石黑一雄小說中全球化時代下的後帝國身份

全文

(1)國立台灣師範大學英語學系碩士論文 Master Thesis Graduate Institute of English National Taiwan Normal University. 石黑一雄小說中全球化時代下的後帝國身份 Postimperial Identity at the Age of Globalization in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans, and Never Let Me Go. 指導教授：陳春燕博士 Advisor: Dr. Chun-Yen Chen 研究生：黃思萍 Advisee: Szu-Ping Huang 中華民國九十八年二月 February, 2009.

(2) TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract in Chinese…………………………………………………………………………..ⅰ Abstract in English……………….…………………………………………………………. ⅱ Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………. iv Chapter One……………………………………………………………………………1 Introduction Chapter Two………………………………………………………………………….12 At the Threshold of the Old and the New Worlds: The Empire’s Liminal Servant in The Remains of the Day Chapter Three………………………………………………………………………...34 The Politics of Space: Capitalism and Transnational Identity in When We Were Orphans Chapter Four………………………………………………………………………….56 Where Have All the Human Clones Gone?: Empire and the Multitude in Never Let Me Go Chapter Five………………………………………………………………………….73 Conclusion Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………..78.

(3) 摘. 要. 本文探討石黑一雄小說中後帝國身分的生成與轉化。伴隨著二戰後大英帝國的解體，後帝國身分的建構與殖民、後殖民和全球化的演變歷程有著密不可分的關係。本文的中心論點是石黑一雄小說的互為文本性揭示了殖民與後殖民歷史與當代全球化的演進互為表裡，並尋求後殖民論述與全球化論述對話的可能性。本論文分成五個章節。在第一章，我將討論石黑一雄所論述的後帝國身分如何呼應後殖民歷史到全球化時代的過渡，並揭示後帝國身分在不同的歷史脈絡和時空背景下會有不同的論述呈現。接著我會討論全球化論述刻意與後殖民論述斷代的危險性。在第二章，我將討論《長日將盡》中英國的身份認同危機與後殖民情境的微妙關係。英國性在帝國瓦解後歷經了身分建構上的混淆，而選擇了擁抱英國傳統的極度內縮與排他性，但終將不敵殖民歷史與文化的滲透及以美國為首的資本主義的介入。在第三章，我將討論《我輩孤雛》中鴉片貿易與帝國主義戰爭做為當代全球化不均衡發展的寓言。接著，我將引用列斐伏爾（Henri Lefebvre）的空間論述來探討跨國身分與資本主義空間生產的辯證關係，並揭示石黑一雄對資本主義經濟的批判。在第四章，我將檢視《別讓我走》中複製人的生存困境如何與哈特與內格里（Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri）的「帝國」概念遙相呼應。石黑一雄不僅批判當代生化科技的濫用，亦同時抨擊了全球化時代下資本主義的過度發展。接著，我將探討「諸眾」做為反帝國的身份主體的能動性與缺憾。在第五章，我總結全篇論文的觀點：不同於全球化論述認為後殖民論述在當代已缺乏論述基礎，全球資本對於勞力的壓榨雖不同於帝國武力侵略，但對於殖民與帝國歷史的關照在探討全球化時代下的後帝國身分仍有其必要性與迫切性。. i.

(4) Abstract. This thesis investigates Kazuo Ishiguro’s conception of postimperial identity by deploying the theories of postcolonialism and globalization. I will look into the intertextuality between Ishiguro’s works to examine the possibilities of the interconnection between postcolonial and globalization studies. In Chapter One, I will explore Ishiguro’s conception of postimperial identity, which, I would argue, illustrates the formation and reformation of postimperial identity in response to the transition from postcoloniality to globalization. In Chapter Two, I will examine the postcolonial ambivalent identity as is presented in The Remains of the Day, which reveals the utter exclusiveness and constructedness of Englishness, and I will also delineate the articulation of the English identity in the postcolonial condition. In Chapter Three, I will read When We Were Orphans as a parable of the uneven development of globalization in the current neoliberal economic arrangements. The issue of transnational identity addressed in the novel is built upon the infrastructure of capitalism, and Ishiguro uses history and geography in a metaphorical way in order to mount an indictment on modern capitalism. In Chapter Four, I will investigate the identity constitution of the multitude in Never Let Me Go under the dominance of global power. Ishiguro uses the human clones to portray the dire existential suffocation under the contemporary development of globalization. My parallel reading of this novel with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s idea of Empire will suggest Ishiguro’s pessimistic portrait of the exploitation of the human clones exerted by the Empire. In Chapter Five, I come to the conclusion that the examination of the intertextuality of Ishiguro’s novels is exemplary in addressing the theoretical links between postcolonialism and theories of globalization. Global capitalism does not necessarily exert the same paradigm of rule as earlier imperialism did with violence, arm forces, military oppression. Yet what can ii.

