Bo G. Ekelund, Stockholm University
The theme of guilt looms large in Kazuo Ishiguro's fiction. A locus classicus for Ishiguro criticism is an explicit observation concerning the dramatization of regret: "What I'm interested in is not the actual fact that my characters have done things they later regret.� I'm interested in how they come to terms with it."1 In this essay I will pursue the issues of guilt and regret in The Remains of the Day2 beyond the narrator's record and investigate how the novel deals with a complicity that is inherent in the very forms it relies upon for its disclosure of the theme. In Remains, guilt as complicity is a principle at work on the level of genre as well as in the imagined lives of the characters. Furthermore, at the level of genre it is involved in the real historical processes that are partially evoked in the fictionalized characters. That is, while the fictional and fictionalized characters, who move about in a history evoked and analyzed by the fiction, may appear complicitous with certain historical forces, the genres that constitute their ground are more directly the accomplices of a less visible history. It is the effect of this narrative to expose the characters more than the cultured forms in which they are given to us. The guilt obsessively repressed by the butler, Mr. Stevens, is exposed by the story as a sedimentation of emotions attaching to the romantic failure vis-à-vis the one-time housekeeper, Miss Kenton, and to the historical-political failure to evade complicity in the appeasement policies of Lord Darlington. The "unreliability" of the narration introduces few doubts as to Stevens's final guilt or his recognition of it. Mike Petry puts it well, when he says that "[i]ndeed, unreliability is so matter-of-fact in Remains that the reader quickly adapts to it."3 What remains unexposed by the irony of the narration, however, is the structural complicity of cultured forms that narrativize and defuse guilt even as they perform the service of exposing it.
To call these genres "complicitous" marks a particular suspicion on my part. The postmodern novel, it has been argued, is almost by definition "subversive" of the literary tradition to which it self-consciously belongs. The relationship between the two, we have heard on many occasions, is insistently ironic. It is indeed a postmodern commonplace that the undermining of genre is a structural function of any incorporation of other genres into the novel. Certainly, it is an effect of the code by which novels are read (and written) at this juncture. Linda Hutcheon's label of historiographic metafiction has been crucial in this regard, and it may well be appended to Ishiguro's novel, along with the labels of postcolonial and postimperialist.4 One purpose of my investigation here is to introduce some doubts regarding this blanket assignation of subversiveness, and suggest that the postmodern irony may even tend to conceal cultural patterns that may legitimately be held to account by a less postmodern sort of critique. The ironic, postmodern staging of history in my view amounts to a misrecognition of history.
Briefly, the story told in Remains is about the narrator Mr. Stevens's lifetime of professional service as a butler, told in the form of a journal he keeps during a few days of traveling through the southwest of England in July 1956. In reminiscences from the 1920s and 1930s Stevens recounts telling episodes charting his relations with his employer Lord Darlington, to the housekeeper Miss Kenton, and to his father, at the time serving as an under-butler at Darlington Hall. The reader is soon given to understand that Stevens is withholding as much as he is expressing. The disastrous effects on Lord Darlington's reputation as he works diplomatically in favor of the German cause before and after 1933, the failure of Stevens to display any feelings other than professional concern for Miss Kenton, his inability to communicate with his father-these are all on display to the reader even as Stevens tries to fit them into his narrative without acknowledging their full import.
In a novel without much of a plot, what goes on in the telling of the story takes on the greater measure of the reader's interest. Critical commentary from the early reviews onwards has accordingly focused on the unreliability of the narrator and on the use of a literary background, knowingly manipulated by Ishiguro.
The expert manipulation of genres in Remains can perhaps best be seen in the chapter titled "Day Two-Morning, Salisbury" (R 42). The chapter title and the first passage about Stevens's lodging clearly belong to the travelogue, which is the ostensible motivation for the entire journal comprising Remains. However, as is the case throughout, the record of Stevens's motoring trip leads time and again to digressions. These digressions are sufficiently coherent to be analyzed as a number of separate generic components. That is, Stevens's journal incorporates distinguishable elements that can be analyzed as the carriers of different genre conventions.
Thus, the travel record is abandoned in favor of a reflection on a letter from Miss Kenton. The letter functions in this instance as a textual gateway to a subplot with entirely different genre conventions than the travel narrative, namely, a sentimental story about private (but never quite intimate) relations, which parallels the professional relations in which the butler stands. The story of a romance that never took off, this sentimental narrative is typically told around key moments that Stevens recalls. This is true also of the plot concerning Lord Darlington's disastrous entanglements in foreign policy between the wars, which is here introduced by Stevens as an alternative story line to which he might attribute a comment about "errors trivial in themselves," which he had inaccurately (he surmises) attributed to Miss Kenton (R 59-60). When attached to Lord Darlington, the phrase takes its place in a story of political intrigue and vast implications, anchored here in the story of the first international conference hosted by Stevens's employer.
The rest of the chapter then weaves the strands of the sentimental story, with emphasis on Stevens's relationship with his father, and the plot of political intrigue with the additional and unexpected element of pure farce, introduced by Lord Darlington's request for Stevens to convey the facts of life to his godson Reginald. Ishiguro's handling of the ensuing complications and the adroit juggling of these disparate components reach a triumphant climax with the final dinner of the conference, when surprising and yet plausible plot reversals are accompanied by a kind of relay race between the different genres: the thickening and unraveling of political intrigue is matched by the heightening of melodrama as Stevens's father on his deathbed tries to establish contact with his son. These charged moments, true to their respective genre conventions, are relieved by the counterpoint of the farce, sustained by snatches of whimsical conversation between Stevens and Reginald, and reinforced by the sorry state of the French representative M. Dupont's feet, to which Stevens must give greater attention than he can command for his dying father.
When Stevens concludes the chapter with a comment on his sense of triumph at the end of that evening, this assessment can be added as a fourth distinct generic element, a reflection on professionalism that is introduced at an early point and sustained throughout the narrative. The critical analysis of greatness among butlers, in contrast with the other major genres employed, is not a narrative form, but a discursive, philosophical one.
