I think it's absolutely HILARIOUS that Stevens reads romance novels, strictly for the professional purpose of improving his dialogue (cf. "universities" today as credential mills, not as places where you can simply enjoy reading and exploring) - so much so that HE CAN'T EVEN TELL when Miss Kenton is flirting with him. It's brilliantly set up on pp. 167-68 and then on 169 is when he shuts her out of his pantry and realizes things have gotten too personal.
*Both of Stevens' failed attempts at banter revolve around the morning wake-up crow (p. 16, p. 130). I wonder if this is a metaphor that he himself cannot "wake up" to present realities, or from his stupor/conditioning to be this cold professional.
Re: "Miss Kenton admits that she did not resign due to moral weakness. That honesty is refreshing compared to Stevens, the consummate rationalizer." I read this more as, Miss Kenton had her own morals but of course had to give way to practical considerations to stay employed; while Stevens does not have his own morals, he accepts those of his master (reiterated p. 201)
I also don't think Stevens is rationalizing or reinterpreting history as much as just ebbing and flowing with blind loyalty and devotion (which he says on p. 173, what more he wants out of life when asked by Miss Kenton [obviously trying to goad him into saying something about love or marriage or something human] is to continue to serve; reiterated p. 201). It *is* also fact that Ribbentrop had plenty of friends in high places in England and beyond so really I think it's just Darlington who was a classic aristocratic fool who wanted to be important and went with whomever and whatever was popular at the time. Stevens has no opinion of his own on this matter.
One more observation, just thought it's interesting that Stevens has almost no private life in the way Hannah Arendt would put it. Perhaps some interesting things to think about there..
I am currently going through a struggle with my own religious beliefs and that is at top of mind, so I really interpreted Mr Steven’s relationship with Darlington as almost a religious and that maybe that is part of what Ishiguro is talking about.
Mr Steven’s dedicates his entire life to service in name of a higher good (Darlington) but what if that higher good has a negative effect on the world? Or what if the service you’re giving has had a negative effect on your life? In To Kill a Mockingbird, there is a line that’s something like (paraphrasing) “We are so busy worrying about the next life we’ve never learned to live in this one.”
His service is similar to a catholic priest who gives everything up in the name of service to their lord of a great house.
I think that this goes along with Mr Steven’s who has never really learned to have a relationship with another person and always has to be on the clock.
I also think there is a religious element in Steven’s refusal to ask questions, or perhaps feel shame in having doubts and questions.
That's an interesting parallel. Stevens essentially treats service to Darlington as service to a higher power (as Darlington is his better/can influence world events). And if he questions it too much, it undermines his self-conception as a butler.
It's also similar to fascism's sacrifice to the higher state (or even what we saw in Plato's Republic, which had a lot of influence in Fascism). The question becomes as you say, is sacrifice noble if it's sacrifice to an ignoble cause.
I remember thinking I was a completely rational guy in my teens, driven by pure logic (so embarrassing). I was so often unable to identify the fact I was feeling emotions and acting on them (often in immature ways) because it was so against my values to admit it.
I think it was a phase I have (hopefully) matured out of, but I just hope that these days I don't lie to myself nearly as much as Mr Stevens...
“Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one’s life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. […] There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”
The novel is essentially Stevens talking to Stevens — a story he is telling himself. Yet even as he punctuates it with profound truths like the passage above, he edits and reworks and deletes and rewrites to preserve a fragile narrative of dignity and service adjacent to greatness and nobility.
It's interesting because I haven't read The Remains of the Day for a while and when I last did, I definitely thought the book was about how clueless Stevens is and how he has wasted his life by focusing on exactly the wrong thing. But in Ishiguro's futuristic work Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun, I feel like the characters who serve/sacrifice themselves for others... exist on kind of a higher plane that the book admires even while finding it heartbreaking? I wonder why the meaning of that "butler" role shifted for him thematically in the later books.
