by Rachel Cusk
What do Gilbert’s large, mostly female readership recognise in this rather tortuous, idiosyncratic and frankly fantastical story? There are several possibilities. One is that they venerate her for reintroducing the idea of the pleasure principle into female experience. She writes as a woman of thirty-five, an age by which many of her readers will be married, to husbands they may experience – in her compelling description – as ‘my lighthouse and my albatross in equal measure’; will be wearing that facial tattoo, motherhood; will be shackled to houses of greater or lesser grandeur; will spend their free time with friends or in superstores – and will find their capacity for devotion exploited to the full by their sense of loyalty to these undertakings, their belief that they ought to honour their responsibilities and make the best of the life they’ve chosen for themselves, even if they sometimes feel that none of it resembles them.
Such a woman is never far from the necessity to cook or abstain from food, to perform an unselfish act, to exercise tolerance and self-sacrifice in relationships that define the core of our cultural conception of love. And she may feel, in the performance of this role, the emotional extremity Gilbert attributes to herself. To have these ordinary aspects of her life repackaged as pleasurable gives her a kind of mental lift; and as Nigella Lawson has discovered, selling the pleasure concept to overcommitted women is big business.
The problem lies in the egotism of these female goddesses and gurus, who require their (female) audience to stand still while they twirl about, who require us to watch and listen, to laugh at their jokes, to admire their beauty and their reality and their freedom, to witness their successes. Elizabeth Gilbert is a relentless cataloguer of such successes, social, gastronomic, spiritual and sexual: the pizza she eats in Naples, the lover she takes in Bali, the friends she makes, even the quality of her transcendence at the ashram, all are perfect, the very best.
This voyage of self-discovery, it turns out, was a competition, at whose heart is a need to win. Gilbert refers once or twice in her book to a childhood in which she was driven to do well and achieve, and her failure to reconcile the forced fruits of female ambition with the realities of woman’s destiny merely embroiders further the space between the two. Her Damascene epiphany in her New York bathroom might have led her not to break the life she had but to accept it, to exercise her capacity for devotion right there; she might have gone to Italy not to eat pasta but to acquire knowledge; she might have chosen not to live entirely and orgiastically in the personal – in pleasure – but instead to have renounced those interests in pursuit of a genuine equality.
But to say that, of course, would be to take it all much too seriously.
Never Let Me Go
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 novel The Unconsoled, Ryder, a pianist, is due to give an important concert in a foreign city. The novel is written in the form of an extended anxiety dream: manifold impediments spring up to delay his arrival at the concert hall; at one point he realises he hasn’t practised the pieces he intends to play. In a field outside the city where, through labyrinthine causes, he finds himself, he comes across the dilapidated wreck of his old childhood family car. ‘I stared through the spiderweb cracks [in the window] into the rear seat where I had once spent so many contented hours. Much of it, I could see, was covered with fungus.’ The elasticity of the subconscious is also the novel’s elasticity – it is more than five hundred pages long – and likewise the novel’s procedures are those of its adopted system of Freudian values.
This tendency – which might be called a type of impersonation, a kind of camouflaging of the writer’s authority and hence his responsibility – can be seen throughout Ishiguro’s work, and goes hand in hand with his most persistent themes: the fear of disorganisation and abandonment; the psychical aftermath of childhood; and the relationship between the institutional and the personal through which these themes are frequently dramatised. His most popular novel, The Remains of the Day, recommended itself to readers by the purity of its translation of that perennial English favourite, the period piece: here the author’s lack of presence was felt to be impeccable, as discreet and thorough as the butler himself, serving up an England of which he didn’t personally partake. But impersonation is also hubris, arrogance, control, for it seeks to undermine or evade the empathetic basis of shared experience. Without empathy, the impersonator can misjudge people quite as spectacularly as he second-guesses them: in Ishiguro’s case, The Unconsoled bewildered and alienated the very readers The Remains of the Day had gone to such lengths to satisfy. And indeed, The Unconsoled can on one level be regarded as a sort of outburst, almost an act of personal aggression, though it is a lengthy and meticulous work.
Never Let Me Go is Ishiguro’s sixth novel and has proved to be his most popular book since his Booker Prize-winning heyday. As with The Remains of the Day, there is a film, replete with English celebrities. Ishiguro’s ventriloquism announces itself in the novel’s first lines: ‘My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year.’ The ‘now’ and the ‘actually’, the absorbed ordinariness, the vagueness of ‘they’ and the precision of ‘eight months, until the end of this year’: Ishiguro’s ear is acute, and these are the verbal mannerisms of the public services sector in the humdrum modern world. Kathy is a ‘carer’, and indeed the notion of the ‘caring professions’ represents precisely that elision of the institutional and the personal that generates the undertone of disturbance in so much of his work. There are undertones of Kafka, too, in these words, and in the immediate sense they convey of the reader’s imprisonment in the narrator, and thus of the narrator’s actual powerlessness. Another elision is the humdrum and the sinister: triviality is the harbinger of evil, and Ishiguro’s prose from the outset is conspicuously dull with trivia. Kathy calls the people she cares for ‘donors’, and on the third page she says of one of them: ‘He’d just come through his third donation, it hadn’t gone well, and he must have known he wasn’t going to make it.’ And so the association, the elision, is swiftly clarified. This is a book about evil, the evil of death, the evil of banality: ‘he must have known he wasn’t going to make it.’
