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- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
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SPEECH, CULTURE AND HISTORY IN THE NOVELS OF KAZUO ISHIGURO Norman Page In the third and most recent of Kazuo Ishiguro's novels, The Remains of the Day, published last year, the narrator is an elderly butler who has spent a lifetime employed in an English country house and who looks back from the vantagepoint of 1956 to a period that begins just after the end of the First World War. It seems a highly unlikely subject for a young novelist who was born in Nagasaki in 1954, but in this paper I shall try to show that it has a certain inevitability anddespite superficial differences - is consistent with the preoccupations to be found in Ishiguro's previous two novels. Born in Japan, Ishiguro was taken to Britain as a small child, received his education there, is resident there, and has chosen to write in English. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), concerns a Japanese widow who has settled in England but who recalls her life in Nagasaki in the traumatic period just after the end of the Second World War. His second, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), is set wholly in Japan but again concerns an elderly narrator, this time male, and places its largely retrospective narrative in the late forties - again, that is, in the postwar years. Even these bald indications will suggest that the three novels have some important elements in common, but rather than treating them chronologically I should like to begin with the most recent and then to suggest ways in which the ground for it is laid by its predecessors. Stevens, the narrator and protagonist of The Remains ofthe Day, is a member of a servant class that came close to extinction as a result of the upheavals in British society brought about by the Second World War and its economic and social aftermath. At the date of his narrative, 1956, his former employer, Lord Darlington, is dead, and the house has been bought - with Stevens as one of the fixtures - by a wealthy American business man. The butler is thus a survivor of a vanished world, reminders of which exist in the other accessories of the once aristocratic household: the furniture, silver, family portraits, and so on. In the course of the narrative Stevens makes a short journey into the West Country to visit one of his former fellow-servants, and simultaneously journeys into the past through a series of leisurely mental digressions. In the course of these he recreates the vanished past, defines and justifies his own role in it, and by NORMAN PAGE implication evokes a major phase of European history. Ishiguro's method thus resembles that of a Victorian novelist such as Thackeray, who in Vanity Fair presents public history not directly but through private experience. Ishiguro's method is, however, more complex and potentially- richer in contrasts and ironies than Thackeray's, for whereas the Victorian novelist looks back from the late forties to the Napoleonic War and its aftermath some thirty years earlier, the contemporary writer takes two strides backward: some thirty years from the date of composition to the period of the narrative, and a further thirty years or more from that date to the beginning of the period recalled. What they have in common is an important relationship to war: Professor John Carey has described Vanity Fair as 'War and Peace without the war', and Ishiguro too foregrounds private experience and allows domestic and even trivial events to represent, by synecdoche, historic happenings on a world stage. The period summoned up by the old butler's memory - an act at once nostalgic and self-justifying - begins in 1920. His then employer, Lord Darlington, is a politician who finds his own aristocratic and gentlemanly code offended by the idea of punishing a defeated enemy. As he remarks at one point to his butler, 'Disturbing, Stevens. Deeply disturbing. It does us great discredit to treat a defeated foe like this. A complete break with the traditions of this country.' (p. 71) Soon afterwards Steven refers to a group of his employer's friends - influential figures in several European countries as well as Britain - who share his view that 'fair play had not been done at Versailles and that it was immoral to go on punishing a nation for a war that was now over'. At such a point the reader would do well to recall that, though his immediate theme is European history...