Klara and the Humans: Agency, Hannah Arendt, and Forgiveness

Original R. Eaglestone 外国文学研究 2022-12-15

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内容摘要

动因是石黑一雄所有小说中的一个重要议题。本文认为，石黑一雄的小说《克拉拉与太阳》比对了两个动因幻景。第一个是如同机器的计算型模式，由人工智能机器人克拉拉演示，这部分，还有克拉拉的故事，与柏拉图的洞穴寓言有异曲同工之处。第二个是更为人类的媒介幻景，由汉娜·阿伦特的行动说明交代得一清二楚。两个幻景围绕小说中一个重要议题即有关宽恕的观念和实践发生冲突。我觉得，对于宽恕的关注及其与动因形式的联系推动了石黑一雄小说中的一个重要主题。他先前的小说表明，我们都被困在自己所作的决定之中，这一点在《被掩埋的巨人》里最为有力地呈现为一个报复性种族灭绝暴行的连环套。《克拉拉与太阳》中的宽恕观念开启了逃脱此套的机会。

关键词

石黑一雄；《克拉拉与太阳》；动因；阿伦特；行动；宽恕

作者简介

罗伯特·伊格尔斯通，英国伦敦大学皇家霍洛威学院当代文学与思想教授，已发表 8 部专著，包括《文学为什么重要》（2019）和《真理与惊奇：柏拉图和亚里士多德文学指南》（2021）。此外，他还编辑或与他人合作编辑了 10 部书籍，其中有《劳特利奇 21 世纪文学小说词典》（2019）。

Abstract

Agency is a central issue in all of Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction. This article argues that Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun contrasts two visions of agency. The first is a machine-like, algorithmic model, demonstrated by the artificial intelligence robot Klara: this, as well as Klara’s story, parallels Plato’s allegory of the Cave. The second is a more human vision of agency which is clarified by Hannah Arendt’s account of action. Both visions collide over a key issue in the novel, the idea and practice of forgiveness. I argue that this focus on forgiveness and its relation to forms of agency advance a key issue in Ishiguro’s fiction. His previous novels suggest that we are trapped in the decisions we have made: in The Buried Giant, this is presented most forcefully in suggesting a chain of retributive genocidal atrocities. The concept of forgiveness in Klara and the Sun begins to offer an escape from that chain.

Key words

Ishiguro; Klara and the Sun; agency; Arendt; action; forgiveness

Author

Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, and is the author of eight books, including Literature: Why It Matters (2019) and Truth and Wonder: A Literary Introduction to Plato and Aristotle (2021), and editor or co-editor of ten other books, including The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction (2019).

Email: R.Eaglestone@rhul.ac.uk

Introduction: Two Visions of Agency

Questions about agency and its attendant problems are at the heart of Ishiguro’s fiction: knowing or not knowing how to act; the ability or inability to act; the impact of actions from the past on the present; the involvement, willing or not, in the mass-actions of others (in nationalist movements, or anti-Semitism, for example). These problems of agency are usually seen through their impact on the agent, even if the agent does not seem to recognise them, which is the source of much of the pathos (in The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go) or irony (When We Were Orphans) or unsettling humour (The Unconsoled) in his work.

Klara and the Sun marks a development in what we might call the “novelistic thinking” about agency in Ishiguro’s work. Not only are there many agents – there are more plots and subplots than in most of Ishiguro’s other novels– but, at its core, the novel contrasts two visions of, or ideas about, agency: a machinic or technological vision of agency against a more “human” one. Significantly, as this article will demonstrate, machine-thinking is not limited to machines, and humans have problems with “human” thinking. The novel plays out and so illuminates the differences between these visions, which tells us something about our world. Moreover, and more importantly in the context of Ishiguro’s work, what I term the “human” vision of agency offers a way out of an intellectual impasse which characterises much of Ishiguro’s fiction.

