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When We Were Orphans, or the Postponement of Home

Quand nous étions orphelins, ou la maison perdue.
Jean-Pierre Naugrette

Résumés

Quand nous étions orphelins porte sur la perte de la maison originelle, et le report, la remise à plus tard du ‘chez-soi’ [home]. Dans son exil, puis sa quête anamnésique de son ancienne maison de Shanghai que mène Christopher Banks, le ‘chez-soi’ semble perdu à jamais, ou en tout cas reporté, objet d’un travail du deuil, au sens de James dans L’Autel des Morts. Tandis que ses parents disparaissent de la scène de son roman familial, maisons et ‘chez-soi’ déménagent dans un passé reconstruit duquel le protagoniste, à la fois investigateur et objet d’investigation, semble détaché tel un étranger: on n'est plus chez soi. Si les maisons détruites de l’enfance sont restructurées par la mémoire narrative, les pièces autrefois familières semblent devenues autant de musées visités par des invités ou des étrangers. On prendra ce report au sens de ‘différance’ (Derrida), non pas seulement ‘différer’, mais être différent: vu la structure musicale du roman, où la fin semble être un écho ‘da capo’ du motif originel comme dans les Arias des Variations Goldberg de Bach, l’émergence finale de Londres dans la diégèse comme nouveau ‘chez-soi’ est moins le symptôme d’un retour du même que du même comme différent: le même mot, mais dans un sens différent.

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 . . . as the years at any rate went by he found himself in regular communion with these postponed pensioners, those whom indeed he always called in his thoughts the Others.
Henry JAMES, The Altar of the Dead, 8.

But that firm voice calling ‘Anyone home?’ had caught us unawares . . .
Kazuo ISHIGUR0, An Artist of the Floating World, 87.

Trying to form in my head a map of my route back home.
Kazuo ISHIGUR0, When We Were Orphans, 122.

1Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction is about houses and homes, in the same way as Lubitsch films are, arguably, about doors: doors being opened, closed, hundreds of times within a single film. From The Remains of the Day to When We Were Orphans, Ishiguro’s narrators seem to be obsessed with the recollection of a lost house, which they, in retrospect, view from different angles, as if the global vision of a whole were for ever lost. The narrator’s desperate anamnesic work consists in trying to bridge the gap of this primeval loss, ‘to construct an image of its interior’, as the painter Ono, in An Artist of the Floating World, puts it when talking about the forbidden reception room of his childhood (41). This doomed quest is pitted against a proliferation of houses as so many signifiers detached from a lost referent, while the notion of home seems to float, to be removed or exiled from the house-frame: exile is precisely about finding a new home where and while the mourning or orphaning of the original house has to be carried out by means of retrospective narration. It will be argued here thathome’, both notion and signifier, ispostponed’ in the course and economy of the narration, in three different meanings:

(i) removed, delayed until a new ‘home’ is found in both fable and subject, story and narrative. This relates to the major themes of removal and estrangement, adoption and exile to be found in the narrator’s family romance, but also in the narrative itself as Bildungsroman;
(ii) as a mark of Joss, until this work of mourning is carried out, in the same sense as Henry James, in The Altar of the Dead, says about his protagonist that ‘he found himself in regular communion with these postponed pensioners’ (8), a typical Jamesian devious phrasing meaning he worships his private altar of the Dead. The Dead aspostponed’, removed in time and space, but not lost, also present in and by their absence;
(iii) postponement as
Derridean ‘différance’, i.e. to defer or put off, but also to differ, to be different, since the delayed building or construction of this new ‘home’, in and by the text, cannot amount to a repetition of the same, which is irretrievably lost.

‘Going Home’

2The starting point will be the scene when Christopher Banks, while meeting up Colonel Chamberlain in London (Part I), is prompted, by the Colonel’s own ‘reminiscences’ (26–27), to describe in a flash-back his farewell to Shanghai after his parents have been kidnapped, removed, or rather, as will be argued here, ‘postponed’. As he is looking dejectedly atthe city steadily receding’ before him, the Colonel says to him:

‘Look here, old fellow. You really ought to cheer up. After ail, you're going to England. You're going home.’
It was this last remark, this notion that I wasgoing home', which caused my emotions to get the better of me for—I am certain of this—the first and last time on that voyage. Even then, my tears were more of anger than sorrow (28).
This is of course a clear allusion to Horatio
’s ‘a countenance more in sorrow than in anger’, concerning the ghost of Hamlet’s father (I, 2,231).

