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Did Mr Stevens Write any Christmas Cards? Purloined Memories in The Remains of the Day

Les cartes de Noël de Mr Stevens: souvenirs dérobés dans The Remains of the Day.
Paul Veyret

Résumés

Le temps dans The Remains of the Day est perçu sur le double mode de l’incomplétude et de la dissimulation. La compréhension rétrospective du passé est sans cesse reportée, un passé qui ne se lit d’ailleurs qu'en pointillé. La recherche du temps perdu dans laquelle se lance Stevens est une expédition des plus hasardeuses car plus le récit progresse, plus il apparaît déstabilisant pour le narrateur: une erreur de montage flagrante apparaît dans le récit puisque les différents moments de la relation de la mort du père ne coïncident pas dans le temps diégétique. Le lecteur est en fait face à un texte ‘diplomatique’, étymologiquement un di-ploma, un texte replié, secret.

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Texte intégral

1It seems increasingly likely that, in the manner of John Sutherland’s tongue-in-cheek micro-reading of fiction (Is Heathclif.fe a Murderer? Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?), I really will undertake an imaginary expedition through The Remains of the Day. An expedition, I should say, which should take me into the split-space of the narrating ‘T’ and delve into the gaps and blank spaces of the butler’s narration. But let me explain further. The title of my paperDid Mr Stevens Write Any Christmas Cards?’ does not question so much Stevens’s epistolary sense of propriety as his own obsession for rituals and repetitions, for the markers and signs that punctuate the narrator’s life, in other words, the intervals that compose this elliptical and oblique fictive autobiography.Did Mr Stevens write any Christmas cards?’, indeed, did Mr Stevens write at ail, apart from the fictional account of his joumey West, did he write to Miss Kenton, at any time after she left Darlington Hall? For that matter, can Mr Stevens write about Miss Kenton?

  • 1 Ali references are 10: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remain. of the Day, London: Faber & Faber, 1999 (1989), (...)

2Stevens’s own story tells the tale of a progressive and retrospective dispossession, a graduai Joss of ail bearings and a hollowing out of the self. The ‘purloined memories’ in question are Stevens’s own memories sifted through the alienating present moment of enunciation. Stevens is never really himself anywhere in the nove), except maybe once, since he is always masquerading behind the smoke­ screen of professionalism: hisbutlerese’ is his own way of putting himself forward as a candid, selfless (although not quite self-effacing) servant. Yet a single letter, or rather the repeated edited extracts of one single letter seem to shatter Stevens’s well­ ordained, well-planned, world order. And very much like in Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’, these fragmented memories that appear are the echoes and reflections of Miss Kenton’s unexpected letterher first in almost seven years if one discounts the Christmas cards’.1 Moreover, the missing letter signifies what is lacking, what is erased from Stevens’s discourse. And since the butler never actually quotes the letter in full, prefering using it as a talisman, a fetish with which he reconstructs Miss Kenton’s, his vision of the former housekeeper is based on the constant denial and erasure of their mutual desire.

3Edited fragments, gaps and blanks form therefore Stevens’s vision of the former housekeeper. Stevens himself is a fragment, the ruined remain of an extinct period and since his narrative is also full of gaps and intervals, he himself can be considered to exist on the mode of intervals, gaps and blanks to be filled. ‘Discount[ing] the Christmas cards’ seems to sum up Stevens’s mode of relation with Miss Kenton and his mode of telling his own story: The Remains of the Day is less the commemoration of dates than the gradual disrememembrance of things past. A story about ‘remains’ of a sort: what remains after a life has burnt out, what remains unsaid and unexpressed, what remains in the folds of the text.

  • 2 Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans, London: Fliber & Faber, 2000, p. 325.

