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Complicitous Genres in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day
The theme of guilt looms large in Kazuo Ishiguro's fiction. A locus classicus for Ishiguro criticism is
an explicit observation concerning the dramatization of regret: "What I'm interested in is not the actual
fact that my characters have done things they later regret. I'm interested in how they come to terms
with it." In this essay I will pursue the issues of guilt and regret in The Remains of the Day beyond the
narrator's record and investigate how the novel deals with a complicity that is inherent in the very forms
it relies upon for its disclosure of the theme. In Remains, guilt as complicity is a principle at work on the
level of genre as well as in the imagined lives of the characters. Furthermore, at the level of genre it is
involved in the real historical processes that are partially evoked in the fictionalized characters. That is,
while the fictional and fictionalized characters, who move about in a history evoked and analyzed by the
fiction, may appear complicitous with certain historical forces, the genres that constitute their ground
are more directly the accomplices of a less visible history. It is the effect of this narrative to expose the
characters more than the cultured forms in which they are given to us. The guilt obsessively repressed bythe butler, Mr. Stevens, is exposed by the story as a sedimentation of emotions attaching to the
romantic failure vis-à-vis the one-time housekeeper, Miss Kenton, and to the historical-political failure to
evade complicity in the appeasement policies of Lord Darlington. The "unreliability" of the narration
introduces few doubts as to Stevens's final guilt or his recognition of it. Mike Petry puts it well, when he
says that "[i]ndeed, unreliability is so matter-of-fact in Remains that the reader quickly adapts to it."3
What remains unexposed by the irony of the narration, however, is the structural complicity of cultured
forms that narrativize and defuse guilt even as they perform the service of exposing it.
To call these genres "complicitous" marks a particular suspicion on my part. The postmodern novel, it
has been argued, is almost by definition "subversive" of the literary tradition to which it self-consciously
belongs. The relationship between the two, we have heard on many occasions, is insistently ironic. It is
indeed a postmodern commonplace that the undermining of genre is a structural function of any
incorporation of other genres into the novel. Certainly, it is an effect of the code by which novels are
read (and written) at this juncture. Linda Hutcheon's label of historiographic metafiction has been crucial
in this regard, and it may well be appended to Ishiguro's novel, along with the labels of postcolonial and
postimperialist.4 One purpose of my investigation here is to introduce some doubts regarding this
blanket assignation of subversiveness, and suggest that the postmodern irony may even tend to conceal
cultural patterns that may legitimately be held to account by a less postmodern sort of critique. The
ironic, postmodern staging of history in my view amounts to a misrecognition of history.
Briefly, the story told in Remains is about the narrator Mr. Stevens's lifetime of professional service as abutler, told in the form of a journal he keeps during a few days of traveling through the southwest of
England in July 1956. In reminiscences from the 1920s and 1930s Stevens recounts telling episodes
charting his relations with his employer Lord Darlington, to the housekeeper Miss Kenton, and to his
father, at the time serving as an under-butler at Darlington Hall. The reader is soon given to understand
that Stevens is withholding as much as he is expressing. The disastrous effects on Lord Darlington's
reputation as he works diplomatically in favor of the German cause before and after 1933, the failure of
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Stevens to display any feelings other than professional concern for Miss Kenton, his inability to
communicate with his father-these are all on display to the reader even as Stevens tries to fit them into
his narrative without acknowledging their full import.
In a novel without much of a plot, what goes on in the telling of the story takes on the greater measure
of the reader's interest. Critical commentary from the early reviews onwards has accordingly focused onthe unreliability of the narrator and on the use of a literary background, knowingly manipulated by
Ishiguro.
The expert manipulation of genres in Remains can perhaps best be seen in the chapter titled "Day Two-
Morning, Salisbury". The chapter title and the first passage about Stevens's lodging clearly belong to the
travelogue, which is the ostensible motivation for the entire journal comprising Remains. However, as is
the case throughout, the record of Stevens's motoring trip leads time and again to digressions. These
digressions are sufficiently coherent to be analyzed as a number of separate generic components. That is,
Stevens's journal incorporates distinguishable elements that can be analyzed as the carriers of different
genre conventions.
Thus, the travel record is abandoned in favor of a reflection on a letter from Miss Kenton. The letter
functions in this instance as a textual gateway to a subplot with entirely different genre conventions than
the travel narrative, namely, a sentimental story about private (but never quite intimate) relations,
which parallels the professional relations in which the butler stands. The story of a romance that never
took off, this sentimental narrative is typically told around key moments that Stevens recalls. This is true
also of the plot concerning Lord Darlington's disastrous entanglements in foreign policy between the
wars, which is here introduced by Stevens as an alternative story line to which he might attribute a
comment about "errors trivial in themselves," which he had inaccurately (he surmises) attributed to Miss
Kenton. When attached to Lord Darlington, the phrase takes its place in a story of political intrigue and
vast implications, anchored here in the story of the first international conference hosted by Stevens's
employer.
The rest of the chapter then weaves the strands of the sentimental story, with emphasis on Stevens's
relationship with his father, and the plot of political intrigue with the additional and unexpected element
of pure farce, introduced by Lord Darlington's request for Stevens to convey the facts of life to his
godson Reginald. Ishiguro's handling of the ensuing complications and the adroit juggling of these
disparate components reach a triumphant climax with the final dinner of the conference, when
surprising and yet plausible plot reversals are accompanied by a kind of relay race between the different
genres: the thickening and unraveling of political intrigue is matched by the heightening of melodrama as
Stevens's father on his deathbed tries to establish contact with his son. These charged moments, true totheir respective genre conventions, are relieved by the counterpoint of the farce, sustained by snatches
of whimsical conversation between Stevens and Reginald, and reinforced by the sorry state of the French
representative M. Dupont's feet, to which Stevens must give greater attention than he can command for
his dying father.
