Ishiguro and the Uncanny Abyss
We aren’t owed an exposition.
What’s the feeling you get immediately after finishing a novel? Is it disorientation, as you snap back to reality from the twilight? Is it wistfulness for having to part from characters you’ve grown to care about?
With the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, I find myself returning to another feeling and it’s guilt.
Be warned: there be spoilers in them waters. Please stop and read Never Let Me Go, Klara and the Sun, and A Village After Back, if you haven’t already. You can thank me after.
Ishiguro’s stories tempt you with alternative worlds, spectrally similar to ours but with a ghoulish twist of fantasy or science fiction. The dark facts of these worlds, however, are revealed to us only partially, through the constraints of first-person narration. Ishiguro fully understands the stipulation of a first-person contract: in exchange for emotional depth, a more direct connection, or even for the defiant joy of uncertainty, we, as readers, will give up our demand for a definitive account of events.
In Never Let Me Go, Kathy H. learns that she’s not only a clone but an organ incubator. The Britain of the novel, having apparently peeled off its Christian conscience and sentimental reservations, has launched a nationwide industry of clone farms, where replicated people are raised, tutored and socialized. They are treated almost like humans. Until, that is, their organs are needed to prolong the lives of others. Kathy learns about her doomed destiny at a young age. But to us, the horror and the injustice are mediated through Kathy’s selective attention — it’s not the ethics of organ farming with which she’s primarily concerned, but with her friend Ruth and her lover Tommy (and the love triangle that forms between them).
This leaves the details of Kathy’s world — the politics, public opinion, the science of cloning — something to be guessed at.1 Why should she, our narrator, fritter any more of her remaining time on contemplating political realities which, for the most part, she already takes for granted?2 We, the voyeurs to her thoughts, aren’t owed an exposition.
By the time she concludes her role as a carer — nursing her fellow clones, including Tommy, as their final life parts are extracted — and moves on to become a donor herself, we no longer care much about the politics either.
Klara, from Klara and the Sun, has a different problem: she’s an Artificial Friend. Part toy part valet, she’s been designed by the best (remaining) minds in a hyper-automated, post-labor America to offer comfort, guidance, and companionship to wealthy and increasingly-alienated adolescents. The cause of alienation — and of the need for AFs — is that to even have a hope at a career, kids must be lifted, that is, have their genes edited to enhance cognitive abilities. (Ishiguro deserves the Ministry of Truth award for euphemisms.) Once lifted, children undergo an extended period of physical weakness during which they remain homebound, educated exclusively by virtual tutors.
For Klara, the problem of perception is not simply that of a limited preoccupation, like Kathy, but of an alien model of reality. Klara, a robot with artificial general intelligence, perceives the world in boxes — literally. Her attention breaks down her surrounding into boxes of data — spatial, motional, sequential, emotional — and stores them up as Lockean “impressions,” memories from which deeper inferences can be drawn. A nondescript copse of grass might merit only one box, but the face of a family member flashing a complicated set of emotions might call for at least 8 boxes (6 of which to capture discrete eye movements).
Again, we rely on the account of a narrator whose grasp of reality is foreign to us, this time qualitatively, Thomas Nagel-y foreign.
Details about the civil unrest spreading through the country in response to monumental unemployment and irreducible inequality predictably recedes into the background of Klara’s attention — these have little consequence to her duty of tending to her human’s wellbeing. Less predictable are the conclusions Klara reaches using the data to which she does pay attention. Embodying the finest network of machine learning, Klara’s mind follows algorithms utterly opaque to her humans, even to her makers. But as readers we get to glimpse under the hood and watch, at times with exasperating frustration, as she follows her cold, imperturbable logic from one faulty conclusion to the next until from them all emerges a rigid, ecumenical system of beliefs and superstitions. By the end, the reader may find himself even wishing against his better sense that Klara’s fantastical suppositions turn out to be true.
Bad logic isn’t Klara’s only vulnerability. As part of her mission to placate the deity whose existence she had herself inferred, Klara decides to sacrifice a part of herself, leaving her irrevocably damaged. Her sensory faculties deteriorate. To her eyes, the world flattens into a two dimensional sketch populated by geometrical blocks, blotches of color and fleeting shapes. Later, the tissues connecting her memories wear thinner and thinner until one bit of recollection begins to show through the other, like diaphanous lines of fabric folded into each other.
Ishiguro’s characters exhibit the ease with which humans shed their humanity piece by piece. Kathy must cede her internal parts by law. Klara does so by her sense of duty. Both fulfill what they accept to be their purpose with infuriating stolidity. If for a brief chapter they contemplate rebelling against the coming darkness it’s only so that they can quickly dismiss the notion as absurd. Fatalism is ultimately taken in stride (if occasionally a staggered one). That their short lives are coming to an end — “completion” for Kathy, “the long fade” for Klara — layers their serenity with melancholy, but doesn’t cause disruption. The system for which they have both been sacrificed is no more reformable than the very order of life and its petulant brevity.
Then there’s Fletcher, who in A Village After Dark, one of the few short stories I consider unforgettable, returns to his old hamlet to discover that he doesn’t recognize a single face there. Like the other two, this story is often described as a post-apocalyptic dystopia but, for my own biases, I read it more as the distorted, demented impressions of a mind in decline. (Though I suppose to take the world of a schizophrenic literally must itself count as dystopian.) Fletcher is angry to find unfamiliar and potentially hostile faces in what he believes used to be his home. Are these the faces of survivors of a cataclysm squatting in his house or of Fletcher’s children and grandchildren, simply decathected from all memories and emotional bonds?
Epistemic flaws are both the device and the tragedy itself. Ishiguro sees the uncanniness of our common experience. It’s all artificial, all reproducible, all unremarkably ephemeral. But it’s also the point of everything, it’s all there is and it’s absolutely inimitable. It’s a valley and an abyss.
The story of a clone waiting to be harvested for parts or of a robot anticipating the winding down of its software or of an old man unable to find his home brings us to the edge of being human — and humanity is always liminal in Ishiguro. It reaches a zenith when we love so strongly that it drives us to make absurd and useless sacrifices, but also and just as much when we simply sit with friends to read poetry or listen to music, and then argue about poetry and music.3 Or perhaps the zenith is really at that cruel moment when finally we catch a clear glimpse at how stupidly easy it is to be blown into consciousness only to be just as easily swept out of it.
It’s at such cruel moments that we tend to leave our narrators, or soon after. In turning the last page, we leave them to their loneliness and long fading, and for whatever reason I just can’t help but feel guilty.
The politics of the world occupy her only insofar as she can affect them in order to extend her time on earth with Tommy, which of course she can't.
This, to be fair, is the way with most first person narrators; the gaps in what’s being told always more revealing than anything divulged. What is it that a narrator finds necessary to conceal? What is it that she takes for granted? The term “unreliable narrator” always struck me as redundant.
Ishiguro’s characters tend to longingly recall, usually as their own lives begin to sunset, the experience of carelessly arguing and philosophizing with friends.