LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

II/15. KAZUO ISHIGURO (1954)

● Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan, and came to England at the age of five. His books are the perfect image of displacement. Either he pictures Japanese heroes displaced (sent to England or to an unfamiliar time), as it happens in A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, or he finds a way of displacing English heroes (The Remains of the Day). He also creates an ideal environment for displacement, actually building a dystopia (The Unconsoled). Displaced heroes are silent, not voicing their unhappiness, which is however there. The mother in A Pale View of Hills remembers in such a way that her whole memory becomes a question mark. She silently wonders whether her older daughter committed suicide because she was brought from Japan to England. She keeps thinking of her Japanese friend who wanted to emigrate, yet possibly never managed to. America is the third Desperado theme which Ishiguro brings up. The new owner of Darlington Hall is American, and his friends look at his new possession as at a bargain with local colour, the ‘real thing.’ Americans are also present in defeated Japan, and described with resentment. When civilization collapses, the Desperadoes see Americans invade, with next to no education, but with obvious welfare. America is the promised land for many after-war individuals, who have had enough of English, Japanese or German poverty. Very sensitive to three major Desperado themes, displacement, dystopia and America, Ishiguro is highly representative for the turn of the millennium.

● Dissimulated emotion is Ishiguro’s main feature in everything he has written so far. His characters may seem empty, they are incredibly shy, reluctant to verbalize. To hunt and shoot feelings is the main pastime of Ishiguro’s reader. Annoyed because he cannot share what he is never told exists, this reader goes back to the text again and again, looking for the least word which could betray sensibility. Some books are colder (An Artist of the Floating World), others are however highly endearing (The Unconsoled), or at least exquisitely loving (The Remains of the Day). Unlike Graham Swift or Ackroyd, yet very much like Barnes, Gray, Amis, though in a totally different manner, Ishiguro holds emotion prisoner in a castle of ice. Japanese lace surrounds every gesture. Each incident is perfect, a haiku in movement. Climbing each step of the soul, while seeming to tread a flat road, the plot reaches emotional intensity blindfolded.

● The characters are unwilling to unveil their names. Very often they do not even have a first name (see Stevens, the butler), and when they do have a full name, it is not important, since very few use it. Which proves that the novel is a dissimulated monologue of the one main hero, surrounded by secondary characters, all carefully outlined, yet totally unimportant for their soul. The only character with a soul is the main one, who takes his time to unveil some of his experiences. Ishiguro is a one-hero novelist, like all Desperadoes.

● Decency and restraint govern Ishiguro’s writings. Apparently his words are unemotional, matter-of-fact. The faces of his heroes are impenetrable, their figures hieratic, prone to immobility. Inner movement cannot be hidden, but Ishiguro would rather the reader discovered that on his own. He will not give in to outspoken lyricism, although the substance of all his writings is unbelievably tender. Each main hero loves and is hurt, every incident must be viewed carefully. Ishiguro wants to look like a gentle author, sparing his characters the pain of unwanted revelation. Actually, he leaves all the signs behind, for the reader to find out suffering. This Desperado author does not know the meaning of happiness. The painter denied by Post-War, Americanized Japan, the butler of a dead master and a past great time, the Japanese mother living in an alien, lonely country, the pianist who does not even get to play, are all tragic masks behind which it is the reader’s task to guess the blood boiling. Ishiguro is not less intense than other writers; he is merely more cautious with showing intensity.

● Psychology is minutely dissected, although there are no traces of surgery in Ishiguro’s novels. It seems he has no idea what can go on in his heroes’ minds. His language never uses ‘he thought’, ‘he remembered’, ‘he thought to himself.’ This is one more proof that we always get the point of view of the main character alone, even though the narrative may be written in the third person. If compared to the stream of consciousness, Ishiguro’s fiction is another direction altogether. The Desperado manner can best be demonstrated in the works of this quiet, self-contained author, whose work rages with unuttered passion. He analyzes minds by carefully selecting incidents, memories that lead to a certain conclusion. The reader gets to judge the order of the arguments more than the emotional quality of each separate incident. We read a mind, discover the way it works, where it fails, and this failure of the mind is the real cause of the tragedy in the book. All characters are peculiar intellects. They are also very stubborn, and stick to their direction. No character in Ishiguro changes, they are all static and revealed in the order the author carefully plans. If we manage to decode the order of thoughts, we are faced with a fanatic mind, which is bitterly defeated in the end. The end of each novel is a defeat, and the author, the reader too, can only accept. Nothing doing.

