Ishiguro's "Remains of the Day": The Empire Strikes Back

A few years ago, at the height of the race riots in England, there was widely publicized picture of an Indian woman leading protest march, carrying placard which read, We are here because you were there. The literary analogue to this phenomenon of the British colonial sins coming home to roost is the number of writers born outside England's shores, from the West Indies to India to Japan, now domiciled in England, who write with unblinking clarity about the empire and the final spasms of its delirium tremens. The best known of these writers are V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, and now we have Kazuo Ishiguro, born in Japan, raised and educated in England, who has become one of England's leading younger novelists.' Ishiguro is unique among post-colonial writers because unlike Rushdie, for example, who writes at such unwieldy length and with much obtrusive polemics about the consequences of history, Ishiguro uses that consummately economical and British literary formthe novel of manners-to deconstruct British society and its imperial history. Elliptically alluded to, never directly mentioned, historical events are the powerful absences which shape the characters and narratives of all three of Ishiguro's novels. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, never referred to, echoes in the intricacies of the fragmented lives in A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World. In his recent and most acclaimed novel, The Remains of the Day, it is the dismantling of Britain's colonial empire, mentioned only as the date on which the narrative begins, which provides the determining historical context of the characters' attitudes and aspirations. The date is July 1956, when President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, thus heralding the end of Britain's long reign as the world's foremost colonial power. Not so coincidentally, on that particular day, the narrator/protagonist of the novel, Stevens, the quintessential English butler, sets out on journey across England and, in the process, recovers the tragic truth of his past, truth inextricably bound up with the history of his country. Even as England has to accommodate itself to the rise of America as an imperial power, Stevens, after having served Lord Darlington for 35 years, has to adjust himself to an American master, Mr. Farraday, who has bought Darlington Hall because he wanted a genuine grand old English house and a genuine old fashioned English butler (124) to go with it. As Stevens reminisces during his cross country trip, we learn more than Stevens is willing to reveal (either to himself or to the reader) about the tragedy of his misguided devotion to Lord Darlington. While critics have praised Ishiguro's masterful control of tone and narrative strategies which make this oblique, and therefore all the more shocking, discovery possible, they have also noted that Stevens' self-abnegation in the service of his master reverberates with larger implications about British politics,