A theme I’d like to pursue in thinking about this remarkable book, is that Emigrants is (among other things) about the effect on the narrator of learning the more complete lives of the four men in the story. However, that effect is not spelled out beyond the clear implication that the narrator was very moved by learning these fuller stories. It is left open, so that the reader’s own reaction is not constrained by the narrator’s. In conversation with Dena, (always a pleasant activity), I got excited over the idea that maybe the character of Paul in the second section of Emigrants, is similar to the implied author of a novel. By way of review, the implied author is an entity “distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the "authorial character" that a reader infers from a text based on the way a literary work is written. Dena and I were talking about Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert, who may have disappointed her readers by divorcing her husband—after the book’s warm climax of finding love with him—true love, the reader was led to believe. But apparently, the real Elizabeth was a different person than the persona or implied author she created in the book. Some might say this was treachery—maybe if you present a book as being your real story, you are vulnerable to being accused of lying if it isn’t. But Eat, Pray, Love was clearly marked as memoir, no? Last week, we considered whether Emigrants is fiction or something else, as it’s based on “real” experience. (Why do you keep putting the word “real” in parentheses? It’s annoying). I concluded that there was a strong element of fiction in this work. Sebald himself talks about a process of “fictionalization” of “real” events and people. (Please respond to my complaint.) In Paul Bereyter, the reader is told a story by a narrator who receives disturbing news. “In January 1984, the news reached me from S that on the evening of the 30th of December, a week after his seventy-fourth birthday, Paul Bereyter, who had been my teacher at primary school, had put an end to his life.” A train came out of the darkness, and he had lain down on the railroad tracks outside of town. The narrator, who for years had thought of Paul as the best teacher ever, is devastated. “…in the end, I had to go beyond my own very fond memories of him and discover the story I did not know.” He sets out to learn what he can about Paul from family and friends, in order to understand how such a positive man could destroy himself. And he discovers that Paul’s excellence as a teacher may have been an attempt to overcome a dark past. Paul was partly Jewish, and his family was persecuted by the Nazis; Paul himself was curiously drafted into the German Army and served during WWII. He suffered from mental health problems and deteriorating eyesight which eventually forced him to give up teaching. Like all the characters in Emigrants, he was afflicted by a feeling of not belonging anywhere. Just as a reader might have a strong reaction to Elizabeth Gilbert’s being a different person than her character in Eat, Pray, Love, the narrator was disturbed that Paul Bereyter might be different from the image he had of him as the “author” of a significant part of his childhood. Of course, the narrator in Emigrants is not a “real” person. (Oh, no. Here we go again. And in typical bully style, you’re ignoring me). It’s an illusion that he’s “real” just as there was an illusion that Elizabeth Gilbert was “really” the protagonist of Eat, Pray, Love. (What?) The narrator believes Paul was the same person he’d come to know in school, just as the reader of fiction thinks the author is the same person who wrote the book. But Paul’s death tips the narrator off to the illusion. He presents Paul’s more complete story, and the reader is invited to react. Let’s revisit our old example of the Dick and Jane stories. I’ve written before about how, as a child reading those books in the first grade, I had no idea of and no interest in who the author, William S. Gray, was. I suppose I had a vague idea that Mr. Gray might actually be my teacher, Miss Schroeder (who I had a crush on, but we don’t have to get into that). What if I had learned, or learned in this present, that Mr. Gray was an alcoholic loner who finally killed himself? A survivor who wrote children’s books to deal with the trauma of intense WWII combat? How would this affect me? I might feel betrayed. I might feel grief. I might decide it didn’t really matter, that the texts were what were important, no matter who wrote them. At least I learned how to read. If I were like the narrator of Emigrants, I’d embark on a program of research into Mr. Gray’s previously hidden life, trying to understand and document its complexity by interviewing his survivors. Did Paul betray his students by hiding his pain? Did he betray them by killing himself? Was what was of real importance the way he helped and inspired his students? (A lot of questions). Yes. #TheEmigrants #W.G.Sebald

In Amazon’s system of classification, Emigrants is found under literature and biography, and the promotion says the book combines elements of biography with fiction. It is a somewhat jarring experience to begin reading the book, perhaps with the expectation that it is fiction, because the four stories, combined with the black and white photographs, that comprise the narrative have such a sharply realistic quality. The photographs in the Henry Selwyn section seem to follow the text closely—except for the enigmatic one of a misty church graveyard. It leaves you guessing: Were Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth and Max Ferber real people? If not, who and what are the photographs of? The first section, Dr. Henry Selwyn, concerns a man whom the narrator—who never mentions his own name—meets while looking for a place to live. The narrator refers to himself as “I” and curiously is accompanied by someone named Clara—the real Sebald’s wife’s name was Ute. In an interview with James Wood, Sebald says that Selwyn was a real person, and that Sebald met him and learned more about his life by interviewing family members. It would seem then that this is a story about an encounter with a real person, an account of what this person said about himself, of what others said about him, and of the thoughts and feelings he provoked in the narrator. Is any of it invented or fabricated? Yes. Does that make it fiction? Maybe, best beloved. That is a difficult question that gets at the issue of what fiction is. Jacques Ranciere in his book, The Edges of Fiction writes: “What distinguishes fiction from ordinary experience is not a lack of reality but a surfeit of rationality.” He goes on to discuss Aristotle who said that history presents how things happened as isolated, particular events, whereas fiction talks about events that do not occur at random but in consequence of a chain of cause and effect. The gods or fate do not cause this chain, the actions of the protagonist do. And these actions must be contrary to what the reader expects—there is always a reversal, a peripeteia that must be resolved. There is nothing here about whether or not the events “really” occurred, rather that, in fiction, they are shown to be caused by humans. By this definition, Emigrants begins to look more like fiction. In Dr. Henry Selwyn, Dr. Selwyn reveals certain aspects of his life to the narrator. He welcomes the narrator and “Clara” into his home and allows them to observe his eccentric lifestyle. He tells the narrator about his life and how he is “homesick” for his childhood, spent in a different country. He