Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Stevens is the perfect English butler. Stylish, discreet, stiff, able to become ubiquitous when ubiquitousness is required, loyal to his masters… For the first time of his life, Stevens embarks on a road trip through England for a vacation, but he has an idea in mind, very much connected with his work, or so he convinces himself: Stevens will visit Miss Kenton in Cornwall, where she moved when she got married. Miss Kenton used to be a housekeeper at Darlington Hall, where Stevens has been a butler for more than 30 years. Stevens, who got news that she left her husband, hopes to persuade her to resume her former position, in order to solve a little drop in the quality of the service that he believes to be caused by a lack of able staff.
During his trip, Stevens reflects on his past, and on what has been his main preoccupation throughout his life, mainly, an answer to the question "what makes a great butler?". First of all, Stevens is convinced that a great butler is someone who is a butler before anything else:
The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising alarming, or vexing. They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstance tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of "dignity".
No doubt, in his life, Stevens has achieved to stick to his own definition of a great butler. But wasn’t his notion of "dignity" a little bit off the mark? Stevens remembers for instance how he faultlessly stuck to his role during an important gathering of politicians and diplomats, while his old father was dying in one of the upstairs room…
The more Stevens looks back on his actions, the more he begins to question his life and the nature of the so-called "dignity" he claimed to serve. Believing that "a "great" butler can only be, surely one who can point to his years of service and say that he applied his talents to serving a great gentleman – and through the latter, to serving humanity", Stevens starts retrospectively to question the greatness of his previous master, Lord Darlington, whose role in the interwar years was indeed a very ambiguous one, since, through a German ambassador who manipulated him, he became a pawn of Hitler. Stevens’s narration is aimed as a justification of his actions (to whom is not clear, since Stevens has very few connections and fewer friends, if any. His addressee seems to be to a fellow butler whose identity remains mysterious: the only butler he mentions who has been something of a friend he has long lost touch with…), but it remains clear that he knew what was going on with his master, from the time he was asked to fire two Jewish maids and complied…
But the biggest mistake Stevens made is maybe not to have stuck by a seriously mislead humanist, but to have betrayed his true feelings and to have missed life entirely. By remaining a professional in all circumstances, Stevens has missed opportunities for love, human warmth and friendship, or even simple human decency. By striving to be a great butler, Stevens has been a very poor human being. The last pages give hope that Stevens has understood that there is nothing he can do about the past, but that he has the "remains of the day" to enjoy life, but the very last paragraph makes us fear that after all, the lesson may not have been potent, and that lifelong habits die hard …
I had seen the movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson when it first aired, and retrospectively, I can say that it is a very faithful and wonderful adaptation. Stevens and Miss Kenton could not have been better impersonated than by these two actors. A great movie and a great book… I recommend both, in any order…
Rating: 4,5/5
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