I guess one aspect might be because of the genre divide between realism and SF. Maybe Stevens reads (at least at times) as a coward who sucks because we as readers know an alternative to Hitler existed in his world whom he could have supported. But unlike Stevens, robots or clones can only exist in a world that produces robots or clones, and (unlike fellow robot and clone enthusiastic George Lucas) Ishiguro chooses not to depict any kind of Resistance within that system when he invents it from scratch, making it difficult for both us and the characters to even imagine an alternate path. Which is kind of fascinating because usually SF writers use the speculative elements in their stories to give characters *more* agency, not less.
I haven’t read Ishiguro’s Sci Fi but could it be that Stevens is a servant, and has built this whole story around what an ideal servant should be, as a “professional” when we know servants would come from a lower class, would have less education, usually from poor families, probably without much choice as to a career and hence subservient to their “masters”, vulnerable to exploitation? After all, these very “noble men” were doing horrific things in the name of empire, even if we ignore the Nazi entanglement of Darlington.
This kind of service where Stevens does everything to maintain a professional, emotionless facade (his inspiration is the butler unperturbed by a tiger under a dining table- to display no emotion, stay unperturbed under trying circumstances, keeping a hold on yourself) would be different from sacrifice for another person with whom one has an emotional connection. (Sorry, haven’t read the sci fi books mentioned so I may be making a wrong comparison)
Also curious how Stevens Sr’s wife/ junior’s mother isn’t mentioned and the Darlington household seems completely free of any female presence (except Ms Kenton and women employees)
“If a butler is to be of any worth to anything or anybody in life, there must surely come a time when he ceases his searching; a time when he must say to himself: ‘This employer embodies all that I find noble and admirable. I will hereafter devote myself to serving him.’ …One is simply accepting an inescapable truth: that the likes of you and I will never be in a position to comprehend the great affairs of today’s world, and our best course will always be to put our trust in an employer we judge to be wise and honourable.” (page 201)
This is a really well-written book. It’s so interesting the way that Mr. Stevens seems to find dignity in transferring his own moral judgments to others, or at least those he sees as great men. It is telling the way that he belittles Miss Kenton’s righteous outrage over the dismissal of the two Jewish girls as “foibles and sentiments” (page 149). To him, her position in life has disqualified her from being capable of having worthwhile moral ideas. Mr. Stevens does seem to have been at least a little disturbed at the dismissal of the girls from the start, but I wonder if he’s just projecting that onto himself because of how things turned out. That he spent months making fun of Miss Kenton over her threats to quit makes me think he never really would have been all that bothered about it.
One of the things Mr. Stevens sees as a major problem is that “there is, after all, a limit to how much ordinary people can learn and know.” (page 194) This is why the foibles and sentiments of these ordinary people can’t be trusted. This is true, of course, for everyone all the time, but Mr. Stevens doesn’t seem to realize that. He seems to have learned to agree with the humiliating example Mr. Spencer made of him, failing to recognize that, in his bullying, Mr. Spencer has created a false dilemma in which each ordinary person needs to know everything about everything or else they know nothing of value for political thought.
On a different subject, I really love the passages of the book where Mr. Stevens is so stressed out over his inability to make witty banter. It’s kind of hilarious, but I see how someone like him could feel that way.
I've had a couple thoughts on this weeks readings.
1) His reaction to encountering an idea of "dignity" that contradicts his own is rather curious. Rather than meaningfully engaging with it, he contents himself to dismiss it as not being worthy of taking seriously, yet it shows some holes in his own ideas. Like other areas of his thought, his idea of "dignity" seems to only account for the experiences of other butlers, or at least those in a similar field to his own, and also has a somewhat self-contradictory definition even then, "Moreover, my main objection to Mr Graham's analogy was the implication that this 'dignity' was something that one possessed or did not by a fluke of nature; and if one did not self-evidently have it, to strive after it would be as futile as an ugly woman trying to make herself beautiful. Now while I would accept that the majority of butlers may well discover ultimately that they do not have the capacity for it, I believe strongly that this 'dignity' is something that one can meaningfully strive for throughout ones career." (pg. 33 in my edition). If some (or indeed many) do not have the capacity for 'dignity', then in what way can they meaningfully strive for it? In addition, it is unclear in what way those who do not directly serve a master may strive for it and what that would look like for them. In light of this, his dismissal of the ideas of Mr Harry Smith's ideas is even more frustrating for me as a reader.
