Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2007"

Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New World Literature

Abstract: that circulates outside the geographic region in which it was produced it is often assumed that texts are being translated into English and that the process of translation leads to cultural as well as political homogenization.1 Translation leads to cultural homogenization, the argument goes, because readers will learn fewer languages, and because texts written for translation will tend to avoid vernacular references and linguistic complexity. (Owen 31; Spivak 18-19; Apter "On Translation" 12). It leads to political homogenization because the world market requires stories that everyone can share, which means fewer distinctions among political histories and social agents (Brennan 59-61). The concern is this: translation is bad for what it does to books (presents them apart from their original language and context); but it is worse for what it does to authors (encourages them to ignore that language and context). In truth, as Emily Apter, Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, and Martin Puchner have shown, the effects of translation will depend on what is being translated and on what happens when translated books are read. Moreover, the meaning of these effects will depend on how we evaluate sameness and difference: do we assume, for example, that homogenization is always a negative outcome? There are many variables in the new world literature, and they press us to consider not only the global production and circulation of texts but also our ways of thinking about cultural and political uniqueness. In today's critical parlance, the "new world literature" refers to a shift both in the study and in the production of books. As a matter of study, scholars such as Damrosch and Moretti have called for a new emphasis on the "phenomenology"

Cruelty Is Bad: Banality and Proximity in Never Let Me Go

Abstract: One of the signature effects of Kazuo Ishiguro's fiction is a moment when a character behaves with sudden, inexplicable, and astonishing cruelty—not to a stranger, but to an intimate. These episodes are always a bit cumbersome to cite, as the reader cannot fully understand quite how bad or how inexplicable the cruelty is without a lot of detail being let in. It's almost as if the emotional violence were so intolerable that, even in the act of repeating the story, Ishiguro also resisted giving it a memorable anecdotal form that could be easily abbreviated, cited, and circulated. In the passage that follows, for example, nothing more happens than a silence, an absence of gesture. Yet this passage from The Unconsoled explains why it is that Gustav and his adult daughter have not spoken to each other for many years:

International Settlements: Ishiguro, Shanghai, Humanitarianism

Abstract: One of the most powerful complements to the globalization of literary studies has been a recent surge of attention to the relationship between literary and cultural studies, humanitarianism, and human rights (Balfour and Cadava; Stanton, "Humanities"). These areas of research form a broad response to the post-Cold War collision of nationalism, international public opinion, and North/ South interests that has been exemplified by wars in the Balkans, Africa's Horn and Great Lakes regions, and the Middle East. An axiom of the conversation holds that Western public consciousness of "global political crises" is in many respects an effect of how mass media, especially television, serializes and frames individual images of rescue, combat, and endurance (Shaw 218-20). l The parameters of understanding and caring about what goes on in a war zone, famine zone, refugee camp, or besieged city are thus dependent on the mechanisms by which media, state and non-state actors, and individuals as well, shape crises into narratives (Ignatieff, "Stories"; Keenan, "Publicity"; Shaw; Slaughter, "Enabling"). Storytelling, in this malleable public sphere, is a form of work through which the visual and persuasive registers of humanitarian and human rights discourses might be said to converge with what Arjun Appadurai has described as the "cultural dimensions of globalization." The flow of people and ideas across national and regional borders invariably changes the parameters of national identity and the state's obligation to its own members. Likewise, the representation of upheavals "elsewhere" as, variously, humanitarian crises, state-sponsored human rights abuses, wars, or agentless natural catastrophes, creates the conditions within which citizens gauge the impact of such situations on themselves, and imagine what an engagement would entail. At the same time, economic globalization normally serves as a kind of substratum upon which developed nations and their citizens balance narratives of strategy and interest against those of ethics and obligation (Koshy 10-18). Is the invisible labor of some far-away group of persons the same kind of problem as the endlessly re-broadcast suffering of a faraway individual? Do these two scenarios spring from a common condition? If so, what is to be done?

