Ishiguro's "Remains of the Day": The Empire Strikes Back
Author(s): Meera Tamaya
Source: Modern Language Studies , Spring, 1992, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 45-56
Published by: Modern Language Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3195017
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Ishiguro's Remains of the Day: The Empire Strikes Back
Meera Tamaya
A few years ago, at the height of the race riots in England, there
was a widely publicized picture of an Indian woman leading a protest
march, carrying a placard which read, "We are here because you were
there." The literary analogue to this phenomenon of the British colonial
sins coming home to roost is the number of writers born outside England's
shores, from the West Indies to India to Japan, now domiciled in England,
who write with unblinking clarity about the empire and the final spasms
of its delirium tremens. The best known of these writers are V. S. Naipaul
and Salman Rushdie, and now we have Kazuo Ishiguro, born in Japan,
raised and educated in England, who has become one of England's
leading younger novelists.' Ishiguro is unique among post-colonial writers
because unlike Rushdie, for example, who writes at such unwieldy length
and with much obtrusive polemics about the consequences of history,
Ishiguro uses that consummately economical and British literary formthe novel of manners-to deconstruct British society and its imperial
history.
Elliptically alluded to, never directly mentioned, historical events
are the powerful absences which shape the characters and narratives of
all three of Ishiguro's novels. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
never referred to, echoes in the intricacies of the fragmented lives in A
Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World. In his recent and
most acclaimed novel, The Remains of the Day, it is the dismantling of
Britain's colonial empire, mentioned only as the date on which the
narrative begins, which provides the determining historical context of the
characters' attitudes and aspirations. The date is July 1956, when President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, thus heralding
the end of Britain's long reign as the world's foremost colonial power.
Not so coincidentally, on that particular day, the narrator/protagonist of
the novel, Stevens, the quintessential English butler, sets out on a journey
across England and, in the process, recovers the tragic truth of his past,
a truth inextricably bound up with the history of his country.
Even as England has to accommodate itself to the rise of America
as an imperial power, Stevens, after having served Lord Darlington for
35 years, has to adjust himself to an American master, Mr. Farraday, who
has bought Darlington Hall because he wanted "a genuine grand old
English house" and "a genuine old fashioned English butler" (124) to go
with it. As Stevens reminisces during his cross country trip, we learn more
than Stevens is willing to reveal (either to himself or to the reader) about
the tragedy of his misguided devotion to Lord Darlington. While critics
have praised Ishiguro's masterful control of tone and narrative strategies
which make this oblique, and therefore all the more shocking, discovery
possible, they have also noted that Stevens' self-abnegation in the service
of his master reverberates with larger implications about British politics,
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culture and society.2 It is this aspect of the novel I wish to examine more
closely, focussing in particular on the ways in which the dynamic between
the upper and lower classes, exemplified by Lord Darlington and his
butler, duplicates very precisely England's relationship to its colonies. It
is my contention that Stevens' private tragedy is precipitated by what
Albert Memmi in his seminal study The Colonizer and the Colonized
terms the cruel "hoax" by which the colonizer or master ensures that the
servant exists "only as a function of the needs of the colonizer, i.e., be
transformed into a pure colonized" (86).
The best known paradigm for this reciprocity between master/
servant, colonizer/colonized is the bond/bondage between Prospero and
Caliban in The Tempest. As Mannoni, Fanon and others have convincingly argued, Shakespeare vividly dramatizes the specific steps by which
Prospero, a typical colonizer, proceeds to establish mastery over a foreign
territory.3 Like most colonizers, Prospero manages to achieve in an alien
country what he has failed to achieve in his own: control. He has lost
his own duchy to a scheming brother because, absorbed in the study of
magic, he has neglected "worldly ends." England has a long tradition of
sending its social misfits abroad to seek their future. Customarily, younger
sons, illegitimate sons and others who could not succeed in their own
Hobbesian society forged a new identity elsewhere. At the extreme end
of this spectrum, convicts from over-crowded prisons were also shipped
abroad: Australia for example, became a haven for British convicts.
Having failed in his ducal responsibilities, Prospero is cast adrift on a boat
by a villainous brother, but manages to land on a remote island where
he is hospitably received by Caliban, a friendly native. Soon, however,
the roles are reversed: the guest establishes hegemony over the island and
turns the host into a servant.
