The Strange Case of Christopher Banks in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans
Résumés
Cet article se propose d’étudier l’utilisation spécifique qu'lshiguro fait des conventions du roman policier. Dans When We Were Orphans, il reprend les conventions thématiques et fictionnelles du genre pour entraîner son lecteur dans un travail de retour sur des dimensions politiques et idéologiques occultées dans les romans policiers classiques. Le roman introduit une réflexion sur l’histoire et la fiction en déconstruisant le mythe littéraire du grand détective.
Plan
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1When We Were Orphans follows a pattern familiar to Ishiguro’s readers, that of a first persan narrator engaged in a process of retrospection. Even though the author hinted at a connection with The Remains of the Day which portrayed an elderly butler looking back on the heyday of his professional carreer, this Iast navel introduces a detective as narrator and a different time scheme as the character reflects on the past at different stages of his life. Taking these specificities of When We Were Orphans as a starting point, I would like to try and demonstrate how Ishiguro does indeed broach themes which are pregnant in The Remains of the Day to reach another dimension, that of a possible reflexion on historical reality.
Narration and Detection
2First of ail, the reader’s propensity to identify with the first persan narrator is in this navel reinforced by its very structure. In fact, as the narrator reflects on his past at different stages of his life, the narrative voice will differ according to the distance—and possibly the hindsight—acquired. Thus, in the first part, the narrator writes in 1931 about his débuts in London in 1923 and the 1931 narrative voice recurrently underlines its hindsight conceming this period through expressions such as ‘How curious to recall a time . . .’ or ‘It is again typical of my smugness of those days . . .’ (20). As a consequence, the reader tends to take for granted the reliability of a first persan narrator who seems able to objectively evaluate his own reliability in the past. Similarly, when Banks recalls the scene which leads to his departure from Shanghai, he tries to reassess the reliability of his memory of the scene, taking into account the vision of the child he was at the time and more generally, the narrative voice always insists on the way memory selects and modifies facts and situations according to the affect involved.
3The reader’s suspicion is first awakened thanks to a number of gaps in representation which ail point towards a discrepancy between the detective’s self image (which the first person narration imposes on us) and the vision others have of himself, be it in the present or in the past. Two such occurences mar the very first chapters of the nove) as first Osboume in chapter one and then Colonel Chamberlain in chapter two propose a past image of Banks as a child which the narrator rejects as totally different from his own memories of childhood. Needless to say that Banks own self-image is much more positive. These gaps in representation undermine the coherence of the reminicent narrative voice of the first part but at that point in the nove), the reader does not have enough clues to go beyond suspicion. Once the detective is in Shanghai, another such example of gaps of vision occurs when Anthony Morgan recalls Banks as a ‘miserable loner’ at school, a memory which is once again totally at odds with the narrator’s vision of himself at the time. However, at that stage, the reader is given a clue which he can choose to interpret or not: ‘But his assertion that I had likewise been a “miserable loner”, one with whom he might have made a matching pair, was such an astounding one, it took me a little while to realise it was simply a piece of self-delusion on Morgan’s part—in all likelihood something he had invented years ago to make more palatable memories of an unhappy period’ (183–84).
- 1 Such as the Japanese businessman’s wife who, though absent from the narrative scene, succeeds in ma (...)
- 2 See, for example, Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights or Machen’s The Three Impostors.
4Secondly, this novel contains an intertextual frame which is fondamental to the author’s project. Ishiguro plays with the reader’s knowledge of the features of a genre he gradually deconstructs in this novel. The filiation between Banks and Holmes serves as a red-herring to establish the narrator in the wake of his famous predecessor. It is true that When We Were Orphans reads as a detective novel and the allusions to the canonical texts of Conan Doyle are legions in the first part. Banks gravitates towards London, the literary stage of Sherlock Holmes’ greatest cases where he settles down in appartements which recall the Victorian cosiness of 221b Baker Street: ‘The rent was not high, but my landlady had furnished the place in a tasteful manner that evoked an unhurried Victorian past; the drawing room which received plenty of sun throughout the first half of the day, contained an ageing sofa as well as two snug arm-chairs, an antique sideboard and an oak bookcase filled with crumbling encyclopaedias-all of which I was convinced would win the approval of any visitor’ (3). He then has a visitor with whom he engages in a philosophical discussion which evokes Holmes’ intellectual brio1 and this debate is followed by another traditional scene2 of detective novels during which the two protagonists contemplate the city presented as the future stage of their exploits.
