#好书奇遇季 #
This article is compiled from the New York Times article "Kazuo Ishiguro Sees What the Future Is Doing to Us" by Giles Harvey.
Recently, Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro unveiled his latest novel, and he once again observed the fragility of our humanity in this age of technology.
On a bright Saturday in late October 1983, nearly 250,000 people took to the streets of central London as the possibility of a nuclear war between the world's two superpowers increased. Among the crowd was a young author named Kazuo Ishiguro, who had just published his first novel. Kazuo Ishiguro's mother survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945, so he joined the parade out of a sense of personal responsibility. Along with like-minded friends, he shouted slogans demanding that the West give up its nuclear weapons and hope that the East would follow. On the way from Big Ben to Hyde Park, they waved signs and banners, and the crowd surged with excitement. At the same time, there were naysayers all over Europe, and for a brief moment it seemed as if they could really change something. But Kazuo Ishiguro thought of a problem: he was worried that the whole thing would be a huge mistake.
In theory, unilateral abandonment of weapons is good, but in practice, it can lead to disastrous consequences. Maybe the Soviets would respond as expected, but Kazuo Ishiguro also thought of a less peaceful outcome. Even though he approved that the parade was well-intentioned, he feared that people would succumb to the inducements of popular emotions and go off track. His parents and grandparents experienced the rise and fall of fascism, and from an early age, they heard terrible stories about the power of the masses. Although Britain in the '80s was very different from Japan in the '30s, he recognized some common traits: tribalism, impatience with the nuances of distinction, and the pressure of ordinary people to choose camps. As a gentle and cautious person, Kazuo Ishiguro did not want to realize at the end of his life that he had chosen the wrong career.
These anxieties found an outlet in the novel he wrote at the time, The Ukiyo-e Painter. The narrator of the novel, Shinji Ono, is a man who waits too long to ask himself if he has supported the wrong cause. As an elderly painter living in Japan in the late 1940s, Ono suffered a moral lashes: his paintings of praise for Japanese imperialism, once a source of glory and fame, became shameful in the postwar era. Looking back on his own life, he tried to reconcile with his choices. Nietzsche once explained psychological repression so succinctly: "Memory says you did it; but self-esteem replied, no, I can't." In the end, the memory succumbed." In Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, behind Ono's strong arguments, the difficult battle of self-esteem and memory involves what he has been carefully hiding from himself.
Kazuo Ishiguro, 66, is now approaching the age of the shameful protagonist he imagined when he was younger. If he hadn't lived in the wrongs as he had feared, he would have underestimated that— Kazuo Ishiguro, the master of subtlety, had been doing it for nearly 40 years. In 2017, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature – the highest recognition a writer can get for its existence. Announcing the award, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences described it as follows: "Kazuo Ishiguro's novels, with their immense emotional power, unearth the abyss hidden beneath the illusion of our connection to the world". Whether it is Ono in "Ukiyo-e Painters" or Stevens, the English butler described in "Long Days Leaving Traces" (winner of the Booker Prize in 1989), he is a person who has rarely known himself. It wasn't until later in life that Stevens realized that he had made a mess of things—rejecting the woman he loved, wasting his best years, and serving a sympathetic Nazi master between world wars.
Ishiguro had won numerous awards long before the Nobel Prize was announced, but the accolade never stopped him from asking the question that had plagued him in 1983: "What if I'm wrong?" What if I make a terrible mistake?" On the evening of December 7, 2017, he confessed to the audience of the award-winning speech that he began to wonder if he had built the novel's house on the beach. "Recently I woke up to the fact that I've lived in a bubble all these years," he said behind a gold-plated podium, "and I realized that my world, the humorous, liberal people, the civilized and exciting world, was much smaller than I thought." The clamor and discontent exposed by Brexit and Trump's rise have forced him to acknowledge a disturbing reality. "I grew up believing that liberal humanist values were unstoppable," he said, "and that could be an illusion."