Caliban details the stages by which this reversal occurs. As he tells
Prospero:
When thou cam'st first,
Thou strok'st me and made much of me; wouldst give me
Water with berries in't; and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night. And then I loved thee
And showed thee all the qualities o' th' isle.
The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile.
Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax-toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o' th' island. (i.ii. 332-344)
The scenario Caliban recounts so graphica
with infinite variations by the colonial enterpr
economic or religious, or all three, as is oft
practice to woo the natives with a combinat
gifts. There is also a display of Western abstrac
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example, which suitably impresses the natives, who in their turn offer
the much more useful knowledge, indispensable for physical survival:
"The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile." The seemingly
helpless visitors soon take over, commandeering the natural resources for
their own use as well as for profit. Cotton from Egypt, for example, was
transported and fed to British mills, and the resulting finished product,
English chintz, sold to the natives at extortionate prices. Prospero's links
to the mother country are broken off, however, so he turns the island
and its natives, Ariel and Caliban, into a source of profit for himself, so
that they substitute for what he has lost. On the island he can continue
his interrupted studies in magic while the natives minister to his physical
comfort much as his servants did in Milan.
This process of drawing sustenance from the host and weakening
him can most accurately be described as parasitical. According to the
OED, a parasite is, "An animal or plant which lives in or upon another
organism (its host) and draws its nutrients directly from it." Colonialism,
a form of human parasitism, has basically two major aspects: the colonizer
draws not only physical nourishment, but also stimulation for the
imagination at the expense of the natives. For example, the British, like
Prospero, created mini-Englands wherever they established themselves
and turned the natives into bureaucrats and servants who oiled the engines
of quotidian life. They also used the conquered territories as food for
their imaginations. From Kipling to Paul Scot, the so-called "dark" continents from India to Africa served as metaphors on which they could
project their own deepest, darkest fantasies. Enslaving Caliban is
necessary so that Prospero can pursue his interrupted avocation, magic
and the arts, which not only give him pleasure but enable him to extend
and strengthen his hegemony over the island. His magic enables him to
terrorize the inhabitants, immobilize the new castaways, and awe them
with theatrical displays.
The key to establishing such mastery is, of course, teaching the
natives the colonizers' language. Prospero instructs Caliban in the use of
his own tongue. As is well known, Thomas Babington Macauley followed
the same principles when he recommended an English education for
Indians.4 He recognized that the consolidation of the empire necessitated
that the bureaucrats, the army, the police, etc., needed to learn just
enough English to obey the dictates of the British government. An
authoritative and imaginative use of the language was not part of the
bargain. However, Caliban understands the precise nature of Prospero's
designs and tries his best to subvert them: "You taught me language, and
my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse" (1.11. 363-364). Caliban resists
domestication, recognizing it for what it is: enslavement and servitude.
Unlike Caliban the recalcitrant servant, Stevens, the butler, is the
apotheosis of the perfect manservant who obliterates all traces of his own
personality, all instinctive drives and desires, all individual dreams in the
service of his master. The dream servant is none other than the English
butler, the human robot with the "correct" accent, the "correct" manners.
Stevens expresses, without a hint of self-awareness or irony, the
quintessential Englishness of butlers:
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It is sometimes said that butlers only truly exist in England. Other
countries, whatever title is used, have only manservants. I tend to believe
this is true. Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are a breed
incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race are
capable of ... when you think of a great butler, he is bound, almost
by definition, to be an Englishman. (43)
It is no wonder, then, that the English butler has acquired the status of
an icon in the popular imagination. In the first half of this century, P.G.
Wodehouse's comic creation, Jeeves, a combination of nanny, father, god
and butler to the upper class twit, Bertie Wooster, achieved immense
popularity.' More recently, Hudson, the butler in the very successful,
long-running PBS television series Upstairs Downstairs, is Stevens' imme-
diate forbear. Jeeves, Hudson and Stevens are indeed Prospero's dream
of Caliban-divested of sexuality (an English butler with a sex life is unimaginable), perfectly trained and domesticated, who can use his master's language not to curse but to respond precisely and briefly to his
commands. He fits Memmi's description of the colonized: "He is hardly
a human being. He tends rapidly toward becoming an object" (86).
