Tag: fascism

Thomas Carlyle, Prophet or Petty Pamphleteer?

There are, it seems, two ways of coming to Thomas Carlyle. The first, and tamest, is through the likes of Borges, who praised Carlyle’s experimental novel Sartor Resartus as a model to be emulated. The second route is far less innocent. Carlyle is perhaps the best known these days for his “fascism”. Carlyle’s dates obviously don’t have anything to do with fascism – he was born in 1795 and died in 1881. However, the man’s politics have aged extraordinarily badly. We may overlook or even, unthinkingly, admire his theory of Great Men, at least from a distance, but as soon as his authoritarianism comes out in his writing it only gets louder and louder, and less and less reasonable or coherent.

I have spent a few weeks with the Penguin edition of Carlyle’s Selected Writings, and in this post I suppose my goal is simply to suggest why there might be a reason to read this side of Carlyle, however reprehensible it may be.

Why read him?

One way to read Carlyle is less as a thinker so much as a character. Carlyle was a Scot. His parents wanted him to be a preacher but he ended up losing his faith. Nevertheless, there’s a strong prophetic tone to his writing that is impossible to avoid. Carlyle is completely incapable of writing in clear English. Not prophecy, but “vaticination”, not a standard sentence but all sorts of inversion. There are plenty of allusions, lists, and terrible images. From the back of my book – “Roar with all your throats, of cartilage and metal… for it is the hour!”

One gets the sense that Carlyle was rather disappointed to be born after the French Revolution, the subject of his major historical work. He has a certain relish for chaos that is distinctly Romantic. And indeed, it’s best to think of Carlyle as a Romantic, one born to late and who lived too long. His fearful view of technology, his praise of the individual and their genius, his loathing for the conforming masses, are all in their essence Romantic. In particular, Carlyle takes a lot from the German Romantics, and was a huge fan of Goethe (seemingly without noticing that Goethe renounced Romanticism later in his life). And these German Romantics were, it must be said, politically suspect. Aside from their support of Revolution, the sheer anti-rationality of the likes of Novalis has left a painful legacy in the intellectual history of the world.

Out of the Romantics grew Carlyle’s views of Great Men. In “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History” Carlyle laid out his view of Great Men as those who take the “dry dead fuel” of “common languid Times” and exploit it to achieve great things. Their conviction is at the heart of their strength. Except, wait a moment, haven’t we by this point in human history noticed that conviction often is little indication of goodness? Stalin, of course, had his convictions, as did Hitler. Generally I disapprove of bringing in these two, because they are classic examples which end up stifling arguments. But in Carlyle’s case the comparison really is appropriate. When he writes that the average man is nothing more than a “dumb creature” saying in “inarticulate prayers: “Guide me, govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot guide myself!”” we see a man who has so little respect for the average human being as to approve of any authority capable of guiding them, without ever questioning their true nature.

So, Carlyle was a fool. That’s no reason to read him, for there have been plenty of fools in history. But I think as a character, he’s interesting. The introduction to my copy is heavy with irony – a particular favourite line is “nothing is more remarkable in Carlyle than the way in which he simply stopped thinking.” But once we get beyond such humour, there’s a sense of sadness in Carlyle’s gradual collapse into authoritarianism. Friends and admirers, even philosophical opponents such as J. S. Mill, turned their backs on him as he grew more and more extreme. Conservatives rejected him for his distrust of the landowners and new money, while those on the side of progress had no time for him at all, even though much of what he said – the criticism of his world – was in line with their own ideas.

Ah, it is not easy, this apologetics business! Carlyle’s works speak for themselves, and not altogether to his credit. The gradual turning inwards of their creator, his isolation, his sense of being outside of time and in a hostile, incorrect world – these are more interesting in a novel’s main character, than in a writer of tracts who had real influence. Carlyle is not without his similarities to Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, which I looked at last week. But still we should read him, I think, and not just because we should always try to engage with ideas we do not call our own. For one, he was incredibly influential in his day, and he has a rather unique style (I shan’t call it good). But most importantly, his criticisms are powerful, however inadequate are his solutions.

Through a look at the essays “Signs of the Times” and “Chartism” I’ll try to demonstrate Carlyle’s worth as a thinker as well as a character.