2) Stevens' constant to avoid any non-professional relationships raises an interesting conundrum. If indeed his father was the great butler he is in Stevens' mind, and this includes an absolute devotion to professionalism, then how exactly did Stevens come to be here? Stevens Sr. must have had a relationship with Stevens' mother which would be, rather decidedly un-professional. Why then in Stevens so afraid of having any kind of personal relationship with anyone, Miss Kenton?
These both point, I think, to Stevens compartmentalizing his personal and professional life so much that he has ceased to recognize himself as having a personal life and views himself as purely a professional creature, and as such has become incapable of the introspection necessary to recognize the absurdity, and tragedy, of this position.
I think you've hit the nail exactly on the head concerning the main conflict of the book here. Stevens cannot begin to admit to himself that Darlington may have been wrong or bad because he has built his entire self-worth around serving a "great house". If that house turns out to not be so great the well... where does that leave him?
I also find it interesting that there is a real cruel streak to Stevens when he speaks to Miss Kenton. Twice now he has noticed that she is upset or sad, and his solution is to critique her work. He seems to want to distract her, but cannot fathom a genuine act of direct kindness. It's something she is clearly bothered by despite some level of attraction.
I agree with most of the points you have made. I think that if Stevens' mindset weren't to serve blindly, he would not have been a butler at all, or not a "good butler." He needed that sense of loyalty and "dignity" (as he put it) to serve as the robot-ish person he was supposed to be, and this is why it gets harder for him to please his American employer, who seems to look for a closer personal connection rather than a strict master-servant one.
I think it's absolutely HILARIOUS that Stevens reads romance novels, strictly for the professional purpose of improving his dialogue (cf. "universities" today as credential mills, not as places where you can simply enjoy reading and exploring) - so much so that HE CAN'T EVEN TELL when Miss Kenton is flirting with him. It's brilliantly set up on pp. 167-68 and then on 169 is when he shuts her out of his pantry and realizes things have gotten too personal.
*Both of Stevens' failed attempts at banter revolve around the morning wake-up crow (p. 16, p. 130). I wonder if this is a metaphor that he himself cannot "wake up" to present realities, or from his stupor/conditioning to be this cold professional.
Re: "Miss Kenton admits that she did not resign due to moral weakness. That honesty is refreshing compared to Stevens, the consummate rationalizer." I read this more as, Miss Kenton had her own morals but of course had to give way to practical considerations to stay employed; while Stevens does not have his own morals, he accepts those of his master (reiterated p. 201)
I also don't think Stevens is rationalizing or reinterpreting history as much as just ebbing and flowing with blind loyalty and devotion (which he says on p. 173, what more he wants out of life when asked by Miss Kenton [obviously trying to goad him into saying something about love or marriage or something human] is to continue to serve; reiterated p. 201). It *is* also fact that Ribbentrop had plenty of friends in high places in England and beyond so really I think it's just Darlington who was a classic aristocratic fool who wanted to be important and went with whomever and whatever was popular at the time. Stevens has no opinion of his own on this matter.
One more observation, just thought it's interesting that Stevens has almost no private life in the way Hannah Arendt would put it. Perhaps some interesting things to think about there..
I am currently going through a struggle with my own religious beliefs and that is at top of mind, so I really interpreted Mr Steven’s relationship with Darlington as almost a religious and that maybe that is part of what Ishiguro is talking about.
Mr Steven’s dedicates his entire life to service in name of a higher good (Darlington) but what if that higher good has a negative effect on the world? Or what if the service you’re giving has had a negative effect on your life? In To Kill a Mockingbird, there is a line that’s something like (paraphrasing) “We are so busy worrying about the next life we’ve never learned to live in this one.”