Kazuo Ishiguro's new book, Clara and the Sun, is his first work since winning the Nobel Prize, more or less connecting with the questions he raised in his acceptance speech. The novel is set in the near-future United States, where society is more divided than it is today, and the values of liberal humanism seem to be on the verge of disappearing. Correspondingly, our window into the world is no longer a human being, but a bionic robot driven by artificial intelligence. Its name is Klara, or rather " her " — a pronoun choice that is key to the novel's moral baggage. The book's shift in the category of human self-perception raises a series of pressing but overlooked questions. If one day consciousness could be replicated in a machine, would it still make sense to talk about a unique self, or would our own particularity go the same way to disappear as a transistor radio?
Unlike his awkward narrator, Ishiguro is a quirky, funny, self-deprecating man who feels comfortable using his talents. Recently, he told reporters, "If it weren't for the script I wrote, I think it would be a pretty good movie." He was referring to "The Countess" (2005), a complete failure film shot by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant. The two had better luck in the film "Farewell to a Love Day" (1994) adapted from "Long Days", which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture. Perhaps, when everyone is saying how amazing you are, it is easier to be humble. Kazuo Ishiguro seems to receive an award on average every year, but there's something about him, a flickering demeanor that makes you think that no matter what kind of parallel world he is in. Robert McCrum, a longtime friend and former editor, said: "There is no darkness in him. Or even if there had been, I hadn't seen it."
His people were like this, so he wrote, and Kazuo Ishiguro's writing did not need to prove anything. Contemporaries, such as those of Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie, sometimes resemble a vehicle for talent, with gorgeous prose and exquisite skill that overwhelms the reader, but the beauty of the individual parts does not equal the beauty of the whole. Kazuo Ishiguro, on the other hand, is a self-effacing craftsman who takes the opposite approach to stunning. At first glance, his books would seem ordinary.
"It seems that the plan for the long trip that has been on my mind these days is becoming more and more like it is really going to come true."
This is the first sentence of "long days leaving traces", and it is not amazing. The real effect is between the lines, or behind the lines, as Stevens defended his favorite sentimental romance novels: "They can strengthen a person's mastery of the English language in a very effective way." As for the fact that they can also provide fantasies for a disheartened middle-aged bachelor, that is what the reader has to deduce. Ishiguro's listing of Charlotte Brontë as the novelist who had the greatest influence on him is not unreasonable. From "Jane Eyre," he learns how to write in the first person the story of a narrator who hides feelings for himself but can be seen by others. A few years ago he reread "Jane Eyre" and saw some episodes that he would always think: Oh my God, I'm just a poor parody of it!
Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel continues this beneficial "theft". The protagonist Clara is an A.F. (Artificial Friend), similar to a governess, who is looking for a job. The first time we met her (or "she" for the time being) was in the window of a storefront, eager to meet her future owner. At the same time, she had to adapt to street life. The interesting thing about the opening of the novel is that we can see how Clara's new, synthetic consciousness gradually awakens. At first, she learned about things like space, color, light, etc. Using solar power), but soon she began to think about more esoteric realities, such as the rigid caste system that shaped the society, and she was both a product of this society and a witness to it.
From his teenage years to his early twenties, Kazuo Ishiguro also wanted to become a singer and composer. He was walking around with shoulder-length hair, goatee, and worn-out jeans and colorful short sleeves. But now, his long hair and beard are gone, and he wears only black (his daughter Naomi told reporters that he hates shopping but wants to dress well, so he bought a thousand black T-shirts). On the night of the interview he looked cool, dressed in black, with rimless glasses, sitting in front of a monitor. To his right there was a bookshelf filled with the Penguin Classics series, and the bed to his left was crowded with furry animals (the reporter wanted to see his room, and he agreed).
Kazuo Ishiguro in Kent, England, in the summer of 1977.
Kazuo Ishiguro likes to compare their post-war generation to the role of Buster Keaton in Captain II. In the classic scene of the film, Buster Keaton is standing in front of a house whose façade is dumped on him, but an open window passes through him cleanly and saves him.
