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Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory

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Inside Job: Professionalism and PostimperialCommunities in The Remains of the Day

Ryan S. Trimm

To cite this article: Ryan S. Trimm (2005) Inside Job: Professionalism and PostimperialCommunities in The Remains of the Day , Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 16:2, 135-161, DOI:10.1080/10436920590946796

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Published online: 16 Aug 2006.

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INSIDE JOB: PROFESSIONALISM AND POSTIMPERIALCOMMUNITIES IN THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

Ryan S. Trimm

A 1999 New York Times article detailed the use of the Merchant-Ivory film adaptation of The Remains of the Day as a pedagogicaltool at the Starkey International Institute for Household Manage-ment, the ‘‘Harvard of high-end household help’’ (Harden). Studentsat the Denver school were instructed to look to Stevens, the characterwho selflessly serves at the fictional Darlington Hall in the decadesbefore and after World War II, as a model of professional devotion.Future ‘‘household managers’’ laughed at scenes in which Stevensirons newspapers before discreetly handing them to Lord Darlington,but took to heart the butler’s refusal to condemn the anti-Semitichiring practices of his employer: ‘‘‘If you start judging your employ-ers . . . your days are numbered’’’ (Harden). Such use of the filmnicely illustrates a tension found in the novel itself. Kazuo Ishiguro’s1989 work of fiction summons an older literary resonance of servants,one where they signify a declining world of aristocratic privilege char-acterized by luxuries such as ironed newspapers. At the same time,service in the novel points toward a contemporary world of consum-ing professionalization, a world in which subjectivity seems to stemfrom occupation, a career providing not only manner and methodbut also social station. In addition to this temporal tension, thenovel’s depiction of service has a spatial divide as well. Stevens’scareer has greatly restricted his field of vision: his ‘‘position’’ havingtied him to Lord Darlington and Darlington Hall, he does not seemto have left the house ever before. However, this insularity ofStevens’s service is pitted against the way such serving positionshim within a broader network: Darlington Hall and its servantscan only be fully understood against a colonial or globalized context,one that provides hidden supports and a rebranded identity.

Ryan S. Trimm is assistant professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. He is

currently working on a project exploring uses of the past in postimperial British culture.

Literature Interpretation Theory, 16: 135–161, 2005

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc.

ISSN: 1043-6928 print/1545-5866 online

DOI: 10.1080/10436920590946796

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These tensions allow the novel to develop a subtle and often comicstrain between the great events happening upstairs (and out in theworld) and the tightly circumscribed life of Stevens. As James Langremarks, ‘‘the novel transcribes a dialogue between the grand narra-tives of the war and the minor, subjective narrative of Stevens—between the macronarratives of public history and the micronarra-tives of private memory’’ (156). The effect, however, is to rewriteour understandings not just of World War II but other major eventsthat impact Stevens’s life and service in understated ways. This 1989novel is structured around a narrative linking Stevens’s holidayjourney in 1956 with a progressive chain of memories of personal tra-gedies occurring in the 1920s and 30s. Such receding retrospectionthen highlights postwar and postimperial transformations: the level-ing of social hierarchy and the establishment of a social welfarenet; the loss of imperial identity and world power status; the attemptsof Margaret Thatcher to rip up the postwar social contract andreclaim imperial greatness. As Stevens discovers over the course ofhis journey, even the seemingly stable center of Darlington Hall hasbeen altered through transformations in other points of its web ofrelations—transformations in Britain, the Empire, and the worlditself. Furthermore, even Stevens’s position has been altered atDarlington, for he is now serving an American retiree (Farraday)rather than an English lord.

This situation depends on Stevens’s connection with aristocraticfigures such as the country house and Darlington himself, connec-tions that help define Stevens’s service in terms of an imperial web.Darlington’s butler is brought into relief, though, by his juxtapositionwith both Farraday and the village of Moscombe, a rural communitywhose own resonances offer a defining contrast with Stevens’s pro-fessional service. Against such a context, Stevens’s role as servant sig-nals an outdated order and a superseded Britain. However, Stevens’sprofessional devotion signifies not only a fallen social order but also aprofessionalism associated with increasing globalization. He mustalso be read as a harbinger of a new globalized network, one in whichhis professional commitment to service might be seen as prescient.Stevens’s own comments about butlers suggest post-national com-munities of professionals even as they depend on an almost jingoisticassertion of the Englishness of butlers. Darlington’s head servantthen is an ambivalent figure: one resonant of past and present, homeand abroad.

The argument here depends on a postcolonial framework.Stevens’s service is situated largely by loaded figures such as thecountry house or his contrast to a rural English village. Both of these

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are signifiers of Englishness, just as Stevens in fact argues that butlersare quintessentially English. In dealing with such markers, KrishanKumar instructs that ‘‘[o]ne has to work from the outside in.. . . One has to see English national identity as a kind of residue [orremains]; the response to and the result of England’s engagementwith its imperial venture, and of its perception of its mission in theworld’’ (43–44). As a result, these signs that orient Stevens’s situationmust be seen themselves as remains, as internalized traces of externalrelations. Similarly, Homi Bhabha argues that this national ident-ity—and its signifiers—was formulated through the ‘‘traumatic scen-ario of racial difference’’ encountered in the colonial crucible(Location 107). Englishness was formulated by retroactively identify-ing the key features of English culture that were seen to distinguishthe colonizer from the radical alterity of the colonized. However,such a national identity proved to be unstable for it depended onthe mediation of the Other. As a result, both temporal and spatialsplits opened through the nostalgic location of national essence in anow lost past and through the defining contrast of Empire. Ifnational identity depends on a shared sense of time and place, thenfractures and ambivalences in national chronotopes mark an identitycrisis. Or, in the words of Salman Rushdie’s Whisky Sisoda, ‘‘thetrouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happenedoverseas, so they do do don’t know what it means’’ (363). This his-tory overseas is the unstable foundation of the markers of Stevens’sservice and its loss intensifies the temporal and spatial ambivalenceof his situation.

A SERVANT’S PLACE

Stevens’s service itself stresses a spatial problem. Bruce Robbinsnotes a servant’s ‘‘place,’’ ‘‘position,’’ or ‘‘situation’’ layers not onlyprofessional post but also location, one that by definition is seen asstatic and restrictive of social mobility—a ‘‘rootedness’’ that helpsnaturalize social and economic relations (SH 53). As a result, Stevensseems almost part of Darlington Hall itself: Farraday thinks of thebutler coming with the house much as a garage or garden might(124)—the head servant is ‘‘part of the package’’ (242). Indeed, be-cause he himself has long been such a fixture at Darlington, Stevensresembles one of the plants in young Cardinal’s curious dream of theideal life (108). Stevens himself imagines the house and his role in it asrooted at the center of unquestioned power relations: ‘‘the world wasa wheel, revolving with these great houses at the hub, their mightydecisions emanating out to all else, rich and poor, who revolved

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around them’’ (115).1 However, Stevens discovers when he finallyjourneys outward from this internal hub that this wheel of powerhas lost its spokes. Though Stevens seemingly has not previously leftDarlington Hall, his journey reveals that changes in Britain and theEmpire have in fact deracinated him. Significantly, by book’s end,this journey remains open-ended, for Stevens still has not returnedto Darlington at the completion of his tale.2