These two visions of agency, this contrast between a vision of life as technological or as human, do not simply stem from the fact that Klara is a machine or that Josie is “lifted” (that is, in the world of the novel, genetically enhanced) or from some notional humanity of the other characters. This contrast is much older and originates in the West from classical antiquity in the philosophy of Plato. I turn to one interpretation of his work to interpret this novel, first and foremost, because it makes up the foundational matrix of Western thought, which deals with the same fundamental questions as Klara and the Sun: Who or what are we? How are we different, or not, from animals and other thinking creatures? Is our thinking at root technical or somehow something else? How are agency and knowledge linked? What role does transcendence play in our lives and in relation to reason? Second, because one strand of this thinking, in the work of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, has led to some of the most interesting work on AI, machine thinking, agency and its importance.

Klara and the Cave

The first vision of how agency works in the novel is Klara’s: a model of agency from the point of view of a product. Perhaps, at first sight, we might think that this is heart-warming. It (I am not going to call it “she”) is a product designed to be an artificial friend (AF), of course, so it sounds almost friendly, but we note that it is only as good as its programming. It follows its pre-programmed hierarchies and ultimately obeys its owner, Josie’s mother. For example, the mother orders Klara to accompany her to the waterfall without Josie, against Josie’s wishes, and Klara obeys, rationalising (using the metaphor of sight) that, since “Mother and Josie had now expressed the view” that it should go, ‘“I could see how likely it was…that I would gain new, perhaps crucial insights concerning Josie’s situation” (KS: 96). More chillingly, it obeys its owner’s commands even when these seem to threaten Josie: instructed by the mother to replace Josie, it says until “just now” that it “believed it was my duty [i.e. programming] to save Josie, to make her well. But perhaps this is a better way” (KS: 214). Klara’s programming means that it also notes only “black-skinned people” as exceptions (Josie Gill notes a similar trope in Never Let Me Go as Kathy has “quite a good look” at George “the big Nigerian man” (NLMG: 251) but fails to see Miss Emily (Gill 65). Even the moment that looks most like an action beginning in its own free agency, its act of worship at the Sun’s barn, stems from a logical series of inferences concerning Josie’s health: Klara brings “several speculations together” until the “idea came into my mind” (KS: 115). Perhaps, this oddly passive construction is an articulation of programming, not thinking. This is because in the question echoed in its model number, ‘B2’ (KS: 42), it is not 2B.

Klara can only follow its programming in matters of agency: it does, however, acquire something that at least looks like knowledge. In fact, this acquisition closely parallels the most famous story about knowledge in Western culture, Plato’s allegory of the Cave. At the centre of The Republic, at the start of Book VII, the allegory’s protagonist begins in the depth of the dark cave, chained in fetters with others. The talk is of the images they can all see, but as the protagonist breaks free, these are revealed to be shadows on the wall cast by puppets. The protagonist is wrenched up and out of the cave into the daylight where, slowly adjusting to the world outside, he begins to see and then to understand the real and beautiful world illuminated by the light of the sun. Descending back into the cave, the protagonist discovers that the former prisoners now despise him and resent his strange talk of the real world and would murder him if they could. It is a journey which parallels the rising and sinking of the sun: rising from our painful, shared human time, in which things change, into the peak of the eternal realm, in which things are forever true and unchanging, and then back down to darkness. In Plato, knowledge and agency are bound together: one reading of Plato is that through reason, through knowledge, his work is trying to give us agency, to make us free from convention, free from others, free even from our own bodily desires, to achieve the “inner freedom of the soul” (Williams 154).

Klara begins in a shop, a cave, imprisoned with others, even though it “always longed to see more of the outside” (KS: 6). Rosa and the other AFs talk about frivolities or tease each other: Klara is keen to learn. Even though it gets sent to the darkness at the back of the shop, it is eventually bought and leaves the shop/cave for Josie’s house. From there it goes outside and makes its way to the sun’s barn, where it communes with the real world, has an insight or il-lusion of mystical knowledge. Having communed with the Sun, it takes its lessons back to the world. In the end, Klara goes back into a cave, the little utility room, and then finally to a yard where, although it can turn its head (KS: 303), it is unable to move (like the cave). It suffers a “slow fade” (KS: 298) (and not “reverse engineering”, being taken apart, at the hands of Mr Capaldi).

