by the narrative

manner, which is contorted, indirect and slow to find itswords. The painter in An Artist of the Floating World, by

Ishiguro, thinks clear thoughts and is introduced inclear sentences. Confusion stems from the order inwhich he brings up and comments on his memories.

Only at the very last does he mention the key-memory,which finally makes it clear why we have disliked himall along, why the book actually accuses him. A whileago, in the times of Japanese imperialist dreams, he

sent to prison a left-wing fellow-painter. Japan is seen inthe novel as submitted to the Americans, the formerleft-wing convict is now in what used to be Kurodas

shoes, when the famous painter was aspiring to aJapanese empire. The wheel has turned and Kuroda, in

his small present circle of reality in the novel, looksaround in astonishment, out of place, apparently just aharmless little old man now. Not so when he was youngand famous, though. The narrator draws the line underall times and gives a moral verdict. Ishiguros verdict is

actually an intransigent one: however free the readerthinks he is to interpret and rearrange present or past,

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in the end the author will not allow any other judgmentbut his. He does not encourage creative reading.

Reading must be careful, observant of every little word.The past detail is carved in the present discourse. This

present discourse, which does not aim at modifying thepast, is dominated by a clarity which imposes itself

upon rememoration and (most often indirect)explanation. The clarity of the Desperado style must byno means be overlooked. The narrative pattern may beexasperating, but the sentences that lead us to it are

crystal clear. The Desperado novel, the Desperadopresent is apparently accessible. In essence, it is a veryhard nut to crack for the readers memory and ability to

put pieces together. This reader is exhausted at theend of a - 38 -

book, fed up quite often, discouraged at the lack ofprospects: since there is no solid present, the future is

even more shaky, almost lost sight of.The Desperado present is a past present, a second,

even third degree present, according to the generationit belongs to. The real present can be located

elsewhere, in moments once present but no more so,which the author prompts the reader to reenact. Thebook becomes a maze of past presents. This is Peter

Ackroyds forte. Hawksmoor, English Music, Chattertonare all landslides of the present into something else.

The narrative opens with something we are tempted totake for the present of the book, then it dives

unexpectedly into previous centuries, the perfume ofthe long gone by. The author watches us sink, and thistrance of the man whose feet no longer tread the solidground is Ackroyds aim in point of narrative craft. Lessaggressive, yet essentially to the same purpose, Alan

Brownjohn mixes presents in The Long Shadows andmakes us wonder: is this a book within a book, are

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these paper heroes or living beings? The borderbetween present and past, however obnubilated, wasthere for the stream of consciousness. James, Woolf,Joyce, Eliot, Conrad, and even more so Dickens andGalsworthy, know exactly when they slip into the pastand all this time the present of the work is allowed togo ahead, slowly, all dressed in memories. To put it

plainly, something happens in the present, no matterwhat. Desperadoes choose two directions: either

something does happen, but, with endless irony, thestory is put down (see Huxley, Orwell, Burgess, Lodge,

Bradbury), or the present is annihilated as present(because it cannot change the future in the slightest),and it becomes a past present, a perfect reenactment(see Ishiguro, Swift, Ackroyd, Barnes, Lessing, Gray,

Ondaatje, Rushdie). More clearly, classical authors writewith a future in view, while Desperadoes refuse to thinkof the future, unless they project it as a dystopia. TheDesperado future withers precisely because the real

present is so faint. The Desperado present is, inconclusion, just a question mark. 4 - 39 -

I/6. THE FUTURE AS A MEMORY, IN DESPERADO

LITERATURE4

I. The Desperado HeroThe return of the hero

The stream of consciousness hero was more anemotional and thoughtful halo than a real life, althoughlife kept happening to him, life was all over him and he

could hardly deal with its intricate twists and turns.Clarissa Dalloway mixed memory and desire (T.S.

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Eliot, The Waste Land), an elaborately rememberedpast, a minimal present and a disturbing apprehensionfor the future. Virginia Woolf preached the abolition of

love interest and chronological causality, but stuckfiercely to them, all the more so as she was unable to

build a classical plot and perceived her inability. Isuspect that she preached what she preached only to

justify her lyrical narratives, which limped butconstantly fantasized about walking. That must also bethe reason why, after reading them, we remember hernovels as chronological stories that would not exist if

we deny them love interest. To put it in a nutshell, afterall, Virginia Woolf did stick to love interest and

chronological causality.- 61 - LiterNet Publishing House, 2006

After Joyces heroes, to whom everything happenedbefore happening, before the actual utterance, in thearea of preverbalization, the unutterable became the

realm of fiction. Leopold Bloom exposes shame

shamelessly (Ulysses). Lord Jim (Conrad) reveals theunspeakable horror which is mentioned even moreinsistently in Heart of Darkness. Lawrences heroesgrapple with a private hell of inexplicable impulse.

