Solar Attunement and Emergent Vitality as Other-than-Human Agency in Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021): A Bennettian Vital Materialist Analysis

Abstract

The novel Klara and the Sun (2021), by Kazuo Ishiguro, has been much talked about in the context of artificial intelligence consciousness, human identity, and the ethics of substitution. This article suggests that the most important and under-considered aspect of the novel is the materiality of the sun as an entity with its own life—one that is more than metaphoric and theological. The article adopts Catherine Belsey's (2005) textual analysis as its research method, as it is a method that emphasizes the agency of the object, and takes its theoretical framework cue from Bennett's (2010) Vital materialism, particularly, that is, Bennett's idea of Thing Power, the capacity of nonhuman matter to affect, act, and generate effects in the world. The article shows that the solar relationship becomes a fully realized model of other-than-human agency in the novel in three ways: first, as a material source of Klara's specific photovoltaic intelligence; second, as the genuine contractual partner in Klara's exchange on her barn's side; and third, as a direct material agent of Josie's recovery during the dark sky morning episode. The results reveal Klara's solar attunement to be materially grounded and irreducibly specific, which accounts for Capaldi's failed substitution programme; that the barn episode is a true Baradian intra-action that has real effects in both parties; and that the Yard's final image is the flattest ontological statement in contemporary AI fiction. The article offers an original systematic vital materialist reading of the novel's solar dimension, thus enriching posthumanist studies of AI fiction and proving the effectiveness of Thing Power as an analytical tool for literary fiction in the present day.