It is in the nature of Remains that the analysis is never given a comprehensive treatment at any one point. Rather, all issues are subject to the "drift" that takes us from one strand to another. We might say that Stevens's journal abides by the vagaries of memory. Seen as a literary construct rather than a psychological representation, however, the novel relies on the device I will term complicity of genres. The original sense of a "complice" was "one associated in any affair with another, the latter being regarded as the principal" and it derives from the opposite of simple (OED). The many genre-specific elements in Remains are all associated with one another, with the original impulse to record a journal of Stevens's unprecedented car trip posing as the principal. More than a complex plot, the novel presents a complex of genres, each carrying particular burdens of meaning and subversion, each of them aiding and abetting the others in various ways. What is more, the intratextual complicity of the generic elements also connects to a guilt by intertextual association, which in turn is linked to historical complicity. In the following I will follow the links of complicity by looking more closely at the genres involved. What must be remembered is the openness of the notion of complicity: as in the original sense, the "complices" will enter into an association with others that is in itself quite neutral and, in fact, inevitable. It is the particular effects of given genre conventions, and the particular historical contents such conventions are related to, that may be complicitous in the sense of illicit. The political memoir has not always and in every case sought to cover up crimes of omission or commission (or, at least, one must give the benefit of a doubt in that case), but the particular political memoirs that belong to the range of historical references established in Remains did use the conventions to gloss over such misdeeds. Furthermore, it may be objected that an author cannot be made responsible for all the associations carried by a genre imported into the narrative. Taken in general, I will leave the objection as it stands, but we should note that Ishiguro has claimed that he is seeking to undermine a particular myth precisely by using it "in a slightly twisted and different way," and we are entitled to see just what elements are being twisted and what is then achieved.5
Five complicitous genres were identified above. They can be labeled travelogue, political memoirs, country house romance (which, as we will see, is related to the detective genre), farce, and an essay on values. The many themes and privileged clusters of meanings that can be elicited by the work of interpretation are disseminated across these genre elements, so that imperialist ideology, for example, is present in the meditations on the English landscape as well as in the memoirs of political service and the essay on greatness in butlering. The point I am making here is that the themes introduced explicitly in Stevens's narration are reinforced by the genres manipulated by Ishiguro, which carry sets of meanings in themselves. The further point is that these meanings are not easily controlled or automatically subverted by a strategy of generalized irony.
To take the kind of modest travel writing that Stevens ostensibly engages in as he pens his journal, Stevens's ruminations closely mimic a genre based on the assumption that landscape is a key to national or regional values of a less concrete nature. The title of the work Stevens consults, Mrs. Jane Symons's The Wonder of England, echoes other titles that hold out to tourists the promise of having a share in the extraordinary properties of a nation or region.6 The English landscape comes to stand for Englishness, the "sign of itself" that tourists search for, according to Jonathan Culler.7 The view described by Stevens is similar to the pastoral landscape evoked by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, an image of England, as Ian Ousby explains, that "we have constructed from the complex realities around us, ignoring the tensions of world politics, editing out the industrial cities of the north and sentimentalizing the landscape of the south into a profoundly attractive, dangerously complacent picture."8
This kind of editing of landscape perception took a particularly intensive turn in the interwar period, with the wave of countryside books that followed H. V. Morton's In Search of England and the production of a great range of guidebooks for the middle-class consumption of the English countryside.9 As Alex Potts has argued, "it was only in the interwar period that a nationalist ideology of pure landscape came into its own."10 Typical of their time were the many publications of the Homeland Association. One of them proclaimed as the ambition of the guidebooks a "desire � to help our fellow countrymen to travel in, to appreciate intelligently, and to study their own country and its story, in other words to encourage knowledge of, and love for, our native Britain."11 It is no surprise, then, that Stevens finds his own preoccupations with greatness confirmed by the landscape. After all, he has studied the relevant volume of Mrs. Symons's book and has gained from it "some sense of the sort of place" in question (R 11). As Taylor put it, the many guidebooks made the countryside "available in pictures, so that when tourists went in search of what they had already seen, they found exactly what they were looking for."12 It is "little England" that is evoked by the ordered landscape Stevens surveys. What he finds to his liking is the image of a greatness that is generated in a circumscribed, rather than an expansive, setting. In an oft-quoted line of praise for the greatness of England, Stevens explains that "it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint." The terms of his appraisal echo the rhetoric of J. B. Priestley's description of true Englishness as found in the English countryside with its air of "happy compromises," and it repeats a prevalent topos of interwar country writing that is described by Potts in words that almost exactly mirror those used by Stevens: the "pervasive image � of the English landscape as one of restraint, without the blatant self-advertisement of more striking foreign scenery."13 Stevens points out that the sights of Africa and America would surely "strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness" (R 29).
There is no doubt that Ishiguro exposes Stevens's nationalist reading of the landscape to an irony that operates through the crucial dating of the travelogue to the month of the Suez crisis, and through the general failure of Stevens to judge politics. From Berkshire to Weymouth Pier Stevens's journey may indeed afford him "surprising new perspectives," some of them even of an "unsettling" nature (R 117), but the gentle ironies generated by the mishaps he experiences as he tries to negotiate the terrain do not extend to the comforting itinerary itself. Even the "counter-instance" to Stevens's elitist "little-Englander" view accords with the genre conventions of interwar country writing, with its emphasis on the Englishness of the pastoral village. The village of Moscombe speaks the values of democracy through its spokesperson Mr. Harry Smith, but pays homage to the authenticity of a "real gentleman" unlike the new money kind exemplified by a local landlord. Dr. Carlisle's assessment at the end of the episode, that the people of Moscombe are happiest when left alone, stands unopposed (R 209), and the idyllic, English reticence of the village contributes to a general structure of feeling conveyed through the safe itinerary that organizes the narrative.
Weymouth pier, of course, is not Wigan pier. The very different irony of Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier (1937) had, for one thing, a concrete reference: the one thing that might have attracted any person, with a choice in the matter, to Wigan was the famous pier, but when Orwell went there it had been demolished. All that Orwell found was Depression unemployment unrelieved by the working-class amusements normally offered at a seaside pier. Stevens's road to the Weymouth pier is not one that depicts a larger sphere of collective experience. In Remains, the irony of Stevens's renewed dedication to bantering does not draw in the difference between the vox populi humor among the amusement seekers of the Weymouth pier and the hierarchically sanctioned wit of Stevens's employer. The postmodern ironies of Remains are based on the concentration on an individual epistemology that can upset "myth" only in the form of individual delusion and regret. The restricted range of this kind of irony becomes even clearer in the case of the complicity of political memoirs.