Ian McEwan's Saturday and the Aesthetics of Prose

Abstract: I worry about images. Images are what things mean. Take the word image. It connotes soft, sheer flesh shimmering on the air, like the rainbowed slick of a bubble. Image connotes images, the multiplicity being an image. Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individuals calloused capacity to feel powerful undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality. They serve no social purpose.

The Trial Narrative in Richardson’s Pamela: Suspending the Hermeneutic of Happiness

Abstract: \"Happiness is a new idea in Europe,\" declared Saint-Just in 1794. Historians have by and large concurred with his assessment, despite its revolutionary hyperbole. The eighteenth century, they claim, confers respectability on secular happiness as no other period before it. Not satisfied with legitimating a merely private happiness, eighteenth-century thinkers spelled out for the first time the radical possibility of a \"right to happiness\" and oriented their political reforms towards \"public happinessw-a phrase always on the lips of Rousseau, Jefferson, Chastellux, and others.' These historical observations are unimpeachable, and yet there is something fundamentally wrong with the picture of an eighteenth century committed to the utopian promise of happiness. When it came down to it, confronted with the opportunity to write their visionary politics into law, the period's revolutionary thinkers balked. The American and French revolutions produced constitutions that are astonishingly reticent about happiness. Kant invented an ethics radically free of the concern for happiness. After the eighteenth century, happiness, which once signified the highest good imaginable, is easily dismissed as sappy, sentimental, even banal. Historians have generally failed to make sense of this confusing picture of the role of happiness in eighteenth-century culture because they have not paid attention to questions of narrative form. The eighteenth century did not invent happiness, as Saint-Just believed, but it did effect a fundamental transformation in the narrative structure of the idea of happiness. Only by making visible this narrative transformation in the period will we be able to understand the eighteenth century's paradoxical attitudes towards happiness. Crucial to the process of transforming the period's narrative imaginary is the emergent novel. In this essay, I will show how Richardson's Pamela develops an unprecedented narrative form-the trial narrative-that wreaks havoc on the narrative underpinnings of the idea of happiness. The trial narrative is not unique to Pamela; indeed, it becomes something like the narratological unconscious of the eighteenth century, insinuating its logic into discourses as disparate as sentimentalism, Kantian

Fit and Surfeit in As I Lay Dying

Abstract: "'Meet Mrs Bundren/ he says." Anse Bundren's introduction, "kind of hangdog and proud too" (261), of his new wife to his astonished children, less than twenty-four hours after they have finally managed to inter Addie Bundren, his first wife and the children's mother, strikes many readers as an outrage. The five-word declaration closes the novel in a stunned silence, borne on currents of shock and disbelief. These responses stem from two related sources. To any reader of the novel, as to the children themselves, "Mrs Bundren" means Addie. In nominating a new Mrs. Bundren so precipitously on the heels of the old, Anse flouts not only the decorum of mourning rituals and the emotional well-being of his offspring, but also conventions of linguistic usage, wrenching the appellation from its accustomed denotation without warning or fanfare.1 For all that it shocks, however, Anse's dramatization of the potential mismatch between a word's immediate context and the greater range of signification that might conceivably accrue to it merely represents a final surfacing at the level of plot and in a form inescapably flagged for the reader's attention of a compositional strategy more subtly in play throughout the novel. Faulkner liked to boast of having written the manuscript "in six weeks, without changing a word," in later years adding that he "set out deliberately to write a tour-deforce." "Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first words," he maintained, "I knew what the last word would be" (264).2 While the veracity of the first of these claims has been marginally attenuated by subsequent critical excavation,3 the latter grows only more convincing if we read it as speaking not just to the last words' emotional force, but also to the broader, highly specific and thoroughly premeditated lexical strategy they might imply. On the book's final page, no one can avoid thinking "Addie" when Anse says "Mrs Bundren" and means, quite obviously, someone other than Addie. But As I Lay Dying, throughout, as if building to and from this denouement, consistently rewards the reader