- 3 WWWO, p. 9.
5The narrative runs two opposed lines of interpretation of the first person narrator. The filiation between Holmes and Banks is embedded in the first two parts to position the narrator as a type, then Banks’ own filiation and childhood introduce persona! and specific touches which jar with the stereotyped representation of a great detective. Indeed, the narrator explains that his projects of carreer in detection stem from his youth. We learn about the trauma experienced by Banks as a child when he was forced to leave Shanghai following his parents’ disappearance. His persona! ‘case’ is thus presented as the origin of his desire to become a detective. Through Banks’ memories of school and of the beginning of his carreer in England, we get further hints which serve a dual purpose. The parallel with Sherlock does contribute to the reader’s construction of the character as a reliable detective. Still, these hints are once again to be reassessed because as often with Ishiguro, the strategy is an indirect one and the character reveals much more than he actually sees. Banks recalls two scenes which took place during his childhood at school in England: during the first scene recalled, Banks’ friends offer him for his birthday a magnifying glass, the emblematic tool of the great detective but during the second scene evoked, shoolmates of his are conversing about his future carreer and commenting on the discrepancy between his physical appearance and that of Sherlock and once again their conclusion is not a positive one: ‘But surely he’s rather too short to be a Sherlock’ (10). What puts the reader on his guards is the secrecy which is supposed to shroud Banks’ future plan, a plan that the whole school seems to be aware of. Therefore, the paradox of these first three parts occuring between 1905 and 1937 is indeniably that while they allow the reader to elaborate a clear-cut image of the narrator as a great detective inscribed in the popular myth, they also Jay the foundations of suspicion, a suspicion which will imperceptibly tum the reader into a semiotician, a reader of signs which gradually deconstruct the ‘popular myth’3 of the great detective.
6To understand better this deconstruction of the genre, we have to come back to narration. Indeed, in a detective novel, the narrative construction has to prevent the possibility of a direct access to the detective’s thoughts which would spoil the suspense of a narrative structure resting on the final revelation of ‘who did it’. In Sherlock Holmes’ stories, the narrative voice is thus generally that of Watson, that is another character following the investigation but from the outside. The focalizer is thus close to the detective but acts as a foil to preserve the pleasure of reading until the last chapter. In Ishiguro’s novel, the detective is the narrating voice—a narrative structure which appears in hard-boiled fiction for instance and which introduces an instability and an introspective dimension characteristic of the genre. This shift from a blind narrator whose narration can never grasp the reasoning process at work in the great detective’s mind to a detective-narrator whose subjectivity is gradually going to get the upper hand on the scientific and rational approach to reality one would have automatically associated to his social fonction informs us on Ishiguro’s enterprise. Indeed, traditional detective novels could be envisaged as attempts at reestablishing a collective order threatened by a subversive agent. In When We Were Orphans, this collective social mission—which is presented as such in the first two parts, though we will have to comment on Ishiguro’s irony on that point—is inexorably superseded by the detective’s personal quest which leads to a restoration of individual order.
