1
The five novels that Ishiguro has written to date show a remarkably
consistent
preoccupation with the same themes, "themes with an emotional
dimension," as he put it (Mason 347). He has been equally consistent
from
the start in addressing a much wider audience than just a British or
English-speaking one. And he began his writing life by distinguishing
his work
from "the kind of book whose raison d'être is to say
something about literary form." "I always try to disguise those
elements of my writing that I feel perhaps are experimental" (Mason
347).
Yet it is Ishiguro's use of language, genre and literary form that most
distinguish his work and account for its power and hold over his
readers. He
has a near perfect ear for the rhythms of the English language, and a
remarkably lucid prose style that is almost unmatched among modern
writers.
What is so fascinating about his career so far is the way in which his
enduring
concern with certain emotional themes and with shaping them to appeal
to an
international readership have driven him to experiment increasingly with
non-realist modes of fiction: to burlesque different genres, and to
rely more
heavily on figurative language, symbolic import, and narrative
manipulation in
his search for the most effective way of giving fictional expression to
these
recurring motifs.
At the same time any examination of narrative manipulation in his work
cannot
be separated from a recognition of its political and national
dimensions. In When
We Were Orphans, the novel on which this essay focuses, the
settings and
characters are departures both from narrative realism and from
nationalism.
Written for an international readership, the novel oscillates between
England,
the old center of empire, and Shanghai where the Occident meets the
Orient,
itself the product of a hegemonic Western discourse. The protagonist is
equally
transnational, moving between center and periphery more than once in
the course
of the book. Childhood becomes associated with Shanghai's International
Settlement where the protagonist spends his early childhood. But the
child's
feeling of being protected in this privileged enclave of colonial power
is
exposed as an illusion when the anarchic forces of the Chinese mainland
(parallel to the unconscious forces of the libido) invade this secure
center
and abduct both parents. In Ishiguro's fiction to be orphaned, to be
deprived
of parental security, becomes a trope for transnational identity, for
doing
without a fatherland or motherland. The protagonist comes to realize
that the
feared other is actually located within the self that has discursively
created
that other out of its own fears. Like the protagonist, the privileged
few have
peopled the world beyond their safe borders with monsters of their own
imagination. In the course of the novel Ishiguro forces the reader to
recognize
that the representatives of colonialism, while attempting to foist onto
the
colonized the stigma of eternal childishness, are in fact themselves
childlike,
having evaded maturation by projecting the unacceptable within
themselves onto
the subjects of their colonial discourse.
Manipulating narrative conventions to break with mainstream fictional
realism
has political as well as aesthetic implications. The classic realist
novel, as
Catherine Belsey argues, "coincides chronologically with the epoch of
industrial capitalism" (67). It serves to conceal from the reader the
way
in which language constructs subjectivity, just as ideology conceals
from
capitalist and colonial subjects the ruling power's interpellation of
their
subjectivity. The adult protagonist's failure to discover the
whereabouts of
his missing parents parallels the failure of the Western powers and
Japan to
interpellate the Chinese as subject peoples. Personal and political
subjection
coincide repeatedly in Ishiguro's fiction, as do personal and political
disintegration. In When We Were Orphans the protagonist's
inability to
counter forces of evil echoes that of democracies in the 1930s faced
with the
destructive forces of fascist powers. Equally history itself is put to
figurative use in this, as in all his novels, to reveal its origins in
the
personal and the psychological. The protagonist's childlike search for
his
missing parents is reminiscent of the Western powers' nostalgic attempt
with
the International Settlement to reassert parental control over an
aberrant
nation. Fascism, like colonialism, is the imposition of parental
discipline on adults
discursively constituted as children. All such efforts can be
characterized as
a consequence of dreams of wish fulfillment, dreams that require a
narrative
mode removed from realism for their successful fictional
representation. While
this essay concentrates on Ishiguro's use of non-realist modes of
fiction, it
should never be forgotten that with this writer these modes always have
a
political and ideological dimension.
His five novels written over two decades divide themselves between the
first
three, all pursuing a supposedly realist mode of narration, and the
last two
which have seemingly abandoned that surface appearance of realism for
what
might be termed a surrealist fictional mode. His first novel, A Pale
View of
Hills (1982), is narrated in the first person by Etsuko, a Japanese
mother
whose eldest daughter recently committed suicide after the family moved
to
England. Her memories of her past life in Nagasaki after World War Two
focus
largely on her friendship with a mother and daughter whose relationship
eerily
resembles that of Etsuko and her dead daughter. The unreliability of
her memory
(one of Ishiguro's principal themes throughout his fiction), to which
she draws
attention early on, is dramatically underlined when she unconsciously
substitutes
her own daughter's name for that of her friend's daughter on the
penultimate
page, revealing the possibility that all her memories of her friend and
her
daughter were in fact disguised memories of herself and her daughter.
What this
substitution of daughters suggests is that her daughter's suicide has
left her
with guilt feelings so powerful that they have caused her to repress
the real
past. Mike Petry claims that "[e]very decisive character, every
important
motif, and every major scene in A Pale View of Hills exists, at
least ,
twice" (25). Even this early in his career Ishiguro can be seen chafing
against the restraints of a realist narrative mode.
His second novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986),
focuses on
Masuji Ono, a Japanese painter who used his art to promote nationalist
militarism prior to the outbreak of World War Two. In his old age long
after
the War he is forced to come to terms with the way a younger generation
sees
the cause he championed in his career as misguided and irresponsible as
well as
being a perversion of his art. As is the case with the portrayal of
Etsuko, Ono
has difficulty facing the truth about his own past. His memories don't
always
square with accounts of the same events offered by others. He
conveniently forgets
or misremembers things. Additionally his daughters and in-laws imply
that he
has an inflated sense of the importance of the role he played in pre-
War Japan.
Once again Ishiguro refrains from offering the reader a definitive
interpretation of events. That is one of the realist aspects of this
technique
- that, as in life, we are missing too much evidence to be sure which
interpretation of the facts is correct.