Klara’s model of knowledge, like Plato’s, is of seeing: “to see more of the outside” (KS: 6). Others echo this continually: “All right Klara, just you wait and see” (KS: 27) says AF Rex; Manager praises its “extraordinary observational ability” (KS: 44); it “notices things no one else does and stores them away” (KS: 77); “Maybe”, Josie says, “you can see things the rest of us can’t” (KS: 108). Its sense of knowledge-as-seeing extends to calculating what goes on inside people: Manager notes its “unusual insight” (KS: 304). Again, Gill notes this trope in Kathy, who “sees” in order to understand the thoughts of others (70). Klara also segments space: the waterfall is described as “filling eight boxes” (KS: 100) and time (Rick’s visits “fell into three phases” (KS: 118). The geometrical shapes it constantly describes are not only the result of its perception system being overwhelmed (nor only, as one of my students insightfully realised, its memory systems running down in the yard in the time of the narration) but also insight into the Platonic nature of reality: echoes, as in the dialogue Meno, of the ideal forms.

Klara may acquire something that looks like knowledge, as the philosopher does in Plato, escaping from the cave, but it can never acquire that “inner freedom of the soul” because it is a programmed machine. Indeed, it illustrates what Heidegger sees as a monumental but subtle shift in Plato’s allegory. While the Sun is the revelation of the true, the beautiful and the good, the philosopher does not bring back the Sun and its revealing light: instead, they bring the images of what is illuminated. In the cave, what is seen is not truth-as-revelation but, instead, truth-as-accuracy, right-or-wrong, standards. The cave-dwellers compare their shadows on the wall with the now-shadowy images brought back from above; (that is, “Cave-thinking” cannot understand these “beyond moments” and can only comprehend them in its own, limited idiom.. This is what computers do: they are accurate, they are not truthful. That is, your laptop can spellcheck ‘I love you’, but can never mean it.

This is all relevant because one reading of Plato is to see his world as the world of products dominated by technical thinking. Alexander Nehamas writes,

The fundamental assumption on which Plato’s system depends is an image of living a life as practicing a craft, as a process that proceeds by definitive rules and whose product depends on how well its rules are applied. To put the point bluntly, just as we are willing to take the advice of shoemakers on the most appropriate shoes, so, he believes, we should be willing to take the advice of philosophers on what life is best for us. (327)

This is a product’s way of seeing the world. Like a computer program or algorithm, it works by applying the right knowledge, the right rules, to get the right outcome. This is true even in Klara’s interaction with the Sun. Klara believes that if it enters the right information in the right way, and undertakes the right actions, it will get the right result: a childish view of religion. The novel shows us that this grounding belief is false. The Sun does not bring the homeless man back to life, for example, nor is it angry that Klara fails in its chimerical mission to prevent pollution: the Sun is just the sun.

One could object that Klara’s seemingly religious vision of the Sun is not rational nor a result of craft, of technological thinking. This seems flawed in three ways. First, to be rational is not necessarily to be materialist or atheist (this conflation of views, that rationalism is the same as materialism is the same as atheism is a contemporary “New Atheist” view). That is to say: Klara’s apparent religion is not irrational. Indeed, second, Klara’s thought process given its view of the Sun is entirely rational: whether the starting point – the near omnipotence and omniscience of the Sun – is correct is an issue beyond rationality: it is neither a rational or irrational decision and cannot be measured in those terms. Third, and perhaps most important, is the “argument by design” for God which assumes that the universe is designed, just as a watch must have a watch-maker. For we humans this argument is flawed as an argument (not least because evolution can be understood to achieve the same end) and it begs an array of the deepest religious and existential questions. But this is not the case for Klara. Klara is a watch, a machine, and unquestionably does have a maker; so, it is hardly a surprise that its view of the universe is “by design”, teleological and algorithmic, and that the Sun, its energy source, is the “designer” and repairer of things broken in the world. Moreover, bearing in mind that it is programmed to see and draw empirical inferences from its vision, we see that the story of the “resurrection” of Beggar man and his dog by the Sun (“a special kind of nourishment from the Sun had saved them” underlies the development of its rational (if incorrect) beliefs (KS: 37). From this belief in the creator/preserver God of the Sun, all Klara’s deductions follow a rational process.

