Shapes in the Mist of Forgetfulness in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

Remembering who we are is the ﬁrst tenet of a personal and, hence, cultural identity.

But what if an awareness of our individual past and cultural memory inevitably leads to pain and destruction? What if our peace, and peace of mind, depend upon forgetting who we are? The mist of forgetfulness is the latest image in Kazuo Ishiguro’s continued contemplation of memory; in The Buried Giant ( ),¹ the Nobel Laureate in literature explores how the ever-changing shape of forgetfulness helps cloud identities that were forged in a hopelessly ﬂawed past, so that individuals may live out the remains of their days in peace.²

The mist of forgetfulness in the novel covers an early medieval land sparsely populat-ed by post-Arthurian Britons, temporarily peaceful Saxons, and other variously trauma-tized and potentially dangerous humans and non-humans. While the characters strive to identify elements of their pasts that occasionally shimmer through the mist, they also attempt to give answers of ever-changing shape and content as to the reason why their memories are clouded. The resulting novel, in its turn, keeps the reader in the dark up until the last chapters as to the precise identity of the protagonists and the nature of their past conﬂicts, inspiring much mist-reading and intermittent re-evaluation of the costs and beneﬁts of forgetting, as opposed to the practices of cultural memory usually encountered in Arthurian literary adaptations.

The protagonists, Axl and Beatrice, whom Axl addresses as princess, are elderly Brit-ons who have been increasingly limited in their freedom and the respect they receive, which pains Beatrice. Axl seems more disturbed by how their fellow villagers appear to forget everything so readily. We ﬁrst meet them early one spring morning, when Axl is up trying to remember events and people from his past, including their son. The couple ﬁnally set out on a journey, ostensibly to meet their by-now adult son and reach recon-ciliation with him, but it is not clear what, if anything, had occurred that would neces-sitate such reconciliation, or even if they indeed ever had a son.

1. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (New York: Vintage, ).

2. This interpretation owes much to Péter Dávidházi’s work as critic, lecturer and supervisor, and speciﬁcally to his “Camel, Weasel, Whale: The Cloud-Scene in Hamlet as a Hungarian Para-ble,” in Shifting the Scene: Shakespeare in European Culture, eds Ladina Bezzola Lambert, Balz Engler (Newark: University of Delaware Press, ), – ; while all responsibility for liberties taken with literary and critical texts remains with the current interpreter.

The characters seem to know who they are from one day to the next, but after a little while an event or a person, like little Marta or a red -haired woman, are lost from memory. When the protagonists remember enough to be able to re ﬂect upon their forgetfulness, they worry about it. As Beatrice says, “Never mind the red -haired woman, Axl. It’s what else we’re not remembering” ( ).

The past seems inaccessible; and even as an image emerges now and again from their memory, their attempts to make sense of it are like trying to identify the ever-changing shape of a cloud. Axl, who is a gentle man and a loving and tactful hus-band, wants to have cleared up what they came to call the mist of forgetfulness because he wants to know, for example, if they always lived like this, on the periph-ery ( ). Beatrice wishes to remember because she heard that some mysterious boat-men, who ferry people to an island, trick couples into going one person at a time, even though most would like to journey to the island together. Yet the boatmen only take a couple when they have “an unusually strong bond of love between them” ( ).

Although Axl reassures her that they have no intention to journey to the island ( ), Beatrice is anxious; partly because there is a slight pain, “just below the rib-cage” ( ), that she consults various wise men and women about, but more vocally because the boatmen seem to measure the strength of love between couples based on their most cherished memories ( ). “What chance do we have, Axl, the way we are now?” ( ).

As the couple make their progress, they learn that the mist that veils the past is produced by a she-dragon called Querig. Inescapably, they hear more about the boatmen to the island, which readers familiar with Arthurian legends will increasingly clearly identify as Avalon, the ﬁnal resting place of King Arthur, while along the way they encounter other Britons and Saxons who seem more on edge than earlier, barely holding back from attacking strangers. Axl and Beatrice also meet an old and appar-ently scatterbrained Sir Gawain, “not easily missed, dressed in rusted chainmail and mounted on a weary steed” ( ), whose quest, long ago assigned by Arthur, is sup-posedly to slay Querig, suggesting some hope that the mist would lift.