Thomas Carlyle, in all his glory. What is there in those eyes?

Signs of the Times

“Signs of the Times”, written in 1829, begins by criticising of the world Carlyle was living in. It is a world of prophecy, rather than living in the moment. Nations and thinkers were all in an apocalyptic frame of mind – whether the Utilitarians in Britain under Bentham or the Millenarians who predicted the return of Christ to earth and its somewhat rapid end thereafter. Carlyle’s main problem with all this constant prophesying is that it’s a symptom of an unhealthy age – an “Age of Machinery”. And not just in the simple sense, of spinning jennies and railway engines and steam – things every British schoolchild, even me, manages to learn about. No, if it were only that, perhaps Carlyle would not have to complain, though he does have sympathy for the weavers who lose their jobs to “iron fingers”, or the sailors who are replaced by steam’s “vaporous wings”.

Instead, the “Age of Machinery” is really about what we might nowadays call systems. It is an age of “adapting means to ends” which at first leads to great advances in wellbeing, as machines come into mass use. But then we start becoming so goal-orientated that people become means in themselves, rather than ends. “The internal and spiritual” side of us is overtaken by this thinking. We lose our spontaneity, our sense of individuality. The Romanticism is visible in Carlyle’s idea that instead of a genius weaver, we now only have talented machine users. Skill, which can be made to a pattern, replaces whatever lies deeply inside of us.

Our institutions, whether the church or the arts or the sciences, are all affected by this way of thinking. Christianity, Carlyle enjoys reminding us, spread because of the force of its “Idea” and the passion of missionaries. It did not spread because everyone was organising meetings or giving our pamphlets. In sum, his enemy is a materialism, a belief in science far greater than even the previous century had had. But it is also a hugely destructive belief, for we end up turning our backs on and denying all that “cannot be investigated and understood mechanically”. The spiritual side of human beings is denied in favour a simple happiness – the sort that lets itself be measured.

However appealing this is on the surface, I have a great deal of hesitation about it. It seems to me that there are two ways of looking at human value. One says that the goal of any theory should be the happiness of the many, while the other looks only at the peak of human achievement, vaguely defined. The former is utilitarian, while the latter is Carlylean (or Nietzschean). The danger is that in pursuing personal human achievement, we achieve general human degradation. Nietzsche’s solution, and I suspect Carlyle’s, is simply not to care about the masses. But it’s not a view which I myself much enjoy, even as I agree with Carlyle that any theory that deflates the spiritual side of humanity is pretty awful too.

This essay is interesting, of course, because the problems have not gone away. In our own age we are under the thumb of great systems, with nary a thought given to our spiritual, internal workings. Indeed, much of what Carlyle says seems in line with contemporary thought about capitalism’s effects on the individual. And when Carlyle speaks of the power of passion, of the Idea, to break through the stultifying frames of these systems, it’s a view that appeals. Carlyle’s piece ends with a muted optimism, a sense that out of this conflict between old and new a better world will be born. Alas, it’s taking a long time to come.

Chartism

“Chartism” was written ten years after “Signs of the Times” and is an altogether less pleasant essay to read. All the same, again there are some things here that are pretty sensible. It was written during a time of great working-class upheaval in Britain and asks what the solution is to the problem. Although the Chartists – the group in revolt – had a charter (it’s in the name), Carlyle does not trust them to know what they want – “these wild inarticulate souls, struggling there, with inarticulate uproar, like dumb creatures in pain, unable to speak what is in them!” Still, he still less trusts the politicians of the day to know what is wrong.

Carlyle is scathing of Britain’s political elite, and also of the “statisticians”. There is an impressive paragraph when he takes statisticians to task for asking the wrong questions. Impressive because Carlyle lists all of the things that one would need to measure, from social mobility to stability of work, to actually know whether the condition of the working class was good. Simply saying that wages are rising is not enough – that fact alone does not mean that things are getting better. It is a criticism that has lost none of its force. Charitably speaking, there are too many of us unconsciously thinking that a healthy “economy” is the solution to all of the world’s woes, without thinking about such questions as how that wealth is actually distributed or accessed. It’s impressive that Carlyle does not miss this point.