Stevens’s spatial and occupational situation is partly defined by thenovel’s deployment of aristocratic iconography. The manners andbearing of Lord Darlington, with his public school diction andvalues, appear as a parody of the stereotypical English gentleman.3

The ‘‘gentleman’s gentleman,’’ Stevens, fits right into this farcicalvein of the novel with his great discomfort with personal affairsand keen reliance on a stiff upper lip. In this choice of protagonist,the novel then invokes an English classic, for Stevens’s role as the quin-tessential English butler apes P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves, an unflap-pable servant whose cool professionalism and resourcefulnessmaintain a smoothly run household.4 However, Stevens’s tragi-comicbumbles (his inability to relate the ‘‘facts of life’’ to Cardinal, hispersonal fumbles with Miss Kenton) are certainly an ironic counter-point to the ultra-capable Jeeves; Stevens, in fact, assesses the qualityof the service he provides to be diminishing (243). This wry replyhas the effect of stressing a decline of English service, a flagging thatquickly betrays a reliance on an equally declining Empire.5 The elderStevens, for example, defines professionalism by telling the story ofthe tiger and the Raj butler, a professional aptitude demonstrated bythe butler’s calm dispatching of the dangerous animal and lytoticreport that ‘‘there will be no discernible traces left of the recent occur-rence’’ by dinner time (36).6 William Stevens’s own professional dignityis exemplified by incidents such as his service as temporary valet to theBoer War general responsible for the death of his son (40–42).Stevens’s own ‘‘greatness’’ is demonstrated by his steadfast perform-ance of his professional duties even as the Empire and his own lifecome crashing down around him: Stevens’s brother dies during theBoer War; his father dies during a conference devoted to addressingthe catastrophic fallout from the Great War; Stevens loses Miss Ken-ton against the backdrop of the disastrous policy of appeasement; thepresent of the butler’s own narrative is the year of the Suez fiasco.7

Because the achievement of English servants in Remains is largelyknown through this illuminating contrast provided by imperial spaces,the purported savagery and chaos permit English service to signify asredoubt of civilization. As these imperial spaces fall away then, thisvery national service finds itself at a loss.

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However, such a loss does not mean that Stevens now situates him-self in a localized frame but rather against a shifting internationalcontext. The movement from Empire to globalized web is reflectedin a corresponding reorientation of Darlington Hall from imperialhub to a retirement home for a wealthy American (Farraday). Thecountry house, the seeming still point of the wheel of imperial life,has had its position altered because of transformations in the networksupporting it. As Neal Ascherson and Tom Nairn have had occasionto acidly comment, the key word in this label is certainly not ‘‘home.’’Indeed, there is little of the domestic in such houses, a lack empha-sized by Darlington’s own singular emphasis on foreign policy.8

As Ian Baucom notes, such houses always point beyond the domestic:

The country house . . . ramifies beyond its own domestic space; it is

resonant with more than merely local significance. It signifies both

Englishness and empire, the manifestation in England’s built spaceof colonial capital and colonial discipline. It represents an authorized

and elite—but increasingly hegemonic—order of English belonging

that not only is financed by the acts of colonial possession but finds

in the disciplinary protocols of colonial administration a model for

its own procedures of identity formation and reformation. . . .The

country house, in this reading, cannot be inspected without our be-

coming aware of its dependence on those distant, all but invisible,

spaces of empire to which it is connected through a perpetual passingof bodies, capital, and commodities, and from which it derives its

principles of order, stability, and rule. (166)

The icon of the country house, while signifying an idealizednational life, also signals other spaces supporting this national ideal.This outward orientation of the country house works not only to ad-umbrate occluded relations, but also functions, as with Darlington’sself-anointed diplomatic duties, to represent the nation to an outsideworld. Here, it is the stateliness that matters, an appearance that issuch a projection of power so that ‘‘Great Britain herself is the statelyhome’’ (Nairn 110). Nairn quotes Nigel Dennis’s 1955 satiric novelCards of Identity in support of this loaded sense of stateliness:

This sort of house was once a heart and centre of the national identity.

A whole world lived in relation to it. Millions knew who they were by

reference to it. Hundred of thousands look back to it, and not only

grieve for its passing but still depend on it, non-existent though it is,

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to tell who they are. Thousands who never knew it are taught every day

to cherish its memory and to believe that without it no man will be

able to tell his whereabouts again. It hangs on men’s necks like a mill-

stone of memory; carrying it, and looking back on its associations,

they stumble indignantly backwards into the future, confident that

man’s self-knowledge is gone forever. (110)

Such an assessment echoes Stevens’s report that Darlington Hall hadbeen ‘‘the very fulcrum of great affairs’’ (139). In this world, the state-liness of the house in fact becomes congruent with the State itself.However, as Stevens’s use of the past tense indicates, this worldhas crumbled, a disintegration marked in part by an increased senseof postwar egalitarianism. The loss of those invisible imperial spacesreveals fissures in the facade of the country house as national sign. Asin Dennis’s comic lament, Stevens finds himself disoriented in a worldwhere the country house no longer occupies such a central place.However, the house is obviously not lost itself but instead‘‘rebranded.’’ The house is now no longer the central hub but in factthe outward face of England.

This new sense of symbolic advertisement is marked by Stevens’snew service role as English ambassador to the American Farraday,for his new employer ‘‘is an American gentleman to whom, surely,one has a special duty to show all that is best about service inEngland’’ (139). Farraday likewise expects that their relationship willbe a symbolically important one. After his skeptical visitors, theAmerican Wakefields, have left, Farraday demands reassurance fromhis servant that Stevens and the house he comes with are genuinelyrepresentative of the culture he had longed to buy into: ‘‘I mean tosay, Stevens, this is a genuine old English house, isn’t it? That’s whatI paid for. And you’re a genuine old-fashioned English butler, notjust some waiter pretending to be one. You’re the real thing, aren’tyou? That’s what I wanted, isn’t that what I have?’’ (124). Stevensand the anachronistic house that he is bound to have passed fromthe dignified stateliness of political representation to being a com-modity representative of the ‘‘genuine grand old’’ English countryhouse culture. He is now not so much a personal servant, but ‘‘partof the package’’ of Darlington Hall (242), merely another feature ofthis particularly English ware. The butler is less in service to theState than he is a symbol of the national ‘‘brand,’’ a packaging ofthe past in the interests of product placement.

