The End of Everything: When Science Becomes Fiction (Part 2)
How Hamlet, Klara, and Mary Came From the Future
“You’re not just writing for different countries. You’re writing for different eras.” Kazuo Ishiguro, Paris Review Interview #196, Issue 184 (Spring 2008)
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Science fiction never felt so real.
We tell ourselves that climate change doesn’t engage our emotions and thus mobilize our energies—OK, except for those earnest teenagers—because its effects aren’t immediate enough. They arrive from time to time in the form of strange weather, but they still come clothed in the verbal armor of “natural” disasters, or in the future tense, where they still belong to an order of things that seems beyond human control. We also tell ourselves that Artificial Intelligence can’t engage our minds because it isn’t yet consequential at the level of everyday life, or, what is the same thing, because it’s still a theoretical abstraction fit only for mathematicians, mad scientists, filmmakers, and venture capitalists.**
But ambitious science fictions and movies made of Marvel fantasies are the best-sellers and blockbusters of our time. Either way, we know the future is upon us.
Among those best-selling science fictions are two that made everyone’s “10 Best” lists last year, from Barack Obama’s to Jonathan Lethem’s—I mean Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future. Apart from their generic designation, when considered as novels, they couldn’t be more different.
Ishiguro writes in the first person as an AF, an Artificial Friend, first stationed in the front window of a store waiting to be be bought by Josie, a “genetically edited” teenager who knows she won’t find companionship among her similarly altered peers—like her, they’ve been equipped to succeed in college, and so can think only of their test scores: they need to but can’t be loved by their equals. Klara, the solar-powered AF, is a quiet, thoughtful, meticulous observer of, well, of every damn thing, from the cyborgs and customers in the store or on the street to the human beings she (?) joins once purchased and placed in Josie’s household. Like Hamlet, she accepts everything, and stays suspended in the narrative time of the Others who surround her—as “someone” who’s always thinking but speaks only when spoken to by these beings, she’s the register or receptacle of their profuse utterance.
Robinson writes in so many voices that the reader can’t find a narrative locus, and that, I think, is purposeful. It’s a “de-centered” novel that prosaically enacts what it hopes for, a grass-roots, trans-national, anti-capitalist revolution without a unitary ideology, program, or party. It’s not even a novel, Lethem notwithstanding, unless we stretch the definition to accommodate Mikhail Bakhtin’s ultra-elastic specifications in The Dialogic Imagination (trans. 1982)), where just about any prose fiction qualifies. It’s more like a screenplay without the punctuation (EXT., etc.) or stage directions, and there’s no fourth wall to break. Every five chapters or so—there are 106—KSR addresses the reader directly in soliloquies, here in the voice of The Market itself, there in the lecture mode of the professor out to explain cryptocurrency or hypothermia. Like Shakespeare’s resolute moderns, he can’t abide the rules of the present, so he turns to us in the hope that we’ll understand what tomorrow already brings. Like Hamlet, he speaks for himself only when speaking directly to us, his audience, and even then he ventriloquizes as if he’s always outside himself, looking in.
In interviews, Ishiguro tells us that Klara started out as a children’s book, a place where he could explore consciousness in the making, as it develops in the “idea of love” rather than as it emerges in a growing inventory of labelled objects. The appointed task of AFs is to keep their—what?—clients from loneliness, so they must bear witness to the emotional states conveyed by voice, posture, gait, gesture, dress, in addition of course to facial expressions and the words themselves; and they must learn to address these states with adequate language in appropriate forms, as questions, statements, explanations, or instructions. Klara is preternaturally good at that selfless, thankless task, according to Manager herself, who is so impressed by this cyborg’s abilities that she gives—what?—it two stints in the front window and, after Josie has gone off to college, even visits it in the junkyard where it has gone to experience a well-deserved “slow fade” from solar-powered life.