was taken to England when he was seven and grew up there, assimilating in a successful manner, even changing his name. He erases his origins and marries, not telling his wife who he really was. And now, in old age, he mourns his past and is unable to be comfortable in the house he lives in, his place of exile. He feels he doesn’t fit anywhere and can only spend his time with animals and plants. After the narrator moves on, Dr. Selwyn shoots himself. One could describe this man’s life as a biographer or historian would—the significant events, the places lived. The people known. Sebald focuses on the way in which Dr. Selwyn adapted to a new country. He rejected his old one and changed his name and identity. He worked hard to become a physician and was successful. Reading this story, one might expect him to continue to meet success, have a family and a career. Happiness. But that is not the case. Dr. Selwyn gradually loses interest in his marriage and his work as a doctor. He becomes melancholy and reclusive, eventually retiring to the dilapidated estate where the narrator encounters him. His life does not go according to plan. He is unable to escape being from somewhere else and feeling, as a result, that he doesn’t belong anywhere. In the interview with James Wood, Sebald responds to the question, is The Emigrants real? “Essentially, yes, with some small changes…Dr. Henry Selwyn, for instance, lived in that house, not in Hingham, but in another village in Norfolk. His wife was just like that, Swiss and very shrewd. She’s still alive, I think and so is Elaine, their most peculiar maid.” Selwyn did have a Swiss mountaineering friend but it was not Johannes Naegeli, whom Sebald read about in a magazine. “It just needed a tiny rapprochement to make it fit…The invention comes in at the level of minor detail most of the time, to provide l’effet du reel.” In a piece about the process of translating Sebald, Michael Hulse shares a letter he wrote to “Max” as he calls him, where he expresses concern that Emigrants might be fiction. “That fiction and imagination are in some manner involved I do not question, but it matters to me to locate them within the documentary aspect of your texts, as a token of your dedication to your quest for these lives…where (does) the literal truth stop and your imaginative re-creation or addition begin?” Sebald responds: “Fictionalization, as I see it, is, in this text not a matter of substance, that is to say it is nothing to do with making up characters, events that befall them and complicated plots. Rather, the sense of fiction, the feeling that one is at a level removed, by a notch or so, from reality is meant to come out of adjusting the focus of the telescope one looks through, so that some things seem very distant and others (especially those which are in the past) quite close and immediate. ‘Kay. Next week, we’ll go deeper into the story. Till then. #TheEmigrants #W.G.Sebald

This week, a new story, The Emigrants by the late German author W.G. Sebald. I’m reading Michael Hulse’s 1996 translation of the 1992 original in German. Austerlitz was the first book I’d read by Sebald, followed in rapid succession by The Emigrants and Vertigo, then later The Rings of Saturn and his essays. Although Sebald was fluent in English—he taught at a university in England most of his life—he left translation to others. Translation was key to the success of Emigrants in America and other English-speaking lands. Michael Hulse does a wonderful job—I’d have to speak German to appreciate all his artistry, but I offer the opening sentence of the first section of The Emigrants as an example: “At the end of September 1970, directly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live.” A beautiful sentence, with great drive and rhythm. It very neatly answers the questions when, where, how, and why. It also introduces a key theme of the story—the search for a place to live. All the book’s characters are emigrants from somewhere else and struggle with feelings of not belonging. The story has four sections of unequal length. Each presents a narrator—never named, but who seems to be rather like Sebald himself—telling the story of four men: Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth, and Max Ferber. Each contains a similar theme of emigration from and loss of a homeland. I would like to examine each section in detail, but today, I want to consider some aspects of Sebald the writer. Recently, I watched Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novak’s excellent documentary on Ernest Hemingway and learned about how Hemingway actively created a persona or avatar, as the filmmakers call it, who was the imaginary author of the writing, the imaginary Ernest Hemingway—different from the real human and,—by the way—immortal. Authors of fiction always do this creation, but some more so than others and more willfully. W.G. Sebald (called Max by those who knew him) seemed to be an author who actively created less of a persona but as a result, invited more speculation. In barebones, we know that Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and grew up in the aftermath of WWII. He emigrated to England and taught European Literature in the city of Norwich, writing and publishing many fine works of literary criticism before his first work of fiction, The Emigrants, in 1992. This won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize, and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal and met with considerable acclaim, particularly after it was translated into English in 1996. Sebald wrote three other works of fiction; his final book Austerlitz, is regarded as his masterpiece. He was married, had one daughter, and tragically died at age 57 in a car accident in 2001. That’s about it. There are some fascinating interviews available as well as several books of criticism and essays. But the Sebald or Max who exists as an imaginary writer the way Hemingway did is elusive. There are a number of photographs—in fact photography plays a major role in Sebald’s writing—something we’ll get to later. The pictures of him show a serious man of middle age, often wearing wire-rimmed glasses, chinos and a wrinkled shirt. He had a thick, graying mustache and was rarely smiling. Nothing heroic, or Hemingway-esque. An intellectual perhaps, someone who was very focused on memory and writing. He was sometimes shown studying a dog-eared paperback. The interviews with him focus on his writing, not his biography. He downplays who he was. There are no statements I can find of this sort: “Sebald loved to force his way into European libraries brandishing a camera and automatic pistol. He’d insist on copying the most delicate and treasured manuscripts, sometimes beating hapless staff members with a dog-eared paperback till he got what he wanted. However, he was equally skilled at charming his way out of the resulting trouble with the authorities, often by drinking them under the table.” (Whiny voice. Mr. Big Shot, Avatar was a science fiction movie. I’ve got you this time, you literary bully. You made all this up, just like always). What I’m attempting to talk about is how images of authors exist for their readers—whether they create them or not. Our society creates avatars of authors, partly as a way to sell their work, partly because readers want to get to know a version of who they’re reading. (You have a mustache, so did Hemingway. You’re the one who’s copying.) I can say for myself that while reading Emigrants, I was curious about who Sebald the author was. I learned what I could and essentially formed an impression of him as a scholarly man, someone who was very sensitive and not interested in celebrity. Someone who loved books and writing. Was this the image Sebald wished to present? Probably. Was it close to who he really was? I think so, but am not certain. Next week, I want to talk about whether the form of the Emigrants is fiction or something else. Till then. And I do have a mustache and beard—they are mine, not Ernest Hemingway’s. I like to be fuzzy. #TheEmigrants #W.G.Sebald