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When Stevens concludes the chapter with a comment on his sense of triumph at the end of that evening,
this assessment can be added as a fourth distinct generic element, a reflection on professionalism that is
introduced at an early point and sustained throughout the narrative. The critical analysis of greatness
among butlers, in contrast with the other major genres employed, is not a narrative form, but a
discursive, philosophical one.
It is in the nature of Remains that the analysis is never given a comprehensive treatment at any one
point. Rather, all issues are subject to the "drift" that takes us from one strand to another. We might say
that Stevens's journal abides by the vagaries of memory. Seen as a literary construct rather than a
psychological representation, however, the novel relies on the device I will term complicity of genres.
The original sense of a "complice" was "one associated in any affair with another, the latter being
regarded as the principal" and it derives from the opposite of simple (OED). The many genre-specific
elements in Remains are all associated with one another, with the original impulse to record a journal of
Stevens's unprecedented car trip posing as the principal. More than a complex plot, the novel presents a
complex of genres, each carrying particular burdens of meaning and subversion, each of them aiding and
abetting the others in various ways. What is more, the intratextual complicity of the generic elementsalso connects to a guilt by intertextual association, which in turn is linked to historical complicity. In the
following I will follow the links of complicity by looking more closely at the genres involved. What must
be remembered is the openness of the notion of complicity: as in the original sense, the "complices" will
enter into an association with others that is in itself quite neutral and, in fact, inevitable. It is the
particular effects of given genre conventions, and the particular historical contents such conventions are
related to, that may be complicitous in the sense of illicit.
The political memoir has not always and in every case sought to cover up crimes of omission or
commission (or, at least, one must give the benefit of a doubt in that case), but the particular political
memoirs that belong to the range of historical references established in Remains did use the conventions
to gloss over such misdeeds. Furthermore, it may be objected that an author cannot be made
responsible for all the associations carried by a genre imported into the narrative. Taken in general, I will
leave the objection as it stands, but we should note that Ishiguro has claimed that he is seeking to
undermine a particular myth precisely by using it "in a slightly twisted and different way," and we are
entitled to see just what elements are being twisted and what is then achieved.5
Five complicitous genres were identified above. They can be labeled travelogue, political memoirs,
country house romance (which, as we will see, is related to the detective genre), farce, and an essay on
values. The many themes and privileged clusters of meanings that can be elicited by the work of
interpretation are disseminated across these genre elements, so that imperialist ideology, for example, is
present in the meditations on the English landscape as well as in the memoirs of political service and the
essay on greatness in butlering. The point I am making here is that the themes introduced explicitly in
Stevens's narration are reinforced by the genres manipulated by Ishiguro, which carry sets of meanings
in themselves. The further point is that these meanings are not easily controlled or automatically
subverted by a strategy of generalized irony.
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To take the kind of modest travel writing that Stevens ostensibly engages in as he pens his journal,
Stevens's ruminations closely mimic a genre based on the assumption that landscape is a key to national
or regional values of a less concrete nature. The title of the work Stevens consults, Mrs. Jane Symons's
The Wonder of England, echoes other titles that hold out to tourists the promise of having a share in the
extraordinary properties of a nation or region.6 The English landscape comes to stand for Englishness,
the "sign of itself" that tourists search for, according to Jonathan Culler.7 The view described by Stevensis similar to the pastoral landscape evoked by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, an image of
England, as Ian Ousby explains, that "we have constructed from the complex realities around us, ignoring
the tensions of world politics, editing out the industrial cities of the north and sentimentalizing the
landscape of the south into a profoundly attractive, dangerously complacent picture."8
This kind of editing of landscape perception took a particularly intensive turn in the interwar period, with
the wave of countryside books that followed H. V. Morton's In Search of England and the production of a
great range of guidebooks for the middle-class consumption of the English countryside.9 As Alex Potts
has argued, "it was only in the interwar period that a nationalist ideology of pure landscape came into its
own." Typical of their time were the many publications of the Homeland Association. One of themproclaimed as the ambition of the guidebooks a "desire to help our fellow countrymen to travel in, to
appreciate intelligently, and to study their own country and its story, in other words to encourage
knowledge of, and love for, our native Britain." It is no surprise, then, that Stevens finds his own
preoccupations with greatness confirmed by the landscape. After all, he has studied the relevant volume
of Mrs. Symons's book and has gained from it "some sense of the sort of place" in question. As Taylor put
it, the many guidebooks made the countryside "available in pictures, so that when tourists went in
search of what they had already seen, they found exactly what they were looking for." It is "little
England" that is evoked by the ordered landscape Stevens surveys. What he finds to his liking is the
image of a greatness that is generated in a circumscribed, rather than an expansive, setting. In an oft-
quoted line of praise for the greatness of England, Stevens explains that "it is the very lack of obviousdrama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that
beauty, its sense of restraint." The terms of his appraisal echo the rhetoric of J. B. Priestley's description
of true Englishness as found in the English countryside with its air of "happy compromises," and it
repeats a prevalent topos of interwar country writing that is described by Potts in words that almost
exactly mirror those used by Stevens: the "pervasive image of the English landscape as one of restraint,
without the blatant self-advertisement of more striking foreign scenery." Stevens points out that the
sights of Africa and America would surely "strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their
unseemly demonstrativeness" .
