What was left of the day

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Was vom Tage Leftover (in new editions Was vom Tage Leftover , English original title: The Remains of the Day ) is a novel by the British writer and Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro from 1989 in the German translation by Hermann Stiehl, for the Ishiguro was awarded the Booker Prize in the year it was first published . In 2015, 82 international literary critics and scholars voted The Remains of the Day one of the most important British novels .

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In Ishiguro's novel, the butler Stevens tells of his life at the Darlington Hall country estate in Oxfordshire . After the Lord's death, the property was sold to the American millionaire Farraday, the manorial operations were severely restricted, many rooms were mothballed and the service staff was reduced to a few. As it turned out, the interventions were too strong to cope with the remaining tasks and it had to be rescheduled.

This is where the novel begins. Farraday offers Stevens that he could drive through England to relax in an old stately Ford during his five-week stay in the United States in late summer 1956. Stevens combines the trip with a visit to the former housekeeper Miss Kenton in Cornwall, who informed him in a letter that she has separated from her husband and whom the butler now wants to bring back to fill the gap in the staff caused by the many layoffs to close with a reliable force.

During the week-long trip, Stevens talks about his memories of the good old days and presents his theory of the perfect butler: At the core is the dignity of the servant, i.e. H. the receding of all personal needs behind the role. In Lord Darlington he believed that he had found the ideal employer whom he trusted and who he wanted to help achieve social success. He performed his task with the utmost discretion, served the guests with perfect restraint, never contradicted directly, but signaled approval and avoided discussions. It was his greatest satisfaction when he and his team had managed a large dinner without any mishaps, the overnight guests had left satisfied and the Lord praised him. The personal had to take a back seat, e.g. B. when he could not be with the dying father because he had to be available to the international conference participants. Miss Kenton stood in for him and closed the dead man's eyes in his place. But her friendliness and advances when she wanted to decorate his sparse study with a bouquet of flowers or was interested in his private reading, he generally brusquely rejected and limited the conversations to business topics. He tried to conceal from her that he was reading a romance novel from Darlington's library and explained to the reader, unbelievably, this reading with his training efforts in elegant social conversation. The dry language in which he tells these stories is characteristic of his suppression of personal needs. It appears bureaucratically precise, controlled and disciplined. He immediately relativizes his statements about the occasional unfriendly treatment or unjustified criticism that has happened to him by considering relieving motives or situational moods of the people in order to avoid the impression of a lack of fairness. He always adapted himself, he owed that to his employer, especially since he valued this politician who was a philanthropist and tried to find a balance.

Because at his country estate conferences and sometimes secret meetings of important European politicians took place. There, Darlington continued for an easing of the Treaty of Versailles stipulated German reparations after the First World War and was later a member of the appeasement policy of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain . He came under the influence of the " Black Shirt Organization " at times , and Stevens had to fire two Jewish maids on his orders. While Miss Kenton contradicted this and threatened her resignation, he carried out the order, although he regretted it, because it was reliable staff that was difficult to replace. This explanation is indicative of his work ethic, which excludes human aspects, for himself as for others. Darlington was also enthusiastic about the leader principle of fascism and saw the western democracies as out of date and incapable of solving the economic problems of the 20s and 30s. Stevens adopted his view that ordinary citizens have too little expertise to decide on complex processes. That has to be left to the elites. Although a young friend of Lord Darlington, Mr. Cardinal, informed Stevens about Hitler's machinations in Germany during a visit and warned against the naive appeasement policy, the butler stood by his master. To Cardinal's question "Can you just watch Stevens [...] as his lordship falls into the abyss?" He replied: "Forgive me, sir, but I have to say that I have full confidence in his lordship's judgment". As a loyal butler devoted to his master, he never questioned his motives and did not think about his involvement in National Socialism. Although Darlington was considered a “Nazi friend” in the post-war period and died a broken man, Stevens admits that he had misjudged his role model, but continues to excuse him with his best intentions to prevent war and the unpredictability of developments in Germany at the time. His unbroken admiration and identification is evident in one scene: after a car breakdown near Moscombe in Devon , he is accommodated by friendly villagers. They consider him a "gentleman" because of his dignified demeanor and he does not dare to tell the truth. Instead, he tells them about the prominent guests in the role of a nobleman and foreign politician. a. Churchill .