As Stevens realizes, the perfect servant learns to play the role
expected of him:
The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their
professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken
by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. They wear
their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit. (42-43)
The metaphors of acting, of clothing, reveal how much Stevens' notions
derive from entrenched British traditions best known in such often quoted
Shakespearean rags as: "All the world's a stage / And all the men and
women players" (As You Like It) and "Life's but a walking shadow, a
poor player / that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And is heard
no more" (Macbeth). The British class system makes such role playing
mandatory as every individual is expected to act out the role assigned
to him/her at birth. A crucial element of such "acting" is the rigorous
submission of the private self to the demands of the public persona.
This self-effacement is bred in the bone from generation to
generation, even as the British class system has survived largely intact
through the centuries. In Stevens' case, hs is not only the son of a butler,
but he also consciously strives to live up to the ideal of service achieved
by his father. He narrates, with great pride, one particular incident in
his father's life which exemplifies the famed British "self-restraint."
Stevens' father is told by his master, an industrialist, that a general who
was responsible for the needless death of a large number of young men
during the Boer war is expected for luncheon. Among the young men
who had died, thanks to the General's criminal irresponsibility, was
Stevens' much loved only brother. The industrialist, who knows about
the tragedy, offers to give his butler the day off. Stevens' father, ever
dutiful, recognizing that "his employer's business aspirations hung on the
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smooth running of the house party" (41) refuses, and even volunteers to
act as valet to the general, thus suffering "the intimate proximity for four
days with the man he detests" (42). The irony of this self abasement,
seemingly unnoticed by Stevens and his father, is that the business
dealings are thoroughly unsavory-illegal arms dealing-and both
Stevens and his father do not question whether their sacrifices are for
a worthy cause. This blindness foreshadows Stevens' own colossal
obtuseness as to his master's true moral stature.
Some of the most painfully ironic moments in the novel occur
when Stevens lives up to the standards set by his father so well that he
sacrifices his dying father's needs in order to ensure that Lord Darlington's
dinner party runs smoothly. Summoned to his father's deathbed by the
housekeeper, Stevens continues to serve port to the assembled guests,
telling the housekeeper, "Miss Kenton, please don't think me unduly improper in not ascending to see my father in his deceased condition at
this moment. You see, I know my father would have wished me to carry
on just now" (106). As the assembled guests, almost all rich and powerful,
feast and drink in elegant surroundings, the death of Stevens' father in
a cell-like room is described in terms strangely evocative of human
sacrifice. Ishiguro makes the parallel with delicate economy. As Stevens
describes it, "I had expected the room to smell of death, but on account
of Mrs. Mortimer-or else her apron-the room was dominated by the
smell of roasting" (109). Thus with a single olfactory detail, Ishiguro
inverts the colonizer's nightmare, beloved of cartoonists, of the cannibal
chief dining on a well-roasted Englishman. Of course, the reality of the
colonial situation is that it is the English, not the natives, who for centuries
fed off of the colonies. It's a well-established fact of history that colonizers
systematically depleted their colonies of their natural resources, starved
the natives, and enriched themselves and their own country.
Such exploitation was not always achieved through the use of
force. As studies of colonialism have demonstrated, very often the natives
colluded with their masters because they were misled into identifying
with the colonizers' interests (Memmi, Fanon et. al.).6 Similarly, Stevens
and his father fervently believe that they can best fulfill themselves by
identifying totally with their masters' ambitions. As Stevens expresses it
with his characteristically absurd brand of grandiloquence:
As far as I am concerned, Miss Kenton, my vocation will not be fulfilled
until I have done all I can to see his lordship through all the tasks he
has set himself. The day his lordship's work is complete, the day he is
able to rest on his laurels, content in the knowledge that he has done
all anyone could ever reasonably ask of him, only on that day, Miss Kenton, will I be able to call myself, as you put it, a well content man. (173)
The comic absurdity of Stevens talking about his job as a butler in
religious terms as a "vocation" should not obscure the tragic dimensions
of his delusions. He repudiates all personal relationships, including the
tentative gestures of tenderness by Miss Kenton, and eschews all personal
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comforts and pleasures, choosing to live in a small, damp, dark, austere
room like a monk, because he finds fulfillment, or so he claims, in
devotedly serving Lord Darlington the way a novice would serve a god.
Indeed, Darlington Hall, for all its grandeur, resembles a luxurious
monastery in one key aspect: none of its inmates has any kind of sex life.
From the master down to the housekeeper, all lead celibate lives, strenuously sublimating their libidinal energies in the performance of their
duties. Lord Darlington, wholly consumed by international politics,
doesn't have any intimate relationship, either with a woman or a man.
