The Remains of the Day and Dignity

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel The Remains of the Day, which, in the form of a diary, tells the story of the career of Stevens, an English butler, revolves centrally around the concept of dignity. The concept of dignity as a carefully conditioned form of inaction motivates Stevens to make a number of tragic decisions, many of which he later regrets. By building a complex relationship between the reader and both Stevens and Stevens’ conception of dignity, Ishiguro creates a complicated moral space in which it is hard to find one’s footing.

At its core, Stevens’ conception of dignity comes from a very mannered form of inaction, of the absence of soiling oneself with what would be considered work. His understanding of the concept seems to be a modern version of the ways in which figures of authority were treated in certain anthropological studies, in that the leader, considered to be some form of deity on earth, could not soil themselves with the act of work, with one anthropologist reporting the story of a chief who died rather than move his form from the plate to his mouth on his own. One can see in the conception of dignity as espoused by Stevens, and which certainly mirrors a very real sociological phenomenon among the upper class at the time in which the novel is set, two ways in which it is a development of this idea of certain categories of person being above the act of anything but sitting around and acquiring prestige.

First, the performance of dignity as a concept shows that the person giving the performance has spent their free time on the acquisition of certain skills. If Lord Darlington, Stevens’ employer, shows in his social skills that he has spent time developing an air of dignity, it serves as a form of guarantee that the time in which he is not being seen by others he is spending in the perusal of the useless arts—useless not in a judgmental sense, but in the sense of them not being in the service of work, or other activities that would not fit within a figure of his stature. This idea of showing that one is not spending one’s time working, but instead on the development of certain approved skills, extends to Stevens as a butler, as it shows that Lord Darlington possesses so much wealth, he can keep on retainer people who spend as much time studying the useless arts as he does.

In addition to this crudely economic interpretation of dignity, it can also be seen as a form of guarantee of behavior. If, in one’s company, a person is committed to being aloof and inactive, then it is reasonable to assume they will act the same way when out of one’s view. Dignity acts as a form of guarantee, a character witness that can convince those with whom one interacts that this is not the sort of person who, in their off-time, soils themselves with activities unworthy of someone of their class. Again, this extends just as much to Stevens as it does to Lord Darlington, his employer; the true sign of belonging in the upper class is not just that one does not break the rules of their class, but that one can hire others to not break the same rules. Stevens, more than his actual activity of serving as the butler for the estate, is thus a living status symbol, a piece of human cultural capital.

What makes Stevens’ conception of dignity so fascinating in the context of the novel, therefore, is his deep connection with the idea of dignity, despite being one which, arguably, does not benefit him sociologically. Instead of it being an internal necessity of his class, like it is for Lord Darlington, it is instead an effect of his job and is one whose benefits are divested not upon him, but upon his boss. The ways in which Stevens has internalized the concept of dignity as the highest good form the fascinating core of the novel.

Stevens’ conception of dignity involves as a crucial element the idea of banter, an art he is constantly trying to perfect. He conceives of banter as a patter of light-hearted conversation which, ultimately, has very little character to it outside the pleasure of using language well. This form of content-less language, of language used merely to use language, expresses the same carefully-cultivated lack of action that the category of dignity implies, applied to conversation; Stevens is attempting to learn how to take time to say nothing, in the same way that the actions of dignity—doing things carefully, methodically, according to a set of rules that only exist so that there would be rules to follow—is the act of taking time to do nothing. By acquiring this skill, he is, as explained above, spending his time in the pursuit of a useless art, an art that could, by no stretch of the imagination, be usable for productive, meaning undignified, purposes. He has internalized the desire to cultivate this form of conspicuous leisure, in Thorstein Veblen’s term.

However, over the course of the retrospection that makes up the novel, he realizes that his commitment to dignity and correctness cost him the love of Miss Kenton, and, in turn, he realizes to what an extent his pursuit of dignity has cost him his happiness over the course of his life. There are two fascinating aspects of this that complicate the reading of the novel considerably. The first is to what an extent one should consider Stevens’ submergence of his own personal wants and desires to this conception of dignity a tragic mistake on his part, or one that he could never have avoided. Is the conception of dignity that forms his identity a path he chose or was it an inevitable effect of the form his society took and the job into which he was born? The question here is a matter of reader-character relationship. What form of tragic figure is Stevens: one cursed by his fateful decision to pursue a form of dignity, or one cursed by his position in life to unhappiness? The first would turn him into an existentialist hero like Kant, who commits to a particular decision despite all that it costs him; the second would turn him into almost a social realist figure, showing the misery and unhappiness of the class system in Britain. The former, arguably, opens up a more interesting ethical space which the reader can explore, as one can question the value of committing oneself to a certain ideal at the expense of all that one truly cares about. 

The second question is attached to the first: To what extent is Stevens a tragic figure? Surely, when he breaks down and cries at the end of the novel (Ishiguro 222), the reader finds oneself in a position of pity for what he fears is a life unlived, but for most of the novel, Stevens is perfectly happy to perfect the art of not living his own life. If the work is interpreted along existentialist lines, his commitment to his personal conception of life, with all of its arbitrary character, is, in a way, admirable, with his tears at the end showing only that he realizes the cost that this form of existentialist purity can cause a person, and with his final decision—to enjoy what remains of his life with his new superior—showing the degree to which he is still, despite everything, committed to his ideals. There is something admirable in his single-mindedness, even as one may consider the qualities in whose service he devotes himself arbitrary and harmful to society as a whole.

In these final moments, Ishiguro opens up a complex space of ethical interaction between the reader and Stevens the character, as it becomes impossible to hold onto a simple relationship of pity or admiration for him as a figure. Instead, the two collapse into one another, showing the difficulty of understanding and relating to a literary character who may be far removed from the reader’s world.

Work Cited

Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. New York: Knopf, 1989. Print.