His service is similar to a catholic priest who gives everything up in the name of service to their lord of a great house.
I think that this goes along with Mr Steven’s who has never really learned to have a relationship with another person and always has to be on the clock.
I also think there is a religious element in Steven’s refusal to ask questions, or perhaps feel shame in having doubts and questions.
That's an interesting parallel. Stevens essentially treats service to Darlington as service to a higher power (as Darlington is his better/can influence world events). And if he questions it too much, it undermines his self-conception as a butler.
It's also similar to fascism's sacrifice to the higher state (or even what we saw in Plato's Republic, which had a lot of influence in Fascism). The question becomes as you say, is sacrifice noble if it's sacrifice to an ignoble cause.
I remember thinking I was a completely rational guy in my teens, driven by pure logic (so embarrassing). I was so often unable to identify the fact I was feeling emotions and acting on them (often in immature ways) because it was so against my values to admit it.
I think it was a phase I have (hopefully) matured out of, but I just hope that these days I don't lie to myself nearly as much as Mr Stevens...
From this week’s reading:
“Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one’s life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. […] There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”
The novel is essentially Stevens talking to Stevens — a story he is telling himself. Yet even as he punctuates it with profound truths like the passage above, he edits and reworks and deletes and rewrites to preserve a fragile narrative of dignity and service adjacent to greatness and nobility.
Is there anything sadder than lying to oneself?
It's interesting because I haven't read The Remains of the Day for a while and when I last did, I definitely thought the book was about how clueless Stevens is and how he has wasted his life by focusing on exactly the wrong thing. But in Ishiguro's futuristic work Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun, I feel like the characters who serve/sacrifice themselves for others... exist on kind of a higher plane that the book admires even while finding it heartbreaking? I wonder why the meaning of that "butler" role shifted for him thematically in the later books.
I guess one aspect might be because of the genre divide between realism and SF. Maybe Stevens reads (at least at times) as a coward who sucks because we as readers know an alternative to Hitler existed in his world whom he could have supported. But unlike Stevens, robots or clones can only exist in a world that produces robots or clones, and (unlike fellow robot and clone enthusiastic George Lucas) Ishiguro chooses not to depict any kind of Resistance within that system when he invents it from scratch, making it difficult for both us and the characters to even imagine an alternate path. Which is kind of fascinating because usually SF writers use the speculative elements in their stories to give characters *more* agency, not less.
Anyway, Ishiguro is the GOAT.
I haven’t read Ishiguro’s Sci Fi but could it be that Stevens is a servant, and has built this whole story around what an ideal servant should be, as a “professional” when we know servants would come from a lower class, would have less education, usually from poor families, probably without much choice as to a career and hence subservient to their “masters”, vulnerable to exploitation? After all, these very “noble men” were doing horrific things in the name of empire, even if we ignore the Nazi entanglement of Darlington.
This kind of service where Stevens does everything to maintain a professional, emotionless facade (his inspiration is the butler unperturbed by a tiger under a dining table- to display no emotion, stay unperturbed under trying circumstances, keeping a hold on yourself) would be different from sacrifice for another person with whom one has an emotional connection. (Sorry, haven’t read the sci fi books mentioned so I may be making a wrong comparison)
Also curious how Stevens Sr’s wife/ junior’s mother isn’t mentioned and the Darlington household seems completely free of any female presence (except Ms Kenton and women employees)
“If a butler is to be of any worth to anything or anybody in life, there must surely come a time when he ceases his searching; a time when he must say to himself: ‘This employer embodies all that I find noble and admirable. I will hereafter devote myself to serving him.’ …One is simply accepting an inescapable truth: that the likes of you and I will never be in a position to comprehend the great affairs of today’s world, and our best course will always be to put our trust in an employer we judge to be wise and honourable.” (page 201)
This is a really well-written book. It’s so interesting the way that Mr. Stevens seems to find dignity in transferring his own moral judgments to others, or at least those he sees as great men. It is telling the way that he belittles Miss Kenton’s righteous outrage over the dismissal of the two Jewish girls as “foibles and sentiments” (page 149). To him, her position in life has disqualified her from being capable of having worthwhile moral ideas. Mr. Stevens does seem to have been at least a little disturbed at the dismissal of the girls from the start, but I wonder if he’s just projecting that onto himself because of how things turned out. That he spent months making fun of Miss Kenton over her threats to quit makes me think he never really would have been all that bothered about it.