Stevens may participate in politics only in a vicarious manner, and his moments of triumph are derivative, entirely dependent on the actual achievements, or lack thereof, of Lord Darlington. Stevens's recognition that these achievements amounted to a historical failure is equally a recognition that his own triumphs were mock ones. But for all that it is experienced at one remove, political life has real substance in Stevens's narration. The manner in which his memories are organized around a sequence of political events-in which Lord Darlington's misdirected Germanophilia turns into support for the Nazi regime-is the conventional one of political memoirs. The genre evocation is certainly ironic insofar as the butler, the servant of the public servant, is shut off from the most important deliberations, not least by his own ignorance concerning the policies that are being deliberated. The irony, however, reinforces rather than detracts from the way reader expectations are guided by the conventions established by such memoirs: the focus on pivotal moments, the character sketches of famous statesmen, the anecdotes, the post hoc explanations for less successful initiatives.
Stevens's narration is enabled by the management of public memory in the autobiographical and biographical writing that came out after the war, in which the political fortunes of the interwar years were dealt with. The concrete relation between Remains and the period of postwar reckoning seems worth insisting on. A parallel between The Remains of the Day and The Fulness of Days,14 Lord Halifax's memoirs, can be drawn so as to reinforce the novel's critique of historical equivocation. Such a parallel will also, to my mind, question the scope of that critique.
The memoirs of the Earl of Halifax came out in 1957, so one might assume that he was busy writing them in that fateful Suez summer when Stevens sets out on his motoring trip. Like Stevens, he is reminiscing about events of the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the same names pop up in both accounts, Chamberlain, Hitler, von Ribbentrop, Oswald Mosley, Lady Astor, and John Maynard Keynes among them. Whether Ishiguro consciously drew on this autobiography and other memoirs of the time is immaterial. To the extent that Remains performs an act of historical recognition that the reader reenacts, the novel captures a familiarity with the memoir genre. In the particular case of Lord Halifax, this familiarity has an uncanny resonance, as I will show.
Lord Halifax himself has a role to play in Stevens's story. Stevens is reminded of Halifax by a signpost with the name Mursden on it, the place, we learn, where Giffen and Co. produced their candles of superior silver polish. This is one of many points where the discussion of professionalism and the political plot intersect. The quality of the silver at Darlington Hall, Stevens assures us, made a "small, but significant contribution" to political events by putting Lord Halifax in a better mood during his "off the record" visit to see Herr Ribbentrop at Darlington Hall (R 136). In Stevens's narrative, we meet Lord Halifax voicing his doubts about the upcoming meeting: "Really, Darlington, I don't know what you've put me up to here. I know I shall be sorry." At that point he sees the silver, declaring its luster a positive delight, and this, according to Lord Darlington, put him "into a quite different frame of mind altogether" (R 135). In the memoirs of Lord Halifax, such apparently peripheral concerns as silver, crockery, and plates also merit mention even in the circumstances of serious affairs of foreign policy. If we turn to the passages describing Halifax's meetings with prominent Nazi politicians, we get a profession of doubts similar to the one expressed in the novel, alleviated by a good-humored dismissal of the significance of Halifax's trip to see Göring and Hitler: "I cannot pretend that I was ever very sanguine of the result of this adventure. But looking back on it I do not think it did any harm, and I am certainly glad to have had occasion to meet such an undoubted phenomenon as was Hitler" (F 184). Göring, too, proves an entertaining spectacle. At luncheon with this "picturesque and arresting figure," Lord Halifax notes the exuberant pride of this "great schoolboy" who had been "concerned" with the "clean-up" in Berlin in 1934, and approvingly comments on the qualities of the table: "Lovely china and glass and all very well done" (F 190). The silver is not mentioned, but any spots would surely have earned a comment, perhaps more severe in tone than those concerning the dark patches in Göring's past.
This particular trip by Halifax is described by one historian of the policy of appeasement15 as "the inauguration of active appeasement," but in the memoirs Halifax contravenes the kind of legend spread by "whispering mischief makers" about the role of appeasement initiatives behind this innocent visit. In his account it is turned into a jaunty occasion for "shooting foxes in Saxony, as a change from hunting them in England" (F 184). Halifax concludes, in a tone of self-justification, that "[t]he facts thus differed from the story that tends to become established" (F 184). In Remains, the same type of vindication is performed by Stevens on behalf of Lord Darlington, who similarly is beset by "rumors" that are "utter nonsense, based on an almost complete ignorance of the facts" (R 125-26).
Lord Halifax's memoirs help us place Lord Darlington and Darlington Hall in a historical setting that demands retrospective equivocation from the narrator/memoirist. In the guest lists of various country houses Stevens finds a special testimony to the "true climate of those times" when Herr Ribbentrop was often a guest of honor "in the very best houses" (R 136). In passing, it is important to note that Stevens never refers, and perhaps simply cannot refer, to any opinion outside these very best houses. In Lord Halifax's case, much the same is true, and in a telling passage he gives us a particularly distorted account of his association with the most famous of those houses: "We used to be asked to join a party at Cliveden from time to time, though not perhaps regularly enough to qualify for inclusion in the so-called 'Cliveden set.' Who or what this legendary body was no one ever knew, and I believe that both it and its alleged corporate feeling of tenderness towards Nazi Germany were a pure invention of some journalistic brain. For, to judge only by those who were our fellow guests when we were there, the Cliveden visitors' book must have held a wonderful gallery of names. Of all political persuasions, of every profession and occupation, from Commonwealth countries, Colonies, and from most countries of the world: it is not easy to marshal so disconnected a collection into a 'set'" (F 156).