Indeed, he seems asexual. Stevens stiffly resists the housekeeper, Miss
Kenton's tentative overtures, and is primly disapproving of romance
between domestics, "I have always found such liaisons a serious threat
to the order of the house" (51). He prefers to read romantic novels in
secret instead, and the scene where Miss Kenton catches him at it provides
one of many understated comic episodes in the novel.
At the other end of the scale, there is a superbly executed farcical
scene when Stevens attempts, with his usual stiff pompousness, the task
entrusted to him by Lord Darlington-that of instructing young Reginald
Cardinal in, as Lord Darlington puts it, "The facts of life, Stevens. Birds,
bees" (82). Reginald is the son of Sir David Cardinal, a politically influential figure and Lord Darlington's godson. Sir David has been trying
to instruct his son in matters of sex for the past five years without success.
Now the paternal concern has reached panic proportions as young
Reginald is about to be married. That a father should assume his twentythree year old is ignorant of sex is funny enough, but Lord Darlington's
choice of words when he asks Stevens to carry out the task is instructive:
"I'm sorry to bring up a thing like this, Stevens. I know you must be
awfully busy yourself. But I can't see how on earth to make it go away"
(81). Passing on the task of sex education to his butler along with other
menial tasks, puts sex in its proper place, so to speak. The empire and
its discontents rest on sublimation and, predictably Stevens takes his cue
from his master.
He does so because of a cruel misapprehension: he believes that
Lord Darlington is a great man and Darlington Hall a noble house which,
along with other stately homes, symbolizes the greatness of England. He
views the world, he tells us, not as a ladder to move up on, as other butlers
did, but "as a wheel" (115) with England as the hub. By running Darlington Hall with all the precision of a general commanding an army,
Stevens hopes he is making a contribution to England's role as empire
builder. He polishes the silver, for instance, with religious zeal because
Lord Darlington has impressed upon him that the high polish of the silver
will put his guest, Lord Halifax, in a more amenable frame of mind, so
that he will not balk at negotiating with the German ambassador, Herr
Ribbentrop. The brilliance of Ishiguro's narrative strategy is such that,
just as Lord Darlington has convinced Stevens of the importance and
nobility of his diplomatic maneuvering, the intimate tone of the narrative
beguiles the reader into a curious complicity with Stevens' point of view;
this enables one to empathize with Stevens even as the butler is completely taken in by Lord Darlington. Thus Ishiguro makes it possible for
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the reader to experience every nuance of the cruelly comic hoax which
lies at the core of the master/servant, colonizer/colonized relationship.
However, midway through the novel the reader is alerted to the
fact that not all is what it appears to be. Even the solid monumentality
of Darlington Hall, the manifestation in brick and stone of England's long
and unbroken history of "greatness" is not the real thing. As Mrs.
Wakefield, a rich American anglophile, discovers after examining a stone
arch that frames the doorway to the dining room, "This arch here looks
seventeenth century, but isn't it the case that it was built quite recently?
... It's very beautiful. But it is probably a kind of mock period piece
done only a few years ago" (123). Just as Darlington Hall is a "mock"
period piece, Lord Darlington's "greatness" seems suspect. Our
uneasiness about the veracity of Stevens' narrative deepens when he
denies having worked for Lord Darlington at crucial moments during
the trip. After having expounded at length on how proud he was to have
served such a "great" master, why does Stevens feel compelled to lie?
Was his service to Lord Darlington something to be ashamed of, in spite
of all his protestations to the contrary? What is the truth about the "great"
Lord Darlington?
