1One of the main difficulties in discussing Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Remains of the Day is that it has been the object of so many studies since its publication in 1989 that it may appear somewhat problematic, at first sight, to add anything new to what has already been said. The interest aroused by the book can be attributed to the fact that it won the Booker Prize and was then made into an internationally successful film directed by James Ivory. However, I have always been struck by what appears as a gap existing between the attention, albeit often brilliant and informative, awarded to the novel’s signification and to its historical and literary dimensions, and the relatively scant time devoted to exploring the actual setting of a story dominated by the all-pervading presence of an English country house and those associated with it. This background thus seems to be reduced to nothing more than symbolic bric-a-brac for a novel whose main purpose is to provide a representation of the human condition itself or, more specifically, of the tensions generated by the challenge to English identity entailed by the collapse of the British Empire.

2The first reading has been largely encouraged by Ishiguro himself with his remark that the novel’s protagonist, the butler Stevens, is representative of all ordinary humans living routine lives in a world whose ultimate purpose is largely incomprehensible and over whose forces they have no control. In his own words: “I chose the figure deliberately because that’s what I think I am, and I think most of us are: we’re just butlers” (J. Viviès, 1997, 79). It might be worth mentioning, from this point of view, that both Sartre and Barthes use the image of the waiter or servant as metaphors for the alienated condition of modern man. In L’Etre et le néant the waiter’s ritualised gestures are thus analysed in terms of the social codes which hide the authenticity of the individual man beneath (Sartre, 95). Barthes, for his part, defines myth, in the sense of the conventional, culturally created meanings which hide the social and historical realities of life from ordinary humans, in the guise of an “ideal domestic” whose service is so professionally performed that the master simply fails to see the sheer extent of the labour and training which go into the achievement of such smooth, seamless perfection (1957, 225). This exclusively metaphorical use of the figure does indeed have clear echoes in Ishiguro’s text, as in the famous incident of the butler in India discreetly dispatching a tiger which had distractedly strayed into his owner’s house and then calmly announcing to his master that “all discernible traces … of the recent occurrence” had been removed (2005 [1989], 37).

3The second, or “postcolonial”, reading is partly connected with Ishiguro’s own status as a second generation immigrant, even though Japan has never been part of the British Empire, but also, quite logically, by the novel’s sometimes scattered allusions to the arrival of political independence, the Suez crisis and the decline of the great houses whose prosperity once incarnated the prestige and prosperity of the United Kingdom. While sharing this perspective, I wish to show how the tendency to concentrate on the novel’s overall signification has led to an emphasis on its allegorical dimension, which ultimately obliterates the actual universe inhabited by the butler Stevens – in other words, the very buildings, functions, and people which constitute the stuff of his daily life – thereby pushing this aspect to the sidelines and reducing Stevens’s existential habitat to a mere collection of symbolic props without any ontological status of their own.

4Without going so far as to say that The Remains of the Day has anything to do, generically speaking, with the encyclopaedic novel as exemplified by Melville’s Moby Dick, it does nevertheless constitute, despite the somewhat generally allusive nature of Ishiguro’s manner, an extremely painstaking reconstitution of the architecture, daily organisation and history of the country house itself. Certainly, Ishiguro refrains from the meticulous, and to some readers, interminable listing of information provided by Melville in his book about the great whale. Nevertheless, the fact remains that his novel is literally saturated with historical and architectural details which would appear to indicate that the author has undertaken considerable research into what is usually considered as a somewhat specialist field.

5There is thus a need to rehabilitate this aspect of the novel. At the same time, however, I wish to place it within the problematic of a narrative strategy forced on the author by his awareness of a certain gratuitousness, or at least, facility, in his use of other background material, notably that relating to the novel’s more ostensibly historical references. From this point of view I was struck a few years ago by a remark made by Ishiguro himself at an unpublished conference he gave at the Sorbonne concerning his fears that his novel might be accused of a certain artificial weightiness. In saying this he seemed to be referring to the innumerable, yet somewhat superficial, references made in the work to a number of major historical events occurring in the period running from the 1920s to the 1950s. Taken together, these events – which cluster around the issue of German reparations in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles, the rise of Hitler and the collapse of Empire – read like a Reader’s Digest version of A.J.P. Taylor’s monumental English History 1914-45 (1965).