A whole array of interpretations is oﬀered in the novel to explain the mist of for-getfulness. An apparently parallel process, that of interpreting the shape of the clouds in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is revealed by Péter Dávidházi in his essay “Camel, Weasel, Whale” to involve an exploration of power positions between Hamlet and Polonius in their short dialogue:

Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.

Methinks it is like a weasel.

It is backed like a weasel.

Or like a whale?

Very like a whale. (III. ii. – )³

In Ishiguro’s novel, interpretations seem to have a diﬀerent function: the repeated enquiries about others’ understanding of the mist and the insistence on comparing fragments of memories appear to be requests for corroboration and validation of their possibly shared suppositions and memories. As characters attempt to make sense of it, the mist is variously introduced as a curse ( ), a sickness ( ), a plague ( ), or a sign of God either forgetting them ( ) or being angry ( ). “Or maybe he’s not angry, but ashamed […] deeply ashamed of us, of something we did, that he’s wishing himself to forget,” as Beatrice suggests ( ). As the characters talk, they readily concede to the possible truth of the other’s interpretation:

“It’s not how I remember it, princess.” […]

“If that’s how you’ve remembered it, Axl, let it be the way it was. With this mist upon us, any memory’s a precious thing and we’d best hold tight

to it.” ( )

Camel, weasel, whale—the shapes memories tend to take in the minds of Ishiguro’s characters, and the possible origin and purpose of the mist, rather than being signs of interpersonal power relations or politics, appear to be indicative of a form of coopera-tion under control exercised over their lives from a higher diegetic level.

While most of those Axl and Beatrice meet labour under the mist, older characters tend to remember more ( ), and those granted ﬁrst-person narratives reveal an entirely diﬀerent level of awareness. Sir Gawain in his reveries, the boatman, and even the boy bitten by a monster, demonstrate a knowledge superior to that of Axl and Beatrice.

They do not voice this in their direct communication with other characters, yet readers can hear their musings. While not every detail is clariﬁed, the diﬀerence in levels of awareness is as if the ghost of Hamlet’s father had been given a soliloquy to let the audi-ence, but not Hamlet, know how he died. All this is disconcerting enough from a narra-tological point of view to have prompted strong criticism from some of Ishiguro’s re-viewers such as James Wood: “Just at the technical level, can one write a successful novel about people who can’t recall anything? Ishiguro is always breaking his own rules, and fudging limited but conveniently lucid recollections.”⁴

The narrative of forgetfulness is on altogether safer grounds when, under duress, the characters appear to remember something as if in a dream. In comparison, Gawain’s

3. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, eds. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Digital Texts, Folger Shakespeare Library. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org (accessed October ).

4. James Wood, “The Uses of Oblivion: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant,” The New Yorker, March . www.newyorker.com/magazine/ / / /the-uses-of-oblivion (accessed October ).

reveries may feel like proof to Wood’s claims. When Ishiguro presents Gawain’s private musings directly, he prevents the reader from discovering the forgotten past alongside the non-remembering protagonists, which is easily perceived as an unwelcome shortcut in the reading process. Yet one can see the appeal of including some of Gawain’s rever-ies, especially the parts which are poetically phrased, evocative, and much less intrusive in terms of the information conveyed: “Yet here he is, still in the mountain, his good wife beside him. I will not meet his eye. Age cloaks us both, as the grass and weeds cloak the ﬁelds where we once fought and slaughtered. What is it you seek, sir?” ( ).

“Hamlet seems to have dreamt up the cloud-scene to make all his three observers re-alize that his whimsical, apparently insane intentions would be at least as diﬃcult to fathom out or pin down as it is hopeless to identify the ever-changing shape of the clouds,” argues Dávidházi.⁵ In Ishiguro’s novel, a now long deceased Arthur seems to have dreamt up the mist to cover up the memory of the Britons’ treacherous and devas-tating days of slaughter and to prevent any retaliation by the Saxons. Without revealing all secrets of the novel, it is clear that the mist has worked to the extent that there is no active war in progress during the period the narrative covers. Yet the unknowability of the past, the fear of the possible tricks of the boatmen, and the lack of understanding as to the intentions of the powers that rule their lives, remain a problem for the characters, much as, in Dávidházi’s interpretation, “the theme of unknowability […] is one of the main problems of both Hamlet and Polonius.”⁶ If Polonius is “playing the old fool in order to take his victim oﬀ guard, and to observe him all the more easily,”⁷ Sir Gawain is called an “old fool” ( ) in accordance with the part he plays, while all the time he is key to the mystery.