There is no doubt that Ishiguro exposes Stevens's nationalist reading of the landscape to an irony thatoperates through the crucial dating of the travelogue to the month of the Suez crisis, and through the
general failure of Stevens to judge politics. From Berkshire to Weymouth Pier Stevens's journey may
indeed afford him "surprising new perspectives," some of them even of an "unsettling" nature (R 117),
but the gentle ironies generated by the mishaps he experiences as he tries to negotiate the terrain do
not extend to the comforting itinerary itself. Even the "counter-instance" to Stevens's elitist "little-
Englander" view accords with the genre conventions of interwar country writing, with its emphasis on
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the Englishness of the pastoral village. The village of Moscombe speaks the values of democracy through
its spokesperson Mr. Harry Smith, but pays homage to the authenticity of a "real gentleman" unlike the
new money kind exemplified by a local landlord. Dr. Carlisle's assessment at the end of the episode, that
the people of Moscombe are happiest when left alone, stands unopposed, and the idyllic, English
reticence of the village contributes to a general structure of feeling conveyed through the safe itinerary
that organizes the narrative.
Weymouth pier, of course, is not Wigan pier. The very different irony of Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier
(1937) had, for one thing, a concrete reference: the one thing that might have attracted any person, with
a choice in the matter, to Wigan was the famous pier, but when Orwell went there it had been
demolished. All that Orwell found was Depression unemployment unrelieved by the working-class
amusements normally offered at a seaside pier. Stevens's road to the Weymouth pier is not one that
depicts a larger sphere of collective experience. In Remains, the irony of Stevens's renewed dedication to
bantering does not draw in the difference between the vox populi humor among the amusement seekers
of the Weymouth pier and the hierarchically sanctioned wit of Stevens's employer. The postmodern
ironies of Remains are based on the concentration on an individual epistemology that can upset "myth"only in the form of individual delusion and regret. The restricted range of this kind of irony becomes
even clearer in the case of the complicity of political memoirs.
Stevens may participate in politics only in a vicarious manner, and his moments of triumph are derivative,
entirely dependent on the actual achievements, or lack thereof, of Lord Darlington. Stevens's recognition
that these achievements amounted to a historical failure is equally a recognition that his own triumphs
were mock ones. But for all that it is experienced at one remove, political life has real substance in
Stevens's narration. The manner in which his memories are organized around a sequence of political
events-in which Lord Darlington's misdirected Germanophilia turns into support for the Nazi regime-is
the conventional one of political memoirs. The genre evocation is certainly ironic insofar as the butler,
the servant of the public servant, is shut off from the most important deliberations, not least by his own
ignorance concerning the policies that are being deliberated. The irony, however, reinforces rather than
detracts from the way reader expectations are guided by the conventions established by such memoirs:
the focus on pivotal moments, the character sketches of famous statesmen, the anecdotes, the post hoc
explanations for less successful initiatives.
Stevens's narration is enabled by the management of public memory in the autobiographical and
biographical writing that came out after the war, in which the political fortunes of the interwar years
were dealt with. The concrete relation between Remains and the period of postwar reckoning seems
worth insisting on. A parallel between The Remains of the Day and The Fulness of Days,14 Lord Halifax's
memoirs, can be drawn so as to reinforce the novel's critique of historical equivocation. Such a parallel
will also, to my mind, question the scope of that critique.
The memoirs of the Earl of Halifax came out in 1957, so one might assume that he was busy writing them
in that fateful Suez summer when Stevens sets out on his motoring trip. Like Stevens, he is reminiscing
about events of the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the same names pop up in both accounts, Chamberlain,
Hitler, von Ribbentrop, Oswald Mosley, Lady Astor, and John Maynard Keynes among them. Whether
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Ishiguro consciously drew on this autobiography and other memoirs of the time is immaterial. To the
extent that Remains performs an act of historical recognition that the reader reenacts, the novel
captures a familiarity with the memoir genre. In the particular case of Lord Halifax, this familiarity has an
uncanny resonance, as I will show.
Lord Halifax himself has a role to play in Stevens's story. Stevens is reminded of Halifax by a signpost withthe name Mursden on it, the place, we learn, where Giffen and Co. produced their candles of superior
silver polish. This is one of many points where the discussion of professionalism and the political plot
intersect. The quality of the silver at Darlington Hall, Stevens assures us, made a "small, but significant
contribution" to political events by putting Lord Halifax in a better mood during his "off the record" visit
to see Herr Ribbentrop at Darlington Hall (R 136). In Stevens's narrative, we meet Lord Halifax voicing his
doubts about the upcoming meeting: "Really, Darlington, I don't know what you've put me up to here. I
know I shall be sorry." At that point he sees the silver, declaring its luster a positive delight, and this,
according to Lord Darlington, put him "into a quite different frame of mind altogether" (R 135). In the
memoirs of Lord Halifax, such apparently peripheral concerns as silver, crockery, and plates also merit
mention even in the circumstances of serious affairs of foreign policy. If we turn to the passagesdescribing Halifax's meetings with prominent Nazi politicians, we get a profession of doubts similar to
the one expressed in the novel, alleviated by a good-humored dismissal of the significance of Halifax's
trip to see Göring and Hitler: "I cannot pretend that I was ever very sanguine of the result of this
adventure. But looking back on it I do not think it did any harm, and I am certainly glad to have had
occasion to meet such an undoubted phenomenon as was Hitler" (F 184). Göring, too, proves an
entertaining spectacle. At luncheon with this "picturesque and arresting figure," Lord Halifax notes the
exuberant pride of this "great schoolboy" who had been "concerned" with the "clean-up" in Berlin in
1934, and approvingly comments on the qualities of the table: "Lovely china and glass and all very well
done" (F 190). The silver is not mentioned, but any spots would surely have earned a comment, perhaps
more severe in tone than those concerning the dark patches in Göring's past.