And just as importantly, he sees that an overreliance on statistics is bad in another way, because it devalues life, and reduces us to just a number. Carlyle sees that workers – and human beings – struggle for “just wages” not just in the sense of money, but in terms of dignity too. But just when he seems to be saying something sensible, Carlyle gets started on the Irish. “The time has come when the Irish population must either be improved a little, or else exterminated.” Yeah, I’m not going to defend this rubbish. Nor what Carlyle says about the Irish spreading bad values like a contagion into Britain itself.

Carlyle talks about dignity, and for him it comes down to justice. But where he goes from there is pretty ridiculous. Might is apparently right. Anyone who has governed a place we must believe is a just ruler, because otherwise they would not have been able to continue ruling. England is fine for Ireland because the Irish haven’t overthrown us (they did). Secret police, guards on every street corner, and a military presence have absolutely nothing to do with control – justice is the reason we continue to rule. “Might and right, so frightfully discrepant at first, are ever in the long-run one and the same”. Carlyle, of course, did not live in the twentieth century. His heart, I am sure, never left the eighteenth. But it must be said that if anything, might has very rarely equalled right, and he’s very much mistaken to think that it ever has.

So, anyway, what do we do with the working class, and with England? Though Carlyle complains that the solutions to poverty in Britain (the “Poor Law”) was a simple solution to a complex problem, and a disaster, his own solutions are no more complex. We do not exterminate the Irish – we merely deport them. Mr Carlyle has heard there’s plenty of land over in Canada where we could send them. As for the British, a bit of forced emigration wouldn’t go amiss either, alongside some education. Now, it is the case that we have some political problems in this country too, so we’d better get a “real aristocracy”. No, Carlyle doesn’t want any of that democracy trash. Strong leaders, powerful Ideas! Man, what a great ideologue Carlyle would have made.

Carlyle, clearly, was struggling for people to support him. In chapter eight he invents (!) a fake book, “History of the Teuton Kindred”, which he quotes for several pages, to support his own ideas. Again, if Carlyle were a literary creation, this would be funny – a little postmodern flourish. As it happens, he was a man, and this just suggests a kind of sad isolation. “Chartism” begins so well, with its diagnosis of the times and how they short-change the individual, but it ends so badly. It was rejected by all the journals of the day and Carlyle had to publish it himself.

Conclusion

Alan Shelston, who penned my edition’s introduction, ultimately gives up on trying to defend Carlyle’s politics and just says they the result of “not ideological belief but rather psychological disturbance and intellectual deterioration”. Maybe. Any belief is the result of something, but finding the correct origin doesn’t change the belief itself. Carlyle is a strange writer. Full of good ideas and bad, unlike a poet or fiction writer it’s much harder to overlook the bad in him. As a man of his time, he is fascinating, but as a thinker, he is deeply concerning. I keep coming back to this idea of him as a character in some postmodern adventure. Ultimately, I think that’s the best way to approach him. Carlyle is someone to look at from a distance, to analyse from one’s armchair, but not to emulate, not to love. That, I think, is fair.

Thomas Mann: Mario and the Magician, Disorder and Early Sorrow

The dislike I have for Thomas Mann’s writing can be summarised as the sneaking suspicion that he does not have a soul. I do not doubt Mann’s intelligence, for how else could anyone write such long sentences on such fascinating topics, ranging from fascism to the conflicted identities of so many bourgeois artists, running around them so that they are illuminated from every possible angle? Yet every time Mann just leaves me cold. I have a certain dislike for the way that his stories always seem to be about educated rich German men, usually on holiday, musing about the same things over and over again. Only exams, and the sheer richness of his writing, makes me get anything out of him. He is the last writer who I would ever read for pleasure. In short: “how clever he is”, says the head; “how cold he is”, says the heart.

Disorder and Early Sorrow (Unordnung and frühes Leid) and Mario and the Magician (Mario und der Zauberer), as the first paragraph perhaps indicates, have not changed my opinion of Mann much. The first story is the description of a party held during the dark days of the Weimar Republic, while the second describes a middle-class holiday gone badly wrong. Both works, published in 1926 and 1930 respectively, are linked, I think, by a certain trepidation about the future. Mann was in his fifties and he had seen his country destroyed in a World War, and in the peace that followed for Europe he saw only its fragility and the growing resentment of individuals, the sort that led eventually to the rise of Hitler and the Second World War.