Kazuo Ishiguro said in an appropriate, steady tone, "We don't realize how lucky we are. If we had been born a little earlier, we would have experienced wars and massacres — all barbarism." But they inherited an incredibly comfortable material world, and the culmination of the post-sexual liberation movement in the 60s brought the world to maturity. "For my daughter's generation, it's not so safe," he said. In the West, since the end of the Cold War, we have allowed large-scale inequality to rise, and as a result, quite a few people think that this may not be for us."
Another theme of the story is technology that is always becoming more complex. In "Clara and the Sun," the widespread use of artificial intelligence has created a permanently unemployed class, which in turn has led to massive revolts and top-down repression. Most contemporary stories about artificial intelligence, even if well-written, such as Alex Garland's "Mechanical Ji" and Ian McEwan's "Machines Like Me," are clichés about the rise of robots as slaves to overthrow human domination. Kazuo Ishiguro's imagination is more practical and bleak. Clara and her peers didn't rebel, just let the government and corporations control people more effectively.
On a philosophical level, AI also puts pressure on the traditional view that humans are special. As one of the characters in the novel puts it, there is something unattainable in each of us that makes us think for ourselves, but it's just an illusion: humans are just the sum of a series of biochemical processes. Kazuo Ishiguro said: "One of the assumptions of liberalism is that human beings have intrinsic value, and that this value is not conditional on contributions to society, the economy, or some common cause. If from now on we can even be reduced to a bunch of algorithms, it will seriously erode the idea that everyone is unique and therefore worthy of respect and concern, whether or not we can contribute to a common cause."
Of course, Kazuo Ishiguro is a novelist, not a philosopher. The power of his books comes from being able to make clear the dangers faced by people in this abstract proposition. This danger began to emerge from the moment Clara was singled out in a bunch of A.F. in the store by a young man named Josie. Josie suffers from an unknown disease. At first, her family seemed like readers, not knowing how to get along with Clara. To them, Clara is like something somewhere between an Au Pair and a household appliance. Kazuo Ishiguro showed great sympathy in these contradictions. One second, Clara was happy to see Josie confide in her like a sister, and the next second she rudely ordered her to leave the room. For a long time, Clara just stood in the corner without complaint, waiting to serve everyone.
Great stylists such as Armis re-acquainted ourselves with the physical world, for example, describing the steam rising from the fences of New York City's sidewalks as "carnivorous elves with the smell of the subway." But Kazuo Ishiguro is more complex and simpler: he uses fairly simple sentences to familiarize people with their situation. The face of the strange creature that he saw again and again in his work, distorted by pain, was originally a mirror. In "Don't Forget Me" (2005), which critic James Wood calls "one of the central novels of our time," the narrator is a clone named Kathy H. As a young woman, Kathy attended a prestigious British boarding school called Hailsham, where she received a solid liberal arts education with others like her, while gradually realizing her true social role: acting as an organ donor for non-clones. Shortly after graduation, this involuntary affair begins and does not end until the donor "finishes" (i.e., dies), and generally when they "finish" they are in their early 30s.
Casey knew what was going to happen, but she told her story and seemed to accept her fate without self-pity or panic. The way she describes it all almost has a sense of stoic humor, as if state-approved organ theft is just another little annoyance in life, like a tax return or a parking ticket. "Why don't they scream?" Readers are curious about the prisoners in these death camps. Their situation seems to be a nightmare, a sadistic abbreviated tragedy of life— until we realize that it differs from us only in the details, and sooner or later we will all move towards an inevitable fate.
As the narrator of the story, Clara is much the same as Casey. As Josie invests more and more emotion in her new A.F., it also reflects the emotions that the reader is invested in. Over time in the book, the crack between "it" and "her" gradually narrows. Whether this crack can, or should disappear, is a provocative, open-ended question. However, Clara's experience of heavy emotional labor in an increasingly unstable job market bears similarities with our own experience. Speaking about his preference for seemingly outrageous narrators, Ishiguro said, "You can get the reader to let go of their guard and they will suddenly realize that the person they've been reading isn't that strange. I want them to realize: This is us, this is me."
