The paradoxical intensification described in Bhabha’s theorization of “the barred Nation It/Self” is remarkably suggestive of the particular processes undergone in Britain in the postwar period. Bhabha demystifies the nation as an essential and immanent subject in
“DissemiNation.” The emergence of the modern nation owes its signification to the historicist articulation of the people or the nation in a linear equivalence of event and idea or a
homogeneous empty time. However, the cultural force of the everyday life is far more complicated than can be contained in the metaphoric construction of the nation. The cultural movement of the everyday disperses the homogeneous, visual time of the horizontal society.
A nation is barred in itself: “the barred nation It/self, alienated from its eternal self-generation,
becomes a liminal form of social representation, a space that is internally marked by cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations” (Bhabha 299). What Bhabha is trying to get at is a sense of a collective social subject that is never completely totalizable as the people-as-one. A temporal contention is inherent in the constitution of the national identity. The modern nation, as depicted in the Imagined Communities, appeals to tradition to draw its pedagogical territory.
On the other hand, the discourses of minorities, the colonized, and the heterogeneous
histories of contending peoples are the performative force that introduces a temporality of the in-between and unveils the nation split within itself. The distinction between the pedagogical and the performative narratives lies in the intriguing boundary of the public and the private.
Pedagogical narratives are identity markers expressed in the official discourses of the state apparatus while performative narratives are the enunciations of daily life that negotiate with the officially enunciated identity formation. “The people” are not just objects of a nationalist pedagogy, but also subjects of living performativity. Beneath the contemporaneity of the national present in the national discourse always lurks the distracting presence of another temporality. The ghostly, the terrifying, and the unaccountable constantly intervene in the national discursive structure of time.
While most postcolonial critics such as Susie O’Brien and Molly Westerman have pointed out the contradiction or the many contestations occurring within the postimperial English identity, their interpretations about Stevens tend to place him in the position of the colonized, reading his narrative as an interruption of the colonial authority or a revelation of the ambiguity of the imperial discursive power. This positioning is evidenced in the two critics’ respective interpretations of Stevens’s relationship with Lord Darlington and Stevens Sr., and his changing situation in Darlington Hall. O’Brien reads Stevens’s relationship to
Lord Darlington and Stevens Sr. in terms of the child’s devotion to the benevolent
paternalism (O’Brien 790). Westerman proposes that Stevens’s unhomeliness is the syndrome of the colonial and postcolonial experiences of colonized people (Westerman 164). Stevens’s unhomely situation is attributed to the binary division of public and private that translates into Stevens’s self as split subjectivity. For Stevens, the boundary between home and the world is confused, which leads to his disorienting, and uncanny experience.
To parallel Stevens with the colonized is problematic. First of all, this parallel appeals to theoretical metonym to codify Stevens’s relationship with Lord Darlington and his father in terms of the colonizer and the colonized, reckoning out Stevens’s actual positioning in a white English society, which nurtures and pathologizes the self-contradictions in his narrative and his split subjectivity. Second, to directly relate Stevens’s unhomely situation to the
disorienting experience of the colonized is to unwarily downplay the mutual inscription of the colonial experience on not only the colonized but also the imperial authority. The colonial experience is also an experience of displacement and disorientation for the colonizer. The unhomely situation epitomized in Stevens is that of the colonizer rather than the colonized. I propose to read Stevens’s reflection of both the national and personal past in terms of the ex-imperial nation introspecting the ambivalence of its identity construction after the loss of its long-time identity designation, the Empire. The imperial Self needs an Other to define itself against. So, when the Empire collapses, the Self can no longer maintain the narcissistic look but has to grapple with the other that is in itself. The pathological subjectivity innate in Stevens is the very syndrome of the identity crisis of the colonizing Self, who finds an antagonistic other looking at itself in the eye.
Apart from Stevens’s pedagogical narrative informed by the parallel between his notion of Englishness and the postwar nationalist discourse, the characterization of Stevens
aligns with the author’s critique of the British Empire.5 I argue that the leverage of disrupting the holistic notion of the English identity comes from the ambivalent position of the butler in the English society. In correspondence to Bhabha’s theorization of the “barred Nation
It/Self,” the butler’s narrative is very much akin to “the liminal figure of the nation-space,” in which the intervention of the performative “would ensure that no political ideologies could claim transcendent or metaphysical authority for themselves” (Bhabha 148). While many reviewers and critics such as Ryan S. Trimm have contributed to reading Stevens as an ambivalent figure, whose subjectivity stems from his occupation, what seems to be lacking, however, is an investigation of the location of the butler in the social context. I agree with Trimm’s speculation that Stevens’s role as a servant points toward a consideration of the temporal divide and spatial tension which signals an outdated order and increasing globalization (Trimm 135, 136). Yet, in order to highlight how a butler’s voice could articulate the internal contradictions within the postwar English society, I would like to examine what exactly causes the butler’s ambivalent position within the social order it serves.
What significance is there in Ishiguro’s deployment of the butler’s narrative of the nation?
Aside from admitting his appropriation of P. G. Wodehouse’s story of Jeeves, Ishiguro comments on his writing an English novel from a butler’s perspective that “[t]he butler is a good metaphor for the relationship of very ordinary, small people to power” (Swift 22).