Klara, then, has the illusion of agency but without agency. This does not mean that it cannot do things. Jane Bennett writes that vibrant matter is “a creative not-quite-human force capable of producing the new” (118). Bennett is referring to nature, to non-human matter, which applies as well to Klara. A watch, or a robot, does something, but may not have agency. It might be suggested that Klara does display agency: take, for example, its desire to go outside. Klara has “estimated” (a mathematical word) that Josie has drawn a picture for Rick and offers to take it to his house to help repair the rift between them: AFs, Josie notes, “go on errands all the time”; Klara adds that it “would be good for me to explore the outside” and that Rick might forgive Josie “and be her best friend again” (KS: 135). This latter is its motivation, but this is clearly a programmed desire, to make the object of its programming happy (through observations, Klara can access “quite comprehensively all of Josie’s impulses and desires” (KS: 210), just as Google can many of ours). Very significantly, as I suggest below, its lack of real understanding is shown immediately. Josie crossly says that it is “for him to forgive me” and Klara has to admit that it does not understand “yet the rules about forgiveness” (KS: 135). It never will because forgiveness has no rules, and without rules, Klara cannot grasp anything. As Jacques Derrida argued, “forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalising. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary […] as if it interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality” (32 – emphasis in original). If there were rules to forgiveness, it would simply be an exchange, one for another, an algorithm. By contrast, he points out that for thinkers like Arendt, forgiveness is “a human possibility” (37).

A human possibility: action and agency

Klara and the Sun offers another vision of agency not based on “product” or “technological” thinking, but on a vision illuminated usefully by Arendt and in which forgiveness, one of the themes of the novel, is understood anew. In The Human Condition (1998), Arendt outlines three modes in which we humans live. The first is labour, repetitive work undertaken to keep the body alive (think: the cyclical sowing and harvesting of crops; cleaning the home; or even the daily brushing of teeth).

The second, and especially relevant to Klara, is work, making things. This is the task of the homo faber, the mode of being of humans-as-makers, as humans-as-machines (and, in the case of Klara, machines-as-humans). Work is algorithmic, it follows a pattern or a blueprint, and in following a blueprint arrives at a preplanned end. It uses the resources of the world: material (a tree becomes a table) but also, we can add to Arendt, less material: the smile and “have a nice day!” phrasing of a customer service agent is work, as are Klara’s addresses to the Sun, which aim to achieve what it is programmed to do. Klara is simply a more sophisticated version of the robot machines that, say, make cars. As I have suggested, Klara both works and is a work, a made-object: its function as an AF to make a world, a more pleasant world for its teenager.

Arendt’s third mode is action. This is widely seen as Arendt’s most innovative idea from The Human Condition. For Arendt, action “alone is the exclusive prerogative of man; neither a beast nor a god is capable of it, and only action is entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others” (22-23). This is why action is the source of politics, our being together. Action stems from the fact of human plurality, that we are always in society with others, and that we act with others. It is unlike the making that work is, because while making has an end in mind, for action, the end is unclear: the doing itself is the point, and in that doing, you express who you are. For example, we do not know what the consequence will be from some shared public action: we may hope or intend a certain consequence, but in taking the action together we are only expressing ourselves and hoping for the result we desire. By contrast, screwing the legs to the tabletop, as per the blueprint, inevitably makes a table if you do it properly. Actions establish relationships but can also end them. Action is unpredictable and irreversible: you can disassemble a table, but you cannot “take back” an action, and any action sets off a chain of further consequences and actions. When the mother “lifted” her first daughter Sal, and then Josie, she took an action. The consequences and damages are unforeseen. The chain of actions leads first to Sal’s death and seems as if it will lead to Josie’s, too. These kinds of chains of events are a central theme of Ishiguro’s fiction: a decision, often taken years before (to become a painter for the Japanese nationalist movement; to teach nationalism; to choose not to ask someone to marry you; to aid commitment of a genocide), begins a series of events and forges a link in a chain which remains unbroken.

These chains of actions, one following unpredictably on from another, are broken only by forgiveness, Arendt argues. It is forgiveness that prevents endless bitterness and anger and is the resolution to the problem of the unpredictable consequences of sequences of action. Arendt writes that the “discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense” (238). What Arendt means is that we do not have to be theists to take forgiveness seriously: forgiveness may be the necessary corrective for the inevitable damages resulting from action (239). In Klara and the Sun, these two models of agency come to meet and contrast most clearly in the central moment of forgiveness in the novel. It is this moment, too, which makes the novel stand out from other Ishiguro fictions and shows a development in the thought of his work. As I will go on to suggest, it answers, in part, questions posed in his previous works.