Disorder and Early Sorrow

“Disorder and Early Sorrow” takes us into the home of a family of what in German are called Bildungsbürger, or the educated middle class. As opposed to the standard bourgeois these people were well educated, but they were economically weak. The family here consists of a mother, a father – Professor Cornelius, two older children – Ingrid and Bert, and two younger children – Lorchen and Beißer (Ellie and Snapper in one English translation). In addition to these are various servants, of whom Xaver is the most important.

The story is about a party that the two older children are throwing. Over and above the difficult financial situation the family finds itself in, unable to repair their nice house or feed themselves properly – at one point they decide they need “a cake, or something cakish” – the problem facing Cornelius, who is the central figure here, is that of dealing with a changing world. Traditional barriers are falling all around him. Not only is language collapsing – as in the cake anecdote – so too are class barriers. Xaver and Bert look so much the same that Cornelius can’t tell them apart when he looks out of the window. For Cornelius, who is a history professor, it is difficult to keep track, so he retreats into his studies – of the beginnings of national debt in Spain and England. 

For the young ones, this breakdown of barriers is only a good thing. They are politically engaged, and make use of all the newest technology, such as telephones. At one point one of their hobbies is described – they go onto a tram and pretend to be other people, speaking in funny accents as if they have only just arrived in Berlin. Cornelius also acts, once the party gets underway, saying hello to his children’s guests, but his acting is far more awkward and nervous. He belongs to a generation where “good breeding” and “gallantry” are the key virtues. When the guests speak to him, they are terribly polite, but as soon as he turns away they speak naturally again.

Cornelius is gripped with a “Father’s pessimism”. His eldest children have already broken free, but the younger two may yet have their innocence saved. There are a number of touching moments in “Disorder and Early Sorrow”, and all of them are between Cornelius and his two youngest children. They play a game with a pillow, and it is Cornelius’s fatherly love for them that most successfully humanises him: “Tenderness floods Dr Cornelius’ heart as if it were wine”.

But even in this love there is something fragile. Lorchen, the girl and his favourite, suffers the “sorrow” of the title when she is rejected by one of the boys at the party who decides he wants to dance with someone his own age, instead of a toddler. She ends up crying tremendously, so that the boy in question eventually comes to wish her a good night. When she falls asleep afterwards, Cornelius reckons that she will forget everything by the next day. But one day Lorchen – whose name recalls the Lorelei myth that inspired so many German Romantic ballads – will grow up, and Cornelius will have to let her go just as he has his other children.

The story is filled with little details but one thing that stood out was the use of space in it. It’s quite a claustrophobic tale, with almost all the action taking place on one floor of Cornelius’s house. In this it reflects the cramping of his own power in the world as the Weimar economy falls apart and the politics of consensus that educated men such as himself had dominated falls apart with it. I almost enjoyed reading it. Perhaps if I had read it in English I would have. As it stands, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. 

Mario and the Magician

“Mario and the Magician” is another one of those fun little beach-tales that Mann was so fond of – think “Death in Venice”. An unnamed family goes on holiday to Mussolini’s Italy only to find to their horror that the country is filled with fascists! This “tragic travel experience” is written like a chapter in a travel book, which is an interesting approach for Mann to take. The style tries to contain excessive outbursts of emotion, but the topic is inherently emotional, because the family had a dreadful time. In some way, this tension reflects the tension in European life at the time between resentment and apparent peace.

Anyway, the story is rather unsubtle. Mann really didn’t like fascism, which we can certainly forgive him for. The story was written before Hitler was a major force in Germany, and so we can call Mann prescient enough for noticing that fascism is bad. Considering he is an artist, it’s something of an achievement for him not to be drawn into it as so many were at the time, including Rilke, Wyndham Lewis, Yeats. But then again, I’ll just put that down to Mann not having a soul. Fascism manages to find so many supporters because it appears to offer salvation for the soul, and only the intellect can stand against that.

