Between dystopia and utopia, Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Klara and the Sun’ is about being human – The Tribune

Rajesh Sharma

Klara and the Sun is Kazuo Ishiguros ninth work of fiction (including a collection of short stories) and the first after he won the Nobel Prize in 2017. It is a genre-bending work, navigating between dystopia and utopia, sci-fi and social realism, and humanism and posthumanism. Imagine Jane Austen and George Eliot fusing with Friedrich Nietzsche and William Gibson in a genetically edited post-self.

Born in Nagasaki in 1954 and living in England since the age of five, Ishiguro is master of control, with a classicists adherence to economy and clarity. He can evoke intricate ideas and complex emotions in a language that is beguilingly simple. The choice of the narrative point of view in the novel bears this out. The narrator is Klara, an Artificial Friend (a robot) tasked to provide company to Josie, a teenage girl, and to gather intimate data on her to produce her robotic impersonation in case the need arises. Josie was lifted, that is genetically edited, to ease her passage into the elite posthuman social class, but the procedure led to a mishap. The result is she is sick and may soon die.

In choosing such a narrator, Ishiguro takes a huge risk. The AFs language is no more than a code, lacking any human dimension. The robotic sensorium, driven by algorithms, registers basic visual patterns but cannot smell nor knows appetite or sleep or desire. Yet Ishiguro manages remarkably to write a novel of tender aesthetic experience and of gentle, overwhelming emotion. In the process, he makes us rethink our humanness.

The theme affords Ishiguro ample opportunities to ponder aloud on age-old existential questions. But he never relinquishes his signature subtlety. Even when dealing with issues like climate change, cloning and barricaded communities, he does not overstep the storytellers domain and preach to the reader.

As some human beings in the novel embrace a rational view of everything, Klara the AF clings to her artificial empathy, turns to hope and prayer against reason and even chooses to sacrifice her well-being for the sake of Josie. Ironically, it is Josie, the human being with enhanced capabilities, who is found wanting in reciprocal empathy and gratitude. Indeed, it is the human characters who fumble and flounder and fail in relationships, who cannot make the right choices, and so regret and are heartbroken. But that may well be Ishiguros point: to turn the lights on the fascinating enigma we humans are, often spinning tragedy out of ourselves (as Rilke says of Hamlet). Paul, Josies father, says we are probably like labyrinthine houses with rooms within rooms, ad infinitum. In words way less pedestrian, one may call it the innate human mysteriousness.

Passing through love, loneliness, grief, nave hope and prayers failed or fulfilled (maybe accidentally), the novel draws to a luminous though melancholy conclusion. Klara, nearly immobile, is slowly fading out in the Yard, an intimation of human dying mirrored in the robots obsolescence touched with memories of a purposefully lived life. As her manager, the woman from whose store she was long ago sold, chances upon her, they get into a wonderful short conversation. It is to Klara that Ishiguro grants the final insight into what it means to be human. That our mystery and worth inhere in our being subjects, not objects. We are our inwardness. And that is irreducible to data.

While artificial production of affects of the kind Klara experiences is conceivable, as research in cognitive sciences suggests, imagination is a faculty that may be a truly human one. That is what Ishiguro, significantly, does not grant to Klara. Only the human characters in the novel possess it, such as Josie and Rick. Rick has not been lifted, yet he can envisage a future properly his own because it is cast in his own terms. He can project himself, as the existentialist philosophers put it fondly. He is human, and complexly so, as is the reader of the novel. Surely, the archetypal character of the Sun looks to a human reader to be redeemed as an archetype. Androids, after all, do not dream of archetypes.

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Between dystopia and utopia, Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Klara and the Sun' is about being human - The Tribune