Franziska Quabeck: Not I – Kazuo Ishiguro and the Politics of Misrecognition

In her monograph Not I – Kazuo Ishiguro and the Politics of Misrecognition, which is based on her post-doctoral dissertation, Franziska Quabeck sets out to challenge the well-known and established concept of the unreliable narrator. And what better novels to choose than Kazuo Ishiguro’s; he is, after all, famous for his unreliable narrators. In addition, Quabeck’s goals are a “reappraisal of the birth of the reader; and a reading of the works of Kazuo Ishiguro that traces their self-proclaimed debt to certain literary predecessors and goes beyond reading the novels by reference to their author’s ethnicity” (9). This adds to existing and, of course, plentiful scholarship of Ishiguro’s works. In her thorough study, Quabeck contributes new insights to most of his novels, which Ishiguro scholars will enjoy. Moreover, scholars interested in narratology will find Quabeck’s notion of inauthentic narration intriguing and will certainly be tempted to think about the concept of unreliable narration in more depth.

Unsatisfied with the moral dimension of Wayne C. Booth’s conception of the unreliable narrator, Quabeck proposes to replace the term “unreliable” with the term “inauthentic” since the narrators are at “odds with their sense of self” (9) and are thus ‘I’ and ‘not I’ simultaneously. Her study is a narratological one; Quabeck finds the split between narrating I and experiencing I characteristic of her inauthentic narrators and elaborates that this split is a “demonstration of the lack of a core, authentic self. Each narrator hides the ‘true’ version of their story behind the account of the narrating I that displays an inauthentic, misrecognised, empty self” (11).

Ishiguro’s narrators, Quabeck argues, are connected to famous literary forebears. In every chapter of the book (each deals with one novel), the protagonists are convincingly contrasted with their literary predecessors in order to show that the narrators do not only seek recognition from their other selves on a diegetic level, but also from a different Other “outside of their fictional world” (10).

Quabeck analyses Etsuko, the protagonist of Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, as an “odd woman” and reads her as having an alter-ego in her (gothic) double Sachiko. This suggests that the struggles single mother Sachiko faces in a deeply sexist, exploitative post-WWII Nagasaki society are in fact Etsuko’s own. What is especially convincing is Quabeck’s foregrounding of Etsuko’s reduction to sexist gender roles which are forced upon her by her surroundings. Etsuko, having accepted the sexist gender roles herself, inadvertently passes them on to her own daughter Niki since she does not actively reflect or fight them. Quabeck highlights that Etsuko did not want to become a mother and is trapped in an unhappy (possibly abusive) first marriage. This makes Etsuko an oddity, “since she is at odds with the society around her, she is at odds with her offspring and for the most part of the narrative, she is also at odds with her own body” (42). This conflict draws attention to Etsuko’s split narrative self which, in turn, highlights her inauthentic narration according to Quabeck.

Characterised as “Odd Father” by Quabeck, Ono is one of many questionable parental figures in Ishiguro’s oeuvre analysed in Not I – Kazuo Ishiguro and the Politics of Misrecognition. In An Artist of the Floating World, ageing artist Ono is stuck in patriarchal ideas on gender roles; he himself promotes them freely, thereby negatively influencing his young grandson. Like A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World has not yet been analysed in regard to aspects of gender and sexism. In a very compelling analysis of these themes, Quabeck manages to foreground new aspects of the novel and relate them to Shakespeare’s King Lear, which is, of course, famous for Lear’s “apparent misogyny” (69). According to Quabeck’s argument, Ishiguro’s Ono tries to be worthy of his literary forefather, King Lear, thereby negating his true inner self. This is the reason for his inauthentic narration. During the novel, Ono clings to an archaic world order which is at odds with his environment, especially his daughters.

The Remains of the Day, possibly Ishiguro’s most famous novel, introduces yet another inauthentic narrator. According to Quabeck’s analysis, Stevens’ self is empty and constitutes his inauthenticity, much like that of T. S. Eliot’s Alfred Prufrock, Stevens’ literary predecessor. Much more intriguing, however, is Quabeck’s shift in focus on the core issues of the novel, namely Stevens’ relationship with Miss Kenton and with his father. Rather than analysing Miss Kenton as a long-lost love, Quabeck reads Stevens as homosexual and his advances to bring Miss Kenton back to Darlington Hall as a desperate attempt to conform to society’s expectations and standards. In doing this, Quabeck sheds new light on a much-discussed issue of the novel and manages to expand academic discourse to Stevens’ relationship with Miss Kenton. An additional shift in focus is Stevens’ relationship with his father. Instead of reading it as Stevens frantically trying to step into his father’s shoes, Quabeck proposes that he is waiting to replace his father in order to gain back the power their relationship has cost him. In the pivotal scene of the novel, when Stevens Sr. has just died and Stevens has, in his own estimation, come into his own as a butler, Quabeck reads the triumph Stevens feels as triumph over an abusive parent. Quabeck’s considerations here are convincing since she zooms in on Stevens’ relationship with his father and successfully re-reads their relationship instead of only reading it literally and focusing on the surface level. Generally, Quabeck carves out Stevens’ empty self in relation to his relationships in the novel. She concludes that both Stevens and his literary forefather Prufrock are observers who cannot be in control of their lives and are therefore hardly actively shaping them at all. Quabeck concludes that there is no self to define Stevens, which leads her to analyse his lack of authenticity as oddity. This, in turn, makes Stevens, Ishiguro’s most famous unreliable narrator, inauthentic in Quabeck’s terms.