(5) be detected in Ishiguro’s works is a call for due regard to the imperial history when we reflect upon the current phenomenon of globalization.. iii.

(6) Acknowledgements. I would first like to thank Professor Chun-Yen Chen, my supervisor, for her supportive and patient instruction. Her marvellous guide and perceptive comments enabled my thesis to take shape and clarified my ideas in the study. During my research, I had been given leave of absence to complete my internship. However, I was somehow very much occupied by the job and my attention to this thesis was distracted. Luckily, my supervisor showed me the proper way to catch up with my schedule every now and then. Without her supervision and patience, this dissertation would not possibly come true. Feeling an immense gratitude to her, I congratulate myself on my good fortune of having an opportunity to be supervised by her. My thanks also go to Professor Jung Su and Professor Min-Hsiou Hung, both of whom were my committee members. Their academic advice on the persuasiveness of argument, and their thorough interpretation of texts make this thesis a better one. Being an MA student in the Department of English, I have received assistance during the writing process from friends and classmates. Of so many benefactors, I owe special thanks to Cheng-Hao Yang for his support, unfailing patience discussing the issues pertain to my topics. Many thanks should also extend to Yi-Ling Hsieh for her critical comments and useful information which helped me sketch out the blueprint for this thesis, and to I-Chyun Lin for his research assistance. Special thanks also goes to Yi-Tai Seih, whose encouragement has sustained me through some of the most tormenting periods of my thesis writing. Finally, I am very grateful to my parents and family for their spiritual encouragement and constant inquiries about the process of my thesis. They were obviously very concerned about my capability of dealing with both academic and realistic lives. Having kept them worried time after time, it is a great relief to have my dissertation completed at last. iv.

(7) Chapter One Introduction. Kazuo Ishiguro’s bicultural background plays a vital role in his writing career and invests a dual and detached perspective in his works. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and came to England at five when his father took up a job as a researcher at the National Institute of Oceanography. Every year the Ishiguro family was planning to go back to Japan, but what was supposed to be a short visit was continuously extended and finally evolved into a permanent immigration. He puts his ability to see his adoptive country in inverted commas down to the fact that he never had an immigrant’s sense of attempting to assimilate. This ingrained unsettledness finds its expression in the elusiveness of meaning in his writing style. He has always written, he says, with a sense of translation in mind. Ishiguro talks a lot about the different ways in which successive generations, or even people born two or three years apart, experience the world. He has a novelist’s fascination in how much of us is shaped, skewered by our particular historical moment. In comparison with the cultural identity concerns of the earlier works (A Pale View of Hills [1982], An Artist of the Floating World [1986], and The Remains of the Day [1989], Ishiguro’s last three novels (The Unconsoled [1995], When We Were Orphans [2000], and Never Let Me Go [2005]) have moved gradually to encompass the pernicious effects of commodity culture and the multifarious effects of international capital. While ample critical work has contributed to analyzing Ishiguro’s novels in light of cosmopolitan and migrant writing, I suggest that the turn of trajectory taking shape in Ishigruo’s last three works demands careful assessment in that these works can help us address questions about the utter reificatory predilection of global capitalism. 1.

