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The Strange Case of the Disappearing Chinamen: Memory and Desire in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans

L’étrange affaire des Chinois disparus: mémoire et désir dans The Remains of the Day et When We Were Orphans de Kazuo Ishiguro
Paul Veyret

Résumés

The Remains of the Day et When We Were Orphans sont deux romans qui décrivent la nature ambivalente de la mémoire. Dans la fiction extrêmement polarisée d’Ishiguro, la jetée de Weymouth de Stevens et le Shanghai déchiré par la guerre de Banks sont les deux faces d’une même médaille: le West Country est la même terra incognita que la ville en ruines. Sans feu ni lieu, en proie à l’exil et à la perte, telle est la texture de la vie des personnages. En tant que récit de confession, chaque roman explore l’espace divisé du ‘je’. Ishiguro pousse cette stratégie de la dissonance encore plus loin: il explore la faille créée par l’acte fictif de l’écriture. Les romans d’Ishiguro explorent cette tension entre, d’un côté, l’ ‘auto-’, le côté de l’introspection frustrée puisque le but de l’autobiographie est de rester en surface, de refuser la profondeur, et de l’autre côté, d’explorer la ‘-graphie’. Il s’agit-là d’un univers de subjectivité bifide, de textes bifides qu’Ishiguro propose à ses lecteurs.

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  • 1 Lorna Martens, The Diary Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

1The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans are two novels concerned with the ambivalent nature of memory. Memory can indeed be construed both as a reassuring home one has never left, ‘hardly a foreign land’, to borrow the working title of When We Were Orphans, and as a page of writing, much akin to wax tablets. Memory is both a journey home, and a journey into the unknown, both a journey west and a journey east. Both novels stage geographical journeys that reflect inner, intimate, metaphorical journeys. Stevens’s journey west is ressembles Banks’s journey east, as each narrator is trying to explore the Bleak House of memory. In Ishiguro’s much-polarized fiction, Stevens’s Weymouth Pier is akin to Banks’s wartorn Shanghai: the West Country is the same terra incognita as the ruined city. Displacement and homelessness, exile and dispossession play key roles in the unraveling of their lives. As confessional narratives, both novels explore the split space of the narrating ‘I’. As Lorna Martens puts it in her study1 of diary fiction—and both novels can be read as mimicking the act of writing, if not actually written as is the case for When We Were Orphans—there is always in that type of writing being a form of ‘dissonance’ in the narrating ‘I’, a form of discord present in the act of writing about oneself. Ishiguro takes this stategy of dissonance one step further as he delves into the gap created by the fictive act of writing performed by the narrator. As Philip Roth puts it, ‘With autobiography, there’s always another text, a counter-text if you will to the one presented’ (Roth 172). The works of Ishiguro explore this tension between, on the one hand, the auto-’, the side of thwarted introspection since the purpose of autobiography is to remain on the surface, to deny depth, and on the other hand, the ‘-graphy’, the gesture of putting words on a page, the novelistic attempt at redefining the self and delving into the depths of writing. It is a universe of split subjectivity, a world of split texts that Ishiguro offers to his readers.

2In other words, hidden within the shell of the narrating ‘I’ lies another, homeless, dispossessed ‘I’: this form of autobiographical fiction is about the constant underwriting of the speaking self, the act of enunciation is a constant shifting of subjectivities where the first person narrator can never be fully grasped. There is a constant gap, an interval that is never bridged. The narrator’s voice is constantly ventriloquised by an unseen, ghostly other. To ventriloquize this piece further, one could say to borrow Sartre’s words about Flaubert, ‘one is spoken’, ‘on est parlé’, the subject ‘one’ being of course this spectral figure casting its shadow across the page.

3Confessional narratives, to which The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans belong, propose a new form of hermeneutics: a hermeneutics of suspicion. What is laid bare by watching the detective and the butler is each narrator’s manoeuvres at both discovering and hiding. Each text is imbued with trace vectors: patterns, rhythms of secrecy, a systole and dyastole not simply of facts, of information consciously or unconsciously withheld but of the self and voice. The rhythm of the novels is a constant oscillation between concealment and unveiling. These confessional narratives lead to the mapping of another set of coordinates, other boundaries for what one may call ‘narrative ethics’. To quote Paul de Man: ‘Confession’s purpose is to rectify (if possible) unethical action through ethical language’ (De Man 81). To confess is therefore to overcome original guilt and shame in the name of truth through an epistemological use of language in which ethical values of good and evil are superseded by values of truth and falsehood. Thus Banks’s and Stevens’s epistemological function, is twisted, perverted, away by Ishiguro, since the very nature of their achievements is somewhat questioned.