  • 1 The final section of the novel takes place in November 1958, after the success and publication of J (...)

3In retrospect, then, the narrating Christopher does not view the narrated Christopher as saddened at the prospect of leaving ‘the city that had been [his] home’ (29), but rather because the word ‘home’ is uttered by the Colonel on the deck of the steamer which brings him back to England. It is the word itself which triggers his tears, as if the very notion were at stake, not the mere fact of leaving: this farewell to Shanghai is a waving to the word ‘home’ which still echoes in his mind as related tothe city that had been [his] home’. This explains his hopeless search for signs of his parents on the shore, which partakes of a misguided conception of home as still there, in Shanghai, while it is not yet over there, overseas, in England: this will have to come out of his narration, and he will have to wait until then, when he is not an angry, but a sorrowful young man,1 when he has achieved his mourning of home and accepted to become the ghost of his former self.

  • 2 Where Tintin and Tchang, as racial foils or doubles like Christopher and Akira, seem to share out b (...)
  • 3 Also see the ‘old chest’ in Christopher’s playroom where he keeps ‘an extensive collection’ of Uncl (...)

4It may be noted here that ‘home’ is associated with the city, not with his house in Shanghai. A first discrepancy is thus operated between ‘house’ and ‘home’, as if you could be moreat home’ in a city than in any specific house. The farewell scene, with ail its potential cinematic or pictorial melodrama—think of Tintin leaving Shanghai at the end of Hergé’s The Blue Lotus2is later echoed and embedded when young Christopher says good-bye to Japan-bound Akira:and I stood outside his house waving off the motor car taking him to the harbour(79). Here again, this is not a scene of sorrow, since Christopher says he waslooking forward to being rid of him’ (78). Characteristically, he is standing outside the house, a house previously described asvery similar to ours’ (71), so that the two houses can already be considered as complementary duplicates, and the scene an image of Christopher standing outside his own house when Uncle Philip urges him to wave to his mother on the fatal day when she is abducted (120). Saying farewell and standing outside houses thus become a leitmotiv, the obsessive replay of the same embedded, buried scene where actors and décors change but what is at stake, the postponement of home, is basically the same. Estrangement begins at home, when the child is playing by himself ‘out on the circle of lawn’ in front of his house just after his father has disappeared, an image of removing himself from the house, within the circle of his own world, playing himself out of it. This corresponds to a time when Christopher finds himself continually ‘putting off a visit next door’, thus postponing a visit to the other house from which Akira might have spotted him ‘out playing from his upstairs window’ (105): this is a clear mirror-structure later to be echoed when Christopher describes himself glancing or watching for kidnappers from his own playroom window (115, 119). After a few moments of hesitation, he finally strides out of his gateway, and joins Akira in his garden, as if he could only grasp a clear view of his own situation from the vantage­ point of the house next door, and admit to himself and others that his father has been kidnapped (106). The image of Christopher and/or Akira playing in their gardens or outside their homes, which recurs along parallel lines in the novel (51–2/105–6, 74/304), is ambiguous in that respect: it is a means of finding ‘avantage point’ or aclear view’ (51), but at the same time a symptom of estrangement and separation, of standing outside and saying good-bye. Or, as narrating Christopher puts it, ‘a child’s vision’ (51) which may well distort the apparent accuracy of memory, and usher into the text a series of fantasies, a family romance whereby the child removes or postpones himself from the original scene, in the same way as he removes or postpones his own parents into a scenario which might suit his fantasy. At the back of Akira’s garden, the two children ‘act out’ scenes from lvanhoe (106/22), and we may also consider the use of ‘kidnapped’ (106, 108) as an echo of Stevenson’s novel of the same name, probably hidden behind the use of names like Osbourne and Stevenson at the beginning of the novel (11). Uncle Philip might be read as an echo of Uncle Ebenezer in Stevenson, the bogey uncle who tries to kill him in the family castle, before selling him and having him kidnapped.3 Thus are those ‘detective dramas’ (11), ‘extended dramas’ (52), ‘dramatic narratives’, ‘scenes’ (106), or ‘elaborate dramas’ (109) abyme narrations of the very fable Christopher is telling, scenarios which enable the two mirror-children to act out the fable of their lives:day after day we invented and played out endless variations on the theme of my father’s rescue’ (107).

