Yağmur Sönmez-Demir
ABSTRACT
This study aims to reveal non-performative chronotopic heroes in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015), The Remains of the Day (1989), and When We Were Orphans (2000). In these novels, the chronotopes of the Arthurian romance, the country house novel, and interwar detective fiction are juxtaposed with the actual historical chronotopes of these genres to undermine the genres’ ideological function of consolidating British national identity. The Buried Giant features a quintessentially English hero, a knight who fails to be a performative subject in the process of national identity consolidation. The narrative thereby foregrounds the constructedness of English national identity and the great gap between how Englishness was imagined in the chronotope of the Arthurian romance and how it is imagined in contemporary times. Other Ishiguro novels, The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, follow a similar trajectory by juxtaposing the chronotopes of the country house novel and interwar detective fiction with the actual historical chronotopes and representations of non-performative English heroes: a butler and a detective, who, with their disillusionment, serve to display the constructed nature of Englishness. In addition to non-performative heroes, who fail to be performative when considered within the framework of Homi Bhabha’s performative mode in consolidating the idea of nation, the dysfunctionality of the genres in Ishiguro’s novels leads to a reconsideration of the way English national identity is imagined now.
KEYWORDS: Ishiguro, chronotope, non-performative heroes, literary genres, Englishness
Yağmur Sönmez-Demir, Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Çankaya University, Turkey (yagmursonmez@yahoo.com).
DOI: 10.30395/WSR.202606_19(2).0007
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