Representing a cultural idea gleaned from the Victorian world of rigid class hierarchies, the butler, also known as the gentleman’s gentleman, exists in a liminal sphere in the English society. Unlike their factory counterparts, “servants,” as Theresa McBride points out, “did not form a true social class” (15). If servants did not have a class identity, the male head-servants’
5 A similar idea has also been pointed out by Cynthia F. Wong in “Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.” She reads Stevens as a national character in relation to Lord Darlington.
position was even bleaker. The butler was subjected to their upper-class employer in the household while he held authority over all the other servants and underservants. The result is that he was rejected by both the upper-class and the lower class. The butler’s liminal position is best illustrated by his clothing. The butler did not have to dress in livery, but instead, he wore gentlemen’s clothing. So attired, they became a symbol of authority for the servants under them. Besides, according to Dorothy Marshall, these waiting gentlemen acted like the noblemen they served and maintained an elite etiquette solely known to upper-class
individuals. However, the upper-class still reigned. The upper-class set themselves as the paternal figure over those lower than themselves. “Paternalism,” as McBride explains, “was the dominant aspect of the master-servant relationship in the nineteenth century” (23).
Though the butlers wore the gentleman’s clothes, the master, as Pamela Horn states, would force them to wear “the wrong tie or the wrong trousers” in order to keep the class distinction clearly delineated (85).
Wearing a gentleman’s clothing, Stevens does seem to conform to and adopt the colonial ideology represented by his aristocrat employer, Lord Darlington, which renders his account a pedagogical narrative of the Empire. Stevens’s unswerving belief in his lordship’s political choice and diplomatic decisions demonstrates an upholding of benevolent
paternalism, which, as O’Brien contends, “was invoked to legitimate the deployment of power by the British ruling class, both at home and abroad” (797). Stevens believes that what the gentlemen do to the empire is to “[further] the progress of humanity,” and by playing the role of a loyal servant to the gentlemen he is making “an undeniable contribution to the future well-being of the empire” (Remains 120). When in the 1930s Lord Darlington asks Stevens to dismiss two Jewish housemaids, Stevens obeys though he concedes that his “every instinct opposed the idea of their dismissal” (156). While Miss Kenton brings the balefulness of such
anti-Semitic behavior to Stevens’s attention, Stevens once again chooses to repress his personal doubts and, in response to Miss Kenton’s deplore, replies that “[servants’]
professional duty is not to our own foibles and sentiments, but to the wishes of our employer”
(157). By deferring to Darlington unanimously, Stevens is able to confirm his own dignity as a butler. As butlers’ clothing signals their liminal position as a gentleman’s gentleman, Stevens does actually use the butlers’ clothing as a trope of their dignity:
[The butlers] wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstances tear it off him in the public gaze;
he will discard it when, and only when, he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of ‘dignity’. (44)
However, if Stevens has deemed himself glorified by his lordship’s political prominence in world events in the 1920s and 1930s, the same inflated pride diminishes considerably when, in 1950s, the world understands the devastating results of fascist politics. In Moscombe, Stevens is confronted with a different definition of dignity, one that is predicted on
democratic vision invoking the urgency of speaking for oneself. This view is proposed by a village folk named Harry Smith, who asserts:
[T]here’s no dignity to be had in being a slave. That’s what we fought [Hitler]
for and that’s what we won. We won the right to be free citizens. And it’s one of the privileges of being born English that no matter who you are, no mater if you’re rich or poor, you’re born free and you’re born so that you can express your opinion freely, and vote in your member of parliament or vote him out.
That’s what dignity’s really about. (196)
Smith’s view of dignity that breaks down the class structure and sets everyone free is
discordant with Stevens, whose sense of self and identity is deeply ingrained in the Victorian
constraints of a strictly stratified society. Thus, in Stevens’s contemplation on Smith’s remark, he concedes:
The fact is, such great affairs will always be beyond the understanding of those such as you and me, and those of us who wish to make our mark must realize that we best do so by concentrating on what is within our realm; that is to say, by devoting our attention to providing the best possible service to those great gentlemen in whose hands the destiny of civilization truly lies. (209) With his wholehearted devotion to the upper-class, whom Stevens holds to be representative of the national greatness, Stevens’s narrative is both literally and metaphorically an “object”
of the pedagogical narrative of the nation.
However, underneath the pedagogical narrative presented by Stevens, Stevens’s narrative shows the very nature of the performative narrative. While performativity in Bhabha’s theorization is aimed to disrupt the construction of a holistic and essential national identity, Stevens’s narrative seems to do without such telo at the same time when the nature of performativity already sets in. The performative nature can be detected in the opposition between present and past. There are three examples. While Stevens recollects that the Hayes Society (a community for English butlers) in the 1920s sets the criteria for membership that
“an applicant be attached to a distinguished household” and disregards the houses of businessmen or the “newly rich” as “distinguished,” Stevens himself in 1956, whose new employer is an American businessman, seems to be excluded from the category of butlers of dignity (32). Another example is Stevens’s recollection about one butler named Mr. Jack Neighbours, who used to be praised by everyone as a great butler yet has fallen out of fame on account of some blunder, on which Stevens comments by asking “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?” (30). Stevens’s comment on Mr. Jack Neighbours is also applicable to himself in the 1950s when he is not only anachronistic but is also guilty of assisting Darlington’s anti-Semitic behavior in the antebellum time. The other example is the contradiction between Harry Smith’s definition of dignity and Stevens’s. While Smith’s notion of dignity is based on democracy, Stevens’s definition is still confined to one’s breeding.