7If we consider the structure of a detective novel it is now well-known that it rests on a paradoxical tension between a progression backwards to grasp the origin of the enigmatic situation which opens the narrative and a diachronie progression of the narrative towards its final resolution. In Ishiguro’s text, we could not even say that the progression of the investigation triggers a backward search for Banks’ origins as in fact both movements seem to be imposed on him by external agents. London’s high society forces him to put an end to his process of procrastination and he finally decides to face the situation in Shanghai out of guilt after having been reminded by three totally different agents of the necessity for him to help solve the crisis threatening there. By then, the reader really starts to wonder whether Banks is indeed well chosen to be instrumental in an international crisis which is certainly beyond the scope of a private detective. The numerous references to social Darwinism and eugenism which present Bank’s mission as an attempt to ‘slay the serpent’ (145), to save ‘our civilisation’ by going back to Shanghai that is ‘at the heart of the maelstrom threatening to suck in the whole of the civilised world’ (162) certainly contribute to the reader’s wonder. Not only does Banks seem to be at a Joss and unable to understand why he should go there but society imposes this ‘Case’ on him: ‘“But you do have, shall we say, a special relationship to what is, in truth, the source of ail our current anxieties. Oh come, my dear fellow ! You know perfectly well to what I'm referring! You know better than anyone the eye of the storm is to be found not in Europe at ail, but in the Far East. In Shanghai, to be exact.”“Shanghai”, I said lamely. “Yes, I suppose . . . I suppose there are some problems in that city.”“Problems indeed. And what was once just a local problem has been allowed to fester and grow. To spread its poison over the years even further across the world, right through our civilisation. But I hardly need remind you of this.”’ (138) Similarly, external contingencies seem inexorably to make him veer off from the international Case and come back to his persona) case. Thus, three or four days after his arrival in Shanghai, Morgan-a former school friend-takes the detective to his former house as if it had all been arranged in advance whereas Banks admits his being totally ignorant not only of such a plan but even of the arrangements which seemed to have been made concerning that house in the past. Thus, the uncanny predominates in this scene and the reader becomes aware that the narrator has great difficulties to make his framed and gilded memories of the past fit with the present reality of Shanghai in 1937.
Memory: Remembering or Occulting Past Reality?
8But Jet’s come back to the narrative voice which accompanies us in this investigation. Why does Christopher Banks write after all? As a detective endorsed with the pseudo-epical mission of saving ‘our civilisation’ (138) he fails and as a man, he aJso fails his scandalous and mundane exit from high society with Sarah Hemmings. The narrator admits that he writes because he worries about the reliability of his memories of the past: ‘I have become increasingly preoccupied with my memories, a preoccupation encouraged by the discovery that these memories—of my childhood, of my parents—have lately began to bJurr. A number of times recently I have found myself struggling to recall something that two or three years aga I believed was ingrained in my mind for ever. I have been obliged to accept [. . .] that with each passing year my life in Shanghai will grow Jess distinct, until one day all that will remain will be a few muddled images’ (67). Following this assertion, the narrator cornes back on the episode between his mother and Morgan-Brook and Byatts’ health inspector he has just recalled and wonders whether the context was the right one and even whether those involved were not in fact his parents instead of his mother and the health inspector. Such an example clearly shows how complex the process of remembering can be and the difficult task assigned to a reader who has to disentangle fiction from reality, affect from objectivity.
9Banks’ narrative could therefore be envisaged as an attempt at reclaiming the past. He represents a very obvious œdipian character writing about a past traumatic Joss which apparently leads to his quest as if Joss triggered quest but ironically enough, quest in this novel seems inevitably to result in Joss. Indeed, the second part of the novel is an attempt at reconstructing his past childhood in the International Settlement in which we obsessively feel the narrator’s anxiety about his propensity to interfere in this reconstruction of a past reality. Such expressions as ‘I have corne to shape that memory’ (86) or ‘I would probably never have dredged up that memory at ail . . .’ soon convince the reader that the narrator’s propensity to shape or even to invent the past has to be taken into account. This mode of escapism which consists in inventing a more suitable and comforting picture of reality stems back from childhood. Indeed following his father’s disappearance what does young Christopher do but invent with his friend Akira detective fictions in which his father is a hero and which are a means to make up for his father’s Joss. This propensity to dress up reality continues in England even though he rapidly realises he had better be discreet about it. Thus, we can now re-envisage his analysis of Morgan’s self delusion which aimed at making ‘more palatable’ those unhappy memories of childhood as, in fact, Christopher Banks lives through images which he constructs to make reality ‘more palatable’ though he does not always control them. Indeed, the image of the detective society has recoils on Christopher Banks.
