Screening the “Other Setting”

It is with respect to the lost milieu of Darlington Hall’s glory days in the 1920s and 1930s that Stevens is able to declare to his new employer—who urges the motoring trip upon him with the remark, “you fellows, you’re always locked up in these big houses helping out, how do you ever get to see around this beautiful country of yours?”—that “it has been my privilege to see the best of England over the years, sir, within these very walls” (4). Yet as Stevens sets off from Darlington Hall, his initial sense of the landscape’s familiarity gives way to disorientation upon soon finding himself to have “gone beyond all previous boundaries” (23–24). In likening the sensations that accompany this passage to what a person might experience “setting sail in a ship, when one finally loses sight of the land,” and in conveying his “alarm” at the thought of “speeding off . . . into a wilderness,” Stevens’s account echoes some of the characteristic moods and figures of explorers’ tales of setting off for distant lands (24). What follows deepens these resonances, for in an effort to quell his anxiety Stevens must stop “to take stock, as it were,” reestablishing his orientation to the landscape by surveying it from the crest of a steep hill (24). The purpose of this strenuous climb, however, is also to partake of a particular aesthetic pleasure travel affords: the taking-in of a glorious view, one that in the opinion of a passerby cannot be bettered “anywhere in the whole of England” (25). The achievement of the summit affords Stevens a vista that he describes in terms hewing to a series of recognizable images of England at its most picturesque: “field upon field rolling off into the far distance,” “bordered by hedges and trees,” and lightly interrupted by “dots in some of the distant fields which I assumed to be sheep.” This picture of untouched natural beauty is framed and finished by the barest hint of a peaceable, benevolent human presence: “to my right, almost on the horizon, I thought I could see the square tower of a church” (26).Footnote ³

Stevens’s encounter with this landscape is seemingly a scene of affirmation, inciting him to observe, “with some confidence,” that “the English landscape at its finest . . . possesses a quality that the landscape of other nations, however more superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess” (28). Such confidence, Timothy Mitchell has taught us, is a characteristic of the regime of representation that imagines and renders the world as “an exhibit set for an observer in its midst.”Footnote ⁴ But while this mode of seeing and its “remarkable claim to certainty or truth” asserts a “political decidedness” in the nineteenth-century imperial milieu Mitchell assesses, Stevens’s version of this gaze is complicated by the loss of political confidence that attends the imperial crisis of 1956.Footnote ⁵ There is an implicit irony in Stevens’s perspective from above, or his ascendance, at this moment of imperial decline. In light of this historical frame, we might read Stevens’s observation that “we call this land of ours Great Britain . . . [and] the landscape of our country alone would justify the use of this lofty adjective” as an anxious assertion of how an England “alone,” denuded of her empire, might continue to lay claim to a “greatness” that, historically, has never simply entailed moral and aesthetic estimations but also territorial ambitions (28).

These anxious invocations of national and imperial greatness might seem to invite a symptomatic reading that would identify the narrative’s repression of Suez and imperial crisis.Footnote ⁶ However, this is hardly the whole of it. Stevens’s recursive and equivocal narration allows the reader eventually to discern what Stevens himself concedes only reluctantly: that his devoted service at Darlington Hall was on behalf of an employer whose tireless pursuit of a political rapprochement between Britain and Nazi Germany allied him with Germany’s ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop and, for a time, with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. There are, then, two vexed histories at work in or at the edges of Stevens’s consciousness, and conscience, both of which he holds at bay to varying degrees: that of imperial crisis and Britain’s postwar decline and that of fascist appeasement and his own passivity, even complicity, with Darlington’s political designs.

What temporal relationship between these histories is established by the rhythm of his recollections? Stevens’s tentative attempt to recount—and thus account for—the events of some twenty years earlier suggest that this reckoning with the past is both deferred and belated. Although deferral is an act of postponing the present into the future, and belatedness the quality of having arrived too late, both are temporal displacements. Indeed, Stevens’s narration is saturated with these forms of untimeliness. The first lines of the novel indicate an anticipatory mood about the journey: “It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. An expedition, I should say, which I will undertake alone, in the comfort of Mr. Farraday’s Ford; an expedition which, as I foresee it, will take me through much of the finest countryside of England to the West Country, and may keep me away from Darlington Hall for as much as five or six days” (3). Likelihood, foresight, and the future tense are characteristics of this passage. But the unremitting communiqué of almost every page is that Stevens is immersed in thoughts of the past, signaled by such phrases as “In fact, as I recall,” “recalling the time,” “in fact, I remember,” “for when I look back,” “I find myself going over in my mind again,” and a host of variations on statements of this sort. All of these draw attention to Stevens’s faculty of memory at work yet—as the insistently revisionary emphasis of some of these phrases suggests—his powers of recall prove tendentious.