This particular trip by Halifax is described by one historian of the policy of appeasement as "the
inauguration of active appeasement," but in the memoirs Halifax contravenes the kind of legend spread
by "whispering mischief makers" about the role of appeasement initiatives behind this innocent visit. In
his account it is turned into a jaunty occasion for "shooting foxes in Saxony, as a change from hunting
them in England" (F 184). Halifax concludes, in a tone of self-justification, that "[t]he facts thus differed
from the story that tends to become established" (F 184). In Remains, the same type of vindication is
performed by Stevens on behalf of Lord Darlington, who similarly is beset by "rumors" that are "utter
nonsense, based on an almost complete ignorance of the facts".
Lord Halifax's memoirs help us place Lord Darlington and Darlington Hall in a historical setting that
demands retrospective equivocation from the narrator/memoirist. In the guest lists of various country
houses Stevens finds a special testimony to the "true climate of those times" when Herr Ribbentrop was
often a guest of honor "in the very best houses" . In passing, it is important to note that Stevens never
refers, and perhaps simply cannot refer, to any opinion outside these very best houses. In Lord Halifax's
case, much the same is true, and in a telling passage he gives us a particularly distorted account of his
association with the most famous of those houses: "We used to be asked to join a party at Cliveden from
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time to time, though not perhaps regularly enough to qualify for inclusion in the so-called 'Cliveden set.'
Who or what this legendary body was no one ever knew, and I believe that both it and its alleged
corporate feeling of tenderness towards Nazi Germany were a pure invention of some journalistic brain.
For, to judge only by those who were our fellow guests when we were there, the Cliveden visitors' book
must have held a wonderful gallery of names. Of all political persuasions, of every profession and
occupation, from Commonwealth countries, Colonies, and from most countries of the world: it is noteasy to marshal so disconnected a collection into a 'set'" (F 156d: it is not easy to marshal so
disconnected a collection into a 'set'" (F 15).
The thesis of a "Cliveden set" operating behind the elected representatives in the matter of
appeasement was launched by Claude Cockburn, who exposed these conservative statesmen and their
aristocratic friends in an article-which immediately gained international notoriety-in his small newspaper
This Week in 1937. The thesis is still controversial. One historian recently claimed it has been discredited,
since, although the circle around the Astors certainly supported appeasement and had considerable
influence, there was "clearly no cell, no conspiracy, no regular meetings, and no definite
membership."16 To my mind, this refutation appears on the contrary to support the more penetratingconclusion drawn by other historians and by the Astors' biographer Lucy Kavaler: "They did not plot; they
did not need to plot.� They were the Establishment."17 The guest list at Cliveden included not only
Halifax and his colleagues Sir Samuel Hoare and Sir John Simon-both authors of similarly sanitized
memoirs-and his superior, Neville Chamberlain, but also Sir Oswald Mosley and von Ribbentrop.18
Clearly, Cliveden is a good example of the kind of great house Stevens describes when he offers us the
insight that "the great decisions of the world are not, in fact, arrived at simply in the public chambers" or
in official conferences, but in the privacy of "great houses" (R 115).
Given the close parallel between the title of Ishiguro's novel and Lord Halifax's memoirs, I think it is
justified to see Lord Darlington's and Stevens's roles in the novel, yoked by the ideology of loyal service,
in light of Lord Halifax's service under Neville Chamberlain. It then becomes difficult to see in Lord
Darlington the "bungling amateur diplomat" that David Lodge claims can be inferred from the text.21
While, as Rock notes in a delicious phrase, Simon and Hoare "tended toward sycophancy," Lord Halifax
has always been seen in a more forgiving light than the other appeasers, "saintly" in character.22 Lord
Halifax is said to have served Chamberlain "faithfully and well, obediently executing the policy set forth
from above, deferring to his leader's initiatives, and providing, according to Chamberlain's own
testimony, great comfort to his chief."23 The image of a wrongdoer despite himself, one caught up in a
web of deceit of someone else's doing, good intentions paving roads to hell, are certainly part of
Ishiguro's picture, and Remains actually reproduces this aspect of the political memoir genre.
My point in the preceding section has been that the genre of political memoir is a structural component
of Remains, and that as such it contributes in various ways to the principle of genre complicity in the
novel. That is, Stevens's account is not merely enabled by the conventions of the genre, nor is it just the
case that symbolic depth is added to the story by the allusion to these works with their formalized
manipulation of memory in the service of an act of historical self-justification. Rather, the genre exists as
a cultured form that, on entering the novel, brings a complicitous history in its baggage. This complicity
relates to the historical theme of the novel in a general way, but in the genre predecessors that pertain
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to that epoch we can see a deeper involvement in the complicity of appeasement and, more importantly,
a more profound investment in the formal maneuvers of evasion, distortion, and self-justification that
characterize the genre.
Just as the political memoir had a complicitous historical model in the self-serving postwar memoirs of
appeasement politicians, the comic conventions involving a butler and his master connect with the workof a quintessentially "English" author who let his professional instincts triumph over political curiosity.
The genre elements of farce, exemplified above in the plot surrounding Stevens's mission to explain the
facts of life to young Reginald, did not fail to be recognized by reviewers as a debt Ishiguro clearly owed
to P. G. Wodehouse,24 and Ishiguro himself has pointed out that he "deliberately created a world which
at first resembles that of those writers such as P. G. Wodehouse."25
In Wodehouse's case, comedy and complicity are directly intertwined.26 As is well known, Wodehouse
was captured by the Germans in 1940, in France. He was released but forced to stay in Germany, and
unwisely accepted an invitation to make a broadcast to America about his experiences as an internee.