Never Let Me Go takes place in the late twentieth century, in an England where human beings are cloned and bred for the purposes of harvesting their organs once they reach adulthood. These ‘clones’ are reared in boarding school-type institutions: much is made, in the clone community, of the differences between one institution and another. Hailsham, where Kathy grew up as an inmate before her ‘promotion’, is mythologised for its special ethos: a Hailsham childhood is idealised, with somewhat grotesque and faintly Dickensian sentimentality, by those who were ‘born’ into less fortunate circumstances. Hailsham is a grand place whose ample grounds encompass a pond, a pavilion and, towards its perimeter fence, a sinister area known as ‘the woods’. It is staffed by ‘guardians’ who have the quasi-parental function of the boarding-school housemaster or -mistress: these worthies bear the knowledge of their charges’ fate as best they can. Once the children have reached maturity they leave their school-type community and embark on a twilit adult life, in which they are given limited access to the normal world while they await the summons to make their first ‘donation’. This is where Kathy, as carer, comes in: she is the attending angel, seeing her portfolio of donors through the series of operations and consequent deteriorations that will lead to their certain death, or ‘completion’. This role has extended her own lease on life, and so she must endure the survivor’s moral and emotional suffering. And indeed, it is her capacity for emotion that provides the narrative occasion, that makes her the writer of this account.
It would seem from this description that Never Let Me Go is a work of unremitting bleakness and gratuitous sordidness. At the very least the question might be asked what style of literary enterprise this is. It isn’t science fiction –
indeed its procedures are the very reverse of generic, for there is no analogy at work in the text, which instead labours to produce its iterative naturalism as a kind of subset or derivation of our own. In this sense it has more in common with a novel such as Camus’s The Plague, in which a dystopian but familiar reality dramatises the dilemmas of the age. But the dilemmas of our age are not really those of Ishiguro’s dystopia: vainglorious science, meddling with the moral structure of life, is a kind of B-list spook whose antics have yet to offer any substantial intellectual or practical challenge to the populace.
In any case, the ‘scientific’ basis of the novel is vague: it is the emotional world of the clones themselves that Ishiguro is interested in, for these are children without parents, children who lack the psychological burden of childhood that Ishiguro so painstakingly articulated in The Unconsoled. And what he concludes is that a child without parents has no defence against death; that its body is not sacred, that it is a force of pure mortality. The parent is a kind of god, sanctifying and redeeming the child: as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the novel’s horrific imaginings almost become a perverse kind of sentimentality, as though these (male) writers are unable entirely to distinguish between imagination and fear. The parent imagines the gruesome things that could happen to his child if he, the parent, weren’t there to protect him; and the novelist tries to translate those imaginings into the empirical evidence valued by male literary culture. He creates a ‘reality’ out of them, with every ghoulish component unrelentingly worked out and provided; a high-caste version of the tabloid newspaper’s loving exposition of gory detail.
The Road has also been a popular success: readers seem to find the depressiveness of these novels exhilarating. In Ishiguro’s case the ‘gory details’ of organ donation and human exploitation are further freighted with the artistic scruples of the impersonator. The prose is locked tight with the inescapable repetitions of reminiscence: ‘There’s an instance I can remember from when we were about eleven. We were in Room 7 on a sunny winter’s morning. We’d just finished Mr Roger’s class, and a few of us had stayed on to chat with him.’ The greater part of the narrative proceeds thus, and Ishiguro gets his darkest effects from this ‘dead hand’ approach, creating an atmosphere of unbearable constriction that is like looking back down a tunnel. But his simultaneous need to manipulate, to dramatise his own concerns, pulls the story in the opposite direction. He gives the world of Hailsham a dominant characteristic: the belief in, indeed the worshipping of, creativity. The Hailsham children are indoctrinated in – and, one suspects as the narrative progresses, deliberately blinded by – the belief that their personal worth and the meaningfulness of their lives resides entirely in their ability to create art. From their earliest years they paint and sculpt and write poetry; they ‘sell’ their work to one another at passionate auctions known as ‘Exchanges’; the cream of the school’s production is selected to be sent to ‘the Gallery’, by a woman known as Madame, who comes two or three times a year in her smart clothes to make her choices. Kathy’s friend Tommy, though highly talented at sport, is bullied and ostracised for being bad at art; when he tells her that one of the guardians has privately suggested to him that his artistic failure doesn’t matter, she hears this as the cataclysm of heresy.
On one level Ishiguro seems to be saying that art is a con-trick, like religion; that it obscures from us the knowledge or awareness of our own mortality, knowledge that in the case of the Hailsham children is brutally withheld. We believe that art is immortal, and so we represent creativity as an absolute good; but in making this representation to children, are we interfering with their right to know about and accept death?