The thesis of a "Cliveden set" operating behind the elected representatives in the matter of appeasement was launched by Claude Cockburn, who exposed these conservative statesmen and their aristocratic friends in an article-which immediately gained international notoriety-in his small newspaper This Week in 1937. The thesis is still controversial. One historian recently claimed it has been discredited, since, although the circle around the Astors certainly supported appeasement and had considerable influence, there was "clearly no cell, no conspiracy, no regular meetings, and no definite membership."16 To my mind, this refutation appears on the contrary to support the more penetrating conclusion drawn by other historians and by the Astors' biographer Lucy Kavaler: "They did not plot; they did not need to plot.� They were the Establishment."17 The guest list at Cliveden included not only Halifax and his colleagues Sir Samuel Hoare and Sir John Simon-both authors of similarly sanitized memoirs-and his superior, Neville Chamberlain, but also Sir Oswald Mosley and von Ribbentrop.18 Clearly, Cliveden is a good example of the kind of great house Stevens describes when he offers us the insight that "the great decisions of the world are not, in fact, arrived at simply in the public chambers" or in official conferences, but in the privacy of "great houses" (R 115).
While it is not my main preoccupation here to establish some real-world model for Darlington Hall, it belongs to the novel's production of a recognizable political world that it condenses traits that characterize the historical British appeasers in the figures of Lord Darlington and his country house. Indeed, descriptions of Lady Astor and her husband Waldorf, of Lord Halifax and Lord Lothian can be used to give an apt summary of the character Ishiguro assembles in Remains, and Lothian's Blickling is as good a model for Darlington Hall as Cliveden.19 We may note that Lord Lothian's biography was written by a Butler, Lord J. R. M. Butler, whose equivocations in the chapter "The Problem of Germany" are not far from Stevens's: "As the result of this ignorance [of the Germans and of Hitler] [Lord Lothian] fatally misjudged the situation and applied maxims which in the present instance were irrelevant."20
Given the close parallel between the title of Ishiguro's novel and Lord Halifax's memoirs, I think it is justified to see Lord Darlington's and Stevens's roles in the novel, yoked by the ideology of loyal service, in light of Lord Halifax's service under Neville Chamberlain. It then becomes difficult to see in Lord Darlington the "bungling amateur diplomat" that David Lodge claims can be inferred from the text.21 While, as Rock notes in a delicious phrase, Simon and Hoare "tended toward sycophancy," Lord Halifax has always been seen in a more forgiving light than the other appeasers, "saintly" in character.22 Lord Halifax is said to have served Chamberlain "faithfully and well, obediently executing the policy set forth from above, deferring to his leader's initiatives, and providing, according to Chamberlain's own testimony, great comfort to his chief."23 The image of a wrongdoer despite himself, one caught up in a web of deceit of someone else's doing, good intentions paving roads to hell, are certainly part of Ishiguro's picture, and Remains actually reproduces this aspect of the political memoir genre.
My point in the preceding section has been that the genre of political memoir is a structural component of Remains, and that as such it contributes in various ways to the principle of genre complicity in the novel. That is, Stevens's account is not merely enabled by the conventions of the genre, nor is it just the case that symbolic depth is added to the story by the allusion to these works with their formalized manipulation of memory in the service of an act of historical self-justification. Rather, the genre exists as a cultured form that, on entering the novel, brings a complicitous history in its baggage. This complicity relates to the historical theme of the novel in a general way, but in the genre predecessors that pertain to that epoch we can see a deeper involvement in the complicity of appeasement and, more importantly, a more profound investment in the formal maneuvers of evasion, distortion, and self-justification that characterize the genre.
Just as the political memoir had a complicitous historical model in the self-serving postwar memoirs of appeasement politicians, the comic conventions involving a butler and his master connect with the work of a quintessentially "English" author who let his professional instincts triumph over political curiosity. The genre elements of farce, exemplified above in the plot surrounding Stevens's mission to explain the facts of life to young Reginald, did not fail to be recognized by reviewers as a debt Ishiguro clearly owed to P. G. Wodehouse,24 and Ishiguro himself has pointed out that he "deliberately created a world which at first resembles that of those writers such as P. G. Wodehouse."25
In Wodehouse's case, comedy and complicity are directly intertwined.26 As is well known, Wodehouse was captured by the Germans in 1940, in France. He was released but forced to stay in Germany, and unwisely accepted an invitation to make a broadcast to America about his experiences as an internee. The broadcasts were void of political messages but caused a scandal in England. Accused of treachery by the British public, Wodehouse found it advisable to move to the U.S. after the war, becoming an American citizen in 1955. As Alexander Cockburn argues in a review of Frances Donaldson's biography,27 the thing to keep in mind was Wodehouse's absolute devotion to his career, to a literary professionalism out of which grew the oeuvre of some ninety books and many film scripts and plays in addition.
It seems clear from all accounts that Wodehouse lived in the profoundest ignorance of what the war was about, and consequently, as Cockburn notes, he was unable to see, until the fifties, that he had really made a disastrous mistake when he agreed to broadcast, and, worse, received payment for it. At least, it was only in the fifties that he expressed his regrets in such terms. His blissful ignorance of politics and devotion to professionalism had held up in the face of vicious press slander-much in the way Stevens refuses to see-until the mid-fifties, the kernel of truth in the "rumors" and "insinuations" that branded Lord Darlington a Nazi accomplice.
This remote connection between the model of manservant and near-treasonable complicity might figure here simply as a fascinating link between fiction and reality. However, both history and fiction raise the same issue: What is the crime of being an ignorant servant, someone who lacks political sense, but is measured by the inability to question his loyalties? Moreover, the matter of career professionalism is crucial in this case, a matter I will return to before closing. Quite apart from any happenstance parallel between Wodehouse and Stevens, my argument is that the presence of the complicitous genre itself, the recognizable conventions of the butler-master farce as practiced and perfected by Wodehouse, requires a balancing of accounts, as it were. The notion of complicity promotes a different attitude than the standard postmodern one, which construes its literary products as automatically subversive of the elements they self-reflexively deploy. A good example of the latter is given by Caroline Patey in her claim that by "heaping [fragments of British literary memory] up in the same narrative framework, [Ishiguro] subverts their meanings, undermines their image and neutralizes their Britishness."28 It seems to me such accounts conveniently forget the lessons of the "age of suspicion"-that late-modern drive to question the values that are implanted in and sustained by each manifestation of established forms and conventions. As the film adaptation demonstrates, literary subversion went only so far, while the power of the constituent genre conventions proved marvelously adaptable to a less questioning narrative.
