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“Many Strange Tongues” in the Fenlands: The Buried Giant as Brexit Allegory?

Richard Robinson Orcid Logo

English Studies, Volume: 103, Issue: 7, Pages: 1 - 20

Swansea University Author: Richard Robinson Orcid Logo

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DOI (Published version): 10.1080/0013838X.2022.2150941

Abstract

The Buried Giant is now established as an uncanny precursor of an emerging ‘Brexlit’ canon. However, Ishiguro’s long-held interest in how nations other than Britain forget, remember and memorialise their pasts, together with his response to civil conflict and resolution in the 1990s, should modify o...

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Published in: English Studies
ISSN: 0013-838X 1744-4217
Published: Informa UK Limited 2023
Online Access: Check full text

URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa61930
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first_indexed 2022-11-22T17:43:53Z
last_indexed 2023-01-21T04:11:51Z
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spelling v2 61930 2022-11-15 “Many Strange Tongues” in the Fenlands: The Buried Giant as Brexit Allegory? dd0360f678f81621c96a94dae0e1c2b3 0000-0003-2097-1931 Richard Robinson Richard Robinson true false 2022-11-15 AELC The Buried Giant is now established as an uncanny precursor of an emerging ‘Brexlit’ canon. However, Ishiguro’s long-held interest in how nations other than Britain forget, remember and memorialise their pasts, together with his response to civil conflict and resolution in the 1990s, should modify overly ‘presentist’ Brexit interpretations. Integrating Giorgio Agamben’s work on the Greek idea of stasis as civil war, I argue that The Buried Giant tests the ethical limits of amnesty, revealing both the culpability of national amnesia and injurious wielding of reawakened collective memory. The essay then turns to allegory and allegoresis, considering the novel’s refusal of the dystopian mode, despite that genre’s concern with the state’s nullification of memory. In the end, TBG frustrates a point-by-point allegorical decoding of its ancient Britons and Saxons. Acknowledging the historical continuity between the 1990s and the post-Brexit present, I argue for a political unconscious in the text which, in taking us to a ‘pre-posterous’ place before England was, is timely in its untimeliness. If the novel is to be read as Brexit allegory, this must be to understand Brexit less as a singular, aberrant crisis and more as a contraction within the longue durée. Journal Article English Studies 103 7 1 20 Informa UK Limited 0013-838X 1744-4217 Kazuo Ishiguro; twentieth-century Britishfiction;twenty-first century Britishfiction; crisis; Brexit; allegory; dystopia 9 1 2023 2023-01-09 10.1080/0013838X.2022.2150941 COLLEGE NANME English Literature COLLEGE CODE AELC Swansea University SU Library paid the OA fee (TA Institutional Deal) 2023-12-22T11:14:48.6209321 2022-11-15T21:02:32.9071865 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences School of Culture and Communication - English Literature, Creative Writing Richard Robinson 0000-0003-2097-1931 1 61930__26347__8635684b89c74277b2556b2f2187b116.pdf 61930.pdf 2023-01-20T14:56:01.3373892 Output 1716254 application/pdf Version of Record true © 2023 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License true eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
title “Many Strange Tongues” in the Fenlands: The Buried Giant as Brexit Allegory?
spellingShingle “Many Strange Tongues” in the Fenlands: The Buried Giant as Brexit Allegory?
Richard Robinson
title_short “Many Strange Tongues” in the Fenlands: The Buried Giant as Brexit Allegory?
title_full “Many Strange Tongues” in the Fenlands: The Buried Giant as Brexit Allegory?
title_fullStr “Many Strange Tongues” in the Fenlands: The Buried Giant as Brexit Allegory?
title_full_unstemmed “Many Strange Tongues” in the Fenlands: The Buried Giant as Brexit Allegory?
title_sort “Many Strange Tongues” in the Fenlands: The Buried Giant as Brexit Allegory?
author_id_str_mv dd0360f678f81621c96a94dae0e1c2b3
author_id_fullname_str_mv dd0360f678f81621c96a94dae0e1c2b3_***_Richard Robinson
author Richard Robinson
author2 Richard Robinson
format Journal article
container_title English Studies
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publishDate 2023
institution Swansea University
issn 0013-838X
1744-4217
doi_str_mv 10.1080/0013838X.2022.2150941
publisher Informa UK Limited
college_str Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
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department_str School of Culture and Communication - English Literature, Creative Writing{{{_:::_}}}Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences{{{_:::_}}}School of Culture and Communication - English Literature, Creative Writing
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description The Buried Giant is now established as an uncanny precursor of an emerging ‘Brexlit’ canon. However, Ishiguro’s long-held interest in how nations other than Britain forget, remember and memorialise their pasts, together with his response to civil conflict and resolution in the 1990s, should modify overly ‘presentist’ Brexit interpretations. Integrating Giorgio Agamben’s work on the Greek idea of stasis as civil war, I argue that The Buried Giant tests the ethical limits of amnesty, revealing both the culpability of national amnesia and injurious wielding of reawakened collective memory. The essay then turns to allegory and allegoresis, considering the novel’s refusal of the dystopian mode, despite that genre’s concern with the state’s nullification of memory. In the end, TBG frustrates a point-by-point allegorical decoding of its ancient Britons and Saxons. Acknowledging the historical continuity between the 1990s and the post-Brexit present, I argue for a political unconscious in the text which, in taking us to a ‘pre-posterous’ place before England was, is timely in its untimeliness. If the novel is to be read as Brexit allegory, this must be to understand Brexit less as a singular, aberrant crisis and more as a contraction within the longue durée.
published_date 2023-01-09T11:14:49Z
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