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COPYRIGHT 2000 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
The novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, from A Pale View of Hills (1982) to The Unconsoled (1995), all bear a powerful and sustained interest in the relationship between history and memory.(1) Ishiguro seems fascinated with the uneasy coexistence of private and public memories in his characters. One of the structuring conflicts of each of his novels emerges from the main character"s struggle--usually unsuccessful--to reconcile his private memories with the public memories of the nation and his fellow citizens. Each narrator's efforts provide the reader with a glimpse of the way that public and collective historical accounts can suppress and deform private memory; each novel seems to assert the important role that private memories can play in helping us recapture and relive the openness and contingency of historical moments in the face of the deterministic tendencies of the national collective memory. And yet in each novel we have reason to resist the narrators' private claims upon the past, because all four narrators are telling their stories--some acknowledge this more openly than others--in order to explain or excuse their own past behavior.
Cynthia Wong has identified the conflict between public and private memories as a fundamental one in Ishiguro's work, and traces it back through his first novel, A Pale View of Hills. In general, Wong argues, Ishiguro's novels suggest that private memory can help us recapture moments and experiences which public history may elide or suppress: "All of Ishiguro's narrators structure their tales according to discernible historical events and, in the unfolding of their texts, the narrators appear to arrive closer at uncovering some missing version of truth about that period."(2) But the recovery of that truth is complicated by the self-interest of the narrators. As the narrators seek to reconstruct, through private memories, a public historical context which they have experienced, they do so at least in part in order to excuse their own behavior in that public context. Hence the recapturing of that "missing version of the truth" must continually be tempered by the reader's awareness of the potential self-interests of the narrator. Etsuko, the narrator of A Pale View of Hills, reconstructs the historical context of Nagasaki after the war, in part, to understand and explain the reasons for her daughter's recent suicide. While her narrative demonstrates the horrible and long-term psychological effects which the nuclear attack had on the city's inhabitants, the exhibition of those effects cannot be separated from her efforts to determine whether she might have somehow planted the seeds of her daughter's suicide in that period.
This pattern of historical reconstruction compromised by narrative self-interest recurs throughout Ishiguro's fiction. It must be situated, though, within the broader context of the more general conflict between private memory and public history in all four of the novels. As in A Pale View of Hills, in his subsequent novels, Ishiguro depicts narrators whose private memories conflict in various ways with those of the public historical record. In An Artist of the Floating World, the aging artist Masuji Ono's constant efforts to reevaluate his youthful, pro-imperialist propaganda paintings never quite match the official reevaluations of that work by his colleagues, students, and the government. In the early sections of the novel, Ono downplays the significance of his work, gently fending off the implicit condemnations of his family and friends. When he reverses his tactic, and attempts to make a public confession of his influential complicity in the imperialist enterprise, he discovers that public memory has bypassed him: he has become a historical footnote. Ryder's dilemma, in The Unconsoled, has some similar components: he can never calibrate his memory with the memories of the public or of the individuals around him. At one point Ryder agrees to a photograph session in front of a public monument, only to discover later that this monument commemorates some individual or event--of which he has no memory--which currently draws the universal condemnation of the local citizenry.
The conflict between private and public memories is at its most acute in The Remains of the Day. The narrator and main character of this novel, the butler Stevens, served with unquestioning loyalty a man who arranged unofficial meetings between British government officials and representatives of the German Nazi government. Much of Stevens's narration in the novel consists of his attempts to justify or explain his blind submission to this man, Lord Darlington, even when Lord Darlington asked him to commit the morally repugnant act of cleansing the household of Jewish servants in order to placate visiting Nazi dignitaries. Throughout the novel, Stevens struggles to reconcile his own private memories of Lord Darlington (and what seemed to Stevens, in historical context, as Darlington's noble and virtuous--though perhaps naive--intentions)with the subsequent public vilification of Darlington after the war. One leaves the novel with a rather uneasy feeling because by the close of the novel both Darlington and Stevens are rather pitiful figures. Although they do somehow seem the products of historical contexts which they could not have created or controlled, they have also clearly done wrong.
In a 1986 interview, conducted while he was working on The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro explained his fascination with a character like Ono from Artist, and his words clearly apply to Stevens as well: "I'm interested in people who, in all sincerity, work very hard and perhaps courageously in their lifetimes toward something, fully believing that they're contributing to something good, only to find that the social climate has done a topsy-turvy on them by the time they've reached the end of their lives. The very things they thought they could be proud of have now become the things they have to be ashamed of."(3) Here, Ishiguro characterizes the conflict between private and public memories as one which emerges from the contrasting attitudes and sentiments of different social climates. Like human memories and public records, the collective memories of these social climates can evolve and dissipate, and consecutive social climates may exhibit contrasting attitudes toward their collective pasts. Public memory can be notoriously short-lived, and the difficulty which Ishiguro's characters face is that the collective ideals and popular sentiments of one social climate have no tolerance for--or even any recollection of--those past ideals and sentiments to which Ishiguro's characters were once committed. Ishiguro's narrators acted according to the ideals of the social climate in which they lived, but when that climate shifted, they suddenly find that their actions have been reevaluated in light of a new set of ideals and public sentiment. Hence their narrative task is to reconstruct for the reader, through their private memories, the social climate in which they acted. This narrative motivation produces the conflict between private and public memory in Ishiguro's fiction.
Of course, it could be argued that historical novels, in a weak sense, always feature conflicts between the private memories of their characters and the public accountings of the life occurring around them. From only a brief glance at the most well-known specimen of the genre, it is evident enough that part of the effect of Tolstoy's War and Peace emerges from the contrast between the official histories of the war of 1812 and the Prince's confused and confusing experiences on the battlefield. Indeed, the contrast between official histories and the actual experiences and memories of soldiers is a stable and recurring trope of war literature, from Tolstoy's epic and Crane's The Red Badge of Courage through the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen to the literature of Vietnam. Ishiguro's novels highlight this conflict...
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