- 4 ‘[ . . . ] I didn’t want to write a realistic book with a crazy narrator. I wanted to actually have (...)
10This tendency to dress up reality accompanies the narrator in Shanghai where it is threatened by the urgency of the political situation but, as we know, the latter is rapidly set aside, presented as inadequate because it clashes with the fictive world of childhood. Ishiguro describes metaphorically the progressive contamination and eventually the destruction of a collective representation of reality—of which the detective is only a metonymy—which disappears to let the individual and subjective confrontation with the fictions of the self express itself. This narrowing down of the focus from historial to individual instability is metaphorically described after Banks has just arrived in Shanghai when he finds himself spending the evening at the ballroom of the Palace Hotel with the International Settlement high society. His claustrophobia reappears and looking for air he tries to reach the balcony where he is proposed a pair of opera glasses: ‘I put the glasses to my eyes, but the focus was entirely wrong for me and I could see nothing. When I fiddled with the wheel, I found myself gazing upon the canal, where I was faintly surprised to see various boats still going about their normal business right next to the fighting. I picked out one particular boat—a barge—like vessel with a lone oarsman—that was so piled up with crates and bundles it seemed impossible for it to pass under the low canal bridge just beneath me. As I watched, the vessel approached the bridge rapidly, and I was sure I would see a crate or two fall from the top of the pile into the water. For the next few seconds, I went on staring through the glasses at the boat, having quite forgotten the fighting. I noted with interest the boatman, who like me was utterly absorbed by the fate of his cargo and oblivious of the war not sixty yards to his right. Then the boat had vanished under the bridge, and when I saw it glide gracefully out the other side, the precarious bundles still intact, I lowered the glasses with a sigh.’ (161) This passage illustrates Ishiguro’s description of the novel4 as the gradual contamination of fictive reality by Banks’ subjective and individual logic, a process which finds its climax in the warren episode at the end of which we find the following exchange: ‘“(. . .) our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown.”“Weil, Colonel, it’s hardly a foreign land to me. In many ways, it’s where I've continued to live ail my life. It’s only now I've started to make my journey from it.”’ (277). The last forbidden room Banks enters is the stage on which the shattering of his childhood’s reassuring fictions will be achieved. One of the narrator’s many father substitutes seems to have resisted time, change and fiction to suddenly force him to face the artificiality of the fictive reality he has protected himself with: ‘But now do you see how the world really is? You see what made possible your comfortable life in England? How you were able to become a celebrated detective? A detective! What good is that to anyone? Stolen jewels, aristocrats murdered for their inheritance. Do you suppose that’s ail there is to contend with? Your mother, she wanted you to live in your enchanted world forever. But it’s impossible. In the end it has to shatter. It’s a miracle it survived so long for you’ (294).
Delocating Vision
- 5 D. Mellier, ‘L’Illusion logique’, Philosophie du roman policier, Feuillets de !'ENS Fontenay-St Clo (...)
11Navels of detection generate a logical illusion. Indeed, as Denier Mellier demonstrated detection implies the creation of fictions, fictions which will fit with the data provided but fictions anyway.5 Thus the detective is always right because the narrative rests on this founding principle that in the end, the great mind will propose a chain of reasoning explaining ail that had remained obscure in a masterful revelation. This equation between detection and fiction informs Ishiguro’s novel. What does Ishiguro propose in this novel but a detective who invents fictions and tries to impose them on reality?
- 6 See pages 73 and 76 and then 135. On page 73 Akira uses this image coming from a Japanese monk who (...)