I'm pleased to announce my story "The Loss of the Whaling Ship Pequod" is now live on the Blue Lake Review site. Here's a link: https://bluelakereview.weebly.com/the-loss-of-the-whaling-ship-pequod.html Many thanks to Blue Lake's Editor, Mitchell Waldman, and to Will Allison, who edited the story. Yes, there is a Moby Dick reference here, but the story isn't really about whaling. #AlanBray #BlueLakeReview

The last chapter of Remains is entitled Weymouth. It begins with Mr. Stevens sitting on a pier, or boardwalk, by the sea, waiting for the evening lights to be turned on. Light and darkness as metaphor for revelation and repression play an important part in the story, and this is a fine example. He then recounts the content of his meeting two days prior with Miss Kenton, which in many ways is the climax of the book. James Phelan, in his book Living To Tell About It, presents a fine analysis of the extraordinary skill Ishiguro displays throughout this chapter. It begins: “This seaside town is a place I have been thinking of coming to for many years. …this pier, upon which I have been promenading for the past half-hour…A moment ago, I learned from an official that the lights would be turned on ‘fairly soon’, and so I have decided to sit down here on this bench and await the event. …it has been a splendid day. … It is now fully two days since my meeting with Miss Kenton in the tea lounge of the Rose Garden Hotel in Little Compton…Miss Kenton surprised me by coming to the hotel. I was, I believe, simply staring at the rain on the window by my table. … The light in the room was extremely gloomy on account of the rain. But by and large the Miss Kenton I saw before me looked surprisingly similar to the person who had inhabited my memory over these years.” What’s of note here is that the chapter begins in the story’s present time, and shows Mr. Stevens looking back two days in time and recalling not only his long awaited rendezvous with Miss Kenton, but also a more recent encounter he’s had with another man on the pier. Thus the character Mr. Stevens knows what’s occurred as he relates the tale and, like a good storyteller, withholds this information until he’s ready to present it. Actually, I believe this is a trace of the implied author, who is the good storyteller. Miss Kenton had surprised Mr. Stevens by seeking him out early rather than keeping their appointment. Mr. Stevens quickly learned that she had reconciled with her husband and had no intention of returning to Darlington Hall as he had dreamed might be possible. But what really rocked Mr. Stevens occurs as they wait for the bus which will carry Miss Kenton away. In his awkward fashion, he steered their conversation toward more intimacy by saying he’d been concerned that Miss Kenton’s husband might be somehow abusive. She reassured him that her husband was not abusive but took things further: “I suppose, Mr. Stevens, you’re asking if I love my husband.” She said that she does but, after a period of silence, continued: “But that doesn’t mean to say, of course, there aren’t occasions now and then—extremely desolate occasions—when you think to yourself, What a terrible mistake I’ve made with my life. And you get to thinking about a different life, a better life, you might have had. For instance I get to thinking about a life I might have had with you, Mr. Stevens…” This was devastating for Mr. Stevens, he reports his heart broke. Why though? I don’t think it’s because he’s shocked at Miss Kenton’s pronouncement and acknowledgement that she more or less loved him. I think that’s what he suspected all along and that this news is more confirmation than anything. Confirmation that he blew it, that there’s no time now to make things right. It’s too late, and he felt the tragedy. What a life I might have had. Also, what she said is central to his own life. The fear of having made a terrible mistake with life, of missing a different, better existence is a driving force in Mr. Stevens’ reality, not just as regards Miss Kenton, but also relative to his service to Lord Darlington. But the point is that as the chapter begins with Mr. Stevens sitting on the pier, he already knows what’s happened, it’s the reader who does not. His narration doesn’t begin: “I am sitting here, and my heart is broken. I’m an idiot.” Perhaps it is more accurate to say he doesn’t feel this way at that moment. In true Mr. Stevens fashion, he’s covered the pain he feels with denial and focuses on the anticipation of when the lights will be turned on. Ooh, metaphor. However, he then relates an equally devastating encounter he’s just had with an older man who was sitting next to him on the pier, a man who quickly discloses he too was once a butler. As I’ve said before, this man is the embodiment of the person Mr. Stevens has been addressing all along in his “diary,” the “you” whom he believes will surely understand him. The others on the pier are willing the night to fall—Mr. Stevens imagines. (Still in the present—after the encounter). “This confirms very aptly, I suppose, the man who until a little while ago was sitting here beside me on this bench, and with whom I had my curious discussion. His claim was that for a great many people, the evening was the best part of the day, the part they most looked forward to…Of course, the man had been speaking figuratively, but it is rather interesting to see his words borne out so immediately at the literal level. I would suppose he had been sitting here next to me for some minutes without my noticing him, so absorbed had I become with my recollections of meeting Miss Kenton two days ago. In fact, I do not think I registered his presence on the bench at all until he declared out loud: “Sea air does you a lot of good…The fact is,” I said after a while, “I gave my best to Lord Darlington. I gave him the very best I had to give, and now—well—I find I do not have a great deal more left to give…Oh dear, mate. You want a hankie?” Here, it’s revealed that Mr. Stevens is crying—not by Mr. Stevens who merely says he’s “overtired” but by the reported utterance of the other man. Mr. Stevens continues: “Lord Darlington wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t a bad man at all. And at least he had the privilege of being able to say at the end of his life that he made his own mistakes. His lordship was a courageous man. He chose a particular path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship’s wisdom. All these years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really, what dignity is there in that?” The other man replies: “Now look mate…if you ask me, your attitude’s all wrong, see? Don’t keep looking back all the time, you’re bound to get depressed. And all right, you can’t do your job as well as you used to. But it’s the same for all of us, see? We’ve all got to put our feet up at some point; You’ve got to keep looking forward…The evening’s the best part of the day.” There’s tremendous irony here. That the evening is the best part of the day is a theme throughout Remains, but of course this sentiment is not true for Mr. Stevens who has managed to hold all the pain of his life at bay until the end when it makes his heart break. At the last page, Mr. Stevens focuses on the future, listening to the people on the pier talk and trying to pick out if they’re “bantering” with one another. Bantering is the language that Mr. Stevens does not know how to speak but would like to learn in order to better serve his new employer, Mr. Farraday. I think what this represents is not a complete regression to his old coping mechanism of denial and repression. During the course of his journey and of the story, Mr. Stevens experiences a shattering self-realization but from that, he resolves to transform to someone who can banter—perhaps learning to use humor to soften the tragedy of his own life, a defense mechanism Dr. Freud would approve of, especially over denial. ‘Kay. Next week a new offering, The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald. Till then. #TheRemainsOfTheDay #KazuoIshiguro