(8) Ishiguro’s preoccupation with history and memory will play a vital role in my reassessment of his works. The question I would like to propose concerns the significance of the intertextual progress of Ishiguro’s work toward addressing the problems we are witnessing in the present global context. Whereas most of the issues explored in previous studies are directly or indirectly related to imperialism and national identity, not much attention has been paid to the problem of identity in globalization or to the ethical demands in Ishiguro’s works. The Remains of the Day is the best known of Ishiguro’s novels, which won the Booker Prize of 1989. Like its two predecessors, the novel was constituted by Stevens’s first person narration, which unveils in rememory of and nostalgia for the past. Set in the 1956 postwar England, the book is frequently perceived as a “stroke of the decolonizing pen” for seemingly attacking the imperial pretensions of a fading British Empire (Rushdie 8), and has aroused the attention of postcolonial critics. As Cynthia Wong contends, what is evident in Stevens’s divided consciousness reveals the “postcolonial attributes” of Ishiguro’s authorship and his critique of the British Empire. A lot of critical work has been invested in reading the novel from the postcolonial perspective. Susie O’Brien reads the novel in two directions: one by revealing the thematic opposition between the Victorian values and ideas associated with America; the other by putting the novel in the condition of postcoloniality, examining the self-contradictory nature in the narration and deploying it to illuminate the discursive structure of global power. While Stevens clings onto a colonial nostalgia without ever completely disavowing it, his “enunciatory disjunction” and “narrative ambivalence” is symptomatic of Britain’s postcolonial condition (801). After the examination of the postcolonial politics in the novel, O’Brien attempts to illuminate the changing discursive structure of global power. 2.

(9) In “Outside In,” Steve Connor takes the novel’s narration as a performance, staging the impossibility of a coherent, essential, and intrinsic Englishness. If the English butler Stevens prides himself in hypostatizing “dignity” and “greatness,” which he hails as the definitive terms of Englishness, then the many muffs or disjunction in his narrative all demonstrate that Englishness is never self-interpreting, but instead owes its constitution to what is excluded, what lies outside. Showing a similar concern with the novel’s narration, Molly Westerman, in “Is the Butler Home? Narrative and the Split Subject in The Remains of the Day,” examines the narrative structure by using postcolonial and psychological theory. Westerman observes that the painful emotional life of the narrator manifests itself in narrative peculiarities, struggles on the page, which form not merely the narrative structure of a story but the story itself. While the narration of history is a way of articulating one’s own identity, the writing of history is also a major concern in postcolonial studies. James Lang investigates how Stevens’s engagement with narrating his own memory of the past serves to disrupt the grand narrative of history. In his analysis of the novel, Shao-Pin Luo proposed to read the orphan condition as a metaphor for dislocation and alienation. The orphan, according to Luo, “has no family and hence no immediate filiation or inheritance” (Luo 57). Furthermore, Luo examines the spatial metaphors represented in the novel to explore questions of identity and belonging. In light of Said’s analysis of Dickens’s Great Expectations, Luo explores the anguish of displacement and the sorrows of exile of the “unconsoled orphan.” When When We Were Orphans was published in 2000, many reviewers has asked why Ishiguro wants to write an event taking place in Shanghai about a century ago. Sim’s reading of the novel as an analogy seems to offer an answer to the question. Building on Luo’s proposal of reading the novel in line with Said’s analysis of Great Expectations, Sim 3.

(10) examines Ishiguro’s rewriting of Said’s analysis in a new light. Sim offers a detailed examination of the opium trade presented in the novel, and draws an analogy of the uneven development of capitalism between then and now. He argues that through reading the novel as a parable, the articulation of the novel’s plot makes an imperative to challenge present neoliberal economic arrangements. As spelt out cogently by Martha Montello, Ishiguro’s latest novel, Never Let Me Go, raises the following issues: “What is immutable? What endures? What is essential about being human? Where does the essential core of identity lie? Does it derive from nature or nurture, from our environment or genetics?” Departing from taking the novel as a science fiction, Sim reads the novel as a parable of the untrammeled development of technobiological science. Sim proposes to read the Hailsham school as an utopia that points toward an ethical reflection on the present development of neoliberal capitalism. Looking through Ishiguro’s conversations and eliciting help from some critics of English Studies, such as Ian Baucom and Simon Gikandi, I will examine the formation of Englishness in relation to postcoloniality and globalization inflections as presented in Ishiguro’s novels, which will pave the way towards my examination of how the configuration of postimperial identity has undergone a series of change against the postcolonial-global condition as a backdrop. My examination will be based on the theories in postcolonial and globalization studies that correspond to the three phases in Ishiguro’s intertextual progress: nationalism and postcoloniality, (neo-)colonialism and globalization, and Empire and globalization. I will elaborate on each of these phases in a chapter, but will keep in view the thematic thread of postimperial identity in relation to postcoloniality and globalization throughout all the chapters. During colonial expansion, the definition of Englishness was informed by imperial 4.

