Time and Meaning: Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills and Time (Continued from previous post.)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel is an attempt to grapple with this concept. In A Pale View of Hills, an old woman must reconcile her daughter’s death with a dark past and an old man, a former state school teacher, is indicted for his role in Japan’s imperial war. Different characters in this book find their pasts exposed to the sentiments of people in a present world much different from the old. A Pale View of Hills is set mostly in a Japanese city following the Second World War. It describes men who achieved greatness early in life who are incriminated in their old age by facts about their past that come to be seen as evils. Ogata’s story is that of the future’s vengeance on the past. Etsuko’s story is different. While in many ways it more poignant—as the story of a mother losing her daughter to suicide must be—there is an element of redemption in Etsuko’s story; Etsuko is able to lose the guilt she feels for her daughter’s death by recognizing that forces from the past had in some ways determine the death. Here, the future is relieved from blame because of the past.

In a 2008 Paris Review interview Kazuo Ishiguro discussed how the theme of personal history transformed by time was easily translated from book to book and nation to nation. “The essence of what I wanted to write,” he says, “was moveable.”[1] After An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro published The Remains of the Day, which won the Man Booker Prize for fiction. This novel, unlike his first two, is set in post-War England. It still retains the essence of the first two books, “an old teacher has to rethink the values on which he’s built his life.”[2] What distinguishes the first two novels, though, given their context, is the ability to read them easily as parallel stories to the lifespan of the short lived “modern” Japanese nation. How this plays out in A Pale View of Hills is the subject of this paper.

Japan’s distinct history of modernization makes it especially important to provide a deeper historical context for A Pale View of Hills; within this context this novel can function as an allegory of the Japanese nation. The history of modern Japan—from the Meiji Restoration in the 1870s to the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—is a story of a uniquely and newly developed Japanese nationalism. Ogata, the old man in A Pale View of Hills, held an esteemed position that made him responsible for the development of the political consciousness of his country. He was, more or less, an employee of state; a schoolteacher whose teaching assisted in the imperial war effort. The gravity of his responsibilities was thus great. This is especially true when considering his treatment following the war. Ogata’s failure was both personal and national, having lost his personal esteem and the war itself.

A Pale View of Hills takes place precisely at the end of the imperial moment in Japan. It was a time of ideological dissonance; the lingering spirit of nationalism and the generation that most arduously waved its banner had begun to run up against the new ideas of a youthful Japan occupied by the United States military. The pre-war values that had privileged national greatness over human life were eroding. Nationalism remained—experienced as humiliation and sadness over the lost war and defeated emperor—but that movement had been dealt a crushing blow. There was no longer room for the representation of such ideas in political life; government was being restructured under U.S. watch. Ministries were stripped of formerly powerful nationalists and pro-militarization leaders were ousted. The Japanese government was rebuilt with younger people, more open to U.S. influence. It was a time of demilitarization, reconstruction and reconciliation.

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[1] Ishiguro, K. 2008. The Art of Fiction No. 196: Kazuo Ishiguro. The Paris Review 184: 23-54.

[2] Ibid. 40.

Time and Meaning

It is true that time has a way of relieving the sting of past pains. As much as painful memories fade, though, so too can formerly benign and pleasant moments of the past reemerge as ugliness. Achievement may be rendered failure if a person late in life discovers that years spent writing poetry should have been spent painting. A young politician’s fame and status can change into infamy and shame if it is revealed that early accomplishments were made through ill-gotten means. Time does not always heal wounds; rather, time allows humans to acknowledge the impermanence of all feelings, both hurt and happiness. Additionally, it makes us sensitive to the fact that we are not in control of how we are remembered. Time can allow a person to reflect on a painful memory in her own past and see it as character building experience in the present. By the same token, one’s own life may be subject to change and reinterpretation by others. A person’s past can have one meaning for him and an entirely different meaning for another.

A letter to a friend in philosophy.

I-

Went to this "Art and Politics" symposium last night at -------. Four faculty members representing different disciplines spoke: one lit, one art history, one philosophy, one music. The lit guy named --------- spoke about Adorno's aesthetic theory which I haven't read but would now like to. The philosophy professor chose a few different works of art to present because of their cleverness that was intended to induce an "Ahha!" response from the crowd. It sickened me so much I couldn't go to my night class. He bemoaned "identity", "singularity", "specificity", and "isolation" and called for a new "collectivity" that wouldn't be homogenizing. What upset me about this was (1) its utopian horizon, and lack of practical political response, and (2) its vagueness.

If art talks about politics, it can be vague, because often it will be trying to express ideas (or ideals) yet to be seen. Art's purpose however is not explicitally functional in the way, say, legislative deliberation is. But when politics describes itself (as this philosophy professor was doing) it cannot be as imaginatively utopian, and vaguely expressive. If this was the case, we lose control of our political ends, and resort to describing (I think, in this prof's terms) a "hole"; an unimaginable space of non-homogenizing collectivity, respecting specific identities. This "politics" ceases to be politics. Poltics is concerned with the functional, and practical aspects of social organization. The moment the language of politics attempts to replace art, it becomes an altogether different animal, perhaps coming closer to literature. This is fine, as long as this form of political speech recognizes itself for what it is; rhetoric that is not properly speaking political, but is emotionally evocative, and artistically imaginative.

