Scott makes some good points about Ishiguro's writing, and provides a good introduction to what makes Ishiguro Ishiguro. Worth clicking over to read. General spoiler warning in effect, both for Scott's post, and then, when you come back, for my own, if you're into knowing about that sort of thing.
Back? Good. There's a few points from Scott's post I'd like to respectfully disagree with. Here's the first point. (I'm saving additional discussion for additional posts.) This one's on the nature of missing information (the fact that we tend to know things that Ishiguro's narrators do not, which Scott rightly points out is a technique Ishiguro has sort of mastered):
Ishiguro's narrators tend to be ignorant of certain, fundamental facts about themselves: For instance, in Never Let Me Go the narrator is missing out on the fact that she's a clone, and then later on the role in society that she is destined to play.
Maybe I'm being picky, but I don't think this accurately represents the novel. It's my understanding that the narrator understands quite well who she is and what she's been put there to do. It's true that she does not know this as a young child, at the beginning of the actual story, that this information is attained by her during her time at the English boarding school Halisham. But as the novel is plotted, the present-tense narrator, the one who is telling the story, looking back at and recounting the events of her life, she knows the facts. She has long since learned what we learn gradually as we read her story.
Which I think is important because it's in there, that realm of knowledge, where I believe the story's pathos lies. I think the tension between what the reader knows and what the character knows is of a far more emotional than factual nature than compared with the other Ishiguro novels that I have read. (This is where I'll step back and note that I'm still trying to place The Unconsoled in terms of this dynamic--I mean, damn, does anybody in that book know anything at all?--and my memories of When We Were Orphans are a bit rough and will bear serious revision after having read The Unconsoled again after so long. Not that I've plans to re-read this novel any time soon, or to pretty much re-read Ishiguro's work repeatedly over the course of my natural life, oh no. Maybe he's a writer I'm sort of completely retarded for. Maybe just a little bit. Maybe. Anyway, point is I don't want to seem as if I'm trying to pass myself off as some all-knowing expert. Yet. Give me another couple re-reads.)
What I'm trying to point at here is the fact that if you compare Never Let Me Go with The Remains of the Day (for the most obvious and, to me, right now, in a coffee shop, away from my books, easiest example), that tension in the latter book arises from the fact that we possess factual information that the narrator does not (or refuses to) have (the chick wants him and his boss is a Nazi), whereas in the former book, we the readers know exactly what the narrator knows (that she is a clone, destined to die). The tragic response of the latter novel is in how we react to that information in a vastly different way than the narrator does. Kathy H. is pretty much okay with things, while we're stuck wanting nothing more than to scream at her that she doesn't have to think that way.
It's like--if you don't mind getting deconstructive with me; don't worry, you'll only feel a bit of a pinch here--if you look at the first verbs of the opening sentences of these two books, you've got a mile-high view of the difference between the two narrators. Take Remains of the Day's "Tonight, I find myself here in a guest house in the city of Salisbury." Then look at Never Let Me Go's "My name is Kathy H." Find versus is. Discovery versus assertion. Surprise versus understanding. Transition versus knowledge. Journey (if you will), versus (if you don't mind) arrival.
Yes, that previous paragraph? Hot-ass decon lit-crit sexy. It's okay if you have to pause here, perhaps to fan a quick breeze over your flushed face, before reading on.
Back to the point: It doesn't have to be that way, that way it is, is what we conclude, when we read the novel. But it does, it is this way, is what Kathy H. concludes, is what she knows. We are reacting to the same information in different ways, and I think one real challenge of this novel is that we need to set aside what we know (or think, or believe) and see things the way the narrator does. It's at that point that the nature of our response is challenged, our assumptions (if you post-modernly will) questioned, and it's then that we might find that it is not Kathy H. who comes up psychologically lacking, but us, stuck here in our lives of quiet desperation, going to jobs and looking out at a cultural landscape riddled with meaninglessness and pointlessness. For it is Kathy H., not us, who knows exactly what she is there to do. She knows her purpose in a literal way we never can, or can only hope to construct for ourselves in the way we lead our lives, the people we surround ourselves with, the things we choose to do or believe in, the families we (are allowed to) create, the knowledge never far from out conscious minds that it's all so much construction that can be blown apart at any time. That what we are is in no way how it must be.
