Seashore Essays

Whenever I make a foray into contemporary literature, I find that, although the writing itself is often easy to read, the shape these books give to the confused substance of our humanity is, on the contrary, inscrutable. Yet, curious assonances between different books can, sometimes, give us a clue, and link to each other writers who are otherwise so distant in style, theme, and culture, that associating them seems strange. Reading close in time two contemporary authors as different as Elena Ferrante and Kazuo Ishiguro, I once came across two scenes that struck me as having something in common, a sort of kinship.

The first of these scenes is not in Ferrante’s most famous novel, the series My Brilliant Friend, but in her essay ‘Frantumaglia’ (2003), which, begun as the written reply to an interview (Ferrante, wishing to keep her identity secret, does not give oral interviews), turned into a long exploration of the key themes in her fiction. In this essay, there is a section titled ‘Women’s Clothes’, where the author, whose mother was a dressmaker, examines an aspect of female identity by narrating her imaginative, conflictual relationship with clothes. In the scene I am talking about, the young Ferrante, probably an adolescent, enters her parents’ bedroom where her mother has laid out, on the double bed, the last dress she has finished sewing, freshly ironed and ready to be delivered to her client. The scene has a mysterious, uncanny quality: Ferrante tells us that her mother had forbidden her to enter, that the room is empty, and that she was then in a phase ‘when I felt sudden gusts behind me, presences at my back even when there was no one in the room, shadowy things’.¹

Suddenly, ‘a puff of air’ (which we can’t help connecting to those mysterious gusts) lifts up and crumples the skirt of the dress: the girl looks under it and finds ‘the naked body of a woman, with the legs cut off, the hands cut off, the head cut off, violet but bloodless: a body of a material without veins’ (F: 155). To the young girl, the mannequin shaping the dress looks like the body of a dead woman, and that is because, as it is explained later, clothes have a way of absorbing the qualities, smells, stories and sufferings of the women who owned them. They become like their flesh: dead when nobody is wearing them, alive again when somebody slides into them, so that for another woman to try them on means to embody a different life. But the dress’ dead look when empty and the mannequin’s mutilated body are also, paradoxically, a reflection of the living: they represent the women’s agony, the violence inflicted on them by their painful experiences.

I think that this episode has a sister scene in Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun (2021). The novel’s characters, experiences and setting – an undefined location in the United States of the future, where AI androids and biotechnologies have become ordinary – could not be more different from Ferrante’s memoir of growing up as the daughter of a dressmaker in postwar Italy. Yet there is a point where the two texts inadvertently touch each other. Klara, the narrator, is an Artificial Friend who has been purchased to be the companion of a teenage girl, Josie, who is seriously ill for having been subjected to genetic enhancement at birth, as required to be part of the society’s élite. But later Klara discovers that Josie’s mother has purchased her also for another purpose: she wants Klara to learn how to speak, move and behave exactly like Josie, so that, in case her daughter dies, she will be able to substitute her and thus ‘continue’ her life. To this end, a doll with Josie’s features (referred to as her ‘portrait’) is being manufactured by a scientist, Mr Capaldi, for Klara to inhabit after the girl’s death, and the scene I am talking about captures the moment when Klara enters the scientist’s studio and discovers the work-in-progress doll hanging from the ceiling.

The episode, like Ferrante’s description of the dress as a dead woman, has a sinister feel. Klara too enters the empty room in secret, and Josie’s artificial body, yet to be animated by Klara’s intelligence, is lifeless. Nonetheless, Ishiguro describes the doll’s expression as if it already had human feelings, as if it was indeed a living teenage girl trapped in a room, passively awaiting a dark destiny that she is unable to control or fight. ‘Little beams illuminated her from various angles, forbidding her any refuge. […] The face looked disappointed and afraid.’² In a way, the doll’s imprisonment and fragile appearance mirror the condition of the real Josie, threatened by an illness that has been brought upon her to comply to external power structures, and completely unaware of her mother’s scheme. Once again, dead matter seems to have absorbed the pains and uncertainties of the living, and its lifelessness prefigures the death, real or symbolic, of the person it is supposed to represent.