Like Guernica and Chernobyl, the word "Nagasaki" is more of a symbol of human destruction than an actual place name. However, for the young Ishiguro, it was only his hometown. By the time he was born in 1954, the city had been largely rebuilt and no one was talking about war. In his early years, he spent time in a three-generation house of tatami and shojimon, which often appears in director Yasujiro Ozu's films, symbolizing a way of life that is disappearing. No washing machine, no TV. In order to watch his favorite show", "Lone Ranger", Ishiguro had to go to a friend's house next door.
Kazuo Ishiguro's father, Mamoru Ishiguro, was an oceanographer whose research on storm surges piqued the british government's interest. In 1960, he moved his young family to Guildford, a small market town an hour's drive from London, to work on short-term research. Like Nagasaki, Guildford is a place with traditional customs. Narrow, winding paths are often blocked by cows, and milk is still transported by horse-drawn carriages. When the Ishiguros arrived, it was Easter, and they were struck by the terrible images they kept seeing in the town: a man crucified and blood spilling from his sides. Everyone there was white, even continental Europeans. However, the newcomers received a warm reception. Kazuo Ishiguro quickly learned English, and in school, he learned to turn his foreignness into his own advantage. For example, he says he's an expert in judo. He also began to go to church and became the head of the choir. His family believes it's important to respect the local way of life, no matter how outlandish those ways may seem.
Kazuo Ishiguro with his parents, 1963, United Kingdom.
Moving to the UK was originally only temporary, but Ishiguro's annual research funding was extended and his return to Japan was delayed. Growing up between the two cultures, Kazuo Ishiguro absorbs his surroundings with an almost ethnographic sense of alienation, while also constructing a mythical image of his distant homeland when he was 5 years old. From his mother Shizuko (a former teacher), he heard horrific scenes of life during the war: a man whose skin had been completely burned by an atomic bomb and survived in a basin of water; a glimpse of a cow's head from the window of a moving train, but the rest of the cow's body was missing. In the comics and books that his grandparents regularly sent, he depicted a more appealing picture of Japan. For Ishiguro, being Japanese was a personal source of confidence, but the more deeply he was rooted in Britain, the harder it was to imagine how to go back. In the late 1960s, his parents decided to stay in The UK forever, which gave him a sigh of relief.
Unlike many future novelists, Ishiguro did not inhale the classics extensively as a teenager. He spends his time listening to music and composing music. In 1968, he bought his first Bob Dylan album, John Wesley Harding, and from there he began to go back. He and his friends would sit for hours, nodding along with Dylan's obscure lyrics, as if they could understand every word. He told reporters that it was like a microcosm of adolescence, pretending to know but not knowing anything. Ishiguro, though, wasn't just bluffing. From Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell, he learned about the possibility of first-person: how to summon a character in just a few words.
Ishiguro's daughter Naomi is also about to publish her first novel, Common Ground. She told reporters that in all of her father's characters, she did not recognize his shadow, and later she corrected her own statement. The obsession of the mischievous grandson of "Ukiyo painter" Ino with "Popeye" and "Lone Ranger" reveals the nascent hegemony of American culture, and it is likely that Ishiguro was the same at that time. Here, however, the similarity stops. Borrowing from singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer, Naomi says, "Some people turn down the stirrer of art so you can see where everything comes from. Some people set it up so high that you can't see it." Ishiguro's art blender was driven to a high end. Like Colson Whitehead or Hilary Mantel, he's more likely to reveal the voices of people who are different from him.
