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Allegory, Monument, and Oblivion in Kazuo Ishiguro's the Buried Giant

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Allegory, Monument, and Oblivion in Kazuo Ishiguro's the Buried Giant Aesthetic Historiography: Allegory, Monument, and Oblivion in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant Bernadette Meyler* Abstract This essay turns to Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 book The Buried Giant for insights into the moral and political implications of the kinds of historiography chosen in the aftermath of atrocity. The Buried Giant foregrounds monument, oblivion, and its own form, allegory, as historio- graphical strategies. If monuments aspire to bring the past into an eternal present, functioning as a kind of symbol, the novel indicates the impossibility of this goal. At the same time, it rejects oblivion’s efforts to entirely remove the traces of prior atrocities. The Buried Giant instead presents a version of allegory as an alternative mechanism for engaging with and negotiating a troubled inheritance. The allegory in question neither involves a one- to-one correspondence between events of the novel and national or international struggle, nor does it simply bring the reader from its particulars to a universal truth. It rather suggests a reciprocal reading of particulars through the windows they furnish upon each other, look- ing at medieval Britain as though through the lens of post-WWII Japan or examining England’s imperial past from the perspective of its prehistory in a time out of memory. This variety of allegory bears a family resemblance to that extolled by Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man, both of whom contrasted allegory with the symbol, and to Christopher Tom- lins’s efforts to produce a Benjaminian historiography. I. Introduction On its publication in 2015, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant was greeted by puzzled and somewhat mixed reviews.1 In the intervening years, it has not garnered as much attention as his earlier Never Let Me Go or The Remains of the Day.2 Nevertheless, the novel has much to tell us about the dynamics of both transitional justice and constitutional settlement. The * I am grateful to the participants in the 2017 conference “When Law Is Silent” at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and the 2018 conferences on “Historiography, Ideology, Law” at the University of Helsinki and the Boston College Law School for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts. This piece also benefitted from conversations with Matthew Smith, Greg Ablavsky, Elizabeth Anker, and Dan Edelstein. 1 Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (2015). James Wood’s review in The New Yorker was captioned “Kazuo Ishiguro’s Folly,” and continued, “His new novel has knights, ogres, and dragons. Why is it such a slog?” James Wood, The Uses of Oblivion: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, The New Yorker 92, 92 (Mar. 23, 2015). In the pages of The New York Times, Neil Gaiman called The Buried Giant “a novel that’s easy to admire, to respect and to enjoy, but difficult to love.” Neil Gaiman, Here Be Dragons, N.Y. Times, Mar. 1, 2015, at A1. 2 Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005); Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1990). ISSN 2291-9732 244 Critical Analysis of Law 5:2 (2018) book takes up the relationship between personal and political memories on the one hand, and a present socio-legal order on the other, exploring the erection of monuments and the encouragement of oblivion as two contrasting strategies for coping with past conflict. The form of the novel itself—that of allegory—suggests a third mechanism for working through, this conflict, one that it presents as potentially more desirable than the other alter- natives. It is this allegorical form, however, that most troubled and perplexed the book’s reviewers, and to which our contemporary sensibility has the least access.3 Several discrete disciplines have connected history with monuments, oblivion, and allegory. Scholars of memory have juxtaposed the narratives derived from collective memory with the kind of history produced by historians and demonstrated the ideological significance of memory for political action.4 Their work has sometimes overlapped with theories of transitional justice, which have frequently foregrounded the respective values of memory and forgetting in reconstructing societies in the aftermath of civil war or atrocity.5 3 James Wood, for example, deemed the deployment of allegory one of the impediments to the novel’s suc- cess. Wood, supra note 1. 4 See, for example, among historians, David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the Amer- ican Civil War (2002); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001); see also sociologist Jeffrey K. Olick’s The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (2007) (drawing on the work of Maurice Halbwachs and others to construct a new account of the significance of collective memory). Philosopher Paul Ricoeur also treated the dynamics of collective memory at length in his Memory, History, Forgetting (Kathleen Blamey & David Pellauer trans., 2004). 