Before we meet the magician of the title, the main event is a trip to the beach. The beach is a rather unnatural place – we are supposed to relax here. Yet the beach instead is “lacking in innocence and aimlessness”. The children aren’t just children, but “patriotic children”, waving flags and being used by their parents as a pretext for nationalist fights with foreign tourists. At one point the narrator lets one of his children run around naked, only to be punished with a fine for it for offending public decency and “national dignity”.

The main event of this story, though, is the trip they take to watch a magician, Cipolla. Cipolla is a fascist demagogue. There is nothing more to it. He stands on stage and manipulates people, and the crowd cheers him for it. His volunteers are made to do embarrassing things, surrendering their will to him in the process. The narrator cannot make sense of it, calling him “the most effective hypnotist I have ever seen”. There is no rational explanation for why people seem to lose their self-control, but it happens anyway. Cipolla, this angry, ugly, monster of a man who is filled with resentment (vaguely related to women) is able to control everyone through the force of his voice and personality. However strange it seems to Mann, the approach worked in much of Europe then, and still works in parts of the world now.

As for Mario, I can’t tell you about his role in the story without spoiling its ending. He is a waiter who serves the children in one of the cafes they visit. But he also takes part in Cipolla’s performance.

“Mario and the Magician” appealed to me less than “Disorder and Early Sorrow”. Its lack of subtlety is not the main problem – after all, the fact that fascism is awful is something that needs to be made clear. I disliked the language of it – I read as much in English as I did in German – but most of all I disliked its message. Not the one that says fascism is bad, but the one that seems to propose a solution. I do not know what the answer is to fascism or radicalization, and perhaps there is nobody who truly does, but the one that Mann seems to put forward here is not one I can support at all. It is, to be frank, politically naïve. But then, perhaps, in 1930 we still had a right to be politically naïve. In a few more years we would lose that right forever.

Conclusion

Mann oh man, I wish I could like Thomas Mann. But I just find him too intellectual. It’s not that intellectuality is a problem per se, but rather that when intellectuality is there without a corresponding warmth of feeling it’s really hard to be excited while you are reading. Dostoevsky’s characters may be in some sense representatives of certain views or systems of thought, but they always feel like passionate people, motivated by ideas, rather than ideas who have been poured into people. Mann liked Dostoevsky – I haven’t read his thoughts on the Russian, but I’d be interested to know what they were.

I am going to read more Mann one day. Like Robert Musil, whose “Three Women” I enjoyed intellectually, there’s definitely something to enjoy in these two stories. But at the end of each you are – or at least I was – always left feeling that there is something missing, and that’s a great shame. Because Mann definitely knew how to write.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day – A Review

My friend James almost always brings up The Remains of the Day when we talk about literature. He’s a huge fan of Kazuo Ishiguro and rather thought the book would be my cup of tea. Well, at long last I’ve read the book and I have to admit that he was right. The Remains of the Day is a fascinating and sad story about the passage of time, and what we can salvage from the end of our lives, when it might seem that so much has passed us by. At my advanced age of twenty-two, it seems perfectly suited for me.

A photo of Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017
Kazuo Ishiguro is among the most celebrated authors writing in the UK now, and The Remains of the Day is probably his most famous work. He won the Nobel Prize in 2017. Photo by Frankie Fouganthin (CC BY-SA 4.0)

It tells the story of the life of a butler, Mr Stevens, who works in a great English country house, Darlington Hall, and the challenges he faces when he comes to look back on his past in his twilight years. For me the book is particularly poignant because of my own experience of the topics dealt within it, as my grandmother lives in a castle that is still served by staff (though they don’t live on site). Although it was published in 1989 and the action takes place in 1956, the questions and concerns of The Remains of the Day all remain vital and interesting now, and stretch far beyond the secret world of British upper classes it takes as its setting.

The Story

Mr Stevens, the aging butler of Darlington Hall, is presented with his greatest challenge yet when his new American employer suggests he goes for a car ride to get himself out of the house. The American is returning for a few weeks to his homeland and thinks that Stevens could use the fresh air. Stevens himself is not altogether for the idea, but he manages to convince himself. He has begun to notice certain mistakes in the running of the household, which he attributes to a lack of staff employed since Lord Darlington, the original owner, left. The trip can therefore be justified as a business one, for Stevens has recently received a letter from a former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, and he decides to end his trip with a visit to her home, hoping she will rejoin the household.

