I offer the following remarks about Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in close proximity to my earlier remarks about Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier because the two novels feel like companion pieces. They deserve to be read together.
The butler of a once-great English house takes the idea of English reserve almost to the brink of Aspergers Syndrome by making himself impervious to anything remotely resembling an emotional life. Kazuo Ishiguro uses the character, Mr. Stevens, as a vehicle for exploring the ethical demands associated with a life of service, a matter of some importance given that almost everyone on the planet lives in service to other people. Stevens repeatedly asserts that a butler’s greatness does not arise in se but arises by association with a great house. One might say the butler falls within the lord’s slipstream and, assuming the lord’s journey through life is a propitious one, the butler can take satisfaction from that fact and bask a little in the lord’s glory. However, Stevens finds himself butting heads with the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, who is of a more modern view. She feels that a servant must assume personal responsibility for their choices, even if that sets them at odds with their master.
The novel’s present day is 1956, post-war England when the peerage is in sharp decline and America is in the ascendancy. Mr. Stevens’s employer, Lord Darlington, has died and an American named Farraday has purchased the estate. Stevens hopes to deliver the same level of service he delivered during the estate’s glory days between the wars when Darlington Hall played host to important personages from all over Europe. So it is that Stevens continually has one eye fixed upon the past, measuring his present performance against earlier successes. However, despite his high-minded words about quality of service, he appears oblivious to the fact that his previous employer was a Nazi sympathizer who, in the early 30’s, worked tirelessly to garner support for Hitler on British soil.
When considering Stevens’s approach to service, one cannot help but think of Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “the banality of evil,” which she offered up in response to Eichmann’s claim that he was “doing his job”. Mr. Stevens and Miss Kenton face their own “banality of evil” moment when Lord Darlington asks Stevens to arrange for the dismissal of Jewish staff in the house. Stevens relays the order to Kenton who is livid and insists that Stevens assume some personal responsibility instead of sweeping everything under the carpet in the name of service. For her part, Kenton announces that once she gets her affairs in order she will submit her resignation. As the weeks turn into months, it becomes apparent that Kenton will not leave; as she confesses, she has no prospects, and so leaving is impossible. Ishiguro raises an important question here about the practical limits of moral agency. It is one thing to stand on your principles, quite another to stand on your principles when you face starvation.
What sets The Remains of the Day apart is the fact that it is told in first person from the point of view of Mr. Stevens in such a way that the reader knows more than Mr. Stevens does. There are some occasions when Ishiguro achieves this quite simply. For example, there are several times when Stevens is unaware that he is expressing emotion and so is unable to convey this directly through his narrative; instead, we rely on the observations of the people who sit with him. For example, we have this exchange between Stevens and Mr. Cardinal, the son of Lord Darlington’s close friend:
“I say, Stevens, are you all right?”
I smiled again. “Quite all right, thank you, sir.”
“As you so rightly pointed out, I really should come back here in the spring. Darlington Hall must be rather lovely then. The last time I was here, I think it was winter then too. I say, Stevens, are you sure you’re all right there?”
“Perfectly all right, thank you, sir.”
“Not feeling unwell, are you?”
“Not at all, sir. Please excuse me.”
Without such cues from those around Stevens, we would have no indication that he had any sort of emotional capacity.
The novel creates space for what might be described as a meta conversation. At the end of his career, Stevens finds himself facing the difficult fact that he has placed all his trust in a man who did not merit it. As readers, we find ourselves in an analogous situation: we have passed an entire novel in the company of a man who cannot be trusted to offer up any reliable insights. In a sense, reading is a form of service, and it raises the question of personal agency in the reading relationship. Do we conduct ourselves like Stevens and defer unquestioningly to the narrator’s account of things? Or do we follow Miss Kenton’s direction and approach the narrator’s account with a more critical attitude? Nowadays I suspect most people would choose the latter approach, insisting on personal agency in all our relations. I think this is ironic given that in the world of global neoliberalism, a world incipient in Mr. Stevens’s 1956 England, servants, or workers, or units of labour, or whatever we call them now, are utterly fungible and possess less agency than ever before.