6The somewhat insubstantial and diffusive nature of these nevertheless easily identifiable references is of course due largely to the symbolic logic of a narrative whose aim is to illustrate Stevens’s inability, or refusal, to address any matter which falls outside his immediate professional sphere. The reader may nevertheless be uncomfortably aware of the discrepancy which exists between the magnitude and gravity of the monumental happenings thus evoked from afar and the manner in which they impinge so little on the events which, within the novel’s actual economy, shape the life and feelings of the central protagonist. From this point of view, one may be tempted to read The Remains of the Day as a form of “contrapuntal” reading (to use Edward Said’s famous phrase, 1993, 78) of another famous “country-house” novel, Mansfield Park. Like her protagonists, it would seem that Jane Austen, whose Hertfordshire settings (as has been pointed out) coincide with the area where Stevens’s father has worked all his life (39), has little time to spend on the macrocosmic historical events (British policy in the Caribbean) which provide the Bertram family with the economic means (sugar) whereby they can indulge in their microcosmic love affairs. Being a postcolonial writer – I use the phrase a little provocatively – Ishiguro, with hindsight, is able, on the contrary, to insist heavily on the great mass of historical matter which Stevens refuses to acknowledge, thereby contributing to the highly sceptical readings of grand narratives which constitute one of the characteristics of postmodernist and postcolonial literature.

7This scepticism is clearly aided by the fact that Ishiguro is writing in an intellectual climate in which re-examinations of earlier works give considerable visibility to the fundamental importance of the way historical perspectives shape communal perceptions of reality. Although it would be rash to make symmetrical comparisons between postcolonial and postmodern developments in contemporary literature, there is a critical consensus around the fact that the need to re-examine earlier works – culminating in the huge number of explicit rewritings of these pointed out by Steven Connor (1995, 166sqq) – is related in Britain with the need to come to terms with the simultaneous collapse of the Empire and the breakdown of the canonical nineteenth century novel which, according to Connor himself (44), and to Timothy Brennan (1990, 49), contributed so much to the imaginative construction of Britain’s national greatness and identity.

8By situating the main action of his novel in July 1956, the month which saw the beginning of the Suez crisis, Ishiguro thus appears to be exploiting an intellectual climate highly conducive to the transmission of his own representation of Britain’s decline. The climate I am referring to thus corresponds to that state of complicity between writer and addressee which manifests itself textually via what Roland Barthes in S/Z has called the narrative’s “cultural code” (1970, 27). This consists largely of that string of intratextual and usually easily recognisable, and by definition common, extratextual references to the world beyond the text whereby the writer seeks to establish a consensual frame of reference with his addressee so as to ensure that the latter is receptive to the meaning he wishes to communicate. In The Remains of the Day, this complicity clearly works against Stevens whose status as a victim is linked precisely to his inability to read or understand history. There is a sense, however, when this presumed complicity can be taken so far that it reflects negatively on the credibility of the symbolic scheme being used in the text. The symptom of this - and maybe one of the reasons for Ishiguro’s aforementioned reservations concerning the artificial “weightiness” of his historical references - may be seen in the way one single background reference, in this case, the mere mention of “July 1956”, i.e. the beginning of the Suez crisis, is made to carry what appears to me as an over-abundance of symbolic weight whose signification is provided less by the text itself than by the emblematic importance of this date in the nation’s collective imagination. Bombastically represented in nineteenth century imperialist rhetoric as the “lifeline”, the “windpipe”, the “vital artery” and the “jugular vein” of the British Empire, the Suez canal became, as this anatomical vocabulary suggests, such an embodiment of British life, identity and importance that its loss, in the words of Sir Pierson Dixon (the British Ambassador to the U.N.), “reduced (Britain) from a first-class to a third-class power” (A. Sked and C. Cook, 1979, 153), thereby launching the process whereby the British people, according to the historians Alan Sked and Chris Cook, “began to question the nature of their world role” (1979, 154). This date, strategically placed at the very beginning of the novel, thus acts as a solitary signifier whose abundant signifieds then proceed to cannibalise the entire text, thereby allowing Ishiguro to make his point with a considerable economy of means. Stevens’s actual journey is then easily transformed into a symbolic depiction of post-imperial Britain’s demise.

