Here’s our widely announced & hotly anticipated conversation on the Nobel winner novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who has a new novel out this year, Klara & The Sun—Noah Millman has written about three of his stories over at Modern Age, including this newest novel, with a view to Ishiguro’s concern for the “suffering servant,” the butler in The Remains Of The Day, the nurse clone in Never Let Me Go, & the robot Klara—those people whose idealism is necessary to, but unrewarded by our way of life.
I have a few thoughts to share on these novels to lead in to the discussion. What is the open secret of the last century? In plain sight, yet hidden, is the failure, so to speak, to benefit by catastrophe. Vast social changes leave us confused & nostalgic rather than able to face a new situation.
The Remains Of The Day is set in the 1930s & 1950s, bookending WWII, which ushered in democracy & wiped out any remnants of aristocracy. Splendor was gone, but this didn’t make for a new dignity in our social lives, a way of treating each other as equals such that we could hope to be happy together, since there would be no more political cause of fear or resentment. The new democrats did not forget their old aristocratic superiors—they wanted some of that glamour. Servitude was maintained even without a constitutional requirement or an ancient habit. Some belief, without institutions, kept people stuck in the old class opposition.
Never Let Me Go is set in 1978 & 1990—what does that bookend? Nothing so terrible as a World War, but at least from the point of view of the political left, there is an obvious answer, a still worse catastrophe: Reagan & Thatcher: The victory of free market capitalism, an individualism oriented to consumption, & accordingly a shocking social inequality based on money—not solidarity & egalitarian redistribution rationally administered. Human expression, what is called creativity, but used to call the imitative arts, is part of that past remembered in the novel, but worthless in the enacted present. People end up consuming people, perhaps because they are not being consumed, so to speak, by the passions involved in art. Aristocracy is dead; but inequality or exploitation endures, both more obvious & more concealed, or systemic, impersonal, not rooted in birth, title, & office. It is, in fact worse. The idealism of the aristocracy was politically dangerous, but without idealism, the consequences are dire.
Klara is set more or less in our times, is my guess. Technology now demands that human inequality itself become technologized—not title, not money, but biotech upgrades of human beings, of course, of the few, not the many, are necessary to keep up in the world. Here the first-person narration that involves retrospection doesn’t really deal with social transformations—Ishiguro has caught up with the present, so to speak, that’s not possible anymore. But I believe the same logic applies to the story: A change has come & people may be failing to look at their new situation with fresh eyes, because they’re obsessed with the remnants of the past.
There is much to say about freedom & religion in this hidden history of the democratic era, but this should suffice to introduce the discussion.