Stevens in fact is so devoted to his occupational role that to evenleave the house he must be ordered to do so by his foreign employer

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Farraday: ‘‘You fellows, you’re always locked up in these big houseshelping out, how do you ever get to see around this beautiful countryof yours? . . . It’s wrong that a man can’t get to see around his owncountry. Take my advice, get out of the house for a few days’’ (4).The butler’s journey out into the heartland of the south of Englandis initiated by an American, just as it is conducted in an Americancar (a Ford).9 Stevens’s drive of discovery into the English interioris thus dependent on the prior intrusion of the outside. This journey-inducing conversation, though, also establishes a difference in theway Stevens and his employer view nation, one formulated in the but-ler’s protest that he has been able to ‘‘‘see’ more of England than most,placed as we were in the houses where the greatest ladies and gentle-man of the land gathered’’ (4). While the American equates countrywith countryside, Stevens instead views it as a ‘‘socio-political construc-tion, held together by the ‘great ladies and gentlemen of the land,’’’ forthese are the ‘‘best of England’’ (O’Brien 794). Thus, while Stevensidentifies England as society, one revolving around country housessuch as Darlington, Farraday associates it with open landscape. Fur-thermore, the butler’s quoted use of his master’s verb (‘‘see’’) signalsa difference in the way each proposes to experience national com-munity. For Farraday, a nation is a visual phenomenon, one to be con-sumed with the eyes—and a wallet.10 Stevens, in contrast, views theexperience of nationness not as the absorption of scenery, but insteadas finding oneself enmeshed in a web of relations, one centered on thecountry house ‘‘hubs.’’ Although Stevens seems to emphasize the socio-political resonances of this metaphor, country houses were of coursehubs of economic and imperial relations, for it was upon such socio-economic foundations that these ‘‘treasure houses’’ were founded.These homes, the crown jewel of aristocratic iconography, bridge thedomestic ruling class with a globalized system of empire. As a result,Darlington Hall itself as the site of Stevens’s professionalism must beread not only as a now out-moded hub of power and stately domicilefiguring the cultural power of the State, but also as an internalized con-tact zone. Again, the signifying power of a national icon is undercut bythe imperial spaces that had served to buttress it.

This sense of being in the center of things is in marked contrast tothe situation of Moscombe, a contrast that helps further situateStevens. The village, of course, is not on Stevens’s itinerary—he liter-ally stumbles onto the hamlet because of his own failure to keep a re-sponsible eye on his gas gauge (160). This off-the-beaten track qualityis a literal one: the village is not on the road, forcing Stevens to searchfor a path to it in the dark. This rustic resonance is amplified by thefact that Moscombe lacks both a functioning inn (thus leaving

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Stevens to stay with a farm family) and electricity: ‘‘It’s not as thoughwe don’t have electricity out here, sir. . . .But something went wrongwith the circuit and we’ve been without it now for almost twomonths. To tell you the truth, we don’t miss it much. There’s a fewhouses in the village that’s never had electricity at all. Oil gives a war-mer light’’ (181). The ongoing neglect of a modern necessity and theaccompanying protest that the village once did make some contactwith modernity only serve to further the sense that Moscombe is amuseum piece of sorts, a residual anachronism of a now lost England.

The village’s archaic sensibility is only increased by the way itsinhabitants interact. The Taylors quickly—and respectfully—inviteStevens to stay the night (163). One by one, the bucolic inhabitantsof Moscombe, informed through the rural grapevine, troop in tointroduce themselves to Stevens, whom they (mis)recognize as agentleman. The villagers know each other well and eagerly pass oninformation to one another garnered by other inhabitants.Moscombe here carries quite a nostalgic charge, for it seems a litera-lization of Raymond Williams’s ‘‘knowable community’’—the villagegossip about Stevens in fact reveals this to be a community where allare known to one another.11 Because of this apparent lack of alien-ation and because of its anachronistic appearance, Moscombeappears initially as Gemeinschaft—and a very English one at that.Malcolm Chase has charted sentiments that increasingly identifyEnglish identity with rural living in British travel guides in the thirtiesand forties, sentiments amplified by the combined threat of economichardship and the coming war.12 It was ‘‘‘here, if anywhere, that good-will may thrive, which, in spite of wars, shall at last bind the ends ofthe earth in the bonds of friendship’’’; indeed, ‘‘‘the English villagehas been as good a social unit as is found anywhere in the world’’’(qtd. in Chase 132).13 Moscombe signifies an idyllic and redemptivevision of England, a village that, through the logic of nostalgia, con-tains an essential identity now lost. As a seemingly timeless Englishicon, Moscombe in fact signals a collapse of time and space. The vil-lage’s quaintness positions it as temporally distant, a distance figuredin its remove from the motor road. Stevens thus discovers a curiousspatial and temporal divide within the interior of the nation itself, adisjunction that signals a defacement of a nation split between peda-gogical past and performative present.14 This disruptive position isdeveloped through its implicit opposition to the ‘‘new world order’’of Farraday—the world of modernity and capitalism in which evenemblems of nationality are commodified. To this community, theprofessional Stevens stands as a representative of this alienatedGesellschaft. Curiously, in its role as residual reservoir of native

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Englishness, Moscombe functions as a site of alterity within this tri-umphant modernity of the contemporary nation. Stevens, in his roleas a professional, a hired broom, therefore stands as a stranger in theheart of this uncanny homeland.

In such a setting, even the deference that all the villagers show abetter such as Doctor Carlisle depends at least as much on the doc-tor’s professional status as his class background. The doctor’s con-fession that he arrived in Moscombe in 1949 full of socialist idealsidentifies him as a physician dispatched under the new NationalHealth Service (210), an organization that sent many a village its firsthealth care professional. As such, Carlisle stands as a type of pro-fessional vital to Anthony Giddens’s version of modernity in whichindividual professionals play a mediatory role between larger insti-tutional systems they represent and a specific community they serve;these individual professionals serve as access points to the largerbureaucracy and form the link between personal and systemic trust(115). Consequently, the respect and feeling displayed toward DoctorCarlisle extends beyond the communal level of Moscombe to signifyfaith in the new postwar national social contract he represents intown. Moscombe signifies not only a nostalgic English communitywhose iconography is freighted with some reputedly lost ideal ofrustic England’s essence, but also a modern, bureaucratic, and social-ist imagined community, one whose welfare state offers an insti-tutional version of the Gemeinschaft ideals figured in a countryvillage. It is perhaps here that what Bruce Robbins calls Remains’sapparent ‘‘case against professionalism’’ stumbles (‘‘Very Busy’’426), for the nostalgia surrounding the Moscombe scenes takes innot only a bucolic communal Arcadia but also the soft embrace ofthe welfare safety net signified by the village’s relations with DoctorCarlisle. Just as the pastoral ideal of a Moscombe can only be locatedin the past, so too can the cradle-to-grave welfare state now, afterMargaret Thatcher’s dismantling, only be located in retrospect.

This expansion of Moscombe from knowable community to anidealized national imagined community is furthered in the argumentsmade by the local political activist, Harry Smith. In response toStevens’s misleading hinted autobiography, one implying the gentle-man’s gentleman has been at the hub of power, Smith professes that

we [the inhabitants of Moscombe] can go year in year out and never

even lay eyes on a real gentleman. . . . It gets easy for us here to forget

our responsibility as citizens. That’s why I work so hard at the cam-

paigning. Whether people agree or disagree . . . at least I’ll get them

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thinking. At least I’ll remind them of their duty. This is a democratic

country we’re living in. We fought for it. We’ve all got to play our part.

(189–90)

Smith’s speech obviously centers on the responsibilities of Moscombe’sresidents as citizens. Such responsibilities need stressing, for Moscombestands outside the web of power relations Stevens had falsely laid claimto. Indeed, because the village is physically and politically isolated, itsresidents must be ‘‘reminded’’ of their role in a larger whole, that theyare related to a multitude of others whom they cannot see.15 Thesereminders—and the responsibilities of citizenship that they articu-late—thus serve to stress to the residents ofMoscombe that they are partof a larger community, one assuring its residents that they all have a‘‘voice’’ in shaping its affairs, in directing the way in which it willconduct itself. This larger community is of course an imagined one,for it is the ideological Gemeinschaft of the nation. The knowable com-munity serves as the figuration for the responsibilities of the citizens ofthe imagined one.