5The borderline between playing and reality, between drama and action, between persona and character is thus gradually blurred, like in David Cronenberg’s Spider (2002), where the child is playing out his family romance much in the same way as ‘Puffin’ does. When Christopher is bent on looking out for the house where his parents are still kept prisoners in the ruins of Shanghai, he is still acting out a scenario which has been obsolete for quite a long time, as evidenced by the scene where he stumbles upon a Chinese post, the sole occupants of which are two Chinese Army officers whose words of welcome sound like a distorted greeting uttered by putative parents:We are both very honoured to have you visit us like this, Mr Banks”’(231). One is called Lieutenant Chow, the other Captain Ma, an image of father and mother waiting for the child to return, a clear sign that the two real parents are absent, that he is facing ironic substitutes: a sign of postponement, while Christopher is obsessed with ‘a particular house’ (231) which might be still intact among the ruins.

The Proliferation of Bouses and the Estrangement From Home

  • 4 Compare Magwitch’s “‘You're my sonmore tome nor any son’ ‘(GE 241) with Uncle Philip’s’ ‘You've de (...)

6Christopher’s and Akira’s houses, if different in contents, are architectural duplicates, so that the aboriginal house is already dual from the start. The opening image—in the time of narration, not in that of the fable—of young Christopher playing in and around his aunt’s cottage in Shropshire, either overhearing conversation or wandering about the common, tums out to be a substitute for the original house in Shanghai, in the same way as his aunt is a substitute for his mother. Christopher seems to be acting out a series of Victorian novels here, from David Copperfield where Aunt Betsey Trotwood welcomes the orphaned protagonist, to The Mill on the Floss where Maggie finds shelter in her attic room, the mill beinga little world apart from her outside everyday life’ (29), which is perhaps echoed here when Christopher’s aunt saysIt’s hardly healthy, a boy his age, sunk in his own world like that.”’(10). The Dickensian pattern of family romance is a major intertext here, when Christopher discovers, at the end of his quest, that hisallowance’ orinheritance’ is not derived from his aunt, who has never been wealthy, but from Wang Ku, the warlord and opium bandit who has been, during ail those years, his realbenefactor’ (293), as opposed to what he assumed (]27). The pattern of this dramatic revelation made by Uncle Philip is obviously taken from Great Expectations, where Pip hears from Magwitch that his real benefactor is not Miss Havisham but the ex-convict who describes himself as his ‘second father’ (241), a part which Uncle Philip also performs.4 Thus is Christopher’s family romance framed, from Shanghai to Great Britain, by an Uncle and an Aunt, as substitutes for his parents.

7As he delves deeper into his monomaniac quest for the house where his parents, after ail those years, are supposed to be held, houses seem to proliferate, not only the building, but also the signifier ‘house’, especially in the 1937 sequence, which climaxes into his chance meeting with Akira in the shape of a wounded Japanese soldier in the ruins of Shanghai, and the ultimate failure of his quest. Starting from a real house, his ‘tall narrow house’ in London (127), Christopher encounters Sarah Hemmings in thecountry house hotel overlooking the South Downs’ (140) where her wedding reception is held, then evokes Jennifer’s school,a large manor house surrounded by several acres of grounds’ (147), an obvious progression from privacy and sanctuary (131) to public estrangement. As far as houses go, the pattern of the novel is repetitive, but with a difference, a law of diminishing returns. This is the case in the next part dated Cathay Hotel, Shanghai, 20th September 1937, where the dissemination of houses goes along with a steady degradation of the house image: starting from ‘the penthouse floor of the Palace Hotel’ described as“the city’s smartest cabaret and a gathering of Shanghai’s elite”’(154), moving on to adark, creaking boathouse’ where three bodies have been discovered (165), then on to Lucky Chance House, ‘a gambling emporium of some size’ (167) where he meets Sarah and inebriated Sir Cecil playing roulette.

8What stood out as a real house in London, at the beginning of the sequence, becomes a hotel in Shanghai, the country house hotel becomes a boathouse, the manor house a gambling den: as houses proliferate for the worse, the original house seems ail the more remote, elusive, and degraded. In Ishiguro’s highly cinematic imagination, the Lucky Chance House sequence may be reminiscent of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1979) where Michael (Robert de Niro), the ex GI, tries to rescue and retrieve his friend Nick (Christopher Walken) in devastated Saigon, just before the Vietminh 1975 takeover. The Nick he faces is now a drug addict who earns his living by playing Russian roulette for high stakes. Just before Nick pulls the trigger and shoots himself, Michael begs him tocorne home, just corne home’ but obviously the word does not mean anything to him any more: the signifier ‘home’ has changed beyond recognition, as if the characters had estranged themselves from it. This is what befuddled Cecil Medhurst expresses in the same sequence at the Lucky Chance House when Sarah begs:

‘Cecil, darling, let’s go home now.’
‘Home? You call that rat-hole of a hotel home?’ (171)

  • 5 Also see Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) and the French family sequence, where the colonists argue that (...)

