ALONE: KAZUO ISHIGURO AND THE PROBLEM OF MUSICAL EMPATHY

Abstract

7 8 Y A L O N E K A Z U O I S H I G U R O A N D T H E P R O B L E M O F M U S I C A L E M P A T H Y M A R K M A Z U L L O All novelists deal with morality, but not all novelists, or even all good novelists, are concerned with moral realism, which is not the awareness of morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes and dangers of living the moral life . . . the inextricable tangle of good and evil and of how perilous moral action can be. – Lionel Trilling, ‘‘Forster and the Liberal Imagination’’ The composer Benjamin Britten once wrote, ‘‘E. M. Forster is surely our greatest musical novelist.’’ I’d like to suggest that the Japanese-born British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro holds that distinction in our time. Like Forster’s, Ishiguro’s novels are filled with artists hungry for meaningful social relationships, striving to unearth the ethical core of their vocation, and often failing in the process. And as with Forster, Ishiguro’s dominant stylistic mode is one of ‘‘comic seriousness,’’ to use Lionel Trilling’s apt phrase. The result, in both cases, is a political identity that is alluringly di≈cult to pin down, a ‘‘refusal to be conclusive,’’ continues Trilling, that suggests that these writers are ‘‘at war with the liberal imagina- 7 9 R tion’’ – not in the sense that they disavow liberalism but that they relentlessly push against the grain of liberalism’s status quo, and in particular against its views of art. While in many contemporary novels (Anne Patchett’s Bel Canto, Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music, Frank Conroy’s Body and Soul), music serves as a convenient placeholder for such established moral codes as empathy and love, in Ishiguro, as in Forster, moments of musical performance are spotlighted as conundrums, put on display as symbols – often ridiculously estranged – that illuminate a contentious moral background . Ishiguro also refuses wholly to embrace the even more common tendency to equate music with empathy’s flipsides – alienation, disa√ection, violence. We have seen this tendency hundreds of times, from the highbrow to the low: the composer Adrian Leverk ühn from Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus whose closest friend says of him, ‘‘I might compare his absentness to an abyss, into which one’s feelings towards him dropped soundless and without a trace’’; Emma Bovary’s ruse of taking piano lessons to enable her ultimately lethal extramarital a√air; Hannibal Lecter’s ecstatic enjoyment of Bach’s Goldberg Variations while skinning a man alive; Tolstoy’s ‘‘The Kreutzer Sonata,’’ Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. In her recent novel Great House (2010), Nicole Krauss nicely captures this interplay among music, empathy, and alienation: putting on a recording of a late Beethoven string quartet, her narrator Nadia muses, ‘‘I’ve never listened to it without feeling as if I alone have been lifted up on the shoulders of some giant creature touring the charred landscape of all human feeling. Like most music that a√ects me deeply, I would never listen to it while others were around. . . . I am embarrassed to admit this, knowing that it reveals some essential lack or selfishness in my nature, and aware that it runs contrary to the instincts of most, whose passion for something leads them to want to share it, to ignite a similar passion in others.’’ Nadia is drawn more to Beethoven’s detachments from the world – his deafness, his lack of romantic love and carnal satisfaction, his ‘‘music without the ghost of another person in it’’ (to quote Adrienne Rich) – than to his contribution to the project of liberal humanism and his fervent belief in its corollary, musical empathy. 8 0 M A Z U L L O Y It has become a dominant critical trend to read Ishiguro – especially since his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, in which the art made by clones raised as organ donors is employed by human rights advocates as evidence of their fundamental humanity – as a satirist...