SECRETS OF “THE BURIED GIANT”Is it a bad thing if a story improves when its background and the author’s become known? My imagination bonded with Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day” without particular knowledge of Ishiguro and his persistent themes—or even that he lived his first six years in Nagasaki quite soon after it was bombed.The bond deepened as I read and viewed more of his work. I saw critics enchanted by Ishiguro's art, by issues of conscience, self-definition, and memory revision, and sometimes by his Britishness. “The Buried Giant,” like other Ishiguro, deserves more than those now-familiar terms of discourse. Potential readers deserve more.Commentators have underestimated the conditioning significance of Ishuguro’s nuclear-emblematic birthplace. They have neglected his travels in the U.S., ignored his early activity in Britain with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and have failed to assess his two periods of employment as a community worker with homeless people. Although readers cannot be expected to study Ishiguro’s biography, or his guidance for reading his works, the commentators should, so as not to mislead readers.Ishuguro’s service to the homeless in East London is usually noted because a co-worker became Ishuguro’s wife. His social service in Renfrewshire, is usually ignored, or sometimes misreported as Glasgow. Although conventionally underestimated, these experiences may be a publicly-unacknowledged pillar of Ishuguro’s enduring moral landscape.Mini-bios usually mention Ishiguro’s short time as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother, an easily-offered bit of color, and with no connecting logic then lead into discussion of the characters’ moral-psychological issues. Among commentators, those are attractive chimeras. But they are not enough.It is an important lapse that nothing is made of Ishuguro’s time in the US, even though he has remarked that race is America’s Buried Giant. Do the memory-misted folk in “The Buried Giant” resemble the American political public, historically amnesic, ethnically riven, warfare-prone, and subject to culturally-ingenuous demagoguery? Certainly Ishuguro leads us to ask that question. He remarks that the singular persons and settings of his fiction, however richly detailed, are masks for Everyman, for universal capacities for experience. The commentariate seems to have failed to remind the reader, as with Walt Kelly’s Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us."A greater lapse, when “The Buried Giant” is read as a trip to fantasyland, is failure to see that the substance and shadow of war pervade virtually all of Ishuguro’s work. “The Buried Giant” spells out the human cost of their hovering presence. The inhabitants of “The Buried Giant” live in a diminished world, between wars. Magically-generated mist veils recollection of past conflict and awareness of the potential for more. The inhabitants bear the existential cost of past war, potential for more, and present oblivion. So do war survivors today who cannot assimilate their experiences and can be objectified as suffering from PTSD. Surely in Ishiguro's social work experience he came to know people whose homelessness reflected the cost that war had exacted from them.“The Buried Giant” needs to stand on its own with capable readers (whatever that epithet may mean). But as with other important novels, exploring the personal context within which an author’s imagination may have operated can open up worlds of meaning. Critics owe readers this understanding, so that reviews may do justice to authors, and readers may learn.I am not trying to disparage the remaining wisdom of the New Criticism. But I have benefitted from traversing the path between Thomas Hardy’s villages, and I have gained more than calories from drinking beer on the City Hotel porch where Graham Greene’s speaker observed vultures on the tin roof of the Church Missionary Society bookshop in Sierra Leone. I ask only that critics, commentators, interviewers and such take it as their task to open up new meaning, rather than to limit themselves to the already-familiar.It was sad that one major critic viewed “The Buried Giant” through the measuring glass of one of William Golding’s lesser books, “The Inheritors,” in which a special version of early humankind was deliberately distinguished from a later Everyman. This critic took post-Arthurian Britain as the center of gravity of the Ishiguro story, became bored, and discouraged readers. “The Buried Giant” characters and drama are richly resonant with the here and now, for us and for all time. The novel’s apparent setting in a fantasyland, however inspired, is a piece of stage business.I urge commentators and readers to consider more broadly who Ishiguro is, where the roots of his imagination reside. His apparent settings may be secondary to an Everyman, anytime depiction of the universal. But his personal equation, and especially the recurring motif, the juxtaposition of action to war and loss, informs all that he does.© 2015 Ken Rothman, [email protected]