One of the things Mr. Stevens sees as a major problem is that “there is, after all, a limit to how much ordinary people can learn and know.” (page 194) This is why the foibles and sentiments of these ordinary people can’t be trusted. This is true, of course, for everyone all the time, but Mr. Stevens doesn’t seem to realize that. He seems to have learned to agree with the humiliating example Mr. Spencer made of him, failing to recognize that, in his bullying, Mr. Spencer has created a false dilemma in which each ordinary person needs to know everything about everything or else they know nothing of value for political thought.
On a different subject, I really love the passages of the book where Mr. Stevens is so stressed out over his inability to make witty banter. It’s kind of hilarious, but I see how someone like him could feel that way.
I've had a couple thoughts on this weeks readings.
1) His reaction to encountering an idea of "dignity" that contradicts his own is rather curious. Rather than meaningfully engaging with it, he contents himself to dismiss it as not being worthy of taking seriously, yet it shows some holes in his own ideas. Like other areas of his thought, his idea of "dignity" seems to only account for the experiences of other butlers, or at least those in a similar field to his own, and also has a somewhat self-contradictory definition even then, "Moreover, my main objection to Mr Graham's analogy was the implication that this 'dignity' was something that one possessed or did not by a fluke of nature; and if one did not self-evidently have it, to strive after it would be as futile as an ugly woman trying to make herself beautiful. Now while I would accept that the majority of butlers may well discover ultimately that they do not have the capacity for it, I believe strongly that this 'dignity' is something that one can meaningfully strive for throughout ones career." (pg. 33 in my edition). If some (or indeed many) do not have the capacity for 'dignity', then in what way can they meaningfully strive for it? In addition, it is unclear in what way those who do not directly serve a master may strive for it and what that would look like for them. In light of this, his dismissal of the ideas of Mr Harry Smith's ideas is even more frustrating for me as a reader.
2) Stevens' constant to avoid any non-professional relationships raises an interesting conundrum. If indeed his father was the great butler he is in Stevens' mind, and this includes an absolute devotion to professionalism, then how exactly did Stevens come to be here? Stevens Sr. must have had a relationship with Stevens' mother which would be, rather decidedly un-professional. Why then in Stevens so afraid of having any kind of personal relationship with anyone, Miss Kenton?
These both point, I think, to Stevens compartmentalizing his personal and professional life so much that he has ceased to recognize himself as having a personal life and views himself as purely a professional creature, and as such has become incapable of the introspection necessary to recognize the absurdity, and tragedy, of this position.
I think you've hit the nail exactly on the head concerning the main conflict of the book here. Stevens cannot begin to admit to himself that Darlington may have been wrong or bad because he has built his entire self-worth around serving a "great house". If that house turns out to not be so great the well... where does that leave him?
I also find it interesting that there is a real cruel streak to Stevens when he speaks to Miss Kenton. Twice now he has noticed that she is upset or sad, and his solution is to critique her work. He seems to want to distract her, but cannot fathom a genuine act of direct kindness. It's something she is clearly bothered by despite some level of attraction.
I agree with most of the points you have made. I think that if Stevens' mindset weren't to serve blindly, he would not have been a butler at all, or not a "good butler." He needed that sense of loyalty and "dignity" (as he put it) to serve as the robot-ish person he was supposed to be, and this is why it gets harder for him to please his American employer, who seems to look for a closer personal connection rather than a strict master-servant one.