Unrequited Labour of Care in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Abstract

In this article, I explore questions of care and selfhood from both the humanist and post-humanist perspectives, as they play out in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Ishiguro’s novel portrays a tragic, futuristic universe, not too different from ours. Klara is an Artificial Friend, a robot caregiver, whose purpose of existence is to care for the child, Josie. However, theirs is not a relationship of reciprocity, as the novel presents a world where care is commodified as emotional labour. It is a world where the worker is manipulated into practising an ethic of care, while the cared-for is encouraged to receive it as mere paid service. In the particular case of Klara, her personal investment in caring for Josie guarantees that she loses everything in the end, including her ‘self’. I discuss here the ways in which Klara is shown throughout the novel to carefully construct a sense of self and an understanding of her place within the environment, only to eventually lose it in the performance of her one-sided duty of care, imposed on her by the system. I examine the ways in which care is co-opted within an unempathetic economy so that the cared-for receives genuine love and care while the carer is simply used and abandoned, feeling humiliatingly dispensable and, simultaneously, eminently privileged to have been of service.

Keywords:

• Ethics of care
• posthumanism
• emotional labour
• selfhood
• Ishiguro
• Klara and the Sun

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As Susan Hekman argues, ‘The ability to make moral distinctions […] constitutes the criterion of full legal and political personhood in our society’ (Hekman 1995: 127).

2 Hochschild explains this phenomenon as it might occur in the life of an emotional labourer in the real world as ‘A principle of emotive dissonance, analogous to the principle of cognitive dissonance […] Maintaining a difference between feeling and feigning over the long run leads to strain. We try to reduce this strain by pulling the two closer together either by changing what we feel or by changing what we feign’ (Hochschild 1983: 90).

3 Hochschild examines the role of supervisors and says that ‘Supervisors monitor the supply of emotional labour. They patch leaks and report breakdowns to the company. They must also cope with the frustrations that workers suppress while on the job. Managing someone else’s formerly managed frustration and anger is itself a job that takes emotional labor’ (Hochschild 1983: 118).

4 Margaret Urban Walker’s argument regarding integrity fits Klara’s character well here. She says that ‘Integrity is commonly associated with forms of responsibility taking where people might be tempted to do otherwise and things would go noticeably easier for them (and sometimes worse for others) if they did’ (Walker 2007: 125).