The broadcasts were void of political messages but caused a scandal in England. Accused of treachery by
the British public, Wodehouse found it advisable to move to the U.S. after the war, becoming an
American citizen in 1955. As Alexander Cockburn argues in a review of Frances Donaldson's biography,27
the thing to keep in mind was Wodehouse's absolute devotion to his career, to a literary professionalism
out of which grew the oeuvre of some ninety books and many film scripts and plays in addition.
It seems clear from all accounts that Wodehouse lived in the profoundest ignorance of what the war was
about, and consequently, as Cockburn notes, he was unable to see, until the fifties, that he had really
made a disastrous mistake when he agreed to broadcast, and, worse, received payment for it. At least, it
was only in the fifties that he expressed his regrets in such terms. His blissful ignorance of politics and
devotion to professionalism had held up in the face of vicious press slander-much in the way Stevens
refuses to see-until the mid-fifties, the kernel of truth in the "rumors" and "insinuations" that branded
Lord Darlington a Nazi accomplice.
This remote connection between the model of manservant and near-treasonable complicity might figure
here simply as a fascinating link between fiction and reality. However, both history and fiction raise the
same issue: What is the crime of being an ignorant servant, someone who lacks political sense, but is
measured by the inability to question his loyalties? Moreover, the matter of career professionalism is
crucial in this case, a matter I will return to before closing. Quite apart from any happenstance parallel
between Wodehouse and Stevens, my argument is that the presence of the complicitous genre itself, the
recognizable conventions of the butler-master farce as practiced and perfected by Wodehouse, requires
a balancing of accounts, as it were. The notion of complicity promotes a different attitude than thestandard postmodern one, which construes its literary products as automatically subversive of the
elements they self-reflexively deploy. A good example of the latter is given by Caroline Patey in her claim
that by "heaping [fragments of British literary memory] up in the same narrative framework, [Ishiguro]
subverts their meanings, undermines their image and neutralizes their Britishness."28 It seems to me
such accounts conveniently forget the lessons of the "age of suspicion"-that late-modern drive to
question the values that are implanted in and sustained by each manifestation of established forms and
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conventions. As the film adaptation demonstrates, literary subversion went only so far, while the power
of the constituent genre conventions proved marvelously adaptable to a less questioning narrative.
Ishiguro's novels cannot be accused of simply shutting out all suspicion. On the contrary, suspicion is an
integral part of his works. They are based on a process of self-questioning by their narrators, by turns
guilty and arrogantly self-justifying. As Gabriele Annan noted in his review of Remains, Ishiguro had used
a detective fiction format in every one of his novels up to that date.29 Each relies on the play between
willed ignorance and a compulsive following of clues for its tension. It is the presence of this genre, the
classical English detective story, that most explicitly brings in the question of guilt. In Remains, it is
arguably more easily identified than in the other novels. The distinct British genre of the country-house
novel cultivated from Jane Austen onwards is part of the tradition so forcefully evoked by Remains. The
sentimental values of upstairs-downstairs melodrama derive from an age when servants were an
essential part of class society, and could be used in literary works as a reflection and a counterpoint to
the more dignified embroilments of their masters and mistresses. Those were, in Bruce Robbins's words,
"the good old days when it was possible to condense the imaginative negation of society into encounters
between upstairs and downstairs."30 One could take the enormously successful TV series Upstairs,
Downstairs as a model example of how these values can still operate in a post-Victorian culture, when
the displacement of actual class relations onto a historical fantasy can generate a "heritage" type of
nostalgia as well as sentimental expressions of class ressentiment.31
More pertinent to the present discussion, the country-house romance must be seen in relation to its
twentieth-century successor, the middle-class detective story. The isolated assembly of characters with
hierarchical relationships typical of the country-house novel generated conventions that were expertly
manipulated by writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. This is the case in Remains as well.
In Raymond Williams's well-known argument, the country-house novel turned into the middle-class
detective story at the juncture when the country house and the rural way of life lost their historical
importance.32 Cliveden and Blickling might then take their sordid place in British history as examples of
a degeneration of the country estate as a site of political importance. In the twenties and thirties Stevens
moves unquestioningly within a vision of a vital public function to which he owes service, while in the
present of the novel, Darlington Hall is first of all a commodity, bought by the American Mr. Farraday,
but its narrative function is to be a site of clues followed for the light they might shed on an intensely
private history.
The innovation here is that Ishiguro lets the butler be his own sleuth, carefully weighing the evidence in
retrospect. He is the private eye, the gentleman's gentleman detective, but he is also the criminal, whotries to avoid being caught, who fiddles with the evidence, who finds excuses for being in the wrong
place at the wrong time, who provides emotional alibis. But no matter how he tries to elude the
tendency of the leads, he is driven to confession. In fact, and this is also an aspect of Stevens's highly
formalized style of delivery, the text is full of "confessions." Stevens constantly confesses this or that and
admits to one thing or another (cf. R 161; 168; 175; 239). The tendency toward confession is finally
harvested in full. The outcome of Stevens's story is the same as in another famous detective story,
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Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Stevens humiliates himself and confesses his crime to an
anonymous representative for common humanity: "I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really-one
has to ask oneself-what dignity is there in that?"
