10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 m arioN g ymNich The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 1 Introduction: Literary Representations of Old Age In recent decades, it has become widely acknowledged that we live in an ‘aging society ’ “According to the United Nations, the global population of those 65 and older is expected to triple to 1.5 billion by 2050 with, for the first time, people 65 and over outnumbering children under age 5,” as Carole B Cox points out 1 This momentous demographic shift tends to be discussed primarily in the context of “challenges with regard to employment, health, retirement, families, and the economy” 2 and has given rise to a large number of studies exploring the implications this development may have for fields ranging from health care to architecture Though there are numerous very practical issues that need to be addressed in an aging society, the question of how both old age and the process of aging are perceived across different age groups is of equal importance It is especially in this context that literature turns out to be relevant, for individuals as well as, hopefully, for wider public discourses about aging Literary works may provide insights into how old age and the process of aging were conceived of in the past. Moreover, contemporary fiction may often be related to how old age is currently being re-configured in the light of increasing knowledge about physical and cognitive changes that accompany the process of growing old Since the 1990s, when Anne M Wyatt-Brown and others coined the term ‘literary gerontology’ to refer to approaches that seek to link gerontology and literary studies, 3 this field has grown, but it arguably has not become as visible as one might expect 4 The reluctance on the part of literary scholars to embrace literary gerontology might partially be due to the 1 Carole B Cox, Social Policy for an Aging Society: A Human Rights Perspective (New York: Springer, 2015), ix 2 Ibid 3 Anne M Wyatt-Brown, “The Coming of Age of Literary Gerontology,” Journal of Aging Studies 4 3 (1990), 299-315 4 The contributions in the following two volumes provide good examples of what literary gerontology may look like: Christa Jansohn, ed , Old Age and Ageing in British and American Culture and Literature (Münster: LIT, 2004); and Katharina Boehm/ Anna Farkas/ Anne-Julia Zwierlein, eds , Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging in Nineteenth-Century Culture (New York/ Abingdon: Routledge, 2014) 202 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 scarcity of representations of old age that go beyond reiterating clichés More often than not, literary texts prove to be ageist by relegating old characters to the periphery of the plot or by exploiting their physical or cognitive shortcomings for comic effects Ever since antiquity, representations of old age have often been informed by stereotypes, perpetuating stock characters like the senex amans and the grotesque old woman 5 as well as the (more positive, but no less stereotypical) image of the wise old man or woman While such conventional depictions of old age are hardly conducive to furthering an understanding of the actual experience of aging, there are also more nuanced representations of old and very old characters in literary texts, which are apt to foster a discussion of what aging means for the individual and for his or her environment, even if, as pointed out above, this type of text is comparatively rare In a cultural context that is (rightly) preoccupied with the representation of groups that have traditionally been marginalised or misrepresented in literature and popular culture, it is striking that the depiction of elderly people so far appears to have played at best a marginal role in the increasingly heated debates about the politics of representation On the whole, it is the process of growing up rather than that of growing old that seems to have captured writers’ and readers’ interest in the last few decades, as Katherina Dodou points out: “The period since the 1970s has […] seen an intense novelistic preoccupation with the child Indeed, in the past few decades, childhood has become established as one of the major themes in the contemporary British novel ” 6 The number of literary texts focusing on children and portraying childhood as an important stage in human life is legion Cases in point include Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996), Nick Hornby’s About a Boy (1998), Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (2000), Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), and Fiona Mozley’s Elmet (2017) Even novels that feature elderly narrators, such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011), often focus on memories of childhood and adolescence for a considerable part of the story This fascination with youth coincides with the emergence of what appears 5 This concept is discussed by Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (New York/ London: Routledge, 1994) 6 Katherina Dodou, “Examining the Idea of Childhood: The Child in the Contemporary British Novel,” The Child in British Literature: Literary Constructions of Childhood, Medieval to Contemporary, ed Adrienne E Gavin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 238 On the current popularity of the theme of childhood in literature see also Sandra Dinter, Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel (New York/ Abingdon: Routledge, 2019) The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 203 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 to be a second ‘golden age’ of children’s literature in the mid-1990s, when enormously successful children’s novels such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000) and the first volumes of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007) were published A further development that provides evidence of the focus on youth in Anglophone literature is the growing importance