12To illustrate how the author transforms the traditional tenets of the genre, we could ponder on an image used twice by Christopher Banks to define his role in society. He first compares children to a twine which builds a coherence in families but when the image reappears in the text, the detective becomes this agent of coherence, ‘the twine that holds together the slats of a wooden blind’.6 We could analyse this image as a positive illustration of the cohesive role of the detective in society. Following the massive industrialisation of England and the anarchie development of the cities, the detective is a reassuring agent of social cohesion. He has a topographical approach of the city but he also knows the darkest recesses of its underground. He possesses an exact knowledge of the cities’ networks which enables him to dominate the social web and eventually to restore social order. Hence, the twine is the fondamental link, the necessary element to achieve coherence, to make the wooden blind hold. However, if the wooden blind stands for society in this image, we can wonder why society as a coherent whole is here assimilated to a blind which prevents vision and occults reality? As usual with Ishiguro, Banks’ image of the twine and the wooden blind is pregnant with meaning but not for the character who is unable to grasp its impact as an indirect commentary of the author. Through the reflexion on vision and reality which the novel proposes, it seems now important to consider what the author tries to achieve in this last work.
- 7 See Shoshana Felman’s famous paper on the subject. S. Felman, ‘De Sophocle à Japrisot (via Freud) o (...)
13Vision and reality is a dichotomy embedded in the text at various levels. Obviously, we have ail noted the variety of optical instruments with which the narrative is sprinkled, the magnifying glass offered as a birthday present, the mirror in which the old man looks at Banks during his first mundane dinner party, the opera glasses which enable Banks to operate a shift of vision from the collective to the individual or the binoculars used to locate the kidnappers’ house in the warren. They could be envisaged as symbols of the subjectivity of vision, of vision as a means of limitation to one perspective. More subtely, Banks’ perception of reality is questioned through a theatralisation of space. We could first recall that Banks is supposed to be reunited with parents who have been kidnapped for twenty years in a house opposite that of a blind actor. This blind actor is obviously an ironical allusion to Banks’ position in the novel, Banks being like an actor who is not aware of the fictive reality he creates to live in. Similarly, the other orphan of the novel, Sarah Hemmings will fail to hem the detective in and bring coherence to Bank’s vision of reality. The music shop scene is another example of Banks’ propensity to refer to fiction, of his inability to extricate himself from fictive frames. When Banks and Sarah kiss, we read this grotesque parody of a cinema kissing scene: ‘She carefully put down her cigarette holder and stood up. Then we were kissing—just like, I suppose, a couple on the cinema screen. It was almost exactly as I had always imagined it would be, except there was something oddly inelegant about our embrace, and I tried more than once to adjust my posture; but my right foot was hard against a heavy box and I could not quite negotiate the necessary turn without risking my balance’ (222). Eventually, in the final meeting with Uncle Philip, an epiphanic scene in which he at last confronts reality and puts an end to his personal quest, his illusions are about to be shattered and Banks comments: ‘As I leant towards him into the glare of the Iamp, an odd feeling came over me that behind my back the darkness had grown and grown, so that now a vast black space had opened up there’ (290). The narrator’s description reveals his sudden awareness of the imminent shattering of the world of fiction he has protected himself with so far, an annihililation leaving only a great dark void. However, this passage could also be read as the opening of a theatrical dimension, the character becoming suddenly aware of the audience following his re-interpretation of the œdipian tragedy. Ali the author’s irony rests on the dichotomy between on the one hand the quest for identity which is indeed embedded in detective novels-and has been since Œdipus, the first detective who incarnates the intricacy between the various set roles (criminal, victim, detective) of the genre7—and on the other hand detective fiction of the first half of the twentieth century which could be envisaged as a mode of expulsion of otherness and the unknown.