(11) dualism, in which England was centered and saw everyone else as peripheralized. Stuart Hall takes imperialism as an earlier moment of globalization. He argues that in the earlier phase of globalization, national identity such as Englishness depended upon a certain construction of the “other” against which England could define itself as good and moral. In addition to presenting itself as a unitary identity through the logic of negativity, Englishness also represents itself as perfectly natural and homogeneous by absorbing and excluding all the differences of class, region, and gender (Hall 21-22). However, under the pressure of contemporary processes of globalization, this strand of English nationalism that can securely locate itself in the imperial binarism now gives way to a more lethal brand of English nationalism. This is best illustrated in Margaret Thatcher’s political discourse in the England of the 1970s and 1980s. The polity of Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands episode brought Englishness to an even narrower and more exclusive and racist definition than had ever seen before. Hall forged the term “Thatcherism” to describe the defensive exclusivism of the English national identity in the 1970s and 1980s. If Englishness used to be firmly grounded in its sense of ethnic homogeneity against an colonial territory outside, this English nationalism appears harder to maintain under the pressure of the contemporary process of globalization and the invasion of the imperial center by its formerly peripheralized populations. Therefore, it must resort to extreme and sometimes violent measures to produce the ideological closure it seeks. As Hall acutely notes in “The Local and the Global,” this acid strand of ethnic nationalism is not an atavistic or anomalous eruption in an otherwise happily integrated global village. It is a constitutive feature of globalization, which fetishizes localities in order to commodify them or pit them against each other in competition for scarce economic resources. Colonial spatial dislocation is tellingly transposed to the temporal realm, which can be 5.

(12) particularly found in the diasporic experience. Hall proposes that we should think of identity as a “production,” which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside representation. Unlike identity as being, which offers a sense of unity and commonality, identity as becoming is a process of identification, which shows the discontinuity in our identity formation. Hall uses the Caribbean identities, including his own, to explain how the first one is necessary, but also how the second one is truer to the postcolonial condition. To explain the process of identity formation, Hall employs Derrida’s theory différance and sees the temporary positioning of identity as “strategic,” “contingent,” and arbitrary. Viewing contemporary global dominance of power as a disjuncture from former imperial rule, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conceive of the present world order as Empire, a new form of capitalist power, in which the old sovereign power based on the nation states is replaced by a network power based on a complex web of socio-political forces. This new political order spreads and sustains its control through its network of hierarchies and divisions, accepting no boundaries or limits in its universal capitalist incorporations. While there are grave inequalities and hierarchized divisions among the nation-states in the new global network, globalization also gives rise to new forms of collaboration and cooperation that stretch across nations and continents. They elaborate in Multitude on the new ways of collaboration and affiliation of people in the global context. If the matrix of capital has invaded into every aspect of people’s lives in the global, post-industrial era, it has also created a common ground on which people can fight back and insert their power into various aspects of the matrix. How do we know that Empire is materializing before us? Negri and Hardt attempt to define Empire in terms of post-industrial labor and production. In the industrial form of labor 6.

(13) and production, Marx has conceived a “real” subsumption of the whole society by capital to control the working class. In the post-industrial era, however, labor and products have become immaterial; there is no longer a clear division between work hours and life hours and the products produced have been extended to immaterial goods. Negri and Hardt draw on Foucault’s concept of biopower to argue that capital has infiltrated into the life of every human being and that the hegemony of industrial labor has yielded its place to immaterial labor. Immaterial labor produces immaterial products such as knowledge, information, communication, relationships, and affect. Empire appears to be parasitic, capturing and living on the vitality of the people. Hardt and Negri’s elaboration of the biopower deployed by the Empire is particularly informative in addressing the identity of human clones as is presented in Never Let Me Go. I will divide my thesis into five chapters. The introductory chapter conducts a survey of theories of postcolonialism and globalization. This survey will be followed by an examination of the inflections of identity formulation in postcolonial and global contexts. Then I will look into Ishiguro’s intertextual progress from The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans, to Never Let Me Go, with a view to examining the possibilities of the interconnection between postcolonial and globalization studies. In Chapter Two, I will explore the postcolonial ambivalent identity as is presented in the novel The Remains of the Day. An exclusive sense of nationalism and postcoloniality has a tacit provenance point, which is connected to the closure of imperialism and decolonization from the late 1940s on. In the face of decolonization, particularly in the period after World War II, both the postimperial nation and the decolonized state sought to articulate their mutual pasts—and their narratives of identity—as autonomous of their colonial heritage. Identity and alterity were written as mutually exclusive entities. Upholding nationalism as the 7.