of young adult fiction as a segment of literature in its own right, a development that has been fuelled by the international success of texts such as Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy (2008-2010) and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga (2005-2007) The phenomenon of children’s novels like the ones mentioned above turning into what has come to be called ‘all-ages’ or ‘crossover’ fiction proves that literary texts may also be appreciated by a readership that is significantly older than the original target group Elderly readers may enjoy depictions of childhood and adolescence for all sorts of reasons, including, but by no means limited to, the feeling of nostalgia for their own youth and/ or for the time when their children were young According to Vera Nünning, “[o]ne of the most important affective consequences of reading fiction is related to the activation of emotional memories on the part of the readers ” 7 Revisiting a range of emotions, experiences, and ways of seeing the world that are deemed typical of childhood through the lens of fictional depictions of young protagonists may help readers create a sense of continuity with regard to their own life narratives Literature focusing on childhood does not necessarily exclude representations of old age; in fact, children’s fiction has brought forth some truly iconic elderly characters, including the wise wizard Dumbledore in J K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, the grumpy Earl of Dorincourt in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), and Charlie Bucket’s grandparents in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) Yet, upon closer scrutiny, the functions of characters like the ones just mentioned within the respective narratives typically turn out to be determined by the young protagonists’ needs and goals In other words, the main function of many elderly characters in children’s literature seems to be that of supporting the young protagonists in various ways, for instance by offering them advice or by providing comfort and moral support Due to its focus on young characters, children’s literature may sometimes even create the impression that elderly characters have hardly any interests and motivations beyond those directly related in 7 Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 124 204 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 some way to the young protagonist(s) 8 Many elderly characters in children’s literature (and beyond) are portrayed in a manner that seems to imply that being old is almost synonymous with adopting the role of a grandparent or grandparent-like figure. Given the fact that investing a lot of effort in one’s role as a grandparent tends to be widely approved in today’s society, literary depictions of elderly people who are first and foremost grandparents reiterate a cultural norm and at the same time forestall a more complex understanding of what old age may mean, especially as long as grandparents are frequently represented in a highly stereotypical, reductive fashion across different media 9 The present article starts from the assumption that literature may play a vital role in cultural negotiations of old age and aging by creating a deeper understanding of and empathy for the situation of elderly people “As people age, they are vulnerable to increasing dependency, frailty, and discrimination by societies”, 10 and literature may, on the one hand, contribute to raising an awareness of the various physical, cognitive, and emotional challenges associated with old age On the other hand, literary texts may serve as a reminder that agency, mobility, and independence should not be regarded as the privilege of younger generations Neither should it be a foregone conclusion that well-being and old age are mutually exclusive Literary texts about old age may also help to combat fears concerning the process of aging Since “old age and ageing is not simply a fixed biological or chronological process but a complex cultural and social phenomenon,” as Christa Jansohn observes, 11 a comparison of literary representations of elderly characters from different pe- 8 A lack of all other interests apart from spending time with the grandchild is, for instance, ascribed to Charlie’s grandparents in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964; London: Penguin, 2013), 19: “Every one of these old people was over ninety They were as shrivelled as prunes, and as bony as skeletons, and throughout the day, until Charlie made his appearance, they lay huddled in their one bed, two at either end, with nightcaps on to keep their heads warm, dozing the time away with nothing to do But as soon as they heard the door opening, and heard Charlie’s voice saying, ‘Good evening, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine, and Grandpa George and Grandma Georgina,’ then all four of them would suddenly sit up, and their old wrinkled faces would light up with smiles of pleasure - and the talking would begin For they loved this little boy He was the only bright thing in their lives, and his evening visits were something that they looked forward to all day long ” 9 For a critical exploration of the role and image of grandparents, see Ursula A Falk/ Gerhard Falk, Grandparents: A New Look at the Supporting Generation (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002) 10 Cox, Social Policy for an Aging Society, 10 11 Christa Jansohn, “Introduction,” Old Age and Ageing in British and American Culture and Literature, ed ead (Münster: LIT, 2004), 2 The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 205 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 riods promises to reveal recurring patterns as well as changes in cultural conceptualisations of old age In the following, I will juxtapose representations of old age in four well-known novels from the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries, i e , from two centuries that share a widespread