At one point Kathy remembers the way poems were treated as equivalent to paintings or sculptures at the Exchanges: it seems strange to her now that it should have been so. ‘We’d spend precious tokens on an exercise book full of that stuff rather than on something really nice for [putting] around our beds. If we were so keen on a person’s poetry, why didn’t we just borrow it and copy it down ourselves any old afternoon?’ Ishiguro’s mask slips a little here: why go to such lengths to distinguish and devalue writing? Is he suggesting that this is what the culture does? Or is it the reverse, a further piece of evidence of the inside-out, perverted values of the novel’s world?
Never Let Me Go, like the clones it portrays, has in the end something of a double nature, for it both attracts and annihilates. Or perhaps it is a book that requires two readers, the reader who can be blind to its ugly visage, and the reader who can see into its delicately conflicted soul. For those who perceive the latter, the novel’s bleak horror will leave a bruise on the mind, a fetter on the heart.
On Natalia Ginzburg
The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Writings from more than half a century ago read as if they have just been – in some mysterious sense are still being – composed. No context is required to read her: in fact, to read her is to realise how burdened literature frequently is by its own social and material milieux. Yet her work is not abstract or overtly philosophical: it is deeply practical and personal. You come away from it feeling that you know the author profoundly, without having very much idea of who she is.
It isn’t quite right to call these contradictions, because they are also the marks of a great artist, but in this case perhaps it is worth treating them as such, since they enabled Ginzburg to evolve techniques with which contemporary literature is only just catching up. Chief among these is her grasp of the self and of its moral function in narrative; second – a consequence of the first – is her liberation from conventional literary form and from the structures of thought and expression that Virginia Woolf likewise conjectured would have to be swept away if an authentic female literature were to be born. Yet this liberation is entirely towards naturalness and simplicity; it is an advance made without the propulsive force of ego, and so it is easy not to recognise it as an advance at all. Finally, Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original. It is an authority grounded in living and being rather than in thinking or even in language, an authority perhaps better compared to that of the visual artist, who is obliged to negotiate first with the seen, tangible world.
Ginzburg was born in Palermo in 1916, the child of a Jewish father and Catholic mother. Theirs was a left-wing intellectual household and she grew up into a milieu of radical thinkers and writers who became, with the advent of war, the defenders of liberalism and free speech. She and her young husband, Leone Ginzburg, were part of a group of anti-fascist activists and were central figures in protecting the freedom of the press. As well as essays Ginzburg wrote several novels, the most famous of which, Family Lexicon, is a history of a family whose observational core – in the person of its narrator and daughter of the family, Natalia – remains opaque. Ginzburg’s distinctive writing technique is easier to analyse in the more spacious setting of the novel. What at first might seem to be a narrative strategy, whereby Natalia withholds her own thoughts and feelings while her observations of those around her pour forth, becomes a profound commentary on the nature of narrative itself and how it so often misrepresents the trauma and tragedy inherent in living. Ginzburg separates the concept of storytelling from the concept of the self and in doing so takes a great stride towards a more truthful representation of reality. She identifies narrative as being in some important sense a bourgeois enterprise, a gathering of substance from the world in order to turn it to the story’s own profit, and moreover a process of ineradicable bias, whereby things only become ‘real’ once they have been recognised and given value by an individual. Put simply, Ginzburg attempts to show what happened without needing to show it happening to somebody. Her job – her art – is t
o represent the flawed charm, the tragedy and comedy of the human, to show the precise extent to which our characters shape our destinies and to watch as those destinies confer their blows and their rewards upon us.
The essays in The Little Virtues, written separately and in distinct circumstances between 1944 and 1960, comprise an autobiography of sorts. ‘Winter in the Abruzzi’ describes a period in which the author, then a young wife and mother, was exiled in wartime with her family to the Italian countryside. In ‘Worn-out Shoes’ she is now alone, living in post-war Rome with another solitary woman, her children being taken care of by her mother outside the city. ‘My Vocation’ describes the dawning of her realisation that creativity is a lifetime calling and is the most enduring of the relationships she will have. In ‘England: Eulogy and Lament’ she is older and exiled again, this time in a strange country whose manners and mores she records by way of making an inventory of her own homesickness and sorrow. In ‘He and I’ she is living with a man whose character she can only describe in terms of its differences from her own, in what is palpably a relationship of middle age; this time the sense of exile is emotional as well as geographical, the feeling of alienation from one’s own history that comes from living with a man who is not the father of one’s children. ‘The Little Virtues’, a work of great restraint and courage, is a look back at parenthood. Entirely without sentiment or subjectivity, it identifies the moral cowardice inherent in conventional attitudes to children and their upbringing, and the ways in which we inculcate the values of materialism and selfishness in the generations that will replace us. ‘As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one’s neighbour and selfdenial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.’ This statement of principle serves equally as a description of Ginzburg’s own life and work.