Although Mr. Stevens spends considerable time reflecting on the past during his journey, he is at times confronted by people from the present who challenge his beliefs. On the afternoon of the second day of the trip, Mr. Stevens has car trouble and encounters a man identified as a servant or batman, who in the course of assisting Mr. Stevens, learns he was employed at Darlington Hall. “Then his voice changed noticeably as he inquired: “You mean you actually used to work for that Lord Darlington?” He was eyeing me carefully again. I said: “Oh, no. I am employed by Mr. John Farraday, the American gentleman who bought the house from Lord Darlington.” Oh no, indeed. Stevens adopts St. Peter’s playbook in denying he knew Christ. This is an important passage and an example of how the story calls for two levels of reading. On the level of his narration, Mr. Stevens describes the encounter in bland, concrete terms. He offers no explanation for his misleading response that no, he didn’t work for or by implication knew Lord Darlington—when the reader knows that he did. Also, the careful reader will note further clues provided by the implied author: the manner in which the man asks Mr. Stevens about “that” Lord Darlington—his voice changes noticeably, he is “eyeing” Mr. Stevens to see his response. The implication here, given weight by Mr. Stevens’ earlier mention of the negative way in which Lord Darlington is perceived, is that the man is raising the issue of Lord Darlington’s tarnished reputation and frankly wondering if Mr. Stevens should be tarnished by it as well. Mr. Stevens doesn’t “let on” if he’s aware of this innuendo, he only relates his response sans commentary. He denies knowing Lord Darlington, a man he claims to have been devoted to. Mr. Stevens then goes to a nearby pond to sit quietly and view nature. He reflects: “Indeed, but for the tranquility of the present setting, it is possible I would not have thought a great deal further about my behavior during my encounter with the batman…I may not have thought further why it was that I had given the distinct impression I had never been in the employ of Lord Darlington…It could be that a meaningless whim had suddenly overtaken me at that moment…” Then Mr. Stevens recalls a second time when he denied knowing Lord Darlington, and then says: ”It may be that you are under the impression that I am somehow embarrassed or ashamed of my association with his lordship…nothing could be further from the truth…Indeed, it seems to me that my odd conduct can be very plausibly explained in terms of my wish to avoid any possibility of hearing any further such nonsense concerning his lordship…I have chosen to tell white lies in both instances as the simplest means of avoiding unpleasantness…Nothing could be less accurate to suggest that I regret my association with such a gentleman.” But why then, the reader must ask, the “white lies?” Just to avoid “unpleasantness?” It’s interesting here that Mr. Stevens must take some “tranquil” time to reflect on what’s happened in order to develop an explanation, saying that otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have thought about it. Personally, I don’t believe him at all. I think he is very aware of what he’s done and is ashamed. Ashamed, aware of the way Lord Darlington is regarded, and unwilling to defend him. This incident serves to alert the reader that “something is wrong,” and it also contributes to Mr. Stevens’ growing inability to keep denying that “something is wrong.” As he reflects on the past and is confronted by the present, he is faced with the way he’s distorted things and, regrettably, wasted his life. Mr. Stevens is an unreliable narrator of his experience. Unreliable to himself. But it takes time and further encounters for him to catch up with the reader on this matter. Mr. Stevens runs out of petrol and stays the night in the small village of Moscombe at a private home. During this evening, the villagers believe Mr. Stevens is a gentleman, and he does nothing to dissuade them, claiming to have known Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden on a much more equal basis than he actually did. One of the villagers, Mr. Harry Smith, challenges Stevens’ definition of dignity, saying that dignity is a quality all men and women have a claim to as citizens of England who fought and defeated Hitler. Mr. Stevens is disturbed by the idea and tries to privately dismiss Harry Smith’s opinions. An idea he has clung to is that whatever mistakes have been made by he and by Lord Darlington, his service to the man has been justified by his showing dignity, the mark of an excellent butler. Now he’s being confronted by someone who says people have dignity because they take stands and oppose tyrants, risk their lives and survive. These stakes are much higher than those Mr. Stevens played. He must exert considerable energy to shore up his collapsing beliefs. He says later on: “But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such an event turned out differently? One could presumably drive one’s self to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of “turning points” one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one’s life, but at the time, of course, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as if one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out vagaries of one’s relationship with Miss Kenton, an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever unredeemable.” Profound, beautiful writing. #TheRemainsOfTheDay #KazuoIshiguro

Remains has an interesting structure. As I have said, the novel is broken up into a prologue and seven chapters, each one identified by a geographic place and by time. Thus we have Prologue July 1956 Darlington Hall, followed by Day One Evening Salisbury, and so on to the last which is identified as Day Six Evening Weymouth. Each chapter begins and ends with at least a sentence or two in the story’s present—the summer of 1956 (which interestingly is the time of the Suez Canal crisis, a diplomatic humiliation for the colonial Britain that Mr. Stevens idealizes). After the story provides a context of Mr. Stevens being wherever he is, he typically digresses into extended memory and association about the past—with some notable exceptions that occur in the present. We will get into those. I promise. Adam Parkes, in his book The Remains of the Day A Reader’s Companion, makes the point that the England Mr. Stevens journeys through is largely a mythic creation, not unlike Thomas Hardy’s evocation of a timeless, rural Wessex or William Faulkner’s American South. Some of the place names—Salisbury, Taunton, and Weymouth are real, but others—Mortimer’s