Telling positions: country, countryside, and narration in The Remains of the Day.(Report)

There is, in retrospect, a certain inevitability about the 1993 Merchant/Ivory cinematic adaptation of The Remains of the Day. The novel itself seemed made to order for the team's literary sensibilities: an opulent period piece centered on the gradual coming to emotional consciousness of a central character whose life work placed him at the "hub" of unvoiced class conflict. Not unsurprisingly, the film's release on the heels of their adaptations of E.M. Forster novels had the effect of underscoring the implicit Forsterian values of Ishiguro's novel: responsibility, the importance of "connection," a liberal vision of the Condition of England. Indeed, the release of Howard's End just the year before furthered these links--critics pointed out that the latter film's recasting of Remains's leads (Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson) and similarities in setting (country houses in some now lost past) and thematics (those Forsterian values again) had the effect of serializing the two films. In this Derridean imbrication of source and response, the romance plot that remains a narrative loose end in Remains is happily resolved in the adaptation of Howard's End, a film set decades before Remains. Such retroactive resolution also serves as perhaps the calling card for a genre that had become virtually synonymous with the Merchant/Ivory team over the course of the 80s and early 90s--the "heritage film." (1) It thus seems fitting that this cycle, one characterized by Edwardian and Georgian settings and adaptations staged in front of luxurious upper-crust settings, would conclude by making the country houses that had been the back-drops for the genre characters in their own right. By doing so, both films--and their source novels--come to stand as summary statements of the debates surrounding the heritage films: that their narratives were short-circuited by a fetishistic focus on aristocratic settings, that the liberal ethics of the source novels had been defused by an imagery that owed much to Margaret Thatcher's "heritage politics"--in short, that a Saatchian sheen speaks louder than Forsterian narration in these films. As such, these films ironically serve as very different Condition of England narratives in their schizophrenic deployment of conservative imagery and liberal narrative judgment. They thus vividly depict a crisis in national identity, one that is written back into the novels themselves. It is through the prism of this rewriting that I will examine Englishness in The Remains of the Day, a national identity that is both figured in--and affected by--the recirculation of heritage imagery back into novelistic form.

Because of this iterative tension between iconography and evaluation, Remains poses an interpretative problem: to what degree is the house and the relations it embodies ironized? Indeed, this issue raises the further problem of the connection between Ishiguro's novel and the loss of Empire: on the one hand, the novel studiously avoids any direct treatment of imperial relations; on the other, as Salman Rushdie points out, the fact that the novel's present is the very month the Suez crisis began with Nasser's nationalization of the Canal is no accident (246). It is precisely this obscuring of relations that I will track in Remains. In addition to the novel's country house, Darlington Hall, this cloaking operation drapes itself around the sites of the English landscape and the village of Moscombe, all of which are important settings for the novel's articulation of a pastoral and nostalgically positioned Englishness.

My argument here depends on postcolonial accounts of Englishness: that this national identity was formulated in large part through the "traumatic scenario of racial difference" encountered in the colonial crucible (Bhabha 107). (2) Englishness was formulated by retroactively identifying the key features of English culture seen to distinguish colonizer from the radical alterity of the colonized. Such an identity proved to be unstable, however, for it depended on the mediation of the Other and on a temporal split opened through the nostalgic location of national essence in the now lost past. The country house, the English landscape, and rural communities--all signifiers of a lost and pastoral nation--then function as signs for this decaying identity. The intersection of country house, countryside, and Stevens's own unreliable narration raises important issues regarding the occlusion of imperial relations. These themes all stress the role of perspective in the articulation of national identity. Indeed, the nostalgic air of these sites of national icons helps establish the novel's sense of a belated Englishness, one figured through the temporal fracturing of narrative form.

Engl ish Treasures

Crucial here is the image of the country house, an image that, as Patrick Wright demonstrates in the second chapter of On Living in an Old Country, came to stand for both the wealth of England's heritage and a largely decayed social hierarchy. (3) Indeed, the Merchant/Ivory films themselves became a political litmus test due to their focus on the country house. Much ire was raised by the perception that these films continued the Thatcherite equation of heritage with the house, an equation reflected in Peter Mandler's ecstatic gush that the country house represented England's "greatest contribution to Western civilization [...] the purest expression of the national genius" (401). Similarly, Patrick Cormack suggests

 
  These houses are a special public possession for it is in them and in 
  our churches that we perhaps come closest to the soul and spirit of 
  England. Germany has its castles, France its chateaux, and Italy its 
  villas and England its country houses [...]. Set in their spacious 
  parklands and often containing priceless collections, our country 
  houses are part of the very fabric of our civilization [...]. These 
  owners could more properly be called stewards or trustees. Their 
  special position, and the importance of what they hold in trust for 
  the nation, has been increasingly recognized since the end of the 
  First World War, which marked the end of the great era of 
  country-house living. (49-50) 

Many critics of heritage seized on this equation of national identity and the country house as inherently conservative, for it functionally stresses Englishness as residing in private property. (4) Remains in fact preserves this tension in its very form, for the privately owned country house in the novel betrays a similar focus on personal privacy. However, this very English reserve is founded, like the country house that supports it, on a colonial foundation, one now fallen away. The novel thus raises the problem of how this national identity of privacy is affected by the loss of its external support and by the increasing visibility of internal fissures.