fascination with childhood, while tending to marginalise old age: Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015) 2 Representations of Old Age in Selected Nineteenth-Century Novels: Jane Austen’s Emma and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations In demographic terms, the society in nineteenth-century Britain differed from that in the twenty-first century in so far as “the percentage of older people among the population was less pronounced” 12 than it is today In this context, childhood increasingly came to be seen as a unique stage of human development, “an idealized life quite apart from the corruptions of adulthood, and for that very reason, childhood and children represented an ideal to strive for, and to protect ” 13 Though the idealisation of childhood has its roots in the eighteenth century, this attitude intensified in the course of the nineteenth century, as Claudia Nelson points out: even while we concede that the Victorians inherited from older generations their interest in childhood, and some of their ideas about it, we may legitimately contend that Victorian conceptions of childrearing, of the state of being a child, and of the emotional importance of children to a society dominated by adults took on such weight as to represent something new in Western history Never before had childhood become an obsession within the culture at large - yet in this case ‘obsession’ is not too strong a word 14 Thus, it comes as no particular surprise that nineteenth-century novels are replete with portrayals of childhood and have arguably brought forth some of the most memorable child protagonists in Anglophone literature, including Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff (in Wuthering Heights), 12 Katharina Boehm/ Anna Farkas/ Anne-Julia Zwierlein, “Introduction,” Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging in Nineteenth-Century Culture, eds eaed (New York/ Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 1 13 Lewis C Roberts, “Children’s Fiction,” A Companion to the Victorian Novel, eds Patrick Brantlinger/ William B Thesing (Malden, MA/ Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 354 14 Claudia Nelson, “Growing Up: Childhood,” A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed Herbert F Tucker (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 69 206 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Mowgli, Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre In contrast to the long list of well-known young characters, there are comparatively few iconic elderly characters in nineteenth-century novels For the most part, elderly characters appear in minor roles, being typically neither particularly important for the plot nor especially memorable, unless they happen to be singled out by their quirks and eccentricities What tends to be missing in many literary works from the nineteenth century is a thorough exploration of elderly characters’ emotions, thoughts, and motivations Jane Austen’s Emma features two characters that prove to be very interesting from the point of view of literary gerontology One of these is Mrs Bates, who is introduced as “the widow of a former vicar of Highbury, […] a very old lady, almost past every thing but tea and quadrille” 15 and who is portrayed both implicitly and explicitly as a “harmless old lady” (51) throughout the novel She appears to be a singularly unassuming character who is hardly ever shown to even engage in a conversation, which may to some extent be accounted for by her being described as hard of hearing Arguably, the remarkable reticence of Mrs Bates is the key to what appears to be her main function in the overall design of the character constellation in Emma: Mrs Bates’s persistent silence throws into sharp relief her daughter’s garrulousness In fact, the only time Mrs Bates is shown to speak in the course of the novel is when Emma visits the Bateses after the Box Hill incident and neither Miss Bates nor Jane Fairfax are keen on seeing their guest Mrs Bates is quite ill at ease when left alone with Emma: Poor old Mrs Bates, civil and humble as usual, looked as if she did not quite understand what was going on ‘I am afraid Jane is not very well,’ she said, ‘but I do not know; they tell me she is well I dare say my daughter will be here presently, Miss Woodhouse. I hope you find a chair. I wish Hetty had not gone. I am very little able - Have you a chair, ma’am? Do you sit where you like? I am sure she will be here presently ’ (371) The unease felt by the old woman when politeness requires her to talk to her young guest is captured quite vividly in these few lines Due to its almost mimetic quality, this short passage of direct speech may perhaps even trigger a brief moment of empathy for the character For the most part, though, Mrs Bates remains too much in the background to evoke much empathy Time and again, it is made clear that Mrs Bates has little agency and relies on her 15 Jane Austen, Emma (1816; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 51 Subsequent quotations from this novel are referenced in parentheses in the text The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 207 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 daughter to take the lead Still, despite a certain tendency to marginalise the old widow, it is also apparent that Mrs Bates is systematically included in activities of her social circle; she has visitors, and there appears to be a general consensus that she must be treated with respect The elderly woman, thus, is part of a social network that is interested in her well-being Another elderly character in Emma who is treated respectfully despite displaying a number of quirks is the title character’s father, Mr Woodhouse Though his age is not specified, he is explicitly referred to as an “old man” (295) by the heterodiegetic narrator While Mr Woodhouse might be interpreted as a hypochondriac due to his demeanour, Margaret Morganroth Gullette argues that he