However, it is tempting to draw a line between Ishiguro's fragmentary immigration experiences and the outsider narrative angles he later pursues. Stevens in "The Long Day" is a perfect British butler, but as his new American boss points out, he has been confined to a stately house for so long that he has little chance of actually seeing Britain. On the advice of his employer, he traveled to the western countryside, where he looked like a helpless foreign tourist, lost, without oil, and completely unable to understand the locals. In fact, what puzzled Stevens was not the British, but the human beings in general. At the end of the book, Stevens watches the sunset on the pier by the sea, observing with great interest a group of people gathered nearby:
"At first I assumed that they were a bunch of friends who were out together at night. But after listening to their conversation for a while, I realized that they were nothing more than a bunch of strangers who happened to meet in the place behind me. Apparently, they had all stopped and watched for a while, waiting for the moment when the lights first came on, and then they continued to talk in a friendly way. At this moment they were under my gaze, laughing happily together. It's strange that people can build up warm feelings with each other so quickly. 」
Like Clara gazing at the crowd from the storefront window, Stevens may be watching the Aurora Borealis, always amazed at what is commonplace.
Before studying English and philosophy at the University of Kent, Ishiguro hitchhiked around the United States, and after returning home he worked various jobs, even hunting grouse for Queen Elizabeth at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. About a mile into the trenches, Queen Elizabeth and her guests sat with shotguns and waited, and the grouse hunters would trudge among the heather of the wasteland and drive the birds into range. At the end of the season, Her Majesty the Queen hosts a cocktail party for the catchers. Kazuo Ishiguro was impressed by her kindness, especially how she let them know it was time to leave: although it was late, she did not turn on the lights, and when the sun began to set, she murmured, "Oh, it's dark" and invited the guests to see a series of paintings that happened to be placed in the corridor leading to the exit.
If the experience gave him a behind-the-scenes look at a magnificent old-fashioned country house, the job he found after graduation at an organisation that helped the homeless find housing in west London gave him an insight into life on the other side of the social spectrum. While working there, he met Lorna MacDougall, a social worker from Glasgow, with whom he later married. MacDougall was Ishiguro's first and most important reader, and her comments were unapologetic. After reading the first 80 pages of his last novel, The Buried Giant (2015), she told him that the flashy dialogue didn't work at all and that he needed to start over. Ishiguro did.
He has always been open to feedback. In 1979, Kazuo Ishiguro applied to and was admitted to the Creative Writing Program at the University of East Anglia. An old friend of his, Jim Green, who was studying for a Master of Arts at the time, remembers Ishiguro's reaction to weekly readings at a 19th-century fiction seminar. "I was impressed by the way he talked about Stendhal, Dickens, Eliot or Balzac, as if they were fellow travelers," Green said. There wasn't a hint of arrogance or exaggeration, but he treated them like colleagues in creative writing classes who were showing him their work. It's like, ah, well, that's why it happens, and that's how it's done, well, I don't know if that works."
Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel, Shadow of the Far Mountains, began at the University of East Anglia and is set primarily in the heart of Japan, a replica of an imaginary home he left when he was 5 years old and never returned. Like almost all of his later works, it is an anxious self-justifying monologue, and the narrator has always said that he does not feel the need to defend himself. Etsuko is a middle-aged Japanese woman living in the UK who recently committed suicide. At the beginning, the reader expects some sort of awakening of the characters to tragedy, while instead, Etsuko continues to talk about a woman she met in Nagasaki years ago, and her mischievous daughter. Gradually, we begin to suspect that an act of narrative transfer is taking place, and the sad and numb Yueko is transferring her uncontrollable feelings for her daughter to these characters of the past. If it weren't for the apparent success of this transfer experiment, the novel might have acquired the label of "experimental" . The novel was published in 1982 and received widespread acclaim, when Ishiguro was only 27 years old. The following spring, the literary magazine Granta included him in the list of Britain's best young novelists, along with Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. The recognition of the magazine emboldened him, and he decided to quit his job and devote himself full-time to literary creation.
Kazuo Ishiguro receives the Nobel Prize in Literature from King Karl XVI Gustav of Sweden, December 2017.
Ishiguro is not the kind of writer who listens to the dictations of his characters. He never sat at his desk to improvise and suddenly started novels. He would plan patiently and meticulously. Before he starts writing formally, he spends years engaging in an open-ended conversation with himself, joting down the tone, background, perspective, motivation, and other ins and outs of the world he wants to build. "Casey's self-deception is not about what happened in the past (like Ono, Stevens, etc.), but about what is going to happen," he wrote in a notebook for "Don't Let Me Go" in early 2001, clarifying the narrator's psychological characteristics. A few days later, he asked the clones: "Should they live in a wider community?" Is there any other way for them to be controlled, labeled, and able to perform their duties? Maybe not: a prison they don't know is a prison is the best."
