LIDIA VIANU, THE DESPERADO AGE, vezi Kazuo Ishiguro la p.

16 There are two major directions in 20th century literature: the stream of consciousness and the Poststream of consciousness, the latter being known as Postmodernism (Post-Postmodernism and the rest). Considering that any trend has its posterity, postmovements or post-trends have been known to exist as long as literature has existed. Those which had a clear meaning attached to them also acquired a name that stayed with us. Quite a number of critics have tried to formulate one Postmodern theory or another, and the so-called Postmodernist movement has struggled for its life 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 word is each for himself, everybody their own trend. This time of utmost literary solitude and bravery, of everyone creating what and how they please and taking the audience their hostage, keeping the reader at their mercy, I have called the DESPERADO AGE. 4 I will try to outline the essential features of Desperado literature, 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 plot to the adventures of the word or the lyrical trips into
1

the self that remembers according to subconscious associations, another generation follows. Alasdair Gray, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, John Fowles and many other writers understand that the novel was about to die, and reinstate story-telling. Had Joyce continued the path - 8 - LiterNet Publishing House, opened by Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the novel would not have survived long. Terrified, Lawrence Durrell made a passionate comeback to exciting incidents. The breathtaking story is back, but it must be added that the Desperado suspense is much more than mere 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 and the pattern is not to be found. The plot, the story, is no longer 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. Like everything Desperado, plot itself is a puzzle: as we go along, we find fragments of time, and we have to make them fit together in a larger image, unknown, unsuspected at first. From the first words, the work exhales 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 a character who narrates. Repeatedly, in Doris Lessing, David Lodge, Martin Amis, the story relies on the pattern of one life. Not several equally important lives, as in Galsworthys impressive architecture, as in Dickens even. Just one life, which swallows everything else. The peculiarity of the Desperado hero, the hold of
2

plot on the reader resides in the individualizing narrative. Incidents flow into the basket of one heros biography, and all the rest are mere pretexts for the show to go on. Although the incidents that make up the plot reach our consciousness in a disorderly manner, there is a sense of chronology and we cannot ignore it. The author does not basically violate chronology, he merely ignores its traditional representation, the progress from past to future. The time sequence no longer is the support of causality, it no longer rules the plot, imposing its logic on incidents and characters, on the readers perception of -9 chronology. The main hero, the only one we are expected to understand this effort is no lesser just because there is only one important hero, it is actually more intense , thinks according to rules his mind makes, and these rules destroy all pre-existing patterns, all order, all attempts at clarification or final explanation by means of ordering the flashes chronologically or according to any other law. The Desperado plot always has an open end. The author refuses to have any say as to where the interaction book-reader should stop. He stops provisionally, having exhausted one set of incidents, unwilling to go on for now. All Desperado novels end in a last indecisive page: some poetic symbol induces a meditative mood, the reader may be overwhelmed with doubt as to the real meaning of what he has read, or an abrupt ending cuts expectation short and actually heightens 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 an insurance policy of the text, which survives in
3

rereading. The Desperado author makes sure the readers will never forget, because they will never leave the text. Creation becomes a timeless trap. 4 The universe the author imagines is gradually revealed. The reader is educated in the spirit of growing patience. The author imposes an ascetic reading. Joyce, Woolf, T.S. Eliot were elliptical, refused to explain, made a deliberate plan to require the reader to piece up the work using its fragments. The stream of consciousness mechanically did away with all connecting words and thoughts, but coherence and order survived underground. A Desperado is a writer for whom order is meaningless. The reader no longer feeds on the creators plan, he no longer reorders planned disorder. Desperado literature bars the reader from experiencing the joy of discovering at the very last a logical, 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! The Desperado author finds his sun, his joy of creation, in using all known conventions till they are exhausted. The novel smashes happy-ends, romance, emotional involvement in the story, even accessibility, to a certain degree. 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 to survive, makes the reader despair, but also gives him the strength to struggle and find out the source and flow of this Desperado plot, which, as most interviews with the authors themselves state, only means to entertain, although it actually intrigues. 2. Character
4

 After the stream of consciousness had smashed characters into tiny words (keeping them painfully alive, all the same), splinters of thought, reflex gestures and cultured meditation, Desperado literature brings palpable characters back into the story. The author imagines somebody in flesh and blood. It does not matter that the imagined person behaves oddly, has an intimidating past, entertains such tangled thoughts that nobody in the text or outside it can order them. Tragic or funny, more or less energetic, the odd hero is very much alive, too, apparently coherent, in fact all the more appealing as its enigmatic side keeps growing and growing. 4 The Desperado author rejects explicit psychological analysis, possibly because it was the major discovery of Henry James and then of the stream of consciousness. More than thoughts, which are there all right, it is actions that speak. The hero is incident addicted. His inner monologue is rich, but it evolves from act to act more than from one idea to another. Caught in the web of 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 are one. 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 his private life, or allows it to be exposed, almost
5

masochistically. Compared to the flamboyant love of life of a James Joyce, the emblematic experience of the Desperado hero, whether joking or in earnest, is existence 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 with lyricism, exasperating readers with its elliptical secrecy. The readers major concern was to find the literal meaning first, and the symbols were investigated only after the text had been clarified. The Desperado style blinds us with colloquial clarity. Julian Barnes and Alasdair Gray, for instance, state that all they want is to make themselves understood. This shows us that Desperado authors have learnt the lesson of the stream of consciousness, they have learnt from previous disastrous experience that the reader comes first, that creation should focus on reading. The Desperado author affords a comfortable reading experience, although meaning is far from obvious. The readers comfort is a consequence of the more than accessible language the writer uses, a language that rejects sophistication, welcomes familiarity, cleans words from far-fetched associations or encoded symbols. Encoding, ambiguity have lost the ground they had gained and kept for several decades. Difficulty is not lost. We find it in a complicated order of detail, which is actually part of the plot, but is mirrored in style too, in the fact that apparently understanding is free and easy, when in fact it is greatly slowed down by the imperative need to remember whatever is written on the page. Every little word will sometime come in handy. To a large extent, the 4 - 12 6