Watching the Detective

4China, Chinamen and Orientals play an oblique yet significant role in the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro and more specifically in The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans: they signify the guilty displacement at work within the realm of remembrance. They stand for the gradual dispossession, the loss of bearings at work in both novels. The Remains of the Day is a novel concerned about the linearity of events and the quest for an unobstructed perspective on the narrator’s past. Similarly his topographical search for perspective, points of view, is the clue to his constant effort at distancing himself from his past and trying to piece together the puzzle of his past life. In When We Were Orphans, the general movement of the text is less a journey forward, albeit circuitous as in the butler’s case, than a movement of entropy, more centrifugal than centripetal. The Chinamen and Chinese men in question are the landmarks that underline moments of passage in the narrators’ lives, moments, to borrow a Stevensian expression, ‘of revelation’. But the narrators are always deferring these moments of revelation: Stevens until the final moment of separation with Miss Kenton under a bus shelter and Banks during his belated reunion with his mother in Hong Kong. Both these moments are the realisation of a belated mourning on the narrators’ part, accepting finally the loss of their loved object.

5Told by reliably unreliable narrators, Ishiguro’s novels put the reader in the role of a detective on the constant lookout for inconsistencies in the narrator’s alibi whose voice, so recognizably stilted and caricatural, devoid of humour, can never be taken at face value. Ishiguro’s narrators are obvious masks, simulacra of themselves whose sole function is to become observers of themselves. It is certainly no coincidence that the social persona Ishiguro’s narrators have so far had to embody always correspond to that of observers, spies of a sort, standing on the margins of society. Etsuko Sherringham is a Japanese woman living in England: her cultural allegiances enable her to perform that dual poetics of observation, both within herself and outside of herself, both about her past and about the incommunicability between Japan and England. Masuji Ono is a painter of shifting allegiances, an alienated observer of a very floating world indeed. Ryder, like Etsuko, is a stranger in a strange town, his vision is that of the distanced traveller, the outlaw forever standing on the margin of the community. These forms of real or metaphorical exile place the narrators in a paradoxical situation: they both belong to the world they observe and they are strangely detached from it, seemingly not belonging anywhere, estranged Chinamen of a kind.

6The dialogic nature of Ishiguro’s fiction proposes to the reader a dialectics of revelation and concealment, an economics of emotions that rely on different modes of reading and telling and finally a new dialectic of mystery. All these dark manoeuvres of the self lead to, according to Adam Zachary Newton, the mapping of another set of coordinates, other boundaries of what he calls narrative ethics.

7Each novel is concerned with a form of tension articulated around the notion of surfaces, around two opposite movements, one centripetal, the other centrifugal, the yin and the yang of confessional narrative. In the words of Adam Zachary Newton: ‘the novels, as Novel, tend a surface in order to disclose the open secret which resides beneath [. . .] The Remains of the Day as Autobiography, obedientently tends a surface with tactful subservience, in order to maintain the pretense that surface is all there really is’ (Newton 1997, 276). In other words, Ishiguro’s text ‘qualifies the conceit of dignified ignorance’ (Newton 1997, 276). The question of correctly defining ‘dignity’, in digressions that take the reader away from moments of ‘revelation,’ is a constant preoccupation of Stevens’s and seems to be the driving metaphor for this desire to avoid knowledge.

8When We Were Orphans and The Remains of the Day are about the paradoxical desire not to know. The narrators are also strangely and paradoxically seized with a desire not to be. Inauthenticity, not being the real thing, seems to be their hallmark. Impersonation and a form of dark pantomime seem to be the driving elements of the speaking selves in both novels. But it is difficult to say what character the butler mimics except a very British, very dignified servant. Although he shies three times from accepting his persona in public due to Darlington’s fascist associations still lingering in post-war Britain, Stevens is perceived as totally inhabiting a role, of being one with its language. As he claims, the shedding of one’s role is akin to ‘removing one’s clothing in public’ (Ishiguro 1989, 210). For him, playing is being the part: ‘A butler of any quality must be seen to inhabit his role, utterly and fully; he cannot be seen casting it aside one moment simply to don it again the next as though it were nothing more than a pantomime costume. There is one situation and one situation only in which a butler who cares about his dignity may feel free to unburden himself of his role; that is to say when he is entirely alone’ (Ishiguro 1989, 169). This total play-acting is embodied by the word ‘dignity’ and constantly defined and illustrated throughout the novel. Yet, once Lord Darlington is no longer here to provide Stevens with the necessary social cues to the play he performs, Stevens seems at a loss. Hence the ironic episode concerning Mr Farraday’s American friends who are not too impressed with Stevens’s impersonation: ‘I mean to say, Stevens, this is a genuine grand old English house, isn’t it? That’s what I paid for. And you’re a genuine old-fashioned English butler, not just some waiter pretending to be one. You’re the real thing, aren’t you?’ (Ishiguro 1989, 131)

