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An Extravagant Reticence
| Article
# : |
17213 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1990 |
2,182 Words |
| Author
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Ihab Hassan
Ihab Hassan is Vilas Research Professor of English and
comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin in
Milwaukee. He is the author of Selves at Risk: Patterns of
Quest in Contemporary American Letters and Out of Egypt:
Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography. In the sixties and
seventies he developed the theory of postmodernism in essays
collected in The Post-modern Turn: Essays in Post-modern
Theory and Culture. |
This seamless, comic novel with humdrum title teases us into uneasy thoughts. The questions begin almost casually. Implacably, though, they deepen - such is the novel's preternatural craft. We begin with this fact: A Japanese-born writer, living in England since his childhood, writes a novel about the butler of a great English house. Is the result a Japanese vision of England or, more slyly, and English vision of Japan? Or is it both and neither, a vision simply of our condition, our world?
For some readers the suspicion will linger that England and Japan mirror each other at the antipodes. Hierarchic, reserved, aloof - yes, xenophobic - these two insular nations eye the world warily and nature their respective traditions with a peculiarly moral sense of their purity. Why, the, couldn't life in an English manor illumine some aspect of Japan? Why couldn't the vices and virtues of one society reflect those of its global shadow? Is there parable and monition in declining Britain for rising Japan?
The Remains of the Day proves such questions, if not pointless, too stark, for its mode is ambiguous, consummately oblique. In it, decency and error are complicit in the best men, and the tribulations of a servant become a subtle allegory of modern history. Thus Kazuo Ishiguro conveys his indefectible sense of current human realities - politics, class, personal suffering, and sentimental attachments - through the reticent narrative of Mr. Stevens, chief butler of Darlington Hall.
It is not clear whom Stevens addresses in his memoir, nor why he decides just then to recount certain events. This minor criticism is not altogether technical: In this narrative, point of view is key. The point of view is ironic, gradually disclosing to the reader more than the narrator seems to realize. Call it dramatic irony, the kind Sophocles put to devastating use. Here, though, irony blends gracefully into comedy and brings to the protagonist, Stevens, only slight knowledge. Hence the pathos of the story, once it starts as the butler's blindness becomes our insight.
The Entrapments of Dignity
The novel, then, depends wholly on its flawless tone, the tone of a distinguished gentleman's gentleman: selfless, fastidious, impassive, prim, professional to a fault. For Stevens considers himself above all a "professional"; not the equal, perhaps, of Mr. Marshall or Mr. Lane - legendary butlers whom Stevens continually invokes - yet a paragon of English
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