The traditional mystery novel leads to a moment of recognition. Remains shares this development, and
operates according to the same "cynegetic model" discussed by Terence Cave in his study of recognitionas a principle in poetics. The induction involved is based on an ability to "select significant detail on the
margins of perception and make capital out of chance occurrences: the talent sometimes known as
serendipity."34 The tension of Remains is based on the syncopation of the paces at which the reader and
the narrator reach the recognition. At the end, however, narration and reading join in a common
moment of anagnorisis as ignorance gives way to full knowledge. Pathos with postmodern irony. But
wait a minute. By ending with Stevens's poignant recognition we are giving thanks, like Lord Halifax, for
the "fullness of days," but the point of my insistence on complicitous genres has been to move from the
"naturalized" psychology and history of the text to the constructed literary object as a historically
implicated form.
The detective story format, like the political memoir and the Wodehouse farce, is gently twisted by its
insertion into a story that works with several sets of genre conventions, but it is never confronted as
such. It forms part of a novel that draws on the familiarity of genre conventions, on the responses that a
sequence of questions about motives will trigger as a matter of a reader's second nature. The reader
may sense the presence of any genre while disregarding its ideological premises, much the way Stevens,
for the longest time, treats the implications of his history. The complicitous genres are servants of a plot
whose effects of mastery absolutely depend on them while its recognition of guilt-private, individual,
even sentimentalized-demands that they remain smoothed over by the surface discourse.
The "drift" of Stevens's narrative takes it back time and again to the non-narrative genre employed, the
essay on values. While I will claim in conclusion that there is another principal, the novel genre itself, the
essay on values and professionalism certainly occupies a predominant position vis-à-vis the other genres.
The theme of professionalism embraces the story as a whole. The novel ends with Stevens's renewed
resolve to incorporate bantering among his professional skills. It begins with Stevens's explanation that
he sets out on his unprecedented trip, so he says, as a consequence of his "preoccupation" with
"professional matters." This explanation is entirely typical of how the essay on values, by turns practical
and theoretical, intervenes whenever other genre elements might establish their independence. In a
turn characteristic of his narrative, Stevens links Miss Kenton's letter to professionalism; its contents
remind him of his faulty staff plan rather than of their past relations. In this preference for professional
concerns over a (censored) amatory association, we find the conceptual pair amateur/professional,which orders values in the discourse on butlering as well as in the narrative of political action. On the
level of genre orchestration, the discourse on professionalism installs itself whenever the sentimental
romance threatens to take precedence. In terms of psychology, Stevens's need to explain the
professional background for his actions so as not to be misunderstood by his narratee is also a need to
defend himself from properly understanding his interest in the letter. In the complicity of genres, the
essay on professional values dominates the other genres by its constant euphemization of other
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contents, its appropriation of other narrative energies. One example is the previously mentioned
discussion of the English landscape, which leads on to the question of great butlers. The meditation-on-
the-landscape scene, which is prompted by the particularities of the motoring trip, takes up a page, while
the digression that displaces landscape aesthetics onto the moral values of service goes on for more than
fifteen pages.35
The closest model for this discussion of greatness in butlering is to be found in Ishiguro's previous novel,
An Artist of the Floating World (1986), with its narrator's meditations on his career as an artist, the
aesthetic and political choices that led him up to the present. It is followed up in a more caricatured form
in The Unconsoled (1995), where, early in the novel, a hotel porter harangues the narrator-protagonist
on the finer points of portering.
In the case of the discourse on values, we are dealing with a complicitous element that, to some extent,
is aware of its complicity, a reflection on artistic values and the values of art that is, and at the same time
is not, "self-reflexive." The stereotyped butler's ruminations on the essence of butlering appears as a
quasi-analysis of literary value only upon a given reader's recognition of the way it resembles the similar
musings of the artist Masuji Ono, and as a recognition of the critical value of self-reflexivity, a fixture in
the discourse of and around literature in the twentieth century.
Seizing on the figure of service as the essence of cultural production, Ishiguro is able to present an ironic
and critical "self-analysis" of one such servant. The hierarchical relationship among the group of
employed servants can easily be read as a map of a literary field. Stevens's ideas revealingly mock a
number of literary positions and point out the impasses of traditional accounts of literary value.
One of the problems of value has to do with its constitution in an act of mutual recognition. Stevens
notes that the power to identify butlers of the first rank resides properly among peers, defined
themselves as butlers who are recognized as outstanding. As to the question of who is a great butler,there was "no serious dispute among professionals of quality who had any such discernment in such
matters" (R 29). This discernment must be distinguished from the ignorance of the great mass of agents
in the field: "How often have you known it for the butler who is on everyone's lips one day as the
greatest of his generation to be proved demonstrably within a few years to have been nothing of the sort?
And yet those very same employees who once heaped praise on him will be too busy eulogizing some
new figure to stop and examine their sense of judgement" (R 30). The newly arrived butlers who
"manage to pull off one or two prominent occasions with style" and are thus celebrated can be seen as
the successful literary newcomers who fail to sustain a career after having been celebrated for their
debut works (R 30).
In Stevens's debate with his colleague Mr. Graham we see the opposition between the charismatic
ideology of the genius versus the view that excellence can be achieved through practice. Great butlers, in
Stevens's view, have acquired dignity "over many years of self-training and the careful absorbing of
experience" (R 33). As Stevens thinks about the merely fashionable "qualities" of style and encyclopedic
knowledge, it is easy to map these values onto literary practice. In Stevens's quest for an essential key to
what constitutes greatness, such superficial virtues are dismissed. In this dismissal lies also a
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denunciation of those many professionals who would refer to such apparent skills for the evaluation of
their peers.
In short, the world of the servants can be recognized as a metaphor for the world of artists and critics.
