Apparently I'm still stuck thinking about the Waste Land.
From Wikipedia, RE: Kazuo Ishiguro
A number of his novels are set in the past. Never Let Me Go, has science fictionqualities and a futuristic tone; however, it is set in the 1980s and 1990s, and thus takes place in a very similar yet alternate world. His fourth novel, The Unconsoled, takes place in an unnamed Central European city. The Remains of the Day is set in the large country house of an English lord in the period surrounding World War II.
An Artist of the Floating World is set in an unnamed Japanese city during the period of reconstruction following Japan's surrender in 1945. The narrator is forced to come to terms with his part in World War II. He finds himself blamed by the new generation who accuse him of being part of Japan's misguided foreign policy and is forced to confront the ideals of the modern times as represented by his grandson. Ishiguro said of his choice of time period, "I tend to be attracted to pre-war and postwar settings because I’m interested in this business of values and ideals being tested, and people having to face up to the notion that their ideals weren’t quite what they thought they were before the test came."
I had to look him up, because his tone and contents really reminded me of other writers whose commitments and styles were transformed by the War. Those were older writers who actively took sides before and during and after the war, and had their life changed by it.
This is my first Ishiguro, but the message is hard to miss. The biggest clue is the letting go of culture. The restrained, quiet acceptance of destruction of Hailsham, (which, I suppose, represents new and improved and learned and artistic and constructed culture.) The will and commitment to live with hardship and oppression using whatever means possible -- including escapes into fantasies and lies and therapeutic creation of arts and random sex, or just random mad blackening of pages -- to endure, and keep enduring, until it all ends. I think most will agree with me that it's frustrating they did not try to escape, and did not try to overturn the oppressive system. And I think that is the point. They -- every last one of them, the students, the teachers, the activists -- let it go. They let the school go, they let their arts go, they let their culture go, one by one, slaughtered, they will not revolt. They will not go full Hieronimo. They resist the impulse, they preserve whatever status quo, they bear the burden of social order. Their aspirations, their new and improved culture, their social justice, their potential to become more, are not worth risking another large scale conflict for.
Ishiguro is, I think, giving the 21st century the blessing to bury the bad experiment that was the 20th century modernism (Ezra Pound etc.) As a postwar baby, he didn't witness the atrocity, he's not responsible for any of that, but he assures us he agrees with the lesson learned.
Again, back to Eliot's Waste Land (written before the war)
“Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s‘ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon16— O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then He fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe
Before the war, Eliot tolerated the idea of bringing down civilization as he awaited "Hieronymo" to do his works. He'll just quietly pick up bits and pieces of high classical cultural fragments worth preserving to put humpty-dumpty back together after the collapse.
After the war, in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948)
What I try to say is this: here are what I believe to be essential conditions for the growth and for the survival of culture. If they conflict with any passionate faith of the reader-if, for instance, he finds it shocking that culture and equalitarianism should conflict, if it seems monstrous to him that anyone should have "advantages of birth" - do not ask him to change his faith, I merely ask him to stop paying lip-service to culture. If the reader says: "the state of affairs which I wish to bring about is right (or is just, or is inevitable); and if this must lead to a further deterioration of culture, we must accept that deterioration" - then I can have no quarrel with him. I might even, in some circumstances, feel obliged to support him. The effect of such a wave of honesty would that the word culture would cease to be abused, cease to appear in contexts where it does not belong: and to rescue this word ["culture"] is the extreme of my ambition. As things are, it is normal for anybody who advocates any social change, or any alteration of our political system, or any expansion of public education, or any development of social service, to claim confidently that it will lead to the improvement and increase of culture. Sometimes culture, or civilisation, is set in the forefront, and we are told that what we need, must have, and shall get, is a "new civilisation." In 1944 I read a symposium in The Sunday Times (November 31) in which Professor Harold Laski, or his headline writer, affirmed that we were fighting the late war for a "new civilisation." Mr. Laski at least asserted this:
If it is agreed that these who seek rebuild what Mr. Churchill likes to call ""traditional" Britain have no hope of fulfilling that end, it follows that there must be a new Britain in a new civilisation.
We might murmur "it is not agreed," but that would to miss my point. Mr. Laski is right to this extent, that we lose anything finally and irreparably, we must make do without it: but I think he meant to say something more than that.
Eliot here, I believe, is letting go. For a long time, before the war, he fought for cultural renewal. After the war, he learned his lesson the hard way. With his incredible intellect and linguistic talents, he helped set into motions (or at least cheered on) a sequence of events that went way beyond what he thought he was prepared to tolerate.
Like Eliot, the students are deflated, demoralized. They are willing to condone the death of their culture, the denial of a fully realized life, the call of spring, the possibility of cultural renewal, continuation, regeneration -- in order to avoid making Eliot's tragic mistake again. In service of avoiding another world war, all prices is acceptable.
And now I'm conflicted (Eliot keeps doing that to me.) I'm tired of postmodernism and the sense of deflation and self-restraint -- not that I'm suffering any sort of significant hardship. I can almost sympathize with that mad drive to "drain the swamp," and watch our institutions come crashing down.
But I don't want that. It's counterintuitive, my impulse is to fight for something better. But no, I have to learn to let it go, in order to not let our civilization go.