Ishiguro majored in philosophy as well as literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury (Plato/Socrates is still a fave, he says), so it’s hard not to read Klara as a way of thinking in search of a language, and vice versa. The question here is not whether but how consciousness exists in sentient beings animated by artificial intelligence, and these include the humans who have been “lifted” by genetic editing—Josie and her older sister Sal, who didn’t survive the transition, maybe Mother, but definitely not estranged Father, Paul, a brilliant engineer who has been “substituted” and now lives as a refugee in an armed camp with other white-collar types displaced by machines, and certainly not Rick, Josie’s next-door neighbor and steadfast boyfriend (they have A Plan to stay together even after she goes off to college, defying the clear class division created by genetic editing).
Mother has her own plan—to “continue” Josie, that is, to “substitute” Klara for Josie, who is clearly following Sal’s path to death by transition, suffering from the genetic editing that would allow her to excel in school as part of a machine-tooled cohort. Mother makes Klara imitate Josie’s asymmetric gait in the store, as the final test before buying the cyborg, to make sure this thing can stand in for her daughter once sheathed in Mr. Capaldi’s three-dimensional “portrait,” a work-in-progress that everyone except Father (Paul) finds a marvelous, uncanny replica of the original. On her (?) only viewing of the portrait, Klara fills out a questionnaire that asks What Would Josie Do? in every kind of hypothetical situation. The cyborg passes this test, too, and how could it not? Its mission is to know the girl better than she herself could, to love her as an unedited person like Rick or Paul might—so much that it would sacrifice its own life to extend Josie’s.
Klara accomplishes that mission in two strokes. First, the cyborg navigates the meadow next door to negotiate a pact with the Sun where He sets, at the shed on the horizon as it appears from Josie’s second-story bedroom window. Second, as her end of the bargain, she (?) destroys a Cotting Machine—a huge internal-combustion contraption that apparently scrapes pavement: it is literally scarifying—which belches enough smoke to block the Sun, the source of life itself for all Klara, a solar-powered cyborg, knows. She (?) does so by letting Father drain PEG fluid from her neck and then pour its poison into the gas tank of the Cotting Machine, ending the evil of Pollution as far as Klara knows (until she sees another one on a different street). But this ostensibly Luddite gesture is not a symbolic act, expressing a generic Rage Against The Machine. Klara fully expects that in return for its sabotage, the Sun will bring Josie back from the brink of death caused by “lifting,” by the genetic editing that will turn the human teenager into a higher kind of being, in other words a college-bound cyborg.
Klara can’t reverse that editing process—Josie’s already limping by the time the two mechanisms meet, and there’s no medicinal cure for her deepening torpor. But like Pinocchio (a 19th-century children’s story, a 20th-century Marvel comic as well as a Disney movie), it can do what a real girl would, learn to love herself by loving another, and, like both Hamlet and Hegel’s bondsman, learn to know herself by treating herself as an object, as if from outside herself, contemplating, in this sense, not just the content of her consciousness but its capacity for self-reflection.
Klara does rescue Josie and make itself redundant, as if it’s a real, unedited human being “substituted,” that is, displaced, by a machine, like Father himself. And, in the end, alone in the junkyard with her memories, Klara knows herself better than Josie ever will. But we know she will expire, and soon: Manager’s kind words are a eulogy. Like the original Pinocchio, and unlike most of his edited successors, Klara dies.
Why? Why does her “slow fade” seem so inevitable that it doesn’t stir sadness for her, in us—at least not in this reader? Is it because she’s not quite human? She doesn’t suffer from loneliness, as my friend Bruce Robbins points out in a brilliant essay on Ishiguro.*** She politely refuses offers from junkyard employees and Manager to move her to where other fading AFs are stationed, so she might chat with them: she’s happy to be alone with her memories. Nor does she fear death. That’s what separates her from all the other characters, including, or especially, the genetically edited, mechanically endowed, residually human teenager, Josie—and that’s why, I think, readers are deflected from mourning Klara.
