Tag: Kazuo Ishiguro

On Reflection

Here’s a question for you. When you reflect, where do you put the mirror?

This seems a silly question, and that’s because it is. But there’s also something here too, because having thought about reflection recently it occurred to me that reflecting on reflection itself isn’t without its value. And luckily, unlike when we put mirrors against mirrors in real life, creating a headache-inducing cascade of images (which I recently experienced at the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Tate Modern), we can stop our reflecting on reflection after only one reflective layer. But still, with its own repetitions, this paragraph shows how dangerous and disorientating such mirroring can be if we are not careful about it.

So. When we see our reflections in real life, we stand in front of a mirror. Alternatively, we turn on the camera on our phones, but I am too old for that already. Facing the mirror, our goal is to examine our physical appearance. Up close, in the mirror of a washroom or via our phone’s selfie camera, we get to investigate the blemishes, the little blotches and patches of colour, the wrinkles and the hairs. From further away, we check out our figure, or how the clothes sit on us. We might be taking advantage of a mirror on the inside of a cupboard to help us select an outfit.

In both cases, from close up or far away, we are seeing ourselves as an object in others’ eyes. We want to look good because when we look good we feel confident and happier. Even if we turn our backs on beauty products and fancy clothes, we certainly don’t want to look bad. This isn’t complicated. We use mirrors and physical reflection – the fake image of ourselves – to improve the real image of ourselves. Mirrors make the world more beautiful, if a little more narcissistic too.

This isn’t too interesting. What is, is when we reflect in a different way. Now, when you try and answer the ridiculous question I set at the beginning of the post, what did you come up with? I’ll tell you what I got. You place the mirrors right in front of your eyes. You look immediately back into yourself, without worrying about such silliness as what you are wearing. Here you are trying to descry the state of your soul.

Reflection in this sense is a matter of personal diagnostics. We are trying to work out our own selves. It’s connected to things like mindfulness. When we reflect, we try to understand our feelings and why we feel that way. We are trying to follow the wires and circuitry of our inner being, such that we might, with any luck, prevent ourselves from falling into bad moral and spiritual habits.

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” Father Zosima, in the Brothers Karamazov.

Reflection is designed to stop just this. By understanding ourselves, we can uproot the lies that have gained purchase within us and prevent hypocrisy, that most fatal and inevitable of human weaknesses. The more we understand ourselves, the less likely it is that we will be able to deceive ourselves. If we spend enough time immersed in our hearts, we deprive the devils that live the chance of twisting them in unhealthy directions.

Yet is that all actually right? The first thing that you will have noticed when I suggested putting the mirrors right in front of one’s eyes is that this position completely obscures the light. Now, the soul is a murky place, but even so, doesn’t it need some light for us to actually see? What a hindrance the darkness is. Though we might be attempting to remove the rot from the floorboards, it is precisely the dark and the wet that the dark contains, which makes the rot exist, to begin with. We go into ourselves, find nothing, come out again and pat ourselves on the back, missing the obvious.

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending deals with reflection as one of its central concerns. First, the narrator takes us on an introspective tour of his life, reaching one conclusion. Then, new information comes to light, and he does the same tour all over again, reaching a completely different conclusion. The process of reflection is the same both times. But what we see is that reflection of a certain sort can be an act of self-deceit. To continue the silly metaphor, how are things supposed to enter us if we have mirrors covering our eyes? Don’t we all cry out with despair every time Stevens fails to notice his life and his opportunities are slipping away in The Remains of the Day?

Introspection is a fairly useless thing when you put the mirrors in front of your eyes. Useless at its best, but often downright hostile. Turning our gaze inwards prevents us from noticing others or the world outside. These modern novels that are so deep within someone else’s head always bother me because they portray quite an unhealthy way of going through life. I confess I am probably more self-centred than most, but even I am more aware of the world and its inhabitants than the likes of Else in Schindler’s Fraulein Else. Of course, Else is not what we would call mentally O.K. But even the narrator in The Sense of an Ending is pretty bad at this. The deeper we go into ourselves, the less we seem to get out, and the less we act as members of the external community as well.