14Indeed, Ishiguro’s piece of fiction oscillates between two ways of envisaging literature. We certainly find in this work an implicit criticism of detective novels as a literary means of evacuation, of exoneration. Indeed, the genre stigmatizes and occults otherness by circumscribing it to criminal deviancy, it gives the illusion of annihilating deviant and transgressive behaviours through a manichean representation of society. A detective novel which takes place in Shanghai instead of London is in fact quite rare enough to be noted because even though exoticism appears in Golden Age detective novels it is always safely kept within the limits of a defined space which does not collide with England’s homely safety. Hence, Uncle Philip’s diatribe on detectives as agents of evacuation of a political and social context. Similarly, Ishiguro’s irony is extremely cutting when he makes his detective reluctantly decide to go East under the pressure of an imperialist ideology which presents England as the faultless mother nation threatened by the evil tendencies of those ungrateful balbutiating powers of the East. Banks mirrors on an individual level the British assumption according to which they are instrumental and unavoidable in the process of civilizing other nations. Detective novels, of the first thirty years of the 20th century in particular, are indeed well-known for their self centeredness on Britain and Britishness.
- 8 See Porée, Marc, Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, Paris: Didier Érudition, 1999.
15When Ishiguro claims that When We Were Orphans is a variation on themes pregnant in The Remains of the Day, we begin to see how through the detour of a genre he has approached from another angle the creation of myth as a purveyor of cohesion in a nation. Do we then have to envisage the narrative as a meta-historical novel, the deconstruction of a myth which would be synonymous with an approach of literature as a means of reflexion and re-evaluation of historical reality instead of a means of evacuation? Does the narrator’s unreliability mirror that of the nation as Marc Porée wrote8 about The Remains of the Days. In both The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans we find the common structure of a journey achieved by a traveller and we could wonder what this journey reveals to or conceals from the traveller. Do we have in the butler’s and the detective’s journeys a deconstruction of British social myths which would make of these novels vehicles of reflexion on pre war society in England? Ishiguro’s unreliable detective certainly reintroduces a number of skeletons in the closet of detective fiction. Through its unstable narrator, the narrative indirectly evokes ontological, social, political and ideological facets of pre-war England which detective writing certainly did not underline and even contributed to occult.
- 9 See Marc Porée and his analysis of Barthes’ myth of the butler in Mythologies.
- 10 Both as a fictive character but also in the story as a man who has reached adulthood thanks to the (...)
16A crucial difference between these two novels nevertheless emerges if we carefully examine the approach to modern social myths which they respectively propose. It has been argued that the mythical status acquired by the figure of the British butler led to an emptying of the historical context which prevents social criticism.9 Indeed, the butler’s integrity as a myth is not directly questioned by the narrative itself and the latter revealingly ends on a poise. When We Were Orphans introduces a crucial difference: contrary to the butler, the detective is first and foremost a literary figure. Being the product of fiction,10 Christopher Banks is unable to grasp the political complexity of Britains’ position in the East just before the second world war. Similarly, on a collective level, London in 1937 is represented as the mirror image of Shanghai in 1937, that is as communities which escape their responsibilities both past and present and which therefore also contribute to the process of mystification by imposing a biased and restricted vision of reality. Once both the individual and the group have been defined as indulging in reassuring fictions, the reader witnesses the shaterring down of these illusions. As far as the collective level is concerned, the exploration of the Warren is a symbolical of an access to a reality which society occults. The shadows hidden behind the sunny facade of British colonisation are at last revealed and the causal dimension underlined. From 1903 and the British hypocrisy on the opium tracte to 1937 and the British refusai to ackowledge the world crisis looming larger and larger, dressing up reality to suit one’s tranquillity of mind perdures: ‘Another thunderous explosion had rocked the room, provoking a few ironie cheers. [. . .] ‘But where’s it coming from?’ I asked [. . .] ‘Oh, it’s the Jap warship in the harbour. The shells actually arch over us and land over there across the creek. After dark, it’s quite a sight. Rather like watching shooting-stars.’ (160).
- 11 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, London: J. Cape, 1972, 135.
- 12 Ibid.
- 13 Ibid., p. 36.