The performative nature of Stevens’s narrative surfaces in his language in enunciation rather than language in the enunciated. Stevens’s repetition of the same events in his account demonstrates what Stuart Hall calls “arbitrary closure” (“Cultural” 278), which, according to Bhabha, would open up “new forms of identification that may confuse the continuity of historical temporalities, confound the ordering of cultural symbols, traumatize tradition”
(179). In light of the ineffable experience in the imperial past, Stevens’s displacement in the present is highlighted by his denial of ever having worked for Darlington. The first time he denies having worked for Darlington is to the American guests of his new employer. Another time is on his journey when he encounters a butler who has worked in a Colonel’s house, and he “had given the distinct impression that [he] had never been in the employ of Lord
Darlington” (Remains 126). About his denial Stevens offers the following comment:
Indeed, it seems to me that my odd conduct can be very plausibly explained in terms of my wish to avoid any possibility of hearing any further such nonsense concerning his lordship; that is to say, I have chosen to tell white lies in both instances as the simplest means of avoiding unpleasantness. . . . Indeed, you will appreciate that to have served his lordship at Darlington Hall during those years was to come as close to the hub of this world’s wheel as one such as I could ever have dreamt. (132-133)
These enunciating moments slip through the dictation of the enunciated past, infiltrating into the pedagogical narrative of his identity. Through such performative act of denying an ineffable experience, Stevens is trying to negotiate an identity between past and present. In Bhabha’s terms, Stevens’s subjectivity can only be thought in “double-time” (Bhabha 145).
Such temporal tension also points to a spatial divide in which the butler’s liminal existence bespeaks an interplay between public history and private memory. As James M.
Lang has pointed out:
The competing strategies of historicization in The Remains of the
Day—official, public, diplomatic history in contrast with the private memories of the diplomat’s butler—find a parallel in the slow movement, on the part of twentieth-century historians, away from the grand narratives and grand characters of earlier historiography toward the lives and experiences of the ordinary, the mundane, the marginalized, and the dispossessed. (147)
In the novel, the grand narrative of national history is intertwined with the butler’s memory of his personal life. This private memory is stringed up by the love story between Stevens and Miss Kenton. On Stevens’s journey through the West Country, his remembrance of Miss Kenton when they were both working in Darlington Hall is brought into focus in his mind. In his recollection, Stevens utters terms like “[e]vents of a global significance are taking place in this house at this very moment” many times to disengage himself from personal
conversations with Miss Kenton, who wants to talk with Stevens about her date, Mr. Benn, and expects that Stevens would at least show some concern about this (Remains 229, 230, 237). On the night when Miss Kenton is about to leave Darlington Hall to marry Mr. Benn and is crying in her own room, Stevens still fails to give Miss Kenton the consolation she has always aspired from him but instead concludes that he is uplifted with a sense of triumph
because he has carried out his service duty most properly. On the last day of his journey in 1956, Stevens in his recount of his meeting with Miss Kenton, who is now Mrs. Benn, records that Miss Kenton has told him that even after marriage she would sometimes ponder upon a different life, a better life she might have had with him. Stevens finally admits, “at that moment, my heart was breaking” (252). This final remark which shows Stevens’s regret for the lost love bears much significance because it dawns on Stevens that for all his life his sense of dignity, defined by serving his lordship and the Empire, is nothing but an empty cause.
This intertwining between public and private narratives is further crystallized in his final epiphany. That is the moment when it comes to Stevens’s awareness that his butler position betrays an intra-racial otherness within the very term of Englishness. Whereas Stevens himself identifies wholeheartedly with the English identity, which he relates to aristocracy, the English landscape, the English butler, his very presence as a white English butler betrays an intra-racial otherness within the taxonomy of Britishness. While he is phenotypically similar—that is, his subjectivity is coded and interpellated as white—he does not enjoy equal access to the hegemonic power as the upper-class. This is intimated in his proffered pride in serving the great gentleman, who, in Stevens’s thinking, occupies the “hub”
around which the world evolves (122). While he identifies the great gentleman and the manor house as the “hub,” he is proud of his contribution to the imperial civilizing mission. That is to say, the colonial empire interpellates a unitary English identity and its synonym, British identity. Yet, after the demise of the empire, which has emptied Darlington Hall inside out, Stevens comes to realize his own position on the margins in relation to the hub. As there is no colonial other to define himself against, he finds his otherness within the white Englishness.
His final epiphany comes with his admission that:
His lordship was a courageous man. He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship’s wisdom. All those years I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really—
one has to ask oneself—what dignity is there in that? (255-56)
one has to ask oneself—what dignity is there in that? (255-56)