Who has not, on this score, found how utterly useless reflection is when dealing with depression? Thinking, reflecting, and ruminating, rather than actually using those CBT techniques to dismember one’s bad feelings, that is. When we reflect while depressed then it really is like we are in a hall of mirrors, because we only get dizzier and dizzier, and further and further away from what is real and meaningful.

One solution to ruminating depression that often works wonders is talking to others. Unburdening one’s soul is removing the feelings from the damp cellar I described earlier and shoving them into the light, where they are often quickly disinfected. Is there not a way of placing the mirrors that also does this?

Indeed, readers, I have determined that there is.

The optimal location for the mirrors when we are reflecting is right in front of us, just like when we are getting changed, but the mirrors in this case are also rather wide, so that we can see the world behind us instead of just ourselves and what we are wearing. When we reflect, we need to be able to place ourselves as a unit within a community. Reflecting when we only get deeper and deeper into ourselves fails to let us see how we fit into the narratives of others’ lives. Rather than binding us to others, reflecting in that sense divides us. Not so here, where we are obliged to see the connections between us all because we have to see others wandering about in the background, even as we focus on ourselves.

Does this mirror placement prevent hypocrisy or lies? Certainly not, but it also lets us see our actions as they are played out in the world, rather than only in our distorted memories. It becomes harder to hide from ourselves. Coupled with seeing ourselves as part of a network of human beings this mirror placement might make us a more responsible being too.

I was reflecting on reflection because I have been thinking about some of Adorno’s comments on fascism, namely how among those who fall victim to it their common characteristic is their inability to reflect. Reflection is obviously hugely important, but so is reflecting the right way, not just going into yourself and expecting that in itself to be enough to sort things out. Adorno, of course, understood that fact when he noted that working through the past is a process we must do every day, rather than simply do in one go and then move on. Here, however, I just wanted to have some fun thinking about what reflection might look like, and how we might want to visualise it.

We might go further and think about a form of reflection in which we ourselves are invisible (the mirror is placed alongside our eyes and takes in images from without). This we could equate to certain Buddhist teachings or else Schopenhauer’s own renunciation-orientated ideals of life. And there are things like music and literature and great art in general, all of which can also lead us to reflect in a way that removes our own egos from the equation.

But those are topics for another day.

The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

I remember first seeing Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending at school. Twenty copies used to sit in one of the classrooms I had English lessons in – I imagined it was on some A-level syllabus as a recent masterpiece, which predisposed me to dislike it. (It was some time before I realised authors could write alright without first being dead.) It did win the Man Booker Prize in 2011, which is practically yesterday, after all. And certainly, if we want to be uncharitable, this is a book that can be knocked down by pigeonholing it as one of those books that seems written to secure a place on a syllabus. We have a textbook unreliable narrator, a dualistic structure to consider, a limited number of characters, things to talk about, literary references, school days, and a length which means even the laziest schoolkid might actually read it, or at least be able to sprint through it on the night before the exam. With that said, readers expecting me to rehash my criticism of Schlink’s dreadful The Reader will be disappointed for the simple reason that The Sense of an Ending is actually pretty good.

There are two stories here, one for each of the novel’s two parts. Tony Webster tells his life story in the first part, or at least the life story he thought was his own. He goes to school and has three friends including the intelligent Adrian Finn, then they head their separate ways and begin drifting apart. At university, Tony meets a girl, Veronica, stays once at her house for the weekend and later introduces her to his friends, before eventually breaking up with her. He later discovers that Adrian, who ended up at Cambridge, is now going out with Veronica. He writes them a postcard and a letter, the latter of which he barely remembers, and then sometime later learns that Adrian has committed suicide. In his note, Adrian explains his decision with reference to philosophy and the importance of free will. This existential flourish seems in line with the Adrian that Tony knew at school, so he agrees with his friends that the death is a shame, but not out of character. Tony then finishes university, gets married and has a child, gets divorced and retires, and that’s really as much as we get. “And that’s a life, isn’t it?” – one told from beginning to apparent end. There are some disappointments, some pleasures, but really it is a slightly cautious, empty thing.