Thus, Moscombe figures as a village laden with national iconogra-phy, but its resonance is not strictly limited to quaint notions ofrurality and community. For Moscombe functions not only as aseemingly timeless emblem of a notion of England, but also a verytimely one. The time of the main action of the novel, July 1956, placesit at the height of consensus about the postwar settlement and thedevelopment of the welfare state, a social contract so institutionalizedat this point that successive Conservative administrations now took itfor granted and in fact worked for its extension.16 Smith’s advocacyof personal political responsibility serves as the most forceful articu-lation of this consensus. As a result, the contrast of Moscombe func-tions largely to brand Stevens as an anachronism, for he still adheresand appeals to antebellum professional and political codes of defer-ence, codes now strikingly out of date.17 Stevens’s service is a relic,one bound to a now extinct aristocratic world.

This anachronism, though, is not a simple thing, for bothMoscombe and Stevens are viewed retrospectively: by setting thepresent of the action in 1956, Remains (published in 1989) framesboth historically. Darlington’s butler and the Devon village are bothseen from a perspective near the end of Margaret Thatcher’s reign.The brave new world of the social contract figured in Moscombehas become shredded by a politics that believes not in society butin individuals, separate selves linked not through communitarianbut professional relations. This individualistic focus makes Stevens’s

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gradual groping toward some sense of self-awareness appear morecontemporary than the nostalgic pastoral of Moscombe. That is,both Stevens and the village of Moscombe find themselves havingto navigate a world split between what Susan O’Brien calls the oppo-sition of Victorian values—‘‘formality, repression, and self-effacement,summed up under the general heading of ‘dignity’’’—and ‘‘those asso-ciated with an idea of ‘America’ that has expanded literally into aNew World—freedom, nature, and individualism’’ (788). In the post-war world, Moscombe is more in tune with the social shift to a moreopen society but, in post-Thatcher Britain, the more individualisticnature and emphasis of Stevens’s navigation between these contrastedcodes makes his tale appear the more contemporary. The figurationof servant Stevens as anachronistic is itself framed retrospectively.Likewise, as Stevens himself dimly perceives, the butler figures anew economic order.

PROFESSIONAL ATTIRE

This temporal problem becomes even more of a difficulty whenviewed against the backdrop of professionalism and postimperialspace. As both Rebecca Walkowitz and Bruce Robbins have pointedout, the comments of Moscombe’s advocate, Harry Smith, regardingthe British Empire (he knows that ‘‘all kinds of little countries goingindependent’’ is ‘‘wrong’’ [192]) suggest that his anti-professionalismand expression of ‘‘strong opinions’’ are not completely authorizedby the text. This false note helps suggest that there might be moreto Stevens and his position than a simple residualism of a feudalorder. The reading of Darlington’s domestic as anachronistic is infact in tension with interpretations stressing the butler’s abiding dedi-cation to professionalism, a dedication whose temporal resonanceseems very timely in an era of globalized professionals. It is, afterall, this dedication that causes Stevens to go so far astray with regardsto the death of his father, to his employer’s politics, and to his ownfrustrated affection for Miss Kenton. Robbins, for example, citesLouis Menand’s complaint that the singular moral of Ishiguro’snovels is ‘‘‘that people need love but continually spoil their chancesof getting it, a piece of wisdom slightly below the level of Dr. JoyceBrothers’’’ as an argument regarding professionalism ‘‘worse thanmerely advice-column dumb’’ (‘‘Very Busy’’ 434). Such silly simplifi-cation stresses an ‘‘ideological privatism that excludes from the realsuch things as the need for respect and connection to the larger com-munity,’’ one that errs by making ‘‘the real into the private, the publicinto the false’’ (‘‘Very Busy’’ 434). Professionalism opens Remains up

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beyond mere housekeeping closet drama, one guised in the tatteredhand-me-downs of early modernist unreliable narration. Profession-alism points toward larger issues of community and responsibility,and it is through Stevens’s professionalism that issues of decoloniza-tion and globalization intrude with a different resonance.

Professionalism is the obvious accomplice in Stevens’s ethicallyand emotionally frustrated life: a single-minded devotion to dutyhas abetted his failure to achieve death-bed rapprochement with hisfather, to distance himself from the myopic (and anti-Semitic) diplo-matic gestures of Lord Darlington, and to emotionally consummatehis relationship with Miss Kenton. It is a long-running concern forStevens, a concern most manifest in his discussions of the HayesSociety. This organization of butlers of ‘‘the very first rank’’ hadgrappled with membership criteria attempting to articulate the pin-nacle of professional service (31).18 The crucial criterion, accordingto the Society and enthusiastically endorsed by Stevens, is that ‘‘theapplicant be possessed of a dignity in keeping with his position’’(33). Stevens, of course, associates this term with

a butler’s ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits. . . .The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their

professional role and inhabit it to their utmost; they will not be shaken

out by external events. . . . They wear their professionalism as a decent

gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstancestear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only

when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely

alone. It is, as I say, a matter of dignity. (42–43)

It is the unflinching and absolute performance of this dignity that isthe code for Stevens’s continual refusal to step out of the role ofbutler to play the son, the lover, or even concerned citizen.

On the other hand, Lord Darlington’s (and by extension Stevens’s)diplomatic fumblings are contrasted with the call for ‘‘professional-ism’’ by the American Senator, Lewis:

You gentlemen here . . . are just a bunch of naıve dreamers. And if youdidn’t insist on meddling in large affairs that affect the globe, you

would actually be charming. Let’s take our good host here. . . .He is

a gentleman. . . .A classic English gentleman. . . . But his lordship here

is an amateur. . . .He is an amateur and international affairs today are

no longer for gentlemen amateurs. The sooner you here in Europe

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realize that the better. . . .The days when you could act out of your

noble instincts are over. Except of course, you here in Europe don’t

yet seem to know it. Gentleman like our good host still believe it’s

their business to meddle in matters they don’t understand. . . .You

here in Europe need professionals to run your affairs. If you don’t

realize that soon you’re headed for disaster. . . .A toast, gentlemen. . . .To professionalism. (102)

Stevens’s own increasing sense of dissatisfaction with the misguideddiplomatic failures of Lord Darlington seems to authorize this viewof professionalism as a necessity in the new world order.19 The pro-fessionalism of our servant then signifies not only a residual remain-der of an older economic world, but also a modern andmodernizing sense of efficiency, a sense of competency Lewis sug-gests will irresistibly ring out the old and ring in the new. AsRobbins notes, ‘‘something is clearly going on if the term pro-fessionalism can refer both to Stevens’s ideological self-mystificationand, at the transnational level, to something like a solution’’ (‘‘Vil-lage’’ 28). Robbins, in fact, sees an intimate connection betweenquestions of professionalism and those of globalization. It is theprofessional who is able to properly imagine global community,for she is the one able to properly conceive of relations that exceedeven the bounds of nation: ‘‘Professionalism, with its peculiar abil-ity to produce bonds among detached, institutionally scattered sub-jects, bonds not created or sustained by the frequent, face-to-faceengagements of the same-site work group, would seem well suitedto new demands for loyalty and solidarity at a distance’’ (‘‘Village’’23). Professional and global issues are both defined against domesticones, an alliance that finds further affiliation in international pro-fessional networks that prefigure a global village. As a result, ‘‘any-thing said on behalf of work will also resonate on behalf of theforeign . . .making a case for work may mean making a case forinternationalism’’ (‘‘Very Busy’’ 430). However, though Stevens’sprofessionalism does expand the boundaries of his position, as wewill see, such devotion moves ambivalently between the inter-national and the national. As a result, whereas communities suchas Moscombe had remained suspended between public and private,professionalism, even that of domestic servants, navigates the ten-sion between domestic and foreign, a tension that in the postwarsetting of Remains is greatly affected by the collapse of empire.