His third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), made Ishiguro
famous
outside his adopted country, especially when it was turned into a
Merchant-Ivory movie starring Anthony Hopkins in 1993. The book focuses
on
Stevens, an English butler who loyally served Lord Darlington during his
pre-War attempts to reach accommodation with the powers of fascism.
Stevens'
cult of dignity serves as a cover for his repression of his emotional
life. He
opts to remain on duty at one of Lord Darlington's important dinners
(for
appeasers of fascist aggressors) when his father is dying upstairs. He
also
ignores mutual feelings of attraction with the housekeeper. His
language is the
language of skilled repression, filled with euphemisms such as "deceased
condition" (106) that keep the unpleasant reality of death at arms'
length. Once again the novel recounts in the first person Stevens'
attempts in
later life to face the truth about his ill spent past, and as is the
case with
the two previous novels he partially succeeds in doing so and earns some
compassion from the reader in the process.
By this point in his career Ishiguro realized that he had taken this
particular
form of narrative realism as far as he could: "what happened with my
first
three books is that I was actually trying to refine what I did over and
over
again and with The Remains of the Day I feel that I came to the
end of
that process" (Vorda 150). Having repeatedly asserted that the two
strongest influences on his writing were Chekhov and Dostoevsky, he
decided to
desert the former for the latter. Abandoning the "controlled
approach," he decided to make his fourth novel, The Unconsoled
(1995), "more emotionally risky" (Jaggi 21). Over five hundred pages
long, this book immerses the reader straight into a fantastic world in
which
the irrational connections and continuity resemble that of dreams.
The first person narrator is Ryder, a famous pianist, who has arrived
at an
unnamed mid European city to give a speech and performance that he and
(maybe)
many of the inhabitants expect to revolutionize the cultural life of
the town.
The first scene includes an impossibly long near-monologue by Gustav
the porter
in the course of taking the elevator to Ryder's floor of the hotel. It
gradually appears that Gustav is the father of Ryder's (ex?) wife,
Sophie, and
grandfather of their son, Boris. Another important trio consists of
Hoffman,
the hotel manager, his wife and their son, Stephan, an aspiring
musician. But
the reality status of these characters is quickly blurred as the
possibility
arises that both Boris and Stephan might represent versions of Ryder at
earlier
stages of his life. The fact that Ryder can read the unspoken thoughts
of these
earlier incarnations of himself indicates to the reader the extent to
which
Ryder has appropriated these two characters for his own purposes and
deprived
them of any independent dialogic status. At the same time Ryder's
inability to
be certain whether Sophie is his wife or Boris his son shows Ishiguro
pushing
to new limits his exploration of the unreliable narrator.
Like the three preceding narrators Ryder seems afflicted by some deep
childhood
wound or trauma that affects every aspect of his adult outlook and
behavior. He
betrays similar feelings of sadness and regret that characterize all
three
narrators of Ishiguro's previous novels. This sense of malaise has its
roots in
another long standing obsession of Ishiguro's - the strained
relationships
between parents and children, which is made much clearer in this novel.
Not
that it is not evident in the earlier three. Etsuko is troubled by the
possibility that the mother (herself or her friend) may have mistreated
her
daughter. Ono is at odds with his two daughters the younger of whom may
have
been rejected by her first suitor because of his past allegiances.
Stevens puts
the needs of his employer above his dying father. But in The
Unconsoled
Ryder is not the only parent who cannot communicate with his son.
Gustav and
his daughter Sophie stopped talking to one another when she was still a
child.
Hoffman and his wife consistently belittle the musical talents of their
son
whose performance pushes interpretation beyond permissible bounds in his
attempt to win their recognition of his real (according to Ryder)
musical
ability. Stephan's parents leave the concert hall half way through his
performance. And Ryder himself is equally devastated by the non-
appearance of
his parents at the same climactic concert. The connection between the
non-realist appropriation of other characters and the book's obsession
with
parent-children relationships is made clear by a remark of Ishiguro's
the year
the novel was published:
I wished to move right away from straight realism [. . .] I thought,
let's
create a world, as in a dream, where you bump into people, and some of
them are
to some extent you when you were small, and some are projections of who
you
fear you might be, or the relationship between these two people is in
some way
the relationship between you and your parents-. (Goring S8)
The fear governing Ishiguro's narrators is that as adults they might be
reproducing the relationship they had with their parents as children.
They
spend their adult lives relating to others in an unsuccessful attempt
to break
away from that definitive model.
Ishiguro broke with the traditional realist mode of fiction in other
ways in
his fourth novel. The rules of not just time but place are broken.
Ryder can
hear conversations taking place where he is not present. His hotel
bedroom in
the city appears to Ryder to be "the very room that had served as my
bedroom during the two years my parents and I lived at my aunt's house
on the
borders of England and Wales" (16). At one point Ryder takes a long
journey in to the country surrounding the unnamed city to appear at a
function
from which he exits through a door that returns him directly to his
hotel in
the center of the city. Next morning he is congratulated on a
"marvellously witty address" he never delivered at the reception
(155). There are also scenes involving breakfast being served on a town
tram,
cards being played in the stalls during a cinema performance, and a
funeral
procession that halts to pay homage to the famous pianist by offering
him as
refreshments a piece of cellophane-wrapped fruit cake and peppermints.
Highly
improbable coincidences proliferate, such as when a tram inspector
confronting
a ticketless Ryder turns out to be a childhood girlfriend from his
village
primary school in Worcestershire. Yet at the same time as he is
abandoning the
realist attempt to suspend the reader's disbelief Ishiguro is careful
to stay
within the conventions of the strange Kafkaesque world he has
constructed:
"If you create an alternative world where alternative rules exist
physical, temporal, behavioural there has to be a consistency, a new
set of
rules" (Jaggi 21). By this stage Ishiguro has become fully conscious of
the way in which even supposedly realist fictional worlds have rules and
conventions that establish for their readers a correspondence with the
world
they live in. So, for example, in The Unconsoled the reader soon
learns
to expect that whenever Ryder sets out for another scheduled
appointment he
will be side-tracked and fail to make it or to make it on time while
increasing
his mounting level of anxiety.