Pond, Moscombe, and Little Compton—are inventions. This structure focuses the reader both on the passage of time as well as on a journey that is set outside normal time. It is a mythic time through an older part of England, a time in which Mr. Stevens, freed from his regular duties, is able to reflect and try to organize the past. The text is written as if it were Mr. Stevens’ making entries in a sort of diary which is written by an “I” and addressed to an unnamed “you,” who is, apparently, imagined as another butler—someone who would surely sympathize and understand Mr. Stevens’ story. So, we get an interesting artifact of first-person narration—the story has two audiences, the imagined “you” written to in the diary, and the actual reader who is unknown and unaddressed by the protagonist. The “you” is privy to what Mr. Stevens tells him/her, the real audience, to all Mr. Stevens relates plus the irony communicated by the implied author. (An example, if you please). In the Day Three Evening section, Mr. Stevens sets out in his diary to address “the question of his lordship’s attitude to Jewish persons, since this whole issue of anti-Semitism, I realize, has become a rather sensitive one these days. In particular, let me clear up this matter of a supposed bar to Jewish persons on the staff at Darlington Hall.” Well, yes, the whole issue of anti-Semitism had become rather sensitive in the wake of the Nazi’s program of genocide. A classic example of Mr. Stevens’ understated and possibly clueless thoughts. Mr. Stevens goes on to relate how Lord Darlington ordered two maids dismissed because they were Jewish, and how Mr. Stevens—although troubled—made little protest. And yet, somehow, Mr. Stevens is shocked, shocked, that anyone would call Lord Darlington anti-Semitic. He says: “…let me say furthermore that they (Jewish staff members) were never treated differently on account of their race. One really cannot guess the reason for these absurd allegations.” This is a nice example of the two levels of message: The imaginary addressee of Mr. Stevens’ diary would read about Lord Darlington’s “supposed” anti-Semitism and how shocked Mr. Stevens was that anyone could think he was so inclined. But then the same entry presents his anti-Semitic behavior, which is difficult to excuse unless you are Mr. Stevens. It’s obvious from the text (the implied author) that, in fact, the two maids were treated differently because they were Jewish—the opposite of what Mr. Stevens says. This structure of two-tiered communication is pervasive. What effect does it have? Adam Parkes says: “In Remains Ishiguro devises a style that tells the reader something is wrong even as the narrator claims the opposite.” Something is wrong. Mr. Stevens presents his memories and musings in, as we have seen, a very “sugar-coated” way. He travels through the beautiful English countryside in his employer’s car, stopping at inns and taverns to take the time to ponder how Lord Darlington, whom he served so faithfully, could now be thought a traitor. And perhaps with slightly more insight, he also recalls Miss Kenton, the object of his quest. If he can persuade her to re-join him at Darlington Hall, it might really “solve his staffing problems.” Indeed. Is Mr. Stevens simple-minded? Hiding something? James Phelan in his book, Living To Tell About It, makes a distinction between a story’s narrator underreporting or underreading what he tells the reader. Underreporting means that in this case, Mr. Stevens, does not admit his own personal interest in what he says—something both he and the reader are however, aware of. Underreading, on the other hand, means Mr. Stevens does not consciously know—or is at least unable to admit to himself—what the reader infers about his personal interest. It’s hard to determine which of these two processes Mr. Stevens is involved with in the passage above. He certainly has an agenda of rationalizing away all objection to Lord Darlington’s actions, as they reflect on his. But, to what degree is Mr. Stevens consciously aware of this agenda? The reader can see it, can he? I think part of the artistry of the book is that an answer to this question is suspended till the end. #TheRemainsOfTheDay #Kazuo Ishiguro

What is the plot in Remains? Well, what is plot? “The main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence.” But this definition leaves a lot out. Do these events flow from the actions of the characters or are they the work of an external entity, like fate? (or the implied author—heh, heh, heh!) Do the characters themselves transform or do they cope with the confines of living in a plot? Is the plot the work of the author or the characters, if you will. (Please answer some or all of these questions). The famous Road-Runner cartoons are fine examples of plot-driven stories. For the characters, there is, sadly, no internal change. The Road Runner and Wily Coyote do the same things, time after time. In a sense, they are imprisoned by the plot. The hapless Coyote always loses, the perky Road Runner always escapes. The viewer knows this outcome, but is still entertained to see how it plays out. The traditional murder mystery novel is plot-driven (and this is not a criticism). A savvy detective must solve a crime—solving the crime is the point of the story, not some inner transformation of the detective. In fact, the detective must remain the same for the series to work. The reader knows the crime will be solved but is delighted by seeing how. We know that Ishiguro tends to be uninterested in traditional linear plots—where there is a story arc, an interrelated sequence of events that may be separate from the characters. The idea Ishiguro is talking about, of having the associations of the characters lead the narrative vs. something external, points us to his stories as being character driven. “Character-driven stories deal with inner transformation or the relationships between the characters. Whereas plot-driven stories focus on a set of choices that a character must make, a character-driven story focuses on how the character arrives at a particular choice.” So, a character-driven tale tends to be more in depth about the inner life of the character. In Remains, the elderly English butler, Mr. Stevens, of Darlington Hall, is encouraged by his employer to take a car trip. Mr. Stevens is initially reluctant but changes his mind when he receives a letter from Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper of Darlington Hall twenty years before. In her letter, she tells him about a separation from her husband and the sadness she feels over how her life has ended up. Mr. Stevens resolves to meet her near where she lives, perhaps persuading her to return with him to Darlington Hall. He’s been making small mistakes in the management of the house and believes he needs help. There’s a gradually developing subtext of Stevens hoping he and Miss Kenton can become romantic partners, but he denies this to himself and others, saying rather that his journey is purely professional, not personal. He sets out, and has many memories both of Miss Kenton, and of his former employer, Lord Darlington, now deceased. In the present of the story (post-war), Lord Darlington is vilified as a Nazi sympathizer, and Mr. Stevens, out of shame, actually denies having known him several times. He tries to reconcile his many years of excellent service with the prevailing belief that his employer did bad things. He does this by denying Lord D’s culpability and his own, maintaining to himself and to an imaginary person he is addressing in a sort of diary, that he was “only