Ishiguro's novels cannot be accused of simply shutting out all suspicion. On the contrary, suspicion is an integral part of his works. They are based on a process of self-questioning by their narrators, by turns guilty and arrogantly self-justifying. As Gabriele Annan noted in his review of Remains, Ishiguro had used a detective fiction format in every one of his novels up to that date.29 Each relies on the play between willed ignorance and a compulsive following of clues for its tension. It is the presence of this genre, the classical English detective story, that most explicitly brings in the question of guilt. In Remains, it is arguably more easily identified than in the other novels. The distinct British genre of the country-house novel cultivated from Jane Austen onwards is part of the tradition so forcefully evoked by Remains. The sentimental values of upstairs-downstairs melodrama derive from an age when servants were an essential part of class society, and could be used in literary works as a reflection and a counterpoint to the more dignified embroilments of their masters and mistresses. Those were, in Bruce Robbins's words, "the good old days when it was possible to condense the imaginative negation of society into encounters between upstairs and downstairs."30 One could take the enormously successful TV series Upstairs, Downstairs as a model example of how these values can still operate in a post-Victorian culture, when the displacement of actual class relations onto a historical fantasy can generate a "heritage" type of nostalgia as well as sentimental expressions of class ressentiment.31
More pertinent to the present discussion, the country-house romance must be seen in relation to its twentieth-century successor, the middle-class detective story. The isolated assembly of characters with hierarchical relationships typical of the country-house novel generated conventions that were expertly manipulated by writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. This is the case in Remains as well. In Raymond Williams's well-known argument, the country-house novel turned into the middle-class detective story at the juncture when the country house and the rural way of life lost their historical importance.32 Cliveden and Blickling might then take their sordid place in British history as examples of a degeneration of the country estate as a site of political importance. In the twenties and thirties Stevens moves unquestioningly within a vision of a vital public function to which he owes service, while in the present of the novel, Darlington Hall is first of all a commodity, bought by the American Mr. Farraday, but its narrative function is to be a site of clues followed for the light they might shed on an intensely private history.
The innovation here is that Ishiguro lets the butler be his own sleuth, carefully weighing the evidence in retrospect. He is the private eye, the gentleman's gentleman detective, but he is also the criminal, who tries to avoid being caught, who fiddles with the evidence, who finds excuses for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, who provides emotional alibis. But no matter how he tries to elude the tendency of the leads, he is driven to confession. In fact, and this is also an aspect of Stevens's highly formalized style of delivery, the text is full of "confessions." Stevens constantly confesses this or that and admits to one thing or another (cf. R 161; 168; 175; 239). The tendency toward confession is finally harvested in full. The outcome of Stevens's story is the same as in another famous detective story, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Stevens humiliates himself and confesses his crime to an anonymous representative for common humanity: "I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really-one has to ask oneself-what dignity is there in that?" (R 243).33
The traditional mystery novel leads to a moment of recognition. Remains shares this development, and operates according to the same "cynegetic model" discussed by Terence Cave in his study of recognition as a principle in poetics. The induction involved is based on an ability to "select significant detail on the margins of perception and make capital out of chance occurrences: the talent sometimes known as serendipity."34 The tension of Remains is based on the syncopation of the paces at which the reader and the narrator reach the recognition. At the end, however, narration and reading join in a common moment of anagnorisis as ignorance gives way to full knowledge. Pathos with postmodern irony. But wait a minute. By ending with Stevens's poignant recognition we are giving thanks, like Lord Halifax, for the "fullness of days," but the point of my insistence on complicitous genres has been to move from the "naturalized" psychology and history of the text to the constructed literary object as a historically implicated form.
The detective story format, like the political memoir and the Wodehouse farce, is gently twisted by its insertion into a story that works with several sets of genre conventions, but it is never confronted as such. It forms part of a novel that draws on the familiarity of genre conventions, on the responses that a sequence of questions about motives will trigger as a matter of a reader's second nature. The reader may sense the presence of any genre while disregarding its ideological premises, much the way Stevens, for the longest time, treats the implications of his history. The complicitous genres are servants of a plot whose effects of mastery absolutely depend on them while its recognition of guilt-private, individual, even sentimentalized-demands that they remain smoothed over by the surface discourse.
The "drift" of Stevens's narrative takes it back time and again to the non-narrative genre employed, the essay on values. While I will claim in conclusion that there is another principal, the novel genre itself, the essay on values and professionalism certainly occupies a predominant position vis-à-vis the other genres.
The theme of professionalism embraces the story as a whole. The novel ends with Stevens's renewed resolve to incorporate bantering among his professional skills. It begins with Stevens's explanation that he sets out on his unprecedented trip, so he says, as a consequence of his "preoccupation" with "professional matters." This explanation is entirely typical of how the essay on values, by turns practical and theoretical, intervenes whenever other genre elements might establish their independence. In a turn characteristic of his narrative, Stevens links Miss Kenton's letter to professionalism; its contents remind him of his faulty staff plan rather than of their past relations. In this preference for professional concerns over a (censored) amatory association, we find the conceptual pair amateur/professional, which orders values in the discourse on butlering as well as in the narrative of political action. On the level of genre orchestration, the discourse on professionalism installs itself whenever the sentimental romance threatens to take precedence. In terms of psychology, Stevens's need to explain the professional background for his actions so as not to be misunderstood by his narratee is also a need to defend himself from properly understanding his interest in the letter. In the complicity of genres, the essay on professional values dominates the other genres by its constant euphemization of other contents, its appropriation of other narrative energies. One example is the previously mentioned discussion of the English landscape, which leads on to the question of great butlers. The meditation-on-the-landscape scene, which is prompted by the particularities of the motoring trip, takes up a page, while the digression that displaces landscape aesthetics onto the moral values of service goes on for more than fifteen pages.35
What is of particular interest in this example is the transposition it effects. By incorporating a process that transforms the axiological discourse about a natural object into a discourse about the value of a thoroughly cultural object, the novel performs an act of recognition that can be reiterated in interpretation.