2
Ishiguro's fifth novel, When We Were Orphans (2000), opens in
the more
realist mode of his first three books and gradually metamorphoses into
the
surrealist mode of his fourth novel. Combining the strengths of both,
When
We Were Orphans offers a classic case study of Ishiguro's
innovative use of
a growing variety of fictional, generic and linguistic conventions in
his
search for the most satisfying aesthetic way of expressing the same
themes that
have haunted his work throughout his writing career. One reviewer
claimed that
this novel demonstrates how Ishiguro's flight from classic realism is
in fact
more realist than so-called realist fiction: "Ishiguro's inextricable
fusion of memory, imagination and dream takes us down into the
labyrinth of
reality which realism has simplified" (Carey 45). By this fifth novel he
shows full awareness of the way in which for the novelist the medium
is, if not
the whole message, the most important aspect of it.
The plot combines the excitement of the detective novel with the
psychological
interest of the first-person confessional that characterizes his
earlier work.
Christopher Banks, the narrator, has spent the first ten years of his
life
protected from the outer world by his English parents who lived in the
privileged haven of the International Settlement of Shanghai, There his
best
friend, Akira, is the son of Japanese neighbors. Banks occupies a
bastion of
the colonial center that is literally surrounded by the dangerous
periphery of
the Chinese mainland. When his father suddenly disappears into that
peripheral
area Banks and Akira develop an elaborate compensatory game in which
they impersonate
the Chinese detective inspector searching for his father. Next his
mother goes
missing and Banks is shipped off (in about 1911) to live with his aunt
in
England. There he grows up determined to become a real detective in his
adult
life. In the 1920s he quickly becomes what his friend Sarah describes as
"the most brilliant investigative mind in England" (34). But he is
motivated all along by his childhood desire to clear up the baffling
case of
his parents' supposed abduction. To this end in 1937, after an
improbably long
interval, he finally returns to Shanghai which at this time is plunged
in the
Sino-Japanese war that was a precursor to the outbreak of World War
Two. In the
nightmarish world of war torn Shanghai the surreal becomes the natural
mode of
narration.
Just as Ryder and the city's leaders automatically assume that his
concert will
prove a turning point in the city's cultural history, so both Banks and
the
inhabitants of the Settlement fully expect him to solve the case in no
time at
all. The absurdity of this assumption is illustrated by the farcical
scene in
which on his arrival Banks is greeted by a municipal official who wants
to
finalize arrangements for the triumphant return of Banks' parents, as
if their
return from captivity were a foregone conclusion. How can the
mysterious,
backward Orient hope to withstand the rational powers of a
representative of
the civilization that constructed China as part of its Oriental
discourse?
Later Banks is taken to a house which turns out to be his childhood
home. Once
again the improbable becomes the norm: the Chinese family currently
living
there immediately offers to move out so that he can bring his rescued
parents
there to live out the rest of their lives a clear instance of wish-
fulfillment
on Banks' part. His search for his parents takes him to the war zone
beyond the
safety of the International Settlement where he meets against all odds
Akira
(or does he?), now a wounded Japanese soldier, who guides him to the
house
where his parents were alleged to be held captive. But the house has
been
struck by a shell and hardly surprisingly a quarter of a century
later his
parents are not there. He doesn't learn the truth about them until
finally he
confronts an old friend of the family, "Uncle" Philip, now known as
Yellow Snake, a Communist double agent for Chiang Kai-shek, who would
be more
at home in a James Bond narrative. Philip tells him that his father ran
off
with a mistress and died from typhoid two years later in Singapore. In
keeping with
a Boy's Own adventure story, his mother offended an opium warlord who
arranged
for her to be kidnapped and kept her as his concubine. She agreed to
submit to
him provided he made a financial allowance for Banks until he grew up.
Some 22
years later the warlord died and she disappeared in war-torn China. But
in a
coda Banks finally discovers her in
It is easy to identify in this novel those recurrent thematic motifs
that have
appeared in Ishiguro's previous work. Once again we are overhearing the
recollections of a first person narrator. Like all his predecessors,
Banks is
an unreliable narrator whose memory is faulty, a fact we ascertain from
his own
reflections on its accuracy and from the conflicting testimony of
others, such
as his old school friend who remembers him as being "'such an odd bird
at
school'" (7), a very different creature from his own recollection of his
regular boyish personality. As in all his earlier books, parents and
children
are alienated from one another, and either a parent or a child, or in
Banks' case
both spend their life trying to compensate for their assumed early
inadequacy
or failure. This need to put right the perceived wrongs of the past so
preoccupies Ishiguro's narrators that they fail to attend to their adult
emotional needs and desires. Only at the end of their lives do they
recognize
(or half acknowledge) the waste that their pursuit of this goal has
made of
their own lives. Consequently all his novels are haunted by a sense of
angst,
regret and sadness. Ishiguro seems to imply that the need to try to put
right
the inevitable failures of our childhood years is an unavoidable
compulsion
that forces all of us to pursue this chimera at the expense of a more
satisfying form of adult life. The shadowy implied author invariably
shows
compassion for his self-deluded narrators. It is as if he shared in
their
predicament (the actual author has confessed in several interviews to
doing
so). Another constant characteristic of Ishiguro's fiction is the way
in which
the carefully controlled narrative withholds more than it reveals. The
narrative continually offers the reader a plurality of meanings and
interpretations while remaining uncommitted. Ishiguro has said that he
is
primarily "interested in the way words hide meaning" (Vorda 136).