James hopes for justice and fairness in a crooked worldwhose only hope is the mind of his heroes, whichswitches the plot of the novel from the incident to

verbalization (meaning statement and understatement)of the act. Speculation and decoding are stream ofconsciousness practices. Between lines, between

words, there lies a meaning that has to be followedclosely and unmasked.

Modernism melted the hero into the effort of expressinghim. The living being evaporated into words, and the

word was the absolute beginning of the world, it waslight and it was life. It was both God and His creation.

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The Desperado age reclaims the right of the hero to beflesh and blood. The word is still important because it

must be remembered, because, if forgotten, it canbecome an obstacle to the understanding of the whole

book. The hero leads a real life and the Desperadoauthor prides himself on having brought the novel backto reality. What he does not admit is that the life of thehero reaches us through his memory, via his mind. AnArtist of the Floating World (Ishiguro) has a palpablestory, on the one hand: we learn that the hero was a

painter who supported the imperialist campaign, thusindirectly bringing the atomic bomb onto Japan, and inthe process he sent to jail another fellow painter who

saw things differently. But the truth comes to us filteredby the artists mind, and we take a while to wind our

souls away from him and give the book the chance of asecond, detached reading. The second time round, thecharm no longer blinds us and we see the ugly realityfor what it is, and we notice every little detail, every

word apparently uttered at random, actually verysignificant in the construction of the novel (such as

suicide, which suggests the artists unavowed sense ofguilt at having brought the bomb and ensuing defeat

and poverty onto his country). The Desperado hero haslearnt from the modernist hero that he must be a mind

above all, but he refuses to leave his body behind.

Clarissa Dalloway was a breeze of memories - 62 and emotions. Lanark describes the physical agony of

every little incident. His mind is the key to the meaning,but his body gives that meaning substance. DavidLodge, Malcolm Bradbury, Julian Barnes mock at

sentimentality, record the defeats of the heroic body,only their very irony relies on a very concrete life: the

heros mind mocks at his expectations of happiness inlove, career, family, society at large. There is no

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happiness. The past devours the future. The mind (thepast) gives birth to a life that is both true and hopeless(futureless). Life is back into the novel, but governed by

intellectual retrospection or (at times) intellectualprojection of the present into a future which is amultiplied suspicion of several roads that can be

travelled at once.Bringing back a hero with an eventful life, the

Desperado novel is this heros diary. Winston Smith(1984) dreams of a real diary whom beings-to-come(inhabitants of a future he cannot bring himself to

expect) will read:To the future or to the past, to a time when thought isfree, when men are different from one another and donot live alone to a time when truth exists and what is

done cannot be undone:From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude,from the age of Big Brother, from the age of double

think greetings!

Lawrence Durrells Alexandria Quartet is a mixture ofdiaries. Doris Lessing writes The Golden Notebook

relying heavily upon the idea of life as a daily businessthat does not exist until it is put down to paper.

Desperado writing is actually the recording of the dailyordeal. No Desperado hero is ever light-hearted or

happy. Fowles does not resort to a diary so much, but

the ordeal and the daily ratio of frustration is alwaysthere. He places a diary at the core of his Collector, but

that diary is just a dead memory of youth, animpossible return. Other heroes, in novels by Barnes,Ishiguro, Gray, Bradbury, Lodge live from day to day,

even though they do not write down their experiences.The diary is their own memory, which records patiently.

It is a disabused recording, hopeless and helpless.Ackroyd derives some power from his lyricism and

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escapes into other texts, other stories, the same as - 63

II/15. KAZUO ISHIGURO(1954)

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan, and came toEngland at the age of five. His books are the perfectimage of displacement. Either he pictures Japanese

heroes displaced (sent to England or to an unfamiliartime), as it happens in A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of

the Floating World, or he finds a way of displacingEnglish heroes (The Remains of the Day). He also

creates an ideal environment for displacement, actuallybuilding a dystopia (The Unconsoled). Displaced heroes

are silent, not voicing their unhappiness, which ishowever there. The mother in A Pale View of Hills

remembers in such a way that her whole memorybecomes a question mark. She silently wonders

whether her older daughter committed suicide becauseshe was brought from Japan to England. She keeps

thinking of her Japanese friend who wanted toemigrate, yet possibly never managed to. America isthe third Desperado theme which Ishiguro brings up.

