Kazuo Ishiguro's Gestural Poetics

Peter Sloane

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501377914
• eBook ISBN: 9781501348006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Through readings of Ishiguro's repurposing of key elements of realism and modernism; his interest in childhood imagination and sketching; interrogation of aesthetics and ethics; his fascination with architecture and the absent home; and his expressionist use of 'imaginary' space and place, Kazuo Ishiguro's Gestural Poetics examines the manner in which Ishiguro's fictions approach, but never quite reveal, the ineffable, inexpressible essence of his narrators' emotionally fraught worlds. Reformulating Martin Heidegger's suggestion that the 'essence of world can only be indicated' as 'the essence of world can only be gestured towards, ' Sloane argues that while Ishiguro's novels and short stories are profoundly sensitive to the limitations of literary form, their narrators are, to varying degrees, equally keenly attuned to the failures of language itself. In order to communicate something of the emotional worlds of characters adrift in various uncertainties, while also commenting on the expressive possibilities of fiction and the mimetic arts more widely, Ishiguro appropriates a range of metaphors which enable both author and character to gesture towards the undisclosable essences of fiction and being.

Chapter 1

GESTURES

Prose fiction has always been either unwittingly but constitutionally resistant to formal classification or knowingly antagonistic towards it. For Michael McKeon, this intransigence is endemic; ‘categorical instability’, he argues, is ‘central to the rise of the novel’ (1985: 161). For Georg Lukacs (‘in process of turning from Kant [Transcendence] to Hegel [Immanence]’), the novel is ‘the most hazardous genre’ precisely because it is always ‘in the process of becoming’ (1971: 12, 72–3). The same typological ambiguity surrounds short fiction, which, as Viorica Patea remarks, has its origin in a range of apparently disparate forms, from ‘myth and biblical verse narratives, medieval sermons and romance’ to ‘fables, folktales, [and] ballads’ (2012: 1). Ishiguro himself is reluctant to define Nocturnes, his only collection of short things, referring to it as ‘just a fictional book that happens to be divided into these five movements’ (Aitkenhead 2009).¹ All fiction, all writing even, is necessarily experimental, a series of arbitrary conventional gestures towards capturing what Virginia Woolf describes, in a language textured by advances in physics in the early part of the twentieth century, as the ‘incessant shower of innumerable atoms’ that ‘shape themselves into’ daily life (1986: 160). The mass-printed (mechanically reproduced, cloned) novel or collection of short fiction is little more than a practical concession to the formlessness of experience and the infelicity of expression, on the one hand, and the pragmatics of the modern publishing industry, on the other.² In The Rise of the Novel, Watt speculates that it ‘is perhaps the only literary genre which is essentially connected with the medium of print’ (1983: 223). For some Marxist critics, this connection with and dependence upon the means of production is particularly problematic, certainly for the realist novel, which ‘overlooks or conceals its own uncritical acceptance of an ideologically derived reality’, thereby performing, according to Pierre Bourdieu, ‘a denegation of what it expresses’ (Tallis 1988: 50; Bourdieu 1996: 4). Prose fiction represents a series of aesthetic and material negotiations always knowingly or unknowingly attuned to the critical and political efficacy of language and form.

Ishiguro’s deceptively ‘conventional’ novels and short stories cultivate and manipulate finely wrought tensions between lexical precision and semantic ambiguity on the level of form, and the ostensibly ‘objective reality’ of history and the ‘subjective realities’ of lived experience on the thematic level. As Cynthia Wong remarks, regardless of changing settings and characters, Ishiguro’s fictions endeavour always ‘to capture the elusiveness of human consciousness’ (2005: 23). Ishiguro is not a metaphysician but more of an existentialist (he has much in common with Kafka, Thomas Bernhard and Kobo Abe), and his interest is not in consciousness abstracted from historical circumstance. Rather, he shares with the great realists a penchant for creating characters that are complexly intertwined with dynamic social and political reality. His protagonists, always at the mercy of changing winds, are often overtaken and overwhelmed by history’s fickleness. Another feature of Ishiguro’s repurposing of realism is the search for unity, and with it the sense of an ending so typical of the form. His characters gather and attempt to order ‘all the details’ of their often ‘misguided’ pasts and, from these, to salvage some meaning, or evasive certainty’s fragile solace. Kathy, Stevens, Ono and Banks move towards what they naively (informed by their readings of ‘Victorian novels’ and ‘sentimental romance’ in the first two cases) imagine will be dénouements, moments of euphoric revelation which will somehow retroactively confer meaning to their lives along with what Frank Kermode might call a ‘regressive pleasure’ for the reader (2000: 55). Alongside his various realist borrowings (which I’ll discuss in more detail later), Ishiguro adopts and adapts modernism’s privileging of the ‘fleeting’, ‘contingent’, ‘ineffable’ nature of experience and the slippages between perspectives so typical of the subjective turn in the arts at the turn of the twentieth century (Nicholls 1995: 6; Walkowitz 2006: 20). Indeed, as I will argue here, it is the fine balance that Ishiguro exploits between the most characteristic elements of realism (unity, certainty, closure) and modernism (disunity, uncertainty, irresolution) that invests his sentences and their aggregated yet always imminent wholes with their uniquely peculiar effect of ambiguity-through-precision.³ As James Wood remarked of The Buried Giant, in a phrase which neatly summarizes Ishiguro’s gestural poetics, it is ‘at once too literal and too vague’ (2015).

