Introduction: Antisocial Goods

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The final film in the series of production/direction collaborations of IsmailMerchant and James Ivory features a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro. The WhiteCountess, released in 2005, invokes many character-types, plot situations, settingsand conflicts developed in his novels, making it a usefully retrospective startingpoint for this special issue devoted to Ishiguro. As Rebecca Walkowitz argues inher opening essay, it is necessary to pay close attention to Ishiguro's stylistic ten-dency towards repetition and his thematic privileging of the inauthentic if we areto understand the significance of his work in a new world of global translatabil-ity. Both qualities signify the realization in contemporary fiction of WalterBenjamin's observations concerning modern works of art "designed forreproducibility" (224). The Merchant Ivoi-y film adaptation of The Remains of theDay (1993), as well as Ishiguro's screenplays for The White Countess and GuyMaddin's The Saddest Music in the World (2003), give a further turn to thisrelation—particularly given the centrality of film to Benjamin's arguments aboutmechanical reproduction—as the reproduced, translated lives of Ishiguro'sfictions make an appearance in the reproducible medium of cinema.

Ishiguro's screenplays, including The White Countess, exhibit a curious inau-thenticity. Characters, events, settings and themes appear as if dislodged fromnovels already written. Novelists doubling as screenplay-writers are certainly notuncommon; however, as a writer who seems to have occasionally "cannibalized"his own earlier material (to invoke fellow novelist/screenwriter RaymondChandler's useful term [332]), Ishiguro does not, in fact, produce novels thatseem "designed for filmability." Instead, the continued, cloned lives of certaincomponents of the novels in his screenplays work to challenge any attribution of"aura" to their original appearance in those novels. If Ishiguro's works challengethe application of geographic definers like English and British, they neverthelessseem in tune with the genre of globalized, translatable/I'cti'ons, as Walkowitzsuggests—and this proposition carries over to Alexander Bain's notion of"humanitarian crisis fiction," to Bruce Robbins's reading of Never Let Me Go as a"welfare state fiction," and to my own reading of Ishiguro's later works as fic-tions of immaterial labor and class consciousness in the twentieth century. JamesEnglish and John Frow's recent analysis of the roles of celebrity and prize culturein creating the field of contemporary British fiction stresses the importance of thelinkages between canonicity and seriality for this field (English and Frow, "Liter-ary" 48; English, Economy 197-216). Ishiguro seems particularly suited to study asan exemplum of the contemporary, as English and Frow conceive it. He's a prize-winning writer of subtly serialized fictions, for both print and film formats, butalso a creator of celebrity protagonists (Ryder in The Unconsoled, Banks in WhenWe Were Orphans, Jackson in The White Countess) in whom inauthenticity is tiedclosely to a need to feel known, instantly recognizable, and "well-connected," in

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Christopher Banks's phrase, within whatever public they happen to findthemselves.

Critical assessments of Ishiguro have frequently linked this interest in the re-petitive and inauthentic to the expressive styles of his first-person narrators, inwhom sincerity is frequently accompanied by a lack of articulacy about whatthey might "really" be feeling, or about events that may, or may not, have hap-pened to them. For James Wood, in a review of the 2005 novel Never Let Me Go,Ishiguro's narrators often sound "excruciatingly ordinary." Potentially distinc-tive aspects of their narratives are "smothered in the loam of the banal" by a dic-tion "relaxed into colloquialism and cliche" (Wood, "Human Difference" 36, 37).This expressive style, wedded to tired-out repetition and cliches, appears to bewhat helps characters like Stevens, Ryder, Banks, and Kathy H. manage theirCuriously blinkered emotional lives. A repetitive, ordinary, banal style helps toaccomplish the "studied husbanding of affect" (Wood, "Human Difference" 37)that Ishiguro returns to repeatedly, making the human clones in Never Let Me Goa literal realization of what, figuratively, his protagonists have always been.Characteristically the memories of the latter, in turn, offer only reiterated "ech-oes" of critical past events, indefinitely deferring their (and our) grasp of the sig-nificance of some original, "defining, transparent event" (Walkowitz 1072; 1052).This attention to repetition, imitation, and echoing has created a body of workresistant to the consolations of authenticity, transparency, and originality. Thatstrategic resistance serves as an organizing critical focus for the essays in thisspecial issue. While exploring the seemingly different motifs of translation, cos-mopolitanism, humanitarian crisis, professional knowledge, the modern welfarestate, and the ethics of distance and cruelty, each essay poses a variation of BruceRobbins's question in his concluding essay: "Why should it be worth hearingabout again and again?" (290).