The truth is that Lord Darlington, far from having been admirable,
was actually a crypto Fascist, busily engaged in the appeasement of
Hitler. Influenced by Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the notorious
British Union of Fascists, who is a frequent visitor at Darlington Hall,
Lord Darlington believes that the world should properly be divided into
two classes: the strong and the weak, leaders and followers, masters and
servants. He does not really subscribe to the notion that "the will of the
people is the wisest arbitrator" on which the democratic process is
founded (197). As he expounds to Stevens,
Look at Germany and Italy, Stevens. See what strong leadership
can do if it's allowed to act. None of this universal suffrage there. If your
house is on fire, you don't call the household to the drawing room and
debate the various options for escape for an hour, do you? It may have
been all very well once, but the world's a complicated place now. The
man in the street can't be expected to know enough about politics,
economics, world commerce and what have you. (199)
This little summation of Fascist doctrine comes after the "kind"
Lord Darlington subjects Stevens to a scene that is as painful to the reader
(Stevens claims not to have been too disturbed to it) as Prince Hall's
demonstration of the waiter Francis' illiteracy in Shakespeare's Henry IV
Part I.7 Stevens is summoned to the drawing room well after midnight
to answer a few questions put to him by Lord Darlington's friends. They
proceed, with barely an attempt at concealing their patronizing attitude,
to quiz him on the subtle intricacies of foreign policies and international
trade. Stevens sees that, "it was clearly expected that I be baffled by the
question" and makes the "suitable response" expected of him which is
the stilted butler's answer, "I'm very sorry, sir; I said, 'but I'm unable to
be of assistance on this matter" (195). He intones this standard response
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repeatedly rather like a parrot, much to the edification of Lord Darlington
and his friends. Thus Stevens fulfills another function of the colonized-
he provides entertainment besides physical sustenance to his masters. As
mentioned earlier, parasitism embraces the metaphoric recastng of the
colonized into imaginative forms in literature, myth and art.
Although it is not clear whether Stevens is really unable to answer
the question or whether he pretends ignorance in order to fulfill the
expectations of his social betters, he ends up internalizing Lord Darlington's views: "There is, after all, a real limit to how much ordinary
people can learn and know, and to demand that each and every one of
them contribute 'strong opinions' to the great debates of the nation
cannot, surely, be wise" (194). In other words, like his master, Stevens
abrogates England's chief claim to greatness-its claim to being the
"mother" of democracies, a claim which, historically, has provided the
major justification for imposing its sovereignty over much of the globe.
At the end of the novel, Harry Smith, a farmer in Devon, reiterates
the idea of England's greatness as the model of democracy:
And it's one of the privileges of being born English that no matter who
you are, no matter if you're rich or poor, you are born free and you're
born so that you can express your opinion freely and vote in your
member of parliament or vote him out. That's what dignity's really
about, if you'll excuse me, sir. (186)
His passionate defense of democratic ideals is sabotaged by the actual
circumstances that have drawn him into a debate with Stevens. The chief
reason for Harry Smith's colloquy is that he mistakes Stevens for a "posh"
gentleman, a mistake that Stevens subtly encourages, without actually
lying, by implying that he has rubbed shoulders with the likes of Churchill
and Lord Halifax. Throughout the motoring trip, Stevens' borrowed
clothes, borrowed car and borrowed accent and manner cause various
people to almost mistake him for his master. In Devon, having run out
of gas, he is offered hospitality by a simple farming couple. By a species
of English bush telegraph, word spreads that a notable gentleman has
landed in the village, and the farmers gather and question him avidly
about his life and ideas. As always, like a good butler and a good
Englishman, Stevens plays the role he is called upon to perform and
expounds on issues, such as the question of dignity, with which he has
already entertained the reader. According to Stevens, dignity is
something a gentleman has. But Harry Smith's democratic notion that
"dignity's something every man and woman in this country can strive
for and get" (186) is undermined because he mistakes Stevens for a
gentleman and that is the chief reason he takes Stevens' pronouncements
so seriously. He thus underscores, with comic irony, Stevens' own view,
learnt from Lord Darlington, that ordinary people may not be qualified
to hold strong opinions.
Stevens' brief masquerade uncovers a deeper problem which he
has in common with the colonized. When Britain acquired much of the
globe, it also trained the army, the police and the bureaucrats to aid in
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their own exploitation. Part of the training was to turn them into brown
Englishmen, speaking their masters' language, wearing their masters'
clothes. A Western educated colonial is by definition a would-be
Englishman who, bereft of his native identity, is often a figure of fun
for either not speaking English well enough or so well that he sounds
too precise and stiff. As he motors across England, Stevens is often
mistaken for a "posh" gentleman, but never for long. He is soon found
out, and the initial gratification at the mistake turns into acute
embarrassment and humiliation.
In Devon, while the "radical" Harry Smith treats Stevens with the
kind of respectful regard that he would accord his betters, a doctor walks
in, takes one look, and Stevens knows the game is up. His feeling of
authority vanishes, and he continues to walk the tightrope of identity:
a butler often mistaken for a lord, but never for long, just briefly enough
to cause a frisson of acute anxiety. The situation is familiar to the Westernized native: culturally displaced, he neither belongs to his own society
nor can he ever hope to attain a comfortable membership in his adopted
country as he continues to wander in an existential and cultural limbo.
