ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some of the modes though which the past is represented in contemporary fiction. K. Ishiguro was criticised for his choice of a fable. But the novel’s engagement with the past relies less on the fabulous and more on thinking the past as fable: this gives access to a range of complexities and difficulties about the past. The novel expresses Viet Thanh Nguyen’s demand that both sides remember the humanity and inhumanity of the other. For Nguyen, the liberal register, like the conservative, is conducive to war, whereas the radical is the source of most anti-war feeling. The chapter suggests that the past has grown simultaneously more important – as trauma, as possession, as memory, as shaping force, for example – and at the same time become much harder to control or understand. The forms of narrative – say, written history or historical fiction – which staked a claim to this control now seem unsatisfactory.