● Ishiguro’s major device is understatement. Although after a second, third reading it becomes fairly obvious that the painter is an ex-fascist, who dreamt of imperial Japan and sent to jail a left-wing colleague, Ishiguro never says a word against him. The book is not very much in love with this tyrannical, resentful old painter, dreaming of his youthful mistakes, which to him are still the right way. Stubbornness is a general feature of all these characters, who never change, not within the space of Ishiguro’s mind. They may decline from favour, but their dignity is untouched, they never repent or amend. Ishiguro’s main heroes are never likable persons. We learn to put up with them. Our irritation grows as we read one more incident, as we discover that the trajectory of their memory is aimed at hiding exactly what we are expected to find out and condemn. Ishiguro is a determined writer, whose judgment of character is not to be argued with. He has a firmness of the soul, which he uses to teach us to like unlikable beings, to overcome our disapproval. Like the wooden shoes that imposed a certain shape on the Japanese girls’ feet of old, his novels silence our sensibility into conforming to his decision, which usually is, This character is doomed. Ishiguro’s beings are all doomed, and we have to scour his texts in order to find out why.

● Ishiguro’s main characters are all might-have-been’s. This is how the reader perceives them. Stevens is a might-have-been day, the Japanese painter is a 

might-have-been success, the pianist is a might-have-been husband and son. All Desperadoes dislike happiness as a way out of the novel, as a direction to be followed by the reader. They resort to this might-have-been happiness, much more effective than a clear recording of a happy-end on the last page. If we think of it, the Desperado novel has no end at all. It merely stops, while the reader feels the underground stream actually goes on and he is denied access. This frustrated reader turns creative, rereads, decodes, writes about the book, in short, he will not let it go.

● The American Mr. Farraday, who buys Darlington Hall with the butler in it, is no longer Henry James’ American, who would defect to Europe at any time, or a T.S. Eliot, who felt America was stifling him as a poet. This American does not complain about his country in the least. He has a complex of superiority. He advises and judges Stevens by his own standards. He imposes his outlook, is totally blind to Europe. Like all Desperadoes, Ishiguro also notices that America has come of age.

● Ishiguro’s characters, whether a butler, a painter, a Japanese mother or a pianist, are all in a mild, yet irrevocable state of shock. This confusion accounts for their inability to lead us to the root of the evil, their inability to see the damage they themselves have done. They are all guilty, and they feel it in their bones, but their minds try to prove them innocent, and this is the trick of all Ishiguro’s novels. The reader is caught between the characters’ determination to be right and his own suspicion that something is rotten in the state of the Desperadoes.

● Ishiguro’s characters, like most Desperadoes’, are unable to adapt to change. Some change occurs, and it sets the novelist going. The butler has to learn the ‘art of bantering’, when all he cared about in his life were the intellectual conversations with his master, ‘improving’ his vocabulary, being very much in earnest. The painter has to accept the Americanization of Japan, down to something as basic as the cartoons watched by his grandson: not samurais, but cowboys. The pianist is set to change the world with his music, yet his own private life is destroyed precisely because of it, because of the tours on which, we have reason to believe, he does not even have a chance to play. The heroes cling to whatever it was they were doing when the change came upon them and the reader has no choice but disapprove. The disapproving reader is a natural consequence of this strategy of change and inadaptability, which Ishiguro, and most Desperadoes, use.

● Ishiguro’s main heroes, like Gray’s, Barnes’, Lessing’s, suffer from a secrecy of the mind. If we are to find the logical way out of the maze of incidents, the order in the puzzle, we have to break a door, violate the author’s silence. Stevens does not like to be found out, on various occasions: he denies having served his master when some villagers denounce him as an ex-fascist, declares he needs a good housekeeper when he goes in search of his real love, Miss Kenton. The painter does not want the reader to realize that he actually threw another painter in jail because the latter was

left-wing, so he postpones remembering the exact circumstances, until it becomes indispensable for the plot to go on. The pianist’s memory is a set of holes, which are filled in turn, one by one, but he opposes his being understood, refuses to voice connections, keeps incidents as separate as he can. These heroes refuse to talk to the reader. Honesty is never the Desperado’s best policy. Deviousness is.