It wasn't until he had drawn up a detailed blueprint for the entire novel that he began to write detailed sentences and paragraphs. At this point, he also follows a well-honed set of procedures. First of all, he writes very quickly, and without stopping to make changes, he drafts a chapter in a desperate way. Then he would read it through and divide the text into numbered parts. Then, on a new piece of paper, he would make a kind of map of what he had just written, summarizing each numbered part of the draft in short bullet points. The goal is to understand what the different parts are doing, how they relate, and whether they need to be adjusted or more elaborated. Based on this map, he would make a flowchart as the basis for a second, harder, more careful draft. When the manuscript is completed to the extent that he is satisfied, he will finally put it in order. He then moved on to the next chapter and started the process all over again.
Kazuo Ishiguro said he was completely unimpressed with his work. Some writers write without thinking about anything else, and he can write nothing for years without being bothered. "Clara and the Sun" is only his eighth novel. In contrast, his contemporaries on the Granta list, Russie, Amis and McEwan, have written 12, 15 and 16 books, respectively. When he's not writing, he likes to have lunch with friends or play his guitar to pass the day (he's been writing lyrics for the famous American jazz singer Stacey Kent since the mid-2000s).
One night in early December, Kazuo Ishiguro told reporters, "You may work harder than I do." He was sitting at his desk in his second home, a 17th-century limestone cottage in rural Gloucestershire, where he and his wife often spent weekends. During the pandemic, they had a routine after a set meal. Sitting at the kitchen table, MacDougall would read aloud Serpents in Eden, a collection of classic British crime stories, while Ishiguro paced the dining area, "like a caged cat," as he put it. Ishiguro, who wears a black T-shirt and a black hoodie, said: "What makes detectives different is that they have this strange, mysterious perception of things like ancient British tapestries or Greek mythology, which is often what makes them solve puzzles."
Speaking about the smaller number of works, Ishiguro said, "I have no regrets about this. I thought, maybe I'm just not as specific about my career because writing wasn't my first career choice. It was almost something I compromised because I couldn't be a singer and a songwriter. Writing is not something I want to do every moment, it's something I'm allowed to do. So, when I write, I really want to write, and if I don't want to write, I don't write."
When he really wants to write, he can write it directly. It took him four weeks to write the first draft of the "Long Day Trace", a period from morning to night, only stopping during meals. At the time, this practice was helpful to him as he and his wife needed a new advance. However, Ishiguro can't do it quickly now. He was skeptical of the modern office, and the practice of having to always be on standby. "Capitalist society is organized in such a way that the workplace is treated as an alibi," he said. If you want to avoid difficult places in your emotional life, you can simply say, sorry, I have too much work to do right now. We are invited to disappear into the commitment to our profession."
Kazuo Ishiguro began becoming a writer in the early 1980s, a development that caught him off guard by market fundamentalism sweeping across Britain and the West. Speaking of his younger self, he said: "I never wanted revolution, but I do believe that we can move towards a more socialist world and become a more generous welfare state." For a long time in my adult life, I believed that was the consensus. When I was 24 or 25 years old, I realized that Margaret Thatcher was beginning to make a very different change in Britain." Although thatcher's neoliberalism is never explicitly addressed in his book, it reflects its depressing consequences for people. For Kazuo Ishiguro's characters, not working is not an option, or even a fetish. Stevens was so devoted to the duties of a housekeeper that he left his father's hospital bed and went downstairs to wait for the guests. Clara was an upgraded version of Stevens, no need to sleep, no need to eat, not even a little private life.
