| Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels are concerned with the fragmentation of modern civilization.The alienation of human beings,the rupture of national memory and the binary opposition between Man and nonhuman lives are all manifestations of how people live in the fragmentary civilization.In order to integrate all these aspects,Ishiguro constructs the organic community at three levels of moral sentiments,nation and ecology.This dissertation analyzes Ishiguro’s interaction with the idea of culture,discussing how he retraces and reshapes the sense of community so as to integrate the fragmentation.The Introduction consists of four parts: the origin of the research topic,a literature review of cultural studies on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels,research methods and dissertation framework,and the research significance.Scholars have noticed that Ishiguro pursues “wholeness” in his novels.When it comes to Ishiguro’s connection with the idea of culture which highlights unity,scholars often analyze his inheritance of “the great tradition” brought up by F.R.Leavis.But such an approach tends to focus on Ishiguro’s interaction with certain groups of authors(scholars)or schools of philosophy,ignoring the fact that Ishiguro may have greater social considerations.This dissertation argues that Ishiguro,like scholars over the centuries,attempts to integrate the fragmentary civilization by exploring the construction of the organic community.Therefore,this study expands the previous width of cultural studies on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels,alters the bias against totality in postmodern thinking,and provides certain solutions for people to cope with the fragmentation caused by the process of modernization.This dissertation is composed of three parts,apart from the Introduction and the Conclusion.Part 1 focuses on interpersonal alienation and relationship repair,analyzing how Ishiguro constructs the organic community in the dimension of moral sentiments.Both The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans depict the failure of emotional communication,building emotional connection through musical writing and childhood nostalgia,respectively.In The Unconsoled,under the influence of the culture industry such as movies and radios,commercialized music suppressed emotions as a result of the triumph of instrumental rationality.But the political music of the ruling class can only maintain a surface of seeming harmony,leading to the confrontation between “music” and “noise” judged by the standards of the elites.Brodsky’s performance on Thursday Night proves that the ideal music should stimulate sympathy during communication and replace instrumental rationality with communicative rationality.In When We Were Orphans,the harmonious International Settlement in Shanghai is constructed as a utopia.Children in nature are naturally sympathetic to the others,and adults with childlike qualities highlight moral sentiments such as “conscience”.However,the discipline of children given by adults reveals a family crisis of interpersonal alienation,which in turn accentuates the ambivalence of “nostalgia.” On the one hand,by rebuilding emotional connection,nostalgia plays a positive role in repairing interpersonal estrangements through imagination.On the other hand,nostalgia may create an illusory community that probably never existed.Both novels retrace the emphasis of “sympathy” in the idea of culture,regarding it as an effective way to promote emotional communication and construct a cohesive community.Part 2 focuses on the rupture of national memory and its restoration,detecting how Ishiguro constructs the organic community in the national dimension.Both The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant are concerned with the inheritance of national memory,advocating strengthening national identity by reconstructing“Englishness”.In The Remains of the Day,knowledge of the world and moral qualities fortify the greatness of English gentlemen.However,the professionalism demanded by the knowledge society puts the gentlemen’s amateurism to the test.That exposes incongruities inside the gentry culture,such as the contradiction between intelligence and experience,and the confrontation between the mass and the minority.The novel foregrounds the tension of the gentlemen’s being “great”.On the one hand,gentlemen,as a symbol of typical “Englishness,” serve as a strong bond for British people to construct the nation as an imagined community.On the other hand,the culture of gentlemen still has many defects.For example,it disdains professionalism and democracy,supports imperial expansion,and pays much attention to external character without catering to the needs of specific individuals.The Buried Giant paints a picturesque landscape composed of rural scenery and historical ruins.The characters often take a bird’s-eye view of the landscape,suggesting that the natural scenery is controlled by human factors.In this way,political discourses concerning national conflict are naturalized and concealed by the landscape.However,as the“Lieux de mémoire”,the ruined monastery restores the national memory while falling into the trap of xenophobic nationalism.Moreover,national memories of “Rural England” and the British imperial past are embodied in the landscape.By representing these past memories,the novel implies that the national community should not be dominated by England,but should be constructed by all the nations in Great Britain.Both novels acknowledge that “Englishness” fulfills an important role in national cohesion,but criticize the imperialism related to “Englishness.”Part 3 discusses how Ishiguro constructs the organic community in the ecological dimension,which helps to deconstruct the opposition between human and nonhuman.Both Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun reflect on posthuman subjectivity,exploring ways in which humans and nonhumans interact.In Never Let Me Go,clones are closely related to images of rubbish,dirt,animals,or monsters,which indicates self-centered human beings regard clones as an absolute Other by making a boundary of distinction.Such an attitude is closely related to the tradition of humanist thought since the Enlightenment.By revealing the rationality,reflexivity,intelligence and sensibility clones possess,the novel extends the notion of “subject” to include the nonhuman,which foregrounds a non-anthropocentric stance upheld by critical posthumanism.Klara and the Sun reflects on posthuman subjectivity by presenting the debate on head and heart.Putting too much emphasis on the function of the intelligent brain,the society reinforces disembodied Cartesian subjectivity.The metaphor of the “human heart” reveals the uniqueness of human beings from perspectives of memory and emotion,questioning Cartesian subjectivity with the interactive inter-subjectivity.The tension between the scientific brain and the human heart represents the tension between critical posthumanism and traditional humanism.For one thing,the novel blurs the boundary between human and nonhuman,advocating that human beings live in the symbiosis with other forms of life.Another theme in the novel is the importance of humanity,with the novel delving into the significance of man’s existence and his responsibilities in the larger ecological system.Both novels insist on a non-anthropocentiric view,refusing to regard nonhumans as wholly opposed or unconnected to human beings.To construct the organic community from the above three levels,Ishiguro pays attention to the small community based on blood and geography,then to the nation based on political sovereignty,and finally moves to a global organic community that transcends racial,national and even species limits.He especially emphasizes the cultivation of sympathy in order to promote interpersonal communication,retracing national memory to reconstruct national identity,and abandoning anthropocentrism to live in harmony with nonhuman lives.These ideas may provide some inspiration for the construction of a harmonious society in China,and also encourage us to build a community of common destiny in the global village. |
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