Kazuo Ishiguro (1989). The
Remains of the Day, Faber and Faber, pp. 258
With the 2017 Nobel Prize in
Literature coming to Japanese-born British writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, the turf of
literary feud (since the award was given to Bob Dylan last year) has calmed
down. Ishiguro, a literary polymath, has written seven novels in addition to
screenplays, short fiction and lyrics. It is a great time to revisit one of his
much-loved novels and the winner of the Man Booker Prize 1989, ‘The Remains of
the Day’.
This novel is about the short
journey that Stevens, the butler of the now decrepit Darlington Hall, takes
across west countryside of England. Stevens has tirelessly worked for the
distinguished family of Darlington Hall during the inter-war years, and the
second world war. His old master is dead and in his place an American comes along,
retaining Stevens as part of the ‘package of an old English house’. Stevens
struggles to fit in the ‘new world’ of careless banter and informality. He
feels a little lost, bereft of older ideals and notions of honour.
It is when Stevens is struggling
with change, that an unexpected holiday comes. An opportunity to leave
Darlington Hall for a few days gives him a chance to reflect on his life and
work. He stumbles upon the truth about his lost love and his old master’s fall
from esteem in the eyes of the world. It is a poignant journey of epiphany, but
the realization of truth is by slow and painful degrees with the glacial
chipping away at the fog of illusion that holds the protagonist intact.
Reflections
on the Past
Stevens look at the past begins
as a fairly straightforward narrative, with his neat, organized and sparse mind
that never regrets. He believes that staunch loyalty to work and ‘dignity’ of
conduct above mere competence, are what makes a butler truly ‘great’. He is
looking back at himself at a time when the world has little use for his virtues
and his place in the order of things stand precipitous. Happy and non-oblivious
to the mechanization of the larger world of affairs that he stands by waiting
every day, and the smaller microcosm of his own life, he evaluates and
validates his life.
His contentment and pride are
shattered by revelations that take place throughout his holidays. Often
poignantly told to him directly by others who love him, he becomes aware of
what he has lost. With a few pages to spare in the novel, we witness Stevens
understanding his life for not just what it was, but also for what it could
have been. He sees the trade-off, the point where there was a choice and how he
missed it completely. And what he decides from there, is the rest of the story.
The theme of an unassuming
protagonist and his journey towards truth is recurrent in Ishiguro’s works. In
his other novel, ‘The Artist of the Floating World’, truth is stubbornly
refused by the artist even as it stares at him. The acceptance of truth and the
awareness of loss that comes with it, are done only when it is inevitable.
Ishiguro takes his readers through these small inner worlds of people with
great austerity and sympathy. The epiphany is not of the Joycean artist as a
young man so that it reveals a world of possibilities ahead. It is the lives of
individuals nearing the end of their lives, and the thick fog of possibilities
that could have been is heart breaking. How Ishiguro’s protagonists negotiate
these bargains forms the enduring philosophy of his works.
