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grandhotelabyss · 3 years

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Speaking of his comparatively small output, Ishiguro said: “I don’t have any regrets about it. In some ways, I suppose, I’m just not that dedicated to my vocation. I expect it’s because writing wasn’t my first choice of profession. It’s almost something I fell back on because I couldn’t make it as a singer-songwriter. It’s not something I’ve wanted to do every minute of my life. It’s what I was permitted to do. So, you know, I do it when I really want to do it, but otherwise I don’t.”

Giles Harvey, “Kazuo Ishiguro Sees What the Future Is Doing to Us”

(A long New York Times profile to crown the publicity campaign for Klara and the Sun, which I will read and review just as soon as it arrives, though I have a foreboding that it won’t add much to Never Let Me Go.

We here at Grand Hotel Abyss are interested in what we have elsewhere called “esoterica in the literary press”—what in other genres of writing would just be called themes or subtexts but which demand a more menacing appellation in the field of journalism, where writing is supposed to be transparent as glass. The undercurrent in Harvey’s piece is dolce far niente, which you can see if you compare how Harvey characterizes Ishiguro’s writing practice—as inspired laziness—to the way it’s described as an almost spiritualized martial art in the Guardian profile [“a process he compares to a samurai sword fight”].

Why this cryptic defense of the indolent? It accompanies an attempt to reinterpret the politics of Ishiguro’s fiction for the present, even though the first novels belong to the early triumphalist neoliberal moment in their skepticism of all organized politics. Never Let Me Go extends this skepticism to the organizations that have taken the place of politics and therefore breaks through into a true critique of neoliberalism. Never Let Me Go speaks to so many on a nearly forbidden channel because it is, more specifically, a critique of the feminine modes of domination that our era brings to the fore [e.g., as I’ve mentioned already, “why won’t men go to therapy?”].

We’ve discussed Nancy Armstrong before in these electronic pages; she wrote the book on the realist novel as a feminine mode of domination, and when she turns to Ishiguro’s science fiction—noting, as did the late Swedish Academy secretary Sara Danius, his odd resemblance both to Jane Austen and to Franz Kafka—she seemingly gets the message:

That is to say, as Kathy verbally replenishes her biologically depleted emotional life by describing all the connections she has made by means of this ruthless logic, what can only be called positive affect pulses back through the web of pathways which end in death. As it does so, her story converts the deaths of individual students into the form of life in common shared even by the dead in Walter Benjamin’s poignant lament for the passing of the traditional village storyteller. As it thus converts loss into connection at once banal and unavailable to normal individuals, Kathy’s story, I would argue, proposes a model of community that does not hark back to a bygone pastoral world, as Benjamin’s does, so much as open up the possibility that even individuals who consider themselves irreplaceable can and must acknowledge the continuous biological substratum on which they are already inscribed.

But Armstrong’s dense theoretical disquisition on a new post-novelistic model of community, as much as Harvey’s journalistic portrait of the artist as neo-social-democrat, doesn’t penetrate to the real Ishiguran esoterica. The author presents himself as a genial bumbling Englishman, a very decent liberal, a kindly multi-genre humanist like Gaiman or Mitchell—see his Amanda-Palmer-quoting daughter—who lacks even the grit in the eye you get from Amis or Rushdie. This is the softer book-club version of what Harvey and Armstrong are selling. Harvey writes,

Ishiguro came of age as a writer in the early 1980s, when market fundamentalism was sweeping Britain and the West, a development that caught him entirely off guard. “I never wanted revolution,” he said of his younger self. “But I did believe we could progress towards a more socialist world, a more generous welfare state. I went a long way into my adult life believing that was the consensus. When I was 24 or 25, I realized that Britain had taken a very different turn with the coming of Margaret Thatcher.” Although his books never explicitly address Thatcher’s neoliberal project, they reflect its dismaying human consequences. For Ishiguro’s characters, not working is not an option, or even a proclivity.

So much in his work is “not an option.” I think of the doomed clones torturing the fly in Never Let Me Go, the pianist enacting his great performance only when thinks he’s alone in The Unconsoled, the painter becoming a fascist because he sympathizes with the poor and oppressed in An Artist of the Floating World. The temptation is to recuperate this for a progressive politics in some watered-down Adornian reading that would show his works’ negativity to subtract from the world the very shape our hopes ought to take so that they become handbooks for utopia once you reverse the writing [I weakly lapsed into this at the end of my essay on Never Let Me Go]. His post-Nobel insistence on his genial liberalism points this way as much as does Armstrong’s summary of his work’s purpose as “provid[ing] a glimpse of what it might be like to live without the misbegotten notion that being a self-contained subject is the best and only way of being fully human,” or Harvey’s quiet argument for social democracy as a system that will allow us to be productively lazy just like the author.

The theme, the subtext, the esoterica is something else, though, something less like socialism in cipher and more akin to a philosophy of quiet retreat, inner exile, beneath the posture of conformity, something like Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith or Jünger’s Anarch, though let me finish Eumeswil before you quote me on the latter.

The 20th century is dying more slowly than Onegin’s uncle, but it’s still clear what the future holds: corporatist biosurveillance city-states, which will come in “woke” Zuck/Bezos forms with democratic-socialist veneers and “based” Thiel/Musk versions that are more frank, but which will be the same in the end. Why else does even the present political left’s theory of “equity,” as encapsulated in this genuinely disgusting meme, imply the coerced correction of inherent biological inequality? This is the point I’ve been making since my essay on Spike Jonez’s Her in 2014: what the woke and the based want is basically the same thing—the juridical and biological extermination of the human being. Some will advertise this state of affairs as the expansion of humanism and the alternative to neoliberalism Ishiguro says he was hoping for. They will buy and sell our information and our atoms and tell us it’s freedom, they will bribe us a pittance to be serfs and call it socialism, and like Kathy and Ryder we will do our best to play our part with pride and decency. It is to this future that Ishiguro’s best novels offer a guide.

Further reading: check the Kazuo Ishiguro tag over at the main site for me on A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, Never Let Me Go, The Buried Giant, and a first response to Ishiguro’s Nobel. Confession: I’ve never read When We Were Orphans; I should have by now, but I know so little about its historical setting and am always intimidated by the word-problem aspect of detective novels, so I’ve put it off.)

#kazuo ishiguro #giles harvey #nancy armstrong #neoliberalism #fiction #literature #science fiction #english literature

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