Thursday 18 August 2022

Ishiguro partial review

I've read two different reviews which described Ishiguro's prose as bland.  Here's my counterargument. The animating theme of Ishiguro's work is dehumanization. A category or person is defined as unworthy of full human status. A servant in remains of the day, a robot in Clara and the Sun, the clones in never let me go. Ishiguro's novels center this person and bestows them with a breathtaking humanity. They experience full and complex feelings, passions and ideas. But the language they have to express their inner life is limited, because language is the first limitation society places on them.  Klara has only the words that she has heard in her short life in a department store. She calls all the people of the outside world passers- by. She does not call them commuters or citizens because these things are outside of her experience. She only understands passers-by in the window or customers in the store.  Ishiguro's characters are full, but their language is limited, because their language is the language the society around them believes they will need to express what that society believes they are capable of feeling or worth. And that disconnect we feel between the simple things they can express and the depth and strength of what they are trying to reach for is the first injustice they experience in their deeply unjust lives. Which is a great deal of the reason why they are written this way. We begin to immediately and intuitively understand that these characters are circumscribed, that they are more than they are let to be.