These are the people engaged in (cultural) service and thus given to engage in discussions of its values,
but it is clear from Stevens's analysis that the source of value is external to the practices themselves. Hecan only come as far in the definition of "dignity" as "a butler's ability not to abandon the professional
being he inhabits" (R 42). In the analogy with literature, a total identification with the literary institution
as such is the standard of value within the field. In Pierre Bourdieu's terms, it is finally specific literary
capital that determines arguments over value within the field to the extent that the field is autonomous.
In Stevens's analysis, however, this could not possibly suffice, since in the nature of service it is subject to
other laws for its achievements. He thus returns to the "outmoded" criteria suggested by the Hayes
society, that of attachment to a distinguished household (R 113). The general principle of judging the
value of service in part according to the object of service is still held good, but for Stevens it is "the moral
status of an employer" that should count (R 114). The "employer" then becomes a figure for the cause
that an artist serves, the traditional or heterodox view of service to which the professional adheres.Stevens rates his own as a more idealistic one, a generation who saw "furthering the progress of
humanity" as their final value (R 114). Stevens marvels at this being a new thought, undiscovered until
the narrative present: dignity, which is the field-specific norm, becomes "greatness" when it connects to
"certain ends" outside of the field.
Stevens's meditations on the subject of greatness are certainly naive, but at the same time they shrewdly
point out the impasses of traditional accounts of literary value: the relativity of judgments made even
within the profession itself, the tautological dead ends of inherent value (dignity reduced to its
etymological root, worth; good literature proven by its complete literariness), and the problematic
reliance on "employers"-patrons, publishers, the general public. The attachment to progressive ends
then appears a reasonable solution to Stevens's question. And there lies the rub, of course, since the
relation of benevolent intentions to ends is complicated by structures-"unacknowledged conditions and
unanticipated consequences" in Giddens's terminology.
Just like Masuji Ono in Ishiguro's Artist, Stevens finally reaches a fairly adequate judgment of his flawed
career, and just like Ono he is still able to affirm the principle of commitment. Stevens balances his
emotional account by telling himself and his complicitous narratee: "Surely it is enough that the likes of
you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some
of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself,
whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment" (R 244; my emphasis). Ono, similarly, takes
comfort in the assessment voiced by his ideological mentor Matsuda: "We at least acted on what we
believed and did our utmost" (A 204). In the final paragraph of Remains, Stevens chides himself for not
having approached the skill of bantering "with the commitment I might have done." I take this as a
signpost toward another genre position that belongs to the narrative present of the 1950s, the Sartrean
analysis of committed art, which is also explicit about the complicity of art.
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It is by the parallel between aesthetic value and the values of butlering-no matter that the latter is an
ironic caricature of the former-that Ishiguro evokes the position of littérature engagé, one that holds
prose to be "in essence, utilitarian."37 With some justification, it could be claimed that Stevens is a
better vehicle for this particular self-reflexive critique than Ono, since Stevens's vocation cannot define
itself as other than service. The purist alternative rejected by Ono, of capturing the transience of beauty
as an end in itself, is not available to Stevens. In the allegory on cultural values performed by the text,the autonomy of cultural production is sharply limited.
The parallel between Ono and Stevens is clear enough: while their "services" won recognition in the
context in which they were provided, they were bound up with historical forces that had disastrous
consequences, and therefore their achievements are drastically devalued in the narrative present. In
Sartre's scheme, usefully rehearsed by Tony Tanner in an article on contemporary American writing, an
artist will stand in a relation to the values of his society that can be described as either celebration,
complicity, or contestation.38 Ono was certainly a celebrant of the emergent and soon dominant values
of expansive militarism in the Japan of his day, while Stevens is the perfect figure for complicity in his
refusal to inquire into the significance of Lord Darlington's political work.
What does that make Ishiguro? The accomplice, according to the definition, presupposes a principal, and
in order to suggest an answer, I wish to conclude by looking at the principal in this orchestration of
complicitous genres. The bourgeois novel faced one of its many "crises" in the mid-1950s, with Nathalie
Sarraute's L'Ére du soupçon (1956) and the debate over the death of the novel marking a certain peak in
the questioning of its tradition. Directly pertinent for my line of inquiry here, Sarraute and Sartre in
divergent ways questioned the complicity of the form, and the latter proposed commitment as a
necessary stance. The notion of committed art was then forcefully critiqued, within the left, by Adorno. If
we leap to the time of Remains, published in that portentous year 1989, we might argue that the
anxieties of the fifties have been actively forgotten rather than exorcized. Ishiguro's investigation of
complicity in the form of a historical novel of sorts falls under the comforting banner of
"historiographical metafiction," which absolves postmodern fictions beforehand of at least the guilt of
complicity, since complicity is taken to attach inevitably to every form of representation. The mere
insertion of "the historical" in forms that are apparent to the reader as artificial, so this line of thinking
goes, will function subversively in this great enterprise of stressing "both the discursive nature of
[postmodern] representations of the past and the narrativized form in which we read them."39
More specifically, it would be argued-and has been argued, as we have seen-that Ishiguro's incorporation
of historically contaminated genres functions precisely to undermine or dispel their ideological charge.40The critical credentials of the novel would then be fulfilled, and Ishiguro's stated intention to debunk a
certain myth of Englishness could be cashed in. Is the question of complicity, at the level of the novel
itself, solved as easily as all that? I think not without some reservations.
