Ishiguro – in intercultural voices

Sauerberg, Lars Ole. Intercultural Voices in Contemporary British Literature: The

Implosion of Empire. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

A.S. Byatt in her introduction to The Oxford Book of English Short Stories notes about
V.S. Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro:

Both these writers use the English language perfectly, and with full knowledge of what
has been written in it, to do something detached from Englishness, looking at
Englishness.

( Byatt, 1998a:xxix ; original emphasis)

Ishiguro and Naipaul may indeed raise eyebrows at the hint of patronising attitude in the
first sentence of this statement, but it is certainly true of both writers that they cultivate
detachment in terms of nationality as a vantage point for approaching Britishness – in
their cases Englishness is certainly too narrow a frame of reference – from intercultural
angles. For Naipaul his ‘triple citizenship’ as British, West Indian and Indian has given
him the possibility of cultivating several detachments vis-à-vis cultures of origin and of
adoption, whereas for Ishiguro his coming to Britain in 1960 as a six-year-old child and
going through a traditional British education must have given him only the vaguest sense
of country of origin against the actuality of the adopted country. But then, perhaps,
Leavis's ‘ideal civilized sensibility’ is the privilege of the writer for whom the double
vision of immigrant and native in relation to Britain is not a question of perfect balance
between the two, but of having the former outweighed by the latter, leaving the
naturalised immigrant with just enough sense of foreignness to experience the adopted
country like a doctor treating a dear relative with love and clinical distance
simultaneously. Henry James and Joseph Conrad share this double vision of the
naturalised foreigner with Naipaul and Ishiguro, whereas of course the same can hardly
be said of Jane Austen, George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Yet it may be argued that a
similar kind of detachment is at work in these writers, for whom

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there was a distance between actual and desired situations: for Jane Austen the social
distance between parsonage and gentry, for George Eliot the imposed distance of the
female writer forced to market her writings under a man's name, and for Lawrence the
distance between what he saw as a petrified civilisation only to be redeemed by a greater
physical awareness.

Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills shares its narrative structure with An Artist of the
Floating World (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1989) whereas the structure is
somewhat different in The Unconsoled (1995), with a return to a (semi-)realistic universe
in When We Were Orphans (2000). Characteristic of the first three novels is a narrative
technique comparable to Browning's in the monologues: a partly deliberate partly
unconscious repression of central events and elements in the narrator's life, the gaps
however making the reader gradually aware of the true state of things. Detachment,
distance and repression thus become aspects of the same phenomenon: the reluctance to
come to terms with an unpleasant, perhaps even mentally destructive, reality.

In A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World we overhear Japanese people
reflecting on their lives, only hinting at the events which have determined their present
circumstances. In A Pale View of Hills there seems to be a traumatic event lurking in the
past of what appears to be a perfectly assimilated and well-balanced person. Once the
reader begins to piece together the past of the women living in the aftermath of the
nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there appears as image of a narrator
desperately holding on to normality by refusing to face certain events back there;
allowing them access would mean instantaneous mental breakdown.

In An Artist of the Floating World the situation is somewhat different, since here we have
to do with a narrator, who has deliberately chosen to distance himself from his past as an
artist contributing to the Japanese war effort by making war propaganda, a past now
frowned upon and blocking his post-war career. The narrator remains unconvinced of his
war crimes, but allows them to dwindle into the background by letting everyday
trivialities possess him totally.

The Remains of the Day follows this pattern, only this time transposed into the 1950s –
July 1956 – when Stevens, a butler

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‘inherited’ by the new American owner of a distinguished English country house,

combines business with pleasure when he sets out on a motor journey to call on a former
housekeeper to persuade her to rejoin the service staff. As he motors through a
countryscape fulfilling all the stereotypical expectations of ‘olde Englande’, he muses on
his past, taking pride in his professional behaviour throughout a lifetime of service to
Lord Darlington. As his complacent thoughts proceed, the reader is made aware of a man
with a pathologically stunted emotional life, always determined to carry on in his duties
without regarding any larger or alternative contexts.

Ishiguro's novel is a brilliantly exercised portrait of a person driven to emotional

destruction by an overwhelming sense of duty, a sense which surely has origins which
psychoanalysis would reveal. But the novel is more than the drawing of a complex
portrait. It is a subtle indictment of certain political activities in pre-war Britain for which
the butler's emotional tunnel vision becomes a metaphor.

If it is possible to talk about repressed national memories, then the sympathy for the Nazi
cause in prewar Britain in the British Union of Fascists led by Sir Oswald Mosley is one
such case. The fictional Lord Darlington in Ishiguro's novel has secret meetings with
German officials and British sympathisers while the butler and his staff are expected to
be part of the furniture. So they become ‘partners in crime’ by their silence and lack of
initiative.
In terms of discourse a postmodernist tour de force, The Remains of the Day explodes
two well-entrenched British myths at the same time: the validity of the stiff upper lip and
the image of all the nation united to fight the Nazis. It offers a fictional glimpse into a
part of the past excluded from the notion of a Britain united in concerted war effort
against Nazism. Using the figure of the loyal butler, a phenomenon greatly amplified in
literature, Ishiguro uses one myth-related construct to reveal the cracks of another. But in
this hall of mythical mirrors one begins to wonder if the novel is not indeed, in allegorical
fashion, a more general indictment of a post-war Britain, like the butler, refusing to get
new bearings in a new world – the old castle now owned by an American businessman –
and happily ignoring the lessons of the past. The novel qualifies, in the light of such a
reading, as

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a text engaging with issues familiar from post-colonial writings, but definitely in terms of
morals, not of the social or political.