The untimeliness of Stevens’s engagement with the past, and his equivocal rendition of that past, are seemingly explained by the failures of judgment that Stevens must confront. The most egregious of these are the political incuriosity and passivity he adopts in the face of his employer’s activities and his willing execution of his employer’s request that two Jewish maids at Darlington Hall be let go from service. His account of the dismissal of the two women emerges gradually, and his first allusion to it is couched in severe words about the “salacious nonsense” of Darlington’s purported anti-Semitism:

Stevens’s concession that that there may be a nub of fact to these views appears at the very end of his thoughts—literally an afterthought separated grammatically and temporally from the rest by a dash. These minimizing remarks appear in the shortest of the novel’s sections, so that the narrative form echoes the containment Stevens hopes to enact on the significance of the episode itself. It is only in the novel’s next section that Stevens dilates on this “minor episode,” opening with the words: “I feel I should perhaps return a moment to the question of his lordship’s attitude to Jewish persons, since this whole issue of anti-Semitism, I realize, has become a rather sensitive one these days” (145). He thus circles back to the topic with an oblique reference to the genocide of the Jews, conceding that what could once be taken as insignificant may seem otherwise in hindsight. We might read Stevens’s delayed but doubled recounting of this incident as an ambivalent attempt to come to terms with the past and with the question of what, if any, “regret or shame” he should feel “on my own account” (201).

However, there is more to the matter of these memories’ timing than their belatedness, for they emerge in temporal coincidence with the crisis of empire of July 1956. In fact, for all the apparent reluctance and equivocation of Stevens’s account of the fascist sympathies and antisemitism at Darlington Hall in the 1930s, these memories prove to be a welcome distraction from the present. “But I see I have become somewhat lost in these old memories” muses Stevens at the end of the analepsis that returns him for the second time to the dismissal of the Jewish staff. “This had never been my intention, but then it is probably no bad thing if in doing so I have at least avoided becoming unduly preoccupied with the events of this evening” (159). What is it about the present that incites thoughts of the past?

The evening in question includes the novel’s single most explicit discussion of empire, in which Stevens, mistaken for a gentleman by his hosts in the small village of Moscombe and unwilling to disabuse them—finds himself in the middle of a political debate between a socialist doctor and a bluff liberal, Harry Smith, who believes in the dignity of the common Englishman on behalf of whose rights “we fought Hitler” (186). Stevens’s repeated attempts to extricate himself with protestations of his exhaustion are unsuccessful until, “seizing what seemed a suitable moment,” he rises from the table (192). Here, too, Stevens’s sense of timing fails him, for before he can make his escape he is confronted with one last entreaty from Harry Smith, who would have wished to solicit his opinion—on decolonization:

It is the question’s belatedness that spares Stevens from having to articulate a position on this timely issue and, back in the safety of his own room, his memories of Darlington Hall in the politically fraught 1930s displace the discomfort of the evening for a time. It may be, then, that the seeming untimeliness of Stevens’s memories is nothing of the sort, for the belatedness of memory in this instance serves a function—it defers the demands of the here and now.

