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by Wayne Pounds
Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo
I.
By the time the Japanese-British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro was thirty-five years old, he had written three prize-winning novels: A Pale View of Hills (1982) won the Winifred Holby (now the Ondaatje) Prize; An Artist of the Floating World (1986) won the Whitbread; and The Remains of the Day (1989), the Booker. Ishiguro’s ascent may not be comparable to the rise of Taira Kiyomori in twelfth-century Japan; it was sudden enough, however, to explain the well-known accolade hailing him as “a paradigm of the polycultural order” (Iyer 54). One may not need The Tale of the Heike to wonder whether his subsequent novels maintain the high interest created by the first three; but this is not to suggest a “fall,” for in the current climate of literary production, the topos of a sudden rise and fall is defunct. One solid success provides a template for subsequent work, and a reputation can be maintained by book-promotion tours and interviews — activities which, according to the Ishiguro himself, have taken an inordinate amount of his time in the last twenty years. (In a recent interview with Linda Richards, he mentions “three or four interviews a week”!)
Ishiguro’s three novels of the eighties were and remain noteworthy for the way they represent a characteristic of much postmodernism writing which has been called “transnationalization” (Franco 507), a reworking of relations between Europe and North America on the one hand and Africa, Asia, and Latin America on the other. In the context of these national terms, however, even more significant are the novels' ideological operations which obscure the social context to which the work responds. In this case, the situation is that fundamental configuration of power in the modern world just referred to for which the now outmoded terms First and Third World were always misleading ciphers better replaced by their obscured if not completely eclipsed original terms, Colonialist and Colonized.
Predictably enough, however, neither Western nor Japanese reviews of Ishiguro's novels touched on the colonialist subtext; instead, on both sides the reception of Ishiguro's work was colored by the lenses of cultural projection, so that it appeared as exotic, alien, "Other." This invocation of the exotic was not surprising, since market forces were already pursuing colonial narratives to satisfy a jaded readership’s craving for novelty (O’Brien 797), and Ishiguro gave the exotic a new kink, in that he is a British novelist born in Japan of Japanese parents (a geographical and cultural displacement distinct from that of other writers considered in the present volume). In the case of the first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), the exoticism noted was their Japanese subject matter; and, in the case of the third, The Remains of the Day (1989), the intensified exoticism of a Japanese-British author writing not about a Japanese subject (thereby betraying our expectations) but rather a traditionally British social figure, and one that belonged to a vanished age, the butler (Bryson 38ff., and Annan 3ff.).
The Japanese reception of Ishiguro's work involved a comparable appeal to exoticism, a mixture of admiration for one of their own who had passed the highest criterion for mastery of the English language by penetrating the sacred bastion of the English novel. It also involved the need to deny that a novel by a writer in full command of the English language could possibly represent Japan, a need determined by the perennial myth of Japanese uniqueness, which maintains that things Japanese can only be represented by native speakers/writers of Japanese.
Not that Ishiguro ever made any pretense to speak for or about Japan. On the contrary, in interviews of this period he emphasized the non-Japanese traditions he spoke from and stressed his ignorance of Japan:
Of course English critics usually insist on my Japanese background, and so for a long time it has been said that my novels are extremely Japanese. Even with my third novel which is set entirely in England, some critics say that the style is very Japanese. . . . Critics merely cling to the fact that my name is Japanese.
Ishiguro also distanced himself from the subject matter of his first two novels, arguing that as a writer he exercised his privilege to create a world of his own imagination, to which he had attached the name "Japan" without particular concern for verisimilitude.
I wanted to create a world that could be found only within my novel, and whether or not it resembled any world outside, I wanted to be able to recognize it as my own. But because I set my novel in a place called Japan, Western readers seem to have believed that everything that was strange or special in the novel was Japanese. . . . Most Western readers are so ignorant about Japan that if I had written a Kafkaesque novel, they would probably have taken that to be a realistic and faithful depiction of Japan.
Pleasing as is the notion of Ishiguro writing a Castle set in Japan and Western readers taking it as a realistic view of, say, Osaka Castle (and Japanese readers arguing it is "really" a depiction of Buckingham Palace?), surely the author was protesting too much.
