Disillusionment at the Caffè Florian: Ishiguro's "Cellists" and the Destruction of Experience

Abstract

This paper examines what Agamben calls the “destruction of experience”—the downgrading of lived experience as truth in favor of empirical knowledge in the modern world—as it manifests itself in Kazuo Ishiguro’s short story Cellists, the final piece in his collection Nocturnes (2009). The first half of the paper examines how the narrative situates Tibor, the story’s main character, within a complex set of symbols that reflect on the question of experience and repetition. Through the theoretical angle supplied by Agamben, I look at how the diminished status of lived experience in Cellists repeats familiar patterns from Ishiguro’s other fiction, in particular his use of unreliable narrators and the ruthless utilitarianism of many of his American characters. The second half of the paper contemplates how this attitude produces a mood of disillusionment that is drawn, in particular, from the story’s setting in the Caffè Florian in Venice, with Ishiguro borrowing this sentiment from a long tradition that includes Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, Honoré de Balzac’s Massimilla Doni, and Thomas Mann’s short story Disillusionment. By examining Ishiguro’s short story in the context of these three texts, the paper looks at how Florian’s has functioned repeatedly in the literary imagination as a site of reflection on the nature of experience and disillusionment.