9It is no doubt to counteract this imbalance, which runs the risk of reducing his novel to yet another somewhat thin and one-dimensional variation on “the condition of England” question, that Ishiguro seeks to invest his main setting, Darlington Hall, with a thickness and depth which, in its own terms, fully recreates the symbolic importance of the country house as a central ideological feature in the constitution of British history and identity. Though (to my knowledge) an invented location the Hall thus comes across as a careful reconstitution of each of the principal phases of English history as evoked by a number of authoritative studies devoted to the English country house. In a sense also, this well documented evolution of English life adds a certain consistency to the symbolic role assumed by Stevens. Instead of appearing as a shallow illustration of pre-designed attitudes and viewpoints, a mere mouthpiece for expressing outdated views, his constant interaction with the décor itself makes of him the very incarnation of a certain conception of history whose thickness does justice to the sheer power exercised by ideologies on people’s lives.

10Darlington Hall itself probably goes back to the mid-eighteenth century, as we are informed that the Darlington family’s title was obtained “two centuries” (6) before the time of a story whose central action, as just seen, takes place in 1956. The Darlingtons may thus be considered as typical products of a period when the Hanoverian kings, George III in particular, sought to consolidate their influence by creating a new nobility whose wealth, estimated at at least £20,000 in annual revenue, was derived mainly from commercial profits which were then invested in the acquisition of land (Plumb 165). This was the time when England was dominated by the likes of Robert Walpole, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1721 to 1742, whose country house at Houghton, modelled on what Mark Girouard refers to as the great “power houses” of the feudal period (1978, 2), became the scene of a number of political “congresses” (as they were then called) held to discuss government policy (1978, 231).

11The symbolic connection with the medieval period, characterised also by the principle of power-sharing between the king and a powerful ruling class, is established very concretely by the huge banqueting halls which became one of the central features of these houses. The one at Darlington Hall, described as “vast” and “magnificent” by Stevens (102), is capable of seating at least fifty people (75). However, the diversity of the rooms described in the novel points to the growing complexity of social stratifications in the post-medieval period. For example, the introduction of dining rooms (37) reflects in itself the breakdown of a feudal society in which all social levels, tacitly respectful of each other’s status, would eat in the same chamber (1978, 203).

12Another illustration of this new complexity was the introduction of the “drawing room” in the Renaissance period. Etymologically “withdrawing room”, this chamber originally permitted informal gatherings of small groups before becoming, from 1720 onwards, the place where women could retire to after meals, a custom apparently specific to Great Britain. On this point Mark Girouard (1978, 204) refers to a remark made by a Lady Lyttelton to her architect in 1752 concerning the nature of men’s conversation at the dinner table as “too boorish” to be listened to all the time. These rooms were also used in the Renaissance period as “morning rooms” for welcoming visitors, although such visits were later transferred to the afternoon, in particular from the 1840s on when tea drinking, stimulated by British conquests in India, became a passion (1978, 293). Incidentally, this custom is perpetuated by the Hall’s new owner, the American businessman Farraday (13), but what is particularly striking here is the historical sense shown by both Lord Darlington and Stevens in their respective attitudes to these rooms. Though he is sometimes presented as a sort of ignoramus, Stevens’s historical sensitivity is apparent when he underlines the “feminine” nature of the drawing room (95). On a different level, Darlington’s tactical use of the room as a place for informal political discussion (95) perpetuates an habitual eighteenth century practice alluded to by the historian of architecture, Robert Adam, in 1778 (1978, 205).

13Darlington’s historical sense, as noted by Stevens, is also apparent in the way he adapts the existing rooms so as to underline, metonymically, the characteristics he considers as most suitable to his status. The presence of both a library (3, 57, 87) and a study (63) not only reflects the house’s size, but also reveals also the importance given to literacy and learning by the nobility as from the seventeenth century. The study in particular is symptomatic of a post-Reformation evolution which saw education and power pass simultaneously from the Church to a new secular aristocracy (1978, 101). In contrast to Farraday, who has the books replaced by ornaments (63), Darlington significantly keeps his books in the entrance hall (63) as if to underline the intellectual influence of his caste. Conscious also of the prestige once granted to the physical prowess of the nobility, whether on the battlefield or the playing field - much the same thing if we are to believe Lord Wellington - Lord Darlington exhibits a number of sports trophies in his billiard room (59), a place introduced into some English homes as early as the eighteenth century. The library also contains the Darlington family portraits (3), thus continuing a tradition initiated at the beginning of the sixteenth century by the Tudor nobility in its bid to consolidate its new-found status (1978, 103). Significantly, the novel opens on a scene in which Stevens describes himself as diligently dusting these symbols of dynastic grandeur.

