Temporality, Agency and the Cosmopolitan in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro and Timothy Mo

University of Dundee DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY A matter of time? Temporality, agency and the cosmopolitan in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro and Timothy Mo Spark, Gordon Andrew Award date: 2011 Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY A matter of time? Temporality, agency and the cosmopolitan in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro and Timothy Mo Gordon Andrew Spark 2011 University of Dundee Conditions for Use and Duplication Copyright of this work belongs to the author unless otherwise identified in the body of the thesis. It is permitted to use and duplicate this work only for personal and non-commercial research, study or criticism/review. You must obtain prior written consent from the author for any other use. Any quotation from this thesis must be acknowledged using the normal academic conventions. It is not permitted to supply the whole or part of this thesis to any other person or to post the same on any website or other online location without the prior written consent of the author. Contact the Discovery team ([email protected]) with any queries about the use or acknowledgement of this work. A Matter of Time? Temporality, Agency and the Cosmopolitan in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro and Timothy Mo Gordon Andrew Spark PhD University of Dundee February 2011 Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Out of Time – A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World 31 Chapter 2: Time Runs Out – The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans 83 Chapter 3: Time and Nation – An Insular Possession and The Redundancy of Courage 140 Chapter 4: Cosmopolitan Time – Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard and Renegade or Halo² 190 Conclusion 236 Bibliography 251 Acknowledgements Although this thesis bears my name it would not have been possible without the assistance and cooperation of a great many people. I would like to express my gratitude to all within the English Programme at Dundee. In particular I am indebted to my supervisor, Dr Gail Low, for her advice and guidance throughout, and for her understanding when deadlines were stretched as a result of my own cosmopolitan busyness. I am also grateful for the advice of Dr Peter Easingwood, who acted as co- supervisor in the early months of my research. I would also like to thank Dr Keith Williams, Professor Aidan Day and Dr Jodi-Anne George who, in their capacity as successive Postgraduate Advisors, have been a source of guidance and encouragement. I am similarly grateful to the various members of staff who have carried out my Thesis Monitoring Committees. The English postgraduate community at Dundee is a vibrant and supportive one and my thanks go to all of my fellow postgraduates, past and present, for their input and support. Their advice, questions and constructive criticism in postgraduate forums and conferences has contributed in no small part to this thesis. Particular thanks go to Dr Christopher Murray, whose advice and continued support of the postgraduate community after successfully graduating himself has been greatly appreciated. Outwith the English Programme, I am indebted to my colleagues in the Academic Achievement Teaching Unit and to my former colleagues in the University Library and Learning Centre for their encouragement, advice and friendship. My thanks are due also to my friends and, in particular, to my family, without whose support this thesis would never have been written. I am particularly indebted to my father, James, and brother, David, for their moral, practical and financial support. My greatest thanks are reserved, however, for my wife Łucja, whose love, support and sacrifice has been unyielding throughout. This thesis, and any benefits which may accrue from it, are as much hers as they are mine. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Elisabeth. Abstract The emergence of novelists such as Kazuo Ishiguro and Timothy Mo in the final decades of the twentieth century has often been taken as evidence of an increasing multiculturalism both in Britain and the wider world, as well as in British literature itself. With their dual British-Asian heritage and their interrogation of notions of history, identity and agency, these authors are often celebrated as proponents of the cosmopolitan novel, a genre which rejects binary notions of East and West or national interest in favour of a transnational mode of cooperation and cohabitation. Reading against the grain of such celebratory notions of the cosmopolitan, this thesis suggests that if the novels of Ishiguro and Mo are concerned with the exigencies of the cosmopolitan world, then they portray that world as one which remains split and haunted by divisions between East and West, past and present, self and ‘other’. That is, they present a cosmopolitan world in which the process of negotiation and contact is difficult, confrontational and often violent. Drawing upon Fredric Jameson’s notion of the ‘political unconscious’, I suggest that these novels in fact reveal the origins of the rather deeper divisions which have emerged in the first decade of the twenty first century, analysing the ways in which they reveal a degree of cultural incommensurability, frustrated cosmopolitan agency and the enduring power and appeal of the nation state. I also suggest that the contemporary critical obsession with the spatial – whereby cosmopolitanism’s work is carried out in ‘Third Spaces’, interstitial sites, and border zones – fails to recognize the importance of temporal concerns to the experience of cosmopolitan living. My analysis of the novels of Ishiguro and Mo is thus concerned with the way in which the temporal is a key concern of these works at both a narratological and thematic level. In particular, I identify a curious ‘double-time’ of cosmopolitanism, whereby the busyness which we might expect of the period is counterpointed by a simultaneous sense of stasis and inactivity. I argue that it is within this unsettling contemporary ‘double-time’ that the cracks and fissures in the narrative of cosmopolitanism begin to emerge. 1 Introduction In a recent interview to publicise his collection of short stories, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall , Kazuo Ishiguro reflected upon the fact that each of the stories is set in the same period: I wanted the stories all to fall in that time between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11…I wanted them all to have that setting…I didn’t want them set in the contemporary world, but [rather] one that wasn’t conscious of things like the clash of civilisations…I look back to that time now and I almost get nostalgic about it. There was a lot of smugness, and you can see a lot of the seeds of things that didn’t go so well. But it was a time of great optimism-the end of history and so on. 1 In this thesis, I wish to return to the novels produced by Ishiguro and by one of his contemporaries, Timothy Mo, immediately before and during that period identified by Ishiguro. The emergence of authors such as Ishiguro and Mo in the latter decades of the twentieth century is most often seen as a celebration and reflection of an increasingly cosmopolitan, international outlook which seems to characterise both Britain and her literature during that period. I want to return to these novels in order to seek out the traces of these ‘seeds of things that didn’t go so well’ and to explore the extent to which, in addition to celebrating an emerging multiculturalism, these novels simultaneously probe the limitations and blind spots of such a transnational outlook, reflecting the fact that cosmopolitan readings of such novels ‘tend to downplay or dismiss paradigms of rootedness, territoriality, and other geocultural factors of political identity’ 2 which nevertheless often return to haunt such novels. In suggesting that we might trace these histories in the texts from that period I am drawing upon Fredric Jameson’s theory of the ‘political unconscious’, the notion that all texts must unavoidably contain traces of the historical circumstances in which they were produced but that these traces are invariably buried deep within the novel’s 1 Bryan Appleyard, Perfect Pitch , Sunday Times, 3 May 2009, Culture section, p.6. 2 Wai-Chew Sim. Globalization and Dislocation in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro (Lewiston N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), p.2. 2 ‘unconscious’, that is, below the manifest surface content of the novel. Thus the critic’s task becomes one of attending to the novel’s form and ‘restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of…fundamental history’ 3. As such, the narratives produced by Ishiguro and Mo to some extent at least expose, within their narrative structures, the failure of Britain and the West in general to realise the potential of cross-cultural contact in the final two decades of the twentieth century and suggest the emergence of deeper national, ethnic and religious divisions which would re-establish themselves at the beginning of the new millennium.

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