(14) radical alternative to imperialism, Britain is anxious to embrace the traditional ethnic culture as the source of national character and anticipates to represent its national history as intrinsic and essentialist. The nationalist discourse of both the former colonial power and the decolonized state is anxious to embrace the traditional ethnic culture as the source of national character. I will argue that Ishiguro defies the nationalist effort to formulate an essential and holistic English identity, and that he does not endorse the nationalist discourse. His concern with the exclusivist nationalism is how colonialism is disavowed in the nationalist construction of Englishness as a white community and how nostalgia is used as a political tool in which stereotypes and myths of Englishness are deployed. Against the backdrop of the pressure for devolution from the Celtic peripheries and the influx of immigrants from former colonies, the winding-up of the British Empire coincided with a growing questioning of Englishness from within. I will appropriate Homi Bhabha’s concept of the “barred nation It/Self” in examining how the writing of Englishness in cultural production offers a ground on which the pedagogical narrative of the past is continually supplemented by the performative narrative of the present and would challenge the status of Englishness as homogeneous and non-totalitarian. Further drawing upon Stuart Hall’s periodization of contemporary globalization as being distinct from former imperial globalization, I will address the relevance of postcolonial theory to the condition of English identity in the global context. Perhaps, Ishiguro is not so positive about viewing post-War forms of imperialism and capitalism as being disjunctive with old imperial formations. In Chapter Three, I will analyze When We Were Orphans in two ways. I will first conduct a parallel reading of Ishiguro’s novel with Edward Said’s interpretation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, to bring to light the grotesqueness of British colonialism. As Luo points out, in light of Said’s analysis we can explore how “the figure of the orphan 8.

(15) becomes for Ishiguro a central means of examining the anguish of displacement and the sorrows of exile” (Luo 55). I will use Hall’s conception of diasporic cultural identity to examine how spatial dislocation is transposed onto the temporal realm. In the novel, the orphan serves as a trope of otherness to imperial English identity, and this can be evidenced by the protagonist’s anxiety to be “more English” (Orphans 76). Through the depiction of the English protagonist’s inheritance from a Chinese warlord and the Britain’s opium trade to China, the novel offers a metaphor of colonialism’s immoral earnings and calls for a critical deliberation of the vast global political economy. Secondly, I will read the novel as a parable of the uneven development of globalization in our current neoliberal economic arrangements. As Sim has observed, the “awkward defamiliarizing episodes and effects” in the novel encourage us to read “our current historical conjuncture” in the light of the uneven development between core and periphery in the system of global capitalism. In this regard, I would like to respond to the conclusion I draw at the end of my analysis of The Remains of the Day by reflecting on the possibilities of a dialogue between the postcolonial and the global. With the course of the development of globalization, the boundaries between nation-states seem to be undermined. In light of Uncle Philip comments on Banks that “he grew up a bit of a mongrel,” I aim to address the theoretical conundrum between postcolonial and globalization studies by arguing that mixed-race histories of colonial translocation and postcolonial migration provide a particularly fertile ground from which to argue for a productive complementarity between theories and histories of the postcolonial and the global (76). While the domain of globalization studies announces either the demise of postcolonial theory (by suggesting that it has outlived its historical viability) or subsumes its varied articulations under the rubric of “globalization,” both positions find their expression in Hardt and Negri’s co-authored Empire. I inquire into the challenge posed to postcolonialism by 9.