17The individual level raises the question of its sheer presence in the text. We could in fact wonder whether Banks does represent the individual level in the narrative as he is first and foremost the product of a collective reassuring myth which dresses up reality and presents society with a comforting vision of itself. However, Ishiguro’s skill resides in his demythification of the myth through the narrative process. Following Barthes’ analysis of Bouvard & Pecuchet, we could say that: ‘[. . .] the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth [. . .]’.11 In that sense, Ishiguro could be said to demythify the popular myth of the detective through the construction of a ‘second-order myth’12 the power of which being that ‘it gives the first its basis as a naivety which is looked at’13 through the distorting prism of an unreliable narrator. The myth of the great detective is present but simultaneously undermined by details and hints which point to the artificiality and irresponsibility of such a mythic construction. What Barthes underlines about myth and its propensity to transform historical and contingent reality into a natural and eternal state of things applies to Shanghai society and its language of the dominant order of the world: ‘For the truth is, the longer I had been in Shanghai, the more I had come to despise the so-called leaders of this community. Almost everyday my investigations had revealed yet another piece of negligence, corruption or worse on their part down the years. And yet in ail the days since my arrival, I had not come across one instance of honest shame, a single acknowledgement that were it not for the prevarications, the shortsightedness, often the downright dishonesty of those left in charge, the situation would never have reached its present level of crisis.’ (216). The myth of Britain as an imperialist power is revealed as totally obsolete in the historical landscape of the period which preceeds World War II and sees the emergence of the new rising colonial powers among which is Japan.
18Deconstructing the myth thus means demythifying a mode of narration which tried to represent reality as a coherent and graspable whole. There is no dramatization of the political dimension within the space of the novel but a gradual coming to awareness of the fossilized, mythified state of British society in this pre world war II period which is operated through the narrator himself. He is faced with the artificiality of those fictive frames which define but also paralyze any dynamic reflexion on historical reality.
Notes
1 Such as the Japanese businessman’s wife who, though absent from the narrative scene, succeeds in making herself heard indirectly: she tells her husband that she will not vote the sense.‘I remember we spent a little time discussing the activities of the worker’s unions, before embarking on a long and enjoyable debate on German philosophy, which enabled us to display to one another the intellectual prowess we each had gained atour respective universities’ (4).
2 See, for example, Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights or Machen’s The Three Impostors.
3 WWWO, p. 9.
4 ‘[ . . . ] I didn’t want to write a realistic book with a crazy narrator. I wanted to actually have the world of the book distorted, adopting the logic of the narrator. In painting you often see that [. . .] where everything is distorted to reflect the emotion of the artist who is looking at the world. [. . .] The whole world portrayed in that book starts to tilt and bend in an attempt to orchestrate an alternative kind of logic.’ Interview with Linda Richards in the January Magazine. See <www .januarymagazine.com/profiles/ishiguro.html>.
5 D. Mellier, ‘L’Illusion logique’, Philosophie du roman policier, Feuillets de !'ENS Fontenay-St Cloud, I 995.
6 See pages 73 and 76 and then 135. On page 73 Akira uses this image coming from a Japanese monk who was referring to children, then Banks as a child tests it on Uncle Philip and finally, Banks the adult detective uses it with the police inspector from Exeter to explain the part played by detectives in society.
7 See Shoshana Felman’s famous paper on the subject. S. Felman, ‘De Sophocle à Japrisot (via Freud) ou pourquoi le roman policier?’, Littérature 49, Paris, Larousse, février 83.
8 See Porée, Marc, Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, Paris: Didier Érudition, 1999.
9 See Marc Porée and his analysis of Barthes’ myth of the butler in Mythologies.
10 Both as a fictive character but also in the story as a man who has reached adulthood thanks to the fictions he invents to protect himself.
11 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, London: J. Cape, 1972, 135.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p. 36.
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Hélène Machinal, « The Strange Case of Christopher Banks in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans », Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 27 | 2004, mis en ligne le 03 septembre 2025, consulté le 23 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16745 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14z5o
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