Mirrors and Windows: Synthesis of Surface and Depth in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) represents an attempt to synthesize modernist and postmodernist conceptions of surface and depth in a positive way. In doing so, it parallels moves by metamodern and transmodern theorists, who are in the process of attempting to divine the dominant artistic mode following postmodernism. However, Klara and the Sun differs from most meta- and transmodern work in that its synthesis give surfaces primacy over depth. Surfaces possess three qualities in the novel. The first is that they can act as a bridge between individuals and groups by expressing hypothetical scenarios that enable cooperation between different parties. The second, explored through the image of the horizon, is that surfaces can be dynamic, and can combine a modernist sense of groundedness with postmodern relativism. Finally, positive surfaces are framed by soft borders, and as such the frames that delineate an image or field of vision can be recognized as subjective while still allowing communication to take place. Taken together, these factors suggest that the concept of depth is a misleading mirage, while positive surfaces are the medium by which empathy and understanding can be achieved.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Christopher Kluz for his comments on a draft of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Vermeulen draws on the work of Alessandro Baricco for the image of the surfer. Baricco provides a good example of the way that surface tends to be coded negatively when he writes of a move toward “the surface instead of the depths, speed instead of reflection, sequences instead of analysis, surfing instead of searching the depths, communication instead of expression, multitasking instead of specialization, pleasure instead of hard work.” While Baricco’s argument is much more nuanced that this single quotation might suggest, it is illustrative in the way that it plays on the negative associations of surface.

2. She contrasts this with the English strand of high modernism embodied by Woolf, Conrad and Forster (Waugh 16).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Zhejiang Provincial Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project under Grant no. 22NDJC030Z.

Notes on contributors

Ivan Stacy

Ivan Stacy is associate professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Beijing Normal University. He is author of The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction (Lexington, 2021) and has published on complicity and the carnivalesque in the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, W. G. Sebald, Thomas Pynchon and China Miéville, as well as the American television series The Wire. Ivan has lived and taught in the U.K., China, South Korea, Thailand, Libya and Bhutan.