4‘Enjoy life, this is not a rehearsal’: the latter-day version of the Epicurean ‘Seize the day’ seems to be the sentence Ishiguro’s narrators have never heard, or at least put into practice. Not only do they assume that the past is ‘hardly a foreign land’,2 to quote Christopher Banks, but in the place ‘where they start to make’ their ‘journey[s] from’ ‘many things aren’t as’ they were ‘supposed to be’. The dashing of the narrators’ hopes and the ironie fulfillment of theirgreat expectations’ are the mainstays of retrospective first-person narratives. Nostalgia is the condition that legitimates the journey backwards, the nostos, Ulysses’s sea voyage towards his homeland. This nostalgie longing is fraught with ambivalence: it is both a desire to look into an unsatisfactory past, but also a desire to look into an unfulfilled future. But for Ishiguro’s narrators, looking back on one’s life is tinged with regret: the best part of the day is not necessarily the evening. Indeed the twilight zone atmosphere of his fiction creates the conditions for a multilayered text to operate and create a gathering web of insinuasions about the past.

Time’s Arrow

5Perception in The Remains of the Day is based on the dual mode of incompleteness and occultation. The narrator keeps postponing his understanding of events, events he perceives, moreover, only in glimpses. His vision and his memory are both most unreliable mediums, but they are the only ones he can rely on to reconstruct his past. Time and space are constantly divided up, computed, as if Stevens were eternally fractioning the space that separated him from Miss Kenton and counting down the minutes and the hours before his tryst. Conversely, during the long-awaited brief encounter between Stevens and Mrs Benn, the butler times the reunion to the minute, down to their final farewell under the bus shelter. The ‘extremely pleasant’ (248)two hours’ (244) are divided into thefirst twenty or so minutes’ (245) of awkward conversation then, after looking ‘at the clock on the mantelpiece’ (248), the postponed reunion has finally come to an end. Time is once more slowed down as Stevens counts down the minutes and moments to come before Mrs Benn boards her bus home. Even space is divided up as ‘a line of telegraph poles led [his] eye over [farm fields] into the far distance.’ (249) This cutting up of time and space into infinitely divisible intervals is akin to Zeno’s paradox according to which motion finally becomes impossible. As Stevens wishes to freeze the scene in time, he keeps counting and recounting theremains’ of the time he has left in order to postpone the closure of his own life for ever.

6As a log-book and fictional autobiography, The Remains of the Day is by definition built on intervals and gaps: each entry in Stevens’s journal comes after a momentary absence, an ellision in the narrative. These intervals first obey to the double aleph paradox whose extreme example is found in Tristram Shandy: the moment of enunciation and the moment remembered, however close they will get in the course of narration, will never coincide. Telling one’s life will forever be bounded by two infinites. The narrator is forever in quest of an origin, in Stevens’s case, an original cause that started off a chain reaction, achain of thoughts’, yet another Stevensian mantra, forever looking for details and retrospectively dividing up time’s arrow into an infinity of successive moments. As he turns towards the future, the narrator is on the other hand forever postponing the moment of closure, slowing down the pace of the narrative by allowing himself an infinite series of pauses and digressions. Thefifteen-mile-an-hour journey’ towards Little Compton is Stevens’s undesigned contribution to the greater design of mapping out the hidden territories of the human psyche.

  • 3 It also seems increasingly likely, to borrow this most recognisably Stevensian expression and to qu (...)

7The other paradox is therefore that fictive autobiography, however sincere the narrator claims to be, is based on incompleteness and unreliability. Stevens’s own reality principle is based on the accumulation of soft spotsdetails and incidents he is fond of repeating—and blind spots, slits in the fabric of the narrative. The Remains of the Day is built on this dialectic of ellision and insistance, of fade outs and close ups.3 The combination of the two gives the impressionistic tone of the novel. As Stevens relates the first conference, his whereabouts in the castle are typical of his long-term vision throughout the novel:As ever, little was done to conceal anything from me as I went in and out of the various rooms [. . .] and I thus could not avoid gaining a certain impression of the general mood [. . .]’ (84). As a fair emblem of Stevens-as-narrator, the butler only relates glimpses of his life, ‘impressions’ of his past, never, of course, the whole picture, since that would mean destroying the very essence of autobiographical fiction. At another point when his father is dying in his attic room,I missed much of [Lord Cardinal’s] speech but his general gist seemed to be close to his lordship’s [. . .] for some reason I do not recollect, I was obliged to leave the drawing room for an extended period’ (96). Constantlyleaving’ places is also a sign of Stevens’s narrative in absentia: ail the important events of his life, his father’s death, the diplomatic conferences, seem to have taken place when he was somewhere around Darlington Hall, hovering in the corridors, chiding the cook or the pantry boy, but never quite there, in the flesh. Stevens is more of a voice, a stilted one upon the market, than an eye. Contrary to ail expectations, the butler did not see a thing.