doing his job,” a job he did well. He finally meets with Miss Kenton, who is reconciled with her husband and does not intend to return to Darlington Hall. But she does say she has at times wondered what her life might have been with Mr. Stevens. Not only does she make it clear there’s to be no future for them, she also lets Stevens know that there might have been one had he communicated his feelings. His heart breaks, although he hides it all. In the last scene, he is at a seaside boardwalk and encounters another aged man who was a butler, a sort of embodiment of the “you” he’s been addressing throughout. Mr. Stevens confesses things, and the man tells him he should stop dwelling in the past. The evening’s the best part of the day. After the man has left, Mr. Stevens remains on the boardwalk. He thinks: “Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day…if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, (to do great things), surely that is in itself…cause for pride and contentment.” He resolves that he will learn a new language of bantering in order to better serve his new employer. So, yes—the plot is simple. A road trip, but one in which the traveler ignores the scenery and the people, and is drawn inward and into the past by associations. His past was rather glorious, being the butler of Darlington Hall, having the lengthy “professional” relationship with Miss Kenton. Believing he was serving a worthy employer and doing important things, like promoting world peace. His present life is much more modest. No grand affairs and dinners, a small staff to supervise. Is the best over? He’d hoped to re-capture a part of it with Miss Kenton, but that is not to be. The journey is essentially inward. There are people he meets along the way who provoke different reactions—like Mr. Harry Smith and Dr. Carlisle. If the question of the novel is will Mr. Stevens re-unite with Miss Kenton and reconcile his conflicted feelings about his past, the answer is no and perhaps. Now then, you might ask, is Mr. Stevens therefore more like Wily Coyote, doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past? Huh. “You” ask the hard questions. Lemme just say straight out that Mr. Stevens doesn’t fall into a thousand-foot canyon or blow himself up with sticks of dynamite. In the end, Mr. Stevens does seem to maintain his personality traits of denial and repression. However, the story is about his confronting his feelings concerning Miss Kenton and Lord Darlington. He admits to himself that he yearned for Miss Kenton and that Lord Darlington made mistakes, admissions he was unable to make at the outset. He will transform by learning a new “language.” #TheRemainsOfTheDay #KazuoIshiguro

In a 1986 Guardian interview, (pre-Remains), Ishiguro writes that he was dissatisfied with his early novels because he judged them as being too much like screenplays with sections of dialogue followed by explanation. During an illness, he read the Combray section of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and saw how he could write in a less linear way by following the characters’ memories and thoughts to link together sections. At the risk of all sorts of legal trouble, I’m going to quote Mr. Ishiguro, begging his indulgence ahead of time. (whiny voice: Don’t worry, he doesn’t read this blog). “Quite aside from the sublime beauty of these passages, I was thrilled by what I then called in my mind (and later in my notes) Proust’s “methods of movement” – the means by which he got one episode to lead into the next. The ordering of events and scenes didn’t follow the demands of chronology, nor those of an unfolding linear plot. Instead, tangential thought associations, or the vagaries of memory seemed to move the novel from one section to the next. Sometimes the very fact that the present episode had been triggered by the previous one raised the question “Why?” For what reason had these two seemingly unrelated moments been placed side by side in the narrator’s mind? I could now see an exciting, freer way of composing my novel; one that could produce richness on the page and offer inner movements impossible to capture on a screen…I could put down a scene from two days ago right beside one from 20 years earlier, and ask the reader to ponder the relationship between the two…I could see a way of writing that could properly suggest the many layers of self-deception and denial that shrouded any person’s view of their own self and past. Breakthrough moments for a novelist are often like this: scruffy, private little events…Everything I have subsequently written has been determined by the revelations that came to me during those days.” So how is this style expressed in Remains? Let’s look for evidence in a passage from the novel’s third section, Morning-Day Two-Salisbury: The protagonist, Mr. Stevens, is beginning the second day of his journey thinking about a future event, his soon-to-occur meeting with Miss Kenton, a woman he has a depth of feeling for, a woman whom he hopes to persuade to return with him to Darlington Hall. A particular visual memory comes to mind: “I can recall distinctly climbing to the second landing and seeing before me a series of orange shafts from the sunset breaking the gloom of the corridor where each bedroom door stood ajar…I had seen Miss Kenton’s figure, silhouetted against a window, turn and call softly, “Mr. Stevens, if you have a moment.” This is powerful, perhaps erotic stuff. Poetic. Then he says, in his fussy, digressive fashion: “There are some very pertinent reasons why this memory has remained with me, as I wish to explain… Well, what are these pertinent reasons? Probably that he loves her, but he cannot acknowledge that as it would mean having to acknowledge how he’s wasted his life. Instead, he presents a long-winded account of several incidents around the time Miss Kenton first came to Darlington Hall. Eventually, he meanders to another near erotic memory of when she appeared in his office bearing a bouquet of flowers to “brighten” the gloom. Of course, within the memory, Mr. Stevens rejects the idea of bright flowers and puts her down by criticizing her conduct in another matter, which leads to an argument that brings them closer yet in anger. What I am trying to convey here is the elegant way Ishiguro moves about in time and space. Many authors might turn Mr. Stevens’ recollections into a “flash-back” event where the narrative moved in perhaps jerky, clumsy fashion. Instead of a smooth progression through a lot of time, a different story might begin: Darlington Hall-1922 “Mr. Stevens was dusting the trophies in the library. The bell rang, and he waited impatiently to see who would answer it.” In other words, it would be more of a cinematic “flash-back” where there is a clear demarcation between two separate time-periods. Ishiguro’s scene is all couched in memory, and the narrative moves in and out of the past as Mr. Stevens recalls long ago feelings that re-contextualize the book’s present. What’s important is the present; the thread which unites these disparate elements is his unexpressed affection and yearning for Miss Kenton, as well as his growing fear that he’s squandered his life. This is very much about using the past to explain and justify things—a central theme of the book. Mr. Stevens is on a journey to justify the way he’s lived his life and must continually move about in time to do so. Ishiguro’s technique is ideally suited to show this. The plot of Remains is actually fairly simple. Next week, we’ll take a look at it. Okay? (‘Kay) Till then. #TheRemainsOfTheDay #KazuoIshiguro