The new owner of Darlington Hall is American, and hisfriends look at his new possession as at a bargain with

local colour, the real thing. Americans are also presentin defeated Japan, and described with resentment.When civilization collapses, the Desperadoes see

Americans invade, with next to no education, but withobvious welfare. America is the promised land for many

after-war individuals, who have had enough of English,Japanese or German poverty. Very sensitive to three

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major Desperado themes, displacement, dystopia andAmerica, Ishiguro is highly representative for the turn of

the millennium.4

Dissimulated emotion is Ishiguros main feature ineverything he has written so far. His characters may

seem empty, they are incredibly shy, reluctant toverbalize. To hunt and shoot feelings is the main

pastime of Ishiguros reader. Annoyed because hecannot share what he is never told exists, this reader

goes back to the text again and - 170 - LiterNetPublishing House

again, looking for the least word which could betraysensibility. Some books are colder (An Artist of the

Floating World), others are however highly endearing(The Unconsoled), or at least exquisitely loving (The

Remains of the Day). Unlike Graham Swift or Ackroyd,yet very much like Barnes, Gray, Amis, though in a

totally different manner, Ishiguro holds emotion

prisoner in a castle of ice. Japanese lace surroundsevery gesture. Each incident is perfect, a haiku inmovement. Climbing each step of the soul, while

seeming to tread a flat road, the plot reaches emotionalintensity blindfolded.

The characters are unwilling to unveil their names.Very often they do not even have a first name (see

Stevens, the butler), and when they do have a fullname, it is not important, since very few use it. Whichproves that the novel is a dissimulated monologue of

the one main hero, surrounded by secondarycharacters, all carefully outlined, yet totally

unimportant for their soul. The only character with asoul is the main one, who takes his time to unveil some

of his experiences. Ishiguro is a4

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one-hero novelist, like all Desperadoes. Decency and restraint govern Ishiguros writings.

Apparently his words are unemotional, matter-of-fact.The faces of his heroes are impenetrable, their figureshieratic, prone to immobility. Inner movement cannot

be hidden, but Ishiguro would rather the readerdiscovered that on his own. He will not give in to

outspoken lyricism, although the substance of all hiswritings is unbelievably tender. Each main hero lovesand is hurt, every incident must be viewed carefully.

Ishiguro wants to look like a gentle author, sparing hischaracters the pain of unwanted revelation. Actually, he

leaves all the signs behind, for the reader to find outsuffering. This Desperado author does not know the

meaning of happiness. The painter denied by Post-War,Americanized Japan, the butler of a dead master and apast great time, the Japanese mother living in an alien,

lonely country, the pianist who does not- 171 LiterNet

even get to play, are all tragic masks behind which it isthe readers task to guess the blood boiling. Ishiguro isnot less intense than other writers; he is merely more

cautious with showing intensity. Psychology is minutely dissected, although there areno traces of surgery in Ishiguros novels. It seems hehas no idea what can go on in his heroes minds. His

language never uses he thought, he remembered,he thought to himself. This is one more proof that we

always get the point of view of the main characteralone, even though the narrative may be written in the

third person. If compared to the stream ofconsciousness, Ishiguros fiction is another direction

altogether. The Desperado manner can best be

demonstrated in the works of this quiet, self-containedauthor, whose work rages with unuttered passion. He

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analyzes minds by carefully selecting incidents,memories that lead to a certain conclusion. The readergets to judge the order of the arguments more than theemotional quality of each separate incident. We read amind, discover the way it works, where it fails, and thisfailure of the mind is the real cause of the tragedy in

the book. All characters are peculiar intellects. They arealso very stubborn, and stick to their direction. No

character in Ishiguro changes, they are all static andrevealed in the order the author carefully plans. If we

manage to decode the order of thoughts, we are facedwith a fanatic mind, which is bitterly defeated in the

end. The end of each novel is a defeat, and the author,the reader too, can only accept. Nothing doing.

