Affective Governance and The Management of Human Feelings in The Selected Works of Kazuo Ishiguro

Abstract

This paper explores the works of affective governance in a small collection of novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, namely, Never Let Me Go, The Remains of the Day, and An Artist of the Floating World. Based on theoretical perspectives of governmentality and affect studies, the paper argues that in the fiction by Ishiguro, institutions influence not only the corporal bodies but also the space of emotional experience. Using narrative methods of memory, restraint, and self-surveillance, characters internalize power structures and, therefore, become complicit in their own governance. In Never Let Me Go, biopolitical power is exercised through hope and resignation mechanisms, whereas in The Remains of the Day, professional dignity is used to tame personal emotion, and in An Artist of the Floating World, collective national memory reconstructs the meaning of shame and pride. In this paper, it is hypothesized that Ishiguro develops a framework of silent authoritarianism where emotional tamening is used to curb dissent, hence bringing to light the finesse of political regulation of human emotion in modern times.