9Being the ‘real thing’ is Stevens’s minor private tragedy. His self is constantly in danger of being split between an authentic ‘speaking’ self and a ‘spoken’ represented self. The fear of being unmasked is constant and explains the butler’s obsession with ritual and repetitions. Stevens ends up a mock butler, at the end of Weymouth Pier, rehearsing witticisms to please his new master, unable to grasp the ethics of the ‘real thing’. On the contrary, Banks seems to be constantly playing with the notion of his phoniness. Whereas Stevens is throughout perceived as a true blue English butler, even during his darkest hour of introspective retrospection, Banks is a somewhat dubious sleuth and, as his friend Akira says, maybe ‘Not enough Englisman’ as well. When at school, Banks is intent upon reproducing his friends’ ‘mannerisms’ (Ishiguro 2000, 8) and his very career as a detective seems to stem from a desire to emulate a fictive character, Sherlock Holmes, whose main prop, the magnifying glass, underlines Banks’s desire to imitate.

10Banks is also keen on emulating the young paying guests from England who come to stay for some time with his parents, among whom ‘Uncle Philip’, the arch deceiver. Moreover, turning points of his life seem to bear the stamp of deception and simulacrum. ‘Rehearsal’ is a key word from his childhood: rehearsing his parents’ kidnapping with Akira and their subsequent liberation is Banks’s way of finding refuge in a world of make believe, the world of childhood memories. Furthermore, his whole life seems to have been a rehearsal: he seems to have lived outside his life, his self having taken on an autonomous existence, outside the points of resistance of the text. Banks seems to have led indeed a double life, a life and a counter-life to quote Philip Roth once more.

Vision and Memory

11Moments of coincidence underline the sham aspect of Banks’s life. The war in Shanghai is first seen through a pair of ‘opera glasses’ (Ishiguro 2000, 189) someone obligingly provides. His comment, ‘So that’s the war. Are there many casualties do you suppose?’ (Ishiguro 2000, 190), shows how alien he is to the world around him. War is one entertainment among others, a music hall act like any other: ‘As the dancers proceeded with their floor show, the room seemed to lose all interest in the battle across the water, though the noises were till clearly audible behind the cheery music. It was as though for these people, one entertainment had finished and another had begun’ (Ishiguro 2000, 192). For Banks, life is unreality itself. Even in the midst of a raging battle his reaction is curiously distanced: ‘I must say, Lieutenant, it was pretty sloppy work on the part of your men to have allowed these Japanese in behind your line. If all your people had been doing their jobs properly, I’m sure such a thing would never have arisen’ (Ishiguro 2000, 288). The situation seems to humour Banks as the Chinese soldier replies in the same vein, excusing his men for having ‘inconvenienced’ the detective.

12So intent is Banks upon living his childhood memories, solving the case of his parents’ disappearance, that the whole world of fiction he seems to have built comes to life as he decides a wounded Japanese soldier is none other than Akira his childhood friend (Ishiguro 2000, 293). The fantasy he has created takes one further dimension when he convinces himself he has finally found the place where his parents are held captive. As in a dream, Banks finds clues he wants to believe will lead him to his parents: ‘my gaze fell upon the hand-painted name-board lying there in the rubble before us [. . .]. ‘Is it possible this says Yeh Chen? Could that be the name written here?’ [. . .] ‘Yes, possible. This say Yeh Chen.’ ‘(Ishiguro 2000, 313). The dream continues as the place they explore ‘had survived strangely intact. There were hardly any obvious signs of damage: the shutters on the window, the crude sliding wooden lattice door, even the charm dangling above the doorway, had all remained unscathed. After what we had travelled through, it looked like an apparition from another more civilised world’ (Ishiguro 2000, 314). Unreality and alienation seem to be Banks’s mode of existence throughout the novel: it is as though he is not living his life but dreaming it, seeing through it, as in a dream.