shows symptoms of dementia: His limited repertory of subjects, his nervousness about going out or being left alone, his craving for the familiar, his ready depressions and fear of having changes made in his routine are among many signs, scattered here and there, of the anxiety that apparently Austen knew can accompany serious cognitive impairment 16 Even more than Mrs Bates, Mr Woodhouse is part of a social network that provides him with a certain amount of pleasure; despite “his horror of late house and large dinner-parties” (51), he is “fond of society in his own way” (51) and enjoys being visited by old friends Notwithstanding some comments that would certainly be thought of as inappropriate if they were uttered by someone else (e g asking Jane Fairfax whether she has changed her stockings after having been out in the rain, 295), he endears himself to his acquaintances as well as to the readers by being “kind-hearted” (295) and always “polite” (295) and by worrying as much about others’ health and comfort as about his own According to Gullette, the depiction of Mr Woodhouse as a likeable character combined with the respectful way in which he is treated by most other characters despite his eccentricity may help readers to “get past some of the ignorance, misinformation, and terror the blanket diagnosis [of Alzheimer’s/ dementia] has inspired ” 17 Even if he worries a lot and is dependent on others (most of all his daughter), Mr Woodhouse all in all seems to have a quite pleasant life In Emma, old age is thus presented as a stage in life that makes the characters dependent on others, but that may still be enjoyed due to the existence of a supportive social network that goes beyond the immediate family 16 Margaret Morganroth Gullette, “Annals of Caregiving: Does Emma Woodhouse’s Father Suffer from ‘Dementia’? ” Michigan Quarterly Review XLVIII 1 (2009), n p 17 Ibid 208 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 The portraits of old age in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations almost amount to caricatures The elderly character people who have read the novel are likely to recall most vividly is presumably Miss Havisham, who reminds the protagonist Pip of a “skeleton” 18 and a “waxwork” (55) figure, who is described as being “corpse-like” (57), and who, according to Pip, with the “crutch-headed stick on which she leaned […] looked like the Witch of the Place.” (80) Yet, though this character at first sight seems to correspond to the “classic archetype of female aging” 19 due to her looks and demeanour, she is not all that old, especially when Pip sees her for the first time. 20 According to Marta Miquel Baldellou, “[b]y means of this figure, aging is depicted as a process of decline, with aging female characters portrayed as bizarre and disturbing, when they resist the cultural demand that they should give up their sexual allure and, instead, surrender to sheer invisibility ” 21 Miss Havisham’s physical decline and her death-in-life situation may also be attributed to the destructive impact passionate emotions (in her case both infatuation and a desire for revenge) were widely believed to have in the Victorian period 22 Her unwillingness to ‘move on’ after having been jilted by her fiancé is what prevents her from leading a contented life and from aging well The notion that ‘aging well’ is indeed possible and is closely linked with being content is expressed by the striking contrast between Miss Havisham and a truly old character who is introduced later in the novel: John Wemmick’s father, who is living with his son and who is described as “a very old man in a flannel coat: clean, cheerful, comfortable, and well cared for, but intensely deaf ” (191) At a later point, the readers are informed that the character who 18 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 55 Subsequent quotations from this novel are referenced in parentheses in the text 19 Marta Miquel Baldellou, “How Old Is Miss Havisham? Age and Gender Performances in Great Expectations and Sunset Boulevard,” Age Culture Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3 (2016), n p 20 Baldellou (ibid ) explains that Miss Havisham’s age can be reconstructed quite precisely on the basis of Dickens’ manuscript: “According to Dickens’s annotations, Pip appears to be seven at the opening of the story and twenty-three towards the end, while in the last stage of the narrative, Dickens portrays Miss Havisham as a woman of fifty-six. If the story that Pip unfolds covers the span of approximately sixteen years, Dickens’s annotations signify that, when Pip meets Miss Havisham for the first time, at the beginning of the novel, she is a woman of scarcely forty years of age Nonetheless, in spite of her chronological age, her markedly aging appearance at first sight has taken precedence in the reception of the novel ” 21 Ibid 22 On Victorian attitudes towards emotions, see Gesa Stedman, Stemming the Torrent: Expression and Control in the Victorian Discourses on Emotion, 1830-1872 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 209 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 is always referred to and addressed by his son as ‘aged parent’, ‘the Aged’ or even ‘Aged P ’ is 81 years old, 23 which makes him approximately twice as old as Miss Havisham is when Pip first encounters the eccentric lady. The unusual expressions used routinely by Wemmick when referring to his father or talking with him are apt to create the impression that old age is the single defining feature of this character Moreover, his being hard of hearing is depicted in a way that pokes fun at the character’s impairment: He misunderstands what is said, he is supposed to be nodded at continuously because this puts him “in great spirits” (191), and his special treat is hearing his son fire a cannon, upon which he shouts “exultingly, ‘He’s fired! I heerd him! ’” (192) All of this amounts to a stereotypical image that exploits the challenges of old age for