Indeed, when Ishiguro goes so far as to claim that the setting of A Pale View of Hills in Japan was an afterthought, the reader doubts. Ishiguro says that his attitude toward setting is technical, "like that of a film director looking for a location," and that when he began this novel, "it was set in England —the 1970s in the west of England. But after a while, although it was the same story, I decided to make the setting Nagasaki" (Aoki 304). While one wants to grant what seems to be at issue here for Ishiguro, the imaginative license to create his own world, surely he is being a little disingenuous. After all, it is not as if he had changed the setting of the novel; it is still set in England. It is the memories of the protagonist, who is Japanese, that are set in Japan — memories which constitute a good half of the novel.
So far the notion of exoticism may serve as an introduction, but not much further, for the question it leads to, "Is Ishiguro a Japanese who writes like a Westerner or a Westerner who writes like a Japanese?" is not only unproductive, but the Japan vs. West terms of its contrast occlude the real conflict, in which Japan and the West are on the same side of the global struggle for power. We can find our way to a better understanding of Ishiguro's novels by putting the questions of exoticism and polyculturalism on hold and noticing two important concerns all three novels have in common — neither of which is Japan. This step will require a preliminary foray into ideological analysis.
II
Ideological analysis means rewriting particular narrative traits as functions of social, historical, and political context (Jameson, Ideologies I.141) --that is to rewrite the literary text so it can be grasped as the rewriting of a prior historical subtext. Burke says "critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose . . . . they are strategic answers, stylized answers" (Philosophy 3). "Situation" here is very nearly what Jameson means by the subtext--what in a less theory-driven age used to be called “context”. Burke further proposes that we distinguish between "strategies" and "situations" by thinking of poetry "as the adopting of various strategies for the encompassing of situations" (Philosophy 3).
I would like to focus on Ishiguro’s second novel, Artist of the Floating World, which brings to the fore the issues that undergird all three of his novels from the 1980s. Its subtext might be called precisely what the key adjective "floating" denies: the sinking world, the crushing weight of history as it impinges on the atomized present of the year of the novel’s publication (1986), and thus an image of the situation of the artist in Thatcher's England coming to terms with English society at the end of empire. The phrase "floating world" promises escape from this social struggle to a distant and exotic hedonism, but the very act of denying the historical context calls attention to itself and to the situation it denies: the coupling of a capitalist recession on a global scale with the long-term crisis of the British economy, giving rise, on the one hand, to Thatcherism with its rightist race-class agenda dressed in populist rhetoric, and on the other to the fragmentation of the social-democratic left, a discursive situation acutely described by Stuart Hall in his essays of the eighties.
The political subtext of Ishiguro’s novels can be further clarified by noting the anomalous features of the author’s situation. Nothing served more to instill life into the moribund literary scene of Thatcher's England than the presence of voices from the former colonies, a fact which Ishiguro alluded to in both of the early interviews cited earlier (see also O’Brien 797-99). To this group Ishiguro bore a tangled filiation. His Asian background and his evidently libertarian sympathies put him on the side of such writers from the former British colonies as Salman Rushdie and Timothy Mo, but within the larger grouping of Asia, his specific national origins excluded him. (Along with these two writers, the Aoki interview also mentions V. S. Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Anita Desai, and Ruth Jabala. What these diverse writers share, of course, in addition to origins outside England, is not a political agenda but a commitment to politics.) For the fact that separated Ishiguro from other Asian-British writers was not merely, as he argued, that Japan was never a former colony of England. The crucial fact was that Japan itself was one of the colonial powers, one whose history of greed and gratuitous destruction lives in infamy among the Asian countries once part of Japan's Greater Asian Prosperity sphere. The ambivalence of Ishiguro's situation is well represented by his symbolically white status in England. Just as by virtue of their capital accumulation the Japanese, unlike other Asians, were allowed to use white-only toilets and drinking fountains in apartheid South Africa, so the Japanese in England, according to Ishiguro, have access to the privileges of the dominant class. Ishiguro uses this fact, as it operates in his personal life, to explain his ability to accept and work within traditional forms of the British novel: “I was brought up in the mainstream of English society, so I’ve never experienced discrimination at any level. None at all” (Aoki 305) — a sense of acceptance that coexists in uneasy equilibrium with the fact that the characteristic uniting the first-person narrators in all six of his novels is that they clearly sense that they are perceived as “odd.”