When he told his audience in his Nobel speech, he had always taken for granted the unstoppable progress of humanist values, perhaps in part modesty. In fact, the flaws of our current liberal order, and the selective blindness of its beneficiaries, are examined in his work. In "Don't Let Me Go," clones hold up a mirror to the reader (like them, we will die one day), and while the same is true of non-clones, these ordinary people calmly accept the mass murder of their kind. How is this possible? We know that the horrific news about the conditions of human cloning caused a public outcry for a while, but no one wanted to go back to a world where the endless supply of organs had stopped, a world where cancer and heart disease were still incurable, and as a result, the discussion of systemic change was wiped out. Instead, the progressive boarding school Hailsham was formed, a slightly progressive compromise that eased their own guilt without having to substantially change the status quo. Clones will still be bred as grim reapers, but some of them will have the opportunity to read poetry and play art in a pleasant rural setting before they are greeted with a scalpel.
You don't have to be a Marxist revolutionary to see the similarities between Ishiguro's novels and the economic distribution of today's society. Over the past year, low-wage workers in retail, healthcare and other industries, many of whom have lived on on-time wages, face a daily choice to either go hungry or expose themselves to a deadly virus. In "Don't Let Me Go," clones are euphemistically referred to as "donors," a term that obscures the involuntary nature of their situation for both clones and humans. In the United States, the terms "essential worker" and "hero on the front lines" play a similar role. Meanwhile, the collective wealth of billionaires across the country grew by $1.1 trillion, up nearly 40 percent from the same period last March. Of course, the plague did not reveal the essential cruelty of the system, as some have claimed. For those who choose to see it, the cruelty has always been evident. It remains to be seen whether there will be transformative changes in the injustices that are visible today, or whether incremental compromise measures will continue as always.
Perhaps the most chilling resonance of "Don't Let Me Go" is the lack of solidarity between the clones. Although their suffering is collective, they can only imagine individual forms of resistance. They don't strike, they don't resist, they don't even try to escape. They are simply pinning their hopes on the rumor that the "extension" may be approved for a small number of people, that is, couples who can prove that they are truly in love. The American philosopher Nancy Fraser, in a powerful essay on the book, argues that Ishiguro exposes the "double-edged sword" of individualism. Liberal arts-educated clones began to see themselves as unique and irreplaceable beings, which Fraser called "a sign of personality and intrinsic value." Outside of school, their only value is to act as body parts, but schooling makes them unprepared for this reality. Fraser argues that such a process also exists in our society: "It is as individuals that we are exhorted to take responsibility for living independently, encouraged to satisfy our deepest desires by buying and owning goods, and guided from collective action to individual solutions, in search of precious, irreplaceable selves."
Jack Davison photography.
"Clara and the Sun" isn't Ishiguro's finest novel (it has the problem of act III, and the image of Josie and her family is a bit strange and less inked), but it offers a vision of where we're going if we can't go beyond this restrictive view of freedom. The most disturbing thing about the future it imagines is not that machines like Clara are becoming more and more like humans, but that humans are becoming more and more like machines. We slowly discover (friends who want to avoid spoilers should now skip to the beginning of the next paragraph) that Josie's mysterious cause is a gene-editing procedure to boost her IQ. The surgery was both high-risk and potentially rewarding, allowing her to become a member of the professional super elite. Those who gave up or simply could not afford surgery essentially made themselves financial serfs.
For hundreds of years, human plasticity has been an urgent concern for novelists. Kazuo Ishiguro told reporters he had always envied 19th-century writers like Dostoevsky. At the time of their creation, ancient religious beliefs were being questioned by the rise of evolution. At that moment, he said, it seemed natural to ask what seemed to be a harbinger in modern times: Does the human soul exist? If it doesn't exist, how will it affect our understanding of the meaning of human life?
Ishiguro said, "I grew up in an era when you didn't really ask such questions, but it seems to me that the great breakthroughs in science and technology force us to go back to these questions and ask, what is the individual?"