But such an essentialist attempt to uncover the constants in Ishiguro's
fiction
ignores the radical differences between When We Were Orphans and
any of
the previous four books. These differences are not simply a matter of
differing
plots. Besides, as Ishiguro points out, he tries "to put in as little
plot
as possible" (Bryson 38). The tendency to give metaphorical significance
to seemingly realist elements increases with each book. He has referred
to
Stevens as "a good metaphor for the relationship of very ordinary, small
people to power" (Swift 22). Similarly he has described Ryder as "a
metaphor for going through life without a schedule" (Kenney 47). This
tendency to give figurative significance to realist elements in his
work is
even more evident in When We Were Orphans. Take for instance the
proliferation of orphans in this book. Not only is Banks orphaned at
the age of
ten. He later adopts Jennifer after she has been orphaned at the same
age.
Sarah, the only woman he cares for, lost both of her parents during her
childhood.
Even Mr. Lin, the owner of his childhood house in Shanghai, recalls how
his
father adopted an orphan girl whom the son treated like his own sister.
The
entire motif is given succinct expression when Banks asks Sarah whether
she
lost her parents long ago: "It seems like for ever," she replies.
"But in another way, they're always with me" (48). The book's
multiplication of orphans invites a figurative reading, forcing us to
understand that to feel oneself orphaned is a common experience that
happens to
most children as they grow apart from their parents, just as it happens
to most
ex-colonies after they have gained independence from their colonial
occupiers.
At the same time we have thoroughly internalized the parents / colonial
occupiers by the time we leave them or they us. As Freud argued, it is
this
internalization of the parental edict that makes possible secondary or
psychological repression in adult life, a condition that Banks obviously
suffers from, as do all Ishiguro's narrators and many other of his
characters.
In the course of the novel the individual experience of the orphaned
Banks is
transformed by metaphorical multiplication into a collective
experience. In
fact Banks occupies a liminal location in the novel, as he fills the
child's
role as an individual, and yet is a representative of the parental
colonial
power as the master detective from England. Whether Ishiguro is
locating the
origins of the individual's neurosis in the collective mania of the age
or
attributing the social malaise to the neurotic behavior of individuals
like
Banks remains undefined. But the close connection between individual and
collective neurotic responses is a given in this as in all Ishiguro's
fiction.
As in his previous novels the settings also become charged with
emotional and
symbolic significance. In his first two novels, he has said, "I just
invent a Japan which serves my needs" (Mason 341). He set The Remains
of the Day "in a mythical landscape" that "resembled the
mythical version of England that is peddled in the nostalgia industry"
(Kelman 73). In The Unconsoled the unnamed mid-European city
where the
action is centered is unmistakably what Ishiguro has called "a landscape
of imagination [. . .] in which everything is an expression of
[Ryder's] past
and his fears for the future" (Krider 151-2). In When We Were
Orphans
Ishiguro transports Banks from the seemingly more realistic setting of
London
to the "exotic" Chinese port of Shanghai where Banks had spent the
all-important years of his childhood. It is interesting that Ishiguro's
father
was born in Shanghai when his grandfather, "the person," he has said,
"who acted as father-figure for the first four years of my life in
Japan," was employed there by Toyota (Tonkin 9). Yet Ishiguro had never
visited the modern city before completing When We Were Orphans.
He
preferred to construct the novel from other books found in antiquarian
bookshops (Tonkin 9), situating his Shanghai at two removes from the
real city.
The International Settlement in which Banks lived is a safe enclave
that the
Western powers sealed off for themselves from the poverty and misery of
the
rest of this Chinese city. In this way, as Ishiguro has said, "the
international zone becomes a metaphor for childhood" for Banks, "that
he later finds is nowhere near as solid and protected as he believes"
(Marchand). Could Ishiguro be subtly implying that the colonial center
comes
closer to acting out the role of the child than the colony it had
"adopted"? Part Two of the novel is largely taken up with the
twenty-nine-year-old Banks' memories of the first ten years he spent in
the
International Settlement. Already Banks catches himself recalling the
house as
grander than it was (53). What emerges is a picture of a privileged and
protected childhood complete with servants, a personal amah, and devoted
parents. Outside this magic enclave lay the forbidden, mysterious
Chinese city
which Banks once glimpsed: "I could see the huddled low rooftops across
the canal, and held my breath as long as I could for fear the
pestilence would
come airborne across the narrow strip of water" (56). His friend Akira
demonstrates the way in which those in power construct myths that
reinforce
their domination by characterizing the other in negative terms when he
makes up
more gruesome stories about the Chinese city where dead bodies piled up
everywhere and warlords ordered innocent bystanders to be beheaded at a
whim.
This childhood fantasy of the adult outside world is so powerful that
when in
Part Four the thirty-six-year-old Banks finally returns to Shanghai he
confuses
his childish fantasies with the real city. This time the Chinese city
really is
undergoing bombardment and invasion by the Japanese. The adult world is
as
terrible and violent as the two children imagined, but in a different
and
perhaps more devastating way. At the same time Banks now sees the
International
Settlement as a place of undeserved privilege in which the Western
élite view
the Japanese shelling of the Chinese part of the city from their hotel
as if it
were another form of entertainment. Banks slowly comes to appreciate the
hypocrisy and exploitation underlying the apparent tranquility and
safety of
the district in which he spent his childhood. This hypocrisy and
exploitation
is made explicit and personal in the form of the opium trade that his
father's
firm promotes. Ultimately the adult world, in the person of Wang Ku, the
warlord his mother insults, erupts into Banks' sheltered existence in
the
International Settlement and brings his idyllic childhood to a
premature end.
Yet, Banks' memories of his childhood and the International Settlement
cloud
his perception of the actuality when he returns, undermining his
principal
adult skill of detecting the truth from what visual evidence is
available.
Indirectly this comments on the failure of the older colonial powers to
see
clearly the emergent ex-colonies in their true colors, preferring to
infantilize them.