The second part begins when the older Tony receives information that he has been given a little money and two documents through the will of a certain Mrs Ford – Veronica’s mother. We are just as confused as he is. The first of these documents is a short and ambiguous letter from Mrs Ford, while the second is a diary – Adrian’s diary – which has been taken by Veronica and which Tony then spends much of the second story trying to get back. Here is our mystery. Why does Mrs Ford have the diary, why is she giving him the money? Tony’s rather confused attempts at working all this out and what he discovers along the way is what The Sense of an Ending is, in essence, about. It completely changes our reading of the first part because it turns out not that Tony has been coy about the truth, but rather that he has simply forgotten it and let it fade. The new information of the second part is a rude awakening that forces him to look back at his life again and interrogate how it all really took place.

Narrative

At its heart, The Sense of an Ending is about the stories we tell ourselves. It’s about the lies that Tony has told himself his whole life, and the “truth” he eventually discovers. Adrian, ever precocious, quotes the Frenchman Patrick Lagrange: ‘“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”’ The first part of the novel is one certainty, the certainty that Tony has about his life based on the memories he has retained of it. The second part concerns the new “history” that writes itself when he finds documentation that does not sit easily next to his original view of things.  

Tony is well aware of how this all works. The novel is full of philosophical asides that work well to hammer in its themes. “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.” Tony does meet Veronica again, but he never sees more than a page of the diary – for she has burned it. Her excuse, “People shouldn’t read other people’s diaries”, is not unreasonable. To read a diary in which you figure is guaranteed to knock you off balance, because it reveals the unadulterated vision of history that belongs to someone else, and thus necessarily contradicts your own.

Worse still is when Tony receives a copy of the letter that he had sent to Adrian and Veronica after hearing that they were going out. In the novel’s first part the letter is passed over briefly as if it were of no importance at all, but we later see that this is an evasion – by Tony or by his subconscious, we cannot say. The letter is brutal, nasty, and exceptionally spiteful. And it is the last thing he ever sent to his friend before he died. Tony cannot deny that it is his letter, but he does not seem able to accept it fully either:

I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn’t recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.

Taken as a whole, The Sense of an Ending is full of things that seem to separate us from anything close to the truth, with language itself being a particular target. Early on, for example, Tony notes how the word “going out” has changed in its definition over the course of his own lifetime, making us aware of how at a basic level the words we read and understand now may not correspond to what Tony is actually trying to convey. At another point, after talking to a solicitor, Tony notes how his own linguistic independence seems to be lost in conversation with them – “Have you noticed how, when you talk to someone like a solicitor, after a while you stop sounding like yourself and end up sounding like them?” Finally, there is the newspaper report of Adrian’s death, the ‘Tragic Death of “Promising” Young Man’, which is so cliché at this point that the words are essentially empty.

It’s not for nothing, then, that Veronica seems to spend the entire book telling Tony that he just doesn’t “get it”. If our memories are faulty, just as faulty will likely be our attempts to fix them. Early on in the first part, while discussing history writing, Adrian says that the only way to understand a given work of history is to understand its author’s biases. But we cannot, because they are too complicated, and often too deeply hidden. One comes away from The Sense of an Ending rather battered, clutching the solution to the mystery that Tony does eventually reach, but with a feeling that so much has been lost in the search for it that we might have been better off just staying in the novel’s staid and stable first part.

All in all, I did enjoy The Sense of an Ending. I had read some rather hostile reviews that had said it was a work of philosophy with nary a novel in sight. This criticism falls flat to me. Of course, the novel does indulge in a lot of introspection, but it does not feel out of place. As far as I am aware, older people do tend to reflect on their lives – Tony is not unique in this. Its main fault is that Tony does tend to repeat himself and the same ideas in only slightly varying phrases, which is tedious by the end. The plot here is sufficiently meaty, the characters sufficiently real, to satisfy me, even if it does suffer from that problem that most introspective works do, namely that it’s a little claustrophobic and airless. There are not enough characters, nor enough vibrancy, at times.

To end with I want to note that it’s interesting how we have come to this sort of novel. The great modernist writers loved their interiority and stream-of-consciousness. Now, with that vein fully excavated, we move from the experience of the present into the experience of the past and the failures of memory and interpretation – as we did in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day or Sebald’s The Emigrants. This is a mere musing on my part, not an exact science – after all, Ford’s The Good Soldier came out in 1915. However, perhaps what I am trying to suggest is that there is no sense that Tony is deliberately confounding us here. Instead, we simply have a world that is hard to make sense of because we are all, all of us, reliant upon memories that do not match up with those of others or to the world itself. In this sense at least it is a somewhat forgiving novel, and one that possesses a message valid for our own lives.