It is this ambivalence which accounts for what I find most intriguing about Ishiguro’s first three novels, the contrast between the denial of history in his novels, as I am going to argue, and the author’s personal desire, announced in his interviews, to approach nearer those centers of contemporary conflict in which the historical drama is enacted. (If this contrast is less felt in his recent novels, they are just that much the weaker, as I will argue by way of conclusion.) In the 1980s, Ishiguro described himself as a “homeless writer” forced by his homelessness into an international style: “Nobody’s history seemed to be my history. And I think this did push me necessarily into trying to write in an international way. What I started to do was to use history” (Oe 11).
The term “international” here is a code word for political relevancy that illuminates the same nucleus of desire, his sense of being pushed toward international themes by a sense “that England is not an important enough country anymore.” Ishiguro explains:
Writers from Britain and to a certain extent writers from Germany and France — and I myself have had this experience — go to an international writers’ conference and somehow feel inferior, compared to writers who come from places like Africa or Eastern Europe, or Latin America, in the sense that in many of the great intellectual battles between liberty and authoritarian regimes or between communism and capitalism or between the Third World and the Industrialized World, the front line somehow seems to be in these countries, and there seems to be a more clearly defined role for writers like Kundera or some of the African writers. Writers from all the Eastern European countries always seem to have some sort of clear political role to play. (Oe 12-13)
The exploration of historical themes in Ishiguro’s work, the “international style,” is a compensatory response to the author’s felt lack of “the natural authority of writers who are living in Czechoslovakia or East Germany or Africa or India or Israel or the Arab countries,” and an attempt to avoid the marginality which he believes characterizes writers in England and Scandinavia (Oe 13).
Given Ishiguro’s preoccupation with the social role of the artist, it seems legitimate to examine how this thread is taken up and woven into the text of the novels, and in so doing we may expect to unravel the colonialist subtext.
III
To return now to thee two common features the novels share. The first is that the protagonists of all three novels are characters who late in life are forced by circumstances into a painful self-assessment. In A Pale View of Hills, the suicide of one daughter and the belated visit of the second pushes Etsuko to reassess her life in Japan and her reasons for abandoning Japan for England. In An Artist of the Floating World the failure of a daughter’s omiai (arranged marriage) causes the artist Ono to publicly apologize for his role as a wartime propagandist. And the failure of love in The Remains of the Day forces the butler Stevens to reassess the dignity of his calling and the meaning of his loyalty to a past master who was a Nazi collaborator.
“Self-assessment” is Ishiguro’s word for these characters’ painful introspection, and his curious confession here throws further light on what is transpiring.
I don’t know whether my own world view has anything in common with these characters’ state of
resignation. But I think you could say that I write driven by the shadow of a certain fear — the fear that when I reach their age I may find myself in the same condition. If I feel a certain sympathy for these characters, that’s the reason. You might even say that I write these books as a warning to myself. That is, I have a lot of pride in what I’m doing right now and a lot of confidence in my value judgments, but when I reach a later stage in my life, the things which seem so clear to me now may present a completely different appearance. When that happens, I wonder what I’ll do. That’s why I ask myself. (Aoki 309)
What sort of sense, the reader must wonder, does it make for an author of Ishiguro’s youth — he was thirty-three at the time of this interview — and in the first flush of success to be preoccupied with a self-doubt that may claim him in his old age? With all due respect to artistic prescience, I find it hard to believe that this kind of preoccupation would seize anyone who had not seen the problem encountered by a person or persons close to him.
