Exploring the complex set of events form the past, 1935–1936. In retrospect the narrator recalls challenged key topics of “dignity” and “loyalty.” Stevens gives a full record of their last arguments and recalls how Miss Kenton wanted to resolve their former relationship six times. With silence and time related narrative simultaneity; a half-humorous, half-tragic conversation with Cardinal pursues Stevens causing him to freeze in a statue-like form.
The chapter ends with the memory of recalling triumph over his emotions, this time the narrator finds it as comforting as in the case of his father’s death.
After arriving in Cornwall, the narrative situation describes Stevens waiting for Miss Kenton to show up, for about forty minutes. During this time via self-narrated monologue Stevens laments on how he would greet the former housekeeper or if he will ever meet her again, he wonders back to the recent past at the Taylors’s inn and further back to the mid-1930’s. During the same morning the doctor collected him up. This is the first encounter – except with the vagrant on page 24 – when people during his motoring trip did not take him for a real gentleman. Stevens is relieved that no further pretence is needed. Yet, the doctor calls him a “pretty impressive specimen” (RD 218) and dignity is a 137
repeated topic of the conversation, through awkward auditory silences and pauses it is obvious that their conversation is uneasy. The devoted socialist, Carlisle asks Stevens’ own views on dignity, the butler stumbles (RD 221). I claim, as a manservant and an inferior as such for long decades, Stevens is so puzzled and embarrassed when he is expected to deliver his ideas to someone other than his superior, he cannot respond smartly. Neither does he respond well, as the self-narrated dialogue below demonstrates, when Miss Kenton continues to provoke and challenge him in vain. The desperate woman tries to wind Stevens up. Kathleen Wall sees Stevens’ raising awareness resulting in his deconstruction of the past. She also advances the idea that the critical reader cannot trust Miss Kenton either.284 After accepting a proposal Miss Kenton, in her final despair over Stevens’
pretended neutrality cruelly mocks him:
“Am I to take it,” she said, “that after the many years of service I have given in this house, you have no more words to greet the news of my possible departure than those you have just uttered?”
“Miss Kenton, you have my warmest congratulations. But I repeat, there are matters of global significance taking place upstairs and I must return to my post.”
“Did you know, Mr Stevens, that you have been a very important figure for my acquaintance and I?”
“Really, Miss Kenton?”
“Yes, Mr Stevens. We often pass the time amusing ourselves with anecdotes about you. For instance, my acquaintance is always wanting me to show him the way you pinch your nostrils together when you put pepper on your food. That always gets him laughing.”
“Indeed” (RD 229–230).
To her fierce and unfair accusations Stevens has only formal answers, as if he was responding to some prestigious guests. In Earl G. Ingersoll’s reading, desire and the female subject play a role in a “masquerade of femininity” by representing “lack.”285 Lack should be interpreted as an absence of privilege or power by both sexes while “Nowhere does it appear more clearly that man’s desire”, according to the definition of Lacan, “finds its
284 Kathleen Wall, “The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration”, Journal of Narrative Technique 24:1 (1994) 18–42.
285 Earl. G. Ingersoll, “Desire, the gaze and suture in the novel and the film, The Remains of the Day,” Studies in Humanities. 2001. 31(28). http://find.galegroup.com/itx/start.do?prodId = AONE (accessed June 16, 2010)
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meaning in the desire of the other, not so much because the other holds the key to the object desired, as because the first object of desire is to be recognized by the other.”286 In Lacan’s understanding desire is always mediated by language, it is always dynamic, and is directed towards the other. Accordingly, the other holds the key to the object desired.
Stevens’ desire is Miss Kenton and the novel itself is shaped by his desire. Miss Kenton confesses her desire in many ways (RD 239), to which I agree, ,she not only intrudes and puts flowers into Stevens’ pantry, provoking him before her marriage deal, but and more importantly, she confesses at the end of the novel how much she wanted to spend all her life with Stevens, though the reader gets to know this only through Stevens. In the film adaptation, to which Ingersoll claims more “determinacy,”287 this crucial declaration of Miss Kenton is omitted.
In terms of narrative technique, Ingersoll draws interesting parallels between the narrative and the cinematic syntax, focusing on the camera-eye as an interpreting device.
