Pamela Wright
Texas A&M University-Kingsville, USA
Shouldering the Weight of A Country: The Artist at War in D.H. Lawrence's Kangaroo and Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of The Floating World
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman [or artist] who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. -Sir Winston Churchill
What if an artist gets involved with unsavoury characters and dangerous convictions? What if he allows his art to become tainted by these same acquaintances and ideas? What if, in retrospect, he regrets allowing such a sullying of his work? Does he then have a responsibility to the public or, perhaps most importantly, to himself, to repent? Will his atonement break his slavery? These are important questions that Richard Lovatt Somers, the writer in Kangaroo, and Masuji Ono, the art professor and painter in An Artist of The Floating World, strive to answer.
Both artists somehow find themselves buying into a dangerous rhetoric that influences their art, only to later suffer for their association with such ideas. Interestingly, though Lawrence's novel deals with the times surrounding and succeeding World War I while Ishiguro's work deals with the years immediately following World War II, both novels seem to carry the same sense of shame and guilt. Somers allows his writing to become a mouthpiece for a radical movement in post World War I Australia only to question his involvement when he sees its effects. Similarly, Ono, Ishiguro's protagonist, begins to believe in the imperialist movement of World War II Japan; when he leaves the purely aesthetically pleasing work he once painted, his work becomes more propagandist in nature. The major action of the novel, however, takes place from 1948 to 1950, when the older Ono questions and expresses some regret for his participation in the imperialist objective. Like Lawrence's Somers, he feels lost, a bit hurt, confused and used by such fascist concepts.
This paper then proposes to examine these issues in both novels. Ishiguro's work seems to echo Lawrence's, and reading the novels together in this light only serves to raise larger questions about implication, guilt and propagandist art in all wars from World War I to the most recent global conflicts.