Desperado author creates the mnemotechnical reading. The Desperado novel trains our ability to activate words we 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 into emotion. 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 intellectual triumphs. Ishiguro is such a hypersensitive author. Ironical Barnes himself has one emotional novel. The excellent narrator Graham Swift dives on and off into the 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 the previous bravery, upgrading it, so to say. Beyond the analysis of a mind in progress, Desperadoes instinctively slip into a public confession of the darkest secrets. Whether we are faced with taboo thoughts which are unveiled with masochistic brutality, or physical life is so bluntly conveyed that it borders on vulgarity, utter honesty is a Desperado manner. In order to shatter and rape the readers understanding, the author breaks all interdictions. The shameless style makes for sharpness of the text. Without an aesthetic motivation, shamelessness might turn into pornography. As it is, the result of deliberate freedom from shyness leads to a firm text, which reaches
7

psychological depth by shocking propriety. Alasdair Gray states in an interview that he cannot reread his own novel because, after finishing it, he became again the shy person he was before writing that particular novel. Other authors are verbally very decent, but reveal shocking moral or emotional ugliness. Whether stylistically or emotionally, the Desperado writer is in love with inciting, intriguing abnormality. - 13 LiterNet Every Desperado is painfully aware that language definitely 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 of consciousness merely discovered. Superficial clarity is accompanied by indirectness. Narration is far more than story-telling. Henry James inaugurated ambiguous narration, at the end of which the readers hardly knew which hero they should side with, who was to blame and who was not. For Desperadoes, all heroes are blameless to start with, they are all indisputably right. The most concrete incidents cohere in a story of the mind, the hidden mechanisms of initial thoughts are unveiled. Unuttered feelings must be guessed at. Desperado reluctance to verbalize the soul goes hand in hand with apparent verbal shamelessness. Feelings merely hinted at show us how certainty is replaced by guessing. The author falls prey to the temptation of hiding, because by being indirect he can complicate things and the text glimmers with life, even if all this takes place behind the stage of a clear style, which becomes the only traffic sign in a maze of roads. The Desperado paradox is born out of the despair to complicate, associated with the determination to be accessible, easily understood.
8

4 4. Relationship with the critic The Desperado author is very much interested in being accepted, praised, and dislikes (who doesnt?) being found at fault, all the more so as he claims he could not care less. Julian Barnes emphatically states it is the easiest thing in the world to quit criticism. Sophistication of the work amounts actually to claiming the critics attention, making sure the reader is a fan, not an enemy. All Desperadoes are addressing an initiated reader, who is far more than a mere relaxed reader. The Desperado writer creates the challenging text. It is a deliberate challenge, its effects are expected, planned, very much unlike the turmoil of revolt in the Stream of consciousness. The authors - 14 - LiterNetambition is both to manipulate emotionally the common reader and make the intelligent critic surrender, exhaust his attack strategies. 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 that the 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 close contact with his reader, that he is welcomed by an involved reader. All Desperado devices aim at manipulating the readers emotions and intellect, despite the fact that no Desperado is willing to subscribe to this guilty intention. Quite the reverse, the writers state with determination they hate to manipulate their audience, the work writes itself, no premeditation involved. Actually, they attempt a
9

deliberate involvement of the reader (triggered by the complication 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 unravels devices, he becomes the authors confessor. He accedes to the story, by means of which the author traps him, but he is constantly intrigued, by every step forward, every obstacle which bars a traditional approach. The reader has been promoted from the passive school to the active school of reading (which process 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 can be 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. Irony overwhelms plot, characters, style and readers. Without irony, which belongs to both author and reader, the Desperado work is nothing. Irony ensures the high quality of the text. It supports the detachment of this author who complicates without getting involved, or not directly involved, anyway. The author is discreet, he avoids sounding personal, refuses the intimacy of confession, replaces it with an imaginary brotherhood. The Desperado author has a strong imagination, behind which he takes shelter at all times. He hides what the reader finds out in the end, and the game is repeated over and over again, because the Desperado work is an eternal beginning. It always leaves behind the bitter sweet taste of inconclusiveness... 7. Displacement 4
10