Continuing with the theme of abusive parent figures, Quabeck finds Ryder’s parents in The Unconsoled thoroughly lacking in parental action and attests that Ryder is stuck in the consciousness of a traumatised child. Quabeck argues that “the conjugal unhappiness [of Ryder’s parents] has arrested him in the psyche of the child seeking shelter in his own imagination” (116), which means that the narrating I and experiencing I are irreconcilably split. This is where Ryder’s inauthentic narration stems from. Like the character Pip in Great Expectations, Ryder is haunted by his dysfunctional parental figures, who he tries to replace with people in his ‘adult’ life, like Brodsky, for example. By comparing Ryder with Pip, Quabeck makes the comparison between The Unconsoled with the genre bildungsroman seem apt. Quabeck reads Ishiguro’s novel as parody since Ryder is a man “who is arrested in the psychological condition of a boy and therefore there is absolutely no character development” (123). The analysis of Ryder is intriguing and a welcome contrast to the otherwise prevailing analyses of him as a dreamer.

The literary forefather of Christopher Banks in When We Were Orphans is likewise Philip Pirrip. Generally, the novel resembles Great Expectations in its form, and it has already been read as a rewriting of this work by Dickens (131). Quabeck identifies the apparent lack of originality as a central theme not only of the novel but of its hero Christopher in particular, who willingly admits to fashioning himself after other (literary) role models like Sherlock Holmes. Other previously carved out themes of Ishiguro’s fictions like the narrator’s inauthenticity, parental abuse, and a childlike state of mind are revisited and updated in When We Were Orphans as well, which leads Quabeck to the conclusion that “all literary characters are orphans, looking to those parents in other stories. Their ancestors will always exist” (145). Overall, the main takeaway of the chapter is that there are no original characters but only copies, which Christopher seems to accept not only for himself but also for his story.

Unlike Christopher, Never Let Me Go’s Kathy does not see the need to accept any literary parents. Kathy “considers herself original as a copy” (180). While there are literary forebears in Kathy’s story, namely Daniel Deronda, the film The Great Escape, and Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, Quabeck finds that Kathy refuses to imitate these (literary) parents, thus conforming to her reality in the novel, which is one of adherence. She (as well as her fellow clones) fails to challenge the abusive system she was raised in and completely subordinates herself. While her literary forebears are acknowledged, they are not followed (180). This fact serves as the root of Kathy’s inauthenticity: her complete and utter compliance with the system. According to Quabeck, this makes Kathy “the most inauthentic of all the narrators discussed here, since the discrepancy between the narrating I’s version of events and the experiencing I’s repressed feeling is more extreme” (147). Quabeck goes as far as to argue that Kathy has no experiencing I at all but only functions as a narrating I, which distinguishes her even further from other Ishigurean narrators. Following different readings of the novel as science fiction, dystopian novel, or Marxist narrative, Quabeck concludes that Kathy cannot be an original, but “openly fends for recognition as an imitation” (180).

One part of the study that feels like something of an afterthought is Quabeck’s analysis of Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. The first half of her last chapter is concerned with defending her decision to focus solely on the novels and not take the person Kazuo Ishiguro into account. I, for one, did not need convincing since her thorough studies of the novels stand on their own. Quabeck’s decision to dedicate only the second half of the chapter to The Buried Giant makes the analysis feel rushed, and it does not align to the well-rounded insights into the other novels. Nevertheless, Quabeck manages to establish the narrator of The Buried Giant as an inauthentic one, thereby remaining faithful to her thesis.

Quabeck’s study introduces a closer look at a well-established concept of the field of narratology, and thereby shifts the focus from an (external) text or reader level to the (internal) character level. It remains to be seen, however, if her inauthentic narrator can offer a viable alternative to the firmly established unreliable narrator. In addition, Quabeck sheds new light on Kazuo Ishiguro’s well-studied oeuvre and adds fresh perspectives to Ishiguro studies, making her work a must-read for all Ishiguro enthusiasts.