13Even when he is faced with the mutilated bodies of war victims, his instinct is to mediate his vision: ‘One arm had been torn off at the elbow, and she was now pointing the stump up to the sky, perhaps to indicate the direction from which the shell had come. [. . .] Then, perhaps out of habit as much as anything else, I bent down and began to examine her through the [magnifying] glass. Her stump looked peculiarly clean; the bone protruding out of the flesh was a shiny white, almost as though someone had been polishing it’ (Ishiguro 2000, 318–19).

14Vision, in Orphans as much as in The Remains is a very much mediated affair, an external phenomenon to the narrator’s self, underwriting the narrative in a never-ending movement of hollowing out. Perception can be summed up by a peculiar cultural phenomenon Banks notices as soon as he arrives in the International Concession: ‘a perrenial source of irritation: namely, the way people here seem at every opportunity to block one’s view’ (Ishiguro 2000, 181). This can be seen as a metaphor of how screen memories perform this act of veiling, of covering up, of thwarting the vision. In When We Were Orphans and The Remains of the Day, some memories seem to stand in the way of reminiscence, screening the hidden object of true horror, veiling the heart of darkness of the narrative. Hence, Banks’s memories of his parents’ disappearance are screened by his vision of Chinese policemen, a blind actor and very own his house opposite. A whole series of frames, like the screen doors in Akira’s Anglo-Japanese house, screen the vision from view and lose the narrator in a labyrinth of by-roads and dead-end streets. In the Remains of the Day, Stevens’s vision is both determined and occluded by Miss Kenton’s vision. His wish not to know is thwarted when he is made to look at the consequences of his father’s fall. The butler’s gaze is therefore conditioned by the housekeeper’s. In other instances, Stevens managed on the contrary to look away, to divert his gaze away from the object of true horror.

15Stevens reminisces about his father’s fall through a series of seven frames. His perception of the event is not direct, since his memory is jolted by Miss Kenton’s letter and it is through the vision of how she saw him after the fall, at a complete loss and rehearsing his final steps, through a window that Stevens eventually gains his vision. A series of screen memories is therefore lifted to reach the heart of darkness: ‘It is something of a revelation that this memory from over thirty years ago should have remained with Miss Kenton as it has done with me. Indeed, it must have occurred on just one of those summer evenings she mentions, for I can recall distinctly the second landing and seeing before me a series of orange shafts from the sunset breaking the gloom of the corridor where each bedroom window stood ajar’ (Ishiguro 1989, 50).

16What Miss Kenton helps Stevens see is what he refused to ackowledge all along: the loss of his father’s strength, akin to the loss of his dignity. In other words, what the very much mediated image of the father’s search for a lost jewel represents is also the loss of the ideals and values he, and the likes of him, have embodied. Looking at Miss Kenton’s silhouette framed by a window, who in turn is looking at the shadows of the poplars which in turn frame the summerhouse which frames Stevens senior who is looking at the ground, Stevens is looking at the impossible mourning for an aspect of the British Empire. The strong indentification with butlerhood and Englishness for both father and son makes them indistinguishable from the fate of Great Britain in pre-war years when it still had delusions about its destiny. The lost jewel is loss itself, the impossible object of mourning which cannot be looked at directly, but through a series of dizzying mediating frames. Distanciation is the only paradoxical way Stevens has of approaching truth. His ethics is an ethics of avoidance and looking away.

17On other instances, he manages just to do that, look away. During the ‘Chinamen episode’, Stevens sheds his mask of the impossibly dead-pan butler to become a visually comic character in the vein of Basil Fawlty from the British seventies series Fawlty Towers (impersonated by John Cleese, who was at one point considered to play the butler’s part in the film adaptation of the novel). The father’s fault is laid bare in this tragi-comic episode: not only have the Chinamen not been correctly dusted, but the one outside the billiard room has been mistakenly exchanged with the upstairs one. Beyond the Upstairs, Downstairs comedy of the passage, there is perhaps a darker meaning underneath. Each character’s reaction seems to be disproportionately violent, Miss Kenton stands her ground and makes Stevens almost cruelly notice his father’s failure as a servant, as the butler is intent upon not seeing anything awry. The episode’s significance first of all lies in the power it has to enlighten Stevens’s discovery of the minutiae of his father’s decline. In an inverted Œdipal riddle, Stevens is made to see his father’s tragic faults. Moreover, the exchange of the two Chinamen underlines how the butler’s and the housekeeper’s world picture, their private cosmogonic chain, has been dramatically altered. The exchange of the upstairs Chinaman for the downstairs one signifies the inversion of their natural landmarks, as much as the East and West furnaces in When We Were Orphans define the boundaries of Banks’s rediscovered childhood landscape.