The closest model for this discussion of greatness in butlering is to be found in Ishiguro's previous novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), with its narrator's meditations on his career as an artist, the aesthetic and political choices that led him up to the present. It is followed up in a more caricatured form in The Unconsoled (1995), where, early in the novel, a hotel porter harangues the narrator-protagonist on the finer points of portering.
In the case of the discourse on values, we are dealing with a complicitous element that, to some extent, is aware of its complicity, a reflection on artistic values and the values of art that is, and at the same time is not, "self-reflexive." The stereotyped butler's ruminations on the essence of butlering appears as a quasi-analysis of literary value only upon a given reader's recognition of the way it resembles the similar musings of the artist Masuji Ono, and as a recognition of the critical value of self-reflexivity, a fixture in the discourse of and around literature in the twentieth century.
Seizing on the figure of service as the essence of cultural production, Ishiguro is able to present an ironic and critical "self-analysis" of one such servant. The hierarchical relationship among the group of employed servants can easily be read as a map of a literary field. Stevens's ideas revealingly mock a number of literary positions and point out the impasses of traditional accounts of literary value.
One of the problems of value has to do with its constitution in an act of mutual recognition. Stevens notes that the power to identify butlers of the first rank resides properly among peers, defined themselves as butlers who are recognized as outstanding. As to the question of who is a great butler, there was "no serious dispute among professionals of quality who had any such discernment in such matters" (R 29). This discernment must be distinguished from the ignorance of the great mass of agents in the field: "How often have you known it for the butler who is on everyone's lips one day as the greatest of his generation to be proved demonstrably within a few years to have been nothing of the sort? And yet those very same employees who once heaped praise on him will be too busy eulogizing some new figure to stop and examine their sense of judgement" (R 30). The newly arrived butlers who "manage to pull off one or two prominent occasions with style" and are thus celebrated can be seen as the successful literary newcomers who fail to sustain a career after having been celebrated for their debut works (R 30).
In Stevens's debate with his colleague Mr. Graham we see the opposition between the charismatic ideology of the genius versus the view that excellence can be achieved through practice. Great butlers, in Stevens's view, have acquired dignity "over many years of self-training and the careful absorbing of experience" (R 33). As Stevens thinks about the merely fashionable "qualities" of style and encyclopedic knowledge, it is easy to map these values onto literary practice. In Stevens's quest for an essential key to what constitutes greatness, such superficial virtues are dismissed. In this dismissal lies also a denunciation of those many professionals who would refer to such apparent skills for the evaluation of their peers.
In short, the world of the servants can be recognized as a metaphor for the world of artists and critics. These are the people engaged in (cultural) service and thus given to engage in discussions of its values, but it is clear from Stevens's analysis that the source of value is external to the practices themselves. He can only come as far in the definition of "dignity" as "a butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits" (R 42). In the analogy with literature, a total identification with the literary institution as such is the standard of value within the field. In Pierre Bourdieu's terms, it is finally specific literary capital that determines arguments over value within the field to the extent that the field is autonomous. In Stevens's analysis, however, this could not possibly suffice, since in the nature of service it is subject to other laws for its achievements. He thus returns to the "outmoded" criteria suggested by the Hayes society, that of attachment to a distinguished household (R 113). The general principle of judging the value of service in part according to the object of service is still held good, but for Stevens it is "the moral status of an employer" that should count (R 114). The "employer" then becomes a figure for the cause that an artist serves, the traditional or heterodox view of service to which the professional adheres. Stevens rates his own generation as a more idealistic one, a generation who saw "furthering the progress of humanity" as their final value (R 114). Stevens marvels at this being a new thought, undiscovered until the narrative present: dignity, which is the field-specific norm, becomes "greatness" when it connects to "certain ends" outside of the field.
Stevens's meditations on the subject of greatness are certainly naive, but at the same time they shrewdly point out the impasses of traditional accounts of literary value: the relativity of judgments made even within the profession itself, the tautological dead ends of inherent value (dignity reduced to its etymological root, worth; good literature proven by its complete literariness), and the problematic reliance on "employers"-patrons, publishers, the general public. The attachment to progressive ends then appears a reasonable solution to Stevens's question. And there lies the rub, of course, since the relation of benevolent intentions to ends is complicated by structures-"unacknowledged conditions and unanticipated consequences" in Giddens's terminology.
Just like Masuji Ono in Ishiguro's Artist,36 Stevens finally reaches a fairly adequate judgment of his flawed career, and just like Ono he is still able to affirm the principle of commitment. Stevens balances his emotional account by telling himself and his complicitous narratee: "Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment" (R 244; my emphasis). Ono, similarly, takes comfort in the assessment voiced by his ideological mentor Matsuda: "We at least acted on what we believed and did our utmost" (A 204). In the final paragraph of Remains, Stevens chides himself for not having approached the skill of bantering "with the commitment I might have done." I take this as a signpost toward another genre position that belongs to the narrative present of the 1950s, the Sartrean analysis of committed art, which is also explicit about the complicity of art.
It is by the parallel between aesthetic value and the values of butlering-no matter that the latter is an ironic caricature of the former-that Ishiguro evokes the position of littérature engagé, one that holds prose to be "in essence, utilitarian."37 With some justification, it could be claimed that Stevens is a better vehicle for this particular self-reflexive critique than Ono, since Stevens's vocation cannot define itself as other than service. The purist alternative rejected by Ono, of capturing the transience of beauty as an end in itself, is not available to Stevens. In the allegory on cultural values performed by the text, the autonomy of cultural production is sharply limited.
The parallel between Ono and Stevens is clear enough: while their "services" won recognition in the context in which they were provided, they were bound up with historical forces that had disastrous consequences, and therefore their achievements are drastically devalued in the narrative present. In Sartre's scheme, usefully rehearsed by Tony Tanner in an article on contemporary American writing, an artist will stand in a relation to the values of his society that can be described as either celebration, complicity, or contestation.38 Ono was certainly a celebrant of the emergent and soon dominant values of expansive militarism in the Japan of his day, while Stevens is the perfect figure for complicity in his refusal to inquire into the significance of Lord Darlington's political work.
