Discontinuous History and Magical Realism: A Foucauldian Reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

Abstract

Michel Foucault’s archaeological approach to history contests Hegelian understanding of evolutionary and progressive history which presupposes an ultimate arrival at a perfect form of society. For Foucault, history does not follow a linear, dialectical line within a cause-and-effect relationship. Each historical period has its own conditions of truth and between these periods, there are breaks, twists, ruptures and discontinuities determined by power relations in that society. These historical transformations occur following a change in épistèmé which connotes to the available set of knowledge produced by discursive practices in a particular period. Within this context, this study aims to analyse historical discontinuities in Kazuo Ishiguro’s magical realist novel, The Buried Giant (2015). In the novel, by benefiting from generic potentials of magical realism, and effectively exploiting the medieval romance, Ishiguro creates a quasimythological historical account of the Anglo-Saxon period. In his version, King Arthur makes Merlin perform a spell on a dragon. Due to the spell, the Britons and the Saxons suffer memory loss which causes historical discontinuities. Moreover, while the spell confines the people into a perpetual here and now, it grants Arthur absolute political power. The study will focus on these discontinuities and present a Foucauldian reading of the text. The study will also theoretically connect Foucault’s discontinuous history with magical realism, which may broaden our understanding of Ishiguro’s text.