Often labelled a realist, Pico Iyer speculates that Ishiguro wrote The Unconsoled, his most intentionally experimental work, to ‘prevent him from ever being taken as a realist again’ (1995). Matthew Beedham makes the same point, suggesting that Ishiguro wrote the novel because he was frustrated ‘by critics who attempted to categorise him as a realist’ (2010: 4). Despite being viewed as predominantly realist, he has always been an elegantly but pragmatically innovative writer or, as James writes, an ‘inconspicuous stylist’ (2009: 61). The Unconsoled is almost aggressively experimental, ‘something close to exhibitionism’ as Ryder thinks of Brodsky’s ill-fated return to conducting (and suffered the same fate as those avant-garde musical performances it parodies), seeming for all intents and purposes to be the work of an author revelling in difficulty, despite his assurances to Charlie Rose that he did not ‘mean deliberately to be difficult’ because it would be ‘bad manners to just deliberately be difficult’ (1995). Viet Thanh Nguyen’s description of Ishiguro as ‘both a popular and accessible writer, and yet also one who is smart, sophisticated, inventive, and experimental’ seems wholly accurate (Kellogg 2017). In this sense, he shares with Maggie Gee a desire to ‘conceal complexity under a surface ease’, giving rise to what James describes as an ‘artful’ ‘self-effacing’ ‘authorial modesty’ on the level of book and narration (quoted in James 2012: 11, 2009: 55). Nevertheless, after the success but misunderstanding of his early novels which led to what he describes as the ‘issue of people taking [him] literally’, Ishiguro has spoken of a desire to ‘get away from a straight social realist way of writing’ (Gaby Wood 2017). Perhaps realism forecloses interpretative possibility because its methodology encourages faith in the ‘reality’ of the subject, stifling meaning’s ambiguous freeplay. In moving away from realism, he attempts to regain a form of authorial control, ‘to announce how I want my novels to be read’, pleading that readers ‘don’t take historical truth too seriously; try to look for something else’ (Gaby Wood 2017). What emerges here is Ishiguro’s loss of faith in the reader’s willingness, or even ability, to seek more than mere verisimilitude. His appropriation of intentionality is a proscription not for closure, however, but polysemy.

Making an initial exploratory pass at aligning Ishiguro’s fictions with several key stylistic and thematic elements of realism and modernism (both will run into the following chapters), and his repurposing of these, this chapter examines his play with detail, order, unity and the varieties of ambiguity of expression and communication which preoccupy Ishiguro’s characters and make his writing so beguilingly distinctive. While situating Ishiguro in a wider tradition of experimental fictions, I suggest that his own prose takes recourse to a gestural poetics, one that is aware both of the failure of the form of the novel and the failure of language to communicate meaningfully, or with sufficient precision to enable authentic expression of ‘selves’. His novels gesture towards space, history, the literary, towards shared experiences of love and regret, to war, betrayal and disappointment, but always in an awareness that the object itself remains ineffable, unconducive to linguistic transfiguration. Mimetic and communicative failures inflect the narratives with uncertainty, doubt, his characters attempting to form or simply maintain meaningful relationships but taking recourse to ‘understandings’ in the absence of adequate language, or because of what Salman Rushdie has eloquently termed ‘an inarticulacy of the emotions’ (The Guardian, 2012). It is in this way, I argue, that Ishiguro engages with the traditions of realism and modernism, highlighting the failures of both and synthesizing from these a philosophically, epistemologically sceptical late modernist aesthetic which is invested with meaning by its situation in a compromised rationalist realist narrative frame. Ultimately, what is at stake for his characters, and by implication the reader, is understanding, communication and, in its absence, a profound isolation arising from the failures of language which is itself, ironically, beyond expression.

