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ABSTRACT
Kazuo Ishiguro’s penchant for affectless, stilted or robotic narrators, along with his tendency to return across his oeuvre to the same concerns and motifs, has led to a growing critical tendency to identify his writing as (interestingly) uninteresting. His most recent novel Klara and the Sun (2021) (swiftly condemned as boring by many online opiners) seems to address this question head on, by thematising interestingness itself. This article reads Klara and the Sun in light of recent work (by Sianne Ngai and others) which theorises interestingness as one of our contemporary aesthetic categories. Exploring Ishiguro’s iterated fictional concerns, in particular via a comparison with Never Let Me Go, it tests out a number of ways in which the uninterestingness of Ishiguro’s narratives has been turned to critical account, but argues that Klara and the Sun withstands these critical manoeuvres. Instead, it demonstrates – via engaging with John Frow’s formalist work on literary interest – that Klara offers a phenomenological investigation of how fictional interest is made. This account serves as a quiet manifesto for the interest of fiction tout court, and for the interest of Ishiguro’s ongoing fictional project.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 These quotations are taken from the Goodreads page for Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54120408-klara-and-the-sun?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=rhdXGBNK2J&rank=1 [Date accessed: 5 September 2022]. They are from the following users respectively: Tatiana (6 March 2021), Emily May (12 August 2021), Nataliya (3 June 2021), Nataliya (3 June 2021), Lata (5 July 2021), Lisa of Troy (15 July 2022).
2 Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (London: Faber & Faber, 2021). References henceforth in the text.
3 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2012). References henceforth in the text.
4 Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, in The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism (New York: Penguin, 1987), p. 191.
5 See Adam Parkes, ‘Ishiguro’s “Rubbish”: Style and Sympathy in Never Let Me Go’, MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 67 (2021), pp. 171–204 which cites reviews by Frank Kermode, Jacqueline Rose and James Wood, each of whom mentions the ‘uninteresting’ qualities of this novel.
6 On the recursive nature of interest see Jan Mieskowski, Labours of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), p. 38f.
7 Doug Battersby offers a helpful survey and summary of this ‘common contention’ in his ‘Contemporary Realism, Postmodernism, and Bodily Feeling: Ian McGuire’s The North Water’, English: Journal of the English Association, 67 (2018), pp. 1–22, p. 2.
8 Sam Hunter and John Jacobus, Modern Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc, 1986), p. 326.
9 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/01/klara-and-the-sun-by-kazuo-ishiguro-review-another-masterpiece [Date accessed: 5 September].
10 On the subject of Ishiguro’s iterations see Chris Holmes and Kelly Mee Rich, ‘On Rereading Ishiguro’, Modern Fiction Studies, 67 (2021), pp. 1–19.
11 Zadie Smith, ‘Two Directions for the Novel’, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009), pp. 71–96.
12 Mieskowski, Labours of Imagination, p. 38.
13 See Jacob Sider Jost, Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century: Herve, Johnson, Smith, Equiano (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020).
14 Blaise Pascal, The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal, trans. C. Kegan Paul (Toledo, OH: Veritatis Splendor Publications, 2012), p. 103.
15 Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 188.
16 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1983), pp. 125–6, identifies three types of interest – intellectual, qualitative and practical – each of which is linked to the drive to narrative closure.
17 Ibid, p. 175.
18 George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, Westminster Review, LXVI (July 1856), pp. 51–79, p. 54. http://georgeeliotarchive.org [Date accessed: 5 September].
19 Ibid, p. 799.
20 Ibid, p. 198.
21 Shameem Black, ‘Ishiguro's Inhuman Aesthetics’, MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 55 (2009), pp. 786–807, pp. 798 and 803.
22 John Lennard points out that this falling rhythm – unlike iambic and anapestic metres – ‘doesn’t sound natural’ and indeed can appear ‘strange’ in The Poetry Handbook (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 6.
23 Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), pp. 243–67.
24 David James, Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). References henceforth in the text.
25 James argues that the moment he reads steers the reader ‘into a partial lee’ (p. 190), and offers a moment of solace even while ‘consolation’s foreshortening’ (p. 191) is simultaneously signalled. Parkes is tentatively sceptical even of the attenuated consolations James explores, wondering whether Ishiguro ‘turns to lyrical realism in order to trade on its belatedness and secondhandedness’: Parkes, ‘Ishiguro’s “Rubbish”’, p. 194.
26 A digital search suggests that ‘happy’ crops up 38 times, ‘sad’ 31 and ‘angry’ 34.
27 Parkes, ‘Ishiguro’s “Rubbish”’, analyses the compositional processes by which Kathy’s voice is made ‘livelier’ across successive drafts, but points out that ‘livelier … doesn’t necessarily mean more interesting or alluring’ the ‘idiomatic’ qualities accorded the voice sharing a depressingly generic quality’, p. 179.
28 To say that is not to decide on one of the question whether a robot can have emotion, but to suggest that any answer to that question would redound on how one theorised the psyche.
29 For an account of some commonplace prejudices against description, including that it is the part of the text that is ‘skippable with impunity’, see Stephen Benson, ‘“What Shall be Our New Ornaments?” Description’s Orientations’, Textual Practice, 34 (2020), pp. 605–25, p. 608. See also Ivan Stacy, ‘Mirrors and Windows: Synthesis of Surface and Depth in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2022). doi: 10.1080/00111619.2022.2146479, which appeared while this article was in the final stages of preparation.
30 I take this subtitle from Jacques Derrida, ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literature:” An interview with Jacques Derrida’, Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 33–75, p. 47. Derrida’s thinking of interest hovers behind by reading of Klara here.
31 Edward Said, ‘Thoughts on Late Style’, London Review of Books, 26.15 (August 2004). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n15/edward-said/thoughts-on-late-style [Date accessed: 5 September 2022].
32 For a reading of (what appears to be) the banality of Ishiguro’s moralising in earlier works, see Bruce Robbins, ‘Cruelty is Bad: Banality and Proximity in Never Let Me Go’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 40 (2007), pp. 289–302.
33 https://www.dailycal.org/2021/05/06/nobel-prize-winner-kazuo-ishiguro-unpacks-his-writing-process-at-7th-bay-area-book-festival/ [Date accessed: 5 September 2022].
34 John Frow, Character and Person (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 2. References henceforth in the text.
35 Elizabeth Ermarth, ‘Realism, Perspective and the Novel’, Critical Inquiry, 7.3 (Spring 1981), pp. 499–520, 506–7.
36 Ibid., p. 508.
37 Henry James, A Life in Letters (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 555.