Love you,

Acid Reflux is playing tomorrow and I'll have no one to go with :(.

-C

Straits of Chosun: Film on the Colonial Peninsula

Straits of Chosun was shown as part of a series of Korean occupation films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City last month.

The event, sparsely attended as it was, offered a compelling glimpse of an earlier moment in the history of cultural globalization. Straits of Chosun, perhaps less impressive than contemporary examples of frenetic, hybrid, global culture, stands out as an interesting artifact of history. The familiar romantic plot, the conflicts between filial loyalty and movements of the heart, and the subtle war story all belie a smoother history of globalization than the film itself is an example of. Western film tropes, and music, Japanese language, Korean familial content are put together to construct a strangely mature piece of work; mature in the way that these normally unrelated elements are smoothly integrated. It is easy to see culture as a natural, flowering of different necessary historical conditions. That is, that the historical causality of culture formation is some how a total necessity of that place's development. Straits of Chosun does not visually embody all of the historical conflicts taking place around its production, and in fact seems to represent some later period of Korean internationalism, and globalization. The film disguises a more violent path to the global, and stands in contrast to the idea that cultures are merely extensions of a people in a place.

Made during the final two-years of the Second World War, Straits of Chosun is a refined propagandist film; by smoothly incorporating the familiarly American melodramatic romance model into the story of one man’s military enrollment, the Korean production team behind this film creates a convincing, and implicit Japanese propaganda piece. Having fallen from honor by ignoring his parent’s demand to let go of his love for a woman of lower social status, the young male protagonist seeks redemption through military service. He trains with the Japanese imperial army, and is eventually set off to fight. The characters sudden decision to join up with the military is integrated so precisely into the plot of the film that the propaganda element (at least to the English speaking viewer) is almost undetectable.

Certain historical conditions can shed light on the more subtle glorification of the war effort, and purification by service that lie beneath the surface. Firstly, this film is a product of a Korean film production company operating within a colonial satellite. While this does not explicitly mean that any depiction of military enlistment is actually a ploy by the colonizer to drum-up false support for a war fought by invaders, and foreigners, the colonial context in which the movie is made, at least, must be noted. In some circumstances (perhaps even those involving the reclaiming of lost honor) the choice of army service would in fact offer the redemptive power necessary to heal a divided family. Within any complex colonial situation there are always multiple layers of allegiance amongst the colonized e.g. compradore bourgeoisie in China, Iran, and elsewhere, or Loyalist in British colonial America. By using a false dichotomy, it is possible to view the activities of the colonizer as always, at the outset, malevolent acts of oppression. Or present the interests of the colonizer (in this case Japan), and the colonized (Korea) as inherently at odds. Clearly this situation is a familiar one and speaks truth to many of the worlds colonial contexts. In thinking about the cultures we have inherited from former empires we must take into account both the fact that colonial culture is never constructed entirely on the basis of a political "us versus them". Rather, colonial culture necessarily gleans from all involved parties; colonial culture is a product of all parties in the colonial situation, not always engaged in outright conflict.

Straits of Chosun is a film record from 1943, the height of World War Two, and the middle of the theater in the Pacific. Japanese urgency to fill its ranks would have been as pertinent as ever. A production company making films in Korea at this time would have had the incentive (perhaps offered in the form of funding, and/or distribution) to make a final product that was in some way cohesive with the war effort. To many students of geography, or world history this may seem, at first, a sign of complacency. The willingness of the Korean production company to manufacture and distribute a film which tacitly condones, and encourages Korean participation in the Japanese struggle in world war seems a sort of bizarre betrayal of "homegrown" Korean culture and society.

In the introductory essay to the book Colonial Modernity in Korea, editor Gi-Wook Shin introduces a new theoretical structure for the analysis of twentieth-century history in Korea. Shin claims that culture, and society during this time were structured by three influences: nationalism, colonialism, and modernity. Between these three ideological frameworks Korea built its sense of self. This seems to hold up in Straits of Chosun for a number of reasons. The Japanese colonial project across the pacific consisted, in part, of assimilating colonized peoples into a greater Japanese "nationalist" program. Peoples, and geographies subjugated by the Japanese colonial project were appealed to by their invaders offering national inclusion; in exchange for coerced allegiance, residents of Japanese colonial territory would be granted citizen-status in the Empire. On a practical level the benefits of such an offering may seem slim. Among limited other opportunities accorded to citizens, colonized peoples could engage in, and enlist for military service. The thrust of Shin's argument is simple--by forcing the relationship between colonizer, and colonized into an dichotomy the possibilities of identity (and in fact, history) are diminished. The dichotomous view of colonizer-colonized would encourage the idea that if one is born in the geographical space of Korea, unless he or she is a traitor, they will oppose colonization, and resist it. Shin's theory is useful in analyzing Straits of Chosun if only because it seems to hold true for the events that occur in the plot. That is, the protagonist has multiple affiliations and loyalties--not the least of which is his family--including a belief, if uncritical, in the ability of the Japanese military to offer him sorely needed opportunity in his life.