For anyone familiar with Ishiguro's novels. The White Countess can seem attimes overpowered by such echoes. The film invites experienced Ishiguro readersto return, again and again, to characters, events, crises, and conclusions thatsound vaguely like something that came before. The film rearranges the remem-bered novelistic material in the same way that Ishiguro's protagonists rearrangematerial from their own pasts: substituting different agents, putting the sameconversations in different people's mouths, altering outcomes, and withholdingany consoling idea of the novels as the "defining, transparent event." Thus, thefilm's 1930s Shanghai setting and its depictions of the 1937-1945 Sino-Japanesewar most obviously echo When We Were Orphans (2001). Its blind American dip-lomat Todd Jackson serves as a counterpart to that novel's British, magnifying-glass-wielding, cosmopolitan detective. The international city-in-crisis, whichalso serves as a temporary refuge for individuals displaced from modern nations,recalls both When We Were Orphans and the nameless central European city of TheUnconsoled (1995). The displaced mother and child who attract, and at times de-mand, the diplomat's attention recall Sophie and Boris in The Unconsoled. At thesame time, the sense of Shanghai as a tense, transitional space recalls the post-war Nagasaki oi A Pale View of Hills (1982), with the "unmistakable air of tran-sience there," as if everyone were "waiting for the day [they] could move to

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something better" {Pale 12), while also bringing to mind the specific situations ofintimate cruelty between stranded mothers and daughters in that early novel.The diplomat himself reads like a palimpsest of character traits associated withIshiguro's male protagonists from An Artist of the Floating World (1986), TheRemains of the Day (1988), When We Were Orphans, and The Unconsoled. Jacksonhas a blinkered, inherently and physically limited perspective on events, pastand present. He is often sleepy when faced with his daytime responsibilities, yetalert to the pleasures of the "floating world" that late-night Shanghai affords. Hebecomes intently focused upon the task he has chosen for himself, and the exper-tise it requires—in this case, constructing the bar of his "dreams." This bar, "TheWhite Countess," serves as the controlled setting both for his working relation-ship with the real Russian countess with whom he has fallen in love (who be-comes the bar's hostess), and for the aesthetic and social responsibility thatdistracts him, for most of the film, from expressing the love he seems to feel. Thefilm's central Japanese character also reads like a composite of the most memora-ble Japanese men from the novels. Mr. Matsuda suddenly, and repeatedly, ap-pears in the diplomat's life just when he needs him, ready to resume theirongoing conversation. He thereby signals the fulfillment of Christopher Banks'sdesire to rediscover his childhood friend Akira as an adult in the streets ofShanghai, and to resume their relationship as if they had never been parted. Therevelation of Mr. Matsuda's ties to the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, and hisarticulation of Japan's imperialist war aims, further echo Colonel Hasegawa'sbrief, oddly well-intentioned contemporary history lesson to Banks in When WeWere Orphans; he is also a direct echo of the earlier character named Matsuda, inAn Artist of the Floating World, who draws the artist Masuji Ono into service to theempire.

As this far-from-conclusive list of echoes suggests. The White Countess couldserve as an object-lesson in the narrative pitfalls of relying, again and again,upon increasingly fainter echoes of earlier material. But if the film seems to palebefore what the novels accomplish, this is not simply because it echoes them, butbecause The White Countess ultimately celebrates "authentic" feelings, as well aswhat Robbins discusses in his essay for this issue as the demands, and banalities,incurred by proximity. The film concludes with a valorization of companionatelove, family life, and "niceness"; in this sense it presents a contrast with the con-cerns raised in this issue. The essays here emphasize Ishiguro's commitment tocreating narratives for demands that might enforce more distant loyalties—to aprofessional class identity (Fluet), to the welfare state (Robbins), to the global(Bain), to the "unimaginable largeness" of interconnected praxis in the world(Walkowitz). These critical emphases present incivility, and other antisocial be-haviors, as the inevitable byproduct of those loyalties. By contrast, the conclusionto The White Countess finds the diplomat deciding to abandon the "bar of hisdreams"—that is, both his self-created expertise and the "imitation" whitecountess—during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai. He owns up to hisauthentic feelings for the real countess and her daughter, and flees the city withthem. He thus achieves the escape from the bewildering demands of the globalcity that Christopher Banks seems to long for but cannot realize. Juxtaposing the