18In When We Were Orphans, the most significant and veiled episode of the novel is the parents’ successive disappearance. This episode coincides with what seems to be an extract from one of Hoffman’s tales: the theft of Ling Tien’s supposedly magic lotion. As in The Remains of the Day, this central episode, concerning yet another Chinese man, is framed, mediated by other visions. As in The Remains where the seven frames finally mediate an absence, here the frames end on another form of blank. The gesture of looking at an empty spot for a lost object is echoed by Akira’s and Christopher’s gesture of dipping sticks into the liquid and tracing invisible figures on a sheet of paper. This gesture of writing in invisible ink echoes the way When We Were Orphans seems to be written. With a whole part of the novel only suggested, hinted at, such as Jennifer’s suicide attempt or the many cases Banks supposedly solved, one can say the whole narrative is written by Banks in invisible ink. Shrouding his text with invisibility is Banks’s paradoxical gesture: by inscribing and erasing signs of the past at the same time, he performs the act of memory.

19The centrifugal force at work in The Remains of the Day is in keeping with the butler’s unobtrusive manner: it has to do with the act of rubbing, which in these circumstances takes on a metafictional dimension. Rubbing, dusting, polishing the text to reveal another layer of meaning underneath, all these are Stevensian activities. As a good servant will, Stevens’s eye is aware of the possible deficiencies concerning a not-so well dusted household. Significantly, the opening of the novel shows Stevens ‘dusting’ a portrait, ‘up on the step-ladder’ (Ishiguro 1989, 3). By way of prologue, Stevens is perceived performing his ancillary duties that stand as the metaphor of the reading of the text as a whole. Stevens’s attention to dusting and polishing is constant. His failure to polish properly the prongs of a breakfast fork for his employer provokes a whole chain reaction concerning his shortcomings as a staff planner, a ‘series of very minor errors’ (Ishiguro 1989, 51) with major repercussions. The failure to rub and polish properly is associated with his notion of dignity and greatness. Inasmuch as he inhabits his role of butler, polishing the silver becomes not only the synecdoche of his activities but is also an extension of his own persona.

20There’s a whole genealogy linked with silver polishing in The Remains: his father’s former employer was a ‘Mr Silvers’, thus underlying the idea that this metal is the standard by which the butler’s life is measured. Tarnished silver is the equivalent of having a moral stain on one’s character. The discovery that ‘several pieces of silver [. . .] bore the remains of polish’ and that ‘the end of one fork had been practically black’ (Ishiguro 1989, 59) is an apocalyptic moment for Stevens. Yet polishing and rubbing also have metatextual implications: polishing the text, through repetition, reveals other meanings and implications. Thus, repeated sentences, pronounced by different characters as Stevens’s inner focus seems to come into shape as he tells his story, acquire a different shine each time. At one point, Miss Kenton tells Stevens about his father’s mistakes: ‘these errors may be trivial in themselves, Mr Stevens, but you must realize their larger significance’ (Ishiguro 1989, 62–63), then Lord Darlington seems to have been the enunciator. The text is thus polished, Stevens seems to rub the sentences with the cloth of his reminiscence and each time a new layer of significance appears. From a minor domestic accident, as it appears, should Miss Kenton have been the one to pronounce the sentence, the episode becomes a virtual condemnation, a death sentence, pronounced by Stevens’s surrogate father and godlike figure.