Though Stevens travels around the countryside, most of The Remains of the Day comes as memories Stevens reconsiders with age. The central tension in Remains of the Day becomes the one between what Stevens is willing to admit to himself, and what out of fear, or cowardice, or pride, he does not accept. The decline and death of his own father, the rise of fascism, and Stevens’ relations with Miss Kenton and Lord Darlington are all replayed to the reader, but only by looking at what is not said can we appreciate their significance.

The Style and Form of The Remains of the Day

The first-person narration of The Remains of the Day is deceptively simple. It certainly is deceptive. Stevens has been plucked perfectly from his upper-class milieu, and like the English upper-class, he rarely says what he means. It is only thanks to the vividness of his memories, in particular through remembered dialogue, that we come to see what is really going on in the past and in the present. To take one example, when Stevens finds that his father has died, he decides to continue working at an important international conference instead of taking a break. In the narration there is no hint that Stevens is suffering. The recollection is explained by Stevens as the apotheosis of his career as a butler, his ultimate mastery of dignity. But then we reach the dialogue of his waiting, and his desired impression comes under attack.

“Stevens, are you all right?”

“Yes, sir. Perfectly.”

“You look as though you’re crying.” I laughed and taking out a handkerchief, quickly wiped my face.

“I’m very sorry, sir. The strains of a hard day.”

Without narration to interrupt and reinterpret this exchange, we are presented with a direct glimpse of Stevens’ pain. But when the chapter ends he tries once more to control our interpretation of the recollection. “For all its sad associations, whenever I recall that evening today, I find I do so with a large sense of triumph.” Language is a tool for the expression of our selves, for communication. But it can just as easily be used for creating a false picture of the world. Stevens, as if to save himself from the truth of that day, from the rejection of his father on his death bed, uses language to justify his cold-heartedness, to turn defeat into a kind of triumph. “You see, I know my father would have wishes me to carry on just now.” He says. But we aren’t so easily fooled.

Love and Deceit

The language of The Remains of the Day, instead of revealing, conceals the true nature of what has passed. Through verbiage and excessive reasoning Stevens tries to fool himself and the reader. Miss Kenton and her attempts to flirt with Stevens are concealed in the narration by Stevens’ refusal to ascribe any kind of romantic meaning to them. They appear only as words, and we need to divine their hidden depths for ourselves. Likewise, Stevens structures his trip to Miss Kenton – he initially “forgets” that she’s married and now Mrs Benn – as a business trip. But to the reader it’s clear enough that there is a romantic interest involved too.

We would be forgiven for thinking that Stevens does not realise what he is doing, that he is deceiving himself. The truth is much more sad. As the book draws to a close we find Stevens, at the end of the day, sitting by the beach. As he talks with a stranger it becomes clear that he knows that his life has been filled with mistakes, and that he’s trying desperately to find something good in all of them. The ending at least gives us a glimmer of hope, that though Stevens is old, still he might yet change, and find joy in what remains to him, and what has passed him by.

A photo of an English country house, located in front of a pond
An English country house, of the sort that Mr Stevens spends his life in. But is there something missing in that world and that life? photo by Ronald Searle (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Great Butler and the Stiff Upper Lip

We English tend not to talk about our feelings, not even among friends. Stevens, one can tell, has never confided a thing to anybody. But though he has survived, The Remains of the Day raises the question of how far our English taciturnity is cause for celebration. Stevens is preoccupied with the question of “what is a great butler”, a question he explores with almost academic rigour. A large part of it is the stiff upper lip, what Stevens terms dignity. It is the decision never to let one’s feelings either show or affect one’s work. Stevens, in his own description of himself, asks the reader to consider whether he himself might be such a butler. For anybody who has been reading, his loyalty to Lord Darlington and his dignity in the face of his father’s death, are all compelling evidence of his “greatness”.

But Stevens never asks us at what cost this greatness has been attained. The Remains of the Day doesn’t just undermine Stevens’ narrative, it also challenges the very values he holds dear. What we see, even if he doesn’t, is that being a great butler attacks Stevens’ own humanity. The coldness, the dedication to one’s craft that Stevens practices, dehumanises him. He is unable to “banter”, to engage in the world and form non-professional relationships with other people. He suffers especially harshly at the hands of his new American employer, Mr Farraday, for whom bantering is second nature.