This tension is most clearly seen in Stevens’s continuing choice ofdomestic service over affective relationships. These choices are best

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illustrated by the repeated scenes of Stevens reporting someoneobserving his tears, an incident then described as a ‘‘triumph’’ despitethe death of his father, loss of Miss Kenton, or final realization of awasted life (110, 228, 243). Obviously, these sad stories can only betaken as a triumph for his vocation, for ‘‘never allow[ing] himselfto be ‘off duty’ in the presence of others . . . [rather he] must be seento inhabit his role, utterly and fully; he cannot be seen casting it asideone moment simply to don it again the next as though it were nothingmore than a pantomime costume’’ (169). In this rigorous occupationof his vocational role, one that extends seemingly even to his ownself-relation (Stevens must always think of himself first and foremostas Darlington’s butler, no matter what the circumstances), Stevensstresses the primacy of this professional responsibility. This pro-fessional imperative is most clearly seen in the affair of the Jewishmaids, refugees who were fired because of his lordship’s desire tonot offend frequent anti-Semitic visitors. Stevens, while later main-taining his disapproval with the move, concludes ‘‘my duty . . .wasquite clear and . . . there was nothing to be gained at all in irresponsi-bly displaying such personal doubts . . .our professional duty is not toour own foibles and sentiments, but to the wishes of our employer’’(148–49).20 Stevens’s responsibility, both to others and to himself,then begins and ends with his inhabiting his role as butler with utmost‘‘dignity.’’ His responsibility is thus to preserve the outward face at allcosts, however personal.

As Stevens himself notes, though, professionalism is not simplydirected outward. The gentleman’s gentleman, in fact, restricts hisprofessional field to a very particular national restriction:

It is sometimes said that butlers only truly exist in England. Othercountries, whatever title is actually used, have only manservants. I

tend to believe this is true. Continentals are unable to be butlers

because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint that

only the English race is capable of. Continentals—and by and large

the Celts, as you will no doubt agree—are as a rule unable to control

themselves in moments of strong emotion, and are thus unable to

maintain a professional demeanour other than in the least challenging

of situations. If I may return to my earlier metaphor . . . they are like aman who will, at the slightest provocation, tear off his suit and his

shirt and run about screaming. In a word, ‘‘dignity’’ is beyond such

persons. We English have an important advantage over foreigners in

this respect and it is for this reason that when you think of a great but-

ler, he is bound, almost by definition, to be an Englishman. (43)

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Although professionalism might, as Robbins argues, suggest a com-munity beyond the domestic, the jingoism of Stevens’s distinctionbetween lowly manservants and great butlers indicates professional-ism itself is an arena in which a similar occupation might serveinstead to stress national performative and cultural differences ratherthan necessitating some sense of extra-territorial occupational unity.At the same time, this insular professionalism had depended on animperial mirror in establishing the uniquely English standard ofservice—it was only in light of colonial contrasts as the tiger andthe Raj butler that this national community of English servants couldbe ascertained.

It is Stevens’s repeated comparison of the professional dignity of abutler to a suit of clothes that offers the most significant of the but-ler’s unusual metaphors for service. A suit suggests there is a surfaceidentity that one assumes. However, by putting on this surfaceidentity, the suit creates a depth effect: other possible identities areconcealed underneath. A suit is also a uniform for a head ser-vant—and uniforms suggest a certain sense of interchangeability:others could inhabit the livery you are wearing; wearing a uniformin many ways suggests a similarity and exchangeability between allwho wear the same sort of suit. Uniforms indicate a homogenizingprofessional identity, but one that in fact masks other identities thatmight surface should the livery be stripped off. In refusing to allowany circumstances to strip them of this identity, English butlers main-tain an abiding allegiance to the surface identity of professionalism.This loyalty to professionalism then paradoxically indicates a certaindisavowal of other habitations of the self (national identity being ob-viously one among many), but the particular professional loyalty ofEnglish butlers itself manifests what Stevens identifies as a nationalcharacteristic. The arguments that Stevens makes about professional-ism conceal the oft-repeated assertion that English national identity,because of its supposed refusal to chauvinistically assert itself, is pre-cisely articulated by this reserved national silence. Professionalism atonce is an identity that obscures other more parochial senses of self,other more parochial communal affiliations, but this concealment isitself a uniquely parochial gesture. Furthermore, Stevens’s stress onmaintaining (a nationalized) professional poise in exceptional circum-stances cannot help but remind us that he himself has largely definedthis ability to permit no ‘‘discernible traces’’ of challenging ‘‘occur-rences’’ through resort to Empire. Such a colonial echo serves toremind that ‘‘[t]he empire . . . is less a place where England exertscontrol than the place where England loses command of its ownnarrative of identity’’ (Baucom 3).

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This spatial resonance of domestic professionalism continues toshift for Stevens: when fleeing the announcement of Miss Kenton’sengagement, he repeatedly pleads that his place is at his post attend-ing the ‘‘matters of global significance taking place upstairs’’ (219).Stevens, though literally misleading, again suggests a global dimen-sion to his service labors when he tells the residents of Moscombe(who have an inflated idea of his station due to his professional dressand manner) that his influence and duties were exercised in thedomain of ‘‘international affairs more than domestic ones. Foreignpolicy, that is to say’’ (187). The servant renders his greatest serviceto the house by looking beyond the bounds of self and national com-munity.21 Stevens’s sly self-aggrandizement is false at face value: hehas had no governmental influence, having in fact self-censored anypossible political stands or actions (as with the Jewish maids affair)to maintain the professional dignity of complete self-abnegation.Even his domestic responsibilities have been of the order of polishingsilver rather than strengthening pound sterling. This face-value read-ing depends on the irony that a domestic servant would trumpet hisown instrumental impact on foreign policy. As Stevens’s remarksabout his current employer suggest, his significance is not directbut representational, a signification oriented outward from nationalboundaries: ‘‘not only is Mr. Farraday a most excellent employer,he is an American gentleman to whom, surely, one has a special dutyto show all that is best about service in England’’ (139). Again, thereis an ironic deflation of Stevens’s global pretensions: his idea of influ-ence and national representation hinge on the deep importance andimpact that well-polished silver might have on distinguished visitorsand employers (135–36). Yet Stevens’s international ambitions ofprofessional responsibility devolve back onto a fealty particularlyEnglish. Professional service has an obligation to outwardly signifya cultural order that is itself singularly national and domestic. Pro-fessional community again slips between a foreign and domesticsphere of operations, an ambivalence indicative of a postimperialimbrication of these spaces.22