It is disturbing to read these scenes, to contemplate these objects which are dead and living at the same time. The ambivalent space they occupy speaks deeply to our subconscious fears of losing the boundaries between life and death, which is why dolls, mannequins, androids and all kinds of animated objects have long been part of the repertoire of horror fiction.³ But Ferrante and Ishiguro, who have in common the ability to flirt with pop genres for a moment, just to turn away the next, decide not to go down the horror route. They refrain from exploiting the thrilling discovery of the dress and the doll: after all, Ferrante’s memory is part of an essay, not a novel, and she has just declared that, as a girl, she was not afraid of uncanny presences; Klara, on the other hand, is an android, and how far she can actually feel emotions always remains a mystery. As if turning down the lights, Ferrante and Ishiguro let their narratives quietly drift into a meditative tone to ponder questions of identity.

The images of the dress, mannequin, and doll as inert matter waiting for life to inhabit them, and already taking on some of the features of that life, encourage us think of them as containers that need a core, a soul, to become alive. But here the two authors surprise us: the core has either become one with the shell, or there is no core at all. In ‘Frantumaglia’, Ferrante considers this in relation to women’s identity: women have been constrained into roles, into forms of outward appearance and behaviour, and bound to choose ‘between dullness and ostentation’, for so long, that they feel as if a stranger’s clothes had been sewn onto their skin. They cannot take the dress off, because it lacks buttons or zips, or because undressing means finding another dress underneath, or opening up the body ‘as if it were a bathrobe’: the living woman inside, if indeed there is one, is unreachable, untouchable, and therefore ultimately as foreign as the dress itself. ‘I suddenly understood that I was only someone else’s dress’, concludes the protagonist of one of Ferrante’s novels who, in an unpublished extract included in the essay, narrates a version of this nightmare (F: 161-67).

But the question of authenticity is not only relevant to women’s history and experience. Ishiguro shows another side of it, which concerns us all, made critical by the rapid development of AI. Is there really, inside each of us, ‘something unreachable’,  something ‘that’s unique and won’t transfer’? Is there a fundamental difference between inner and outer, soul and matter, human and non-human? There is no aspect of Josie’s individuality, however complex, that Klara won’t be able to learn and replicate. And the crucial point is, as Mr Capaldi tells Josie’s mother, that ‘The second Josie won’t be a copy. She’ll be the exact same and you’ll have every right to love her just as you love Josie now’ (KS: 233). After all, if we can only infer truth (for instance, the truth of an individual) by looking at appearances, that truth is itself an artifice. ‘Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions’,⁴ says Nietzsche – and the echo of his disbelief is now shaking the very foundations of humanity.

If these two contemporary explorations of identity had nothing more to offer than an empty dress and a hanging, work-in-progress doll, we would be left with a rather hopeless picture. Luckily, Ferrante and Ishiguro also open up a brighter view, but surprisingly, the path they indicate towards finding the authentic self is the opposite of identifying a ‘core’: it is about expansion. At the conclusion of ‘Frantumaglia’, Ferrante has no ‘definite answer’ to the question of how one arrives ‘at the body beyond the clothes’. Instead, she ends by describing her mother, the dressmaker, at the moment when she always seemed to her most beautiful, no longer constrained by expectations, but ‘a woman in tranquil expansion’. She depicts her while engaged in her work, when ‘she dreamed of salvific clothes, and drawing needle and thread straight she sewed together again and again the pieces of her fabrics’ (F: 168).

For Ishiguro, the self spreads by weaving relationships: these form the pattern that makes every individual irreplaceable. In the novel, it is Klara who realises it: ‘There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her’ (KS: 338). Searching for an inner core is misleading, for to find the key to a person’s uniqueness one must look around them. I find this view of the self as something undefined that seeks expansion, through creativity, through connections, very comforting and promising, perhaps more than one which succeeds at offering its truth. Because a ‘core’ can be fixed, used, manipulated, replicated, pressured, even technologically improved, according to various and often cruel social standards. A radiating energy, a growing branch, cannot.

1. Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, trans. by Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2016), p. 154. All quotations and references to the essay ‘Frantumaglia’ are based on this edition, from now on abbreviated as F. ↩︎
2. Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (London: Faber & Faber, 2021), p. 226. From now on abbreviated as KS. ↩︎
3. Sandra Mills, ‘Discussing Dolls: Horror and the Human Double’, in The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, ed. by K. Corstorphine and R. Kremmel (Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2018), pp. 249-55. ↩︎
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Truth: Engagements Across Philosophical Traditions, ed. by David Wood and José Medina (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), pp. 14-24 (p. 17). ↩︎