14The dominant eighteenth century flavour of Darlington Hall is, however, indicated by a number of architectural features which are given a certain prominence by Stevens’s evocations. The large first floor windows (97), so much admired by the housekeeper Miss Kenton, with their commanding view over the surrounding countryside, the French windows on the ground floor opening directly onto the grounds (66), the presence of a summerhouse (66) in place of the more traditional conservatory, and of a gardener’s lodge (93): all these point both to the mid-eighteenth century nature cult made fashionable by Rousseau’s ideas as well as to the mid-seventeenth-century power shift from the court to the country revelatory of the rising influence of the country squire as best symbolised by Oliver Cromwell. What is most striking, however, in Stevens’s evocation of the Hall is the manner in which the very disposition of the main rooms is arranged in such a way as to reflect, consciously, the continuities of English social life, or at least the attempts made to paper over the discontinuities. This is particularly apparent in the way the five major ground-floor rooms converge around the huge entrance hall (58) which is itself surmounted by what Stevens refers to as the “great staircase” (58). The importance of the ground floor in effect underlines an early eighteenth century reaction to a Renaissance tendency to push the great house’s centre of gravity away from the medieval courtyard to the upper echelons of the building, as if mirroring, in a patent, visible manner, the new Tudor and Jacobean nobility’s desire to ground their new-found status on a clear break with what came before. The reinstatement of the ground floor occurs at the precise moment when the commercial classes (including the Darlingtons) basking in their wealth and in the political prestige granted them quite officially by the Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights, now seek to re-establish a form of symbolic contact with the great feudal lords of the pre-Renaissance period. In architectural terms this translates into a taste for vast vertical structures disappearing into the skies like the Piranasian staircases of William Beckford’s neo-Gothic fantasy Vathek. This feature is best illustrated in the novel by what Stevens refers to as the “high and magnificent” ceiling of the banqueting hall (75), a style actually realised by Gothic novelists like Horace Walpole in his residence Strawberry Hill and which anticipates the mid-nineteenth century Gothic revival initiated by John Ruskin and the architects John Nash and Pugin (1978, 180, 226).

15The novel’s reconstitution of political history is thus made visible in the very texture of the house’s architecture. But the latter, seen strictly in terms of its formal disposition, also acts as a reflection of the social changes occurring in Britain over the years. This is apparent, for example, in the way the servants’ quarters at Darlington Hall are pushed as far as possible to the margins of the building. Hence the presence of the minor servants’ quarters on the fourth floor, as illustrated by Stevens’s father’s “attic bedroom” situated just under the roof tiles and the guttering (67). Stevens’s pantry is actually beneath ground level as is indicated by the fact that he can hear cars arriving “somewhere above (his) head” (89). This physical distancing of servants (1978, 23, 138), which was taken even further in the nineteenth century when the construction of wings and outhouses announced the actual removal of domestics from the main building, is the consequence of a long process occurring in the wake of the gradual breakdown of the feudal ideals guiding the notion of service as a whole. As illustrated by a number of medieval and Renaissance “household regulations” or treatises (1978, 82sqq), for example the fifteenth century Babees Book laying down the rules governing the service of young pages from the nobility (1978, 17), the notion of service was considered at that time as by no means socially degrading. Specialisation in the form of remunerated service only came in much later after the disappearance of the former criteria.

16These factors must also be borne in mind when considering what may appear to a contemporary reader as somewhat eccentric behaviour on Stevens’s part. For example, his questioning of Miss Kenton’s right as housekeeper to call his father by his first name (55) remains largely incomprehensible unless one understands his profound awareness of the complex hierarchy which reigns in the servant world. But here again we are witnessing the consequences of a long process of social change whose developments go back at least to the eighteenth century. Prior to the introduction of remunerated servants, important domestic tasks were conferred to senior yeomen who, though outside the nobility, nevertheless enjoyed considerable social prestige in terms of rank. Among these the butler, as the etymology of the word indicates, had as his privileged duty to look after the lord’s wine, just as the panter looked after the bread and the ewer after the washing (1978, 22). Though Ishiguro makes several references to the butler’s traditional function of fetching bottles as an essential aspect of Stevens’ duties, he also alludes to the manner in which this category of servant gradually emerged as the senior domestic whose prestige was reinforced by his assumption of administrative responsibilities formerly reserved to the clerks and stewards in charge of running the great estates. This explains the importance given in the novel to Stevens’s duties as the Darlington household’s accountant and manager (54, 89) in charge of a house thirty or so employees (7) of which make of it the equivalent of a small or medium-sized company. Significantly, the house plans of several of the great houses illustrated in Mark Girouard’s book indicate the central importance of the butler’s pantry; the location of which was strategically placed between the servants’ quarters and the long back corridor connecting this to the rest of the house. Stevens is thus not exaggerating when he speaks of his pantry, in military terms, as a headquarters (173).