‘‘NOT TIME JUST NOW’’

Just as Stevens’s proper sphere of action is ambiguous, so, too, is histemporal positioning. Though Stevens’s outward and globalizingambitions might proleptically hint at a contemporary professionalcommunity, these aspirations all depend on his remaining in serviceto Darlington Hall, a site whose time of power has clearly passed.Stevens’s own dutiful code of professional responsibility uber alles

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is itself temporally problematic. Even in relation to a national frameof reference, Stevens’s professional standing is not entirely modern.Robbins’s own work on servants chronicles the way servants servedas a type of conspicuous consumption, employees whose emphasison cleaning house and attiring their masters stressed their own roleas glorified window dressing. This advertised affluence was increasedby the strange, almost familial position servants occupied in wealthyhouseholds. As such, servants signified an older world of economicrelations, for their personal relations with employers stood in con-trast to the stark alienation of the proletarian caught in the cashnexus. As Stevens’s career runs from attendance to a titled lord toserving a retired American, his code of responsibility remains poisedbetween fealty and the contractual. Indeed, it is as a hired hand thatStevens enters Moscombe, one who moreover stands as a representa-tive of the ‘‘new world order’’ that Susan O’Brien locates in the figureof Farraday. Stevens then serves as a tendril of the multinationalforces of capital. The butler at once indexes a pre-capitalist relationand a late capitalist one. Moscombe’s uncanny guest is uneasilypoised between past and present, between home and abroad.23

Just as professionalism is defined through disturbances associatedwith imperial spaces, Stevens’s service likewise is delineated by a his-toricity that circumscribes personal crisis. Here another echo of earlymodernism comes into play. Just as John Dowling’s, the unreliablenarrator of The Good Soldier, private and privileged world comescrashing down the very day of the outbreak of World War I, sotoo is Stevens’s rigorously insulated life a constant parallel to histori-cal events. These events signal the decline of the British Empire in avery personalized fashion, running from the death of his brother inthe Boer War to the final decay of his relationship with Miss Kentonduring the time of the Suez fiasco.24 Just as Stevens’s attempts tomaintain an exclusively professional life are constantly disrupted bylosses betraying connections both longed for and half realized, sotoo is his ‘‘splendid isolation’’ broken by the intrusions of the outsideworld. Furthermore, these intrusions—in the form of imperial saberrattling and wars, and the international diplomacy that precedesand concludes these catastrophes—continually point outward to thecolonial contingencies that supported Stevens’s country house hub.The history that had happened elsewhere returns to redirect and tem-porally fracture the English inward gaze. The fall of Darlington, bothin the form of the now disgraced aristocrat and the now desertedhouse possessed by an American (‘‘the only ones who can afford itnow’’ [242]), reflects the disintegration of the imperial network thathad supported these treasure houses and their servants.

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It is this loss that gives Ishiguro’s text its mournful tone and greatsense of belatedness. The present of the novel is Stevens’s living afterthe loss of all that had given his world meaning: Miss Kenton, LordDarlington, and the importance (and Englishness) of DarlingtonHall. Moreover, it is only now through the narration of these eventsthat they take on full import for Stevens. As such, Stevens’s accountof his failed attempt at consoling Miss Kenton for the loss of her auntbecomes paradigmatic for the whole of his reminiscences:

Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may in-deed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one’s

life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had.

Rather, it was . . . an infinite number of further opportunities in which

to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was

surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small inci-

dents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable. (179)

A sense of loss is dependent on the retrospective glance: it is only inthe present that one can adequately appreciate what has been lost—infact, it is only in the present that the losses of the past can be felt. Thispresent is only a narrative one, though; the historical framing of thenovel serves to push these lost opportunities into a receding horizonof the past, definitively closing the era they once represented. Thisprivation functions just as the country house did, a national iconwhose ‘‘object is lost. . . .This act of translation requires an erasureof the present from the processes of reading, an insistence that refer-ence is only to the past, not to the contemporary’’ (Baucom 180).

However, this sense of irreparable loss, one that ties community,professional, and national to a pedagogic temporality, is not the con-cluding note of the novel. Instead the final stress is not on a loss withpersonal and national dimensions, but rather on the residual, on ‘‘theremains of my day’’ (244), a remainder dependent on a professionaltone, one that seems to return Stevens to his service. These remainsbecome forward-looking around Stevens’s final musings on theproper place of banter. This matter of banter is a crucial one: evenif Stevens is merely an unreliable narrator who cannot or will not seethe emotional truth of his tale, then his final pledge to find in bantering‘‘the key to human warmth’’ and community seems at least a guardedlyoptimistic move (245). This is supported by the observation thatprompts his pledge, an observation of ‘‘people of all ages . . . strangerswho had just happened upon one another here. . . . It is curious howpeople can build such warmth among themselves so swiftly’’ (244–45).

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These strangers, who so rapidly construct a community of laughter,seem to be quite foreign to Stevens, for he finds himself conductingan ethnography of their behavior. This sense of foreignness in one’sown country underscores the fact that Stevens’s environment has hith-erto been that of the antebellum country house, not the urban life ofthe postwar settlement with its attempt to at least ameliorate class dis-tinctions. In fact, Stevens focuses on banter not so much as a key togreater connection but rather because ‘‘bantering is hardly an un-reasonable duty for an employer to expect a professional to perform’’(245). By practicing this insincere teasing with a fresh ‘‘commitment,’’Stevens hopes to ‘‘pleasantly surprise’’ Farraday with a service newlyseasoned by jocularity (245). Even this seeming turn toward ‘‘humanwarmth’’ is conducted only with an eye to professionalism. This con-textualization certainly encourages a reading of bantering as a sort oflow-grade emotive expressiveness, one making scant emotionalgrowth in Stevens over the course of the novel.

Bantering had in fact been previously marked by Stevens as analien behavior, one distinctively American. Not only does this jocu-larity, according to the butler, mark the relations of Americanemployer and employee, it also is the mark of ‘‘good professional ser-vice’’ there (15). These jibes, structurally stressed as a mode of relat-ing in both opening and closing notes of the novel, thus become aninternalized otherness over the course of Stevens’s travels. The initialintrusion, though, of bantering into the English confines of Darling-ton Hall occurs not with Farraday but with his compatriot and pre-cursor, the American Senator Lewis.25 The honorable gentlemanfrom Pennsylvania is continually described as ‘‘genial’’ and ‘‘jovial.’’These qualities are not innocent ones, for this jocularity is part ofthe Machiavellian maneuvers Lewis practices to disseminate dissentamong the conferees, using his jibes as a method of isolatingM. Dupont, the fussy French delegate, from Darlington’s gentle-manly back-room diplomacy. Such cynical stratagems are conductedin the name of ‘‘professionalism’’ (102). Though bantering as pro-fessional ploy is certainly a surface theme even in Stevens’s mutedresolve at the end of the novel, the link through Lewis expands thepurview of this professionalism. Bantering, though it might containresonances of emotional warmth, is certainly not a singular key toforming a community of affective relations. However, through theconnection to Lewis, it cannot simply be thought an occupationalstratagem, a means of striking some low-key sense of professionalfellowship. Instead, it is a type of performance one takes on, a rolethat for Stevens has a particular national valence. Further, in takingon this part, Stevens risks losing the dignity that had been such an