That the biographical suggestion is not inapt becomes clear when we note that the second thing all three novels share is the subject of the characters’ painful self-assessment: the second world war. In all three novels circumstances force a character toward a painful self-assessment of his responsibility for supporting the Axis powers. From this perspective the novels’ relationship to Japan takes on a new significance, for in A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, the painful reassessment involves a Japanese artist or intellectual who collaborates with the militarist faction which ruled Japanese politics in the Dark Valley (as it is called by Japanese historians) from 1931 to 1945. The Remains of the Day, set entirely in England, takes up this theme in terms of the party of pro-German aristocrats within England who during the 1930s accepted the Nazis as the price of an England-German rapprochement. The narration, again first person, is supplied by the butler Stevens, whose attitude toward such concepts as authority and loyalty repeats that of Ono in Artist, as does the personal circumstance of losing a family member in the colonial sector of the war.
The addition of this second common element, which may be abbreviated as war guilt, reveals for the first time the penultimate relevance of the author’s national origin, for no country has been more haunted by the repressed specter of war guilt than Japan (Germany too has been haunted but there the specter has been clamorous and unrepressed, as Ian Buruma shows in his fine study), and suggests the two common terms might merge into a single obsession, the notion of a painful reassessment of responsibility for the war. From a purely psychological perspective, Ishiguro’s novels might then seem to invite comparison with Hawthorne’s New England stories, which taken together constitute an epic of North Americans’ inherited guilt over genocide and social repression. But the psychological dimension, which is also the dimension that the novels’ first-person narration emphasizes, must be subsumed in the larger historical perspective provided by the novels’ colonialist subtext. This perspective will at last allow us to see the significance of the obsession with World War II, for the second world war, like the first, of which it was the continuation, was a war of colonialism, fought by the colonialist powers to determine control of the wealth of the colonized world. But to gain this perspective we must first see how the anti-authoritarian argument of the novels is at odds with itself.
IV
The concern with war guilt is least central in the first novel, where it is represented by Etsuko’s father-in-law Ogata, a school teacher and active propagandist during the war years, and unrepentant in the present. In terms of psychology, we could say that in the first novel the guilt ridden protagonist of the later two is split into two characters, the father-in-law, active in the war years, and Etsuko, active in the present. Ogata is a preliminary study of Ono, the artist of the second novel, and shares the latter’s guilt in having reported a colleague (five colleagues in Ogata’s case) to the police. A difficulty arises here, however, for no matter how unattractive Ogata is as a character, the novel lacks an adequate answer to his militarist arguments. Sounding rather like the butler Stevens in Remains, Ogata explains the nationalist point of view in terms of “discipline,” “loyalty,” and “a sense of duty” (PV 65), and his defense, over the novel as a whole, runs to several pages. The only rebuttal, though a telling one, occupies one small paragraph, and is spoken by a very minor character, Shigeo, late in the novel, who tells Ogata, “I don’t doubt you were sincere and hard working . . . .But it just so happens that your energies were spent in a misguided direction, an evil direction” (PV 147). Though the rebuttal may seem telling to readers who are predisposed to accept it, Shigeo’s scant reply can’t cancel the effect of Ogata’s several pages of exposition. The novel’s ambivalence at the level of public history — the question of state authoritarianism — is repeated at the level of private history in Etsuko’s inability to distinguish fantasies of guilt from her actual responsibility for her daughter’s suicide.
With the second novel, which concerns Ono’'s role as a propagandist during the war, the question of war guilt takes center stage. An Artist of the Floating World focuses on the painter’s relationship to the military powers which he served with his painting. Like all of Ishiguro’s novels, it is narrated in the first person — in this instance by the artist Ono — but in such a way that the reader rapidly comes to doubt Ono’s reliability; the convention of unreliable narration is here handled with marked finesse and understatement. The narrator’s habit of revealing more than he intends plus the quoted dialogue, which provides a point of view outside the narrator’s consciousness, allow the reader to see that the narrator’s self-justification rests on self-deception. The decisive episode in swaying the reader’s judgment comes when we learn that Ono, as an adviser to “the Committee of Unpatriotic Activities,” turned in his protégé Kuroda to the police (AF 182-84), resulting in the latter’s beating and incarceration.