● Irony is, for Ishiguro as for all Desperadoes, the only possible creative attitude. The author waits somewhere, behind his hero, and shows us his smile from time to time. Some Desperadoes are bitingly ironic (Bradbury, Lodge, Barnes, Fowles), others mildly so (Gray). Some are bitter (Lessing), others dreamy (Ackroyd, Swift). Ishiguro has an ironical pattern. His novels are structured on irony. He deliberately mocks at found secrets. His heroes are both endearing and ridiculous. Since Ishiguro will not allow sentimentality – which is, for him, a grievous sin – , his energy finds an outlet in debunking loves of all kind. Did Virginia Woolf even imagine love could be so harshly treated by a writer, when she wrote her Modern Fiction, against love-interest? Ishiguro contemplates the remains of Stevens’ wasted love and, while tears run down the butler’s cheeks, the author smiles at the perfect pattern of his book. Love does not even enter the equation. The hero is perfect, and Ishiguro could not care less whether what he has lost is love or hatred. The main thing is he has lost it. Since all Ishiguro’s main heroes are losers, there is always something to smile at. This Desperado irony shows us we live in a cruel world, where dryness corners sympathy, and art (the game) supersedes emotion. The reader has to fill in the feeling, and this was unheard of in literature before the Desperado age.

● Ishiguro, like many other British Desperadoes, decides upon a set of rules for Englishness. His butler is the essence of Englishness, the same as The English Patient of Ondaatje, a Hungarian hero by birth, conforms to the same English character. It took a displaced Japanese and a displaced Indian to describe the typical English hero.

● Many Desperado authors are concerned with history, the two World Wars mainly. Such are Swift, Lessing, Barnes, Lodge, Ackroyd, Ishiguro. Even writers born after the two World Wars write about the war. Almost every Desperado has one novel about the past (The Remains of the Day, An Artist of the Floating World, Out of the Shelter, Martha Quest, Lanark, Staring at the Sun, Waterland, Hawksmoor, Shuttlecock, Out of This World, Ever After). Ishiguro writes about Japan immediately after World War II, England before World War II. It seems more dramatic to a Desperado to place his plot during a time of deprivation and death. Those who do not use the war to that purpose, write dystopias. In one way or another, Desperadoes manage to find the uncomfortable.

● It often happens to Desperadoes to write about artists: writers (Swift, Lessing, Barnes, Lodge, Bradbury, Amis, Ackroyd), painters (Gray, Ackroyd, Ishiguro, Fowles), actors (Swift). They also write about politicians, and politics is very important to the Desperado character (see especially Lessing, Ishiguro, Swift). Whatever is connected to the mind, less to the heart, appeals to them, especially if it means examining a creative mind in progress. Ishiguro also likes to see things from above, to offer a generalized image of society, human condition, art. There is a lot of subtlety in the way Desperadoes deal with these very traditional, almost exhausted themes; Desperadoes hate being in a crowd, so they look for a peculiar approach to issues they will not give up. Ishiguro fakes humbleness. His painter is a past glory, and his politician, dead now, is a memory of the butler. His pianist is a fake VIP, an empty, confused personality, who hardly knows what he is supposed to do. Claiming confusion, Ishiguro debunks politics and art, reducing them to human, everyday size.

● As Desperado novels roll the film backwards, they are slow progresses. Ishiguro uses memory in his first three novels, and invariably the plot goes from end to start, making use of the least detail, and revealing much later the importance of each. The plot may be delivered in fragments, though, but the pain is continuous. The tragic mood of Desperado novels makes the incidents remembered at random cohere in a brotherhood of the weak. These characters for whom life goes backwards are totally helpless. They burst into our minds, make us unbearably curious (suspense is the major Desperado device), explain fitfully, and withdraw whenever a page ends, an author runs out of sentences, a reader is bored and shuts the book. The end is inessential. The hero’s helplessness when confronted with his own fate, which he cannot change in any way, is a sign of the Desperado depression. The Desperado novel is resigned.

● The Unconsoled is Ishiguro’s dystopia. It could be anyone, from the writer himself, to the common passer-by. It is an amnesiac, nightmarish world, which Ishiguro probes with intent sense of observation. Whether epic, lyrical, comic, dramatic, tragic, grim, nostalgic, all Desperadoes are in search of a refuge, they all need an escape. More often than not, whatever the literary genre (which is usually a medley), they end up in an uncomfortable future. Wherever they are, whatever they may be writing, Desperadoes feel fragile, threatened and doomed. Which makes their struggle to survive and be unique even more endearing, in a literary world of uncertainties. A world where the fate of the book needs to be fortified again and again.