 The Desperado author can be identified by his repeated attempt at leaving one space and moving into another, leaving one age for another, or simply by leaving and then finding another fixed point (often much worse than the previous, but refreshingly new). The passage, travel, departure and shipwreck, the discovery 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 are pervaded by an acute need for a home, by a feeling of rootlessness. Some authors come to the English language from other geographical areas (India, Japan, Africa), and their roots become inessential. The fact that they were born elsewhere entitles them to feel they belong everywhere and nowhere at the same time, they exist in a literary utopia, without borders such 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 which menaces all coherence. This inner void explains and supports the inexplicable side of his psychology, the maze of thoughts and feelings which the reader has to cross when he tries to piece up the hero. All Desperado heroes are intensely solitary. Not even love can bring them together, and other feelings are apparently mere shadows of traditional passionate turmoils. Which does not mean lack of intensity. Quite the reverse. Intensity is exacerbated. Detached from reality, yet handcuffed to it, inert yet crucified to the narrative, slashed into numberless captivating incidents, the people of these paradoxical books are paradoxical themselves, contradictory beings who are
11

finally unexplained and inexplicable on the whole, incomplete circles, mouths opened to utter a last unheard word. 4 The authors are oppressed by the constant struggle for survival. Life is a burden, more than mere joy, even in the humorous books. The heroes long for the peace and carelessness of childhood, they feel driven away from an unknown paradise which they subconsciously long for incessantly. The Desperado hero is restless, his world-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 fear of rejection or despising attitudes, the risk of never being understood properly. These experiences result in a nightmarish atmosphere (see Kazuo Ishiguro in The Unconsoled, Salman Rushdie in Midnights Children), a nightmare of alienation. The heroes build themselves islands of familiarity, dreams, loves, sentimentality, but their life mostly unfurls in an inimical world, a hostile universe. The displaced Desperado authors experience a subtle, incurable frustration. Irony and tragedy join hands. - 17 LiterNet 8. Dystopia The Desperado authors favourite space is dystopia, black, negative utopia. The long line of dystopians actually begins with Huxley (Brave New World) and Orwell (1984), and continues with most contemporary writers. Dystopia is more frequent than writing poetry in adolescence or than falling in love. Whenever a Desperado 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 is unmistakable and must not be ignored because it is an
12

essential, very significant symptom of emotional estrangement. The list of dystopian authors is long. It starts with the stream of consciousness, with T.S. Eliot and his Waste Land. Beginning with Huxley, we can talk about Desperadoes. Besides Brave New World, Huxley also imagined Ape and Essence. Others follow: William Golding (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), David Lodge (Nice Work), Julian Barnes (Staring at the Sun, The Porcupine), Peter Ackroyd (Hawksmoor, Chatterton, English Music), Kazuo Ishiguro (The Unconsoled), Alan Brownjohn (The Long Shadows), and many more. We are not always faced with science fiction. Quite the reverse, the surroundings are most often than not apparently common. The dystopia begins insidiously, with a defamiliarization of the familiar. The familiar present, exaggerated and blackened, is projected into future indeterminacy. Defamiliarization is accompanied by a maximized fear. In a nightmarish, yet very real world, heroes live naturally. Gray even confesses that it was his aim to see how far he could go, how hard he could stretch the heros rationality, and he placed his character in abnormal circumstances, boasting with the characters very natural reactions to the unusual. 4 - 18 The basic feature of Desperado dystopias (unlike Jonathan Swift, with his country of the Houyhnhnms, for example) is the victory of imagination, which renders the terrifying appealing to us. Whoever reads Lanark by Alasdair Gray feels very reluctant to leave the world of
13

the novel, would rather linger there after the last page spells GOODBYE, they all go back and reread, reconsider the first time around. Lingering and rereading are the defining particularities of Desperado dystopias. The aim of Desperado dystopias is broader than before, because traditional dystopias merely warned that nightmare could become reality. Contemporary dystopias are copiously inventive of non-experience. Desperado authors imagine a wealth of details, worlds of all kinds. Desperado dystopias are: political (the most 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, the crisis 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 than T.S. Eliot did in his aesthetics of the ugly, in 1922. The writer imagines frantically, allows himself to be carried away by his own imagination, and this message of the joy of living the dystopia is that whatever the imagination can hold is alive, consequently the dystopia becomes an apology of life, a kind of life that knows no border between beautiful and ugly, a life in which mere existence (it is irrelevant to call it good or bad) counts. Dystopia is the result of the Desperado instinct to intrigue and shock the reader at all costs. From defamiliarization, through imagination, the reader comes 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 may be, and his mind - 19 - LiterNet Publishing House, 2006
14

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 a mind in progress, ceaselessly discovering new literary and even existential modes. 9. The hybridization of literary genres The mixture of literary genres became a major literary mode with the stream of consciousness, at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the great invention of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, alongside with the cultured text (intertextuality). The Desperado writes poetic novels and fictional poems, contaminated with drama, essay, literary criticism and literary history. Any technique is good, all techniques must be combined, as many as possible in the same text, no matter what age they belong to or what literary genre. Desperado literature is a merry-go-round of techniques: realism, oneirism, symbolism, stream of consciousness, absurd. The word is handled with an eye wide open to preserving clarity, but to the one aim of making 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 community flatly refuses being enrolled in any collectivity, group, movement, because he feels utterly different from all the rest, so he proclaims himself his own trend. 4 A Desperado text is a composite text, a text within a text within a text, a multitude of texts in one. The cultured 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. What makes us discuss a contemporary Desperado
15

