La totalité de l'entretien fut publiée
par Études
britanniques contemporaines: “"Kazuo Ishiguro :
the Sorbonne Lecture – 9th December 1999".” Études
britanniques contemporaines 18 (Juin 2000) : 1-20.
Extract:
François Gallix: This will be my last
question. It's a question about history. And I'm quoting an article
from Le Monde (23/02/90) by Nicole Zand who wrote: ‘There is
in Ishiguro, born in 1954, something of a Patrick Modiano, an obsession
with troubled periods which they were born too late to have lived
through and that have left an indelible mark on their lives’.
So, the question is about your own vision of history and about its
inclusion in your fiction and particularly in The Remains of the Day,
but not only. This idea, in fact, of having to bring back to your
memory events that yourself couldn't have lived through, simply because
of your age.
Kazuo Ishiguro: This question about the relationship to history is
a very interesting area. I think it is particularly interesting for
writers of my generation. I am forty-five years old. It applies to
people who are also slightly older than me, too. A few years ago,
I would have had a fairly simple answer to this question. I felt I
had always used history almost as another kind of technical device.
I always thought I was profoundly different from – say –
a writer like Primo Levi, somebody who experiences something crucial
to our history and who feels the urge to bear witness to it. I always
thought that I and also other writers of my generation were almost
like movie-makers, looking for location. We have a story and we look
through our history books for a period and a place where this story
could really come to life.
Alternatively, we may just look through history and think: ‘This
is a very interesting period, I'm interested in it. I'll write a novel’.
And to some extent – I don't know if this is the case here in
France – in Britain, in the late 70s and early 80s, there was
a kind of an inferiority complex on the part of the younger new emerging
writers. The inferiority complex was this: that we lived in a very
safe, affluent, boring country. And if we just wrote about our lives,
what was going on on our doorstep, if we simply wrote about British
life as generations of writers had done before us – we would
write a very small, provincial novel. We were aware that many people
around the world had started to regard the modern British novel as
being very inward-looking, obsessed with class, that nobody else was
interested in. I think this had something to do with the fact that
the British Empire had collapsed and that for many generations, British
writers did not have to worry about being provincial. You could write
about the British class system and it was automatically of global
importance because of the huge Empire. I think Americans are now in
this position. They can write a very inward-looking novel about going
to night-clubs in Manhattan. It should be of interest for everybody
around the world because of the dominance of American culture.
The British had this attitude for a long, long time. Perhaps it was
this generation who came after the war who had suddenly realized that
Britain was just British society, that it was suddenly very small
and that the big questions of the age, in those days about communism
and capitalism, or the third world, the South and the North, were
somewhere else. Writers writing in East Germany, in Africa had it
ready-made. Here we were in this quiet little place, what could we
do? I think the answer a lot of us had was: you will either set books
in Africa or in Eastern Europe – and some people did –
or you look back through history and go to the last time, when everything
was fragmented, when everything – democracy, stability –
was really at risk. It's no coincidence if you often find a lot of
writers who emerged in Britain in the 80s: Salman Rushdie, Graham
Swift, Ian McEwan, you find them going back again and again to the
war and more recently to the first world war (people like Sebastian
Faulks, Pat Barker).
… / …
When I finished An Artist of the Floating World I felt I had written
a very good manual about how to waste your life in the sense of your
career and your vocation but I hadn't discussed or written very much
about the emotional, personal area of one's life. It seemed to me
that there are other perfectly great ways to waste your life, even
if you had a splendid career that helped the world and the poor, your
life was still somehow being impoverished, you just failed to live
properly.
If in the personal arena you have failed to love and have proper relationships
and so in The Remains of the Day I decided I'd write my second novel
all over again except this time with this dimension as well and I
thought perhaps if I changed the setting from Japan to England people
wouldn't notice very much the similarity! So really those three books
were attempts always to try again, try again.
By the time I finished The Remains of the Day I felt I had come to
the end of that process and so for The Unconsoled I addressed slightly
different things and this is natural. One of the difficult things
for writers is that you tend to discover a voice at a certain point
of your life. People praise you for it, people fix you up as a person
who is good at this kind of thing, but of course you change, your
life changes, you change as a person as you get older, you change
as a writer probably and I often see writers who are still stuck with
the techniques and styles that were appropriate to them twenty, twenty-five
years earlier in their lives and there is a difficulty: the voice
is not coming through. In other words the techniques have not kept
up with the person changing in the world. I felt that I was in danger
with this.
When I came to write The Unconsoled, I was as much older as the person
who started these three novels. My fife had changed profoundly and
my whole view of life had probably changed. I suppose, it felt slightly
unsatisfactory to me, this notion that, as Stevens or as Ono does,
you can at a certain late part in your life look back over your life
and see a kind of a clear road that you've come down and you can point
at this point and this point when you went wrong. Somehow, I'm not
saying that's incorrect or not realistic, but that somehow it did
not fit anymore my view of how life was, or life might be when I got
to that age. I'm not sure that life really can be seen as a kind of
clear path where you took a few wrong turns.
In The Unconsoled I wanted to express my feeling that it wasn't that
controlled, that there was no path. Fate, circumstances, deterministic
forces pick you up and just put you down somewhere and then you say:
‘Oh yes, I'm rather glad I chose to do this job, I'm glad I
married this person’ and then you make pronouncements about
what you're going to be doing in the future and then this wind picks
you up again and puts you somewhere else and you're doing something
completely different where the values that you've espoused before
you have completely changed. You change everything to fit the place
where you've been thrown down and you say 'Yes you know I'm working
for this company because I believe in globalisation' but actually
it is the only job you can get and this is how we tend to go through
life, dignifying the position we have landed in. I don't want to make
any definitive statement here but at the time when I wrote The Unconsoled
I was trying to replace that model, which is a rather useful one for
writing novels. You can write neat novels by having this model of
roads and people taking the wrong paths, but I suspect that if we
think about it, our lives are just not like that. It's usually a mess,
about a man who's lost his schedule but is too embarrassed to admit
it. That became the model for me rather than the road you've lived
back on. That's the main difference.
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