8In other words, discontinuity and withdrawal, two key notions in Stevens’s language, are the butler’s mode of perceiving reality, a mode of being, based on an intermittent absence, or, in his own words,that balance between attentiveness and the illusion of absence that is essential to good waiting’ (75). Thus, being a butler, Stevens is placed in a most illogical situation: that of being present while being socially, but also ontologically, absent. Stevens’s presence to himself performs the same impossible illusion, orsleight of hand’: his own sense of unreality is so strong that, once out of the castle, he finally becomes what he had always been, a ghost. Incomplete and estranged, Stevens is forever banished from the land of the present. The butler is the subordinate narrator, forever submitted to the grander narrative of history and resigning himself to the footnotes of marginality.

9Stevens, a very Prufrockian character, is obsessed with signs of ageing and loss of control. And this obsession with the passing of time is betrayed by the repetition of figures and details. The more these become apparent, the more Stevens loses his grip on events. His counting the dwindling number of servants at Darlington Hall mirrors his own fading abilities:Recalling a time when I had a staff of seventeen under me, and knowing how not so long ago a staff of twenty-eight had been employed here at Darlington Hall, the idea of devising a staff plan by which the same house would be run on a staff of four seemed, to say the least, daunting’ (7). The order of these figures also echoes Stevens’s mode of reminiscence: different layers of the past are uncovered and finally end on the promise of a brighter future with the possibility that ‘an additional member of staff could be hired’. But this is mere wishful thinking since the time of remembrance is a time of substractions, not additions, as Stevens discovers at the end of his journey. The arithmetic of memory is an arithmetic of gradual dispossession.

10Not only is Stevens’s retrospection rife with hesitations, displacements and postponements, elements that make up the true stuff of unreliable narration, but it also contains some continuity errors, the most striking of which is the precise date concerning his father’s illness and demise. The butler tells us it coincided with his ‘coming of age’ as a butler during the first secret conference of March 1923. Yet some other details tend to prove that Stevens’s sense of chronology is rather blurred, and that perhaps not just his silver needs polishing. The repeated image of his father in front of the summerhouse is superimposed with the preparations for the conference. Thus Stevens remembersthat summer evening [. . .] very soon after that encounter [between Stevens and his father], the evening of the same day.’ (69), then on page 81 he mentions ‘my father’s fall in front of the summerhouse—this occurring as it did just two weeks before the first of our conference guests were likely to arrive’, that is to say ‘on a rainy morning during the last week of March 1923.’ (95) There’s no way with Stevens’s computation of dates that his father’s fall and subsequent rapid agony could have taken place both in the summer and two weeks before the beginning of the conference, during the first week of March. The two events have been superimposed in his mind and the appearance of control Stevens displays, hides on the contrary an ever-changing, blurred and fantasised account of his past. Stevens, although repeatedly at thehub’ of great events, is an off-centred narrator, standing on the margins of his own life.

11Everything in the The Remains of the Day seems to take place, or to have taken place, offstage, during an interlude. The novel is itself an interval, a break in Stevens’s routine as Mr Farraday obligingly suggests twice, ‘You look like you could make good use of a break’ (4). The novel is therefore told in a moment when the narrator sidesteps from his silent role, and casts himself in the unusual role of a fictive autobiographer. In other words, he no longer ‘waits’—in the two meanings of the word, both ‘expects’ andwaits on’ his master—but decides to embark on a peripatetic retrospection. The narrative itself mirrors this momentbetween the acts’ since most of the story Stevens indulges himself to mention takes place offstage: off the stage of servants’ work and aiso off the stage of history. Stevens’s self-denied sentimental story with Miss Kenton, took place, or rather did not but could have taken place, ‘off duty’. Stevens himself is an ‘off duty’ butler, wearing the discarded, old-fashioned and ill-fitting clothes of one of his social betters, estranged from a world he no longer understands.