community is that, true enough, birds of a feather flock together: they are all unbelievably similar in their despair to be dissimilar. - 20 I/2. THE DESPERADO FREEDOM I. Previous bondage to previous conventions The stream of consciousness, which precedes the Desperado age (starting in the early 1950s) in time, was an illusion of freedom. The desire to struggle free from 19th century realism, from traditional omniscience, from the order of the predictable plot and characters, ended in a frenzy of defiance. The character was no longer a story for Joyce, Woolf, Conrad: he was a stream (of thoughts, emotions, memories). Virginia Woolfs famous essay on Modern Fiction was an act of rejection. She turned her back on Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells, but she was not really prepared for a substantial change. Many critics have noticed that she discovered denial, nothing else. I should say she replaced the old convention of predictability, the old horizon of strong expectations, by a new convention of defiance. If readers had grown too addicted and accustomed to peaceful, gratifying reading, she decided to wake them up: she used symmetrical opposition and came up with the imperious need for unpredictability. The stream of consciousness novel is what we do not expect to see on page, whether it is in point of structure (plot, character, chronology, all shattered, reshuffled, different from what centuries of literature had made them into), or, more confusing, in point 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
16

understanding arduous, and we can safely say that the novel 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 a hidden intention, a concealed plan, the compression of all meanings by means of a language which left the purpose of mere communication, straying into poetry. The - 23 - LiterNet Publishing House, 2006 encoded style led to an encoded meaning, and on the whole, the stream of consciousness text refuses accessibility. This refusal began as an absence of incident, which was replaced by emotion and thought. More emotion with Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, more thought (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 in progress. If there is no story, then there is no sense of closure either. The reader who finishes a stream of consciousness novel is left afloat in an open space of the soul. Reading is threatened, it will soon have to change. Briefly, in Woolfs own terms, love interest has to die. I must say she proclaims this but never manages to kill it right in her novels. Once the reader has come out of the text, love and story are back in his mind, and he remembers characters who are very much in love. Yet it is now, with Joyce, Woolf and Eliot that the idea of the couple, of family and loving/ loveless endings begins to fade. The horizon of expectation has to change, to accommodate these new, defiant novels, apparently deprived of what was the basic food of literature for at least nineteen centuries. We used to
17

form an intimacy with the hero as we read his story and expected the suspense, the absolute end. We are no longer supposed to expect anything. We form an intimacy with the author, who baffles us and confuses the text. If the novel used to be a statement, it is a question mark now, and it is the reader who must find his own answers or stay forever displeased. 4 20th century realism (Galsworthy is the best representative) still hopes to please the reader. Forsyte Saga is a consummate architecture of conventional devices, from perfect chronology to plot and character. Its main rule is logic. The readers guide is his own understanding, which passively travels across the incidents, all connected and meaningfully built into a pyramid longing for an attainable future. The horizon of expectation in such novels has been the same for twenty centuries and more: something begins and ends, and we see the interim. This is what the Desperado refuses to do. He rejects both the convention of order (traditional novel) and that of deliberate disorder (stream of consciousness). We could easily sum up the main moments of a novel by Dickens, Cervantes, Petronius (to go backwards). The chronological sequence makes sense. The same attempt at restoring chronology - 24 whirling incidents (because something happens in all fiction, at all times), we find ourselves in the exhilarating world of etymological genius. Before the Desperado, fiction was always in bondage to convention, and it accepted the artificiality. The Desperado is the first to say, I am different and I am free.
18

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 other works (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 those texts with their grin, their irony tells us: Do not trust them do not trust me, no other text but mine can be taken seriously, and even my text has to be viewed with a smile, with the love of game in your mind. Irony is the mother of the text as a challenging game. (2) In interviews, Desperadoes are fond of denying the question. You say they love to play with their readers and they reply, I love my readers and want to impress them, not challenge. A Desperado is always in denial: he denies statements, he denies first impressions, he builds his always present suspense on denying the readers 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: the baffling hero, the confusing incident are his major means of communication. 4 - 25 (3) Although writing No on every page, the Desperado expects us to fervently welcome him with a Yes. He needs the readers approval and courts us, while apparently grumpy and eager to displease. The reason for their anxious desire to be different and take us by surprise is to silence us into loving, amazed acceptance.
19

(4) When the plot is at its peak, it is ruthlessly suspended and the reader is left breathlessly hopeless. The Desperado work never ends happily or unhappily, and never even considers an open ending. It ends unexpectedly. The character in Lanark leaves no room for speculation, he dies, but he dies enigmatically, with a 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 helpless disapproval, after he has enjoyed a certain kind of power and fame his whole life. We would not expect him to be that gentle. Fowles plays with his endings in full view, in The French Lieutenants Woman. Since the couple 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 all about the absence of love, while proclaiming the freedom of women from men. Waterland is an image of old age and faint reminiscences of the trouble caused by young love, now all but vanished. The stream of consciousness discredited love theoretically, yet still clung to it (see V. Woolf, who would not breathe without emotion). The Desperadoes snicker when they should sympathize, love is a source of fun. Their irony is dry, although they are very much concerned with the readers 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
20