Forgiveness

Before focusing, in detail, on the most important moment of forgiveness, and in order to stress how important forgiveness is in Klara and the Sun, I want to look at three examples in the novel: one is fake; one is not forgiveness (despite the appearance of it); and one is real. First, a fake, totally instrumental non-apology, from Miss Helen to Vance. Rick and his mother meet Vance, her lover from twenty-seven years before, in order to persuade him to offer Rick a scholarship to the Atlas Brookings College. Vance takes the chance to attack Helen. As he “changed the mood so suddenly I almost let a surprised sound escape me” (KS: 250). She apologises, badly, “I often wish I could line up all the people […] I’ve treated shabbily […] the way a monarch might […] look each one in the eye and say, I’m so sorry” (KS: 252-3) and then, more abjectly in response to particular wrongs (“that evening at Miles Martin’s house […] That voicemail” (KS: 254). Vance, knowing full well that the apology is designed as an exchange (an apology for a scholarship), clearly declines it. Immediately afterwards, Miss Helen affirms its instrumental nature, “I’m wondering if that was enough. If that will satisfy him” (KS: 256). This is not an apology, but it is a simple exchange, almost an exercise in ritual humilia-tion, and certainly a kind of economic exchange (a submission for a favour).

A second kind of “non-apology” occurs towards the end of the novel. Like its comparable counterpart Jessie from Toy Story 2, Klara is, more or less, thrown away by Josie as Josie gets older. For a while, it is stored in the little utility room and eventually sent to the junkyard. In this period, Rick is concerned for it: “Are you going to be OK?” he asks, and it replies that “The mother is always very kind to me” (KS: 292). Josie’s farewell is not much: “I guess you may not be here when I get back. You’ve been just great Klara” (KS: 301). But Klara is nether bitter nor forgiving, because – as a machine – it can be neither. Indeed, it may be that “all humans are lonely. At least potentially” (KS: 260) but Klara is not, because it is not human. Klara has no capacity for “being with”, only a programme to look as if it has, and so no need to ask for, or be offered, forgiveness.

A third, real act of forgiveness occurs between Rick and Josie. Not only is their teenage relationship full of acts of forgiveness and making up, but their growth into an adult relationship, as friends, is as well. They change and grow, and “now we’re no longer kids, we have to wish each the best and go our different ways” (KS: 292). They are friends and have, as it were, forgiven and freed each other from each other, and remain fond: a positive way to come to be with former lovers. This kind of positive view of a former relationship is almost unique in Ishiguro’s work and is a sign that there is something important in that act of forgiveness. These three examples only serve to build or reflect on the core moment of forgiveness in the novel.

That’s some message

The crucial scene in the novel is based around forgiveness and draws on the metaphorical field of light/dark, sun and vision. It brings into stark contrast the technological, machinic workworld and the plural human shared sense of action with all its fallibilities. Josie is ill, possibly dying like her sister, from “being lifted”. The Mother, bitter and in despair, lashes out at Rick: does he feel like the winner, even though he was not “lifted”? All he has is the “dark sky” (KS: 280) that she gestures at as she “waved her hand at the window” (KS: 281). Something “ignited” (KS: 281) in Rick’s face. He passes on a message from Josie; the Mother’s eyes are “filled with fear” (KS: 281) in apprehension, in case Josie is going to condemn her, as her actions seem to have risked killing Josie. But, in fact, the message is one of love and of forgiveness. Josie loves her mother and was happy to be lifted despite the seeming real risk of her death: “she’d do exactly what you did and you’ll always be the best mother she could have” (KS: 282). The Mother replies:

“That’s some message”, she said finally.

“Excuse me”, I said.

“Jesus”, the Mother said and sighed quietly. “That’s some message”.