This is the question Ishiguro has been asking in his own way when he first started writing. Judging by the poor and docile people in his book, his view of people seems vague. In "Don't Let Me Go," Casey's friend Ruth argues about "possibles" (referring to real people who might be clones of human models): "We're based on garbage. If you want to find them, and really find them, you should go to the people in the gutter. Look in the trash, look in the toilet, and you'll find out where we're from. Of course, this is also where most of Ishiguro's characters go, whether human or not. Once society takes everything available from them, that's how they end up.
But strangely enough, when we come out of his book, we don't feel the cheapness and nothingness of life, quite the opposite. In "Don't Let Me Go," Casey's job is "caregiver," someone who takes care of a clone who starts donating organs. Her patients include her old classmate Ruth and Tommy, who were once a couple. Casey and Tommy have been attracted to each other since childhood, but reality has always separated them. Later in the novel, they are finally together and have had a brief period of happiness. Believing they were eligible to apply for an extension, they tracked down one of their old teachers, only to be told that the extension was just a myth. Soon after, Tommy dies, and Casey gets the news that it's time to donate her own organs.
While she cherishes her memories of old friends, Casey says she doesn't dwell on the past: "The only time I've ever indulged in my life was driving to Norfolk a few weeks after hearing that Tommy had died." This is where the three of them have been together. On a quiet country road, she noticed a barbed wire fence and a cluster of trees at the edge of the field, filled with garbage. "It's like the garbage you see on the beach, the wind must have blown the garbage for miles, and finally it hit the trees and these two lines of barbed wire." The scene is reminiscent of Ruth's words earlier in the book, "We made it out of garbage models," but Casey's reflections on what she saw before her eyes offered a defiant contrast, like a faint elegy for the neglected and abandoned:
"That was the only time." I stood there, looking at the strange garbage, feeling the wind blowing through the wilderness, and began to have a little fantasy... I was thinking about the garbage, the plastic flying on the branches, the strange things on the shore sandwiched between the barbed wires, and I half-closed my eyes, imagining that this was where everything I had lost since childhood had been washed ashore, and I stood here now, and if I waited long enough, a small figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and then gradually grow larger until I could see clearly that he was Tommy, and then he waved, and maybe called my name."
Kazuo Ishiguro said of "Don't Let Me Go" in a recent episode of BBC Radio 4's Book Club, "I think it's an optimistic idea about human nature." Love and friendship may not escape death, but they can become stronger and deeper until the last moment. In his view, this tenderness, rather than the exploitation of clones, is the moral center of the novel.
What exactly is an individual? First of all, we are all unfinished products and make mistakes big and small. Technology holds the promise of human perfection, but in Ishiguro's view, it is a promise that we must resist. The mistake we make is the key to discovery.
Almost from the moment he began writing, Kazuo Ishiguro had only tasted success. The last time the reporter spoke to him was in mid-January, and in particular wondered what the main disappointments of his extraordinary career would be.
"They're like parallel lives," he says, separating the open self that is interviewed and receiving awards from the private self that works day after day in the study to turn the imaginary world into reality: "Most of the time, when I finish a book, I feel that I haven't written down exactly what I want to write. That's probably why I keep writing. I always felt a sense of urgency to get back to my desk, because I never felt like I had written what I wanted to write."
When we discussed the topic of artistic failures and setbacks, his train of thought led him to an old memory. In the summer after graduating from high school, he and a group of musician friends spent a few weeks in a log cabin near Loch Fyne on the west coast of Scotland. They carried musical instruments and a portable tape recorder and recorded songs day and night. Ishiguro had an idea to rearrange his favorite song, "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," which was written by Jimmy Webb and made the song famous by Glen Campbell. He recalled: "I really cajoled my friends, made myself miserable, told them to do this and do that. One of us, certainly not me, happened to be a great guitarist, and another was a very talented singer, and that all happened." Later, the song was almost exactly as he had envisioned.
"That thing in my head, something abstract, became reality, and right there," he continued, squinting his eyes and lowering his voice, "it was very, very close to what I had always wanted to achieve, and I remember there was a strange upsurge in the mood." Ishiguro chuckled to himself, remembering the long-lost summer: "At that time, I thought that such moments would happen often, but in retrospect, I never felt this way again."