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  • Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory by Yugin Teo
  • Amit Marcus
Yugin Teo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xi + 176 pp.

Memory is one of the most discussed topics in both fictional narratives and the literary and critical theory of the last decades. The reasons for the fascination of many contemporary writers with memory are almost as variable as the work of memory itself: the intricate relations between memory and history (as well as historical writing); memory as a crucial element for the development, the retention, and the effacement of self-identity; and memory as a fundamental factor in the stream of consciousness. Perhaps more emphatically than any other cognitive process, memory is evidence of the construction (rather than the reflection) of reality by the human mind.

Yugin Teo’s book Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory chimes in with this cultural and literary interest in memory. Teo’s approach to Ishiguro’s fictional narratives is basically thematic. Accordingly, his argument is structured on three major (but not necessarily sequential) phases in memory work: forgetting, remembering, and, eventually, a release of the unfortunate consequences of memory. He emphasizes the interrelations between Ishiguro’s insights concerning memory in his fictional writings and the philosophical ideas of Paul Ricoeur, especially in Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) and The Course of Recognition (2005). Teo’s interdisciplinary approach also extends to film: he compares the (limitations of) representation of trauma and loss in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) with Ishiguro’s novel A Pale View of Hills (1982).

A major topic of the first part of the book is narrative unreliability, which is linked to the question of the very (un)trustworthiness of memory. Teo claims that the unreliable narrators of some of Ishiguro’s fictional narratives struggle to reconcile past memories with present circumstances and discover that the complicated process of remembering and retelling events leads to a less accurate and less objective version of the past. The distortion of memory results in part from self-deception (see also Marcus 2006). Following Kathleen Wall (1994), Teo claims that no narrator — or any human being — is entirely reliable, coherent, and rational. Self-reflexive readers will recognize not only the narrator’s flawed memory but also the limitations of their own memory, which is impaired by biases, mistakes, and delusions. They will, in turn, realize that they are neither superior to the unreliable narrator nor less susceptible to memory flaws. Such a recognition bridges the cognitive and moral gap between reader and text and causes the reader to empathize with the emotions and experiences of the narrator. However, Teo does not seem to differentiate the reader’s inaccurate memory of the story told by Ishiguro’s narrator — an inaccuracy that is the product of a perplexed and perplexing rhetoric designed by the implied author — from the biased memory any reader (or person) has of events and experiences from his or her own life. [End Page 193]

The first part of the book continues with an exploration of another type of forgetting related to a repressed traumatic past, which can only be represented through a fragmentary narrative. The last section of this chapter is devoted to collective and national forgetting. Teo contends that some of Ishiguro’s protagonists (and other characters) distance themselves from accountability and are motivated by the wish to promote a version of history that disclaims the responsibility of a nation for the atrocities it inflicted on others.

The second part of the book begins with a discussion of remembering as the recognition of one’s own self through narration. In this respect, too, the fictional narrator may trigger self-reflection in the reader by means of identification and empathy. Recognition, however, does not necessarily alter the narrator’s or reader’s worldview. In this part Teo also discusses testimony, based on Ricoeur’s argument that memory can be challenged but not eradicated. Following Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006), he argues that the injunction to forget “becomes absurd as well as reprehensible when it is uttered by — or on behalf of — the perpetrator” (77). This is illustrated by the testimony of the clones...

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