Stevens is longing for Miss Kenton and by the snapshots, as expressions of the male gaze, the spectator is allowed to visually grasp his dialogue gaps. Stevens is a repressed character “circumscribing heterosexual desire”288 in his subordinated servants. Ingersoll offers a provocative argument stating that the novel has a clear indication of homosexual desires between Lord Darlington and his German friend, Bremann, whereas the film cleverly plays with the issue leaving it dubious. Nonetheless, Darlington Hall is an
“asexual” or “homosocial” world within which Stevens is “pre-sexual”289 and his desire is also masqueraded by his artificial language. In Ingersoll’s view his gaps and slips in language and the “camera’s male gaze,”290 meaning that the spectator watches the film on many occasions from Stevens’ point of view, enabling the reader/spectator to “read his desire.”291 Using the narrative theory of Peter Brooks292 Ingersoll argues that Stevens does not yet know the outcome of his story whereas in Brooks’ terms the ending of a narrative precedes the beginning of the storytelling.
286 Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” Trans. Alan Sheridan. Écrits, A Selection. (London, Tavistock, 1977), 58.
287 Earl. G. Ingersoll, “Desire, the gaze and suture in the novel and the film, The Remains of the Day,” Studies in Humanities. (Accessed June 16, 2010)
288 Earl. G. Ingersoll, “Desire, the gaze and suture in the novel and the film, The Remains of the Day,” Studies in Humanities. (Accessed June 16, 2010)
289 Earl. G. Ingersoll, “Desire, the gaze and suture in the novel and the film, The Remains of the Day,” Studies in Humanities. (Accessed June 16, 2010)
290 Earl. G. Ingersoll, “Desire, the gaze and suture in the novel and the film, The Remains of the Day,” Studies in Humanities. (Accessed June 16, 2010)
291 Earl. G. Ingersoll, “Desire, the gaze and suture in the novel and the film, The Remains of the Day,” Studies in Humanities. (Accessed June 16, 2010)
292 Peter Brook, Reading for the Plot, Design and Intention in Narrative (New York, Knopf), 1984.
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This is consonant with Molly Westerman’s claims. As a conclusion, Ingersoll notes that Stevens sitting in his employer’s car with the rain falling down the windshield and the headlamps blinding the spectators’ gaze, Stevens’ devastating sorrow is blindfolded. In this moment both the camera and the viewer “see” the lack, that which was denied, the gap between desire and possible fulfilment. Interestingly, the narrator does not comment on Miss Kenton’s (above noted) accusations, this narrative gap is filled from the plot, i.e., when Cardinal manipulates him into giving up information about the prestigious Nazi guests of the lord. In this, as well as challenging him to betray his master, he asks three times if Stevens feels all right. In other words, from Cardinal’s point of view the reader is given a clue that Stevens had suffered a real emotional blow that evening. The climax continues as Mr Cardinal accuses Stevens with incuriosity and “indifference” (RD 236) and claims that Lord Darlington is making a fool of himself; he is “a pawn” (RD 235) and is manoeuvred by the Nazis.293 From my point of view, Stevens is trapped. He is deeply distracted by the news about Miss Kenton’s marriage and the brutality with which she has treated him, as well as this, his loyalty to Lord Darlington was ridiculed. Basically his whole world is in danger and the narrator – via prompt and punctual dialogues – evades taking sides. In other words, via active dialogue he avoids a contemplating monologue. At a crucial point he goes to the housekeeper’s door but cannot pull himself together to knock.
Instead he takes up his usual position under the arch in the hall and, after some twenty years, the narrator proudly remembers: “I had managed to preserve a ‘dignity in keeping with my position’ - and had done so, moreover, in a manner even my father might have been proud of” (RD 239).
7.8 Empty silence of the future
The most lyrical of all chapters, “Day Six – Evening” will give full record of the final meeting in the gloomy light of the sentimentally named Rose Garden Hotel. Another uncanny meeting will take place on the pier in the evening light. A man on a bench will converse with the narrator on his remains of the day. Metaphorically speaking in this chapter the sun is starting to set but there is plenty of daylight left. By the end of the record of the Kenton-meeting, lights will be switched off and the foreign man on the pier will
293 This is the first time the actual word “Nazi” is mentioned in the novel. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, 233.
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