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film and the novels also suggests that the diplomat's desire for leave-taking on agrand, final scale has in the written works been broken down and managed viasignificantly less grand, more routine attempts to delineate spaces of intention-ally brief, antisocial retreat from the everyday claims of unimaginable largeness.The butler's pantry of The Remains of the Day, so memorably evoked in theMerchant Ivory film as the place where Stevens cannot admit his feelings for thephysically close Miss Kenton, actually serves in the novel as an antisocial spaceof retreat for Stevens—until Miss Kenton enters it, and takes his book away fromhim. Stevens's occasional need to get away should be demarcated, in otherwords, from a too-easy argument—one the film wants to make—about his"secret" love for Miss Kenton and the risks of repression. If, as Michael Woodhas suggested, Ishiguro's "deepest subject" is not repressed love but rather "thecomedy and the pathos and the sorrow of the stories we tell ourselves to keepother stories away" (177), the antisocial practices of his protagonists contribute tomaintaining that process of keeping away, or at bay, the competing stories thatStevens, at least, recognizes in their demanding, bewildering need for his com-plete attention. Small wonder that he sometimes needs his pantry.

Jeff Nunokawa, the respondent to this issue, has elsewhere discussed nov-elistic depictions of the antisocial longing for leave-taking—the ways in which"people go to considerable lengths to get away from others in the nineteenth-century novel, and to get others away from them" (839). His arguments providea useful framework for organizing the antisocial feelings and behaviors dis-cussed in the essays here—cruelty, irritation, rudeness, multi-tasking, disgust,leave-taking, and the simple refusal to engage with another. These forms of affectand practice enable Ishiguro's protagonists to direct their attentions to the imag-ined needs of those far away, yet also subject them to the frequent criticism ofrepressing their real feelings for those close by. Of St. Theresa of Avila, as sheappears in George Eliot's prelude to Middlemarch, Nunokawa argues that "dwell-ing within the very zeal of her high-minded devotion to community" we find"an inflamed disdain for all manner of other social bonds" (841), as well as therealization that "a hunger for solitude haunts even the most extraordinary spiritof public service" (840-41). Nunokawa's study, along with Christopher Lane'sHatred and Civility (2004) and Lee Edelman's No Future (2004), invite speculationupon how Ishiguro's service-oriented protagonists evoke the antisocialunderpinnings of the Victorian novel's "knowable communities," but within con-temporary fictions that eschew the possibility of showing "people and theirrelationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways" (Williams 165).Instead, as Alexander Bain argues, "community" is experienced by Ishiguro'sprotagonists as a convergence of "globalization and chaos." Community is not somuch "knowable" as bewildering; communities, both proximate and imagined,clamor for the attention and services of Ishiguro's heroes—to the point that theycan no longer distinguish personal responsibilities from public ones.

If Ishiguro's protagonists display the "extraordinary spirit of public service"that Nunokawa finds in Eliot's St. Theresa, however, they also exhibit radicallyisolating behaviors. A .commitment to public service, in Ishiguro's novels, neces-sarily entails an ethical commitment to what we might call "antisocial goods." In

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this way, the essays in this issue offer a qualification to the reading of TheRemains of the Day put forth by Kwame Anthony Appiah, in his essay "Liberal-ism, Individuality and Identity" and later in The Ethics of Identity (2005). ForAppiah, "individuality presupposes sociability" (326); Ishiguro invites readers toconceive Stevens as an individual precisely because he is so very invested in thetrappings of sociability and public service. By contrast, the essays in this issueexplore the paradoxically antisocial qualities of the public servant, and the directcorrelation between the impulse to serve and the impulse to view oneself, asBruce Robbins argues here, not as an individual, but as a "statistic."

The "antisocial thesis" put forward in recent queer theory, exemplified inEdelman's No Future, invites us to consider how queer theory might be broughtto bear upon the mysterious drive to professional service in Ishiguro's protago-nists. If his male heroes frequently decide against entanglements with women,that is not their only challenge to traditionally heteronormative forms of relation-ship. They have also chosen alternative objects for their emotional investments,resulting in relationships that come close to the connections, born of "far-resonant action," wished for by George Eliot's "[m]any Theresas" (3). The antiso-cial behaviors of Ishiguro's characters are not deludedly misanthropic, oruninterested in the social per se, but may be read as calling attention to the feltinadequacies of the forms of relationship available to them through "sociality aswe know it" (Bersani, Homos 7). What is arguably queer about Stevens, Ryder,Banks, and even Kathy H. is not their sexuality, but what they choose to have acommitted relationship with. In each case, this turns out to be some version of animpersonal "we" (class, one's generation, inter-war Europe, contemporaryEurope, Shanghai's International Settlement) that claims their affections overmore local forms of companionate love. As Tim Dean writes, "Nothing is morepromiscuously sociable, more intent on hooking up, than that part of our beingseparate from selfhood" (827). If we can utilize the terms "promiscuous" and"hooking up" without their obvious associations with physical sexual activity,they might apply to the professional behaviors that Stevens, Ryder, Banks andKathy H. present. Each is eager to hook up to a chosen "we" via the outward-directed presentation of responsible service; each elevates this preferred realm ofservice over the claims of selfhood. And, as Kathy H.'s emblematic sterility sug-gests, each also has no future, no next "generation" of immaterial laborers tocreate and inspire by example.