(6) A Desperado must be new at all costs. He must be new in the context of all literature, and he must also be new in relation to his previous work. Being new implies surprising 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 their own 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 : be shameless. (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. Which brings us to: 4 I/3. THE NATURE OF FICTION IN THE DESPERADO WORK 1. TRUTH OR FICTION? Henry James used to state that a work of art must approximate truth. Joyce, Woolf and Eliot restricted the area to the truth of the mind. The basic contention would be that nobody can tell for sure what truth is. Actually, our perception of the truth has changed so
21

much that we read Dickens and do not see the life but the old-fashioned convention in him. Which brings one possible answer: in literature, truth is just another convention. The Desperadoes could not have been absent, since they delight in conventions of all kinds, as many as possible, as varied and as different. Consequently, the Desperadoes claim today, All we want to do is give you the truth. 4 The Desperado imagination adapts to a new nature, a new reality. It always brings about confusion, and the reader stops and wonders: Is this a new experience, or is it just a baffling of my old way of looking at things? Defiance is in the nature of all conventions. The only difference is that for many centuries, since ancient times to the realism of our own century, readers have been fed one pattern, that of chronological causality, of the couple living (un)happily ever after. The couple and the ending are two outmoded, exhausted conventions. For the first time, the Desperadoes defy the very basis of traditional fiction. The defiance is stronger than the stream of consciousness hybridization of literary genres. Joyce, Woolf, Eliot merely played with the existing conventions, and kept them whole, actually. Literature became a game. Desperadoes find this game and all they can think of is to smash it to pieces. They claim they want truth, not just a game, but their truth is desperately confusing. It is very hard to create a new convention when you start by smashing all components that could have been useful. Imagination works hard, and here we are in front of a question which is in fact as old as the hills: Truth or fiction? - 30 - LiterNet Publishing

22

It is quite obvious that what the stream of consciousness claimed to do, which was adjusting literature to the truth, making it more capable of rendering life, was just another illusion of truth. Desperadoes no longer claim to mirror life. They are more 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 unfamiliar surroundings and starts building a new house of fiction. No harm done, as long as the reader keeps in mind that this 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, that he wants to be truer than anyone before him; second, that, being a Desperado, he must make his own law as he goes along. The first thing that must be secured is the readers emotional involvement. Most Desperadoes confess in interviews that they want to be friends with the reader, they want the reader on their side, and very much pleased by the work. They mean to say that they need this reader to hold their hand, to trust and believe, 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 the text, because the war with old conventions is long and hard. The Desperado reader, steeped in intertextuality and other such fine tricks, trots along the new book, disabused and snubbed, till suddenly a miracle happens and he changes. Reading is no longer mere involvement. The reader learns defiance from the author, and Desperado reading is essentially incredulous (is the truth in the work?) and dissatisfied. The critic is more easily silenced. The contention that the work is the truth and not a mere image of it leads
23

to the idea that, since the truth cannot be changed, the work is above argument. Julian Barnes confesses he has quit criticism. Other Desperadoes surrender and accept criticism, claiming that anyone can see in the text what they please. If the author does not even fight for copyright of his fiction, it is easy to understand why the 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 is anti. If truth is tradition, untruth is innovation, so it must be explored. This is how the favourite Desperado space is created, that of dystopia. The text outsmarts the familiar, it defamiliarizes, and instead of a place, which is a traditional approximation of nature, it displaces, 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 in maximized 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 such scary places of the mind unless they knew they were not for real. Fiction it is, then. Fiction which does not mean to please, not in the way Jane Austen or Galsworthy pleased the reader. Fiction which pushes the reader to the 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 most ambitious so far.
24

4 2. DIARY MAYBE? The shape of Desperado fiction is varied, yet more often than not it has a diary-like quality. It records incidents in the first or third person. The incidents are disparate and the author keeps them short, like daily entries. The Desperado novel rarely has more than one main hero, so the book is easily seen as this one heros self-revelation. The order of incidents is apparently dictated by hazard. In fact the hero postpones the embarrassing, hides the key of our disapproval. Dickens, the Brontes, Galsworthy, had positive and negative characters. There is no such thing for a Desperado author. The one hero he offers us is good and bad at once,- 32 likable and unlikable, we had better suspend judgment and 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 can do is remember in a certain order, which order suggests to us what they feel, what they most want to hide. They keep recreating past presents. The feeling of a permanent present invades memory, the past. These characters are finally forbidden to hide anything: the text becomes a forceful revelation. They have the inner strength to reveal the embarrassing at last, and this strength 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 several simultaneous endings, no ending, blank pages, a mere GOODBYE. He will discredit the future to the best of his abilities.
25

Desperado fiction always takes author, hero and reader by surprise, which explains why Desperadoes make such an exacerbated use of suspense. The book is not a carefree diary, with a reliable past to remember, present to describe and future to hope for. The book is a maybe diary, helpless to imagine tomorrow, but highly skilful in playing with the past. Some authors write as if they were keeping a diary, and they are the introverts (Orwell, Burgess, Lessing, Gray, Ackroyd, Swift, Ishiguro). Others talk, jump, attempt a traditional plot which looks insufficient to a lover of tradition, and those 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 them together is the addiction to incident and the diary technique, which places the plot in the indeterminacy of memory. 4 Since the fiction resulted is a diary, a day to day progress, the novel is inconclusive, commanding all those who enter here to abandon all hope for happy endings. If the diary ever stops, it is only because the author needs a breath of life to continue. We have here the first real open work (opera aperta) in the history of the novel, which covers more than a millennium.- 33 -

I/4. THE POST-TIME OF THE DESPERADO WORK I. REAL TIME 4 Real time, the concrete time of the Desperado work, the interval during which the plot begins and ends
26

(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 is under various threats. It steals from the pockets of the narrative 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 find themselves floating up in the air, in a present that devours 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. Ackroyds heroes 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 forget that 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 much by 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 makes the 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 can never be summarized. We can state briefly the plots devised by Dickens, Austen, Galsworthy, even Conrad at times, but we will find it impossible to utter a few sentences about what is really going on in the Desperado present. Ishiguros butler in The Remains of the Day has a meager ratio of here and now, which he does not know how to use and his powerlessness makes him cry. Alasdair Grays Lanark ends his race
27