But as the title announces, the novel is a portrait of the artist, and it thematizes the question of aesthetics, here a dialogue between, on the one hand, aestheticism (art-for-art’s-sake), which asserts the divorce between art and politics, and, on the other, a socially engaged aesthetic which asserts their marriage. After a long apprenticeship in aestheticism under the master Moriyama, Ono comes under the influence of Matsuda, an ardent militarist (AF 173-74) who persuades him to change his allegiance and put his brush at the service of Japan’s aggressive colonial policy. In the postwar present of the novel, Ono remains conveniently blind to the consequences of his acts, unable even to see any connection between his activities and his son’s death in China. Ono’s self-justification is that whatever may be said against the colonialist policy which pushed Japan into the Chinese and Pacific Wars, his and his colleagues’ motives were “sincere,” and that it is better to be committed to a wrong cause than to have no commitment at all. “Whatever we did, we did at the time in the best of faith” (AF 202).
Given the convention of the unreliable narrator, and the Western reader’s presumable condemnation of Japanese aggression, we are readily persuaded to condemn Ono, and in condemning him, by the usual ad hominem association, to condemn his argument. One of the novel’s strategic effects, at least for this reading of the novel, is to reinforce the aestheticist position. Burkean “identification” operates here to position the reader within the dominant ideology of the English-speaking industrial powers — an ideology which says, depending on whether the speaker is a philistine or a cultural caretaker, that art has nothing to do with life, or that it comprises an autonomous world of purely aesthetic qualities about which the only judgments that can legitimately be made are aesthetic.
The difficulty of this anti-imperialist reading of the novel is that it can only be sustained by ignoring the ways the text undercuts it. For the present argument, three instances may be adduced. 1) Ono's daughters insist that he overestimates his influence and importance; therefore his apology can be understood as the excesses of a conscience rendered overly sensitive, even slightly morbid, by the criticisms of postwar reconstruction. But if Ono is not responsible for the failure of Noriko’s first omiai, why should we believe he’s responsible for what happened to his protégé Kuroda? 2) The novel’s implied aesthetic argument, as I have formulated it so far, says committed art is dangerous because it is likely to be fascist art, committed to a wrong cause. But if, as the novel shows, the world of politics is also a floating world, there’s ultimately no intrinsic difference between the two kinds of art. There being no difference, it does not matter what kind of art Ono pursued. (This argument, however, cuts both ways and has the curious effect of rescuing the notion of a socially committed art, reflecting an ambivalence at the heart of the aesthetic question.) 3. The ending of the novel, in which Ono takes up his brush again but now to paint flowers, affirms the uncritical view (propagated by major governmental and social institutions down to the present) that “oriental calm” rather than violence is the essence of “Japaneseness” and suggests that Ono’s apology represents a genuine coming to terms with the past, freeing the artist to paint again. The reader is thus pressured to accept the tenor of the apology and that of Ono and Matsuda’s conversation at the end: they were virtuous in the sincerity of their beliefs and at fault only in lacking “a broad enough view” (AF 199). What it comes down to in the present, the novel would have us believe, is merely that the old men’s ideas are “out of date”; it’s time for them to step aside and make way for the corporate juggernaut.
Since the title ties off the bundle of issues by reasserting the aestheticist position, the reader must ask, Who in this novel is the artist of “the floating world” (the world of nocturnal pleasure resorts)? It is not the character who directly stands for the aesthetic position and enunciates its arguments, the teacher Moriyama, for by any measure of fictional value he is too unimportant. Who can the artist of the title be but Ono, the artist who is the main character and the narrator? The title then implies that the socially committed artist, the position Ono has represented, is in some important way equivalent to the aesthete, the artist of the pleasure haunts; which is to say that the life of society, the tale of human suffering, if seen from a sufficiently godlike or Buddha-like perspective, is no less maya than the world of nocturnal pleasure-seeking. Thus the artist of the title appears now as a self-critical image of Ishiguro himself, as though he discerns within himself the futility of the artist’s desire to remove himself from history.
