الموضوع: ما سر "الروعة" في افضل مائة رواية عالمية؟ دراسة بحثية
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قديم 12-17-2011, 01:13 PM
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Kazuo Ishiguro lives in London with his wife Lorna and their 8-year-old daughter Naomi.
You said that you're very conscious of your international audience. I wonder if part of that might be that you have a more global or cosmopolitan view because of your own background. I know you were born in Nagasaki and that your family left Japan when you were six?
Five, actually.
And your family never intended to stay in Britain, though they did stay there. I wonder if that would help to make your outlook more global?
I don't know if it would make it more global. Certainly dual. Japanese and British. I don't know if I was particularly global in my outlook as a child. But, as a writer, almost accidentally, because I started off writing about Japan -- and I had all kinds of personal reasons for doing that -- I think I kind of unnecessarily put myself in the position of being a kind of international, if you like, quote-unquote writer. That's how I kind of branded myself right from the start: as somebody who didn't know Japan deeply, writing in English, whole books with only Japanese characters in. Trying to be part of the English literary scene like that. Part of the reason that I was able to make my career as a novelist very rapidly in Britain in the 1980s was because there was -- just at that time when I started to write -- a great hunger for this kind of new internationalism. After quite a long time of people being preoccupied with the English class system or the middle-class adultery novel or whatever, publishers in London and literary critics and journalists in London suddenly wanted to discover a new generation of writers who would be quite different from your typical older generation of English writer. And they were damned sure that that writer was going to be somebody very international who could kind of blow British culture out of its inward-looking, postcolonial post-Empire phase. In the 1980s people who were keen on literature went around carrying people like [Gabriel] Garcia Marquez in their pockets: One Hundred Years of Solitude, or Milan Kundera. They became the suddenly fashionable writers, from being utterly obscure writers.
The people writing in English -- people like Salman Rushdie -- became the new heroes. And I think I was almost kind of allowed onto the literary scene because I seemed to be an international writer. I kind of thought that was the role I was supposed to play. That's why I was there. And so I think for that reason I perhaps am very conscious of the whole international thing. But I think most writers of my generation are.
If I can paraphrase -- and tell me if I got this right -- what I just heard you say is that some of your very early success was due almost to fashion, in a way.
Fashion is perhaps putting it too superficially, but yeah: a trend. I think it's more than a fashion because it was part of a serious shift in the way the British thought.
A literary movement?
More than a literary movement. It's to do with a big shift in the way the British thought of themselves. Because you have to remember, for a long, long time Britain thought of itself as the center of a huge empire. For a long time writers who wrote English literature felt they did not need to think consciously about whether they were international or not. They could write about the smallest details of English society and it was, by definition, of interest to people in the far corners of the world because English culture itself was something that was internationally important. So they never had to think about what if somebody in Shanghai wasn't interested in how English people went about having their dinner parties in London: Well, they damn well ought to be interested. That was the attitude because that was the dominant international culture. That was the culture that was being forced or pushed onto other cultures around the world. If you wanted to know about the world for quite a lot of the last two or three centuries, you had to know about British culture.
But that finished, you see. And I think it took a little while after the end of Second World War for the British to realize this. And then suddenly, around the time when I started to write, I think people came to this realization: We're not the center of the universe. We're just this little backwater in Europe. If we want to participate in the world, culturally speaking, we've got to find out what's happening in the rest of the world. Similarly with the literature. It's no good anymore just going on about the difference between an upper middle class Englishman and his lower middle class wife, you know. That's just purely parochialism. You've got to start looking outwards and wider and we want writers and artists who can tell us how we can fit into the rest of the world. We want news from abroad. I think it was that big shift, the basic realization that Britain wasn't the heart of an Empire, but just a little -- albeit a powerful one, still -- just a little country.
American writers now are in a not dissimilar situation to English writers of the last several hundred years. You can write the most inward-looking provincial kind of American novel, because American culture is so dominant around the world. They're writing stuff of world importance. It's easier to write things that everybody should be interested in just by describing your own knee if you're American, you can write something that's very important. The rest of us can't do that.
So I think it was something deeper than just a fashion. And I think it's reflected in many aspects of British life. Literature is just one, small bit of it. The whole attitude to what "English" means has undergone a huge change since I was a child in England. | October 2000