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 his history class, in order to unveil the mystery of his whole life, to reveal his origins and his very substance. This present of the page which we can hardly put into words, as a matter of fact springs from what is now past (a past that can by no means be summed up with a critical eye, but which is fertile soil for stories, author and heroes), while the future is inconclusive, open and never closed. The Desperado present is a ghost present. If we make up our minds to find this present, all the same, we find a time peopled by confused heroes, with confusing stories. The doctor in Flauberts Parrot, whom Julian Barnes makes investigate Flaubert with almost detective greed, is in fact an unhappy man, who has helplessly witnessed his wifes death, his wife having been the only woman he loved, while he was by no means the only man in her life, which the doctor very well knows. When interviewed, authors such as Graham Swift, David Lodge, Alasdair Gray perform a subtle gymnastics of avoiding a clear-cut statement. In their subconscious, if not otherwise, these writers need the freedom to keep changing. Their own writing present, the same as their heroes, is chameleonic. They answer enigmatically that life is enigmatic, that there are answers nowhere, and therefore an author cannot afford to state. The Desperado author guesses, fumbles within a present which he keeps rejecting, because his narrative strength lies in the past. Galsworthys heroes were very busy knitting their present, they were constantly besieged by incidents. They had a past, but this past kept changing according to what each new day might bring. Even Virginia Woolf, despite her - 37
28

intense need to change the novel (adapt it to her sensibility), does not neglect the present, no matter how often she rushes into the past. She creates a present past. Half a century later, Desperado authors like 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 in awareness. They are not so much interested in the subconscious teeming with monsters. The Desperado author writes logically, provides clear explanations, avoids the confusion of the unuttered. If there is confusion in his text, it is caused by the narrative manner, which is contorted, indirect and slow to find its words. The painter in An Artist of the Floating World, by Ishiguro, thinks clear thoughts and is introduced in clear sentences. Confusion stems from the order in which 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 him all along, why the book actually accuses him. A while ago, in the times of Japanese imperialist dreams, he sent to prison a left-wing fellow-painter. Japan is seen in the novel as submitted to the Americans, the former left-wing convict is now in what used to be Kurodas shoes, when the famous painter was aspiring to a Japanese empire. The wheel has turned and Kuroda, in his small present circle of reality in the novel, looks around in astonishment, out of place, apparently just a harmless little old man now. Not so when he was young and famous, though. The narrator draws the line under all times and gives a moral verdict. Ishiguros verdict is actually an intransigent one: however free the reader thinks he is to interpret and rearrange present or past,
29

in the end the author will not allow any other judgment but 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 the past, is dominated by a clarity which imposes itself upon rememoration and (most often indirect) explanation. The clarity of the Desperado style must by no means be overlooked. The narrative pattern may be exasperating, but the sentences that lead us to it are crystal clear. The Desperado novel, the Desperado present is apparently accessible. In essence, it is a very hard nut to crack for the readers memory and ability to put pieces together. This reader is exhausted at the end of a - 38 book, fed up quite often, discouraged at the lack of prospects: 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 generation it 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. The book becomes a maze of past presents. This is Peter Ackroyds forte. Hawksmoor, English Music, Chatterton are all landslides of the present into something else. The narrative opens with something we are tempted to take for the present of the book, then it dives unexpectedly into previous centuries, the perfume of the long gone by. The author watches us sink, and this trance of the man whose feet no longer tread the solid ground is Ackroyds aim in point of narrative craft. Less aggressive, yet essentially to the same purpose, Alan Brownjohn mixes presents in The Long Shadows and makes us wonder: is this a book within a book, are
30

these paper heroes or living beings? The border between present and past, however obnubilated, was there for the stream of consciousness. James, Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Conrad, and even more so Dickens and Galsworthy, know exactly when they slip into the past and all this time the present of the work is allowed to go ahead, slowly, all dressed in memories. To put it plainly, something happens in the present, no matter what. Desperadoes choose two directions: either something does happen, but, with endless irony, the story 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 write with a future in view, while Desperadoes refuse to think of the future, unless they project it as a dystopia. The Desperado future withers precisely because the real present is so faint. The Desperado present is, in conclusion, just a question mark. 4 - 39 -

I/6. THE FUTURE AS A MEMORY, IN DESPERADO LITERATURE 4 I. The Desperado Hero The return of the hero The stream of consciousness hero was more an emotional and thoughtful halo than a real life, although life 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.
31

Eliot, The Waste Land), an elaborately remembered past, a minimal present and a disturbing apprehension for the future. Virginia Woolf preached the abolition of love interest and chronological causality, but stuck fiercely to them, all the more so as she was unable to build a classical plot and perceived her inability. I suspect that she preached what she preached only to justify her lyrical narratives, which limped but constantly fantasized about walking. That must also be the reason why, after reading them, we remember her novels as chronological stories that would not exist if we deny them love interest. To put it in a nutshell, after all, Virginia Woolf did stick to love interest and chronological causality. - 61 - LiterNet Publishing House, 2006 After Joyces heroes, to whom everything happened before happening, before the actual utterance, in the area of preverbalization, the unutterable became the realm of fiction. Leopold Bloom exposes shame shamelessly (Ulysses). Lord Jim (Conrad) reveals the unspeakable horror which is mentioned even more insistently in Heart of Darkness. Lawrences heroes grapple with a private hell of inexplicable impulse. James hopes for justice and fairness in a crooked world whose only hope is the mind of his heroes, which switches the plot of the novel from the incident to verbalization (meaning statement and understatement) of the act. Speculation and decoding are stream of consciousness practices. Between lines, between words, there lies a meaning that has to be followed closely and unmasked. Modernism melted the hero into the effort of expressing him. The living being evaporated into words, and the word was the absolute beginning of the world, it was light and it was life. It was both God and His creation.
32