Here we begin to understand why three of the four sections of the novel begin with Ono standing musing on the Bridge of Hesitation which leads to the Migi-Hidari, a neighborhood pub which Ono was instrumental in creating and where he and his protégés hung out. The pub, the locus of a celebration of “the new spirit of Japan” (AF 63-64) in the 1930s, hangs on in the bombed-out waste land of the present as a reminder of the past. Its significance is announced in its name, literally “right-left,” intended to represent the marching boots which were part of the “new spirit.” For the reader attuned to the political overtones of the novel, however, the name suggests rather the political choices which the novel, unlike its protagonist, evades. For while Ono chooses the rightist politics to which he devotes his art over the liberalism which art-for-arts-sake has come to denote in the present — the liberalism which, having won the war, is represented by the daughters’ argument that art does not matter (AF 192-93) — the novel itself never opens up the possibility of a left or socialist alternative, which would suggest not only a totally different aesthetics but would open the hermetic space of the novel to the winds of history. Indeed the novel’s alignment of socially engaged art with rightist politics is the dominant sign of the novel’s repression of history. This seal, however, begins to break in the third novel.
The first thing to notice about The Remains of the Day is that only with difficulty can it be made to fit the paradigm I have constructed, for it would require a fatuous reader indeed not to see that the butler Stevens’ arguments for loyalty to an authoritarian establishment, an argument he couches in terms of “dignity”, “duty”, and a desire to serve the centers of power, are contradicted by the grotesque emotional poverty of his personal life, the numbed existence of a man unable to respond to love or loss. Stevens’ adherence to the mask of dignity, a dehumanized en-soi, demonstrates a classical Sartrean mauvaise foi that recalls the merciless portrait in Being and Nothingness of the waiter who pretends to be a “waiter,” for the dignity Stevens argues for is the elitist dignity of the “gentleman” which consists of gesture and dress (never taking off his clothes in public) rather than the democratic dignity of act and character. But Stevens’ adherence to the mask of a self-protective ideal also recalls the character of Ono in Artist of the Floating World, and now may be the place to say something about the ethical argument which runs through these novels and supplies one of the major ideological rewritings of the text.
Though the key ethical term for Ono is “sincerity” and for Stevens “dignity,” the two terms perform the same functions for the two characters so that in fact they amount to synonyms. Dignity in The Remains of the Day is defined in terms of consistency to the mask of the self’s identity, which we may take as a postmodern definition of “sincerity” (and one which at least has the virtue of making sense of the otherwise incomprehensible injunction ubiquitous in the modern West to “be sincere”). There are two fundamental approaches to the ethical in literature, depending on whether, to employ Ricoeur’s terms, we are operating from a positive or a negative hermeneutic. The former might take up the term from its rise in the late eighteenth century as part of that enlargement of the self that we associate with Romanticism. The latter would take up Marx’s argument that ethical thought is a phosphorescence of economic relationships; or Nietzsche’s that it originates in ressentiment, and projects as permanent features of human “experience,” and thus as a kind of ”wisdom” about personal life and impersonal relations, what are in reality the historical and institutional specifics of a determinate type of group solidarity or class cohesion” (Jameson, Political 59). In the present case, this would mean showing how the necessities of an authoritarian society based on domination and submission are rewritten in terms of a morality of obedience. Besides these two alternative interpretations of the ethical, a third has recently been suggested by John Rajchman, who argues that, given the prison-like system of control by which modern society constructs the self, a new kind of ethical problem emerges, namely, “the issue of what we might do to ‘resist' it’” (167-68). Foucault, the central figure in this argument, offers a solution here that is surprisingly close to Sartre’s, for the former’s view of freedom as resistance to socially constructed self-constituting practices recalls the view of freedom-as-resistance that underlies the latter’s philosophy and in particular his view of mauvaise foi as a denial of the self’s freedom.
But to return to the difficulty of fitting The Remains of the Day to the pattern of the first two novels, what is most striking to the reader who comes to this novel from a reading of the first two is that here at last a constricted dialogic space opens in the conversations between Stevens and the English citizens he meets on his automobile journey — the journey around which the novel is structured. The view which emerges to counter Stevens’ submission to authority is captured in one character’s comment, “there’s no dignity to be had in being a slave” (RD 186). The result is a dialogue on the subject of dignity, contrasting aristocratic and democratic premises and opening up, in effect, if not a utopian dimension, a space outside the iron cage of authoritarianism which dominates the first two novels.