comic effect and infantilises the character Yet, there are also some features of the depiction of Wemmick’s father that go beyond the image of a somewhat ridiculous, childlike old man Unlike Mrs Bates in Emma, he likes to talk to and interact with people, even if he cannot really figure out what they say. This suggests that he has maintained an outgoing personality Moreover, various hints at the everyday life of the old man imply that he is taking care of small tasks around the house, such as “feed[ing] the fowls” (191), making toast (272), and reading the newspaper aloud to his son and guests. (273) The idea that fulfilling domestic duties contributes to making the character content appears to be rooted in the Victorian tendency to idealise the home When he is reading the paper aloud, for example, he is “so busy and so pleased, that it really was quite charming ” (273) Yet, the readers are also informed that the old man needs to be watched over during this task, which again reinforces the idea that he is childlike: As he wanted the candles close to him, and as he was always on the verge of putting either his head or the newspaper into them, he required as much watching as a powder-mill But Wemmick was equally untiring and gentle in his vigilance, and the Aged read on, quite unconscious of his many rescues Whenever he looked at us, we all expressed the greatest interest and amazement, and nodded until he resumed again (273) Even if passages like the one above doubtlessly infantilise the character, they also reveal that the other characters, and most of all his son, genuinely like the old man All in all, the Wemmick household appears to be rendered more cosy by the old man’s presence and by the love he and his son clearly feel for each other Miss Havisham, by contrast, has turned her house into a gloomy, almost Gothic place where her bitterness and her dreams of revenge ulti- 23 Wemmick tells Pip that his father will “‘be eighty-two next birthday ’” (238) 210 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 mately destroy her own life and all but ruin her adopted daughter Estella’s prospects for being truly happy 3 Representations of Old Age in Recent British Novels: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant Representations of old age in contemporary British fiction increasingly appear to be informed by current scientific knowledge about the various physical, cognitive, social, and emotional challenges elderly people are likely to face This renders the texts particularly interesting from the perspective of a theory-of-mind approach As Vera Nünning explains, “[t]hough there are different conceptualisations of theory of mind, there is an overall agreement that it is basically a mainly analytical cognitive process which focuses on knowledge about what other people think or feel ” 24 According to the theory-of-mind approach, “humans assess the beliefs and desires of others on the basis of their own knowledge, while taking into account the particularities of other people’s preferences, dispositions and knowledge ” 25 Contemporary literary texts about old age often promise to broaden the readers’ understanding of particularities of elderly people’s cognitive processes The main focus in this context seems to be an exploration of the consequences of dementia, as works such as Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing (2014) and the two novels which will be discussed below illustrate In Ian McEwan’s Saturday, the account of a day in the middle-aged protagonist’s life includes a visit to the old people’s home where his mother lives This visit is described exclusively from the perspective of the protagonist, Henry Perowne, who serves as focaliser throughout the novel and whose expertise as a neurosurgeon explains his familiarity with the physical processes that are causing his mother’s progressing dementia: “The disease proceeds by tiny unnoticed strokes in small blood vessels in the brain Cumulatively, the infarcts cause cognitive decline by disrupting the neural nets She unravels in little steps Now she’s lost her grasp of the concept of a gift, and with it, the pleasure ” 26 Yet, knowing exactly what is damaging his mother’s brain does not help him to come to terms with the situation on an emotional level For Henry, visiting his mother is a duty that is associated primarily with negative feelings: 24 Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, 134 25 Ibid , 137 26 Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005; London: Vintage, 2006), 162 Subsequent quotations from this novel are referenced in parentheses in the text The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 211 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 He knows the routine well enough Once they’re established together, face to face, with their cups of dark brown tea, the tragedy of her situation will be obscured behind the banality of detail, of managing the suffocating minutes, of inattentive listening. Being with her isn’t so difficult. The hard part is when he comes away, before this visit merges in memory with all the rest, when the woman she once was haunts him as he stands by the front door and leans down to kiss her goodbye That’s when he feels he’s betraying her, leaving her behind in her shrunken life, sneaking away to the riches, the secret hoard of his own existence Despite the guilt, he can’t deny the little lift he feels, the lightness in his step when he turns his back and walks away from the old people’s place and takes his car keys from his pocket and embraces the freedoms that can’t be hers (152-153) This passage, which describes a typical visit from the point of view of the protagonist, portrays both the time spent together and the life of Lily Perowne in a very bleak way The middle-aged man sees visiting his mother as a burden, as references to “the suffocating minutes” and “the little lift he feels, the lightness in his step” upon leaving her make abundantly clear, but the