9In war-tom Shanghai, Sarah’s typical British entreaty sounds absurd, as if the whole English community were not at home anymore here—if it ever was, a mild critique, on Ishiguro’s part, of Western colonization and construct(ion) of ‘home’ as illusory and alienating,5 as Sir Cecil’s sorry figure exemplifies. The proliferation of houses is a symptom of the displacement of home, of a split from the word as signifying shell and shelter. This is only guessed at by Christopher when, after having been removed (or postponed) by Uncle Philip, he tries to go back home:For a few confused seconds I stood in the middle of the street, trying to form in my head a map of my route back home’ (122). After what he callsthat punishing run home’ (123), the house appears to be empty and his mother, after his father before her, is gone. Later, his meeting with his old school-fellow Morgan, in the French Concession, will suggest that ‘home’ is already postponed in his case, too. Morgan hashad to abandon his home’ because of the fighting, but admits himself that it’ ‘wasn’t much of a home, anyway’ ‘(182). In fact, he sounds more clear­ sighted than Christopher, who persists in calling ‘home’ the International Settlement when he addresses Akira among the ruins:

‘I’ll tell you an odd thing, Akira. I can say this to you. Ali these years I have lived in England, I've never really felt at home there. The International Settlement. That will aways be my home.’
'But International Settlement . . .’ Akira shook his head.Very fragile. Tomorrow, next day . . .’ (256)

10It is no coincidence if it is Morgan who, without providing any explanations, takes him to a residential district, an uncanny trip through the streets of a city where they come across thehuddled figures’ of refugees (182–83), and finally to alarge house’ with which he, Morgan, appears familiar. The repetition of the wordhouse’ four times within the same page (184) is characteristic of a semantic proliferation which can be read as a symbolic mark of Joss. Under Morgan’s guidance, Christopher is then led in the dark through a series of steps and doorways, out of which he emerges into a family gathering, a Chinese family who has settled in his ‘old Shanghai house’ where, over the years,some vast restructuring’ has obviously taken place (186).

  • 6 The image is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), where Dr Edwardes (Gregory Peck) is haun (...)

11The ironic, inverted pattern of Christopher’s quest is highlighted here. While he does not really look for it, he stumbles upon his old Shanghai house. Later, when he is desperately looking forthe house where [his] parents are being held’ (255), he will come across families in several bombed-out houses, or what he callspockets of domesticity’ (257), but certainly not ‘that house’, nor his parents for that matter. Whereas Morgan seems familiar with this restructured house, Christopher can hardly make out his surroundings at first, as if he visited his former house in a dream: for instance he tries ‘to work out the exact spot where the couch’ at the bottom of the stairs could have been, a motif which Pascal Zinck rightly analyzes in terms of the psychoanalyst’s couch (I, 121). At this moment, Christopher’s anamnesic stance enables him to relive, asan old memory’, his childhood ‘habit of coming down the long curve of the stairs at huge speed [. . .] to land in the depths of a couch positioned just a little way away’, a feat he is able to perform as long as hisincreased weight’ enables him to do so, until the day when the ‘frame’ of the couch collapses (186). The mental repetition of the scene points to a kind of obsessive memory therapy, a compulsion to repeat and conjure up the image of the child for ever landingin the depths of’ the couch while the item has been removed a long time ago. The spiral or ‘long curve’ of the staircase thus becomes an image of sped-up growth6 while expressing the desperate wish to ‘land’ home, to find a receiving end which could be that of self-analysis.

12But if the ‘old memory’ of this habit comes back like an accurate remembrance of things past, his eye can only tracethe route our stairs had once taken’ (187), the very same image used before (‘a map of my route back home’, 122) which stresses hisdisorientation’, a feeling experienced and a word used right from his return to Shanghai (153), which will grow on Christopher as he gradually loses his bearings (203). The word can be read as /dis/orient/ation/, an uncanny feeling of estrangement from the very orient which, so far, had been considered as ‘home’. The fact that a Chinese family should now live where he and his family used to dwell, thathome’ should now be referred to asthis’ (188), and nothis’ home, suggests a dream-like restructuring of the past now conceived of and perceived as a plastic world of displacement and substitution. The Chinese family who has stepped into the missing Banks’s shoes stands both as a reminder and a substitute, much in the same way as the two Chinese captains point to the missing originals. Christopher has now become a visitor of his former house, a recurrent image in the novel, which points to another kind of postponement.