One looks for factors by which to account for this liberating development. One may be Ishiguro’s setting a novel at last in the country he inhabits (a trend which continues in his novels after 1989), thus minimizing that exoticism which in the earlier novels served as an escape from history. Another may be his enlarging the field of characters beyond the family so that at last dialogue becomes a possibility — ot that dialogue is necessarily impossible within the family but the family of the first two novels was an authoritarian structure that stifled conversation and thought alike. A third may be his own growing sense of dissatisfaction that his Japanese subject matter misrepresented himself and his subject (it is absent from his last three books). For a social reading that limits itself to the particular historical moment in which the novel was written, the most significant development is the disarray of the Thatcher administration brought about by popular opposition to the poll tax, presaging the opening of democratic possibilities within the stifling grid of Thatcherite statism.
Yet even this progressive development within the novel is limited by the first-person form of narration. All three novels employ the convention of unreliable narration, and in all three the narrator is the protagonist, giving the works something of the character-centered mystery of a confession. Historically, unreliable narration arises at the end of eighteenth century as one of a number of symptoms of exacerbated subjectivity, reflecting the writer’s increased alienation as the older literary institution of patronage disappears and the author-audience relationship shrivels to the cash nexus. It is as if fiction itself had to doubt the autonomy of the individual ego at the very moment the latter was enshrined in the bourgeois revolutions’ texts and social formations. The work of Poe with his psychotic narrators may be taken as paradigmatic of this development in North America.
While a purely taxonomic operation might here be content to see Ishiguro’s devotion to an anachronistic convention as part of that ahistorical scavenging of the past which is characteristic of postmodernism, a reading of the text as symbolic action requires an interrogation in terms of function. How does the narrative form advance the ideological rewriting of the subtext identified in other features of the text? First-person narration by the protagonist provides a mask for the author comparable to the masks the characters themselves wear, for the limited point of view — a set of blinders on the horse that draws the narrative cart — has the tactical advantage of relieving the author of the responsibility of knowing what goes on around him. The form of narration, through its tendency to dramatize the psychology of the speaker, also helps seal off the novels from the historical subtext, rewriting the social text as psychology and shrinking the social field to the psychology of the narrator. Like the methodology of Anglo-American empiricism, it is characterized by “a turning away of the eyes, a preference for segments and isolated objects, as a means to avoid observation of those larger wholes and totalities which if they had to be seen would force the mind in the long run into uncomfortable social and political conclusions” (Jameson, Prison House 24).
I would not, however, like to end with this hermeneutic of suspicion; rather, I would like to close by returning to the desire Ishiguro ascribes to himself in the interviews and on that basis suggest the possibility that the sequence of his three novels may mark the progress of the writer’s attempt to escape the frustrations of historical marginality and exclusion from “the front lines” (Oe 12-13) of history. From this new perspective, the first novel is a preliminary sketch of the problem of the artist/intellectual’s social role; the second is, as its title proclaims, the completed portrait; and the third begins to imagine the future, the attenuated time of “the remains of the day” which, as Stevens is told by one of the folk he discovers in the countryside, may be the best part of the day (RD 240, 244). If the progress discerned here is indeed real, the reader may be allowed to hope that in future novels Ishiguro’s nagging fear of irrelevancy may be altered into a realization that there are not three worlds but one.
V.
The last two sentences in the preceding paragraph represent the qualified optimism I felt at the end of my first attempt twenty years ago to describe the figure in the carpet in Ishiguro’s novels. The intervening years have brought three more novels, spaced an even five years apart — The Unconsoled, 1995; When We Were Orphans, 2000; and Never Let Me Go, 2005—and what these novels tell me is my optimism doesn’t conceal a lack of prescience. There is little sign in them that the novelistic project I describe in the first three novels has advanced much. Of the last three novels, the first seems to abandon it, setting up a narrator lost in a foreign city where he can’t read the signs. The second seems to return to it somewhat in the vein of parody. And the third turns away from it to science-fiction, as though in search of a new template. In all of them the first-person narrator is an orphan, as lost in the polycultural cosmos as in the class system.