12During this interval Stevens becomes homeless and paradoxically this situation enables the telling of his own story. The other estranged story-teller of the novel is Miss Kenton herself since the ietter she wrote mentioning her disappointment with life, is written during the interval of her leaving home,a period of four or five days’ (245). But on the point of returning back home, once more, after this short reunion with Mr Stevens, she seems to deny certain phrases and in particular the very sentence that prompted Stevens’s joumey,the rest of my life stretches out like an emptiness before me’ (248). Miss Kenton may safely return to her role as Mrs Benn, to her home and in expectation of a grandchild. She needs no narrative time and space as a subsitute for home, or as a consolation. She doesn’t need the solace of addressing herself to a ficticious narratee anymore, as Stevens seems to have been, briefly, when she wrote the letter. She is not the unconsoled. She will certainly continue writing Christmas cards, those phatic letters signifying nothing except the cyclic punctuation of time, and will remain forever in the hors-texte of Stevens’s fantasy.Off the record’, as it were. Mr Stevens may not have written over-enthusiastic and romantic accounts of his life at Darlington Hall, but Miss Kenton will anyway keep on sending him those Christmas cards,words signifying nothing’.

Of Diplomacy and Narrative

13Similarly Lord Darlington’s secret diplomatic manœuvres took placeoff the record’, and seem not to have signified very much in the scales of history. And of course, as servants will, while pretending he would do no such thing, Stevens tells everything he thinks he knows about those ‘off the record’ meetings. Both Darlington and Stevens are therefore trapped in the paradoxes of anoff the record’ narrative: Darlington found himself to be a pawn eventually outmanœuvred by the nazis, unable to read between the lines of the other’s political discourse. Likewise, Stevens found himself in the same situation, unable to read between the lines of Miss Kenton’s discourse the marks of affection she might have expressed while still at Darlington Hall. Stevens, like his master, was outmanœuvred, despite the clear writing on the wall (the two elopements that punctuated Miss Kenton’s arrival then her final departure: the former housekeeper’s, then Lisa’s), outmanœuvred this time not by Herr Ribbentrop, the dashing, elusive German diplomat, but by plain Mr Benn, a Devon shopkeeper.

14Both men failed to unfold the secret diplomatic messages spoken by others. At the heart of the book is this secret folded message, the two halves of a slip of paper that do not always quite coincide. The etymology of ‘diplomatic’ points at the existence of a secret meaning hidden within the original text, of a folded text facing the first one, in other words, thedi-ploma’—the folded letterpoints at acounter text.’ Diplomacy is therefore, etymologically speaking, the art of writing a counter text to the one presented to the reader, a text that subverts the meaning of the first one. Bence the existence of the subterranean manœuvres surrounding each of the two visits in 1923 and, more specifically, the secret meeting in 1936.

15For Stevens and Darlington, diplomatic metalanguage and emotional metalanguage both posit the existence of a hidden agenda, in the case of political discourse, and a countertext in the case of self-denied desire. Both demand from the reader an attention to the undertones of writing, to the silences between the words, both demand an art of decoding secret ciphers. Stevens, as he parrots his master’s diplomatic language, seems to be, on the surface, quite an expert. His art of hedging, and concealing himself behind antiquated expressions betray his having totally absorbed his master’s language. Reality is thus comically distorted, and his use of expressions such as ‘rather exasperated’, ‘somewhat embarrassed euphemise his vision of the world. What Stevens tries to keep concealed with this pantomime use of diplomatic metalanguage is his own self, the ‘T’ that reluctantly performs the narrative. Not only are his emotions kept at check but his own body is also linguistically censored and becomes ‘my person’, an abstract name that denies its ‘flesh and blood’. Stevens wishes almost to be perceived as a ‘person’, in other words a persona, a mask inhabited by its fonction and devoid of emotions.

  • 4 Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 335.
  • 5 Philip Roth, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, New York, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1988, p. 17 (...)