4 Ishiguros major device is understatement. Althoughafter a second, third reading it becomes fairly obvious

that the painter is an ex-fascist, who dreamt of imperialJapan and sent to jail a left-wing colleague, Ishiguro

never says a word against him. The book is not verymuch in love with this tyrannical, resentful old painter,

dreaming of his youthful mistakes, which to him are stillthe right way. Stubbornness is a general feature of allthese characters, who never change, not within the

space of Ishiguros mind. They may decline fromfavour, but their dignity is untouched, they never

repent or amend. Ishiguros main heroes are neverlikable persons. We learn to

- 172 LiterNeput up with them. Our irritation grows as we read one

more incident, as we discover that the trajectory oftheir memory is aimed at hiding exactly what we are

expected to find out and condemn. Ishiguro is a

determined writer, whose judgment of character is notto be argued with. He has a firmness of the soul, which

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he uses to teach us to like unlikable beings, toovercome our disapproval. Like the wooden shoes thatimposed a certain shape on the Japanese girls feet of

old, his novels silence our sensibility into conforming tohis decision, which usually is, This character is doomed.Ishiguros beings are all doomed, and we have to scour

his texts in order to find out why. Ishiguros main characters are all might-have-beens.

This is how the reader perceives them. Stevens is amight-have-been day, the Japanese painter is a

might-have-been success, the pianist is a might-have-been husband and son. All Desperadoes dislike

happiness as a way out of the novel, as a direction tobe followed by the reader. They resort to this might-

have-been happiness, much more effective than a clearrecording of a happy-end on the last page. If we thinkof it, the Desperado novel has no end at all. It merelystops, while the reader feels the underground stream

actually goes on and he is denied access. This

frustrated reader turns creative, rereads, decodes,writes about the book, in short, he will not let it go.

4 The American Mr. Farraday, who buys Darlington Hall

with the butler in it, is no longer Henry JamesAmerican, who would defect to Europe at any time, or a

T.S. Eliot, who felt America was stifling him as a poet.

This American does not complain about his country inthe least. He has a complex of superiority. He advisesand judges Stevens by his own standards. He imposes

his outlook, is totally blind to Europe. Like allDesperadoes, Ishiguro also notices that America has

come of age.- 173 - LiterNet Publishing

Ishiguros characters, whether a butler, a painter, aJapanese mother or a pianist, are all in a mild, yet

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irrevocable state of shock. This confusion accounts fortheir inability to lead us to the root of the evil, theirinability to see the damage they themselves have

done. They are all guilty, and they feel it in their bones,but their minds try to prove them innocent, and this isthe trick of all Ishiguros novels. The reader is caught

between the characters determination to be right andhis own suspicion that something is rotten in the state

of the Desperadoes. Ishiguros characters, like most Desperadoes, are

unable to adapt to change. Some change occurs, and itsets the novelist going. The butler has to learn the artof bantering, when all he cared about in his life were

the intellectual conversations with his master,improving his vocabulary, being very much in earnest.The painter has to accept the Americanization of Japan,down to something as basic as the cartoons watched byhis grandson: not samurais, but cowboys. The pianist is

set to change the world with his music, yet his own

private life is destroyed precisely because of it, becauseof the tours on which, we have reason to believe, he

does not even have a chance to play. The heroes clingto whatever it was they were doing when the changecame upon them and the reader has no choice butdisapprove. The disapproving reader is a natural

consequence of this strategy of change and

inadaptability, which Ishiguro, and most Desperadoes,use.

4 Ishiguros main heroes, like Grays, Barnes,

Lessings, suffer from a secrecy of the mind. If we areto find the logical way out of the maze of incidents, theorder in the puzzle, we have to break a door, violate the

authors silence. Stevens does not like to be found out,on various occasions: he denies having served his

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master when some villagers denounce him as an ex-fascist, declares he needs a good housekeeper when hegoes in search of his real love, Miss Kenton. The painter

does not want the reader to realize that he actuallythrew another painter in jail because the latter was

- 174 LiterNetleft-wing, so he postpones remembering the exact

circumstances, until it becomes indispensable for theplot to go on. The pianists memory is a set of holes,which are filled in turn, one by one, but he opposes hisbeing understood, refuses to voice connections, keeps

incidents as separate as he can. These heroes refuse totalk to the reader. Honesty is never the Desperados

best policy. Deviousness is. Irony is, for Ishiguro as for all Desperadoes, the only

possible creative attitude. The author waitssomewhere, behind his hero, and shows us his smilefrom time to time. Some Desperadoes are bitingly

ironic (Bradbury, Lodge, Barnes, Fowles), others mildly

so (Gray). Some are bitter (Lessing), others dreamy(Ackroyd, Swift). Ishiguro has an ironical pattern. Hisnovels are structured on irony. He deliberately mocksat found secrets. His heroes are both endearing and

ridiculous. Since Ishiguro will not allow sentimentality which is, for him, a grievous sin , his energy finds anoutlet in debunking loves of all kind. Did Virginia Woolf

even imagine love could be so harshly treated by awriter, when she wrote her Modern Fiction, againstlove-interest? Ishiguro contemplates the remains ofStevens wasted love and, while tears run down the

butlers cheeks, the author smiles at the perfect patternof his book. Love does not even enter the equation. The

hero is perfect, and Ishiguro could not care less

whether what he has lost is love or hatred. The mainthing is he has lost it. Since all Ishiguros main heroes