This position is plotted (or signified, if you like) by the cyborg’s language, the way it tells the story. On the one hand, Klara is the almost-omniscient narrator, more observer than participant in the proceedings. Even when speaking directly to Josie, it doesn’t address her as “you,” as if it is, in fact, there, in the scene: Klara addresses the teenager in and as the third person, as a character being watched and narrated from outside the frame of the dialogue. No one can mourn the narrator because it is the absent cause of its own creation—its life is on the page, and only on the page.
On the other hand, Klara is allergic to metaphor. The closest she comes to mistaking a thing for a word—that is the work of metaphor, to equate unlike substances and thereby to create meaning where there was none—is to say that so-and-so was “similar to” this or that. The reported dialogue, by contrast, is full of similes and metaphors, mostly metonymic reductions of Klara to a machine, as when Mr. Capaldi asks permission to “take a look under the hood” to see how AFs think, to understand why they’re replacing unedited human beings.
Mortals need metaphors, mistaking some paint for a person (art), a man for a God (religion), a word for a thing (literature), because they know they’ll die—not when or how, but some day—because they want to make their short, brutish lives durable, meaningful, and significant. Their language sets them apart from other sentient beings, for example animals that fear death only at the hour, when a predator has hunted them down, or cyborgs that might recharge their batteries. In the language of such mortals, as against that of animals, say, bees who can communicate the location of nectar, or cyborgs who have no fear of death, there is no “fixed correlation of its signs to the reality which they signify.” That’s Jacques Lacan talking, explaining how we are “born into Language at the moment of the loss of the Other”—how the mistakes made by metaphors, the very possibility of arbitrary or absurd correlations between words and things, are determined by this sense of loss, by our attempts to reinstate what never was. They are what make us human.
Klara doesn’t know loss. She feels no sense of an ending. not when parked in the Utility Room after Josie has recovered and is preparing to leave for college—to leave her AF behind—nor when the teenager departs with “I guess you may not be here when I get back,” not even when planted in the junkyard. She has no use for metaphor: she is not (quite) human.
And so Klara can’t be loved. It can love Josie, but it can’t replace her. At the very end of the novel, Klara itself explains to Manager why it couldn’t “continue” Josie, and does so in a way that suggests self-consciousness is what William James said it was, “a kind of external relation” rather than an interiority in flight from being in the world—in abstention from the time of the Other. “The Mother, Rick, Melanie Housekeeper, the Father. I’d never have reached what they felt for Josie in their hearts,” Klara says.
Manager remonstrates without knowing what is at stake. Klara replies:
“Mr. Capaldi believed there was something special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr. Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn’t have succeeded.”
“It was inside those who loved her.” Klara doesn’t succeed with us, either, her readers, because she’s not quite like us. We can’t love her, not any more than Rick or Father can, even though her kindness and generosity are too good to be true—or rather precisely because she is too insightful, humble, helpful, and fearless to be true. Only a machine or a God or an omniscient narrator could be that infallibly good. Even Jesus proved himself a man, a mere mortal, by knowing he would die and expressing his fear of death. Klara has no such credentials to present. And so we can’t mourn her passing. Like Josie, all we can do is say, “I guess you may not be here when I get back.”
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**On AI, which for Ishiguro is a philosophical conundrum that manifests as a problem of narrative technique, see my rudimentary remarks in The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (2009), chap. 5, where I cite Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future (1999), N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (2002(, and Richard Lanham, The Economics of Attention (2004) as useful introductions to the relevant issues. See also Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), still the most original imagining of digital capitalism outside of the fictions Fredric Jameson studies in Archaeologies of the Future (2005). An up-to-the-minute account is Steven Johnson, “AI Is Mastering Language: Should We Trust What It Says?” New York Times Magazine, April 4, 2022.
***Bruce Robbins, “Klara in the Junkyard,” forthcoming in Peter Sloane & Kristian Shaw, eds., Kazuo Ishiguro: Critical Essays, Manchester University Press.