16But let me digress one moment and let my short digression be, thanks to a Stevensian ‘sleight of hand’, a dialectic short eut to the heart of the matter. Let me mention two often-quoted remarks, Stanley Cavell,a first-person narrative is, after ail, a confession; and the one who has something to confess has something to conceal. And the one who has the wordT’ at his disposal has the quickest device for concealing himself.4 Then the other one, by Philip Roth: ‘With autobiography, there’s always another text, a counter-text, if you will to the one presented’.5

17Confessions, and The Remains of the Day does belong to the genre in an extented way, are based on this dialectic double-talk: writing about oneself, as Stevens fictionnally does, is the art of writing around oneself, it is the art of eluding and erasing the central figure and subject of the book. Thus, the text is organised around an elusive, displaced ‘I’, always the shadow of another text.

18However, let me return to my original thread. Such is the case for Stevens: his reminiscences seem, almost up to the end, but not quite, to run along the lines of preestablished principles and linguistic turns of phrases. Thus it is as though the old butler were parrotting a narrative already performed for him by his social betters, or perhaps forefathers. Bence perhaps one of the meanings of the tiger episode, told by his own father as a tale defining the butler’s emotional contral under extreme circumstances. Confession is therefore performed almost in spite of the butler’s effort at suppression. It is the paradoxical art of ‘leaving no discernible traces’ (37) of one’s past. Stevens’s retrospection is performed in fear of introspection: every time he sidesteps from his narrative thought and wanders off into introspection, he eventually gets round it by saying ‘But I'm digressing’ or ‘let me return to my thread’.Morose introspection’ undermines the frail order of Stevens’s retrospection by focusing on details and abolishing the movement of time. Confession is the paradoxical art of writing on adi-ploma’, on a folded piece of paper, a text with a counter-text opposite, writing one text riddled with ellipses and hesitations, haunted by the ghost of another text. The ambivalence of Stevens’s narrative questions the nature of his predicament: a ghost caught in the limbo of his past, or a redeemed spirit freed by the telling of his own tale. Orpheus or Scheherazade?

  • 6 Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

19What Adam Zachary Newton suggests in his Narrative Ethics6 is precisely that the act of performing a confessional narrative, whether it be autobiographical or fictitious (the first-person narrative simply imitating the patterns of autobiography and distancing reality one step further) is both an act of release and incarceration, of liberation and alienation. By retracing the steps that gradually led him to the solitude and isolation of his late years, Stevens unfolds a series of ‘minor errors’ and ‘turning points’. Living now in what he believes to be a world of tarnished honour and no longer attainable ‘dignity’, Stevens tries both to exonerate himself from guilt and by doing so, he also confirms his past mistakes. The Remains of the Day describes both theGreat Escape’ contained in the act of writing, but also represents ‘A Farewell to Arms’, or rather to silver spoons and dusty Chinamen, since it is unsure whether Stevens liberates himself from his emotional and social straitjacket or not. The remembrance of things past is for Stevens the painful and reluctant remembrance of a series of misunderstandings, of realising too late the consequences of having talked atcross purposes’.

Keys and Turning Points

20The key to Stevens’s life appears to be an abject outside the text, never quoted in full but whose shadow looms across the book. It is Miss Kenton’s letter, a belated Valentine, that punctuates and motivates Stevens’s journey West. The letter, whose words the butler seems to learn by heart to the point perhaps of imagining them, serves in the novel as the problematic key to Stevens’s predicament. As always in The Remains of the Day, the letters’ role is not to unite but to measure the distance between the letter writer and its recipient. The three occurrences of letter-writing in the novel underline a gap between the butler and the housekeeper. Thus the notes Stevens and Miss Kenton exchange, and which are moreover pinned on her door (serving as yet another obstacle), then the letter the housekeeper receives informing her of her aunt’s death and which underlines Stevens Jack of an emotionally adequate response on his part, and finally Lisa’s letter after her elopement which Stevens places on the table between himself and Miss Kenton, ail point at a series of gaps and epistemological dead-ends. Ali three occurrences perform the talismanic fonction of replacing an absence, a void between the two protagonists.

21The extracts Stevens quotes from Lisa’s letter, which he remembers possibly ‘fil[ing] away for reference’ (167) (but one may wonder for what reference? As an appendix to the sentimental novels he is fond of reading?), are the mirror images of the desire for Miss Kenton he has always been terrified of spelling out: ‘We don’t have money but who cares we have love and who wants anything else we've got one another that’s ail anyone can ever want’ (166). Therefore Stevens ‘placed the pages face down’ (167) so as not to face up to the offending truth about the destructive and anti-social nature of desire. Furthermore, the butler himself is never as assertive as the young servant when letter-writing is mentioned. Instead, Stevens hides behind the mask of modality: ‘I would of course have to write to Miss Kenton to tell her I might be passing by’ (20).