Restructuring the Past: Rooms, Pictures and the Model of Museums

13In retrospect, the beginning of the novel is about the apprehension and measurement of rooms, an activity which Christopher, ruler in hand, pretends to be indulging in when cooped up in the library:I could claim to be in the process of measuring the dimensions of the room’ (70). The image is a relevant one to describe his obsession with rooms which appears quite early in the novel: first hislittle attic room’ (10), thenthe crowded room on the first floor of the Charingworth Club, which he can hardly ‘picture’ with sufficient accuracy (12–13), the office of Mr Harold Anderson in Shanghai, a room withtall grand ceilings’ but whose ceiling fans he cannot actually remember (24), or the intricate inside architecture and layout of Claridge’s, a labyrinth of rooms, ballroom and anteroom where a drama is ‘unfolding’ (39) as uninvited Sarah Hemmings tries to force her way in:I tell you I must, I absolutely must go in! I've dreamt of it for so long,’ she exclaims (40). The dream image she uses is quite significant here: the scene has already been dreamt up, which gives a feeling of strangeness to the whole sequence, as Christopher and Sarah move into the ballroom and eye each other across the room. A similar uncanny effect can be found in some of Kubrick’s films, like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980), or the party sequence at the beginning of Eyes Wide Shut (1999), inspired by Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle. The surrealistic, Magritte-like image used by the narrator to describe the way he has lost his bearings in the French Concession also seems to be taken out of a dream: ‘and I had begun to feel ridiculous, like a man who has brought a horse into a house’ (203).

14The uncanny effect of the London sequence is not only created by the hesitant, inaccurate memory of the narrator whose focus seems constantly qualified, blurred or deformed, but by the very ‘restructuring’ of the past, whether recent or distant, in terms and in the shape of rooms whose general layout implies that space, over the years, has been reshaped and postponed. The obsession with rooms in the London sequence is but a rehearsal, or rather the duplication of Christopher’s obsessive quest and search of architectural accuracy in the Chinese sequence. ‘Restructuring’ does not only apply to the way the old Shanghai house has been remodelled, but to the whole mental process of re-membrance taking place in what Stevenson, in ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, calls ‘the chambers of the brain’ (154). Or, as Emily Dickinson puts it in her poem n° 670:

One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—
One need not be a House—
The Brain has Corridorssurpassing
Material Place—(66).

  • 7 Also see An Artist of the Floating World, 40–41.
  • 8 The sentenceOne evening not so long ago, l was standing on that little wooden bridge and saw away (...)

15From the posh rooms of Claridge’s down to the ‘warren’ described by the Lieutenant (235) or the ‘vast, ruined mansion with endless rooms’ to which he compares the sium district of devastated Shanghai (240), the reader is under the uncanny impression that Christopher is describing the same missing house with ‘endless variations’, a musical image used to describe his father’s imaginary rescue (107). The complex layout of his childhood Shanghai house,7 with its grand staircase, study, playroom, library oranteroom’ and dining-room partitioned (235) by so many ‘heavy doors’ (69), thus appears disseminated, fragmented into the narrator’s perception of space as so many chambers into which he seems to stumble as an estranged outsider. This change of perspective and focus already applied tothe Bridge of Hesitation’ in An Artist of the Floating World, first introduced from a low angle as leading up to the house (7), then, from a high angle, as part of a wider area known as the pleasure district, if one is looking in the other direction, down the hill (27). It is the same bridge,8 but in the first instance it is the foreground to the house, while in the second it frames a whole devastated district, thereby introducing a shift from a private to a public perspective, from a whole building to theremains’ of a destroyed city, from the familiar to the unfamiliar. A similar eerie effect is created at the end of Takeshi Kitano’s film entitled Dolls (2002), when the young wandering couple peer through the dimmed window-panes of a snow-bound hotel and view their former selves as part of a lost community.

  • 9 Also see lm Kwon-taek’s film Chihwaseon (Ivre de femmes et de peinture, 2002).

