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READING THE ENVIRONMENT THROUGH FANTASY FICTION: ISHIGURO AND GENRE
Even if readers of Kazuo Ishiguros masterpiece, The Remains of the Day (1989), recognize and critique his butler Stevens for denying himself and enabling his Nazi-sympathizing employer Lord Darlington, they nonetheless often harbor qualified sympathy for him and curiously neglect the basis for much of the monstrous Stevenss racism and anti-Semitism, at best viewing his dutiful actions as enabling Darlingtons fascism and appeasement of Germany, not apprehending the real responsibility he takes at times for promoting fascism. With his recent novel, The Buried Giant (2015), Ishiguro leads us into a medieval past populated with actual monsters as his protagonists, Axl and Beatrice, trudge across a harsh landscape to find their son and eventually, to confront the dragon that has breathed the amnesiac mist covering the land. Despite these actual monsters, some of which are easily dispatched, including the dragon, here, too, several characters are revealed to be monstrous in their irrational hate for other people groups and individuals. In both novels, Ishiguro challenges William Blakes ideal of England as a green and pleasant land (set forth in his preface to Milton: A Poem in Two Books) showing us the horror that lurks under or on the bucolic surface of this world. Taken together, these novels subvert one subgenre-pastoral-and expand the category of fantasy fiction, thus forming a kind of anti-pastoral dyad, an extended fantasy examination of the English countryside in the i92os-i95os and in the near-mythic Arthurian past, respectively. In so doing, they lift the veil from the pastoral view of English landscape as calm, peaceful, lovely, a view that continues to be promulgated by tourist boards and which prevents our deeper exploration of the violence etched deeply upon and lying deep below the rural English landscape. In both novels, the interiorized monsters of racialized hatred, driven by this destructive passion, awake and perpetrate violence. While it is beyond the scope of the present essay to thoroughly treat Remains as a fantasy novel, the first part of my argument assesses it from the perspective of both the fantasy genre broadly conceived, and from Ishiguoros own perspective looking back at it from the horizon of The Buried Giant, a moment in his career when he reclaims Remains...