sunny dispositions and darkened souls
Some Thoughts on Klara and the Sun
[ contains spoilers about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun ]
According to its jacket cover, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun seeks to answer the question “what does it mean to love?”
The book’s “unforgettable narrator” is an Artificial Friend (AF) named Klara, who we first meet in a store full of AFs. Klara’s Manager, a mostly sympathetic and friendly figure, moves Klara and other AFs around the store—when Klara gets her turn in the front window of the shop, she is spotted by a girl named Josie. It is Josie and Klara’s relationship that occupies the majority of the book, and the implications of Josie’s sickness that bring to light the purported question of the book.
Josie, who is sick and at risk of dying, would leave her mother (and father) childless. Her younger sister succumbed to illness long before, but Josie is determined that she will not die.
Josie’s mother, apparently unable to cope with the loss of her only remaining daughter, employs a Mr Capaldi (or, as Melania Housekeeper refers to him, “Mr. Son Bitch”) to create a “portrait” of Josie. It seems creepy at first: Mr Capaldi does not force Josie to sit in place as he paints a portrait, but rather takes many photos of her over multiple visits.
As we and Klara discover, Mr Capaldi is gathering the details he needs to create an AF version of Josie: her exact likeness in bodily form, with an “actor” to play the part of Josie herself. Klara, so impressively observant that she is able to mimic Josie’s hobbling gait for her Mother, is to be that actor.
It is here that we begin to wonder about the meaning of love—in conversation with Klara, the Mother tells Klara that she would love her just as her own daughter. Klara, in return, merely needs to play the part of Josie. She needs to play it so well as to convince the Mother that she is indeed Josie.
While Rick, Josie’s father, seems unconvinced that such a thing could be, Mr Capaldi believes that the Mother can love Klara-Josie just as the had loved the real Josie. Functionally, she will be the same: there would be no perceivable difference in looks or behavior.
The tension we are presented with, then, is what the Mother loves when she loves Josie—perhaps it would be better expressed if we explain this without thinking of Josie as her daughter, however. Does she love Josie’s behavior, her external characteristics, or is there something internal to Josie that could not be replaced and that would be missing were Klara to fill in?
I think there are two interesting questions here, even without thinking about love:
Is Josie’s personhood something functional/external or internal?
Were Klara to fill in for Josie, but without the Mother’s knowledge, would the Mother’s love be any different?
The first question is, of course, a difficult one. Are we the people we are because of the way we act and look, or is there something more fundamental, a “soul” of sorts, that defines who we are? It seems hard to disagree that there is some ground to our actions and behaviors that is deeper than those occurrences themselves. We generally speak of ourselves as a self-identical “I,” in possession of a singular, coherent personhood. From a Cartesian viewpoint, it might indeed be a soul that endows us with this sort of self-identity. Yet, as has long been recognized (probably first by Princess Elizabeth in correspondence with Descartes), it seems difficult to account for causality between an immaterial “soul” and our material bodies (and Descartes lacks a convincing answer).
But these are all questions about an internal, “real” personhood. The personhood the book is concerned with is an external personhood, the performance of Josie to the world around her. Phrased in this way, the personhood question has much in common with the second question. In the book, the Mother is fully aware that Josie may die and that it will be Klara who is mimicking Josie’s behavior in an attempt to "be” Josie. Unless the Mother were to forget something, it seems reasonable that this knowledge could linger and interfere with her ability to truly “love” Klara-Josie. Even her belief that there is something “missing” in Klara’s rendition of Josie might render her unable to experience the same sort of feelings.
But without the knowledge of Klara’s acting, perhaps things would be different. If the Mother were totally unaware of Klara’s filling in for Josie—of course, to a great degree predicated on Klara’s ability to play the part convincingly—then the question of whether she is “the same person” doesn’t seem to matter, at least practically. If your best friend were one day, without your knowledge, replaced by an artificial person who looked and behaved precisely the same, would your relationship be different?
Importantly, would any of your feelings be any less “real?” In his upcoming book Reality 2.0 (or whatever he’s calling it currently), David Chalmers gives us many reasons to believe much of what we might encounter, do, and feel in a simulated world is “real.” A tree in a simulated world, for example, is not a Tree in the way you and I talk about it in the natural world (supposing we are not already in a simulation). But the “tree” does indeed exist: it is a digital object that plays the role of a tree in a simulated world.
In the same way, your feelings are for something like a simulation of your best friend. But those feelings exist, insofar as they correspond to particular chemical processes in your brain and you feel feely things when you have those feelings, and those feelings are towards something that looks and talks and bends and twists like your friend. If you were to later discover that your friend wasn’t “really” your friend at all but an imitation, you might be disturbed but it seems hard to doubt the genuineness of your feelings. They existed at a moment in time, informed by your knowledge at that point. There’s not much reason to revise their status.
Josie is saved in the end of Klara and the Sun and the Mother never has to contend with her ability, or inability, to love an “artificial” version of her daughter. Neither are we forced to contend with the authenticity of Klara-Josie’s status as Josie—the potential is never actualized. But perhaps that is a feature: we never experience the potential of an artist or a founder as such. That potential is always actualized by means of the work produced, the companies built, the lives lived. But Klara-as-Josie, while cognized, never becomes actual. We are left with a mere thought, un-manifested.