Social Critique and Reader Response Criticism In Kazuo Ishiguro's "When We Were Orphans"

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 The Sherlock Holmes Label

3 Genre Expectations
3.1 The Detective's Assistant
3.2 Focus on the Detective's Process
3.3 The Early Encounter of the Crime
3.4 The Worlds Compared

4 Expecting the Reinstallment of Order
4.1 Society's Expectations
4.2 The Necessity of Banks's Childhood-Detective-Narrative

5 Identity Deformation as Way to conform to a Sherlockian Rule

6 The Ridiculement in the Denouement

7 Conclusion

8 Works Cited

1 Introduction

Let me tell you, dear Watson, about a most peculiar case I have solved in your absence. It concerns a little boy whose parents both disappeared within a few weeks of each other. The case promised to offer everything from an economic drug conspiracy to a courageous family stand and of course the police failed to look at the most obvious clues. It was, as it always is, not the crime it looked to be and I'm afraid I, myself, could not tell the little boy the truth about the disappearance of his parents for it would have been too cruel to let him know. So I let him believe just what he wanted to believe, which I think was also the reason he consulted me in the first place. I have to admit, though, that the case was quite out of the ordinary we usually encounter in our adventures.

In Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, the surfeit labelling of Christopher Banks as a Sherlock Holmes evokes reader expectations of the Holmesian genre and lets the reader judge Banks and his methods more critically in the light of Holmes. The novel though defies reader expectations in terms of any detective formula fiction it starts to set out - but it are exactly those expectations and the refusal of their completion that bind Banks and the reader together. Banks’s childhood view of what had happened to his parents (which shall be called "childhood-detective-narrative" from now on) mirrors the world of Sherlock Holmes and follows Banks into his adult world. It is the belief that, against all odds, a Sherlockian detective can solve the crime of his parents' disappearance. However, to make this possible the crime has to be one that equals the crimes in the world of Sherlock Holmes. As Banks adopts the personality of a Sherlockian detective because he labels himself one so does the reader expects certain personality traits because he sees this label. Banks and the reader fall into the same trap of believing that the narrative should go in a particular way because the ideas on and beliefs in detectives rely on a fixed formula. In debunking Banks as not being a "Sherlock” the novel ridicules the believe in archetypal heroes like Sherlock Holmes and in debunking the principle of a detective itself, in the denouement chapter, it ridicules not only Christopher Banks’s life but also the reader’s expectations. Thus it is not only Banks's world that gets disenchanted but the reader’s world as well.

2 The Sherlock Holmes Label

Banks' self-modelling on Sherlock Holmes is marked from the first chapter on. His London flat with the address "14b Bedford Gardens" reminds the reader, by the use of the double "b", of Sherlock Holmes' famous residence in 221b Baker Street (3). Further, Banks

rents the flat just as Holmes does from a landlady. The "unhurried Victorian past" (3), which the furniture of his flat evokes, further reinforces Banks's assimilation with Holmes who "is widely thought of [as] a nineteenth-century or Victorian figure" (Worthington xvi). This described furniture consisting of "two snug armchairs, an antique sideboard and an oak bookcase filled with crumbling encyclopaedias" as well as the "Queen Anne tea service" can easily be imagined in Holmes' apartment and evoke the feeling of Britishness, which again is one of Holmes' features (3). This Britishness in the context of Sherlock Holmes is something Banks admires from his early days on. When he had been living with his parents in Shanghai he had studied and emulated the houseguests, usually men, who brought with them „the air of the English lanes and meadows [he] knew from The Wind in the Willows, or else the foggy streets of the Conan Doyle mysteries" (52). He is further directly compared to Holmes by Roger Brenthurst, one of his schoolmates, who remarks "[b]ut surely he's rather too short to be a Sherlock" (10). With his following acknowledgement about his "aspiration to be a 'Sherlock'" (10) Banks reveals not only his wish to be this specific detective but also that the identity of Sherlock Holmes is something that can be acquired. Here, the name "Sherlock" is used as a coinage referring to idiosyncrasies distinctive to Sherlock Holmes while the indefinite article "a" suggests that there is, or can be, more than one Sherlock. His aspiration thus, reveals his wish to be a copy through acquiring the idiosyncrasies of Holmes and in the course of the novel "it becomes clear that Banks's role as a detective is, precisely, a performance" (Matthews 84). Another feature of introducing Banks as a Sherlock is the magnifying glass they both have. As Banks tells his reader the magnifying glass was manufactured in 1887 which is the same year that Arthur Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet (Miller 483). Another date, which alludes to Doyle is July 1930: The month and year in which Banks starts writing his notebook and Arthur Conan Doyle died (Miller 484).

