Ishiguro on dignity and wasted devotion
📚SOURCE
💎PERMANENT NOTES
🧵SYNTHESIS
A novel, the only one of the year, and the only literature note here on fiction. Stevens has been butler of a great English house for more than thirty years. In the summer of 1956 his new employer, an American, lends him the car, and he drives west for six days to visit the woman who was housekeeper there before the war. He tells us it is a professional errand about staffing. The book is his account of the drive, and of the memories he keeps arriving at and steering away from.
His subject, he believes, is dignity. He has a theory of it: a great butler never abandons the professional self he inhabits, whatever the provocation. He offers his proofs. He went on serving at an important dinner while his father lay dying upstairs. He carried out an instruction he knew to be unjust and did not object. He never told the housekeeper anything of what he felt, and she left to marry someone else.
By the end, on a pier at dusk, he has seen what the theory cost. His employer, whom he trusted to be wise on his behalf, was badly wrong and died disgraced. Stevens gave his best years to that judgement and, as he puts it in his own roundabout way, cannot even claim the mistakes as his own.
✨KEY IDEAS
Dignity, for Stevens, means never stepping out of the role, in public or alone.
He counts the night of his father's death among his professional triumphs.
He handed his judgement to his employer and called it loyalty.
Everything he felt for the housekeeper is told through arguments about staff plans and a book he was reading.
A stranger on the pier tells him that for many people the evening is the best part of the day.
📝READING NOTES
No quotation, as it is in copyright and as with everything else here. Read 24 to 29 August, most of it on a jetty at Lake Bohinj with my feet in the water. This note has no chapter summaries. It is about one idea.
How the book works
Stevens narrates, and Stevens is not to be trusted. He does not lie. He manages: each painful memory is approached, qualified, corrected, and filed under a professional heading. The reader's work is to hear what he is not saying. I do not know another book in which the form is so exactly the fault it describes. He is still in the role while telling us.
What he calls dignity
Three things, which he thinks are one:
- Self-command. Not showing strain. Real, and admirable in a crisis.
- Service to something larger, by serving a man he took to be at the centre of events.
- Wanting nothing for himself. Never asking, never stating a preference, never putting a claim.
The first is a virtue. The second was a bet on another person's judgement. The third is the damage. He treats his own wishes as an intrusion on the job, and by the end there is nobody left to have them.
Why this ended up in a promotion file
I read it three weeks into 📂 Promotion case for Group Product Manager, and four weeks after asking for the role out loud. I had spent five years doing good work and waiting for someone to notice. I called that modesty, or professionalism. Leona had another word for it at lunch in July, when she asked what I was waiting to be given.
Stevens is the far end of that road. I am not a butler and Halden is not a great house. The comparison is unfair to nearly everyone. But the mechanism is the same: if I never say what I want, I get to believe it was withheld and not that I failed to ask. His silence protects him from refusal, and it costs him his life.
So: 💎 Dignity is not the same as never asking for anything. The longer, less tidy version is the reflection I wrote on the jetty, 🕯️ Stevens and the promotion file.
My argument with the book
- It may be too hard on him. A man of his class and time had few roles on offer. The novel knows this and still lets the last scene land as his own doing.
- Its lesson is not that restraint is bad. I would not want to work with someone who had none. The lesson is narrower: restraint that never ends is absence.
- Asking is not sufficient either. He never asked and lost. One can ask and also lose. The book cannot tell me whether that is better. I think so, and I am about to find out.
Beside it
📖 Emerson on self-trust, read a week later, argues the other side at full volume. Between a man who trusts only himself and a man who never did, there is somewhere reasonable to stand.
Not this cycle. I asked, and the answer was no. It is better. I know what was decided and why, and the mistakes in the case are mine.
Questions it left me with
- What am I currently filing under a professional heading so as not to look at it?
- Whose judgement have I handed mine to? At work the honest answer, until May, was Dov's.
- Is one novel a year a failure of nerve? This one did more than most of the non-fiction.
Reading record
- Favourite: yes, one of the few I would hand to someone else
🗣️IN SHORT
- In : The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989
- Ishiguro shows that : a life given wholly to a role and to another person's judgement can be lost without a single dramatic error
- by showing that : a butler who defines dignity as never leaving his professional self serves through his father's death, obeys an order he knows to be wrong, lets the woman he loves leave, and understands only afterwards what he gave away