“Excuse me!” This time I’d almost shouted… “I’m sorry to interrupt. But there’s something occurring outside. The Sun’s coming out!” (KS: 282)

The mother means “Jesus” as a kind of expletive, but we do not have to hear it that way: instead, following Arendt, we can hear it as noting the power of forgiveness. Klara is interrupting because the sun is appearing (and we can note: the humans are concerned with what they can hear, but the robot with what it can see). It demands: “we must go upstairs”, to Josie. Klara and Rick, “coming to some intuitive conclusion” (KS: 283), throw open the window, “the Sun had broken through the dark clouds, and all at once – as if each of us in the room had received a secret message – we turned to look at Josie” (KS: 284). She wants to drink water. This scene is a quasi-miracle (“quasi” in the sense of “as if”): it seems like a marvellous, redemptive event.

From the machinic, technological point of view, Klara’s plea to the Sun and the sun’s coming out are linked: if the proper steps are followed in the algorithm, if the ritual is performed in the correct way, the Sun will respond. But we know not only from our common sense but also from the novel itself that this is not the case. The Sun is not a divinity in the novel, nor is it like a reliable “piece of technology” that can be switched on by the right actions (like a child’s version of the Christian God): it is Klara’s product-vision of agency which has created this idea for it. But from the other view of agency, of human action, a different kind of event has occurred. Josie’s act of forgiveness (and of love) has broken the chain of events. It is this breaking of the chain that, as it were, is the miracle. Josie is the victim of her mother’s choices, and her life is in danger. But once she has forgiven her mother, the burden of the past is thrown off (are there other examples of this “throwing off” in Ishiguro’s wider body of work? It is hard to think of any, and none so obvious. Even Axl’s forgiveness of Beatrice’s affair in The Buried Giant is combined with anger and long-held grudges). Josie’s recovery may not stem from her forgiveness, but the physical recovery is almost secondary to the psychic one: the sun breaking through the clouds is metaphor for the breaking of the chain of events, perhaps, and the secret message is that all is forgiven and can begin afresh.

In the novel, this moment undoes all the knots and plots: Josie is free to live on; Rick is freed from his obligations to Josie and so any sense that he needs to be “lifted”; the sinister plan with Mr Capaldi will come to nothing; even Josie’s need for Klara, which stemmed in no small part from her sickness and her mother’s concern, begins to wane. The forgiveness begins the happy ending of the novel. It is even more significant, perhaps, for the change it marks in Ishiguro’s fiction. I began this article noting that Ishiguro’s fiction is about the ways in which our past choices, whether made or unmade, whether free or not, trap us and how they then shape our present and future: Masuji Ono trapped by his nationalist past in An Artist of the Floating World; Stevens led to loneliness through dignity in The Remains of the Day; Kathy’s ‘choiceless choice’ of passivity in the genocidal world of Never Let Me Go; Banks trapped in an adult version of his childhood trauma in When We Were Orphans. These characters live with but cannot escape the way they are trapped by the actions of their past: Ryder simply tries to leave the city at the end of The Unconsoled. In the novel immediately before Klara and the Sun, this “entrappedness” is given its full significance, namely Wistan’s vision of the retributive genocide and atrocity in The Buried Giant: “Men will burn their neighbour’s houses by night. Hang children from trees at dawn. The rivers will stink of corpses bloated from their days of voyaging” (BG: 324). In that novel, as in the Ishiguro’s earlier works, there is no way out from the choices of the past, and simply living with them (by learning to banter, say, and enjoying the remains of the day) is not enough to avoid the catastrophe that the past brings to the future: Kathy is both a collaborator with and will be a murdered victim of genocide; Winstan’s allies will commit retributive atrocities. All these are examples of Klara’s algorithmic, “machine” way of thinking, its product vision of agency. One move leads inexorably to another and then to another: there can be no escape.

