石黑一雄《克拉拉与太阳》能教我们什么关于关怀的事

一部小说为何在此刻成为镜子

石黑一雄2021年的小说《克拉拉与太阳》里，女孩乔西患有一种未说明的疾病，她的姐姐萨尔已死于同一种病，可能与名为“提升”的择性基因改造手术有关。母亲买下人工智能朋友克拉拉陪伴乔西，其中也隐含着缓解自身愧疚的意味。作者重读后感到，这部小说的反乌托邦世界与当下现实的距离正在迅速缩小：电影改编版本周五10月23日上映，人工智能也突然遍布日常生活，于是小说被重新摆成一面镜子。

用机器人的眼睛看人类

故事由克拉拉叙述。石黑一雄把读者放在克拉拉的视角里，绕开了她是否有意识的问题，转而让读者把自己的意识投射到她身上，透过她有时出故障的机器眼观看人类世界。她不作评判地传达那些有缺陷、有时绝望的人类行为。作者举出一个场景：克拉拉看见母亲与乔西在床上相拥，乔西说不想死，母亲只是轻声说“没事的”。此前一直是克拉拉以始终在场的方式安慰乔西，但乔西呼唤的仍是有过紧张关系的母亲。

先照护，才有爱

作者结合自己初为人母的经验，谈到孩子出生后自己仿佛绕着一颗新太阳运转。若克拉拉去查心理学研究，会看到温尼科特的“足够好的母亲”、亲子之间很少完美同步的研究，以及照护中破裂与修复本身强化依恋的证据。作者提到Edward Tronick的“静止脸”实验等研究，认为照护者与孩子之间不完美的互动为韧性与情绪调节打下基础。发展心理学家、哲学家Alison Gopnik在《哲学婴儿》中写道，与其说我们因为爱孩子才照护他们，不如说我们因为照护他们才爱他们。作者称，除Gopnik自己的研究外，还有大量数据支持这一点，例如在同性伴侣中不承担怀孕的一方、作为主要照护者的父亲，其大脑区域出现与怀孕女性相似的变化。

This essay contains mild spoilers for the novel Klara and the Sun.

The baby, my baby, was to be named Josie. Josie Joy.

But when she was born, she was decidedly not a Josie. The name was too soft, too ethereal for such a sentient, wide-awake, bird-like baby. I knew that I had to find a new name. Who are you? I whispered into the swirls of her astoundingly warm, circulated, and singularly perfect ear. I couldn’t wait to get to know her.

In another story, a girl named Josie is dying. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun, Josie has an unknown illness and a prognosis that haunts the pages. Her life exists in the shadow of her sister, Sal, who has already died of the same unarticulated illness, likely caused by an elective genetic alteration procedure known as “lifting.”

In Josie’s world, being lifted is the new social currency; those who are lifted are expected to have greater access to both intellectual and economic success. The procedure does not, however, come without risk. When we meet Josie’s mother, she is tasked with the impossible: coping with the impending death of her only remaining child. A death likely resulting from a choice she made as a parent. The ultimate consequence.

Klara is a robot purchased by Josie’s mom to be her companion, in part (it is implied) to assuage the guilt she feels. I first read Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun shortly after its debut. Despite being disturbed by some aspects of the dystopian world depicted within, my memory of the novel was poignant. I recalled Klara with particular affection.

Now, the distance between Ishiguro’s dystopian world and our current reality is rapidly collapsing. With the much anticipated film adaptation set to be released this Friday, October 23, and the sudden ubiquity of artificial intelligence in our day-to-day lives, Klara and the Sun is now repositioned as a mirror. If we look closely enough, we might discern what remains uniquely human during this moment of profound technological and social change.

Care through other eyes

We are introduced to Klara, the story’s narrator, when Josie’s mom takes her to find an artificial friend, or AF for short. In the novel, AFs confer social standing, but also offer practical assistance—tutoring, companionship, monitoring an ailing child—not unlike the benefits purported by artificial intelligence companies today.

Klara has been patiently waiting, alongside several other AFs, to be chosen. Josie’s mother is the final decider. In a foreboding scene, Josie’s mother commands Klara to reenact Josie’s gait—a test, of sorts—before agreeing to purchase her. It’s the precision of Klara’s mimicry that convinces “the Mother” (as she’s called in the novel) that Klara is the right model for Josie.

All of this, we learn through Klara. Ishiguro’s choice to position the reader within Klara’s perspective allows us to bypass the quagmire question of whether or not Klara is conscious and instead project our own consciousness onto her. In doing so, we view the human world through her sometimes malfunctioning robot eyes, as she nonjudgmentally conveys the complexities of the very flawed and sometimes desperate human behaviors she seeks to understand. In one particularly moving scene, Klara witnesses the vulnerability of caring for another human being:

I saw before me, on the near edge of the bed, a large shifting shape, made additionally complex by the patches of blackness and moonlight moving over its surface. I realized the shape was the Mother and Josie embracing. . . . As well as their limbs, their hair had become mingled, and then their shape began gently to rock, in a way not unlike when their goodbyes became extended.

“Don’t want to die, Mom. I don’t want that.”

“It’s okay. Okay.” The Mother’s voice was soft, at just the same level mine had been.

“I don’t want that, Mom.”

“I know. I know. It’s okay.”

Prior to this moment, Klara—steadfast and ever-available—had offered her presence to comfort Josie. Yet, despite their far more complicated and at times strained relationship, it is the Mother that Josie calls for.