But Stevens also doesn’t appreciate beauty either. Although he claims to live in one of the most magical places in England, he rarely shows it. Whether the portraits on the wall or silver on the table, the beauty in objects simply becomes part of Stevens’ job – he must keep things clean and shiny. It is only extremely infrequently, and often in the company of Miss Kenton, that Stevens’ narration is forced, for a moment, to acknowledge the beauty of the sun setting or the grounds of the manor house. Stevens is a great butler, but for all that he’s lost his friends, he’s failed to find love, and he cannot even appreciate the beauty that lies in front of him. Truth be told, the cost of his excellence seems far too high.

The Glory of the Past

The common note in The Remains of the Day, even before Stevens’ personal failures are explored, is melancholy and decline. It is the gentle melancholy of Chekhov, seeing the world fall apart but not wishing to intervene. In Ishiguro’s novel this decline is primarily a decline of the worldview and corresponding world of the British upper class. We see this immediately at the novel’s beginning. Stevens has remained in the employ of the owners of Darlington Hall, but the Darlingtons are nowhere to be seen. Instead, an outsider – and American – has arrived, and most of the original staff have left. Americans in The Remains of the Day represent the future. Lord Darlington, dismayed by the cruel treatment of Germany with the Treaty of Versailles, hopes to change the treaty’s contents.

To this end, Darlington eventually organises a conference with major figures from all across Europe. The goal is to pressure their respective governments to ease the reparations demanded of Germany. It is a noble goal, motivated by honour and respect for the First World War’s defeated countries. However, it is a goal from a bygone age. An American in attendance stands and gives a speech where he attacks all of the Europeans for their foolish idealism, for their useless values and amateurism. What they need to succeed is cunning and professionalism. He is booed out of the conference. But Hitler succeeds precisely because he knew how to manipulate this idealism, how to appeal to the values of the British classes when encouraging appeasement. In the end, of course, the American is proved right.

The glorious past that Stevens loves is revealed, over the course of The Remains of the Day, to be ultimately an illusion. Darlington, with his conference a failure, dabbles in fascism and dies a disgrace. Antisemitism leads to the unfair dismissal of two maids, and Stevens – ever the professional – refuses even to comfort them as he removes them from their positions. Stevens is also a terrible elitist and snob without ever, really, justifying these views. As easy as it is to begin The Remains of the Day with a sense of nostalgia, it’s equally hard not to end the book with a feeling of disappointment in the world that lies behind us. Of course, there was a lot to value in some of the old British values – but there was far more that really isn’t worth our time.

Conclusion

It was interesting as I read The Remains of the Day to see how my attitude to Stevens himself changed. At first I thought of him as something of a buffoon. But then as time went on that bemusement morphed into sadness, disappointment, and finally a kind of anger. I was angry that Stevens was so obsessed about being a great butler that he came to neglect everything else in the world. I was angry that he spends the entire book lying to himself. It’s only at the very end that there’s a brief hint that all that might change. But I was glad of it, just as I was glad for Stevens. In truth, I pitied him.

the original cover of The Remains of the Day, showing a pocket watch on a black background
The book’s original cover.

The Remains of the Day is a lovely book. Its story of decline hidden under the façade of class glory rings true with my own experience of the declining position of old elites. It is wonderfully written – it is not beautiful, but it is the perfect blend of form and content. Stevens feels incredibly real, and his self-delusion seems strikingly real too. There are many of us who go through life trying to tell ourselves that our own course is the right one. But sooner or later the time comes when we must face the truth of our error. Even if we are already in the remains of our own days upon this earth, there is still great value in taking the step towards self-knowledge. In that sense, for all its melancholy, the message of The Remains of the Day remains an uplifting one. Check it out.

For more delicate treatment of the past, consider Salvatore Satta’s tale of the coming of modernity in Sardinia, The Day of Judgement, reviewed here; and also Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time, presenting in an interview format the collapse of the Soviet Union from those who experienced it, reviewed here.