What does that make Ishiguro? The accomplice, according to the definition, presupposes a principal, and in order to suggest an answer, I wish to conclude by looking at the principal in this orchestration of complicitous genres. The bourgeois novel faced one of its many "crises" in the mid-1950s, with Nathalie Sarraute's L'Ére du soupçon (1956) and the debate over the death of the novel marking a certain peak in the questioning of its tradition. Directly pertinent for my line of inquiry here, Sarraute and Sartre in divergent ways questioned the complicity of the form, and the latter proposed commitment as a necessary stance. The notion of committed art was then forcefully critiqued, within the left, by Adorno. If we leap to the time of Remains, published in that portentous year 1989, we might argue that the anxieties of the fifties have been actively forgotten rather than exorcized. Ishiguro's investigation of complicity in the form of a historical novel of sorts falls under the comforting banner of "historiographical metafiction," which absolves postmodern fictions beforehand of at least the guilt of complicity, since complicity is taken to attach inevitably to every form of representation. The mere insertion of "the historical" in forms that are apparent to the reader as artificial, so this line of thinking goes, will function subversively in this great enterprise of stressing "both the discursive nature of [postmodern] representations of the past and the narrativized form in which we read them."39
More specifically, it would be argued-and has been argued, as we have seen-that Ishiguro's incorporation of historically contaminated genres functions precisely to undermine or dispel their ideological charge.40 The critical credentials of the novel would then be fulfilled, and Ishiguro's stated intention to debunk a certain myth of Englishness could be cashed in. Is the question of complicity, at the level of the novel itself, solved as easily as all that? I think not without some reservations.
A number of very powerful reservations have already been made by Susie O'Brien. O'Brien argues that the novel can all too easily be read as an affirmation of a new political order represented by the easy-going American Farraday. In her analysis, the ideological work takes place through the offices of the romance elements in Remains: "The potentially coercive terms of this new political order [associated with Farraday] are finally subordinated to and concealed within the universalist logic of a love story, resistance to which can only be construed as unworldly and finally unnatural."41 By deciding to start from the bad old repressed days of Lord Darlington, Ishiguro certainly seems to imply that we are now living in the good new liberated ones with Mr. Farraday.
I subscribe to O'Brien's general argument, but I think there is a further case to be made that concerns not just the politics in this novel but the politics of the novel as a form of expression. My approach in this paper has been guided by the time frame set by the novel. Its narrative present in the mid-1950s creates a tension with the novel's situatedness in the late 1980s, and by rehearsing the notions of complicity and commitment Ishiguro resurrects a moment in the history of the novel as well as in political history.
As a novel, Remains4 performs a labor of transformation of the generic elements that precedes it. By placing in its very center a relationship between a master and a servant it evokes the symbolic origins of the bourgeois novel in Don Quixote. In the figure of Stevens, who is present to the reader as the carrier of the various genres, but also as the carrier of an unchanging style that smoothes out the artifice of the different plots and the distinctly undermotivated transitions, this novel performs a pessimistic reversal of a great many predecessors. In Don Quixote, Sancho Panza is a servant who resists the follies of his master. In Jeeves we see a servant who diligently manipulates his inept master so as to maintain their mutually defining positions to the best advantage of the servant as dominant servant.42 D. H. Lawrence gave the power of sexuality to Lord Chatterley's menial, Mellors. Robin Maugham's servant, better known in the film version scripted by Harold Pinter, parasitically preys on the decadence of his master. In July's People by Nadine Gordimer, the reversal between servant and masters, as Robbins notes, is an emblem for a large-scale social revolution.43 In drama, Crichton, in J. M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton,44 passes the test of the desert island as "the best man" among both masters and servants; Bertolt Brecht's manservant Matti never subordinates his own moral being to Herr Puntilla, and J. A. Strindberg, the self-proclaimed "son of a servant maid," has his valet Jean strike back at his master by seducing his daughter. More generally, Bruce Robbins has demonstrated the central, and most importantly, active role played by servants in the English fiction tradition.
Ishiguro's treatment of the dynamics between master and servant breaks the pattern in a manner that demands critical attention. Certainly, the servant holds a central place, but he does so at the price of relinquishing independent agency. Apart from the master's rule, then, there is no room for maneuver. Perhaps it is not "the office of art to spotlight alternatives," as Adorno put it, but neither can it be its task to close the door on them. It is not just that practicing bantering in order to fit into a more relaxed form of domination is a vile alternative. What is troubling with the scheme of ideological positions in Remains is also the way that the main contrast presented to Stevens's blind loyalty is immediately made suspect. Most commentators seize on Harry Smith as a voice for the opposition, since he claims the virtues of participant democracy for the people. What must be remembered, however, is the way his democratic rhetoric is immediately thrown in doubt by his own pro-imperialist stance: "Our doctor here's for all kinds of little countries going independent. I don't have the learning to prove him wrong, though I know he is" (R 192). And this is followed up by Dr. Carlisle's disillusioned comments to Stevens the following morning, when he identifies Smith's stance as a confused mixture of communism and "true blue Tory" values. Carlisle then confesses that he came to Little Compton in 1949 as a "committed socialist." The commitment has clearly been tempered by his recognition that the people he came out to serve are "happier left alone" (R 209). Carlisle's concluding observation echoes with a particularly marked hollowness: "Socialism would allow people to live with dignity. That's what I believed when I came out here."
Commitment becomes, in the key scenes of Remains as well as Artist, just another form of complicity, a faith that retrospectively can be seen as valuable only for the sacrifices it demanded. The "democratic" faith held by Harry Smith is seen to be premised on ignorance, just as Lord Darlington's belief in authoritarian solutions stems from good intentions but is "misguided," and Dr. Carlisle's commitment to socialism is seen to founder on the rock of human nature. Only Miss Kenton is allowed to state her principles and at the same time explain why she cannot act on them, but she ends up wistfully regretting her decisions. Young Reginald pleads for "curiosity" as a minimal value, and goes off to be killed in the war. In these examples, as in the central presence of Stevens himself, politics is individualized and sentimentalized in an essentially pessimistic vein. At the same time it is fitted into a parable on service with a more universalizing scope.