encounter also evokes guilt and a feeling of loss As the passage quoted above already suggests, the current stage of his mother’s life is conceptualised exclusively in terms of decline and deprivation (“the tragedy of her situation,” “her shrunken life,” “the freedoms that can’t be hers”) Lily’s cognitive and emotional situation is represented as being defined entirely by her dementia, which causes extreme disorientation, concomitant with fear: “she hardly possesses the room because she is incapable of finding it unaided, or even of knowing that she has one And when she is in it, she doesn’t recognise her things […] a small journey disorients or even terrifies her.” (153) Moreover, “[e]ven boredom is beyond his mother’s reach; ” (159) i e her experience is presented as being totally alien for her son as well as, presumably, for many readers Due to the distance that is established with respect to this character, the portrayal of Lily Perowne, who is described as “[c]hildlike in her obedience” (166), is more likely to evoke sympathy than empathy in the readers 27 Her state of decline is thrown into sharp relief by her son’s memory of Lily as a capable homemaker and as a strong, fast, and graceful swimmer, who even won second place “in the county championships ” (156) The section 27 On the distinction between empathy and sympathy, see Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, 122: “While empathy and the Spanish as well as German definition of sympathy imply a reduction of the distance between reader and character, pity involves a greater distance: in the case of compassion for a character, the reader has to adopt the position of an observer who judges and evaluates the situation and then feels an emotion that is likely to be different from that of the character ” 212 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 detailing Henry’s memories of his mother (154-158) serves to convey the impression that the person Lily Perowne once was is now irretrievably gone This assessment of Lily’s situation echoes the widespread conceptualisation of dementia derived from “medical and neuropsychological studies [that] have pictured dementia and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) from the perspective of a gradual loss of memory and the entirety of selfhood ” 28 The notion of dementia as “[m]ental death” (165) and disintegration of identity in Saturday is also supported by the fact that it has become impossible for Lily’s son to engage in a real conversation with her Notwithstanding the fact that her utterances almost invariably come across as “nonsense monologues” (162), the protagonist notices that “[i]t pleases her if he nods and smiles, and chimes in from time to time” (162), which establishes a kind of reassuring, essentially phatic communication that is reminiscent of the one enjoyed by Wemmick’s father in Dickens’ Great Expectations What is predominant in the interpretation of dementia in Saturday, however, is the fear felt by the protagonist, who “thinks how in thirty-five years or less it could be him, stripped of everything he does and owns ” (165) In McEwan’s Condition of England novel, which shows “the privileged and print-savvy Perownes” 29 capable of coping with all sorts of problems, including criminal violence, by using their language skills, the threat of losing one’s ability to communicate by means of language is bound to loom especially large While the three novels discussed so far present aged characters in quite marginal roles, embedded in essentially realist scenarios, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant departs from this pattern in so far as it features “an elderly couple” 30 called Axl and Beatrice as main characters in a vaguely delineated historical setting that borrows heavily from fantasy fiction. The Buried Giant is a hybrid novel that seems to have baffled most reviewers with its combination of features known from fantasy and historical fiction: It is a quest narrative that is set in Britain during the so-called Dark Ages after Roman rule, i e during a period for which hardly any historical documents exist This age is referred to in the novel as a time when “ogres […] were […] still native to this land ” (3) Throughout the text there are references to creatures such as ogres or pixies and to a dragon called Querig as well as to King Arthur, Merlin, and an (elderly) Sir Gawain, who even appears as one of the main charac- 28 Matti Hyvärinen/ Ryoko Watanabe, “Dementia, Positioning and the Narrative Self,” Style 51 3 (2017), 337 29 Michael L Ross, “On a Darkling Planet: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and the Condition of England,” Twentieth-Century Literature 54 1 (2008), 93 30 Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (2015; London: Vintage, 2016), 4 Subsequent quotations from this novel are referenced in parentheses in the text The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 213 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 ters All of this situates The Buried Giant in the tradition of fantasy literature Using creatures and figures from myth and legend may, however, also be read as a tribute to medieval historiographic texts, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s chronicle Historia Regum Britanniae (c 1135) Similar to Ishiguro’s novel, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia liberally draws upon what would be categorised as legend from today’s point of view, which also accounts for the lasting impact the Historia has had on the tradition of Arthurian literature from the Middle Ages to the present The unusual setting in The Buried Giant provides unique opportunities for addressing the theme of old age Much like (high) fantasy following in the footsteps of both medieval romances and prototypical fantasy novels such as J R R Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), The Buried Giant features a plot that is a variation on the pattern of the hero’s quest as described