22Significantly enough, Stevens, while waiting at the Rose Garden Hotel for the right moment to go and visit Miss Kenton, considers the former housekeeper’s Jack of reply as a sign of agreement: ‘I am only too aware that I never received a reply from Miss Kenton confirming she would be happy about a meeting. However, knowing Miss Kenton as I do, I am inclined to think that a Jack of any letter can be taken as agreement’ (216). In a form of ghostly displacement, the absence of the letter becomes a letter itself. Each time a letter is mentioned, it coincides with an interruption, a moment of pause which forces the narrator to try and understand, to perform an act of recognition, of knowing and acknowledging. But the letter measures an irreducible distance. Thus Stevens is frozen still in the eternity of repetition and rehearsal, unable to acknowledge the uncertainty of signs. The letters keep trace of Stevens’s secret archives.

23The Remains of the Day is a novel about waiting for signs. As an eternal observer forever expecting some sign to change his life, Stevens is a prisoner of time, as he is a prisoner of the instant Miss Kenton left the castle. His retracing his steps is his way of repeating his life, of trying to find thekey’ andcrucial turning points’ he failed to perceive at the time. Stevens’s narrative is his constant failed readjustement with the demands of contemporary times he cannot understand anymore and the nostalgic longings for a past he cannot erase. As Stevens hypnotically retraces his steps backward in time, his memory finally uncovers the episode that caused the misunderstanding to take place between himself and Miss Kenton: ironically, having passed through ail the episodes of his life and having euphemised their portent, Stevens misses the point, metaphorically but also physically.

24When Stevens loses his way in the Devon wilderness and is put up for the night by the Taylors, Mr Taylor mentions the name of the inn the butler might have stayed at,the Crossed Keys’ (172). The mention of the name of the pub coincides in the narrative with what Stevens calls acrucial turning point’: the chancing upon by Miss Kenton of his reading a sentimental novel and, later on, the change in the ‘predictable pattern’ of her ‘days off’ (178–79). The book with which Stevens protects himself is the closest he would ever get to carnal knowledge. Emotions on a page will never turn into flesh. This episode coincides in Stevens’s memory with his discovery of Miss Kenton’s change. Giving as always his full attention to details, Stevenscould not help noticing that Miss Kenton had started receiving letters on a fairly regular basisonce a week or so—from the same correspondent, and that these letters bore a local postmark’ (180). Bearing the imprint, the date mark and place name of his potential rival, the love letters Miss Kenton receives cruelly perform before Stevens’s very eyes the comedy of seduction he never acted out.

25As an eternal outsider, Stevens once more misses the point, and he does so twice. TheCrossed Keys’ he misses a third time are the ironie repetition of the missed opportunities of his life. His only escape is tospeculate’ on the past, another favourite word of his: in other words, to view the reflections of his past, as in the rear-view mirror of Mr Farraday’s Ford.

26In the scenography of his memories, Stevens has arranged his fiction according to a mirror structure. This image, most often represented by the paradigm of the chiasmus, is omnipresent in the novel. The chiasmic structure is the backbone of Stevens’s text: it posits the possibility of permutation, the criss-crossing of situations and identities. The chiasmic structure of the novel makes possible in Stevens’s mind the notion of reversal, not only of identities but also of time. Stevens’s dual journey, in time and space, is both a progression and a regression. The mirror image present throughout the novel renders conceivable the fantasy of the eternal permutation of opposite poles. In love’s labour’s lost, Stevens no longer has the role of the expecting lover, nailed to the spot, in suspense like a sleeping beauty under wraps at Darlington Hall, waiting to be woken not by a kiss but by a letter. As Stevens discovers during his journey:Rather it was as though one had available a never­ ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the 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 irredeemable’ (188).