Here he comes into contact with the villagers for the first time, and he feels the contrast to his isolated butler life in the golden cage of Darlington Hall. The politically active Harry Smith takes a contrary position to Steven's elitist concept of dignity: “One of the prerogatives of a person [...] is that he - no matter who he is and whether he is rich or poor - that he is born free and that he can express his opinion freely and elect and also vote out his MP ”. This attitude of personal responsibility contrasts with that of the butler's allegiance. Above all, the encounter with Mrs. Benn, the former Miss Kenton, in Little Compton, Cornwall , leads to a turning point in Stevens' outlook on life and to the admission of the emotional atrophy behind his distance facade. After her suggestion that she could have imagined a life together with him, he lets a moment look behind his armor and confesses: "Truly [...] at that moment my heart broke". But it's too late to turn the clock back, and he encourages Mrs. Benn in the decision she made after the last crisis letter to live again with her husband, whom she left three times in the course of their marriage, and to care for her daughter Catherine and him soon-born grandchild to look forward to. At the last stop of his trip, on the illuminated pier of the seaside resort of Weymouth, in the midst of a happy crowd of pleasure seekers, he himself decides to give up the old stiff butler attitude, to adapt to the new times and the relaxed communication with entertaining jokes and what goes on with the day all that is left to enjoy is as much as possible.

Literary meaning

The literary critic Wayne C. Booth noted in 2005 that in addition to the figure of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain in literary works rarely so thoroughly dubious voice ( "a consistently dubious voice", see unreliable narration ) was created as the butler in this work .

criticism

“In her analysis of the novel, Bettina Steinhage refers to two readings: either as a work that 'deals with the perception and representation of the past and from this develops the question of the relationship between history and the present', or as a 'universal teaching piece about misguided idealism and a person's personal tragedy '(190). Presumably both apply: The Remains of the Day is a general character study about distorted perception, but also a historically exact examination of the downside of much-touted British virtues such as reserve, discretion, dignity and loyalty. The fact that Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki but socialized early on in England, includes the reader in the interpretation of his characters with the help of a subtle narrative style, is the real strength of the novel. "

- Johann N. Schmidt

expenditure

  • The Remains of the Day . Faber and Faber, London 1989, ISBN 0-571-15310-0 .
  • What was left of the day . From the English by Hermann Stiehl. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-498-03210-0 .
  • What was left of the day . From the English by Hermann Stiehl. btb-Taschenbuch, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-442-73309-X .
  • What was left of the day . From the English by Hermann Stiehl. Heyne (paperback), Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-453-42160-8 .

Adaptations

literature

  • Adam Parkes: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. A reader's guide . London: Bloomsbury Publ. 2001. ISBN 978-0-8264-5231-3
  • Daniel Schäbler: “'… What Dignity Is There in That?' On the connection between narrative unreliability and ethical behavior in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day . ”In: Works from English and American studies . Vol. 38, H. 1, 2013. pp. 19-36.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Guardian: The best British novel of all times - have international critics found it? , accessed on January 2, 2016.
  2. ↑ All quotes from the edition: Kazuo Ishiguro: What was left of the day. German by Hermann Stiehl. Reinbek b. Hamburg 1990. Here: p. 260, p. 262.
  3. ↑ p. 219.
  4. ↑ p. 278.
  5. ↑ Wayne C. Booth, "Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother?", In: A Companion to Narrative Theory , edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Blackwell Publishing, Malden / Massachusetts and Oxford 2005, paperback edition 2008, ISBN 978-1-4051-1476-9 Table of Contents , pp. 75–88.
  6. ^ Johann N. Schmidt : Great Britain 1945-2010. Culture, politics, society (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 305). Kröner, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-520-30501-5 , p. 351.
  7. ^ The Remains Of The Day , accessed May 22, 2019
  8. ^ The Remains Of The Day @ Union Theater, London, September 1-25, 2010 , accessed October 5, 2017.