The Desperado age reclaims the right of the hero to be flesh and blood. The word is still important because it must be remembered, because, if forgotten, it can become an obstacle to the understanding of the whole book. The hero leads a real life and the Desperado author prides himself on having brought the novel back to reality. What he does not admit is that the life of the hero reaches us through his memory, via his mind. An Artist of the Floating World (Ishiguro) has a palpable story, on the one hand: we learn that the hero was a painter who supported the imperialist campaign, thus indirectly bringing the atomic bomb onto Japan, and in the process he sent to jail another fellow painter who saw things differently. But the truth comes to us filtered by the artists mind, and we take a while to wind our souls away from him and give the book the chance of a second, detached reading. The second time round, the charm no longer blinds us and we see the ugly reality for what it is, and we notice every little detail, every word apparently uttered at random, actually very significant in the construction of the novel (such as suicide, which suggests the artists unavowed sense of guilt at having brought the bomb and ensuing defeat and poverty onto his country). The Desperado hero has learnt 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. David Lodge, 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 in love, career, family, society at large. There is no
33

happiness. The past devours the future. The mind (the past) 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) intellectual projection of the present into a future which is a multiplied 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 is free, when men are different from one another and do not 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 of diaries. Doris Lessing writes The Golden Notebook relying heavily upon the idea of life as a daily business that does not exist until it is put down to paper. Desperado writing is actually the recording of the daily ordeal. 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 always there. He places a diary at the core of his Collector, but that diary is just a dead memory of youth, an impossible 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
34

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

II/15. KAZUO ISHIGURO (1954) Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan, and came to England at the age of five. His books are the perfect image of displacement. Either he pictures Japanese heroes displaced (sent to England or to an unfamiliar time), as it happens in A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, or he finds a way of displacing English heroes (The Remains of the Day). He also creates an ideal environment for displacement, actually building a dystopia (The Unconsoled). Displaced heroes are silent, not voicing their unhappiness, which is however there. The mother in A Pale View of Hills remembers in such a way that her whole memory becomes a question mark. She silently wonders whether her older daughter committed suicide because she was brought from Japan to England. She keeps thinking of her Japanese friend who wanted to emigrate, yet possibly never managed to. America is the third Desperado theme which Ishiguro brings up. The new owner of Darlington Hall is American, and his friends look at his new possession as at a bargain with local colour, the real thing. Americans are also present in defeated Japan, and described with resentment. When civilization collapses, the Desperadoes see Americans invade, with next to no education, but with obvious 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
35

major Desperado themes, displacement, dystopia and America, Ishiguro is highly representative for the turn of the millennium. 4 Dissimulated emotion is Ishiguros main feature in everything he has written so far. His characters may seem empty, they are incredibly shy, reluctant to verbalize. To hunt and shoot feelings is the main pastime of Ishiguros reader. Annoyed because he cannot share what he is never told exists, this reader goes back to the text again and - 170 - LiterNet Publishing House again, looking for the least word which could betray sensibility. 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 surrounds every gesture. Each incident is perfect, a haiku in movement. Climbing each step of the soul, while seeming to tread a flat road, the plot reaches emotional intensity 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 full name, it is not important, since very few use it. Which proves that the novel is a dissimulated monologue of the one main hero, surrounded by secondary characters, all carefully outlined, yet totally unimportant for their soul. The only character with a soul is the main one, who takes his time to unveil some of his experiences. Ishiguro is a 4
36

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 figures hieratic, prone to immobility. Inner movement cannot be hidden, but Ishiguro would rather the reader discovered that on his own. He will not give in to outspoken lyricism, although the substance of all his writings is unbelievably tender. Each main hero loves and is hurt, every incident must be viewed carefully. Ishiguro wants to look like a gentle author, sparing his characters the pain of unwanted revelation. Actually, he leaves all the signs behind, for the reader to find out suffering. 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 a past 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 is the readers task to guess the blood boiling. Ishiguro is not less intense than other writers; he is merely more cautious with showing intensity. Psychology is minutely dissected, although there are no traces of surgery in Ishiguros novels. It seems he has 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 character alone, even though the narrative may be written in the third person. If compared to the stream of consciousness, Ishiguros fiction is another direction altogether. The Desperado manner can best be demonstrated in the works of this quiet, self-contained author, whose work rages with unuttered passion. He
37

analyzes minds by carefully selecting incidents, memories that lead to a certain conclusion. The reader gets to judge the order of the arguments more than the emotional quality of each separate incident. We read a mind, discover the way it works, where it fails, and this failure of the mind is the real cause of the tragedy in the book. All characters are peculiar intellects. They are also very stubborn, and stick to their direction. No character in Ishiguro changes, they are all static and revealed in the order the author carefully plans. If we manage to decode the order of thoughts, we are faced with 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. Although after a second, third reading it becomes fairly obvious that the painter is an ex-fascist, who dreamt of imperial Japan and sent to jail a left-wing colleague, Ishiguro never says a word against him. The book is not very much in love with this tyrannical, resentful old painter, dreaming of his youthful mistakes, which to him are still the right way. Stubbornness is a general feature of all these characters, who never change, not within the space of Ishiguros mind. They may decline from favour, but their dignity is untouched, they never repent or amend. Ishiguros main heroes are never likable persons. We learn to - 172 LiterNe put up with them. Our irritation grows as we read one more incident, as we discover that the trajectory of their 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 not to be argued with. He has a firmness of the soul, which
38

