“llusions of Absence:” Disappearances, Displacements, and the Limits of Responsibility in The Winter's Tale and The Remains of the Day
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay takes for its subject the disappearances of characters from two different texts: Ruth and Sarah, the Jewish servant girls expelled from Darlington Hall in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and Mamillius, the heir to Leontes, King of Sicilia, who dies in Act 2 of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. These characters are so absolutely erased from the texts in which they so briefly appear that it is as if they have been “disappeared” by them: they become, I argue, quite literally notable by their absence. Denied a presence in the texts, however, such personages do not, as might be expected, simply disappear. They won't quite go away; rather, they lodge instead in the mind of the reader, the pretence of their absence troubling the illusions of closure with which the texts both end. This displacement from textual to mental medium, I maintain, entails ethical consequences for the reader or audience. Unable to lay these ghosts to rest in the way in which the texts' protagonists appear to be able to do, the reader is forced to confront issues of responsibility not by what is present in the text, but by what is not there, or not there any longer.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.070 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".