Nationalist discourse, as Benedict Anderson suggests, expresses a will to homogenize the coincidences of identity by submitting the present to the sovereignty of the past and projects the sense of nationness in a synchronic coexistence “within homogeneous, empty time” (187). Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s political discourse in the 1970s and 1980s is typical of the nationalist attempt to construct pure English identity by employing nostalgia for the past: “Let us make it a country safe to grow old in. . . . May this land of ours, which we love so much, find dignity and greatness and peace again” (qtd. in Krieger 77; emphasis mine). The endeavor to restore national “greatness” was a key theme in Thatcher’s election campaign, and the term must have been widely circulated when Ishiguro was writing
Remains. One of her attempt to forge national solidarity is made through stereotyping
nationness in “cultural artefacts” (Anderson 4) that depend upon monuments like the English country houses to function as sites for commemorating the putative national past.4 Besides, in addressing the problem of the influx of immigrants from former colonies, Thatcher never coils from calling the black immigrants a threat to Englishness. Therefore, the very
Englishness or national identity Thatcher evokes tacitly denotes white England. Thatcher’s epic story of national greatness culminated in the Falklands conflict of 1982. When Argentine invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands, Britain collaborated with the U.S. in the United Nations Security Council to pass Britain’s military action to claim the islands back.
Following Britain’s victory in the war, Thatcher asserted that the victory has “put the Great back into Britain” and that “this nation still has those sterling qualities that shine through our history” (qtd. in Webster 219). Stuart Hall has coined the term “Thatcherism” to describe the defensive exclusivism of national identity in England of the 1970s and 1980s. According to Hall, Thatcher’s political discourse, especially her exultant extol over the Falklands victory, is one that attempts to consolidate a homogeneous national identity by reliving the past through myth. She sanctioned the Second World War and the imperial past as a “myth” and made England’s victory in the Falklands War a symbol of national greatness linked to Britain’s imperial past. If Englishness used to be firmly grounded in its sense of ethnic homogeneity against its conquered territories outside, postwar English nationalism appears harder to maintain under the pressure of contemporary process of globalization and the invasion into the colonial center by its formerly peripheralized populations. Therefore, postwar nationalism must resort to extreme and sometimes violent measures to produce the ideological closure it
4 The Thatcher Government legislated the National Heritage Act and launched the National Heritage Memorial Fund in 1980 to preserve the national heritage.
seeks.
Ishiguro clearly points out in an interview that he bears this nationalist construction of Englishness in mind when writing this novel in the 1980s, and aims to critique the stereotype and myth of England that is embedded in it. In an interview held in 1990, Ishiguro observes that “there is an enormous nostalgia industry going on” in England, and gives the following comment:
[Nostalgia] is used as a political tool . . . It’s used as a way of bashing anybody who tries to spoil this Garden of Eden. This can be brought out by the left or right, but usually it is the political right who say England was this beautiful place before the trade unions tried to make it more egalitarian or before the immigrants started to come or before the promiscuous age of the ‘60s came and ruined everything. I actually think it is one of the important jobs of the novelist to actually tackle and rework myths. (Vorda and Herzinger 15) Ishiguro writes Remains as an ironic reworking on a timeless, mythical England to assert his critical stance on the nationalist discourse in the postwar England that seeks to construct a pure unsullied English identity. Ishiguro appropriates such stereotypical images of England as country house and butlers to replicate and distort the idea of Englishness. It is noteworthy that in the novel the decline of the Empire is reflected by the deterioration of many English estates and by Stevens’s assessment that his quality of service has declined in the narrative present of 1956.