Last week, I began our discussion of The Remains of the Day by saying that we’d sniffed out another unreliable narrator—Mr. Stevens, the butler of Darlington Hall—who is shown narrating the story of his six-day journey by car to the West of England in 1956. During the trip, he presents a labyrinthine tale of his days so far at Darlington Hall, employed in large part by Lord Darlington, a wealthy man, now deceased, who has been vilified as a traitor to Britain because of his activities before and during the Second World War. Mr. Stevens defends Lord Darlington, to himself and to an imagined reader he addresses as “you,” in large part because Stevens himself feels implicated in the mis-behavior of his former employer whom he served with blind devotion. The style of the book often shows a more complete story to the actual readers than the one Mr. Stevens presents to his imagined one. What we get from Mr. Stevens are at best morally ambiguous doings served with a majestic dollop of denial. It’s as if Mr. Stevens, in presenting his memories, is daring his imagined reader to disagree with his sugar-coated interpretations—that, or he yearns for affirmation. As a result, Mr. Stevens appears increasingly unreliable, although cracks begin to appear in the form of self-doubt. (more on this later). A fine example of how Mr. Stevens distorts and misreads things occurs in his recollections of the 1923 Peace Conference held at Darlington Hall—notable too because it coincided with the death of Mr. Stevens’ father. Lord Darlington convened an international conference to try to persuade world governments to scrap the Versailles Treaty, a treaty he believed was too harsh on Germany. The attendees are largely wealthy gentlemen (there are two ladies) who are anxious to allow Germany to regain its power (we all know how that went). Lord Darlington and his colleagues blame France for much of the negative sentiment toward Germany, but they realize to have any real effect, they must have an actual Frenchman at the conference and try to enlist him in their cause—even though they dislike the French. They invite M. Dupont, an official in the French government. M. Dupont keeps himself removed from the attendees—except for the American delegate, a Mr. Lewis. Mr. Stevens observes the two men having private, possibly conspiratorial discussions. Whenever Lord Darlington or the other delegates try to talk to M. Dupont, Mr. Lewis interrupts them. M. Dupont seems disengaged from the conference, spending his time listening—perhaps so as to be able to report to his government about what these aristocrats believe and are planning. Then on the final night, at the farewell dinner, Mr. Stevens observes M. Dupont giving a speech to the assembly. He thanks Lord Darlington for his hospitality and says: “Many things of interest have been said in this house over the past days. Many important things…There has been much which has implicated or otherwise criticized the foreign policy of my country.” He paused again, looking rather stern. One might even have thought him to be angry. “But none of them, may I say, has fully comprehended the reasons for the attitude France has adopted toward her neighbor.” This remark causes some puzzlement among the other delegates who evidently aren’t sure how to interpret it. M. Dupont continues: “…there is, I believe, an imperative to openly condemn any who came here to abuse the hospitality of the host, and to spend his energies solely in trying to sow discontent and suspicion…My only question concerning Mr. Lewis is this. To what extent does his abominable behavior exemplify the attitude of the present American Administration?…You see, I refrain from outlining just what this gentleman has been saying to me—about you all.” Mr. Stevens, as well as many of the delegates, reads this as a rebuke to Mr. Lewis, who then gives his own speech, in which he describes Lord Darlington and the others as “gentlemen amateurs” who are headed toward disaster by trying to meddle in politics. To me, this scene represents Mr. Stevens misunderstanding what occurs and reporting his misunderstanding as if it were the “truth.” I believe the implication of the scene, communicated by the actual narrator, is that M. Dupont and Mr. Lewis have conspired to pretend to have a falling out in order to allow M. Dupont to diplomatically let the delegates know that he has not been fooled by them, and that what he and Mr. Lewis really think is that they’re a bunch of ignorant losers. However, Mr. Stevens only sees the surface theater, the reflection of what he wants to see. And it should be said that, during the conference, he’s focused on his butler duties, wanting to make the conference a success—which he defines as whatever Lord Darlington thinks. Mr. Stevens does this at the expense of ignoring his father who is upstairs dying. His father tries to tell him important things—that he loves him, that he’s been a good son, but Stevens chooses his duties as more important—perhaps because he’s unable to respond in a human way. However, on his car trip into the past, Mr. Stevens shows that doubt has crept in. #TheRemainsOfTheDay #KazuoIshiguro

This week, a new story, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1988 The Remains of the Day. (Whiny voice: This week, a new story, Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat and—ow! Sounds of struggle, a crash. Something seems to strike a microphone, and feedback ensues). ‘Kay. Everyone settle down. I want to apologize—get him! Don’t let him get away!. (indistinct yelling). I first read Remains in 1995 when I was living in Chicago. My wife and I had seen the wonderful 1993 Merchant/Ivory film version starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, and I was eager to read the original book. I purchased the 1993 Vintage International Edition—connected to the film—and rely on it to this day. Remains is one of my favorite books and films, and this is the fifth time I’ve read it. (Distant shouting—big deal, Mr. Big Shot!) There has been a lot of scholarly attention on and writing about Remains, and if I make use of any of these ideas, I’ll do my best to cite them. The cover of this edition is made up of images from the film showing Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in character as Mr. Stevens and Miss Kenton, the butler and housekeeper of Darlington Hall, a large estate in England during the nineteen twenties. (The film collapses the time a bit, I believe, so that its events begin more in the thirties). After the title page, there is a dedication to a real woman who was a friend of Ishiguro’s in the 1980s, Mrs. Lenore Marshall. Remains is in broad terms about a road trip that the protagonist, Mr. Stevens, undertakes from Darlington Hall in southeast England to the southwest where he seeks Miss Kenton, who had left Darlington Hall to marry before the war and has recently written Mr. Stevens to let him know about a separation from her husband. Stevens hopes to persuade Miss Kenton to return—both for professional and personal reasons. So it is a story about a journey, both to reconnect with Ms. Kenton and to understand the past, and Stevens’ role in it. The novel is divided into eight sections, each one’s title refers to portions of the six days of Mr. Steven’s journey, except for the first, which is—Prologue 1956 Darlington Hall. The first line. “It seems increasingly likely that I will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.” Mr. Stevens original employer, Lord Darlington—deceased in the book’s present—had a compromised life. An enormously wealthy man who socialized with the elite of