As a novel of structural recognition-in contrast to character-based recognition-Remains can finally be read for a recognition of the structural identity of the novelist and the butler as the providers of professional service. What has happened to the novel between 1956 and 1989 is the massive professionalization of this field of cultural production. It is fitting that a writer with an M.A. in creative writing should thematize the values of professionalism in a novel that deals with the ambivalent relation between commitment and complicity. The choice between the two belongs to an era when novelists still, as in Sartre's argument, were seen to have a choice to "unclass" themselves or to remain safely within the middle class to which they belonged and which they addressed. Now novelists are professionals, with academic credentials to show for themselves, and their "employer" is an apparatus of mediations with a public that is often, like the writer, professionally accredited. Stevens describes the misguided idealist among his fellow professionals who would be "forever reappraising his employer" and withdrawing his service when the employer failed to measure up morally. The inadequacy of such an attitude was obvious, as Stevens notes, in that such butlers disappeared from the profession. No doubt that serves as an appropriate comment regarding commitment in the era of professional literary service.
Professional to a fault, the perfectly crafted novel created by writers like Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, and Martin Amis has developed within an Anglo-American tradition that Geoffrey Hartman once shrewdly contrasted with the "aesthetics of complicity" cultivated by French writers. While the French novel turned on its inherited forms a purifying kind of suspicion, the Anglo-American novel is one, says Hartman, that "honors technique and takes pleasure in craft. Yet the relation of craft to craftiness, of technique to a fictional in-fighting which pits the artist against art, is rarely felt."45 A similar sense of a self-imposed impotence is expressed by Geoff Dyer in an astute review of Remains, when he notes that the irony here "is not ironic enough, never calling itself into question, always immune from its own inquiring, exempt from its own attention."46 In the terms of my own analysis here, Remains resists a full recognition of its own labor of transformation. As I have shown, the theme of complicity extends to the historical complicity of forms incorporated into the novel, but as a novel it obliterates those concrete mediations of history in favor of the purely literary ironic subversivity that is conferred on postmodern fiction by default, thus keeping its revelations safely within the profession.
Notes
1. Qtd. in Susan Chira, "The Need for Self-Deception," New York Times Book Review, 8 Oct. 1989: 73.
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2. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (London: Faber, 1989). Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation R.
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3. Mike Petry, Narratives of Memory and Identity: The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro (Frankfurt/M: Lang, 1999) 123.
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4. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989).
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5. Allan Vorda and Kim Herzinger, "An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro," Mississippi Review 20.1-2 (1991): 140.
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6. For example, Robertson Scott's England's Green and Pleasant Land, Christopher Hussey's The Fairy Land of England, Thomas Burke's The Beauty of England, and the collection edited by J. B. Priestley, The Beauty of Britain, all from the interwar period when Mrs. Symons was active.
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7. Jonathan Culler, "Semiotics of Tourism," American Journal of Semiotics 1 (1981): 127.
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8. Ian Ousby, The Englishman's England. Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 3.
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9. See Alex Potts, "'Constable country' between the wars," Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Raphael Samuel, vol. III: National Fictions (London: Routledge, 1989) 160-86.; and John A Taylor, A Dream of England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) 124-35.
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10. Potts 166.
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11. Qtd. in Taylor 128.
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12. Taylor 130.
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13. Potts 175.
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14. The Earl of Halifax, The Fulness of Days (London: Collins, 1957). Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation F.
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15. Ronald M. Smelser, "Nazi Dynamics, German Foreign Policy and Appeasement,"The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement," ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Lothar Kettenacker (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983) 38.
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16. William R. Rock, British Appeasement in the 1930s (London: Edward Arnold, 1977) 55.
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17. Lucy Kavaler, The Astors. A Family Chronicle (London: Harrap, 1966) 220.
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18. Kavaler 219.
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19. Frances King notes the likeness to Lord Lothian in "A Stately Procession of One," The Spectator 27 May 1989: 31.
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20. J. R. M. Butler, Lord Lothian (London: Macmillan, 1960) 190.
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21. David Lodge, "The Unreliable Narrator," The Art of Fiction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) 155.
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22. Rock 57-58.
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23. Rock 57.
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24. See the reviews of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day by Gabriele Annan, "On the High Wire," New York Review of Books Dec 7, 1989: 3-4, and by Salman Rushdie, "What the Butler Didn't See," Observer, 1 May 1989: 53.
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25. Vorda and Herzinger 140, qtd. in Susie O'Brien, "Serving a New World Order: Postcolonial Politics in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day," Modern Fiction Studies 42.4 (1996): 789.
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26. Cf. P. G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves! (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999).
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27. Alexander Cockburn, "P. G. Wodehouse: The Road to Long Island," Corruptions of Empire: Life Studies & the Reagan Era (London: Verso, 1988) 75-83.
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28. Caroline Patey, "When Ishiguro Visits the West Country: An Essay on The Remains of the Day," Acme 44.2 (1991): 144.
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29. Caroline Patey discusses the detective story as one of many literary motives "woven in the butler's fabric of words" (142). Her semiotic perspective differs from my analysis.
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30. Bruce Robbins, The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 222.
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31. See Susie O'Brien's insightful comments on this aspect of Remains, particularly in its Hollywood version.
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32. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973) 249.
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33. Stevens's narration might be treated as part of the confessional tradition examined by Dennis Foster, Confession and Complicity in Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See p. 18.
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34. Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) 251.
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35. Comp. Kathleen Wall, "The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration," Journal of Narrative Technique 24.1 (1994): 25.
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36. Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World (London: Faber, 1986). Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation A.
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37. Jean-Paul Sartre, "What Is Literature?" and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) 34.
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38. Tony Tanner, "Games American Writers Play: Ceremony, Complicity, Contestation, and Carnival," Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 176-82. Tanner adds Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque as a fourth alternative that refuses the other three.
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39. Hutcheon 87.
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40. See Salman Rusdhie's review of Remains in The Observer.
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41. O'Brien 796.
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42. See especially the superb concluding story, "Bertie changes his mind," in Carry On, Jeeves!
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43. Robbins 223-24.
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44. J. M. Barrie, The Admirable Crichton, 1914 (London: Hodder, 1949).
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45. Geoffrey Hartman, "The Aesthetics of Complicity," Georgia Review 28 (1974): 388.
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46. Geoff Dyer, rev. of Remains of the Day, New Statesman, 26 May 1989: 34.
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