But as we saw in Arendt, and in Rick’s message from Josie, there is a way to end this chain, there is a kind of reply to Wistan. That is forgiveness which breaks the chains of action. Now a slightly wild claim: Klara and the Sun retrospectively imagines this forgiveness across Ishiguro’s canon. The novel is full of conscious, powerful echoes from Ishiguro’s earlier works: significantly, in Klara, each one is case redeemed. Who are Coffee Cup Lady, “I estimated sixty-seven years old”, and her Raincoat Man, “I estimated seventy-one years old” (KS: 19) but Beatrice and Axl, once sundered and now reunited: “at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness” (KS: 21)? They are referred to again at the close of the novel (KS: 293). They may also be Miss Kenton and Mr Stevens, spending the remaining hours of the sunny day together, “She and the man were holding each other so tightly they were like one large person, and the Sun, noticing, was pouring his nourishment on them” (KS: 20): this image of two united as one, each having found “their other half”, is taken, of course, from The Symposium). The Mother and Miss Helen are echoes of Etsuko and Sachiko from A Pale View of Hills, right down to the suggestion of a potential murder plot and the uncertainty about their degrees of mental stability: but, unlike the earlier novel, nothing wicked this way comes. The Mother, too, with her “Sal” doll (and potentially her Josie doll) hints at Kathy’s dance in Never Let Me Go: but Mother does have a child. Josie and Rick parallel Kathy and Tommy, a couple who hope that their love will allow them something special. Rick, like Tommy, is kind of a failure (he has not been “lifted”) but has something special to show (his mechanical birds which will be used for surveillance, of what is past or passing or to come). Yet both grow out of their love in a healthy and human way (that is, they are not murdered for their organs). Klara itself is also like Kathy, with her naivety and her keen observation of others, but with her blindness, too: but Klara (unlike Kathy) is simply a machine. Klara is also like Stevens, with views on good household management and, much more significantly, abetting something wicked or questionable because it is told to by an authority, but it sacks no Jewish maids, nor does the plot for it to replace Josie come to anything. It is also teased by Josie’s cronies in a way that clearly recalls Stevens’ interrogation by Lord Darlington and his friends, in which Stevens has to act the role of “the man on the street” (itself a rewriting of Tolstoy’s scene between Lavrushka the Cossack and Napoleon in War and Peace), but Klara does not feel shame, nor does it need to dissimulate. Even in terms of the style, the novel has sections which echo the mysterious oneiric quality of The Unconsoled (why, for example, are the shop’s shelves complete with coffee cups in the barn?). However, in contrast to Ishiguro’s earlier novel, we even see one of these scenes “from the inside” (KS: 306) where we and Klara understand what it means (the meaning is redeemed, as it were), while the interlocutor, Manager does not: there is a version of the same bravura prose trick earlier in the novel too, in a conversation between Rick and Klara (KS: 159).

All this is to say that Ishiguro has gone some way towards answering the challenge made by Wistan in The Buried Giant: he has found, for an individual at least, a way of breaking the chains that lead from action to retribution, that is, forgiveness. However, in order to do this, he has had to present a different model of agency, one in which forgiveness is possible. As Mother puts it in Klara and the Sun: “That’s some message” (KS: 282). He has achieved this by using a machine to draw out attention to the limits of “machine thinking” and so to the possibilities of “human thinking”.

Conclusion

In a review of Never Let Me Go, Louis Menand writes that there is “something animatronic” about Ishiguro’s characters: they are “simulators of humanness, figures engineered to pass as ‘real’. What it means to be really human is always a problem for them. Can you just copy other people? Would that take care of it?” This is why, as Menand writes of that novel, genetic engineering “the idea of human beings as products programmed to pick up ‘personhood skills’—is a perfect vehicle for a writer like Ishiguro.” I am not sure I agree completely with this assessment. In my reading, Menand is picking up on the way that Ishiguro’s characters seem often to accept a “machine” version of human agency. However, it is the case that in Klara and the Sun, the “simulator of humanness”, Klara, is what leads us to see (or better, to hear) through its own limitations: what is not “animatronic”, what is really human in the other characters.

Agency is a central issue in all of Ishiguro’s fiction. Klara and the Sun offers two visions of agency. The first is Klara’s: a vision of agency about production from a product, in which one event follows – is made – by another in programmable, predictable steps. This sense of agency corresponded to one way of understanding a Platonic vision of the world, that living life is the same as practicing a craft. The other is a more profoundly free and more profoundly human vision: the sense of agency involved not with production but with action that Arendt describes. In this vision of our human condition, forgiveness is what breaks the potentially endless chain of actions. In Klara and the Sun, it is Josie’s forgiveness of her mother that breaks this chain and resolves the plots of the novel. The possibility of personal (though not communal) forgiveness and the sense of agency it implies mark a movement beyond his previous novels.

责任编辑：张爱平

此文原载于《外国文学研究》2022年第1期

由于公众号篇幅所限，原文注解和引用文献省略

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