27Thus Stevens, searching for the origins of hismisunderstanding’ andturning back the clock’ to review every minor incident that punctuated his carrer, seems to be caught between the two infinites: between the microcosmic world of repetitive chores and the macrocosmic presence of time. These two extremes may be represented on the one hand, by the final reluctant owning up to a series of mistakes concerning the silver, the polishing errors that undermine his confidence, and on the other hand, the openness represented by his final—in terms of chronology—destination, Weymouth Pier. This Newtonian cosmogony places Stevens along the chain of beings, eternally caught between cause and consequence, between the darkened prong of a silver fork and the illuminated end of Weymouth Pier at night. Like Pascal, Stevens seems to stand in awe of two worlds: the infinite, unaccountable microcosmic world of details, and the macrocosmic infinity of the sea. In a moment of dark inverted epiphany, Stevens realises not the ultimate order and significance of his world, but on the contrary, its frailty and insignificance:at that moment my heart was breaking’ (252) Stevens’s final confession seems to stand in that single sentence, abolishing the rest of his life in an instant of intense yet fleeting comprehension. His only solution is a compromise. After yet another break, the missing entry in his diary, day five, the day it took him to recover his wits, his only solution is to return to a rehearsed routine, his own way ofturning back the clock’.

28Thecrucial turning point’, thecrossed keys’, in Stevens’s life are precisely two repeated moments of indifference and indecision. During the secret 1936 meeting, Stevens remains twice on the threshold of an act he never performs: he twice refuses to enter into a room, thus linking together, crisscrossing the twokeys’ of the text, the diplomatic sub-text and the sentimental sub-text of The Remains of the Day. Stevens, like a British Bartleby, prefers not to know about thevery crucial’ events going on ‘just several yards from’ him,over in that room’ (232). Similarly, heremains standing there’, whilejust a few yards away, on the other side of that door’, while, he is convinced Miss Kenton is crying (237). These crystallised moments are the repeated parapraxes, bungled actions, that conditioned the butler’s life.

29The chiasmic structure of the novel implies a meeting point, a crux, or, to borrow Stevens’s expression, aturning point’ where two parts of a proposition meet in an intersection or crossing of two tracts in the form of the letter X. The crisscross structure enables a form of inversion to take place: by reading despair and loneliness in Miss Kenton’s words, by describing his father’s fall, Stevens projects on others what he refuses to see in himself. A mirror image performs the permutation of identities: by becoming obvious in others, faults, gaps, and accidents are erased in the subject. The repetition of expressions such ascrucial’ and of ‘crucial turning points’ in Stevens’s narrative is the trace of his paradoxical behaviour. One particular instance brings home this folding up of the text and its cross over implications: when Stevens chances upon Reginald Cardinal to explain to him theglories of nature’ (94), the conversation is precisely at cross purposes, each talking about his own undisclosed countertext. Thus the object at the heart of the misunderstanding, young Cardinal’s ‘attaché case’, does indeed contain in more ways than one,every permutation the human mind is capable of’ (94). It stands ironically as an emblem of Stevens’s secret counter life, the one unexpressed, which turns out to bemost awkward’ once opened bythe wrong person’. Stevens’s own private Pandora’s box happens to be opened by the wrong person indeed: namely, the reader. At the heart of Stevens’s reluctant narrative is his inability to do more than read about thefacts of life’. His reconstruction of Miss Kenton’s letter betrays his hidden inability to piece together the fragments of an imagined lover’s discourse.

30Reading and re-reading Miss Kenton’s letter and looking for ‘significant passages’, ‘crossed keys’ of a kind, Stevens brings to life a whole system based on the uncertainty of signs. Stevens, an avid reader of sentimental fiction, knows by definition, and so do the likes of you and me, hypocrites lecteurs, that signs are not proofs of love, since signs are by nature ambiguous or false. And yet, as Stevens discovers, however ambiguous language finally is, he has no other choice but to fall back on the letter and the omnipotence of language. Hence is another of Stevens’s paradoxes: since nothing assures language, nothing assures the context in which Miss Kenton’s letter was written, therefore it remains as his sole and final assurance. The reading of the letter belongs both to the realm of paleography as Stevens unearths subtexts of memories buried in the writing, and divination, trying to wrest from the silences of the words some magic formula to redeem his whole wasted life. Once more, the reader cannot escape Stevens’s time labyrinth.

