"Humours," artificial friends, and a social soul
Warning: spoilers ahead! Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun focuses on characters, personhood, and whether human identity might be "excavated."
Read time: 9 minutes. This week: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun was published in spring 2021, and I’m planning on using it in my fall course at Duke. Some thoughts and sketches on it. Next week: I’m thinking (rather tentatively, I have to admit) about a topic that has puzzled and challenged me for some time: ways that our body “reasons.” Is there a language that arises from our body? This topic re-emerged from some reading I did over Spring Break: Marcel Mauss’ “Techniques of the body” (1934). I might supplant this topic with an easier one to tackle, though.
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One of my friends told me that Kazuo Ishiguro’s character development is awesome, but for him Klara and the Sun was a little wanting in the plot department. I can see the criticism, but I think that perhaps Ishiguro was most interested in the characters of the novel and chose to focus on them rather than on the ups-and-downs of their stories.
Ishiguro’s focus on characters got me thinking about a kind of story-telling that at one time was popular in theatre. Ben Jonson made his mark in the late sixteenth-century playhouses with his “humours plays” Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Every Man out of His Humour (1599). They were published in the first years of the seventeenth century, and they were his first successful comedies.
Early in Every Man out of His Humor, the character Asper defines humour for the audience:
So in every human body,
The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood,
By reason that they flow continually
In some one part, and are not continent,
Receive the name of humours. Now thus far
It may, by metaphor, apply itself
Unto the general disposition:
As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way.
The humours that Asper describes has little two do with our understanding of “humor” — in that is isn’t a laughing matter. Rather, it’s an old concept, and was even in Jonson’s day, drawing from medical theories of four bodily “humours” — bile (yellow and black), phlegm, and blood — which echoed the “four elements” that classical thinkers believed made up all matter — earth, air, fire, and water. Humours were also associated with Zodiac symbols, and physicians would consult astrological tables to diagnose illness. Words still in use today come from humours theory to describe emotional states or personalities: “Melancholy,” for example, was supposed to come from too much black bile. We all know someone who is “phlegmatic,” “sanguine,” or “choleric.” Babies get “colicky.”
Klara’s sight for character and the beats of the plot
We see the whole story unfold through Klara’s eyes — or perhaps I should say sensors. She is an “AF,” short for “Artificial Friend,” a robot of a very specific type performing a role of friendship. Klara serves as an AF for Josie, a teenaged girl who has undergone a risky genetic treatment so that she is “lifted” or enhanced in order to give her advantages in the competitive world of the book.
Klara’s artificiality comes forth in her rather automatic manner and her depiction of her visual perception which she captures in “boxes” especially when the situation is tense or confusing. She interprets events with her own logic: an angry-looking bull she thinks is swallowed by the earth. Perhaps most noticeably, she often refers to others according to the role she perceives them playing: “Mother” for Chrissie, Josie’s mother, “Melania Housekeeper” for the housekeeper, “Father” for Josie’s father and Chrissie’s ex-husband, “Manager” for the shopkeeper where she was sold to Chrissie and Josie to serve as an AF. “Beggar Man” begs across the street from the shop.
Such classifications of course help to characterize Klara, and we have to remember that Klara narrates. She presents a view, and her “perspective” is profoundly unlike ours; Klara’s world is simplified or at least filtered with a profoundly different intelligence. The characterizations that attach to others in the story are Klara’s, conveyed to us in her voice, and it actually makes sense for an Artificial Friend to be so attuned to others’ characteristics and habits.
As my friend observed, the plot’s beats do sound rather softly. This is not a novel of bass drums or crashing cymbals, but the events that do unfold depict a brokenness and dysfunction.
The scenes serve to reveal characters, or rather their driving “humours”: the teenaged asshole and bully, the fretful mother, the insecure father, the addled and traumatized woman, the pompous and wounded man. They play their scenes: A rather forced gathering of “lifted” teenagers, set up to try to teach them some social skills, devolves into back-biting, name-calling, and teenage drama. The teens’ mothers huddle in the next room and manage in a few minutes to sow their own unease and discontent with each other. Josie’s mother and father have divorced. Josie’s father had been fired from an engineering job at a nearby factory, presumably a victim of automation, and lives in the city among gun-hoarders and white supremacists. Rick, Josie’s next door friend, lives with his unstable mother in somewhat ramshackle circumstances. A reunion in a coffee shop devolves into a tirade and sorrowful argument.
There are few moments of peace and unity, usually involving Josie, Rick, and of course Klara. This is a world where society has dissolved, leaving individual remnants — characters possessed of their own “peculiar qualities” that they can play out.