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are losers, there is always something to smile at. ThisDesperado irony shows us we live in a cruel world,

where dryness corners sympathy, and art (the game)supersedes emotion. The reader has to fill in the

feeling, and this was unheard of in literature before theDesperado age.

4 Ishiguro, like many other British Desperadoes,

decides upon a set of rules for Englishness. His butler isthe essence of Englishness, the same as The English

Patient of Ondaatje, a Hungarian hero by birth,conforms to the same English character. It took a

displaced Japanese and a displaced Indian to describethe typical English hero.

- 175 - LiterNet Publishing Many Desperado authors are concerned with history,

the two World Wars mainly. Such are Swift, Lessing,Barnes, Lodge, Ackroyd, Ishiguro. Even writers born

after the two World Wars write about the war. Almost

every Desperado has one novel about the past (TheRemains of the Day, An Artist of the Floating World, Out

of the Shelter, Martha Quest, Lanark, Staring at theSun, Waterland, Hawksmoor, Shuttlecock, Out of This

World, Ever After). Ishiguro writes about Japanimmediately after World War II, England before World

War II. It seems more dramatic to a Desperado to place

his plot during a time of deprivation and death. Thosewho do not use the war to that purpose, write

dystopias. In one way or another, Desperadoes manageto find the uncomfortable.

It often happens to Desperadoes to write aboutartists: writers (Swift, Lessing, Barnes, Lodge, Bradbury,

Amis, Ackroyd), painters (Gray, Ackroyd, Ishiguro,

Fowles), actors (Swift). They also write aboutpoliticians, and politics is very important to the

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Desperado character (see especially Lessing, Ishiguro,Swift). Whatever is connected to the mind, less to the

heart, appeals to them, especially if it meansexamining a creative mind in progress. Ishiguro alsolikes to see things from above, to offer a generalized

image of society, human condition, art. There is a lot ofsubtlety in the way Desperadoes deal with these verytraditional, almost exhausted themes; Desperadoes

hate being in a crowd, so they look for a peculiarapproach to issues they will not give up. Ishiguro fakes

humbleness. His painter is a past glory, and hispolitician, dead now, is a memory of the butler. His

pianist is a fake VIP, an empty, confused personality,who hardly knows what he is supposed to do. Claimingconfusion, Ishiguro debunks politics and art, reducing

them to human, everyday size.4

As Desperado novels roll the film backwards, theyare slow progresses. Ishiguro uses memory in his first

three novels, and invariably the plot goes from end tostart, making use of the least detail, and revealing

much later the importance of each. The plot may bedelivered in fragments, though, but the pain is

continuous. The tragic mood of Desperado novelsmakes the incidents remembered at random cohere in

a brotherhood of the weak. These

- 176 - LiterNet Publishing House, 2006characters for whom life goes backwards are totally

helpless. They burst into our minds, make usunbearably curious (suspense is the major Desperado

device), explain fitfully, and withdraw whenever a pageends, an author runs out of sentences, a reader is

bored and shuts the book. The end is inessential. The

heros helplessness when confronted with his own fate,which he cannot change in any way, is a sign of the

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Desperado depression. The Desperado novel isresigned.

The Unconsoled is Ishiguros dystopia. It could beanyone, from the writer himself, to the common passer-by. It is an amnesiac, nightmarish world, which Ishiguroprobes with intent sense of observation. Whether epic,

lyrical, comic, dramatic, tragic, grim, nostalgic, allDesperadoes are in search of a refuge, they all need an

escape. More often than not, whatever the literarygenre (which is usually a medley), they end up in anuncomfortable future. Wherever they are, whatever

they may be writing, Desperadoes feel fragile,threatened and doomed. Which makes their struggle to

survive and be unique even more endearing, in aliterary world of uncertainties. A world where the fate of

the book needs to be fortified again and again. 177

lidia vianu desperado age

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