31Love is about waiting, and computing the time of the other’s absence. Time and space are marked out by Stevens’s patient and obstinate computing. As he waits for Miss Kenton’s arrival at the Rose Garden, his mind once more obeys to the computing syndrome: ‘I have ascertained from the young woman who served me lunch that the address where Miss Kenton is presently residing is some fifteen minutes’ walk away, which implies I have at least forty minutes to wait’ (216). Forever superimposing time and space distances in his mind’s eye, Stevens remains forever the passive, expecting part of the couple that never took shape between himself and Miss Kenton, almost the feminine yin, instead of the masculine, active yang. Once more, just as years before when Miss Kenton brought him some flowers—as if she were the wooing suitor and he were the brideStevens’s plan of staying put is thwarted. The dynamics of life is therefore not on the side of Stevens the reader but on the letter-writer’s side. Stevens is the lector lost in a fabula of his own device. Ironically, the only decisive and apparently minutely calculated step he ever took in his life—the journey West—ends on a miscalculation.

32Stevens’s over-deictic narrative, intime and space, makes him eventually Jose the thread of his own remembered life, just as he keeps losing his way along the road. Stevens is lost in the labyrinth of present-day England which bears little ressemblance to Mrs Symons’s The Wonder of England, and is lost in the labyrinth of time. As he winds his way along the country roads of Devon, Stevens finally reaches a dead-end. Painting, directing, the crux of Stevens’s fiction tums language against itself: the mock epiphany on Weymouth Pier,this small event’ (256), which enables Stevens to ‘adopt a more positive outlook’ (id.), also underlines dual epistemological quest. As he reaches his final destination, aland’s end’ of a sort, he has also come to the end of his own narrative. His response to his having reached the limits of the world is to fall back on ritual and repetition: learning the art of bantering in order topleasantly surprise’ his new master. In a final act of pathetic and ironic displacement, Stevens embarks upon the wooing of his new master and bids farewell to the chimaera of Miss Kenton and her blank Christmas cards.

33Love letters bear a dialectic of their own, they're both blank (encoded, and only the lover has the key) and expressive (charged with longing to signify desire). And like desire, the love letter waits for an answer and implicitly enjoins the other to reply, since without the reply, the other ceases to exist and remains an image, an aura of potential desire. And Stevens takes Miss Kenton’s absence of reply to his letter as yet another encouragement. Miss Kenton does not write back. She remains an outlinedfigure’, a shape to be filled by Stevens’s accretion of memories and desire.

34Stevens reinvents, through his narrative centered on the absent woman and a fragmented love letter, reinvents the creation of language, the child game based on the presence/absence of the mother, the fort-da game of fiction centered on absence. Stevens creates and recreates, always ‘starting from’ somewhere, as he starts off home at the end of the novel, convinced that although hehas given everything’ to Darlington, he still hasyears of service’ ahead of him. Thekey to human warmth’ lies indeed in bantering, that Beckettian wordgame of rehearsal and repetition, both a ‘form of consolation’, but also the saddest passion of ail. His having performed this reluctant retrospective introspection is also paradoxically the greatest ‘discernable trace’ he could have left of his passage in the interval of his existence.

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Notes

1 Ali references are 10: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remain. of the Day, London: Faber & Faber, 1999 (1989), p. 5.

2 Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans, London: Fliber & Faber, 2000, p. 325.

3 It also seems increasingly likely, to borrow this most recognisably Stevensian expression and to quote a remark from Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’s narrator Saleem Sinaï, that cinematographic metapha-s seem to have become part and parcel of the vocabulary used to define contemporary fiction sincenobody from Bombay should be without a basic film vocabulary’ (Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991 (1980), p. 31) and indeed anyone, for that matter . . .

4 Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 335.

5 Philip Roth, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, New York, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1988, p. 172.

6 Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

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Paul Veyret, « Did Mr Stevens Write any Christmas Cards? Purloined Memories in The Remains of the Day »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 27 | 2004, mis en ligne le 10 septembre 2025, consulté le 19 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16780 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14z5s

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Paul Veyret

IUFM de Paris

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