The plan and, perhaps, a point of the book
Klara and the Sun is filled with characters that seem to follow — or are at least reported by Klara to follow — a certain life script. That plays a role in the development of the novel’s themes, I think, in that a main driver of the plot has to do with a plan to fashion a continuation of a learned, “excavated” human identity — specifically Josie’s — by means of her Artificial Friend Klara. Through most of the novel this plan remains enshrouded, occasionally hinted at with tidbits and references to earlier times but more fully revealed about two-thirds of the way into the book. Klara’s role in the plan was to mimic — no, really embody — Josie in the event that Josie dies as a result of risky treatments she underwent to be “lifted.” Klara would step in as a human character, leaving her role as an artificial friend and becoming Josie, the initial object of her artificial friendship.
Klara would become a new character, completely ingesting new habits — the telling and unique traits of Josie while she lived.
Henry Capaldi, the “scientist” who was making a “portrait” of Josie for the scheme, explained the plan to Klara this way: “Klara, we’re not asking you to train the new Josie. We’re asking you to become her.” And then, referring to the “portrait” of Josie that Klara saw in a room in Capaldi’s studio, he continued, “That Josie you saw up there, as you noticed, is empty. If the day comes — I hope it doesn’t, but if it does — we want you to inhabit that Josie up there with everything you’ve learned…. Learn her til there’s no difference between the first Josie and the second.”
Of course, the plan is a matter of contention, with Josie’s mother waveringly supportive though committed and Josie’s father forcefully and angrily opposed, something he couldn’t hide from Capaldi.
Even in the dystopia of the book, a plan to replace a human with a machine challenges norms, underscoring a very important point Ishiguro seeks to make. The plan challenges assumptions about the uniqueness and the value of human lives. Josie’s father tries to explain to Klara his anger at the plan and at Capaldi in particular, in the process showing the nub of the matter:
I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond doubt there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know better. That’s how Capaldi sees it, and there’s a part of me that fears he’s right…. This is why I find it so hard to be civil around people like Capaldi. When they do what they do, say what they say, it feels like they’re taking from me what I hold most precious in this life.
But is human uniqueness really excavate-able, copy-able, transferable? In the closing scene of the novel Klara ties up her thinking about whether she could “become” Josie, essentially replacing Josie if she died. Broken and “fading” in a junkyard, more or less immobile from the neck down, Klara says, “I did all I could to learn Josie and had it become necessary, I would have done my utmost. But I don’t think it would have worked out so well. Not because I wouldn’t have achieved accuracy. But however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach.” Recalling her conversation with Capaldi, she continued,
Mr. Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr. Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn’t have succeeded.
The constellation of people (including Klara) in the novel — the assemblage of characters — make up the substance of identities. Klara and the Sun depicts a broken society, a scattered dystopia of individuals all laden with their regrets, their predelictions, and precarious circumstances that play out in a humour-ous fashion. Klara sees what no one else sees: That loving connections conspire to create a soul, that “something very special.” Lonely twirlings and antics of our individual humours cannot alone fill in an individual’s being.
Others complete a picture.
Tags: robotics, fiction, love, soul, society, identity
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
A follow-up relating to last week’s post: Parisi, David. “Can’t Touch This.” Real Life, March 3, 2022. https://reallifemag.com/cant-touch-this/.
The novel: Ishiguro, Kazuo. Klara and the Sun. First edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. Available in a bookstore near you.
Old plays and lots else are free to read on Project Gutenberg: Jonson, Ben. Every Man out of His Humour. Project Gutenberg, ebook: 2009; 1599. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3695/3695-h/3695-h.htm.
A law review article from the 1990s: Solum, Lawrence B. “Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, March 20, 2008. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1108671. First published in the North Carolina Law Review in 1992, when AI was considerably less developed than it is today. (Former students will know I have a weakness for law review articles.)
A good thesis that touches many of the legal points of AI and personhood or AI rights and duties: Maia Alexandre, Filipe. “The Legal Status of Artificially Intelligent Robots: Personhood, Taxation and Control.” Master thesis, LL.M, Tilburg University, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2985466.
On the four humours, a high school-level course lesson plan: “The Four Humors: An Introduction with Primary Sources.” US National Library of Medicine, January 2012. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/shakespeare/education/lessonplans/highschool/materials/HS-Four_Humors_Primary_Sources.pdf.
“What the hell is a human being, what's inside their mind and how irreplaceable is any one human? Those are the questions that, as a novelist, I'm interested in.” — Kazuo Ishiguro in a Wired interview: Knight, Will. “‘Klara and the Sun’ Imagines a Social Schism Driven by AI.” Wired, March 8, 2021. Accessed March 9, 2022. https://www.wired.com/story/kazuo-ishiguro-interview/.