The Unconsoled resolutely turns its back on the possibility of historical knowledge, relating the odyssey of a man whose experience of the world is an unrelieved confusion. Ryder, a famous pianist who arrives in a central European city to perform a concert, has no memory of what he has committed himself to perform nor any memory of other commitments that nag at the penumbra of his awareness — which doesn’t make his sense of having obligations any less urgent. If we grant that part of the subtext of any gifted writer’s fiction is his own attempt to write it, Ryder’s forgotten obligations and general befuddlement suggest the disorientation of a writer who has chosen to forget his obligations but not succeeded in forgetting them completely. This is indicated by the novel’s setting in an unnamed city of Central Europe, the territory which Ishiguro in his interviews from the eighties associated not with Kafka (whom commentators on the novel’s style inevitably mention) but with writers on “the front line” (Oe 12-13) of history like Kundera. The first-person narrator of The Unconsoled wouldn’t recognize Ithica if he arrived there, but that doesn’t lessen his need to arrive. And that, surely, is one reason why he cannot be consoled.
When We Were Orphans re-uses the template of the early successes set in the “Dark Valley,” with most of the novel occurring in the Shanghai of the 1930s under attack by the Japanese army, but too often the seriousness of the setting is trivialized by the retro-exoticism of the private-eye, with Sherlock-Holmes magnifying lens in hand and Agatha-Christie drawing rooms underfoot, giving the reader the confused feeling of a parody which has found no object worth parodying — unless it be the author’s own obsession with detecting and his parents’ history. (The English protagonist, Christopher Banks, returns to China to solve the case of his parents’ disappearance, a solution which is to avert a world catastrophe.) Yet it is in this novel that Ishiguro surprises the reader with a powerful scene that feels like outrage, when Banks follows a police lieutenant into a broom closet and climbs up a ladder where he looks out on history: “the warren” of the factory workers not visible from the drawing room, living conditions so crowded, the lieutenant asks Banks, “You do not believe . . . that human beings can live like this?” (234-35).
The third novel, Never Let Me Go, moves away from the original template by taking its genre conventions from science-fiction: the setting is a dystopian Britain in the near future in which human beings are cloned to provide donors for organ transplants. Its nearest kinship with the early novels may be a protagonist who reminisces at length about her childhood. In the subtext of the novelist’s struggle to be a writer, cloning seems a code for the market forces which demand that the writer imitate his early success, filling the demand for the unique “product” which is his own work, with the whole wrapped in the enabling armature of promotion tours and interviews. The concept of cloning has critical force in the light of transnational markets in which writers face a demand to write not just for readers of their native language but for readers of other languages who depend on translations, for the ideal translatable text is one in which the strong colors of culture and language are diluted (“grayed-out,” as the software makers say) in order to ease the labor of translation.
The burden of writing under such a lowered sky is not Ishiguro’s alone, for it must afflict any writer who writes to be translated. In Japan, one thinks of the converse case of the prolific Murakami Haruki, a Japanese born and reared in Japan who under the tutelage of Raymond Carver has anglicized his Japanese style and learned to minimize cultural referents, so that the Tokyo settings of his many novels could often be taken for Seattle. His critical reputation is not high in Japan, but he is an enormous commercial success both at home and abroad.
Ishiguro is refreshingly frank about the graying-out process and its sorrows, and by way of an inconclusive conclusion it seems fit to let him have the last word about the situation of the novelist as it weighs upon him:
So, it’s this kind of more globalized international world that writers write for now. . . . The downside is that a kind of grayness might sweep over literature too. That we’ll all start writing in the same kind of way. I’m aware of this happening to me, too. There are a lot of things I don’t write now. I stop myself writing certain things because I think, for instance, that it wouldn’t work once it’s translated out of English. You can think of a line that’s brilliant in English — with a pun or two, you know — but of course it becomes nonsense once translated into a different language, so I don’t use it. . . . (Richards)
The descending grayness is a prospect bleak enough; yet, we can still hope that the writer may surprise us. Ishiguro is now in his mid-fifties, at the height of his powers. He should be strong enough to reposition himself on the front lines of history if he chooses to do so — unless, that is, he is too exhausted by the Sisyphean round of book-promotion tours and interviews. But he will have to re-capture the full spectrum of the colors of the English language, for it is only that fullness that can satisfactorily embody the social text which is the novelist’s proper concern.
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