Kazuo Ishiguro in January Magazine

I already cribbed Kazuo Ishiguro's Nobel speech, so here's an interview from January Magazine. Most of the article has to do with the movie versions of his novels and book tours but since parochialism has been a concern I have raised in this blog I found this relevant:

More than a literary movement. It's to do with a big shift in the way the British thought of themselves. Because you have to remember, for a long, long time Britain thought of itself as the center of a huge empire. For a long time writers who wrote English literature felt they did not need to think consciously about whether they were international or not. They could write about the smallest details of English society and it was, by definition, of interest to people in the far corners of the world because English culture itself was something that was internationally important. So they never had to think about what if somebody in Shanghai wasn't interested in how English people went about having their dinner parties in London: Well, they damn well ought to be interested. That was the attitude because that was the dominant international culture. That was the culture that was being forced or pushed onto other cultures around the world. If you wanted to know about the world for quite a lot of the last two or three centuries, you had to know about British culture.

But that finished, you see. And I think it took a little while after the end of Second World War for the British to realize this. And then suddenly, around the time when I started to write, I think people came to this realization: We're not the center of the universe. We're just this little backwater in Europe. If we want to participate in the world, culturally speaking, we've got to find out what's happening in the rest of the world. Similarly with the literature. It's no good anymore just going on about the difference between an upper middle class Englishman and his lower middle class wife, you know. That's just purely parochialism. You've got to start looking outwards and wider and we want writers and artists who can tell us how we can fit into the rest of the world. We want news from abroad. I think it was that big shift, the basic realization that Britain wasn't the heart of an Empire, but just a little -- albeit a powerful one, still -- just a little country.

American writers now are in a not dissimilar situation to English writers of the last several hundred years. You can write the most inward-looking provincial kind of American novel, because American culture is so dominant around the world. They're writing stuff of world importance. It's easier to write things that everybody should be interested in just by describing your own knee if you're American, you can write something that's very important. The rest of us can't do that.

So I think it was something deeper than just a fashion. And I think it's reflected in many aspects of British life. Literature is just one, small bit of it. The whole attitude to what "English" means has undergone a huge change since I was a child in England. | October 2000