Early blurbs about Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun” sounded as if they would be disappointing. They promised the book to be about a clone who becomes like a human being or about the dire consequences of technology. Neither of these themes were to be the case even if Ishiguro’s earlier masterpiece, “Never Let Me Go” does show how a clone is recognized by the reader as having become human because one pair of them does find a family and one of the pair finds art by doing doodles. Rather than these themes becoming inevitable for the sci-fi universe, as when in “Blade Runner”, the robots, however short their life spans, have seen great experiences and so are the equivalent of humans, Ishiguro works to an opposite tack, which is to show how the clones, in this case the mechanical artificial intelligences, are of a very different kind of species, subject to their own initiatives and feelings, and the reader only gradually learns what is universal to all sentient species, including both humans and those not biologically based. This is a much deeper inspection into this particular sci-fi genre, in that it goes beyond showing creatures to be human like by showing what is natural to a species, any species, and so does the work that was done to Rousseau and others to find out what is the nature of human beings if they are shed of social conventions and left only with their most primitive or elementary sensations. Rousseau was the end of a century or so long experiment to find a bare bones psychology in Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke and Hume, the collection of them usually understood as contract theorists when what they were more importantly dealing with was philosophical anthropology, which meant the elementary origins of human emotions, that sequence overturned by Kant, who took up a critical stance, whereby he demonstrated what had to be there in actual rather than original life and society, because without these assumptions the world as it is wouldn’t make sense.
But Ishiguro’s book is a novel rather than a treatise and so his story unfolds itself from very narrow beginnings, a bildungsroman where the birth of the heroine is not a baby or a child found to be David Copperfield but an Artificial Friend who has in the past few days been commissioned and so come into consciousness and sitting in the storefront of a store where AF’s are sold, looking out the window to learn something of the world, her seeing the rush or the standing of taxis, and people walking past, and the sun between the buildings, that so important because each of the energy of the Af, so that it does not become lethargic or worse, depending upon the heat of the sun. The AF’s are cheered by the sun and the tone of the AFs is that they are cheery in a simple kind of way in that being helpful and emotionally supportive is their reason for being-- or, rather, that is the feeling rather than the reason they have for being. They wish to be pleasing, that the equivalent of Asimov’s three laws of robotics, that the purpose of their lives. So they notice so they can learn and be chosen by a customer to buy one of them as a companion to a child, that being the only purpose, which ,raises right away the conundrum a reader will consider from very early on, which is what happens to AFs after a child has gone off to college? Will the AF become decommissioned, or set to remain in an vacated child’s room, like a nanny who keeps a room in the family house, or is there some other role for the artificial companion to play? Meanwhile, the prose moves slowly and carefully spelling out in overly clear English just what are the circumstances which are part of the world the afs have found in the world. The tone is that everything is for its best, like a children’s book, such as in Anna Sewell’s “Black Beauty'' rather than the danger and double dealing of “Treasure Island''. The store manager tells every af how well they are doing, and to be praised for diligence and getting the ultimate word of fining a human child as a companion, even though Klara is briefly chastised for not being pleasant to one child whose mother might buy Klara, Klara hoping for a child she had met to come back to her and claim her, the store manager suggesting that this might be a disappointment. So Ishiguro is imagining that the relation between child and af is a kind of courtship whereby people tentatively offer a deeper commitment based on a superficial resemblance or cue one by the other.
When Klara does get claimed by the one she had hoped to have claimed her, the home she moves into is not as kind as Klara is or would want it to be and that makes her confused. She remains calm and considerate, but when the children get together to occasional group activities at the home of one of the parents homes, people get very picky with one another, the opposite of the serenity Klara wants for herself and Josie, her human friend, Klara living in Josie’s room and hiding in the dark patiently or else turned to the refrigerator in the kitchen so as not to be intrusive if she invades privacy. Class-like interests prevail, in that AF’s are inferior to people, and there are ranks of the children or some inferior to others, for reasons not clear, that lead to confrontations that the parents say should be resolved by the children themselves. Why so much mutual hostility? Is it just a parody of the way real teeners are really like or is there a mystery, another secret, which underskirts the whole society and which the reader has not yet understood? It is like a Shakespearean problem play in that something is just off and can’t quite put a finger on what it is, whether values or emotions skewed from what ordinary life is like. At a later point, for example, Josie’s mother confides in Klara, which might not be appropriate to someone who is just an automaton, even as Rosie’s boyfriend Rick is willing to admit that Klara is clever and might sort things out better than Rick can.