by Joseph Campbell in one of the classics of comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces The journey undertaken by Axl and Beatrice in Ishiguro’s novel evokes many of the stages identified by Campbell as being constitutive of quest narratives, ranging from the initial “call to adventure,” 31 to the “womb image of the belly of the whale [where] [t]he hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died,” 32 and, last but not least, a “succession of trials” 33 heroes must face before they reach their goal Campbell does not suggest that the hero’s journey is the privilege of young characters; in fact, from the point of view of comparative mythology age appears to be largely irrelevant in this context: no matter what the stage or grade of life, the call [to adventure] brings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration - a rite, or moment, of spiritual passage […] The familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand. 34 In recent fantasy, however, the typical hero or heroine - Rowling’s Harry Potter, Pullman’s Lyra Belacqua, Jon Snow and Arya Stark in George R R Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire (1996 - ongoing), and many others - tends to be young or even very young, and the quest plot often turns out to be interwoven with a coming-of-age story In novels focussing on elderly characters, by contrast, and especially in those addressing dementia, “the wish of ‘coming 31 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008), 48 32 Ibid , 74 33 Ibid , 81 34 Ibid , 42-43 214 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 home’ to familiar surroundings, which promise safety and comfort, is a common trope,” as Susanne Christ points out 35 Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant defies these expectations by featuring elderly characters who embark on a journey to find their long-lost son’s village and who get involved in the larger quest to slay a dragon All the while, the physical and cognitive challenges associated with old age are not downplayed Axl is struggling with his “eyesight [which] had grown annoyingly blurred with the years” (22), Beatrice is suffering from a mysterious illness that causes a lot of pain, and both appear to be affected by dementia None of this, however, is regarded as an unsurmountable obstacle by the protagonists The emphasis on their agency could be read as a response to “[c]urrent debates about aging […] [which] share a language of maintaining and enabling agency in old age: catchphrases like ‘active aging,’ ‘positive aging,’ and ‘productive aging’ promote a vision of successful late life ” 36 By drawing upon the fantasy quest plot, The Buried Giant seems to suggest that it is never too late to answer the call to adventure while taking the characters’ ailments very seriously Despite its focus on maintaining agency in the later stages of life, the novel does not conjure up a utopian vision of aging; instead, it refers to a range of problems that also tend to be associated with old age in today’s society Axl and Beatrice feel exposed to disrespect due to their age; they live “at the periphery of the community” (7) and are no longer allowed to keep a candle in their room at night - something that Beatrice complains about bitterly: “‘It’s an insult, forbidding us a candle through nights like these and our hands as steady as any of them ’” (9) Another experience that is addressed in Ishiguro’s novel is the fear of having to cope with the death of one’s partner after many years of living together This topic is introduced already quite early during the couple’s journey, when they encounter a querulous old woman whose husband has been taken to an island, “a place of strange qualities” (44), by one of the mysterious ‘boatmen ’ This image picks up the idea of the ferryman Charon taking the dead across the river Styx from Greek mythology as well as the Celtic notion of the island of Avalon The encounter with the old woman who has lost her husband foreshadows what will happen at the end of the novel, when Beatrice will be taken away from Axl by a boatman What invites the reader to feel empathy with their fear of being parted is the portrayal of the love Axl and Beatrice feel for each other This love is apparent in 35 Susanne Christ, “Fictions of Ageing, Illness and Dementia: Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother (2006) and Emma Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing (2014),” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns - Literary Developments - Model Interpretations, eds Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2018), 219 36 Boehm/ Farkas/ Zwierlein, “Introduction,” 2-3 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 215 the characters’ utterances, in their loving gestures, and in the passages where they function as focalisers, as the following quotation illustrates: “Her [Beatrice’s] grey mane, untied and matted, hung stiffly down past her shoulders, but Axl still felt happiness stir within him at this sight of her in the morning light ” (27) When Beatrice worries that their failing memory will eventually make it impossible for them to convince the boatman that they ought to stay together, Axl tries to reassure her, promising her that “‘the feeling in my heart for you will be there just the same, no matter what I remember or forget ’” (51) At the end of their quest, however, it is remembering rather than forgetting that brings about their separation, since the memories that are retrieved make the characters aware of mutual betrayal and guilt As in previous novels by Ishiguro, the ending is informed by melancholy and disillusionment The Buried Giant offers a very unusual approach to the representation of dementia, which combines psychologically plausible depictions of the characters’ cognitive processes and elements of fantasy fiction. The novel invites the reader to imagine what it means to struggle with a failing memory by providing insight into the