Ishiguro has said that he believes that most writers "do write out of
something that is unresolved somewhere deep down and, in fact, it's
probably
too late ever to resolve it" (Vorda 151). Does this help to account for
the strange combination of megalomania and guilt that pervades The
Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans? The dream-like
atmosphere into
which this novel plunges us arouses just those feelings of dread and
horror
that Freud claims is the effect of the uncanny. Freud opens his essay,
"The Uncanny," by demonstrating the paradoxical way in which the
German word for "uncanny" (unheimlich) means both something
strange and new and something familiar and old. Freud explains this
paradox by
arguing that "this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but
something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which
has
become alienated from it only through the process of repression" (241).
Repression is what causes the producer of the uncanny to over
accentuate the
psychical reality at the expense of the material reality. In fact
Freud's
definition of the sources of the uncanny coincides remarkably with the
fictive
techniques pursued by Ishiguro. Freud argues that "an uncanny effect is
often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and
reality
is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as
imaginary appears
before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of
the
thing it symbolizes" (244).
Ishiguro immerses Banks in a dreamlike world on his return to Shanghai
where,
he says, he experiences a sense of "disorientation which threatened to
overwhelm me" (164). Ishiguro positions Banks midway between the real
and
the imaginary, so that the reader can never be sure whether an incident
is
located in the real (fictive) world or in Banks' imagination. The
effect of
this simultaneous evocation of the homely (heimlich) and the
alienated
is that of the uncanny which pervades not just the more fantastic later
portion
of the novel, but in more subtle form the earlier sections as well. For
instance, the hallucinatory expectation among the members of the
International
Settlement that Banks is the one who can save civilization from an
encroaching
evil predates his arrival in Shanghai as an adult, being voiced by Sir
Cecil as
early as Chapter 3 (45). In fact the novel is organized by what Freud
called
repetition compulsion. According to Freud the compulsion to repeat
something
does "arouse an uncanny feeling, which, furthermore, recalls the sense
of
helplessness experienced in some dream-states" (237). In the first part
of
the novel Banks experiences a sense of extreme helplessness at his
inability to
recover his parents despite his empathetic impersonation of the renowned
Chinese detective put onto the case. In the second half of the novel
Banks
experiences a repetition of that sense of helplessness when he fails
again to
recover his parents as a detective in his own right. Freud explains why
such
repetition gives rise to the effect of the uncanny in Beyond the
Pleasure
Principle, a book he worked on at the same time as he was
writing "The
Uncanny": "the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past
experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can
never, even
long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinctual impulses which
have
since been repressed" (21).
Freud claims that the uncanny thrives more readily in literature than
in life
because the author tricks us into believing in the reality of his
fictive world
only to introduce effects which rarely or never occur in actuality,
thereby
"betraying us to the superstitiousness which we have ostensibly
surmounted" (250). Banks' coincidental encounter with Akira in the war
zone is a perfect example of this: by the time Banks comes to doubt
that the
Japanese soldier is indeed Akira it is too late for the reader who has
already
experienced the sense of the uncanny. The point Freud is making is that
the
writer can manipulate our credence in his fictive world to achieve his
desired
effects: "He can keep us in the dark for a long time about the precise
nature of the presuppositions on which the world he writes is based [. .
.]" (251). This is precisely what Ishiguro does. For a long time we
share
Banks' obsessions and projections and do not necessarily recognize the
distortions and fantasies embedded in this professional detective's
attempt at an
objective narrative account of his life. Only when he starts to shed his
illusions after Uncle Philip has revealed to him the truth about his
parents'
disappearances do we come to retrospectively appreciate the extent to
which the
author has immersed us in the uncanny by his own narrative
manipulation.
Even the wounds inflicted on "Akira" and Banks come to assume
figurative significance as the wounds inflicted on them by childhood.
This
would explain why Banks reflects so savagely on the "pompous men of the
International
Settlement" and on "all the prevarications they must have employed to
evade their responsibilities" (258) a fine example of displacement.
Banks' entire career as an outstanding detective is just another
instance of
displacement which equally fails to heal the original wound. Childhood,
like
the International Settlement, is more complicated and less idyllic than
Banks'
remembers it as being. The shattering revelation of the sacrifice his
mother
made for him that Uncle Philip delivers in the penultimate chapter
finally
exposes the price paid for Banks' retention into his adult life and
career of
this chimera of an innocent childhood protected, like the International
Settlement, from the corruption and dangers of adult life epitomized by
the Chinese
city and mainland. Uncle Philip spells it out to him:
"But now do you see how the world really is? You see what made possible
your comfortable life in England? How you were able to become a
celebrated
detective? [. . .] Your mother, she wanted you to live in your
enchanted world
for ever. But it's impossible. In the end it has to shatter. It's a
miracle it
survived so long for you." (314-5)
Ishiguro's strategy in this book is to progressively break the reader's
dependence on the conventions of traditional fictional realism. The
improbable
accumulation of instances of orphans detaches the reader from a realist
response as effectively as does the move from a seemingly orderly
London to an
anarchic Shanghai under siege where the surreal activities of war merge
with
the surreal experiences of Banks. In point of fact Banks' unreliable
memories
have been distorting the narrative from the opening pages set in London.
Ishiguro talks about When We Were Orphans, not in terms of
surrealism,
but in terms of expressionist art, "where everything is distorted to
reflect the emotion of the artist who is looking at the world"
(Richards).
Banks' vision is indeed at its most expressive or subjective in the
later
sections of the novel set in Shanghai when his investment in his
childhood
dream is in maximum conflict with the stark reality. Banks is suffering
from a
common failing, according to Ishiguro, "the futile hope or wish that you
can return to some point in your childhood, or your distant past, when
you
suppose things went wrong, when your world went askew, [. . .] and undo
what
happened" (Coldstream 62). Banks' illusion that he can achieve this
superhuman feat becomes increasingly divorced from the reality of the
situation
as the novel progresses until he is brought face to face with the false
image
he has been treasuring of his childhood world. "In each section,"
Ishiguro has said, Banks' "mind has gone further away from what we call
reality. When he goes back to Shanghai, we're really not quite sure if
it's the
real Shanghai or some mixture of memory and speculation" (Mudge).