Introduction: Antisocial Goods

Abstract: The final film in the series of production/ direction collaborations of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory features a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro. The White Countess, released in 2005, invokes many character-types, plot situations, settings and conflicts developed in his novels, making it a usefully retrospective starting point for this special issue devoted to Ishiguro. As Rebecca Walkowitz argues in her opening essay, it is necessary to pay close attention to Ishiguro's stylistic tendency towards repetition and his thematic privileging of the inauthentic if we are to understand the significance of his work in a new world of global translatability. Both qualities signify the realization in contemporary fiction of Walter Benjamin's observations concerning modern works of art "designed for reproducibility" (224). The Merchant Ivory film adaptation of The Remains of the Day (1993), as well as Ishiguro's screenplays for The White Countess and Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World (2003), give a further turn to this relation - particularly given the centrality of film to Benjamin's arguments about mechanical reproduction - as the reproduced, translated lives of Ishiguro's fictions make an appearance in the reproducible medium of cinema. Ishiguro's screenplays, including The White Countess, exhibit a curious inauthenticity. Characters, events, settings and themes appear as if dislodged from novels already written. Novelists doubling as screenplay-writers are certainly not uncommon; however, as a writer who seems to have occasionally "cannibalized" his own earlier material (to invoke fellow novelist/ screenwriter Raymond Chandler's useful term [332]), Ishiguro does not, in fact, produce novels that seem "designed for filmability." Instead, the continued, cloned lives of certain components of the novels in his screenplays work to challenge any attribution of "aura" to their original appearance in those novels. If Ishiguro's works challenge the application of geographic definers like English and British, they nevertheless seem in tune with the genre of globalized, translatable fi etions, as Walkowitz suggests - and this proposition carries over to Alexander Bain's notion of "humanitarian crisis fiction," to Bruce Robbins's reading of Never Let Me Go as a "welfare state fiction," and to my own reading of Ishiguro's later works as fictions of immaterial labor and class consciousness in the twentieth century. James English and John Frow's recent analysis of the roles of celebrity and prize culture in creating the field of contemporary British fiction stresses the importance of the linkages between canonicity and seriality for this field (English and Frow, "Literary" 48; English, Economy 197-216). Ishiguro seems particularly suited to study as an exemplum of the contemporary, as English and Frow conceive it. He's a prizewinning writer of subtly serialized fictions, for both print and film formats, but also a creator of celebrity protagonists (Ryder in The Unconsoled, Banks in When We Were Orphans, Jackson in The White Countess) in whom inauthenticity is tied closely to a need to feel known, instantly recognizable, and "well-connected," in

From City to Country: An Outline of Fluvio-Critique

Abstract: Narratives are models for time. They figure the conflict between desire and what thwarts it. Such dialectics of desire define what we hope time will bring and what we fear forestalls such fortune. Thus stories conceive our experience as lived, charged temporality. But the time narratives represent is never simply "time in general/' They focus an apprehension of their culture's forms of aspiration and resistance. These figures of temporality go far beyond simple "manners of speaking." They are how time occurs for us. To read them is to engage the character of temporality that defines a culture. To get at the phenomenology of time as it was experienced in the middle part of the nineteenth century in France a moment of epochal changes in the socioeconomy of the period I want to reconsider some fictions that migrate from province to Paris. The seemingly unilinear narrative of such novels is familiar. They represent a dynamic that appears obvious: the desire of and for the capital. Characters like Rastignac, Rubempre, Julien Sorel, and Frederic Moreau come immediately to mind. The action of their stories is motivated by a conjunctural appetite, promoted by generalized patterns of value-formation and social development at the heart of the culture and enacted by an entire class of writers who in turn projected them onto their protagonists. In these tales, time is an intense preoccupation: everything in them seems to press toward Paris in a headlong craving for acceleration of property accumulation, of erotic intensity, of personal power. This longing for velocity inscribes and describes a construction of time that characterizes the post-Revolutionary period. But such a vision misses a complex of other temporalities that cohabit and collide in these fictions in particular a powerful counter-dynamic that pulls the city toward the country, toward the provinces, toward "underdevelopment" and the "not fully realized." The myth of Paris "culture" evokes another cultural