The Treatment of Background in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

Abstract

Literary criticism has long established the fact that the meaning of a text, in particular in the case of discursive genres such as the novel, depends largely on the writer’s ability to exploit the common frames of reference he shares with the average reader so as to build up a credible world which can give the illusion of existing on its own beyond the surface of the written page. This aspect is all the more important where Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is concerned as the novel’s signification would appear to rest almost entirely on the considerable gap tacitly assumed to exist between the “real” world so abundantly visible to the implied reader and the idealised and ultimately misguided vision of reality entertained by the main protagonist, the butler Stevens. In this article I will seek to show to what extent this implicit reliance on a consensual view of recent history enables the author to present an illusion of reality resting on a number of carefully selected, yet highly allusive, historical references. In contrast, the text’s meticulous and largely underestimated recreation of Stevens’s habitat via the life and history of the English country house appears to disappear somewhat paradoxically into insignificance. By riding the tide of the post-war onslaught on “grand narratives”, many of which – as indicated by Edward Said’s “contrapuntal” reading of Jane Austen – were predicated on the invisibility of historical forces, Ishiguro can uncover the illusive nature of Stevens’s anachronistic worldview by an unashamed use of the codes of literary realism, while at the same time placing his novel, with minimal recourse to literary experimentation, within the framework of postmodernism.

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