British society, he also became involved with those who supported Adolph Hitler and the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany. He went so far as to try to broker a peace agreement between the Nazis and the British government, and is shown as being anti-semitic. He is, however, also shown as someone who rejected the Nazis and their beliefs, perhaps too late. Stevens was his loyal butler throughout, and now struggles with the satisfaction he feels at being a good butler vs. the reputation his former employer has as a traitor. Was Stevens complicit with Lord Darlington’s misbehavior? Was Lord Darlington himself complicit with the Nazis, or was he their dupe? It should be said that Mr. Stevens is never shown directly doing something to help the Nazis (beyond taking the German Foreign Minister’s coat). His sins are, if you will, ones of possible omission rather than commission. He remains the loyal servant of Lord Darlington despite having clear evidence of the Lord’s mis-guided conspiracy with immoral people. The text is written in first person, presenting the thoughts of Mr. Stevens—not so much as a memoir but as a piece of rhetoric designed to persuade an imaginary reader of Mr. Stevens’ lack of guilt—not unlike Pat in Silver Linings Playbook, who is trying to convince his ex-wife of how he’s reformed himself. However, in Remains, we gradually sense that this imaginary reader is another butler whom Mr. Stevens believes is the only person who can really understand him. Let’s define the imaginary reader as a hypothetical entity that a work is addressed to, whose attitudes, etc. may differ from an actual reader’s. Adam Parkes in his book The Remains of the Day: A Reader’s Guide, writes that the use of this structure (a narrator addressing an imaginary reader) sets up two audiences. One is the sympathetic “you” to whom Stevens addresses his plea for understanding; the other is the reader of the novel, who is shown not only Mr. Stevens’ plea, but also the growing evidence that compromises claims of innocence. Mr. Stevens is pre-occupied with presenting himself in a certain way which is not congruent with the truth. An example occurs when he is traveling through the countryside and stops to avoid running over a chicken. The hen’s owner rushes out to thank him, saying he was probably in a great hurry, and he replies: “Oh, I’m not in a hurry at all,” I said with a smile. “…I’m just motoring for the pleasure of it, you see.” Well, this statement is contradicted by large sections of the narrative that show Mr. Stevens’ eagerness to re-connect with Miss Kenton. Why does Mr. Stevens deny this? He wishes to present the world with an image of himself as a different person, sometimes a gentleman, sometimes the perfect, loyal servant to a great man, instead of the person he really is—and this person, we shall see, remains a puzzle to him. #TheRemainsOfTheDay #KazuoIshiguro

One of the hallmarks of fiction, one of the things that often keeps us reading, is how the protagonist transforms in the story. Aristotle himself got us going on this idea; static heroines/heroes just aren’t very interesting. Recently, we looked at a story—By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept—that is all about transformation via Ovid’s Metamorphoses. So…(wait for it)…how does Pat transform in Silver Linings? At the beginning of the story, Pat is focused on the end of what he calls “apart time,” the separation from his wife, Nikki. He dreams of reconciliation with her and is convinced that the pathway to this is to do all the things she wanted him to do in their marriage. Nicely summarized by the expression “To be kind rather than right,” this path involves being in excellent physical condition, not losing his temper (that’s an understatement; it’s more like controlling his rage), and reading and appreciating the novels she taught to her high school students. Pat believes that by being a “better” man (as he thinks is defined by Nikki), he will get her back. He believes this process will occur magically, that all he has to do is stick with his program, and his personal movie will have the happy ending he desires. We’ve talked about how Pat is shown to be an unreliable narrator of his story. At the end of the novel, he has given up his dream of re-unification, he has taken direct action to become closer with Tiffany, and has lost interest in his self-betterment program. He has, I believe transformed from someone who feels essentially worthless, to being able to recognize his worth. Most importantly, his view of the “reality” he shares with his family and friends becomes much more realistic. He journeys to see the real Nikki and observes her with her husband and children, a tangible sign that she’s moved on. And we’ve talked about how this transformation occurs because of the (mostly) gentle disconfirmation and confrontation of Pat’s delusions by his family and friends. And therapist! After considerable confrontation, Pat is at his parents’ home on New Years Eve. His mother falls asleep on the couch, Pat goes to retrieve a blanket to cover her and finds the VHS tape of his wedding. He puts it in the machine and presses PLAY. There’s no commentary and/or internal experience of this, but I think there’s a sense in the story that, at this point, Pat is ready to face his demons. He’s gone through lengthy preparation—the process of loving confrontation, the trauma of learning Tiffany has deceived him about Nikki, and the trauma of being mugged and having his leg broken. He’s—somewhat miraculously—reconnected with his old friend Danny, who does not offer explicit advice but has a strong influence on Pat to face his problems. Pat presses PLAY and watches the film of his wedding. He sees Nikki, his parents, his brother. He hears the dreadful “Songbird” song that the wedding band played and which has haunted him ever since. Then for the first time, he’s able to remember what he could not previously—the reason for his being sent to the psychiatric hospital. He’d gone home early from work and found Nikki with the man she’d been having an affair with. He physically assaults this man, nearly killing him, and turns with rage on Nikki, but she conks him over the head with a CD “boombox.” He wakes up in restraints in the hospital. Nikki divorces him, and he is sent to a secure psychiatric setting for years. Pat remembers the whole thing; the narration is dispassionate, matter-of-fact. He finishes, regards his reflection in the TV, then goes and leaves a message for his brother, saying he needs a huge favor. The favor is to get Tiffany’s number. In response to a call that is not shown, she sends him a long letter explaining why she made up the story about Nikki—because she loves Pat. She writes of the loss of her husband and the difficult process of letting go. She asks forgiveness. This letter is another nice example of layering in the narrative. The reader is presented with an unmediated message from another character in the story—not Pat, who is not shown distorting what Tiffany writes to him. At the end, Pat meets Tiffany in a park. He acknowledges he needs her as she needs him. It’s clear they are going to be a couple and that they will face many problems together. There is no resolution of everything. Just a reliable narration. And this represents Pat’s biggest transformation—giving up his delusions about the past, his attempts to “go back” to something that never was. Next week, a new story. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, a novel with a different sort of unreliable narrator. Till then. #SilverLiningsPlaybook #MatthewQuick