Anyway, it’s an interesting little book and easily readable in a single sitting.

Burning to the Last – Sándor Márai’s Embers

Sándor Márai’s Embers is the second work of Hungarian literature that I’ve read after Satantango, but I’m not quite sure whether “Hungarian” is the best word for describing this short novel of ageing and decline. For though Embers was published in 1942, its attention is focused back towards the past, when Márai’s country (he was born in 1900) was Austria-Hungary and not the dislocated Hungary it became after the Treaty of Trianon. The sheer nostalgia for a Vienna that once was, for a life that once was, is unmistakable. Márai had even once considered writing in German instead of Hungarian, in the same way that Kafka, another citizen of an empire that disappeared, felt compelled to choose between Czech and German. They made different choices, but a common sensibility, a common heritage, ties them, and Hofmannsthal, and Rilke, and so many others, together. They were once all Austro-Hungarians.

Sándor Márai (1900-1989), only recently was “discovered” by the literary establishment, but his incorporation is in full swing. Embers is his most famous work, it seems.

The Plot of Embers

In the castle there lives an old general. The General (his name – Henrik – we learn later, but the sheer formality and seriousness by which he lives means that the text rarely refers to him by it) lives with his servants, chief among them Nini, a 91-year-old who once served as his nanny and wet nurse. He has lived, almost without any contact with the outside world, for many years. People come to his estate to hunt in the expansive grounds, but they stay in the hunting lodge and do not see the master. The general’s wife died young, and his only friend disappeared 41 years ago. His life is one of looking back. We are told early on that “he thought only in decades, anything more exact upset him, as if he might be reminded of things he would rather forget”.

But the things that we wish to forget are often the things that keep us going. The novel begins when the General’s peace is at last disrupted by a letter, informing him that this friend will be coming for dinner that evening. The scene is set for a walk through the past, an untangling of confused memories, and a working out of something akin to the truth. But when life is almost at its end it is precisely truth, hazy and unpredictable, that can be the most valuable thing in the world.

The original title of Embers, A gyertyák csonkig égnek, is literally translated as “Candles burn until the end”. And indeed, most of the story takes place by the fire, and each chapter mimics the slow decline of life as the red glow grows dim, before finally going out. At first the General and his friend deal with their common past in the military academy and service, both in dialogue and in reminiscences, but with time they move ever closer to the present, and to the questions that have been tormenting the General for all those years that they were parted. These questions, as he himself says, are perhaps what have been giving him the strength to stay alive all this time.

Male Friendship

It is a friendship that needs to be worked out. Konrad, the returning friend, tried – the General is sure of it – to kill the General on the day of a hunt, 41 years before the novel takes place. He tried to do this, perhaps, because of a secret relationship with the General’s wife. The day after the hunt Konrad disappeared and the General’s wife ceased talking with him. The General wants to understand what happened, and why, but as the one-sided interrogation is carried out by the fire – Konrad almost never speaks, even to defend himself – we get the strange feeling that the General is trying to save himself, just as much as he’s trying to save his friendship.

The novel is unusual in the focus it lays upon friendship, particularly male friendship. I can’t think of many other books that do so. Destructive forces, even love, always seem to take precedence over the banalities and subtleties of friendship when it comes to novels. No doubt because they’re much more dramatic. But friendship is an important topic, even if it’s one that is already in a way outdated in the way we encounter it in Embers. The two kids meet at a military academy, where they spend every day and night together. And though they have different backgrounds – Konrad is poor, while Henrik is wealthy – and share different worldviews – Henrik is martial and serious, while Konrad loves music – the friendship that springs up seems built to last forever.

The intensity of the arrangement is hard to understand for people who haven’t experienced something similar. I’m lucky, perhaps, in that I went to boarding school, and know the sort of thing Márai describes here. Of course, many of my friends were friends only through common experience, a weak bond; but for those friends who were friends for deeper reasons, the length of time we spent together means that even now, when we are all separated and scattered across the world, we remain close in a way that is hard to describe.