The state of not knowing appears as a possibly safe protection from the acute pain of remembering the past. Yet unknowability does not extend to the outcome of the story for the readers, as Tom Holland notes: “We know, of course, what is destined to hap-pen: that the Saxons will indeed recover the memory of the wrongs done to them, and that the Britons will be swept amid carnage and ﬁre from the future England.”⁸ The characters, however, must endure under the cloud of unknowability, even if they are immune, to varying degrees, to the mist of forgetfulness. This is perhaps one of the most engaging elements of the novel. It seems that revenge, ideologies and memories may set communities against one another, but respect and even love may prevail among the individuals. Ishiguro creates a long scene between the ancient Sir Gawain and a younger Saxon warrior, Wistan, who will clearly ﬁght a battle in which one of them will

5. Dávidházi, p. . 6. Dávidházi, p. . 7. Dávidházi, p. .

8. Tom Holland, “Kazuo Ishiguro Ventures into Tolkien Territory: The Buried Giant,” The Guardian, March . www.theguardian.com/books/ /mar/ /the-buried-giant-review-kazuo-ishiguro-tolkien-britain-mythical-past (accessed October ).

perish, because each has a mission, and these missions are in direct contradiction with one another. On a personal level, however, there is respect, comradeship and mutual appreciation between them, as well as warmth and some collegial bantering ( – ).

Ambivalence concerning the absolute value of remembering deepens further when Beatrice and Axl themselves develop doubts, anticipating the devastation that might follow:

Right enough, princess, the warrior’s words make me tremble. You and I longed for Querig’s end, thinking only of our own dear memories. Yet who knows what old hatreds will loosen across the land now? We must hope God yet ﬁnds a way to preserve the bonds between our peoples, yet custom and suspicion have always divided us. Who knows what will come when quick-tongued men make ancient grievances rhyme with fresh desire for land and

conquest? ( )

Tom Holland, author of several nonﬁction works of history from ancient times to the origins of Islam, has a special appreciation for the signiﬁcance of oblivion: “A griev-ance forgotten, Ishiguro implies, is an atrocity forestalled. That the relevgriev-ance of this is not conﬁned to dark-ages Britain hardly needs to be pointed out.”⁹ Nicholas Lezard also suggests that “the book can be applied to our own times.”¹⁰ In her announcement of Ishiguro as the winner of the Nobel prize in literature, Sara Danius, Permanent Secre-tary of the Swedish Academy, emphasized that Ishiguro “is very interested in under-standing the past, but he is not a Proustian writer, he is not out to redeem the past, he is exploring what you have to forget in order to survive in the ﬁrst place as an individual or as a society.”¹¹

These concerns have been addressed before in Ishiguro’s oeuvre, for example in The Remains of the Day ( ). The question in The Buried Giant is still, as in Never Let Me Go ( ) and so often elsewhere, about the extent to which the individual is responsi-ble for decisions that will unavoidably touch upon the lives of others. What is new here is the Arthurian context. In an interview Ishiguro stated very clearly what he wanted to write about:

For a long time I had this story without a particular setting in which to put it down in. I knew it was about some society that had buried certain dark memories about a generation back. I wanted that contrasted with an ageing

9. Holland, “Kazuo Ishiguro Ventures into Tolkien Territory.”

10. Nicholas Lezard, “Here Be Dragons: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro,” The Guardian, January . https://www.theguardian.com/books/ /jan/ /buried-giant-kazuo-ishiguro-review-nicholas-lezard (accessed October ).

11. Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Alison Flood, “Kazuo Ishiguro Wins the Nobel Prize in Litera-ture ,” The Guardian, October . www.theguardian.com/books/ /oct/ /kazuo-ishiguro-wins-the-nobel-prize-in-literature (accessed October ).

couple who had been married a long time and they faced the same questions, about do they want to remember something in their pasts or do they want to leave them buried.¹²

The setting ﬁnally decided upon, however, is as signiﬁcant a part of the resulting novel as the story to be told. In any literary image, the vehicle will have, or may take on, a life of its own, like the clouds in the scene between Polonius and Hamlet, even if other elements remain stronger in the battle for the attention of the reader.

The uneven match between context and concerns certainly called forth further criti-cal comments. “Fantasy and historicriti-cal ﬁction and myth here run together with the Mat-ter of Britain, in a novel that’s easy to admire, to respect and to enjoy, but diﬃcult to love,” Neil Gaiman wrote.¹³ James Wood was even harsher; in his view, Ishiguro “has written not a novel about historical amnesia but an allegory of historical amnesia […]

allegory, which exists to literalize and simplify. The giant is not buried deeply enough.”¹⁴ Yet one could argue for the importance of Ishiguro’s gesture to work with the Arthurian legends. Myths, like clouds, oﬀer changing shapes for contemplation and may allow the freedom of laterally processing problems occupying one’s mind.

Dávidházi’s interpretation of the cloud-scene also turns towards concerns relevant to Hungary in the historical and political climate of the period around – , when János Arany translated Hamlet and, a hundred years later, after another revolution. The relevance is testiﬁed by the prevalence of references to the scene by Arany in his other works, discussed by Dávidházi, as well as by a volume of papers published on Arany’s translation of Hamlet.¹⁵

Ishiguro’s novel reads readily as a meditation on how to survive after a devastating conﬂict. The Buried Giant was published in March , six months after the referen-dum on Scottish independence, and not much more than a year before the Brexit vote, a referendum that asked whether the country should remain a member of, or leave, the European Union. It is diﬃcult not to interpret the mist of forgetfulness keeping Britons and Saxons at peace as an anguished exploration of how to proceed after a political conﬂict split the voters in an almost equal manner; what it means to be British at a point when the UK is on the verge of breaking apart; and how one deﬁnes one’s

identi-12. Alan Taylor, “Booker Prize-Winner Kazuo Ishiguro Digs up The Buried Giant,” The Her-ald, March . www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/ .Booker_Prize_winner_Kazuo _Ishiguro_digs_up_The_Buried_Giant/ (accessed October ).

13. Neil Gaiman: “Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant,” The New York Times, February . www.nytimes.com/ / / /books/review/kazuo-ishiguros-the-buried-giant.html (ac-cessed October ).

14. James Wood, “The Uses of Oblivion.”

15. János H. Korompay, “»egy dióhéjban ellaknám« Hamletkint. A Hamlet-fordítás Arany János életművében,” in “Eszedbe jussak”: Tanulmányok Arany János Hamlet-fordításáról, ed. Júlia Paraizs, Hagyományfrissítés, , (Budapest: reciti, ), – .

ty as a British subject, in particular, one whose national identity as British subject goes back no further than the times when Scotland was part of the UK and not much further than when the UK became part of the European Union.

A Britain at war with itself must be painful to watch for Ishiguro. He published a passionate letter in the Financial Times after the Brexit referendum, suggesting a second referendum to clarify the voters’ position on immigration and a single EU market:

I am angry that the UK is now very likely to cease to exist, only two years af-ter the Scottish referendum seemed to secure its future. […] I speak as a -year-old man of Japanese birth who has lived here from the age of ﬁve; who has observed and experienced this society from the perspective of a small, vis-ibly foreign child who was for years the only such child in his school or his wider community […]. The Britain I know—and deeply love—is a decent, fair-minded place, readily compassionate to outsiders in need […]. If that view has now become outdated […], if today’s Britain is one I should no longer recognise as the one I grew up in, then let me at least hear the bad

In document Panka Dániel– Pikli Natália – Ruttkay Veronika (eds/szerk.): Kősziklára építve/Built upon His Rock. Írások Dávidházi Péter tiszteletére/Writings in Honour of Péter Dávidházi (Pldal 146-153)