For me, though the novel is tragic in that I want Kathy H. to come to a moment of realization, to see that things can be different for her, that she could escape her fate, I am also alternately drawn into her story and the comfort she has in knowing what she does and why she does it. This fantasy of Ishiguro's, it is, I believe, simultaneously pleasing and depressing. That he evokes this reader's envy of a tragic character may be one of his greatest writerly masterstrokes.
(Next up, sometime soonish: on Ishiguro's being "fully formed" as a novelist.)
3 comments:
I can't even quite reconstruct how I got here, to your blog-- but was so delighted to see your discussion of Never Let Me Go, which I'm utterly smitten by. And maybe I should have written about it on my blog-- you ruminate about what's going on and why in ways that I'm usually too lazy to do-- too lazy to even think through.
But I don't agree with this: "we the readers know exactly what the narrator knows (that she is a clone, destined to die)." We only know that, and gradually. We have to assume that the narrator knows much more about her life and world and that there are reasons why she and the others can't escape their fate-- some compelling infrastructure out there that they can't escape. Or perhaps they have been bred with an extra gene for compliance? Anyway, this is one of the things that I loved about the book-- that this machinery remains unexplained, that I as a reader longed to understand it but also didn't want this understanding because it would spoil the terrible dreamlike fatality of the book. And somehow sully the presence of Kathy H, about to go out like a light.
This is, indeed, a bit of "hot-ass decon lit-crit" sexiness.
In describing what makes Ishiguro so compelling, I think you and Scott have articulated a few things that I've been distractedly circling around for a couple of weeks now, regarding hidden knowledge.
However, as you noted in your post, The Unconsoled doesn't fit so neatly into that discussion. And yet, it had a very similar effect on me as Never Let Me Go, left me feeling a deep sense of dissatisfaction and impotence -- and, of course, confusion. My reading of Ishiguro focuses more on how he plays with reality, whether in the sense of Reality, or in the sense of perceived realities. (I suspect it has to do with precisely where these two intercept.) Incomplete/hidden knowledge is central, but primarily as a factor that shapes perceptions of or personal reality.
Ishiguro manages to do amazing things with reality in these two books, don't you think? In The Unconsoled, reality as experienced by the protag is entirely distorted – or is it in fact just like that?! In NLMG there is a similar, though more subtle, sense of an altered, troubling reality. And after we find out what, exactly, is so troubling about Reality, our confusion (and dissatisfaction) is transferred over to the way Kathy H lives and sees the world, her fatalistic acceptance of her place in society -- her personal reality.
Maybe?
Oh, and regarding your response to an earlier comment:
How much of the “reality” of the novel he presents us is actually a psychological framework he's constructing to shore up his own belief in his (potentially not so real) status? I'm thinking of Stephan as being a sort of...psychologically created display of both his own desire to be great, and the public (parental) recognition that he isn't great. Something along those lines. (Certainly not shooting down the idea that he really is all we are led to believe he is--but a lot of my thinking about the novel makes me wonder how much of it is not what it is.)
Yes, Stephan (and Boris as well, don’t you think?) reads like one aspect of Ryder’s psychological landscape, his very heartwrenching and really rather futile search for parental approval (and his child-like belief that the problems his parents deal with are caused by him). I read it more as a need to gain parental approval – how we’re all (emotionally/psychologically) only as successful as our parents think we are. (This is something that’s represented often in our popular culture, don’t you think? A struggling or even rather successful professional, cut to shreds because Mom/Dad isn’t apparently/overwhelmingly approving, viz, “I’ve done all of this for you, I’ve worked so hard for you!” shocked expression on parent’s face, tears welling, “Dear, of course I’m proud of you,” &c.)
Am looking forward to more posts on Ishiguro and The Unconsoled.
Interesting, as you actually put your finger on something that connects Remains... with Orphans (and aren't all the clones in Never orphans?) and again with the Unconsoled. I had always seen some close connection between the Unconsoled and Orphans in his use of the physical geography through which his protagonists move - there is in both novels this sense of being lost and yet making strange leaps from A to B. In the Unconsoled, he travels all night, moving away from the centre of the city into that house (? I think it was a house, on a grand scale) and yet finds himself back where he started, in the theatre.
In other words, excactly the same sense of discovery as you note happening in Remains - a journey without transition, maybe.
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