21Silver polishing is constantly associated with the past and its glorious associations: the landscape itself seems to revolve around silver polishing. Thus, as Stevens is on his way to Miss Kenton he sees a road sign, ‘“Mursden” was where once the firm of Giffen and Co. was once situated [. . .]. For some time, Giffen’s was undoutedly the finest silver polish available’ (Ishiguro 1989, 141). Stevens’s private topography seems to be closely identified with his domestic habits and chores. His pride seems akin to a form of hubris as he reminisces: ‘no other objects in the house were likely to come under such intimate scrutiny from outsiders as was silver during a meal, and as such, it served as a public index of a house’s standards’ (Ishiguro 1989, 142). The appearance of a true historical figure within Stevens’s confessional narrative provides another clue as to the nature of his ethics: ‘By the way, Stevens, Lord Halifax was jolly impressed with the silver the other night. Put him in a different frame of mind altogether’ (Ishiguro 1989, 144). The presence of Lord Halifax is not fortuitous: it is a real point of resistance in the text and it deserves closer scrutiny.

The Double Life

  • 2 Isaiah, 53: ‘Because of his affliction he shall see the light in fullness of days; Through his suff (...)

22What appears underneath the text of The Remains of the Day is altogether another text, by another author. Under the polished silver of Stevens’s narrative, another book comes to the surface, the title of which is Fulness of Days by the Earl of Halifax. The title of the memoirs of Lord Halifax ironically echoes the title of Ishiguro’s novel in an inverted manner. The High Church patrician, former Foreign Minister ‘at the hub of world affairs’ as Stevens would say, has been replaced by a marginal character from a novel, writing from the shadows of history whereas Lord Halifax stood in the limelights. The unaccountable ‘fulness’ of the light of day of the memoirs has also been replaced by the countable, computed ‘remains’ of the day. And finally, the ‘real thing’, a real politician, has been replaced by a disembodied fictive voice. The transformation is also obvious when the content of each book is scrutinised. The Remains of the Day is a novel mimicking the mechanics of a memoir, playing with surfaces to suggest hidden depths. Stevens claims to be nothing but a mask, an empty shell at the service of his master, a voice echoing his master’s voice. But the constant gesture of avoidance and looking away suggest hidden meanings and a turmoil of feelings. On the contrary, Lord Halifax’s book claims to bear the exact traces of a ‘full’ life, exposed in broad daylight, as the quotation from the Catholic version of the Bible suggests.2 But, upon a first reading, it contains nothing more than disconnected shallow remarks and remains nothing short of anecdotal. Here is the account of his meeting with nazi dignitaries during his much controversial trip to Germany in November 1937: ‘Back in Berlin for breakfastand later luncheon with Göering [. . .] we were waited on by parlour maids in some country-peasant costume, and by footmen dressed in eighteenth century liveries, green and white plush, reversed cuffs and caught up tails of the coat. Lovely china and glass and all very well done—except for the food, much of which was uneatable. Talk after luncheon, which did not break any new ground’ (Halifax 190–91).

  • 3 Salman Rushdie, ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’, London Times, 3 July 1982.

23In other words, nothing but empty talk, such is the stuff of his memoirs: a constant avoidance, not of the minutiae of everyday life, but of the ‘larger consequences’ such details may have on history. The strangely anhistorical and anecdotal memoir stands as a vivid counterpoint to Ishiguro’s novel when it comes to comparing the politics of memory. The Remains of Day, although embodied by a fictional character provides a more political statement than Fulness of Days: it is the voice of the margin speaking about the centre of events, addressing ethical questions about the nature of one’s political responsibility in the face of chaos, it is the voice of the slave, ‘writing back’ to quote Rushdie’s famous essay3 and filling the void of post-imperial England. Finally, Lord Halifax’s memoirs, written within a year of Stevens’s fictitious autobiography in 1957, stands alone on the empty stage of post-war British history, as a memorial to the country’s past glory. The riddle of memory in the Remains is the political riddle of submission and marginality, with a vengeance.

24In Orphans, the centrifugal force at work is much more defined by violence. Whereas the butler’s world becomes more and more saturated with the notion of dispossession, dislocation seems to be the key word for Banks. As his name suggests, the banks of the world, its boundaries, are gradually dissolving into a maelstrom of chaos. In other words, to quote Yeats, ‘Things fall apart: the center cannot hold’ (Yeats 211), and the centre of the novel gives way to the gradual deconstruction of the subject and total dislocation of the narrative. The riddle of memory is told amidst a collapsing universe. One of the leitmotivs of the novel is indeed that of gradual entropy towards a sort of heart of darkness in the ruins of Shanghai where massive destruction and chaos reach a climax. ‘The world’s collapsed around your ears’ seems to be the leitmotiv of the novel. As the murders Banks unearths become more and more gruesome, violence is gradually let loose. The different crimes Banks enquires about form a chain of ever-increasing mindless violence. The first one is conventional enough, set in an Agatha Christie-like background: landed gentry and ‘to the manor born’ form the setting of this first murder whose details escape the reader.