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essential part of his maintaining his role as professional servant of thehighest order. This English suit then might slip for the assumption ofanother inhabited guise as Stevens adapts himself, as an English ser-vant representing England to his employer, to a new professionalorder, one whose very performance depends on the staging of trans-atlantic modes of interrelation. Stevens then finds himself best able tosignify English service to his employer by assuming a more Americanbrand of relationship: he is best able to be a better professional bybeing less professional in his bearing. Stevens thus resolves the ten-sion between Victorian and new world values, between professional-ism and national community, through a paradox, through a solutionthat maintains the antinomy. The result is a muted sense of openness,one much like that Homi Bhabha charts in his account of the ambiva-lent historicity in which the postcolonial migrant finds him- orherself:

The present of the world, that appears through the breakdown of tem-

porality, signifies a historical intermediacy . . . : ‘‘a transferential func-tion, whereby the past dissolves in the present, so that the future

becomes (once again) an open question, instead of being specified by

the fixity of the past.’’ The iterative ‘‘time’’ of the future as a becoming

‘‘once again open’’, makes available . . . a mode of performative agency.

(Location 219)

Stevens himself suspends resolution until the return of the AmericanFarraday. He is not yet in the remains of his day but merely waiting forthem. The chronological congruence of these moments thus leads notto direct resolution but to a suspension of the tale, to an interruption,a pause that paradoxically creates an opening out. As a result, Stevensis in a position of penultimacy, for he is not at the end but merely wait-ing on it. It is for this reason that this temporal gulf—between therecounted past and the diminished narrative present—is given suchemphasis in Stevens’s journal. Because of this chronological and spatialinstability, a slide between anachronistic service and contemporary pro-fessionalism, between residual loyalty to hierarchical hubs and serviceto a new economic order, between a little Englander notion of dignityand the assumption of American banter, between an English professionand its colonial mirror, Stevens cannot be definitively situated. Theworld he inhabits has neither a singular temporality nor spatiality,but instead an ambivalence that leaves him suspended between pastand present, between the domestic and the global. This sense of anawaited end, a social and imperial end narratively assumed to have

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already happened, is not simple postimperial and postsocietal nostal-gia. The retrospective positioning of this gaze into personal, national,and imperial futures already lost functions as a type of historical inver-sion, one that locates a present sense of ambivalence about a now lostsense of imagined community and a still emergent global one, about thebonds of known loyalties and the uncertain openness of professionalones, in a layered past, a vision of the past whose complex temporaland spatial resonances open a cautiously circumscribed narrativeoutward. It is in this fractured and unstable past that one is able togo back to both future and present, and to radiate outward from avoyage back in.

NOTES

1. As many have commented, these hubs themselves depended on anetwork of labor and capital—both at home and in the colon-ies—that was relentlessly concealed. The classic points of refer-ences here are Raymond Williams’s The Country and the Cityand Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. John Su has recentlyexplored Remains as the culmination of the country house novel.

2. This failure to return is made an issue by the skip of more than aday (from Day Four, Afternoon, to Day Six, Evening) inStevens’s final two journal entries. Likewise, Stevens does notexplain his ultimate presence in Weymouth, far off the returntrack from the purported location of Darlington Hall ‘‘nearOxford’’ (207). These two divergences from his heretofore fairlyregular course and journal obviously suggest a losing of theway still not corrected by novel’s end.

3. As, for example, in his Lordship’s musings on the 1923 Confer-ence and the French (‘‘Frenchmen. Really, I mean to say, Ste-vens. Frenchman. . . . It’s not the English way of carrying on.’’)and his comic re-assignment of young Cardinal’s sex educationto Stevens (71–76; 81–83).

4. An inside joke: ‘‘Stevens’’ is in fact another male domesticencountered by Jeeves as he pries young master Wooster fromanother scrape in The Inimitable Jeeves.

5. For Stevens, butlers—and the great service they provide—arequintessentially English (43).

6. Inasmuch as Stevens views the professionalism of butlers ascharacteristically English, this incident renders his father’s col-onial discovery of proper service in the same terms as HomiBhabha’s account of the disclosure of the English Book. See‘‘Sign Taken for Wonders’’ in The Location of Culture.

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7. Britain and France conducted a poorly planned and executedjoint operation to seize control of the Suez Canal in 1956 afterit had been nationalized by Egypt. Supply problems and inter-national disapproval forced a humiliating retreat oft seen as thedeath knell of British imperial ambitions. Of course, MargaretThatcher’s 1982 Falklands War was proclaimed as the event thatfinally exorcised the ghosts of Suez. Because of the 1956 setting ofthe novel and its late eighties publication, both events inform thenovel’s exploration of a postimperial world. With regards to thewar in the Falklands, Stevens’s bad joke about the greatness ofthe landscape being the reason why the nation is named ‘‘GreatBritain’’ echoes Margaret Thatcher’s post-Falkland’s crow aboutreturning the ‘‘‘Great’ to Great Britain.’’ John McCombe dis-cusses the Suez angle extensively; James Lang and RebeccaWalkowitz also comment on this theme of imperial hangoverin the novel.

8. James Lang has noted that in the behind-the-scenes supportStevens provides Lord Darlington, the butler performs thetraditional role of a diplomat’s wife (151).

9. Englishness in Remains owes much to the contrasting focus givento it by the American garrulousness and emotional brashness ofFarraday and his visitors, the Wakefields. Indeed, Stevens’s no-tion of English professional service is clarified by the negativeexample of too familiar American help (15–16). In this contrast,Remains strongly echoes Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, alink that will be elaborated later in this essay. See also AdamZachary Newton’s Narrative Ethics (n. 50, 329). Furthermore,Mr. Lewis, the Senator from the United States, mimics AnthonyTrollope’s The American Senator, Elias Gotobed, in his opencriticism of his host, a scene that plays conniving Americanprofessionalism off good-intentioned English amateurism. SeeM. Spiering’s Englishness for further discussion of this theme inBritish postwar fiction.

10. Cf. Farraday’s need to ensure his English purchases—the houseand Stevens himself—are the genuine articles (124).

11. This resonance itself is framed by a great deal of critical baggage,for Moscombe is reminiscent not only of Williams’s ‘‘knowablecommunity’’ but also of F. R. Leavis’s ‘‘organic community.’’Perry Anderson summarizes the latter as a ‘‘shared, stable systemof beliefs and values’’ (98), one we can see embodied in the con-sensus of opinion of the good folk of Moscombe. Like the wayMoscombers attempt to connect with Stevens through interrog-ation, the Leavisite method itself worked to rhetorically construct

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an imagined community of readers by question (‘‘This is so, is itnot?’’) and a taken-for-granted assent. For more on Leavis’s at-tempt to construct a national community of readers, see PerryAnderson’s ‘‘Components of the National Culture’’ (in his Eng-lish Questions) and Francis Mulhern’s ‘‘English Reading’’ (inNation and Narration, ed. by Homi Bhabha). Bhabha himselfoffers a postcolonial version of the disruptive potential of com-munity in ‘‘How Newness Enters the World’’ from The Locationof Culture.