The reader becomes aware of Klara’s physical and emotional limitations. Klara goes on a wild goose chase reminiscent of the clones in “Never Let Me Go” searching for the human or humans from which they are descended. Klara finds it difficult or tiring to wander through grass shifted by the winds or keep her feet through pebbled and winding paths, suggesting that whatever gyroscopes keep her erect are not well calibrated and her legs are perhaps not very strong. Moreover, she sees things through boxes each of which have a different take on what she sees, which suggests that she has multiple cameras and that they are not always integrated with one another into a single field and so try to make sense of pictures that are conflicted with one another as she moves along from one space to another. More important, however, is her naive and earnest sense that people are likely to be accommodating and friendly. She is going to a barn where the sun sets and thinks that it is the place where the sun stays at night and she hopes to propitiate the sun so that it will pay more attention to Rosie’s illness and make her well. There is an astonishing passage where Klara sees the declining sun move through the barn as she is within the structure and interprets herself as having made a kind of deal with the sun, that it will attend to Josie’s need if Klara shows that she acknowledges the significance of the request and does so by offering to do something in reply, sort of as a courtesy to acknowledge the power of the sun. Ishiguro is recrafting the idea of atonement into a much less dark idea. Something has to be done not so as to repay for a sin or to make a bargain or exchange; it is just to exchange concerns, and so is mutual even without making or acknowledging demands, as might be the case with children who act with good will to one another as an expression of friendship. The significance of Klara’s elemental sentience is that such is all that is needed for people, as well as robots, to associate with one another. This is a very Humean perspective: people act out of their common sympathy to one another, everything else an accretion, even if the world of social life is filled with animus and calculation as well. Reducing religious feeling to this emotion of natural complementarity is quite a spectacular set piece on the part of Ishiguro. Klara’s “natural religion” is based on the elemental feelings of a simplified and more “natural” person and so is found in human origins. It might appeal to Rousseau’s natural religion, but would be criticized earlier in the century by Hume, who thought that religion had to be based on faith because natural reason was illogical, as would clearly be the case in Klara’s religion, her religion a fallacy about presuming events to be willfully conducted rather than just subject to the facts of physical nature.
Here is a spoiler alert that takes place about two-thirds into the novel and that made reviewers think the novel is about the dangers of technology and how a person gets a human soul, though it is not. It happens when the novel shifts its focus from children, what with all their good will and earnestness to a focus on the adults, who are trying to make decisions about how to manage lives rather than simply assent to the lives children will believe is the way to deal with adults.
Josie’s mother has arranged to use a kind of artist to make a totally accurate picture of Josie so that Klara can perfectly mimic Josie if Josie dies, and both Josie’s mother and father each engage in just the selfish and wrongheaded emotions that shows what is wrong with the world, not its technology. Josie’s mother makes decisions that children think adults of good will prefer to avoid. That skewing of Hume like empathy so that Klara should agree to presenting herself as Josie because the mother so needs her even though, of course, Josie would in fact be dead and so this situation would be the perpetuation of an illusion. It also means that Klara would never become a person, just a simaculum of one, a means to an end, and so not meet the definition of what Kant insisted was the definition of personhood rather than an ideal for ethical behavior. Josie’s father, for his part, asks whether Klara could ever imitate Josie well enough so as to convey the heart of Josie, which Klara believes that she can, and so avoids or never considers the question of whether a person is ever more than an imitation in that it is a mimic of its behaviors and feelings, rather than a consciousness whereby people look out at the world from the inside, consciousness cuh a tricky kind of entity. Moreover, Josie’s father is so overwrought that he endangers Klara so as to allow her to follow some ridiculous quasi-religious scheme to save Josie, and so betrays that Klara will be allowed to be a person but rather a dependant creature whose personal well being is to be respected for herself alone. The two parents have undercut the ability to raise Klara to being what the two of them say they want to become even before the fact of mimicry is undertaken.The parents are cruel and Klara does not have adult moorings whereby they can handle the situation.The children, both Josie and Klara, are passive while the adults try to do something, uncertain about the way to proceed, the children having trust in the benevolence of adults. As the denouement of the novel shows, a lot of people can become monsters.
Kant is not the only figure who does revolutionary things at the turn into the Nineteenth Century. Jane Austen is radical in describing people with such accuracy, that careful examination of the way people are, as in the models for Josie, that the characters are not at all stereotypes even as the people are aware, as every person does, that people give off stereotypes and are known as stereotypes. The author of “Frankenstein” also wants the appearance rather than the substance of personal identity. There is some additional spark to make it whole. What I will say is that we move from the eighteenth to the beginnings of the nineteenth century, the exploration of human character so delicately made that it can become an inspiration, like Frankenstein, for the whole idea of clones and artificial friends. This revolution is not discontinuous but the evolution of the mind imagines and reimagines what it is.