Looked at structurally the book is organized into seven chronologically
sequential sections of varying length. Yet the dates only refer to the
time
when the narrative is being written which largely coincides with the
dates when
Banks recalls memories from the past. As one reviewer put it, in this
book
"the past is alive in the present" (Sutcliffe 49). More importantly
each section is structured in a non-chronological sequence that is
determined
by the emotional, subjective quirks of Banks' memory. Ishiguro has said
that he
is "more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than
what actually happened" ( Dunn). Ishiguro's rejection of any
chronological
imperative leaves him free to develop the narrative "tonally," as he
puts it (Mason 342), to use narrative structure to uncover the
structure of the
narrator's unconscious. Lacan's linguistic explanation of Freud's
conception of
the unconscious and its manifestation in the form of neurotic symptoms
is
relevant here:
[. . .] if [Freud] has taught us to follow the ascending ramification
of the
symbolic lineage in the text of the patient's free associations, in
order to
map it out at the points where its verbal forms intersect with the
nodal points
of its structure, then it is already quite clear that the symptom
resolves
itself entirely in an analysis of language, because the symptom is
itself
structured like a language, because it is from language that speech
must be
delivered. (59)
Banks' unconscious coincides to a great extent then not just with the
unconscious of his civilization but with the unconscious of the
text.
Part One focuses on Banks' first meetings with Sarah, but has
flashbacks to his
English schooldays and his traumatic return as a child from Shanghai.
Already
there appear to be discrepancies between his memories of his past and
those of
his old school friend, Osbourne, and of Colonel Chamberlain who
accompanied him
back to England. Part Two opens with another meeting with Sarah but then
reverts to memories of an earlier period of his childhood in Shanghai
spent
with his parents and Akira. This crucial section establishes some of
the key
childhood fantasies that will come to dominate his adult life. For
example the
section ends with Banks' dream, continued since the age of ten, of being
reunited with Akira when he returns to Shanghai, oblivious of the fact
that
almost twenty years have passed since he left, during which time Akira
could
have moved away, died, or simply changed into someone who no longer had
anything in common with Banks. When Banks finally enters the war zone
outside
the Settlement in Part Six he comes across a Japanese soldier whom he
persuades
himself must be Akira. The dialogue is carefully constructed to preserve
complete ambiguity concerning the identity of the Japanese soldier. He
can be
seen learning his part once he realizes that his survival depends on
Banks
assuming that he is Akira. When the Japanese soldier is finally
arrested on
suspicion of giving information to the enemy, Banks is forced to
recognize the
possibility that his childhood fantasy overwhelmed him: "I thought he
was
a friend of mine from my childhood. But now, I'm not so certain. I'm
beginning
to see now, many things aren't as I supposed" (297). In a lesser way too
Banks first ascribes a sentence to his mother when she was reproaching a
company inspector, and then, after reflecting on the inappropriateness
of the
accusation, re-ascribes it to her reproaching his father (63, 71,
74).
Part Three returns to the present for the most part, but it largely
concerns
Banks' adoption of Jennifer, herself an orphan, which only underlines
his
neurotic need to compensate for his own orphaned state. Parts Four,
Five and
Six all take place during the month in 1937 that Banks spends in
Shanghai
ostensibly to solve the mystery of his parents' disappearance a quarter
of
century earlier. The increased unreliability of Banks' account of these
experiences (as opposed to the experiences themselves) is indicated to
the
reader in the first chapter of Part Four by an incident already
mentioned - the
absurd concern of Grayson, an official of the Municipal Council, to
finalize
arrangements for the triumphant reception of Banks' released parents at
a
ceremony in Jessfield Park (169). An attentive reader will remember
that when
Banks was describing his and Akira's childhood game of playing
detectives,
"our narratives would always conclude with a magnificent ceremony held
in
Jessfield Park" (118). The fantasies of childhood are constantly in
danger
of taking control of the narrative from this point until the
dénouement. How
much of the horror of the war-torn Chapei district of Chinese Shanghai
is real
and how much is it based on Banks' recollection of Akira's invented
accounts of
his visits to the same district? How can we take literally the offer of
the
Chinese family occupying Banks' childhood home (which his parents did
not even
own) to hand it over to him now that he will need it for his parents
and his
old amah? Mr. Lin, the Chinese head of the family, seen by the child in
Banks
as representative of the wild Orient that encircled the seemingly
civilized
International Settlement of his boyhood, appears to be just another
outlet for
voicing Banks' infantile / colonial fantasies when he says to him: "Of
course, it is quite natural. You will wish to restore this house to
just the
way it was when you were a boy" (207). Equally clearly the expectations
of
the entire International Settlement that Banks will not just solve the
mystery
surrounding his parents' disappearance but will in the process restore
their
society to its former moral standards must be a projection of Banks.
(The
parallel with Ryder here is particularly close.) On the other hand,
don't
people in imminent danger of a collapse of their civilization regularly
project
their needs and fantasies onto potential saviors, however unsuitable?
We are in
that realm Ishiguro explores repeatedly, "where," he says, "
you're not quite sure what reality is" (Mudge).
Ishiguro has always suggested a connection in his fiction between the
personal
and the political personal and political repression, personal and
political
disintegration. In The Remains of the Day Stevens' personal
repression
of his emotional needs mirrors the repression implicit in the most
oppressive
form of nationalism. As Ishiguro has pointed out, the nostalgia for Old
England, for a mythical landscape that never actually existed, which is
cultivated by Stevens, is also used as a political tool by the
political right
to oppose trade unions, ban immigrants and blame the permissive sixties
for
ruining everything (Vorda 139). In When We Were Orphans Banks,
according
to Ishiguro, "does equate his subjective world crumbling with the world
around him hurtling toward the Second World War" (Mudge). Most of
Ishiguro's novels center on the period of Western history leading up to
World
War Two. Ishiguro told one interviewer that he is "drawn to periods of
history when the moral values in society have undergone a sudden change"
(Bigsby 26). What interests him is not history as such, but the way
these
critical periods of history expose the fault lines in human nature as
instanced
by his characters. Ishiguro stresses the need "to make a particular
[historical] setting actually take off [. . .] as metaphor and parable"
(Vorda 140). The initial draft of A Pale View of Hills was in
fact set
in England in the present. But he found that he "could write more
effectively if [he] changed the setting [to Japan] and put the whole
thing at a
greater distance" (Bigsby 26). He has pursued this strategy ever since.