25As much as Stevens was obsessed with the greater repercussions of small everyday events, the text of Orphans is gradually saturated with the repercussions of crime and violence: the concentric circles of each murder and each death seem to ripple through the narrative, sending ripples of entropy throughout the book. After moving to child murder, apparently by the hands of their own parents, we end up with disembowelled bodies on the water front of Shanghai. The violence seems to have come full circle and one particular image seems to embody that centrigugal movement of chaos: ‘Finally, closest to where we were standing [. . .] lay a boy slightly older than the girl we had followed in. One of his legs had been blown off at the hip, from where surprisingly long entrails, like the decorative tails of a kite, had unfurled over the matting’ (Ishiguro 2000, 318). Together with the constant loss of bearings Banks experiences throughout the novel, the vision of horror underlines Banks’s grasp on the world on the mode of understatement and distanciation.

26The adverbs, ‘possibly’, ‘surprisingly’, and the clinical description of the carnage underline how Banks is absent from what he witnesses. His voice seems to be on another stage, not here, not sharing the moment. A sense of incoming disaster is paradoxically an obsession of Banks’s, as he denounces the members of the European community living in the Concession, ‘Here, in other words, at the heart of the maelstrom threatening to suck in the whole of the civilised world, is a pathetic conspiracy of denial; a denial of responsibility which has turned in on itself and gone sour, manifesting itself in the sort of pompous defensiveness I have encountered so often’ (Ishiguro 2000, 192). Just like Stevens who remains blind to his faults until the very end when he falls into tears next to a stranger on a bench, Banks also lives in constant denial. The portrait he made of the society he loathed is none other than a self-portrait. In confession, one’s face seems to be invisible to oneself, looking into oneself seems to be akin to looking away, looking for a metaphor or a comparison (the tails of the kite, dignity . . .) to avoid looking at the heart of darkness. Confession is the art of veiling the unnamable.

27Whereas in The Remains memory partakes of a slow process of dispossession of the self, climaxing in one single sentence when Stevens finally sheds his mask and confesses ‘my heart was breaking’, memory in Orphans is part of a violent process of dislocation and destruction. Each novel obeys a different problematic, each narrator functions on a different mode. In When We Were Orphans the narrative is told on the mode of erasure and understatement. We never quite know about the narrator’s professional activities or emotions since they seem to be one step beyond the text. In The Remains of the Day, the narrative seems to be told on the mode of avoidance, of facing away, of never looking truth in the eye. In each novel, memory is presented on a different mode. In The Remains of the Day, memory is presented through the guise of rubbing, polishing the text as it were, transforming it into a multilayered palimpsest revealing stratas of meaning. In When We Were Orphans memory follows the hidden spiralling patterns of growing entropy and disorder. Yet the patterns of disaster are present in both: the disappearing Chinamen of the novels are the metaphors of that truth that always resists the reading of the text, of that constant supplement that cannot yield to interpretation. Change the Chinamen, change the axis mundi and change the whole interpretation of the world. One Chinaman disappears, a whole world collapses around the narrator.

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Bibliographie

De Man, Paul, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Halifax, The Earl of, Fulness of Days, London: Collins, 1957.

Ishiguro, Kazuo, The Remains of the Day, London: Faber & Faber, 1989.

When Were Orphans, London: Faber & Faber, 2000.

Martens, Lorna, The Diary Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Newton, Adam Zachary, Narrative Ethics, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1997

Roth, Philip, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988.

Rushdie, Salman, ‘The Empire Writes back with a Vengeance’, London Times,3 July 1982.

Yeats, William Butler, ‘The Second Coming’, Collected Poems, London: Macmillan/Papermac, 1982, 210–11.

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Notes

1 Lorna Martens, The Diary Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

2 Isaiah, 53: ‘Because of his affliction he shall see the light in fullness of days; Through his suffering, my servant shall justify many, and their guilt he shall bear.’

3 Salman Rushdie, ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’, London Times, 3 July 1982.

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Paul Veyret, « The Strange Case of the Disappearing Chinamen: Memory and Desire in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 29 | 2005, mis en ligne le 25 juillet 2023, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/13828 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ebc.13828

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Paul Veyret

IUFM de Paris

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