16In When We Were Orphans, the allusion tovisitors’ (56, 74, 116) penetrating into the house, or ‘guests’ who do not really belong to the place they find themselves in (13, 74, 279) connotes the postponement of the original home as a kind of picture-gallery which could be ‘visited’ by outsiders: this applies to Uncle Philip as a ‘house guest’ (74) but also, at the end of the novel, to Christopher himself, who ends up in aguest room’ in the British consulate (279). In An Artist of the Floating World, Ono’s relationship with Matsuda is also set on a visitor-visited basis. Matsuda’s visit at Moriyama’s villa coincides with the disturbing proposal he makes to Ono about the Okada-Shingen exhibition and his ‘development as an artist’ (89): the villa is that of Moriyama and his disciples, an art school which could be considered as an artistic version of home, a major step in Ono’s Künstlerroman,9 but certainly not thehome’ Matsuda has in mind when he asksAnyone home?’, a question which catches the studentsunawares’ (87). Thirty years later, the pattern is inverted when Ono visits old Matsuda, who seems removed or postponed into a potential dead. Although on a less explicit mode, When We Were Orphans is also fraught with references to museums (15) and picturesespecially the pictures in the study of Christopher’s father (85)—, but ‘picturing’ is also a metaphor used to describe a revisitation of the past (12, 27, 51), an image already to be found in An Artist of the Floating World, where the narrator is a painter himself: ‘It is perhaps hard for you to picture how ugly Fukurawa was in those days’ (65) or ‘I have retained a vivid picture of that first time I saw Matsuda’ (87). The feeling of estrangement experienced by the reminiscing narrator comes from a restructuring of the past in terms of a room with pictures, in other words a kind of museum in which one cannot, by definition, dwell, but one is doomed to be a visitor.

  • 10 ln An Artist of the Floating World, the image used to describe Ono’s paintings being ‘tidied away ( (...)

17Thus, when talking about his house in Shanghai, the narrator says that he is ‘able to bring back that picture very vividly’ (51), he is already removing the past into a frame, postponing it into a kind of mode! comparable to that of museum plans, where items are singled out in their respective rooms and floors, and walls and roofs are transparent in order to enable the visitor to visualize, from a high angle, the museum as a gigantic doll’s house. If the past is restructured and modelized into a series of rooms where images are so many pictures, then the grown-up child becomes the visitor of his own private museum. This is the case when Christopher revisits his former Shanghai house, whoserestructuring’ may stand as an embedded image of memory reshaping rooms, introducing partitions, removing objects.10 The revisited past thus becomes both familiar and unfamiliar, i.e. uncanny. Describing the oldlibrary’, he writes:It had been greatly altered: the ceiling was much higher, a wall had been knocked through to make the space L-shaped; and where there had once been double doors through into our dining room, there was now a partition against which were stacked more crates of rice wine. But it was unmistakably the same room where as a child I had done much of my homework’ (190).

18In An Artist of the Floating World, Mrs Kawakami suggests that Ono, by bringing back his old friends,start rebuilding the old days’ (76), a significant image of reconstruction after the past has been demolished. But it is also an image of re­ creation, if not creation: when Ono describes his childhood curiosity which compelled him toconstruct an image’ of the interior of the reception room, he immediately associates it with his aptitudeto realize a scene on canvas based only on the briefest of passing glances’ (41), as if his ability to visualize the inside of a room were already that of a painter’s eye ready to frame and depict aconstructed’ image.

19Christopher’s predicament and the reader’s sense of the uncanny do not so much arise from the fact that the past cannot be recaptured, since at times, it seems to be the case, when the narrator smells proto-Proustian gusts of memory wafted across the years—for instance when afragment of memory’ comes back to him while talking to his mother in Hong Kong, the memory of his mother on a swing, on a windy summer’s day (304). It rather comes from a sense of growing postponement, a restructuring or modelization of time and space in terms of a frame, or viewed through a partition which, even if clear and transparent, is there. When We Were Orphans is not about remembrance of things past as the fable might suggest, but about childhood revisited and modelized into an acceptable museum, as the narrative does: hence perhaps a general effect of trompe-l’œil. The picture may bevivid’ or the viewclear’, yet it is apicture’ or aconstruct’. In that respect, Kazuo Ishiguro seems close to John Updike, who inWhat MoMa Done Tole Me’, revisits his own childhood in terms of a visit to museums, especially with his mother or his aunt: ‘My father’s sister lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and on one of my visits to her house she took me into the city to the Museum of Modem Art, and later claimed that she had never seen a child so interested in the place’ (3). Thus, the sight of a ‘mummy’ in one of the antechambers of the museum seems to overlap with the name of hismummy’, his mama, or is it MoMa, which he feels compelled to visit and revisit. If any Bildung is to be built or constructed out of his family romance, Christopher’s is that of a growing visitor, as already illustrated by his frequent visits to Uncle Philip’s office. The description of the presents he receives from him, the ‘office items’ which gradually constitute anextensive collection’ (75), is an early image, in the novel, of the past and its bouses bound to end up into a museum of sorts. When Christopher visits his mother in Hong Kong, he describes herhome’ as ‘a large white bouse built in a British colonial style’ (301), the inside of which is bathed in sunlight:there were bright watercolours pinned ail over the walls’ (302), the image of a well-designed museum with its well-lit rooms, with its specific style, and in which his mother stands as a postponed statue.