Harry Smith's mistake also highlights a central contradiction in
British society that, in its most intense forms, amounts to a kind of schizo-
phrenia. Britain, like Harry Smith, has justifiably prided itself on its
democratic government and has provided the model for the rest of the
globe. Indeed, its pride in its institutions has often served as a justification
for imposing its government on alien countries. But it also happens that
England is one of the last surviving monarchies in the world. The
monarchy, retained with all its symbolic, if not its political power, serves
as the cornerstone of the class system. Its full panoply of pomp and
circumstance reinforces the chasm between the upper and lower classes.
All nuances of class-speech, manners, clothes-derive from the tone and
style of the royal family. The most obvious example is the standard
English that all English speakers aspire to, also termed the King's English.
And it is this that finally imprisons every British citizen behind the bars
of his class, no matter how free he may be legally and theoretically.
Stevens will never form an opinion of his own; he will always trust Lord
Darlington to lead him. Harry Smith's inability to distinguish a butler from
his master calls into question his political judgment, for there is always
the possibility that it will be clouded by the reflexive respect he accords
his social superiors.
At the end of his odyssey across England, Stevens recognizes, as
the result of his unsettling experiences on the road, a devastating truth:
"I trusted in his lordship's wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted
I was doing something worthwhile. I can't even say I made my own
mistake. Really-one has to ask oneself--what dignity is there in that?"
(243). And the man who had expounded at such absurdly tedious length
on the importance of always maintaining one's dignity, of never revealing
one's emotions in public, breaks down and weeps openly before a total
stranger he meets on the pier at Weymouth. The stranger, a retiree, has
talked about enjoying the remaining years of his life, in one of those
moments of spontaneous intimacy which Stevens has experienced outside
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the confines of Darlington Hall and which forms a reassuring counterpoint to the emotional bankruptcy of his life. As they watch the sun set,
the stranger assures him that "The evening's the best part of the day.
You've done your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy
it" (244). Stevens prepares to take this well meant advice, as he becomes
aware, sitting on that pier, of another mode of being, not one of service,
but of enjoyment in the spontaneous, unselfconscious camaraderie of
strangers, something which he had never known until now.
As the sun finally sets on the British empire, we hope that Stevens
will replace his unquestioning loyalty to one master with membership
in the larger human community. However, old habits of mind reassert
themselves in a new guise. His means of experiencing human warmth,
Stevens decides, is to learn the art of bantering which his new master
indulges in and which he seems to expect his English butler to reciprocate.
If bantering is defined as verbal game-playing, we could interpret
Stevens' decision as a bid for freedom, at least on a verbal level. But alas,
Stevens' attitude to bantering is inevitably butlerlike-he envisages it as
a service he must perform to please his new employer: "It occurs to me,
furthermore, that bantering is hardly an unreasonable duty for an
employer to expect a professional to perform" (245). In other words,
Stevens will learn a new trick to perform for a new master. Even as he
has acknowledged the waste of his life in service to a discredited master,
he prepares to devote the rest of his life to another. As he rationalizes,
"The hard reality, is surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little
choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great
gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services" (244). The
sun has indeed set for the British empire, but Stevens prepares to adjust
himself to its rise on American shores. Caliban, it will be remembered,
sought to free himself from Prospero's tyranny, only to enslave himself
to Stephano and Trinculo, his new masters. Instead of cursing, Stevens
like Caliban, will learn to banter. The cruel hoax, the false consciousness,
bred in the bones of generations caught in the vise of the class system,
will not be eradicated by a single amount of anagnorisis.
It is a measure of Ishiguro's novelistic genius that while he presents
the historical context of Stevens' tragedy with the delicate economy of
a sketch by Hokusai, the power of the novel resides in the precise and
powerful articulation of human feeling, which is none the less painful
for being oblivious of historical forces. For the majority of us who do
not play leading roles on the world's stage, history is not experienced as
"history," but as it affects the fabric and texture of personal relationships.
What the critic Raymond Williams says about the great tradition of
nineteenth-century fiction is applicable to Remains of the Day: "Neither
element, neither the society nor the individual, is there as a priority. The
society is not a background against which the personal relationships are
studied, nor the individuals merely illustrations of aspects of the way of
life. Every aspect of personal life is radically affected by the quality of
the general life, yet the general life is seen at its most important in
completely personal terms" ("Realism and the Contemporary Novel"
Partisan Review XXVI 200-213).