5 In the wake of the Holocaust, remembrance became imperative, both for survivors and for the German polity. See, e.g., Elie Wiesel, Night 34 (Marion Wiesel trans., 2006) (“Never shall I forget . Never shall I forget . Never shall I forget”); Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce (Stuart Woolf trans, 2003) (1947) (testifying to the year Levi spent at Auschwitz); Jürgen Habermas, Defusing the Past: A Politico-Cul- tural Tract, in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective 43, 44 (Geoffrey H. Hartman ed., 2000) (“There is the obligation we in Germany have—even if no one else is prepared to take it upon themselves any longer— to keep alive the memory of the suffering of those murdered at the hands of Germans, and we must keep this memory alive quite openly and not just in our own minds.”); see also Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994) (treating the historiographical debates surrounding accounts of the Holocaust); Stiina Löytömäki, Law and the Politics of Memory: Confronting the Past 24-25 (2014) (dis- cussing the unique status of the Holocaust as an object of memory, as well as the delay in bringing remembrance to the fore in Germany, while the Holocaust has simultaneously served as a paradigm for “how memories of other traumatic events express themselves”). The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission has often been viewed as continuing the emphasis on memory while adding the element of impunity for offenses committed. Scholars of transitional justice have often lauded the TRC’s strategy of seeking truth while also enabling forgiveness. See Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence 52-91 (1999). As Adam Sitze, however, has elaborated, critiquing the transitional justice approach, what has been forgotten is the colonial origin of parliamentary impositions of impunity. This origin was strategically erased at the very moment when the new South African state was in the process of establishing itself. See generally Adam Sitze, The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2013). The emphasis on memory in transitional justice seems to have waned slightly, as several recent writ- ings are ranged largely on the side of forgetting. See, e.g., David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (2016); Bradford Vivian, Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again 7 (2010) (asserting that “the central purposes of this study are to provide: (1) an updated conceptual framework devoted to analyzing forgetting as an organized public practice; and (2) a series of case studies that reveal, by implementing that framework, how one may argue for and enact such forgetting in the political and moral languages of public life”); Adriaan Lanni, Transitional Justice in Ancient Athens: A Case Study, 32 U. Pa. J. Int’l L. 551, 551 (2010) (contending that the Athenian amnesty in the wake of the reign of the Thirty Meyler — Aesthetic Historiography 245 The significance of memorials and monuments has often stood at the heart of such anal- yses.6 At the same time, literary scholars have vigorously debated the role of political allegory and allegorical reading in the context of the postcolonial novel.7 Drawing upon these various approaches, this essay foregrounds the disparate im- plications of monument, oblivion, and allegory for the observer and reader of the novel and, ultimately, for legal historiography. If monuments aspire to bring the past into an eter- nal present, functioning as a kind of symbol, the novel indicates the impossibility of this goal. At the same time, it rejects oblivion’s efforts to entirely remove the traces of prior atrocities. The Buried Giant instead presents a version of allegory as an alternative mechanism for engaging with and negotiating a troubled inheritance. The allegory in question neither involves a one-to-one correspondence between events of the novel and national or inter- national struggle, nor does it simply bring the reader from its particulars to a universal truth. It rather suggests a reciprocal reading of particulars through the windows they furnish upon each other, looking at medieval Britain as though through the lens of post-WWII Japan or examining England’s imperial past from the perspective of its prehistory in a time out of memory. This variety of allegory bears a family resemblance to that extolled by Walter Ben- jamin and Paul de Man, both of whom contrasted allegory with the symbol, and to Christopher Tomlins’s efforts to produce a Benjaminian historiography.8 The remainder of this essay will furnish an overview of The Buried Giant in Part II, then turn to the poles of monument and oblivion, which the book seems to set in opposi- tion to each other, in Part III. Part IV then elaborates upon the vision of allegory presented by the novel and demonstrates how it furnishes its own legal historiography.
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