(16) Hardt and Negri by asking how they would theorize a mode of hybrid belonging in a globalized world that has a long colonial history of racial and cultural mixing and that is not just a by-product of late capitalism’s global generation of difference. This examination would enlighten the parable drawn by Ishiguro to unravel global capital’s false rhetoric of an even playing field of ever proliferating difference and mixedness. In Chapter Four, I intend to explore the identity constitution of the human clones in Never Let Me Go under the dominance of global power. Together with the development of late capitalism, we are witnessing an unprecedented biotechnological development in our present world. If the current biotechnological development goes untrammeled, then an all-encompassing Empire that exerts biopower to “regulate social life from its interior” is “materializing before our very eyes” (Empire 23, xi). If Empire, together with the global capitalism, has now exercised power that directly organizes our brains and bodies “toward a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity,” what is the agency in considering the identity of the human clones? I will use Hardt and Negri’s conception of multitude as a reconception of the identity of the human clones. If Empire exerts a biopower that dominates from within—within our bodies and minds—Empire is also parasitic on the multitude’s production, and it is from here that Empire shows its inner contradiction and rupture. I will use Jameson’s conception of “the politics of utopia” to cope with the current issue of an untrammeled development of late capitalism. If contemporary globalization bases its strength on some new spatial domination and new experience of spatiality, then an imagining of utopia would demonstrate “our imprisonment in a non-utopian present without history of futurity” (“The Politics of Utopia” 46). I would argue that the literary imagining of utopia facilitates the interrogation of the hegemonic transnational global power and brings to light an ethical demand of thinking about identity 10.

(17) formation in Never Let Me Go. Moreover, the element of a sense of history and time can expose the self-contradiction of globalization and perhaps provide an ethical perspective of conceiving identity beyond the spatial articulation of identity politics. In the concluding chapter, I argue that the intertextuality of Ishiguro’s novels suggests a rejection of the “periodization desire,” the desire to mark the epoch of global capitalism as being radically disrupted with the earlier, imperial, phase. Instead of synchronizing with the assertion that postcolonialism is no longer relevant in globalization studies, I would testify against Negri and Hardt’s contention about the “newness” of the contemporary globalized world which they choose to call Empire. The intertextuality of the three novels by Ishiguro elucidates the relevance of the colonial and postcolonial conditions and articulates the continuity of globalization with (post-)colonial history.. 11.

(18) Chapter Two At the Threshold of the Old and the New Worlds: The Empire’s Liminal Servant in The Remains of the Day. The lesson of the Falklands is that Britain has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities that shine through our history. This generation can match their fathers and grandfathers in ability, in courage, and in resolution… —Margaret Thatcher, Speech to Conservative Rally at Cheltenham. We are confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its population. The barred Nation It/Self, alienated from its eternal self-generation, becomes a liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference. —Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. In a conversation with the Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo, Kazuo Ishiguro proclaims epigrammatically that “nobody’s history seem[s] to be my history” and positions himself as a “homeless writer” (Ishiguro and Kenzaburo 115). A Japanese-born English bred writer residing in England, Ishiguro has encountered in his writing career various inquiries about his preoccupation with and distance from both Japanese and English cultures and has come to 12.

(19) realize from his migratory experiences the impossibility to claim a nation or a history to be his own. Not only does he have to use his memory and imagination (usually from movies and books) to create the postwar world of an atomic bomb-devastated Japan in his first two novels (A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World), in writing about the land of his immigration in his third novel The Remains of the Day Ishiguro also acquires an ironic distance from the postwar England he depicts. In “Stuck on the Margins,” Ishiguro testifies to his “ironic distance” from the England he creates in Remains by offering the following remarks: “What I’m trying to do . . . is to actually rework a particular myth about a certain kind of England. . . . I’ve deliberately created a world which at first resembles that of those writers such as P. G. Wodehouse. I then start to undermine this myth and use it in a slightly twisted and different way” (Vorda and Herzinger 14-15). Set in 1956, Remains portrays a postwar English society that is torn between an imperial past and a new globalized world, a transition that is illustrated in the novel by the transaction of the English estate from an English aristocrat (Lord Darlington) to an American (Mr. Farraday). Focusing on the 1950s that signals a much turbulent era for England—decolonization, the dismantling of the Empire, the pressure for devolution from the Celtic fringe, the influx of immigrants from former colonies, and the economic decline in the metropolis—I intend to examine the novel as a postcolonial narrative in which an emerging nationalist formulation of an essential English identity is confronted with its own disruption.1 Englishness is belated, for it is formulated by retroactively identifying key features of English culture that are seen to distinguish the colonizer from the radical alterity of the colonized. In my analysis of the contradictions in the 1. In “Outside In,” Steven Connor has offered a detailed survey of the cultural turbulence in postwar Britain. Encountered with the influx of immigrants from former colonies and the concomitant threat of increasing unemployment rate, England tried to relieve the internal contradiction by erecting symbolic barriers against outsiders. These barriers, according to Connor, include “various forms of immigration legislation passed in 1962 (Commonwealth Immigrants Act), 1968 (Kenyan Asians Act), 1971 (Immigration Act), 1981 (British Nationality Act), and 1988 (Immigration Act)” (88). 13.