3 Genre Expectations

The allusions and comparison to Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective, in the introductory chapter, trigger reader's expectations of key conventions and a familiar formula distinctive to Sherlock Holmes. The reader is invited to expect the Holmesian key features of detective fiction such as “the detective's assistant, the focus on the detective process, the early encounter of the crime and the retrospective reconstruction“ (Worthington 115) as well as the by Holmes epitomized use of analytical reasoning (Sim 2010 77). Because of the strong assimilation with Sherlock Holmes, this text will in its comparison concentrate on Holmesian key features and leave out a comparison with hard-boiled detective fiction.

3.1 The Detective's Assistant

Like the Sherlock Holmes narratives, When We Were Orphans is written in the form of notebooks, but in contrast to them the author not a Dr. Watson figure. Dr. Watson, who is Holmes' assistant and chronicler of his stories, serves as an explanatory intermediate between the detective's mental process and the reader. He explains, and sometimes gets explained, background information and deductions the reader might find useful to solve the puzzling crime him- or herself. Through Dr. Watson the narrative not only gains objectivity and clarity and gets explained but also offers the reader a person to identify with outside incomprehensibly analytical mind of the detective while still inside the story. Banks lacks this companion and with him the objective intermediate that screens off Holmes' inner life from the reader. Instead of having someone else recording his cases, Banks serves as the first person narrator and only witness to his narrative which lets the reader look directly into Banks' mind and be even more critical about his reasoning and deduction. This lack of an assistant, which leads to an insight into Banks’ mind, correlates with the deformation of his identity which will be explained later.

3.2 Focus on the Detective Process

As the reader will notice, there are no scenes in which Banks' process of detection is explained or even looked at and thus When We Were Orphans fails detective formula expectations. The only person in and outside the narrative to have the opportunity of seeing the process of detection is Sarah Hemmings, to whom the mystery of Charles Emery's death gives the opportunity “to watch the great man at his work“ (32). Contrary to reader expectations of detective narrative formula, Banks never analyzes any finger- or footprints, never decodes a cypher, performs any scientific experiments or disguises himself as his role model Sherlock Holmes does. Throughout the novel, Banks does not question any possible suspects or witnesses -such as his former ama Mei Li who he had found weeping in the house after his mother had gone - about the disappearance of his parents. The only investigation he conducts in this direction is a brief conversation with Inspector Kung and later with the yellow snake alias Uncle Philip. A further unfulfilled expectation about detective narratives is the investigation of the crime scene, which in the case of finding Banks' parents would be Banks’ childhood house from which they had disappeared. Banks does not actively look for this crime scene but is brought to the house by his former schoolmate, Morgan. The dreamlike visit elicits no thought of an investigative approach towards the place in Banks. As a child, returning home from Kiukiang Road, where uncle Philip had deserted him, he noticed which doors were opened or closed and detected it as the place where “the thing“ (123) had happened. But upon revisiting the place as an investigative detective it becomes a journey into happy moments of his childhood and a homage to the relationship with his mother. The two crime scenes Banks investigates (Charles Emery's murder scene and the creaking boathouse in Shanghai) are mentioned, but again offer no insight into the detective’s deductions. One could argue that the disappearance of his parents has happened more than 20 years before Banks returns to Shanghai and therefore leaves little evidence to analyze, but this still leaves out questioning possible witnesses and Banks' own remark about cases and time. As he tells Miss Hemmings who raises an objection, concerning the elapsed time in the case of Charles Emery's death, “there are some advantages in coming to a case after some time has elapsed“ (33). When complimented as a "great man at his work" by Miss Hemmings he carefully searches her face “but [can] detect no sarcasm“ (32). This reaction further indicates his insecurity and also the suspicion that people do not acknowledge him as a detective. Banks cannot find any sarcasm on Miss Hemmings face but in a strange way it is as if Banks, who defies detective expectations, knows that there is doubt about his detective process.

3.3 The Early Encounter of the Crime

The early encounter of the crime is tightly linked to the clue-puzzle narrative, which was fostered by the Holmes stories and elaborated in the Golden-Age narratives of Agatha Christie (Worthington 115). This gives the reader the opportunity to try and "solve the puzzle by analyzing all the information and arriving at the [conclusion] before the unmasking in the denouement" takes place (Rzepka 415). In When We Were Orphans the crime to be solved happened early in the life of Christopher Banks, but the reader's encounter of the crime is stretched and spread across the narrative almost up to the denouement chapter. The reader’s knowledge about the case, though, only comes through Banks' memories and is not enhanced through facts gathered by detective work. This makes it impossible for the reader to come to any conclusion. A further key feature of Holmesian (and Golden-Age) detective fiction is thus not fulfilled either.

3.4 The Worlds Compared

"'[T]he world of Sherlock Holmes' is one in which crime is 'intriguing, […], eminently soluble [and] not an ugly social problem" (Sim 2006 229).

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