Which ‘Home’?

20In the final paragraph of the novel, the narrator suggests that he has eventually reconciled himself to the idea that London has become his home, a contrasted echo to his feeling when on board the ship leaving Shanghai:This city, in other words, has come to be my home . . .’ (313). This sounds like the end of David Copperfield, where David’s narration loops the loop between narratingl’ and narratedI’, as if the time of narration and the time of the story were at last converging and merging into one. In that perspective, Christopher’s Bildungsroman would consist in growing out of a sense of exile from Shanghai, in passing fromthe city that had been my home’ (29) to ‘This city . . . has come to be my home’ (313). Compared to his statement to Akira among the ruins, according to which The International Settlement ‘will always’ be his home (256), the evolution sounds obvious. The present perfect is the grammatical symptom of his maturity, as opposed to his previous illusory construct of the past as present. The use of the word ‘home’ at the end of his narration reads like a postponement in the trivial sense of the term: the acceptance of London ashome’ is delayed, put off until the final paragraph, which echoes the beginning of the novel, where London was associated with a series of bouses, but certainly not perceived ashome’.

  • 11 Thus, Gould’s different versions of the Goldberg Variations have one point in common: the length of (...)

21Yet one has the feeling that this final repetition of the same word does not quite amount to a repetition of the same. The last sentence evokesa sort of emptiness’ which cannot be filled, and which the reader can feel in the very same paragraph where the narrator describes his days in London:I enjoy my walks in the parks, I visit the galleries . . . ’ (313) which sounds like an ironie echo of Osboume’sNot interested in museums, by any chance?”’ (15) at the beginning of the novel. This new ‘home’ sounds empty, or at least it is not full, as opposed to what his former ‘home’ in Shanghai used to be. The ending of When We Were Orphans sounds like the ‘Aria da capo’ to be heard at the end of Bach’s Goldberg Variations: it is the same Aria as the first one, but in between, the 30 variations have been taking place, thereby altering and filtering the perception and the execution of the final Aria, which cannot be quiteda capo’, even if the musical score is the same.11 Christopher aptly defines his and Akira’s invented scenarios in terms of ‘endless variations’ on the same theme (107), an embedded image and portrait of the artist as a young story­ teller, which applies to the musical conception and architecture of the novel as a whole. ‘Horne’ is taken up as a final leitmotiv here, but it does not sound like the same ‘home’, since the aria of home cannot be sung or played as if nothing had happened in between. ‘Horne’ is thus forever postponed: there is no process of solving contradictions or internalizing thern into what Derrida, about Hegelian idealism and Aujhebung, calls ‘intériorité anamnésique’ (Erinnerung)’ whereby difference might be internalized into ‘une présence à soi’ (59). Horne is postponed not only in the sense of deferred or delayed, but in that of differred, made different: characteristically, the verb ‘to differ’ is present in the novel in relation with ‘disorientation’ (153). There is something left over, a rernainder which will not be integrated, or, as Derrida puts it, ‘ne se laissant jamais totalement relever’ (61). Postponement as ‘différance’, or ‘procès de différenciation’ (60, note 6).

22‘Horne’ is not to be found in what the narrator says it is, i.e. in London, but in the very act of saying where it is, writing aboutit. ‘L’écriture qui, à ce moment, se re-marque elle-même (tout autre chose qu'une représentation de soi)’ (63). It is the loop of writing finally recoiling on itself which matters, not what is being looped. The text, not the texture of what is being recollected. The ‘twine’, not the slats which cannot be held together, to take up the image used by the Japanese monk to describe children (73), echoed by Akira. The advent of writing, notas a medium for recovering a postponed home, but as the very place of différance, where home is, where, when and whence ‘I’ is writing:

  • 12 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, V, 405–09, quoted by Michel Schneider as epigraph to Glenn Gould Piano (...)

By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the Jean solicitor
In our empty room.12

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Bibliographie

Derrida, Jacques, Positions, Paris: Minuit, 1972.

Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations (1861), New York and London: Norton, 1999.

Dickinson, Emily, Poems, London: Dent, 1997.

Eliot, George, The Mill on the Floss (1860), Oxford: Oxford UP,World’s Classics’, 1996.

Eliot, T.S., Collected Poems, London: Faber, 1963. HERGÉ, The Blue Lotus, Paris: Casterman, 1946.

Ishiguro, Kazuo, An Artist of the Floating World, London: Faber, 1986.

Ishiguro, Kazuo, When We Were Orphans, London: Faber, 2000.

James, Henry, The Altar of the Dead, 1895. London: Martin Secker, 1915. SCHNEIDER, Michel, Glenn Gould Piano solo: Aria et trente variations, Paris: Folio-Gallimard, 1994.

Stevenson, Robert Louis,A Chapter on Dreams’ (1888), Across the Plains with other memories and essays (1892), London: Chatto & Windus, 1915.

Updike, John,What MoMa Done Tole Me’, Just Looking: Essays on Art, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.

Zinck, Pascal, l’Art de la fugue: l’aliénation dans l’œuvre de Kazuo Ishiguro, Paris IV-Sorbonne: thèse de Doctorat, 2003.

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Notes

1 The final section of the novel takes place in November 1958, after the success and publication of John Osbome’s play: the irony of the date suggests that Christopher is not an angry young man any more, but a more sedate adult having accepted the loss of his parents and his ‘home’ in Shanghai.

2 Where Tintin and Tchang, as racial foils or doubles like Christopher and Akira, seem to share out between them two traits which are separated and severed in Christopher’s case: while Tintin is weeping when leaving Shanghai and the Wang family, Tchang is also weeping because Tintin is leaving, but smiling because he has found a new mum and dad (62). The Blue Lotus reads like a matrix for When We Were Orphans: Tintin saves Tchang, an orphan (43) later to be adopted by the Wang family, who plays a leading role in the anti-opium fight. Professor Fan Se Yeng, who is also a leading figure in that fight, is kidnapped by bandits and is later found alive in the very opium den of the Blue Lotus.

3 Also see the ‘old chest’ in Christopher’s playroom where he keeps ‘an extensive collection’ of Uncle Philip’s office items (75), perhaps an echo of the chest belonging to the old sea dog in Treasure Island.

4 Compare Magwitch’s “‘You're my sonmore tome nor any son’ ‘(GE 241) with Uncle Philip’s’ ‘You've despised me ail these years, Puffin, the closest thing lever had to a son . . .’” (WWWO 294).

5 Also see Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) and the French family sequence, where the colonists argue that this piece of land has been theirs from time immemorial, etc.

6 The image is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), where Dr Edwardes (Gregory Peck) is haunted and paralyzed by the traumatic image of his fall as a child, which brings about the death of his own brother. For an image of childhood associated with speed, see lchiro in An Artist of the Floating World, often described as speeding through his grandfather’s house.

7 Also see An Artist of the Floating World, 40–41.

8 The sentenceOne evening not so long ago, l was standing on that little wooden bridge and saw away in the distance two columns of smoke rising from the rubble’ (27) may be reminiscent of the opening chapter of The Mill on the Floss, where the anonymous narrator is also standing on a bridge, remembering a scene from the past.

9 Also see lm Kwon-taek’s film Chihwaseon (Ivre de femmes et de peinture, 2002).

10 ln An Artist of the Floating World, the image used to describe Ono’s paintings being ‘tidied away (just) for the moment’ (32, 79) could constitute another definition of postponement.

11 Thus, Gould’s different versions of the Goldberg Variations have one point in common: the length of theAria da capo’ differs from that of the first Aria, and is always longer (1955: 1'53/2'10; 1959: 1'48/2'00; 1981: 3'05/3'45). A good instance of postponement or dijférance: the Aria da capo is deferred, but it also differs.

12 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, V, 405–09, quoted by Michel Schneider as epigraph to Glenn Gould Piano solo. Eliot’s influence on lshiguro and The Waste Land intertext can be felt for instance in An Artist of the Floating World: ‘You might still be able to make out through the gloom those heaps of broken brick and timber, and perhaps here and there, pieces of piping protruding from the ground like weeds’ (27), reminiscent of ‘The Burial of the Dead’.

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Jean-Pierre Naugrette, « When We Were Orphans, or the Postponement of Home »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 27 | 2004, mis en ligne le 04 septembre 2025, consulté le 23 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16747 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14z5p

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