17In a sense, Stevens’s motivation – so often reduced, as seen, to a mere incapacity to understand larger historical forces – remains incomprehensible if disassociated from his keen awareness of the tensions surrounding his own status as the butler of a former great house. Within his limits Stevens sees the futility of the Hayes Society’s attempt to establish the myth of a natural aristocracy (32), thereby tacitly recognising the historical fact that the nobility has always been formed by a constant process of social recycling based on the acquisition of wealth. At the same time, his emphasis on moral virtue as a distinctive sign of nobility is fully in keeping with Girouard’s analysis of the attempts made by the landed aristocracy to compensate for its economic decline after 1880 (in the face of cheap corn imports from the US) by incarnating the virtues of Victorian domesticity. This ideal was also valued by the new business aristocracy of the early twentieth century in its quest for respectability and status (1978, 300) and marks a distinct contrast with the more ribald tradition illustrated by the likes of Squire Western in Tom Jones or the cynical Lord Henry Wotton of Dorian Gray.

18It is largely against this background that one can best understand the nature of both the professional rivalry and the sexual tensions which characterise Steven’s relations with the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. In professional terms, Miss Kenton’s challenge to Stevens’s status is the consequence of a seventeenth-century development which saw a massive rise in the number of women servants corresponding, as seen earlier, to the spread of remunerated, as opposed to feudal, service. Miss Kenton is in effect Stevens’s second-in command in a complex pyramid which the novel once again takes great pains to evoke in detail. Beginning at the bottom with the “second footman” (166), a survival from the day certain servants would accompany their masters everywhere on foot, the novel goes up the scale respectively taking in the first footman (94), the under-butler (53), the valet (“aspiring to the position of butler”, 31), the valet-butler (19) and, finally, the butler himself. In sexual terms, Stevens’s inability to respond to Miss Kenton’s advances may quite legitimately be explained, over and above the sometimes ingenious psychoanalytical theories which abound in the studies of this novel, by his no doubt exaggerated need to support his master’s tendency to equate social status with morality.

19It may of course be said that Ishiguro’s very insistence on the details of country house life and organisation is a symptom of the need to revive a world whose existence is taken for granted - and hence less scrupulously described – in the novels of an earlier period.Yet this thickness of detail, though clearly distinct from the lengthy photographic evocations of nineteenth century realism, gives the novel a dimension which, though very much present in James Ivory’s film, tends to be overlooked in many of the allegorical readings mentioned above. This is the human or psychological aspect of a character whose desperate attempt to cling to a world with which he can identify comes across with a certain poignancy in his constant appeals to an imagined “you” (perhaps a projection of himself) whose assumed familiarity with the world of the country house contrasts dramatically with the novel’s assumed addressee, in other words the fore-mentioned sceptic whose vision is shaped by a post-Suez view of Britain.

20Not only does Stevens’s bewilderment give the novel an unexpected emotional depth, it also shows, from the inside as it were, to what extent ideology, far from being a set of abstract ideas, corresponds (in the words of Leonard Meyer) to a set of “beliefs and attitudes which are not naturally arrived at but which nevertheless channel our perceptions and cognitions – in short, our understanding of ourselves and the world” (1970, 69). For all his postmodern foregrounding of postcolonial ambiguity, and in spectacular contrast to the narrative experimentation rendered fashionable by the school of Salman Rushdie, Ishiguro achieves this representation of the workings of ideology by merging Stevens fully into his social and cultural background, thus re-employing the codes which commentators like Raymond Williams consider as one of the defining features of literary realism (1977, 30). This is not the least of the paradoxes brought to the fore by The Remains of the Day.