Stevens is not only a butler, but also a loyal servant to the nation. Stevens articulates a vision of the nation and restores the English “greatness” through imagery and language resembling those employed by postwar British nationalists. This is best illustrated by his association of “greatness” with the English landscape:
The English landscape at its finest . . . possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations, however more superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess . . . [T]his quality is probably best summed up by the term
‘greatness’ . . . [I]t is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it. (Remains 29)
For Stevens, the rural landscape not only represents national greatness but also bespeaks the traditional Victorian virtues of reserve and restraint. As Jed Esty observes, after the
dissolution of the Empire, English universalism gives way to English nativism and particularism. Postwar English narrative presents a national identity shifting “away from aggressive Britishness, toward humane Englishness” (17). If earlier Englishness was informed by colonial power, postwar England tries to “recapture the humanist, aesthetic, pastoralist values” by shrinking back to its original island center (39). By using an idealized rural landscape as a trope, England in Stevens’s nationalist construction is figured as a pastoral Eden and is disengaged from imperial aggressiveness.
What is central to the novel’s correspondence to the nationalist discourse is Stevens’s nostalgia for the traditional English society, which is dictated by the Victorian values.
Aroused in nostalgia is a sense of continuity in time and an affinity with the past. This nostalgic affiliation with the past is best illustrated by Stevens’s relationship with his father, Stevens Sr., also a butler of a great house before he came to serve in the Darlington Hall in the 1920s. While Stevens’s idea of Englishness rests on notions of “dignity” and “greatness,”
Stevens’s memory of his father’s restraint and fortitude is crucial to his sense of dignity.
Stevens associates the notion of Englishness with the “dignity” of the English butler, and the
“dignity” is defined as “a butler’s ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits”
(Remains 43). This is evidenced by his complacent assertion that “butlers only truly exist in England . . . Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race is capable of . . . [W]hen you think of a great butler, he is bound, almost by definition, to be an Englishman” (44). Not only does Stevens stereotypes Englishness in the English butler, but he also extends the paradigm of a great butler, largely defined by the Victorian virtues of restraint and repression, to the myth of national greatness. This mythical construction of great butlers has to do with his recollection of his father, Stevens Sr., whom Stevens has always respected for his “dignity in keeping with his position” (36). Much like the postwar nationalists who sanction Churchill and World War Two as the representation of the national greatness, Stevens seems to talk about his father as if alluding to a myth; by recounting and living that myth, the national greatness can be restored in the present. There are two examples for the myth of the great butler. One is the episode in which Stevens’s Sr. had to serve a General, whom Stevens Sr. held responsible for the death of his other son, Stevens’s elder bother Leonard. Despite Stevens Sr.’s loathing toward the General, he managed to repress personal feelings and assured his employer that his service to the General “would be provided to the usual standards” (42). Another episode is Stevens Sr.’s recount of a story about how even a tiger under a dinner table could not startle a
“great butler” (37). These myths, for Stevens, portray the virtue of restraint that any butler of dignity should have, and Stevens’s experience of working while his father lay upstairs dying is a repetition of such myth, in which the “dignity” or “greatness” implied in the myth is revived.
Myth serves here as a projection of the traditional values and also gives the sense of continuity for the posterity who by living that myth can revive what accounts for national
greatness. According to Susie O’Brien, Stevens’s attitude to his father is “consistent with his reliance on an anachronistic social order to provide him with a sense of self-definition” (791).
In this sense, Stevens’s affiliation with his father is an allegory for the national pedagogy, which addresses the national identity by basing its authority on the pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past. Bhabha contends that “the simultaneity of the Nation—its
contemporaneity—can only be articulated in the language of archaism, as a ghostly repetition;
a gothic production of past-presentness” (qtd. in Sue 119). Stevens revives an old England that is defined by the butler’s restraint by recounting the myth of his father to the effect of reviving national pedagogical narrative which restores the past to the present. Besides, in Stevens’s clarification, the English butler is defined against the Continentals, who, in Stevens’s view, are not entitled to serve as butlers. Despite the apparent naturalization of a pure and essential English identity, Englishness is always belated since the nationalist
discourse can only formulate it by retroactively identifying the key features of English culture that are seen to distinguish the national Self from the Other.