characters’ fruitless efforts to retrieve lost memories The reader witnesses both the characters’ frustrating failure to remember (“now, as earlier outside, nothing would quite settle in his mind, and the more he concentrated, the fainter the fragments seemed to grow,” 7) as well as the pleasure caused by the experience of recalling something that seemed forgotten (for instance when Axl is “well satisfied: for he had this morning succeeded in remembering a number of things that had eluded him for some time,” 5-6) What turns The Buried Giant into a particularly innovative novel about dementia is the fact that memory loss is presented as a collective phenomenon, which affects all generations In the course of their quest, the protagonists find out that this collective amnesia has been caused by Merlin and is meant to make people forget atrocities committed during the war, which supposedly is the prerequisite for making a peaceful coexistence between Britons and Saxons possible Due to this collective dimension of memory loss, Ishiguro’s novel is read as a political allegory by Bernadette Meyler 37 Yet, similar to Ishiguro’s dystopia Never Let Me Go (2005), The Buried Giant combines a political/ collective dimension with an exploration of individual psychology The fact that “oblivion is not represented as an unalloyed evil” 38 in The Buried Giant is bound to be particularly thought-provoking, since this idea runs counter to prevalent discourses about both cultural and individual memory 37 See Bernadette Meyler, “Aesthetic Historiography: Allegory, Monument, and Oblivion in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant,” Critical Analysis of Law 5 2 (2018), 243-288 38 Ibid , 253 216 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 The depiction of characters who manage to live lives that are worth living despite failing memories might even lead readers to see the widespread fear of dementia in a somewhat different light Recent research has begun to question long-standing beliefs which equate dementia with a loss of identity Matti Hyvärinen and Ryoko Watanabe, for instance, argue that traditional formulations of the narrative self and identity - all of which are drafted for the purpose of theorizing the self in distinctively human terms - seem to run into severe problems when applied to people facing the advanced stages of dementia and AD [Alzheimer’s disease] Either we decide that people with severe memory problems no longer have a narrative self at all, or we revise the terms of the narrative self so that it is not necessarily equated with extensive, autobiographical stories 39 The depiction of Axl and Beatrice might provide some inspiration for re-configuring narrative identity. Although, for the most part, representations of “[d]ementia in 21st century British novels can be understood as the culmination of problems of frailty, memory, dependence and care,” 40 Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant offers an alternative way of conceptualising both dementia and old age by stressing agency and independence despite memory loss 4 Conclusion As the discussion of the four novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro has shown, an analysis of representations of old age in literary texts provides insights into historically variable notions of what aging (well) may mean Beyond that, novels like Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant may contribute to raising an awareness of “the need to radically rethink the ways in which age and ageing have been culturally configured.” 41 In this context, various literary strategies may prove to play an important role Ishiguro’s novel, for instance, demonstrates that genre hybridisation, which, as Ansgar Nünning and Christine Schwanecke have shown, “has recently become even more important as a catalyst for generic change than ever before,” 42 may also open up new ways of exploring the manifold facets of aging Liter- 39 Hyvärinen/ Watanabe, “Dementia, Positioning and the Narrative Self,” 338 40 Christ, “Fictions of Ageing, Illness and Dementia,” 220 41 Hannah Zeilig, “The Critical Use of Narrative and Literature in Gerontology,” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 6 2 (2011), 16 42 Ansgar Nünning/ Christine Schwanecke, “Crossing Generic Borders - Blurring Generic Boundaries: Hybridization as a Catalyst for Generic Change and for the Transformation of Systems of Genres,” The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction: Theoretical Frameworks, Genres and Model Interpretations, eds Michael Basseler/ Ansgar Nünning/ Christine Schwanecke (Trier: WVT, 2013), 119 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 ature about old age may thus share “a central impulse in critical gerontology, which aims to unsettle our habitual and comfortable frameworks and needle us towards personal and cultural transformation ” 43 Dementia, for instance, is a condition that is currently associated first and foremost with fear for many people Yet, as Anne Davis Basting claims, “living a full life with dementia or fully living with and loving people with dementia” 44 is possible, provided one understands the cognitive and emotional changes gradual memory loss causes The huge potential of literary texts for creating empathy and “enlarging the scope of readers’ experience with and knowledge of various emotions” 45 may play an important part in this context Though literary texts of course cannot claim to represent the state of the art in gerontological research, different, potentially even contradictory interpretations of old age and innovative re-configurations of the challenges and opportunities associated with aging may provide an invaluable repertoire of ideas for working towards the well-being of all generations in an aging society Works Cited Austen, Jane Emma (1816) Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 Baldellou, Marta Miquel “How Old Is Miss Havisham? 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