Part 1: Realism

I

In a friendly but not overly positive review of The Buried Giant, James Wood highlights what he describes as the ‘dizzying dullness’ of Ishiguro’s novels, which often involve ‘episodes as bland as milk’ (or even eggs) (2015). However, as he goes on, the peculiar power of Ishiguro’s writing derives from this apparent triviality, because the author’s

banality has always been a rhetoric in search of a form. He doesn’t need the pressure of realism (though his best work is powerful surely because it exerts its own pressure on the real) … But he does need the pressure of form, a narrative shape that forces his bland fictional representations to muster their significance. (2015)

Ishiguro has referred to his own work as realist, at least those novels before, and one can surmise by similarity after but not including The Unconsoled; ‘although they’re interior monologues’, he comments, ‘basically they’re realistic books’ (Rose 1995).⁴ For Wood, when style is employed artfully (but inconspicuously), it can imbue the ‘bland’ with ‘significance’ (we might think here of Williams’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ (1923) or Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ (1633)). Ishiguro’s works, in this understanding, are emergent, their significant totality supervening upon disjointed fragments of closely studied insignificance. Form, then, more particularly realism, orders and privileges the disordered and unprivileged, producing a dynamic and meaningful ‘whole’.

Fittingly, realism is itself an ongoing and incomplete experiment in the ordered narrativization of experience, one that, much like later experimental movements, was written against a precursor perceived in some sense to have become ‘exhausted’, to use John Barth’s term, or ‘moribund’, in Ishiguro’s (1984: 62; The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, 2015). Writing in the late nineteenth century of the shift from romance to realism and later naturalism, Émile Zola noted ‘that all the conditions of the novel have changed. Imagination is no longer the predominating quality of the novelist’; in the new novel, the ‘great thing is to set up living creatures, playing before the readers the human comedy in the most natural manner possible. All the efforts of the writer tend to hide the imaginary under the real’ (1893: 209, 210). Ishiguro’s early success as a novelist (his debut PVH won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize; AFW, the Whitbread; RD, the Booker) evidences his mastery of this technique, as does his evident frustration at readers taking the ‘historical truth [of his works] too seriously’. The ‘human comedy’ is a singularly apt description of Stevens, Ono and Banks, three buffoons caught up in the mechanics of world affairs, but ‘not remarkable enough to stand outside of that generation and moment’ (Ishiguro and Sean Matthews 2009: 115). Kenzaburo Oe complimented Ishiguro, who left Japan aged five and wrote his Japanese novels without revisiting, that he ‘was struck by the excellent descriptions of life in Japan, of Japanese buildings and landscapes’ in An Artist of the Floating World, to which Ishiguro replied that ‘the Japan that exists in that book is very much my own personal, imaginary Japan’ (1991: 110). Here, we see precisely the ‘pressure’ applied to the real and realism by the effect of verisimilitude achieved by Ishiguro’s realistic rendering of an imaginary Japan, and the reason that his work has often, much to his displeasure, been taken ‘literally’.

In some ways, Oe’s comment seems unsupported by the text; aside from the repeated refrain of ‘tatami’ in Ishiguro’s first two novels, and the use of traditional Japanese names and suffixes (-san), there is very little specificity to his literary portrait of his estranged country of birth. In Ishiguro’s second novel, Masuji Ono, a retired artist, recalls of his acquaintance’s apartment that it was ‘small, and like many of these modern affairs, had no entryway as such, the tatami starting a little way inside the front door’ (AFW 109). The post-war Japan that Ishiguro conjures is textured by the influence of the West (and filtration through Western media): ‘each apartment identical; the floors were tatami, the bathrooms and kitchens of Western design’ (PVH 12). Tatami functions as a lexical, atomistic detail, at once vague and idiosyncratic, communicating an understanding that the novel is set in Japan (under Western, essentially US administration). Niki, the daughter of A Pale View of Hill’s Etsuko, is named as a ‘compromise’ with her English father; ‘it was he who wanted to give her a Japanese name, and I – perhaps out of some selfish desire not to be reminded of the past – insisted on an English one. He finally agreed to Niki, thinking it had some vague echo of the East about it’ (PVH 9). Possibly influenced by this interview and Ishiguro’s own description, Barry Lewis sees in A Pale View of Hills a ‘displaced Japan, a recreation of an original that probably never existed’ (2000: 23). Perhaps this is because the ‘Japanese’ novel was originally conceived to be set in a ‘Cornish town’, until Ishiguro ‘realized that if [he] told this story in terms of Japan, everything that looked parochial and small would reverberate’ (Hunnewell 2008). A political decision, then, reflecting the post-war reconstitution of global politics which had, as Ishiguro remarked, led to a feeling among young British authors that ‘England is not an important enough country anymore’ to garner international interest (Oe 1991: 119). Ishiguro’s choice of Japan as a less ‘parochial’ setting than England could not have been coincidental, but also works from an association of the name ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’ with the traditionally Japanese (one character in PVH is, after all, named Kazuo). Perhaps it is here, the accumulation of period-specific cultural details, that for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Where the World Worlds
• Chapter 1 Gestures
• Chapter 2 Imagination
• Chapter 3 Aesthetics
• Chapter 4 Architext
• Chapter 5 Space
• Conclusion: The Remains of The …
• References
• Index
• Copyright Page