Both setting and period are for Ishiguro primarily narrative devices
rather
than objective elements in his fiction. He has continued to employ them
figuratively in all his subsequent novels. As we have seen, in When
We Were
Orphans the state of being orphaned becomes an ahistorical fact of
existence. But situating Banks, his principal orphan, in the period
leading up
to the Second World War enlarges the metaphor. Banks' journey through
the
inferno of the Japanese-Chinese warfront is both a personal rite of
passage and
a vivid confrontation with the death and destruction produced by the
commercialism and imperialism of the industrial nations prior to the
War, death
that inevitably adds heavily to the number of children left orphaned.
Just as
Banks' protected childhood was bought at the price of his mother's
servitude to
a Chinese warlord, so the protected and privileged existence of the
wealthy
community living in the International Settlement was bought at the cost
of
widespread opium addiction and poverty among the Chinese population.
Banks, like Ishiguro, is a transnational torn between two countries and
cultures. When Colonel Chamberlain reassures Banks on the boat leaving
Shanghai
for England that finally he is going home, Banks bursts into tears of
rage:
"As I saw it, I was bound for a strange land where I did not know a
soul,
while the city steadily receding before me contained all I knew" (30).
Banks is simultaneously exiled from the safety of his childhood and
from the
city of his birth. What he discovers in the course of the novel is the
fact
that he cannot go back. No one can, as Colonel Hasegawa proves when he
quotes
from a Japanese court poet: "our childhood becomes like a foreign land
once we have grown" (297). He is permanently alienated from both his old
and new life. The orphaning of Banks parallels not just his enforced
journey
away from his childhood and childhood home and homeland, but also
Ishiguro's
journey away from narrative realism. As he matured Ishiguro found that
the
certainties and security of classic realist fiction, like those of
childhood,
have to be left behind. Banks' mythic journey to the heart of his own
repressed
fantasies is homologous to Ishiguro's journey as a novelist which he
describes
as "closing in on some strange, weird territory that for some
reason obsesses me" (Vorda 150). Ishiguro's compulsive return to this
territory in an attempt "to write out of something that is unresolved
somewhere deep down" (Vorda 151) comes strangely close to Banks'
obsession
compulsion.
As a child Banks, like his friend Akira, suffers from a fear that the
reason
his parents quarrel is that he isn't English enough. Uncle Philip
comforts him
by saying that because Banks has grown up in such a multiracial society
he is
bound to be "a bit of a mongrel" (79). But, Philip reassures him,
there would be fewer nationalistic wars if everyone grew up as Banks
has done:
"So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy" (80). Of course we all
know that Ishiguro himself grew up a bit of a mongrel, continuing to
observe
Japanese customs and speak Japanese at home while absorbing English
culture at
school and among his friends. From the start Ishiguro has addressed his
fiction
to an international readership. Ishiguro has said in a number of
interviews
that his bi-cultural upbringing helped him to appreciate the fact that
Britain
was no longer a major world power whose customs a writer could assume
would be
understood by readers beyond Britain. In one interview he explained how
this
realization inevitably involved his "moving away from realism."
Because he can't use the texture of English life in addressing a wider
audience, he says, "you start to create a slightly more fabulous world.
You start to use the landscape that you do know in a metaphorical way"
(Vorda 137-8).
shiguro has said that he found Shanghai "a rich setting to write about
the
issues of multiculturalism" (Kenney 47). His use of Shanghai in this
novel
exemplifies this move away from fictional realism. Apart from his use
of the
International Settlement as a metaphor for childhood (already noted),
he turns
the larger city of Shanghai in its entirety into a metaphor for the
meeting of
East and West; of the barbarity of Wang Ku, the Chinese warlord, and of
the
barbarity of Morganbrook and Byatt, the English firm his father works
for that
imports opium for profit; of the civility of both Japanese and Chinese
officers
to Banks, and of the civility of Englishmen like Colonel Chamberlain,
Mr.
Grayson, and even Uncle Philip to Banks, who frequently is insulting to
them.
In the very act of confronting each other East and West reveal their
essential
similarity, just as Akira and Banks share the same fear that they are
responsible for the perfectly normal parental disagreements that they
witness.
Even this comparison of the similarity of Eastern and Western childhood
experience is rendered metaphorically, by means of an image that
reverberates
throughout the novel. Akira quotes a Japanese monk who compared
children to the
twine that held the slats of a sun-blind together: "it was we children
who
bound not only a family, but the whole world together" (77). Next Banks
uses the same image to explain to Uncle Philip his fear that if he did
turn
"mongrel" everything might and he hesitates "'Like that
blind there'-I pointed-'if the twine broke. Everything might scatter'"
(80). Later Banks uses the same image in a wider social context to
attempt
(unsuccessfully) to reassure an English police inspector who has become
disillusioned by a horrific child murder:
'[. . .] And those of us whose duty it is to combat evil, we are . . .
how
might I put it? We're like the twine that holds together the slats of a
wooden
blind. Should we fail to hold strong, then everything will scatter.'
(144)
But, as one reviewer wrote, Banks is wrong, "for only if the strings
give
way can the light come in" (Carey). Banks is in effect urging the police
inspector to play the (impossible) childish role of binding the adult
community
thereby keeping the darkness at bay. That double take is not some
reviewer's
display of his own critical dexterity. It is intrinsic to the way
Ishiguro
writes. Nothing can be read simply at face value. His use of the full
resources
of the fiction writer's literary palette forces his readers to attend
to every
nuance and possible ambiguity in his writing.
