„WHEN WE WERE NEW“: (PRIVRŽENO) PREDAVANjE O JEDNOJ KLAUZI KAZUA IŠIGURA

Abstract

The paper proposes a formalist reading of the initial clause of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun contextualized by an approach leaning on “evocative impressionism”, broadly corresponding with declamatory procedures which Paul Frye has labeled “appreciative teaching”. Aiming to address both the “texture” and the “structure”, the reading probes minutia of the functioning of the aforementioned initial clause in terms of its phonetics, semantics, as well as its intertextual and metafictional references. The resulting interpretation offers to see the clause as relatively self-sufficient and self-referential; not only can the clause be shown to refer to itself, its own past and future instances, but also to be „doubly directed” flowing toward the rest of the novel, but also back toward itself, as if doubling back challenged by the “tidal bore” of the remaining text. As such, the phrase is further discussed as a structural building block, a form of refrain, almost verse-like, which, however, occurs in a form of “decremental repetition” – fading away as it recurs, as if in the guise of an echo growing ever less frequent and ever more distant, finally becoming a kind of “phantom presence” of the concluding pages of the novel from which, as it turns out, it begins, and in which it reaches its end.