This situation is captured in The Unconsoled in Ryder's angrily impassioned as-sertion to Sophie—the woman who may or may not be his wife—that the peoplein the cities he visits "need" him: "I arrive in a place and more often than not findterrible problems. Deep-seated, seemingly intractable problems, and people areso grateful I've come ... I'm needed, why can't you see that? I'm needed outhere!" (37). To echo Nunokawa's argument, Ryder's "high-minded devotion tocommunity" is matched by "an inflamed disdain for all other manner of socialbond"—-including marital and familial bonds. In committing himself to theresponsibilities of service, however, Ryder, like Masuji Ono, Stevens, Banks, andKathy H., also submits to a chronic "harriedness," as Bruce Robbins argues hereand elsewhere ("Very Busy" 428-30). This harriedness, in turn, brings on the

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characteristic "multi-tasking," as I argue here, of Ishiguro's protagonists. ForRyder and Stevens in particular, multi-tasking becomes the most available meansof ethical response to the bewildering, competing claims placed upon thosecommitted to service; but of course, no person in need ever gets Ryder's orStevens's undivided attention. Multi-tasking is the ethical response to the presentprecisely because Ishiguro's protagonists know that their way of life has "no fu-ture," to quote Edelman, no way of forestalling the situation that Eliot's Theresasknow so well—where "sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and aredispersed among hindrances, instead of centering on some long-recognisabledeed" (4). That inevitable dispersal of good intentions among innumerable hin-drances causes Stevens, Ryder, and Banks, too, to sob at the ends of their narra-tives. But any consolation to be derived from the "incalculably diffusive" effectsof "unhistoric acts" upon "the growing good of the world" (Eliot 838) in the fu-ture is absent in Ishiguro. Instead, Stevens, Ryder, Banks and Kathy H. attend tothe working needs of the present without the consolation of a better future, butalso without the sense of irony in which the futility of their efforts might havebecome apparent.

Soon after the publication of Never Let Me Go, Louis Menand summarized the"central premise" of Ishiguro's books as follows:, "even when happiness is stand-ing right in front of you, it's very hard to grasp" (78). It is certainly true thatIshiguro's protagonists are routinely unable to achieve what the novel suggestsmight be "happiness," and they seem unwilling or unable to dwell upon anydeep regrets about their situations. However, in various ways the essays in thisissue seek to move beyond the question of the ostensibly "shallow" psychologythat Menand attributes to Ishiguro's characters in order to ask what else, otherthan "happiness," might these protagonists be directing their energies towards?Can happiness ever result from abandoning the nuclear family, love relation-ships and biological reproduction for professional, institutional, public, extra-national, and global attachments? Might non-traditional forms of communityrather create the need for alternative forms of affect?

The suggestion of the essays in this issue is that Ishiguro's fictions gesture to-wards the need of a kind of affective education—for his readers, if not for hischaracters: the insistence of the latter on the viability of less-than-happyattachments prevents them' from learning to settle for relatively more consolingalternatives. As such, the readings presented here collectively address the vexedstatus of "idealism" in contemporary fiction. This is especially evident when weconsider the ways in which Ishiguro's protagonists lack a sense of "irony," andthus seem committed, for all their unreliability, to a progressive vision of a worldthat can be repaired—even if not by them. In a 2001 interview with Brian Shaffer,Ishiguro addressed the question of another, suspicious emotion evident in hisworks—nostalgia—and argued that, for all the accusations of escapism andevasion that it frequently generates, nostalgia nevertheless serves as "the emo-tional equivalent or intellectual cousin of idealism," as well as "something thatanchors us emotionally to a sense that things should and can be repaired" (7).Certainly a nostalgic attachment to the past—to former employers, to theInternational Settlement, to Hailsham—tends to be read as a contributing

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element to the blinkered perspective on the present that Ishiguro's protagonistsshare. But nostalgia also enables unironically progressive thinking; moreover,Ishiguro's formulation suggests that, for all the disaffected coldness that his pro-tagonists frequently exhibit, they do care very passionately about something outthere, even if that something cannot ever return their intensely concerned affec-tion They therefore exhibit an emotional maturity towards what Bruce Robbinshas elsewhere called "feeling global" that stands in stark contrast to theem'otional immaturity of their relations with those nearby.