Friendship’s Decline

The General and his friend’s relationship is both the second sort, and not. Certainly, at first glance the friendship between the two of them seems to rely only on common experience. But that’s not true – there is a sense that they also have a shared internal world, which even though their interests are mismatched is nonetheless enough to bond them tightly. They make vows of chastity, and promise other monkish feats. The problem is that as time passes divisions between them grow, and what was once unimportant becomes unavoidable and painful.

Chief among these divisions is the problem of money. Though Konrad is at the prestigious military academy and a nobleman, he is there only because his parents are starving themselves for his sake. He says that whenever he spends money he is “expending a portion of their lives”, and though Henrik tries to understand this, their difference in backgrounds grows harder to bear. Henrik lacks the imagination for understanding – he is a military man. And once the two finish at the academy and start working, stationed near Vienna, their differing sensibilities become a further obstruction to understanding. Henrik goes carousing and lives the life of a young officer. Konrad, delicate and musical, cannot. And though he feigns indifference, “one could hear in his voice the need of a thirsty man yearning to drain life dry”. With time such feelings only get worse.

Music is also another point where the boys’ divisions are obvious. Henrik doesn’t understand music. He feels cut off from Konrad whenever the other listens. But for Konrad music is liberation: “When he listened to music, he listened with his whole body, as longingly as a condemned man in his cell aches for the sound of distant feet”. Music connects Konrad with Chopin, who is mentioned several times in the book as a figure of mixed identity, having a French father and Polish mother. Konrad and the General’s wife are both artistic and uncertain in their origins. Unsurprisingly, an affair forms, and it is for that reason that Konrad may have wanted to kill his friend.

End of an Era – Closed Spaces and the Politics of Embers

Embers takes place not long before its publication in 1942. But war is hard to hear through the castle’s walls. One thing I noticed early on is the use of space in the novel. The General’s world is one of closed spaces. He is out of touch with the times. In this he is very reminiscent of Stevens in The Remains of the Day. Just as Stevens (unknowingly) hides within Darlington Hall to avoid facing a world that has changed, so too does the General in the castle. He looks at portraits from the past and thinks of how good things were – “absolutely dedicated to honour, to the male virtues: silence, solitude, the inviolability of one’s word”. Yet he also keeps most of the castle closed down, unvisited, to avoid facing the memories locked within those rooms. And though he hunts, he never leaves the estate.

A castle from Hungary
A castle in Hungary. I liked Embers’ use of closed spaces to show both the isolation of the General, and his attempts to keep his homeland alive inside him. Photo by Puffancs CC BY-SA 2.5 HU

Like Stevens, he relies on silence to deceive himself. “Everything… had fed into his very bloodstream the tendency never to speak of whatever caused him pain but to bear it in silence”. Even his friendship with Konrad is described as “hermetic”. For Henrik the Austro-Hungarian Empire has not ended because within his own person – in the values he chooses to embrace – he can keep it alive, and because within his castle he can believe it still is safe. As much as he wants answers from the past, it’s seems more to complete a picture of it than to change the present.

Konrad is almost the exact opposite of the General in all this. His music serves to break down barriers. Music, of course, is a universal language. It connects him first to the General’s mother, herself a Frenchwoman, and then to the General’s wife. Only the General and his father cannot understand it – their focus is on the physical, rather than the sublime. When Konrad disappeared, he moved to England, and from there to the tropics to serve in the Empire. He doesn’t seem to have any loyalty to his past country. But he has come back. The General says this is because their friendship has remained strong, even through the years of separation. That’s true. But it’s also true that Konrad is just as trouble as the General is by the past. In his case, by the failure of his relationship with the General’s wife.

For both men, the evening is a way of working out what happened – both are old, and both are ready for the peace that can only, perhaps, be attained by resolving a lasting uncertainty.

Conclusion

Embers is not a long novel. Forty-one years of separation take up little time if all that time is spent in waiting. But though it’s short, it’s densely and beautifully written – hence why I’ve tried to include plenty of quotes. The ideas of friendship, of trying to hold onto the past, are just as relevant today as they were when the book was written, and leave plenty of food for thought. If you can find yourself a copy, it’s well worth the short time it will take you to read it.

The conclusion to Embers is also especially worth pondering. If you’ve read the novel, please do leave a comment, as I’d like to see what others made of it.