(20) formulation of the postimperial English national subject, I show that Ishiguro’s narrative strategy in the creation and distortion of a certain kind of mythical England—where “people lived in the not-so-distant past, that conformed to various stereotypical images”—is intended to critique the nationalist discourse and demystify the essential and holistic conception of Englishness in the postwar England (Vorda and Herzinger14). Circumstances around the Suez Crisis can serve to elucidate our understanding of the convoluted configuration of postimperial English identity. The Suez debacle in 1956 marks an important watershed of the British imperial power decline in the postwar period. The crisis erupted when the Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company in July 1956, the very month and year in which Ishiguro sets the narrative frame of Remains. Britain was outraged by Egypt’s violation of their previous agreement on the canal, and launched military attack on Egypt, with the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden justifying the effort to regain the Suez Canal by figuring Nasser as the reincarnation of Hitler and Mussolini. The United States, however, did not take in Eden’s stated pretext for military action and castigated the attack as a crass attempt to revive “gunboat diplomacy” (Sanders 91). The U.S. intervened militarily and economically to thwart Eden’s plans.2 Under pressure from the U.S., British forces were completely evacuated from the Suez Canal by the end of the year. The Suez debacle not only displayed prominently to the world that Britain could no longer compete with the U.S. for global influence, but also brought home to the British consciousness the inexorable demise of British imperialism. Contextualized in this critical period, this chapter aims to elaborate on the formation and reformation of postimperial national subject which is both intertwined with and crystallized in English postcolonial 2. The American government, which was then under the Eisenhower administration, deployed fleet in the eastern Mediterranean to obstruct military operations on the Anglo side and orchestrated the devaluation of the pound through the cooperation with the International Monetary Fund (Sanders 91). 14.

(21) narrative. Though the Suez debacle is not in fact mentioned in the novel, it looms large in the novel’s background against which the English identity crisis is depicted. This observation drives us to the question as to how the novel represents the identity crisis in the postimperial context. In this chapter, I would like to appropriate Homi Bhabha’s elaboration on the formulation of nationness as a narrative strategy and focus my discussion not on postcolonial political structure but on postcolonial cultural representation.3 As Bhabha suggests, the cultural construction of nationness, though sophisticated and variegated, is a form of social and textual affiliation. The construction of national identity in postcolonial narrative is a site of contestation between the postcolonial desire and fear, from which we can explore and articulate the postcolonial subject’s ineffable experiences. Constituted by the protagonist Stevens’s first-person narration, Ishiguro’s Remains tells a story in which Stevens, the head butler of an English estate, Darlington Hall, finds himself to be the very symbol of a flawed history in an evanescent world, and strives hard to reconcile with his own past. Framed in 1956 yet frequently reversed back to the interwar years, Stevens’s first-person narration is a multilayered account of his personal memory intertwined with the public history. Nominally, the novel reads like a travelogue written in the present tense when Stevens motors in 1956 across England to meet with a female ex-coworker, Miss Kenton. Yet, triggered by the journey to recollect and enlighten his earlier professional experience of serving Lord Darlington during the 1920s and 1930s, Stevens’s narrative stages an interior drama in which Stevens strives to repress his regret for a lost love (with Miss Kenton, who is now Mrs. Benn) and his blind devotion to his employer, Lord Darlington, whose sympathy with the Nazi Germany soils his name after the war. Stevens’s 3. Bhabha asserts in “DissemiNation” that “the narrative and psychological force that nationness brings to bear on cultural production and political projection is the effect of the ambivalence of the ‘nation’ as a narrative strategy” (140). What is noteworthy here is the cultural construction of national identity on the narrative level. 15.