With this in mind, I want to turn, finally, to a different moment from The WhiteCountess—a moment more in keeping with the varied approaches to idealisticcommitment that these essays explore. Like other elements in this film, theeponymous bar echoes earlier works of Ishiguro. As a space for the congregationof displaced persons of varying ranks, one that merges the "floating world" ofpleasure and drinking with something akin to the international conference atDarlington Hall, "The White Countess" looks nostalgically back upon—andrecreates, to happier effect—the League of Nations experience of the diplomatTodd Jackson. For all the film's evocations of another famous World War II filmabout an American expatriate who maintains a bar in a city of displaced persons,refusing "to stick his neck out" for anyone. The White Countess presents a quitedifferent register of idealism, and a quite different affect, to that of Curtiz'sCasablanca (1943). The dilemma is not, in other words, one of cosmopolitan disaf-fection versus emotional engagement in securing the survival of others.Although Jackson ultimately accomplishes just what Rick accomplishes (andmanages to escape as well), Ishiguro's bar offers an alternative to the imperialmodes of conquest advocated by the film's Mr. Matsuda, and arguably left inplace in Casablanca. If The White Countess serves as a haven for internationalnostalgia. The White Countess suggests that the "bar of Jackson's dreams" is notan escape—from an "authentic" emotional life with the real white countess, orfrom the terror lurking outside—but rather a figure for, or a portal to, a world inwhich things might be repaired. It is with a sense of this possibility for repara-tion, then, that the essays in this issue examine how Ishiguro's protagonists feelabout how the world works, and take up the question of why those feelingsmight have a legitimate claim upon the sympathies and affections of his readers.

Works Cited

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.

. "Liberalism, Individuality, and Identity." Critical Inquiry 27 (2001): 305-32.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968.

Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.

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Chandler, Raymond. Letter to Howard Hunt. 16 Nov. 1952. Selected Letters of RaymondChandler. Ed. Frank MacShane. New York: Columbia UP, 1981.

Dean, Tim. "The Antisocial Homosexual." Forum: Conference Debates. PMLA 121.3(2006): 826-28.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871-72. Ed. Rosemary Ashton. New York: Penguin, 1994.

English, James. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value.Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005.

, and John Frow. "Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture." A Concise Companion

to Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. James English. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. An Artist of the Floating World. New York: Vintage, 1989.

. Never Let Me Go. New York: Knopf, 2005.

. A Pale View of Hills. New York: Vintage, 1982.

. The Remains of the Day. New York: Vintage, 1989.

. The Unconsoled. New York: Vintage, 1995.

. When We Were Orphans. New York: Knopf, 2000.

Ivory, James, dir. The Remains of the Day. Perf. Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, JamesFox, et al. Screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Columbia Pictures, 1993.

• The White Countess. Perf. Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Hiroyuki Sanada,Vanessa Redgrave, et al. Screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro. Merchant Ivory Productions,2005.

Lane, Christopher. Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England. New York:Columbia UP, 2004.

Maddin, Guy, dir. The Saddest Music in the World Perf. Mark McKinney, IsabellaRossellini, Maria de Medeiros, et al. Screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro and Guy Maddin.Buffalo Gal Pictures, 2003.

Menand, Louis. "Something About Kathy." The New Yorker 28 Mar. 2005: 78-79.

Nunokawa, Jeff. "Eros and Isolation: The Antisocial Eliot." ELH 69 (2002): 835-60.

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Robbins, Bruce. Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress. New York: New York UP, 1999.

• "Very Busy Just Now: Globalization and Harriedness in Ishiguro's TheUnconsoled." Comparative Literature 53.4 (2001): 426-41.

Shaffer, Brian and Kazuo Ishiguro. "An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro." ContemporaryLiterature 42.1 (2001): 1-14.

Walkowitz, Rebecca. "Ishiguro's Floating Worlds." ELH 86 (2001): 1049-76.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.

Wood, James. 'The Human Difference." Rev. of Never Let Me Go. By Kazuo Ishiguro. TheNew Republic 16 May 2005: 36-39.

Wood, Michael. "The Discourse of Others." Children of Silence: On Contemporary Fiction.New York: Columbia UP, 1998.171-82.