The Remains of the Day
In 1989, Kazuo Ishiguro won the booker prize for this masterpiece about an ageing butler in the twilight of his career. It is exquisitely crafted, despite the fact that Ishiguro wrote it in a single month in the summer of 1987. It makes use of one of my favourite literary tropes: the unwitting narrator who discovers through the retelling of his life that his past is not what he always thought it was. (Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is another excellent example of this). I would trade an unreliable narrator for an unwitting one any day, because they illuminate our haunting capacity for self-deception, illustrating how memory often prioritizes self-preservation over precision.
Mr Stevens is head of staff at Darlington Hall, a stately English house in Oxfordshire that has just been purchased by a wealthy American. When Stevens’ new employer encourages him to take some time off, he decides to take a motoring trip to visit Miss Kenton, a former housekeeper who left Darlington Hall two decades earlier and recently sent him a letter which implied that her marriage is falling apart. In the course of his trip, Stevens reflects on his career and former employer, Lord Darlington, whose grand ambitions have long undergirded Stevens’ own professional self-worth, despite the ultimately disastrous consequences of Darlington’s political machinations between the wars.
The central theme of the novel is ‘dignity’: the institutions and relationships that it upholds and destroys; its intrinsic and instrumental value; and whether and how it is an ideal to which one can devote their life. Stevens ends up associating dignity with “a butler’s ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits.” His father exemplifies this ideal to an appalling degree and, while it does not come as naturally to Stevens, he lives up to his father’s legacy just enough to undermine his own happiness. This understanding of dignity mirrors Alasdair MacIntyre’s discussion of ‘characters’ as “a very special type of social role which places a certain kind of moral constraint on the personality of those who inhabit them in a way in which many other social roles do not” (After Virtue, 27). These ‘characters’ embody certain ideals of a society in such a way that it is particularly jarring if their personal conduct ever clashes with their role (not unlike if a priest disparages belief in God). For Stevens, the dignified butler is a ‘character’ who embodies the ideals of propriety and civility without ever abandoning his professional personality.
A more ancient strand of thinking has it, to the contrary, that dignity is inbuilt into humans. Dignity stems from personhood, and thus all persons are to be treated as ends rather than means. By inverting this classical understanding and instrumentalizing himself, Stevens’ pursuit of dignity transforms him into a means to what turn out to be some rather unsettling ends.
What is most moving about Stevens is not so much the emotion that boils under the surface of almost every line—the double meaning in his stories lends a darkly comedic tone to the novel. Rather, it is how much he has overcome when his defences crack and he finally comes to acknowledge his feelings. This is a book about opportunities wasted and love lost, and it is heartbreaking and infuriating in equal measure. Much like Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” the protagonist is forced to give up his pretences to greatness, pride, and even dignity until he is left only with his love for Miss Kenton and his thoughts of what might have been.
I take it as a sign of my having adapted somewhat to English culture that I enjoyed this book as much as I did. To say that it is understated is, well, an understatement. The central action happens off-screen and the most important words are those left unsaid. But in each of these moments, we receive something unforgettable: as one reviewer put it, “The Remains of the Day does that most wonderful thing a work of literature can do: it makes you feel you hold a human life in your hands.”