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NOTES
1. Born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954, Ishiguro moved to England in 19
his parents when his father, an oceanographer, was invited to par
in the British government's research on the North Sea. He attended
schools and graduated from the University of Kent, where he ma
English literature. He studied creative writing at the University o
Anglia. His first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the
World, set in post-war Japan, won the Whitbread Book of the Ye
Winifred Holtby prizes. The Remains of the Day, his third novel,
England in 1956, won the 1989 Booker Prize.
2. Lawrence Graver, writing in The New York Times Book Review (8
notes that, "It is remarkable, too, that as we read along in this str
original novel, we continue to think not only about the old butler, b
his country, its politics and culture." Among others who have com
on the cultural and political implications of the novel are: Susanne
in the Nation (18.12.89):761. and Rhoda Koenig in New York M
(16.10.89):81.
3. In his groundbreaking study, Prospero and Caliban: The Psych
Colonization (N. York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964). 0. Mannoni ana
the dynamic between the colonizer and colonized, using the Pr
Caliban relationship as a paradigmatic model. Since his appro
psychological, Mannoni does not give sufficient weight to the eco
realities of the colonial enterprise. Thus, his stress on the supposed
superiority/inferiority complexes of the colonizer and colon
justifiably aroused much controversy. A corrective to Mannoni's vie
out eloquently in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Mask (N. York
Press Inc. 1967). Fanon rightly points out that feelings of superior
inferiority are induced by the very real economic imbalances cre
colonization. Another corrective to Mannoni's views is Aime Cesaire,
Discourse on Colonialism (London: Oxford University Press, 1982). For a
recent discussion of Caliban as a symbol of the colonized native, see Alden
T. Vaughan's essay, "Caliban in the 'Third World"': Shakespeare's Savage
as Sociopolitical Symbol." in The Massachusetts Review, 29 (1988).
4. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), Member of the House of
Commons, essayist and educator, was Law Member, Government of India
between 1837-1838, and his famous Minute on Education, reflecting the
views of Bentick and Trevelyn, was instrumental in shaping British educa-
tion in India.
5. P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) was the author of nearly a hundred books-
novels, short stories, essays, an autobiography-which were immensely
popular all over the world, but especially so in British colonies. Most middle
class Indians, for example, were brought up on a daily diet of Arthur Conan
Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha
Christie. Jeeves, the paragon of a butler to the dim-witted but amiable
gentleman about town, Bertie Wooster, achieved a mythical status on a par
with Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes. Born in England, P.G.
Wodehouse spent the last three decades of his life in the USA, and wrote
about the social inequities in England with nostalgic good humor not
unmixed with clear-eyed satire. There is a curious similarity between P.G.
Wodehouse and Lord Darlington in their political naivete during the war.
When he was briefly a prisoner in Germany, Wodehouse, pressured by the
Germans, made a number of broadcasts which were construed as pro-
German and caused a huge furor in England. For a while, P.G. Wodehouse
55
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found himself persona non grata in his own country, and this may have
contributed to his decision to spend the rest of his life in America.
6. See Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized. Also, Frantz Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth.
7. In Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I, Prince Hal, who is very popular among
frequenters of the Eastcheap tavern because of his egalitarianism,
undertakes to demonstrate the illiteracy of Francis, the waiter. To this end,
he calls on Francis with various confusing orders in quick succession till
Francis is struck dumb, to the amusement of all present. Hal concludes with,
"That ever this fellow should have fewer words than a parrot, and yet the
son of a woman! His industry is upstairs and downstairs, his eloquence the
parcel of a reckoning" (11.IV. 99.102). Hal's insensitivity to the consequences
of poverty is astonishing but entirely in keeping with the self-serving myopia
of the ruling classes.
WORKS CITED
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. N. York: Grove Press, 1
. Black Skin, White Mask. N. York: Grove Press, 1967.
Graver, Lawrence. Review of The Remains of the Day. N.Y. T
Review 8.10.1989:3.
Kazuo Ishiguro. The Remains of the Day. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1989. All
quotations are from this edition and are indicated by page number within
parentheses.
Koenig, Rhoda. New York Magazine. 16.10.1989:81.
Lee, Susanne Wah. The Nation. 10.12.1989:761.
Mannoni, O. Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. N. York:
Frederick A. Praeger, 1956.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.
Williams, Raymond. "Realism and the Contemporary Novel" Partisan Review
XXVI: 200-231.
56
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