As a novel, Remains performs a labor of transformation of the generic elements that precedes it. By
placing in its very center a relationship between a master and a servant it evokes the symbolic origins of
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the bourgeois novel in Don Quixote. In the figure of Stevens, who is present to the reader as the carrier
of the various genres, but also as the carrier of an unchanging style that smoothes out the artifice of the
different plots and the distinctly undermotivated transitions, this novel performs a pessimistic reversal of
a great many predecessors. In Don Quixote, Sancho Panza is a servant who resists the follies of his
master. In Jeeves we see a servant who diligently manipulates his inept master so as to maintain their
mutually defining positions to the best advantage of the servant as dominant servant.42 D. H. Lawrencegave the power of sexuality to Lord Chatterley's menial, Mellors. Robin Maugham's servant, better
known in the film version scripted by Harold Pinter, parasitically preys on the decadence of his master. In
July's People by Nadine Gordimer, the reversal between servant and masters, as Robbins notes, is an
emblem for a large-scale social revolution.43 In drama, Crichton, in J. M. Barrie's The Admirable
Crichton,44 passes the test of the desert island as "the best man" among both masters and servants;
Bertolt Brecht's manservant Matti never subordinates his own moral being to Herr Puntilla, and J. A.
Strindberg, the self-proclaimed "son of a servant maid," has his valet Jean strike back at his master by
seducing his daughter. More generally, Bruce Robbins has demonstrated the central, and most
importantly, active role played by servants in the English fiction tradition.
Ishiguro's treatment of the dynamics between master and servant breaks the pattern in a manner that
demands critical attention. Certainly, the servant holds a central place, but he does so at the price of
relinquishing independent agency. Apart from the master's rule, then, there is no room for maneuver.
Perhaps it is not "the office of art to spotlight alternatives," as Adorno put it, but neither can it be its task
to close the door on them. It is not just that practicing bantering in order to fit into a more relaxed form
of domination is a vile alternative. What is troubling with the scheme of ideological positions in Remains
is also the way that the main contrast presented to Stevens's blind loyalty is immediately made suspect.
Most commentators seize on Harry Smith as a voice for the opposition, since he claims the virtues of
participant democracy for the people. What must be remembered, however, is the way his democratic
rhetoric is immediately thrown in doubt by his own pro-imperialist stance: "Our doctor here's for allkinds of little countries going independent. I don't have the learning to prove him wrong, though I know
he is" (R 192). And this is followed up by Dr. Carlisle's disillusioned comments to Stevens the following
morning, when he identifies Smith's stance as a confused mixture of communism and "true blue Tory"
values. Carlisle then confesses that he came to Little Compton in 1949 as a "committed socialist." The
commitment has clearly been tempered by his recognition that the people he came out to serve are
"happier left alone" (R 209). Carlisle's concluding observation echoes with a particularly marked
hollowness: "Socialism would allow people to live with dignity. That's what I believed when I came out
here."
Commitment becomes, in the key scenes of Remains as well as Artist, just another form of complicity, afaith that retrospectively can be seen as valuable only for the sacrifices it demanded. The "democratic"
faith held by Harry Smith is seen to be premised on ignorance, just as Lord Darlington's belief in
authoritarian solutions stems from good intentions but is "misguided," and Dr. Carlisle's commitment to
socialism is seen to founder on the rock of human nature. Only Miss Kenton is allowed to state her
principles and at the same time explain why she cannot act on them, but she ends up wistfully regretting
her decisions. Young Reginald pleads for "curiosity" as a minimal value, and goes off to be killed in the
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war. In these examples, as in the central presence of Stevens himself, politics is individualized and
sentimentalized in an essentially pessimistic vein. At the same time it is fitted into a parable on service
with a more universalizing scope.
As a novel of structural recognition-in contrast to character-based recognition-Remains can finally be
read for a recognition of the structural identity of the novelist and the butler as the providers of professional service. What has happened to the novel between 1956 and 1989 is the massive
professionalization of this field of cultural production. It is fitting that a writer with an M.A. in creative
writing should thematize the values of professionalism in a novel that deals with the ambivalent relation
between commitment and complicity. The choice between the two belongs to an era when novelists still,
as in Sartre's argument, were seen to have a choice to "unclass" themselves or to remain safely within
the middle class to which they belonged and which they addressed. Now novelists are professionals,
with academic credentials to show for themselves, and their "employer" is an apparatus of mediations
with a public that is often, like the writer, professionally accredited. Stevens describes the misguided
idealist among his fellow professionals who would be "forever reappraising his employer" and
withdrawing his service when the employer failed to measure up morally. The inadequacy of such anattitude was obvious, as Stevens notes, in that such butlers disappeared from the profession. No doubt
that serves as an appropriate comment regarding commitment in the era of professional literary service.
Professional to a fault, the perfectly crafted novel created by writers like Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, and
Martin Amis has developed within an Anglo-American tradition that Geoffrey Hartman once shrewdly
contrasted with the "aesthetics of complicity" cultivated by French writers. While the French novel
turned on its inherited forms a purifying kind of suspicion, the Anglo-American novel is one, says
Hartman, that "honors technique and takes pleasure in craft. Yet the relation of craft to craftiness, of
technique to a fictional in-fighting which pits the artist against art, is rarely felt."45 A similar sense of a
self-imposed impotence is expressed by Geoff Dyer in an astute review of Remains, when he notes that
the irony here "is not ironic enough, never calling itself into question, always immune from its own
inquiring, exempt from its own attention."46 In the terms of my own analysis here, Remains resists a full
recognition of its own labor of transformation. As I have shown, the theme of complicity extends to the
historical complicity of forms incorporated into the novel, but as a novel it obliterates those concrete
mediations of history in favor of the purely literary ironic subversivity that is conferred on postmodern fi