Care creates love

When I first became a parent, I confided to a friend that when my not-Josie was born, I felt like a new sun had burst into my solar system, and I was now orbiting around her. I couldn’t quite articulate the “before,” in my metaphor. I didn’t feel like I was previously my own sun, nor did I feel like I was a planet untethered to others. But there was something distinctly different when she arrived, a whole new consciousness, a space and force and awareness created within me. Her pull was intoxicating, undeniable, sometimes terrifying, and my awareness and attention seemed to expand overnight to now include not only my own experiences, but also to track, perceive, anticipate, and accommodate her own.

If Klara had turned to psychological theory and research about the complexity of parent-child bonds, she would have found a great deal of it. Consider Winnicott’s “good-enough mother” or research indicating that parents and infants are rarely, if ever, perfectly attuned, and the growing body of evidence suggesting that the navigation of the ruptures and repairs themselves reinforce attachment. It has become increasingly clear through evolving applications of experiments such as Edward Tronick’s now famous “still-face” experiment that the imperfect dance between caregiver and child lays the groundwork for resilience and emotional regulation.

In The Philosophical Baby, developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik says, “It’s not so much that we care for children because we love them, as that we love them because we care for them.”

We love them because we care for them.

Beyond Gopnik’s own research, there is an abundance of data to back this up. Studies I have long been familiar with, such as those demonstrating that in same-sex, non-carrying male couples, fathers who act as primary parents show changes in similar brain regions to women who carried their pregnancies and go on to parent their children. Yet, there was something profound about the simplicity of Gopnik’s statement, about love being something we cultivate within ourselves and, more precisely, about care being the means through which we build love, not merely a necessary byproduct.

In a separate interview, Gopnik jokes that spending time with a three-year-old gives you a small taste of sainthood. Not in the sense that the demands are so extreme that you inherently become a saint (though there is a real argument to be made here for any parent who weathers the storm of a parking lot tantrum), but in the actual felt-sense of the divine, the experience of feeling so acutely and utterly in love with this being, so in awe of their singularity, their specialness, their openness to experience, their brilliance.

Gopnik continues on, teasing, about our tendency to claim the uniqueness of our three-year-old, in her case her grandchild, but gently affirms the truth beneath: that there is something numinous, universal, pure within all three-year-olds, a near-magical vitality that we sometimes make contact with when we intimately care for one. Something primal, or perhaps primary, is awoken when we re-experience the world through the eyes of a three-year-old.

Care and distance

My not-Josie is now three. In many ways she is more unknowable, separate, than she was when she was a newborn, so physically attached and dependent on me. Now, she has her own relationships—with teachers, classmates, family members—that are entirely her own. And yet, she occupies and orients so much of me, continually changing my experience of the world, my access to play, to awe, to unadulterated, intoxicating adoration. 

This past summer, I was sitting by a lake, relaxed but hawk-eyed as I watched my not-Josie from the shore. I felt a familiar presence by my side, the barely-perceptible shadow in my peripheral vision of a small body sitting down, and soon thereafter, the unselfconscious weight of a small hand on my leg. I looked down to see a head covered in feathery blonde hair, not the dark, curly brown of my own child.

The wispy tufts belonged to another small child who had clearly mistaken me for her mother. In that brief moment before she looked up, before we both acknowledged our separateness, I felt overcome with the awareness—as though received through the touch of her hand on my leg—that her mother loved her in the way that I love my child, and that, despite how unbelievably special my not-Josie is, my love for her is not. It is precious, but also universal.

Intellectually, of course, this is not a profound realization. Emotionally touching into it is, on the other hand, equally as brutal as it is beautiful. Next to this small child, healthy and safe, I felt her preciousness, but also that of all the children flooding my news feed every day who are not healthy and safe, and whose parents must live with this love and that devastation.

Care and consciousness

On the back cover, Klara and the Sun is described as a story about love, which it undeniably is. But I think it’s perhaps more fundamentally about care.

Care is arguably more tangible than love, but also more complex, friction-prone, messy. It’s the gaps, the mistakes, the harms, the repairs, the precarity, the forgiving, that make care so deeply painful and so deeply nourishing. Nourishing enough to sustain the vulnerability of love.

It is care that drives Josie’s mother to have her “lifted” in an age-old attempt of desperation to give her child what she perceives as the best chance at a full life in a rapidly reorganizing world. It is care that sends the Mother down the path of trying to find a way to have Klara “continue” Josie’s life, even though she has already tried and failed to recreate her first child’s consciousness in an artificial intelligence through the work of an artist and scientist named Capaldi.

It is care that allows the Mother—despite her cold exterior—to fearlessly comfort her child as she confronts the possibility of her own death, enveloping her, rocking her, soothing her through the unimaginable. It is the Mother’s human care, not her cowardice, that makes her love true.

There is so much in Klara and the Sun that is undeniably relevant in this particular social, cultural, and technological moment, so many ways in which Ishiguro’s Josie and my not-Josie’s world are suddenly uncomfortably proximate, but it is what Klara herself affirms about humanity that is most resonant.

At the end of the novel, Klara reflects on what she’s learned. She did not have to become a Josie 2.0, for Josie survived. Klara is glad for this, of course, believing that it was her bargain with the Sun (which she sees as a kind of god) that saved Josie. Sitting discarded in a junk yard, Klara is increasingly convinced that the desperate plan to turn Josie into a digital consciousness wouldn’t have worked:

Mr. Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr. Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn’t have succeeded.

It is what happens within us and between us when we care for another being that differentiates us as humans. In other words, it’s not so much what’s there but what’s not there—the space between the person in front of us and how we perceive, imperfectly care for, and ultimately love them—that makes us human.

Through Klara’s eyes, I was able to see more clearly what connects the Mother and her Josie to me and my not-Josie. It is the very fact that we can so wholeheartedly love another being, without being them, having them, solving them, knowing every bit of them. It is the fact that still, we carry them in our hearts, and somehow we are not heavier for it.