12. Stevens dates his fictional travel guide, Mrs. Jane Symons’s TheWonder of England, as having been written in the thirties, thussuggesting these imaginary volumes are part of this nostalgicwave. These guides stressed the virtues and wonders of both land-scape and country villages. However, this apparent nostalgicinsularity in fact depends on contrast with Empire: Stevens isonly able to articulate the glories of the English countryside bycontrasting it with former imperial topographies (29).

13. Chase also charts the extension of this nostalgic logic into an ad-vocacy by many of these writers for increased power for land-lords, thus giving them an almost feudal strength in an attemptto check the decay of countryside and village. Not surprisingly,many of these writers were also thirties supporters of fascismas the best means to save the national Gemeinschaft, a detailpicked up in Remains through Darlington’s (the lord of themanor) fascist fellow-traveling.

14. I borrow the terms pedagogic and performative from HomiBhabha’s ‘‘DissemiNation’’ (in The Location of Culture). Bhabhaargues that national temporality must be thought of as divided,double:

The nation’s people must be thought in double-time; the people arethe historical ‘‘objects’’ of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the dis-course an authority that is based on the pre-given or constitutedhistorical origin in the past; the people are also the ‘‘subjects’’ ofa process of signification that must erase any prior or originarypresence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, livingprinciples of the people as contemporaneity. . . . The scraps, patchesand rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs of acoherent national culture, while the very act of the narrative per-formance interpellates a growing circle of national subjects. In theproduction of the nation as narration there is a split betweenthe continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical,and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. (145)

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My argument about the iconicity of Moscombe hinges on thisdivision and on how space intersects with this double time. Thevillage signals an idealized national identity, nostalgicallylocated in a rapidly disappearing past. Moscombe’s isolated pos-ition thus speaks to a residual identity at odds with the globalcapital that has reterritorialized Stevens and Darlington Hall.Simultaneously, as suggested below, Moscombe also signifieshow the postwar social contract restages national identity, a per-formance that makes even out-of-the-way communities part ofthe contemporary national scene.

15. This is of course how Benedict Anderson suggests that societiesappropriate the language of community. Cf. his ImaginedCommunities.

16. This sense of complacency and shared pride in the provisions ofthe welfare state is perhaps best summed-up in Conservativeprime minster Harold Macmillan’s 1958 campaign slogan‘‘you’ve never had it so good.’’ Similarly, The Economist noticedsuch a continuity in economic and social policies between thechancellorship reigns of Hugh Gaitskell (Labour) and R. A.Butler (Conservative) that it coined the term ‘‘Butskellism’’ tocapture this consensus.

17. Cf. also Bruce Robbins’s suggestion that in general servants, asrepresentatives of pre-industrial economic relations, give off anaura of the ancien regime (SH 42). This sense of having outlivedhis era gives Stevens a great deal of his melancholic poignancy.Indeed, this sense of mortality and belatedness is an importantaspect of Stevens’s reflections on ‘‘the remains of the day’’ atthe end of the novel. In a later discussion of Elizabeth Gaskell,Robbins suggests that death, in its relation to work, is not ran-dom: ‘‘In its modern, industrial context, it befalls those whoseefforts are insufficient, whether because history has overwhelmedthem or because they have surrendered to it. Work does not con-sume life, but produces life and preserves from death’’ (SH 121).Because Stevens has outlived his era, he now finds himself over-whelmed by history and his changed relation to his work (as seenin the increasing errors and fatigue that he himself chroniclesthroughout the novel). The older, aristocratic order that Stevensserved and now serves as representative meshes well with theNairn-Anderson thesis that, because it never fully completed itsmiddle class revolution, Britain still remains partially controlledby an ancien regime. See Perry Anderson’s English Questions.

18. Stevens notes that the Hayes Society insisted on its membersallowing themselves to be guided by the distinguished households

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of ‘‘true ladies and gentleman’’; otherwise, the Society warned,‘‘‘we may as well adopt the proprieties of Bolshevik Russia’’’(32). He tacitly implies this rigidity kept the membership atunsustainably low numbers and forced it to dissolve ‘‘in 1932or 1933’’ (31). It is perhaps for this reason that Robbins doesnot mention the Society, at first blush an oversight for an argu-ment stressing Stevens’s absolute devotion to professionalism asa sign of the possibility of a globalized, modernizing, and inter-national community of professionals that might transcend moreparochial gatherings. The regressive notions of this defunct pro-fessional community do, however, bring into relief the contrastwith professionalism in its Moscombe guise, where it is in factpart of the figuration for the village as a sign of a national ima-gined community based around social welfare.

19. Young Mr. Cardinal also endorses this view of professionalismlater in the novel (223–24).

20. This abjuration of responsibility certainly undermines a readingof professionalism as unalloyed good in the novel.

21. In this elision of domestic (servant) and global significance,Stevens then repeats the same sort of instability embodied inDarlington Hall itself, the country house that is not a homebut a stately signifier.

22. Stevens’s repeated insistence on this larger ramification of hislabors, one that extends not only beyond the stately house butbeyond the nation itself, does demand a reading that takes it ser-iously. Robbins usefully suggests that one way of doing so mightbe by taking the butler’s insistence on ‘‘carrying on’’ to have beena correct choice, one that is dependent on a decision to stress aglobalized public sphere over a personal or even a nationalone. The key to this reading is a positive evaluation of Darling-ton’s attempt (with Stevens’s domestic assistance) to broker akinder postwar settlement than the retributive one dictated bythe Versailles Treaty:

The butler’s professionalism turns out to have been correct. Hisdetached professional affectivity removes him sufficiently fromthe national passions raging around him that he can play hissmall part in what turns out to have been a plausible, even vision-ary project, a project to avoid Hitler’s rise to power and thecatastrophe of World War II. . . . The butler’s moral obtusenesstoward those closest to him has to be radically revalued at theworld scale, for it helps nurture the larger, more distant solidari-ties that will come back to determine whether those closest to

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him, like Mr. Cardinal, end up dead on the battlefield. That is thesense in which Mr. Cardinal is right about professionalism.(‘‘Village’’ 30)

However, Stevens maintains this same professionalism at diplo-matic gatherings that are certainly bad ideas—the 1935 confer-ence with Ribbentrop being the prime example. Stevens’s ownsense of self-satisfaction also betrays the hierarchical class struc-ture that this version of globalization depends on: ‘‘Who woulddoubt at that moment that I had indeed come as close to the greathub of things as any butler could wish?’’ (227). Physical proxim-ity here serves only to emphasize the great gulf in a class-basedpower structure. The contrasting political vision offered by Mos-combe ironizes this sense of ‘‘triumph’’ as anachronistic.

23. See Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the paradoxical spatial andtemporal resonances of specters and guests in Specters of Marxand Of Hospitality.

24. Again, the novel achieves its impact in the implicit tension be-tween the present of the reader and that of the narrative action.Just as the Moscombe scenes resonate with the Thatcherite unra-veling of the social safety net, so too does the Suez atmosphere ofthe novel invoke the 1982 Falklands campaign to undo this lossof prestige and ‘‘return the ‘Great’ to Great Britain.’’

25. These two characters are fused in the Merchant-Ivory cinematicadaptation into a single role (played by Christopher Reeve). Thisnarrative economizing, while certainly expunging the nuance ofdifferences between these two Americans (and more importantlywhat they mean for Stevens), does have the useful effect ofprovoking us to look for functional similarities in Ishiguro’snovel.

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