The Remains of the Day is an "upstairs/downstairs" type novel that sets two stories side by side, a public one involving the English aristocracy and political class during the interwar years and the decline of the Empire in the years following, on one hand, and the private life and emotional regrets of the butler of Darlington Hall, Mr. Stevens, as he reflects back on his past during a drive out west in 1956. The two big discoveries towards the end of the novel are that Lord Darlington was a Nazi sympathizer (this disgrace explains how possession of Darlington Hall has passed to a more or less vulgar American owner) and that the feisty housekeeper Miss Kenton has been in love with Stevens all along. The question all this poses is how we are to connect these two stories.
I wanted to read the novel (I had seen the film in college) because I was reading Gillian Rose's book Mourning Becomes the Law. She discusses the novel in a chapter titled "Fascism and Representation." Here is what she says. "Impotence and suffering arising from unmourned loss do not lead to a passion for objectivity and justice. They lead to resentment, hatred, inability to trust, and then, the doubled burden of fear of those negative emotions. This double burden is turned inwards or outwards, but both directions involve denial." What is at issue is a reading of fascism as "the nihilism of disowned emotions." I wonder.
I think Rose gets something right in emphasizing a big difference between the book and the movie. "In the film, the loveless upbringing of the servant, confessed by his father on his deathbed, is substituted for his unexplained conviction of having inherited the benign but exacting notion of selfless service from his father in the book."
But I think Rose also gets something important wrong. She believes there are two competing ideals and definitions. She opposes "dignity as unstinting service to the novel Lord" and "dignity as the liberal, representative notion of citizenship." Darlington Hall, she says, is a "microcosm" of the appeal of fascism, because we see how a servant who is "free in their initial pledge of loyalty... become[s] unfree in their consequent total rescinding of the right to criticize." Now, that is certainly a theme that Stevens takes up, in just about those terms (on p. 200).
Rose is on the right track that the relationship to the father's ideal is all-important. But I do not think there are two ideals of dignity at stake. There is, on my reading, a way of upholding the ideal to the letter (in the case of the father) which is at the same time the deepest betrayal of the spirit of the ideal (in the son). We find the same theme in its typical Englishness in The Bridge on the River Kwai. This is perhaps too schematic but let's see where it goes.
The most beautiful image in the novel, I think, concerns the father when he is confronted with his mortality, when he has been humiliated in a moment of human weakness. He retraces the steps where he faltered, and Miss Kenton, observing him, remarks that it appeared "as though he hoped to find some precious jewel he had dropped there." As I see it, the elder Mr. Stevens rightly embodies "dignity" in a sense that is meaningful and real. In the example where he has to serve as the valet to the General responsible for the death of Mr. Stevens's son during a badly managed action in the Boer War ("a most un-British attack" on the civilian population), the elder Mr. Stevens betrays nothing of his repugnance and anger. But those feelings are there. They are kept down in his "professional being." Here is how our Mr. Stevens puts it: a great butler wears his professionalism like a suit, and "he will only discard it when, and only when... he is entirely alone." But there is a discord, a minimal difference, which we would identify with the self. We can glimpse this in the sad painfulness of (secretly, stubbornly) confronting his weakness and decline, his hurt pride "a precious jewel" that cannot be picked back up.
For our Mr. Stevens there is no inner difference, no discord. There is therefore no spirit, or only a confusion between letter and spirit that is total. At the moment when he has absolutely severed any tie between himself and Miss Kenton, wounding her terribly, telling her that he has "not taken anything [she has] said to heart" at the climactic moment of their (missed) relationship, he considers this to be the apex of his "dignity." The evening is a "triumph": "I had, after all... managed to preserve a 'dignity in keeping with my position' ... in a manner even my father might have been proud of." What he has actually done is commit moral suicide. As he puts it later, what we can only regard as catastrophic errors of judgment and vanity were not even owned or lived as his. "I can't even say I made my own mistakes." This acknowledgment is too little, too late, surely.
Back to the question at hand. Ishiguro is very clear about the fantasy structure of the servant who does not only want to wait upon the lord but to be mistaken for him, to inhabit his privilege, indeed to usurp him and (in the face of the American owner of Darlington Hall) to be more convinced and faithful to the ideal than the aristocratic class itself. It is the lords who cannot be trusted with lordship.
So, is that really "fascism"? Could fascism be staved off by a liberalism of fellow feeling? Here the figure of Lord Darlington comes in. He is in his own way a prisoner of his role as much as Mr. Stevens, so we should judge his occasional noblesse oblige (he visits the homes of the poor and suffering at the moment he is closest to actual fascist "blackshirts") as a requirement of his position rather than part of his "true character." Lord Darlington's political mistakes are not, absolutely not, because of something pathological in this individual. There is much that is "good" about Lord Darlington (Stevens is absolutely right about this) but it all turns sour because he also has no distance from his role. He is a fascist because he is a Lord.
The troubling conclusion one wants to avoid is that fascism could be avoided if someone like Mr. Stevens could just "loosen up." The last page of the novel teases with this idea, which is meant to be totally insufficient. (As if the prescription were just to be more like Mr. Farraday.) But the point about "disowned emotions" is completely elsewhere. The problem is not (only) that Mr. Stevens is too "dignified" to allow the messiness of human feeling to ruffle his exterior. The problem is that denial and coldness and separateness are the basic facts, what come first. We cannot just live out in the open exposure with death and hate and pain. Lord Darlington and Mr. Stevens are not different in this regard from you and me. But something else begins, or could begin, when denials stop working, when "some precious jewel" slips away and cannot be found again. Everything depends on what can be lost. If nothing can be lost, there is not even denial.