(22) narrative, which is split within itself, bespeaks the fragmentation and contradiction in writing national identity. Appropriating Bhabha’s argument of the cultural representation of nationness as a narrative strategy, I would like to investigate the liminal construction of Englishness represented in Stevens’s negotiation for subjectivity between past and present. My interpretation of the novel is composed of three parts. In the first part, I will examine the novel’s narrative structure which echoes Englishness in the postwar era as a site of contestation in which nationalist discourse purports to be an essential identity against the infiltration of other narratives into the writing of the English identity. In the second part, I will probe into the thematic structure of the novel and elaborate on the characterization of Stevens as an ambivalent figure that is emblematic of a barred national subjectivity. I propose that Stevens’s narrative is never self-congruous in the sense that it is crisscrossed by the pedagogical and performative narratives. In the conclusion part, I would like to reflect on the strength and weakness of reading the novel in light of postcolonial narrative, which would point to a rethinking of the configuration of subjectivity in the contemporary world. I. Belated Englishness and Nationalist Discourse 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 16.

(23) 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. 17.

(24) 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: 18.

(25) 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 19.

(26) “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 20.

(27) 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. II. Pedagogical Narrative and Performative Narrative 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, 21.

(28) 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 22.

(29) 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 23.

(30) 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. 24.

(31) 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 25.

(32) 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 26.

(33) 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 27.

(34) 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) 28.

(35) 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 29.

(36) 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: 30.

(37) 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) This epiphany reveals his utter difference from Lord Darlington in the sense that Lord Darlington wields much more power than he does all the time due to their class hierarchy. If there used to be a sameness that he shared with Lord Darlington—the sameness defined against a racial/colonial other and depending on cooperating in furthering the expansion of the Empire and human progress—the sameness is now breached to find its internal difference, a difference that is inscribed in region and class. As the imperial project advances and the welfare state consolidates, a common white identity under the taxonomy of Englishness and Britishness becomes progressively more accessible to the working class. However, as Alistair Bonnett observes, this whiteness was not the whiteness of bourgeois English exceptionalism, but a “populist identity connotating superiority” (318). While the English imperialists exert class hierarchy as a paradigm for racial inequality in the colonial and settler societies, they import the class hierarchy back to the imperial center. The elite class link racial categories associated with the colonial project and settler societies to the metaphors of class domination and hierarchy in the metropolis. If whiteness denotes privilege in colonial expansion, postimperial Englishness exposes internal differences, which bars some white subjects from gaining equal access. III. Conclusion In this final part, I would like to first make a connection between Stevens and the village, Moscomb, where he travels to on the third day of his journey. Moscomb is described 31.

(38) in the novel as a rural village that neglects modern necessities because it has been without electricity for two months (Remains 190). Much like Stevens, who is split between the pedagogical past and the performative present, Moscomb plays the role of a reservoir of native Englishness and, in Trimm’s terms, “functions as a site of alterity within the triumphant modernity of the contemporary nation” (143). It is a site where the old Victorian values and the new American order coexist in peace. Its local folk, Harry Smith, who advocates democracy, serves to highlight the consensus between the old and the new in this place. In this sense, the national past or tradition is not something so pernicious that has to be disposed of, but points to a formulation of national identity that is in process with the supplement of the “new,” of other cultures. However, this celebration of the postcolonial notion of identity in process seems ineffective in explaining the global condition presented in the novel. This global power takes the form of global capital that is all-encompassing and all-inclusive. This is best illustrated by Mr. Farraday, who commodifies Stevens and the Darlington Hall he has bought as authentic Englishness and inquires Stevens of the question: I mean to say, Stevens, this is a genuine grand old English house, isn’t it? That’s what I paid for. And you’re a genuine old-fashioned English butler, not just some waiter pretending to be one. You’re the real thing, aren’t you? That’s what I wanted, isn’t that what I have? (131) According to O’Brien, Farraday appears to have bought the myth of the grand old England, which is commodified as a form of cultural capital “to which Stevens, as its product, does not have the same access” (797). Even if the British Empire has come to an end, Stevens remains a butler and, this time, he is bound to serve the interests of a new global power, one that is apparently inclusive yet covertly demarcates and denies access to the underprivileged. 32.

(39) With Mr. Farraday signaling the advent of a new world order, Ishiguro’s later works cast a critical gaze at global capitalism. In the following chapters, I will try to elaborate on the process of globalization in the twentieth century that is represented in When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go.. 33.