That last quotation concerning the need to "combat evil" is
representative of one further aspect of Ishiguro's extensive
exploitation of
the literary in this novel -- his parodic use of the classic detective
genre.
This is not the first occasion on which he has parodied aspects of an
older
genre. Reviewing The Remains of the Day, Salman Rushdie called
the novel
"a brilliant subversion of the fictional modes from which it at first
seems to descend" (Rushdie 53). In the case of that novel it descends
from
the genre of the English country house comedy made popular by P. G.
Wodehouse.
As Ishiguro explains, having "deliberately created a world which at
first
resembles that of those writers such as P. G. Wodehouse," he then starts
to "undermine this myth and use it in a slightly twisted and different
way" (Vorda 140). In When We Were Orphans Ishiguro is parodying a
genre that already tends to parody itself the detective novel. Just as
Ryder
in The Unconsoled deals with his parents' separation from him by
what
Shaffer calls "a strategy of denial, fantasy, sublimation, and later,
music-making" (105), so does Banks do likewise, resorting to detection
in
place of music-making. Banks' outstanding reputation as a detective can
be
viewed as his unconscious adult compensation for the impotence of his
childhood
games of detection. But Ishiguro gives this psychological
interpretation a
distinctly literary dimension by his parodic references to the classic
detective novel featuring the likes of Sherlock Holmes (to whom Banks is
jokingly compared eight pages into the book). It is fascinating to
learn from
Ishiguro that he excised 110 pages from the manuscript in which Banks
performed
as a classic literary sleuth, because "the pasteboard figures wheeled on
'simply to be suspects' in a traditional whodunnit could never co-exist
with
more solid characters" (Tonkin 9). What we are left with is an old
fashioned detective thrust into a modern world where evil can no longer
be
confined to a lone murderer uncovered by a Poirot or a Holmes.
W. H. Auden has offered one of the best diagnoses of the formula
underlying
classic detective fiction:
The magic formula is an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt;
then a
suspicion of being the guilty one; and finally a real innocence from
which the
guilty other has been expelled, a cure effected, not by me or my
neighbors, but
by the miraculous intervention of a genius from outside who removes
guilt by
giving knowledge of guilt. (158)
In other words the classic detective novel creates a closed world from
which
evil can be separated and expelled. It represents a primitive desire
for a
prelapsarian world of innocence. In it evil, like the serpent, is an
extraneous
element that attempts to invade this paradisal state and can be
defeated by the
forces of righteousness. This is the ingenuous position Banks adopts
throughout
the larger part of the novel: "My intention was to combat evil-in
particular,
evil of the insidious, furtive kind" (22). Ishiguro has commented on the
irony "that this genre should have flourished as a kind of therapeutic
reaction to the horrors of the Great War" (Tonkin 9). There is something
essentially escapist about the entire genre and the inter-war society
that made
it popular. It is fitting that Banks, like the citizens of the
International
Settlement, should be pictured as escapist in his / their belief that a
solution can be found to the complex contemporary web of evil and
corruption in
which they are really implicated. This fantasy in which "a greater
man," an outsider, would go "to where the heart of the serpent lies
and slay the thing once and for all" (144) is essentially a childhood
dream
still harbored in adult life. Banks' childishness, then, is exposed by
Ishiguro
as much through his parody of genre as through more psychologically
realist
means. At the same time Banks is ultimately made to face the far more
complex
complicity of good with evil - of his father's act of family betrayal,
of the
villainous warlord's honor in keeping to his bargain to provide young
Banks
with a generous financial allowance, of the simultaneous savagery and
humanity
of soldiers fighting on both sides of the Chinese-Japanese war.
Banks also learns to recognize the childishness of his dream of
cleansing the
world of evil through his work as a detective. In the only case we
witness, his
attempt to solve the case of his disappearing parents, is hopelessly
misguided.
It is his expectation that he can eradicate evil from his world that
misleads
him and makes him miss the vital clues. Or rather it is his proximity
to his
fictional antecedents Holmes, Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey that blind
him to
the ubiquity of evil in the modern world he inhabits. "My great vocation
got in the way of quite a lot, all in all," Banks reflects in the finale
(331). The novel ends with Banks finally at peace with himself and the
world,
once he has abandoned the attempt to live out the fantasies of his
literary
predecessors and childhood self. He has at last come to recognize the
universality of his orphaned state, to adopt (with the reader) a
metaphorical
understanding of his circumstances and his world. In typically ambiguous
fashion he concludes that for most of us, "our fate is to face the world
as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents"
(335-6). Whether this observation represents a deep insight into the
workings
of our collective psyche or a palliative for Banks' own wasted life is,
as
always in Ishiguro's skillfully polished work, impossible to determine.
What is
so satisfying about Ishiguro's fiction is the way he employs fictional
means to
establish connections between the personal and the social / political,
and
between the present and the past. It seems inevitable that he should
have been
drawn to non-realist modes of writing in order to establish the reality
of such
connections. Like Stephen Dedalus, Ishiguro remains within or behind or
beyond
or above his handiwork, leaving the esthetic image (as Stephen calls
the work
of art) to work on us principally in esthetic and imagistic ways.
Notes
1. In 1923 Freud renamed what he had called the "ego-ideal" the
superego, which he held responsible for secondary repression. The
superego
arises as the last of the great primal repressions which makes
secondary or
psychological repression possible. See pages 3-59 of Freud's "The Ego
and
the Id." Vol. 19 of The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Trans. James Strachey.
London:
Hogarth, 1953-1974.
2. I am indebted to Michael North at UCLA for his suggestions for
changes to an
earlier draft of this essay.
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Copyright
2001 Brian H Finney <http://www.csulb.edu
/~bhfinney/ishiguro.htm>l
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