he uses to teach us to like unlikable beings, to overcome our disapproval. Like the wooden shoes that imposed a certain shape on the Japanese girls feet of old, his novels silence our sensibility into conforming to his 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 a might-have-been day, the Japanese painter is a might-have-been success, the pianist is a might-havebeen husband and son. All Desperadoes dislike happiness as a way out of the novel, as a direction to be followed by the reader. They resort to this mighthave-been happiness, much more effective than a clear recording of a happy-end on the last page. If we think of it, the Desperado novel has no end at all. It merely stops, 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 James American, 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 in the least. He has a complex of superiority. He advises and judges Stevens by his own standards. He imposes his outlook, is totally blind to Europe. Like all Desperadoes, Ishiguro also notices that America has come of age. - 173 - LiterNet Publishing Ishiguros characters, whether a butler, a painter, a Japanese mother or a pianist, are all in a mild, yet
39

irrevocable state of shock. This confusion accounts for their inability to lead us to the root of the evil, their inability 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 is the trick of all Ishiguros novels. The reader is caught between the characters determination to be right and his 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 it sets the novelist going. The butler has to learn the art of 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 by his 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, because of the tours on which, we have reason to believe, he does not even have a chance to play. The heroes cling to whatever it was they were doing when the change came upon them and the reader has no choice but disapprove. 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 are to find the logical way out of the maze of incidents, the order 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
40

master when some villagers denounce him as an exfascist, declares he needs a good housekeeper when he goes in search of his real love, Miss Kenton. The painter does not want the reader to realize that he actually threw another painter in jail because the latter was - 174 LiterNet left-wing, so he postpones remembering the exact circumstances, until it becomes indispensable for the plot to go on. The pianists memory is a set of holes, which are filled in turn, one by one, but he opposes his being understood, refuses to voice connections, keeps incidents as separate as he can. These heroes refuse to talk 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 waits somewhere, behind his hero, and shows us his smile from 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. His novels are structured on irony. He deliberately mocks at 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 an outlet in debunking loves of all kind. Did Virginia Woolf even imagine love could be so harshly treated by a writer, when she wrote her Modern Fiction, against love-interest? Ishiguro contemplates the remains of Stevens wasted love and, while tears run down the butlers cheeks, the author smiles at the perfect pattern of 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 main thing is he has lost it. Since all Ishiguros main heroes
41

are losers, there is always something to smile at. This Desperado 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 the Desperado age. 4 Ishiguro, like many other British Desperadoes, decides upon a set of rules for Englishness. His butler is the 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 describe the 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 (The Remains of the Day, An Artist of the Floating World, Out of the Shelter, Martha Quest, Lanark, Staring at the Sun, Waterland, Hawksmoor, Shuttlecock, Out of This World, Ever After). Ishiguro writes about Japan immediately 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. Those who do not use the war to that purpose, write dystopias. In one way or another, Desperadoes manage to find the uncomfortable. It often happens to Desperadoes to write about artists: writers (Swift, Lessing, Barnes, Lodge, Bradbury, Amis, Ackroyd), painters (Gray, Ackroyd, Ishiguro, Fowles), actors (Swift). They also write about politicians, and politics is very important to the
42

Desperado character (see especially Lessing, Ishiguro, Swift). Whatever is connected to the mind, less to the heart, appeals to them, especially if it means examining a creative mind in progress. Ishiguro also likes to see things from above, to offer a generalized image of society, human condition, art. There is a lot of subtlety in the way Desperadoes deal with these very traditional, almost exhausted themes; Desperadoes hate being in a crowd, so they look for a peculiar approach to issues they will not give up. Ishiguro fakes humbleness. His painter is a past glory, and his politician, 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. Claiming confusion, Ishiguro debunks politics and art, reducing them to human, everyday size. 4 As Desperado novels roll the film backwards, they are slow progresses. Ishiguro uses memory in his first three novels, and invariably the plot goes from end to start, making use of the least detail, and revealing much later the importance of each. The plot may be delivered in fragments, though, but the pain is continuous. The tragic mood of Desperado novels makes the incidents remembered at random cohere in a brotherhood of the weak. These - 176 - LiterNet Publishing House, 2006 characters for whom life goes backwards are totally helpless. They burst into our minds, make us unbearably curious (suspense is the major Desperado device), explain fitfully, and withdraw whenever a page ends, 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
43

Desperado depression. The Desperado novel is resigned. The Unconsoled is Ishiguros dystopia. It could be anyone, from the writer himself, to the common passerby. It is an amnesiac, nightmarish world, which Ishiguro probes with intent sense of observation. Whether epic, lyrical, comic, dramatic, tragic, grim, nostalgic, all Desperadoes are in search of a refuge, they all need an escape. More often than not, whatever the literary genre (which is usually a medley), they end up in an uncomfortable 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 a literary world of uncertainties. A world where the fate of the book needs to be fortified again and again. 177

44