Recollecting and remembering are channels for attention and, in Stevens’s case, the means of diverting his attention from the present to the past. The question of attention and its distribution is thus just as important as the arrangement of Stevens’s recollections.Footnote ⁷ Along with the profusion of terms indicating recall, Stevens continually finds himself in a state of preoccupation. The word preoccupied (or preoccupying and preoccupy) appears more than a dozen times, including in the novel’s first sentence as well as in the passage I discussed previously, in which Stevens resists “becoming unduly preoccupied with the events” of his uncomfortable evening in Moscombe. He repeatedly uses the word to describe states of mental absorption, though even here there are bathetic shifts of register that suggest his inability to discriminate between greater or lesser degrees of importance. In the context of Stevens’s actual occupation—that of a butler—his susceptibility to preoccupation ironizes his labors. Although he takes professional pride in his ability to manage and apportion his own and others’ labor to best effect, noting of his prized staff plan that “the ability to draw up a good staff plan is the cornerstone of any decent butler’s skills,” the discrepancies of scale and value between the various objects of his attention suggest his mismanagement, in an ethical and historical sense, of the energies that fuel the work of memory (5).Footnote ⁸

But Stevens’s propensity to preoccupation is not just ironic. It is also a mechanism of psychic defense. In several instances, Stevens invokes “preoccupation” to describe, variously, a state of distraction in which one’s attention is not in readiness; a form of misplaced or excessive attention; and a frame of mind in which one has been diverted away from a more pressing object of attention. In fact, while the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that, most recently, preoccupation designates the state of being engrossed in something or occupied with a matter that dominates or takes precedence, it also notes older variants in meaning: in the late nineteenth century, the term described “mental prepossession leading to a particular disposition or tendency,” or “the occupation of a place in advance.” Earlier still (and now obsolete), it is a rhetorical term: “a figure of speech in which objections are anticipated and prevented; anticipation, prolepsis.”Footnote ⁹ Attention thus also functions to displace and rearrange significance, and, like belated or deferred memory, it has a temporal structure that anticipates in order to preempt, predispose, and prevent. In other words, it has a conscious or unconscious strategic dimension.

Such strategic rearrangements and redirections of a subject’s attention to memory, and particularly to the displacement of one memory by another, describe the dynamic of Freudian screen memory. That is, an apparent memory expressed as a visual image or scene, which in fact points toward a quite different memory not available to consciousness—one that is both displaced and disguised by but also preserved and encoded in the recollected image. On my reading, the novel in fact stages an instance of screen memory and its symptoms. We find it in the novel’s final analeptic episode, as Stevens whiles away a morning, awaiting his much-anticipated meeting with Darlington Hall’s housekeeper during the 1930s, whose unrequited and unspoken romance with Stevens constitutes the novel’s failed love plot:

Here, memory—a particular memory—is explicitly the object of his “preoccupation.” Despite the intensity of his attention and the vividness of the picture, however, the recollection of the scene is fraught with difficulty. The difficulty concerns the placement of this memory fragment in its proper time and context, and in accounting for the source and character of the “peculiar sensation” that attends it. Stevens continues:

Stevens realizes that the evening in question is the one on which Miss Kenton informs him of her plans to marry. He now recalls that on that evening, too, he stands poised before her door, struck by indecision as to whether he should knock, and conscious of Miss Kenton’s grief, not at her aunt’s death but at his own seeming indifference to her engagement. It is this pattern of (mis)remembering that approximates what Freud terms a Deckerrinerung, or cover memory, but whose usual English translation is “screen memory.”

The symptom of a screen memory, Freud explains, is the seeming reversal of the expected “relation between the psychical significance of an experience and its retention in the memory,” according to which “whatever seems important on account of its immediate or directly subsequent effects is recollected; whatever is judged to be inessential is forgotten.”Footnote ¹⁰ In the case of a screen memory, however, the subject instead remembers something inessential or fragmentary, which analysis will reveal to be a memory that has “associatively displaced” the essential experience, whose affective power motivates remembrance on the one hand but resistance on the other.Footnote ¹¹ According to Stevens, he remembers a moment apparently out of time, insisting that it has “remained firmly embedded in my mind,” even as he concedes that he may have long misidentified its connection to the death of Miss Kenton’s aunt. Moreover, he registers the presence of an affect whose connection to the scene in question is apparently inexplicable or unnamable. The suggestion of a screen memory at work is heightened by the literal screening off—or, as per the German Deckerinnerung, covering over—imposed by the door that stands between him and Miss Kenton. It seems, then, that Miss Kenton’s announcement of her engagement is the painful memory Stevens covers over with the “substituted memory” of an earlier event (Miss Kenton’s grief at her aunt’s death), connected to the later one by what Freud terms “symbolic or similar links.”Footnote ¹²

As Stevens reassembles the memory of that evening, however, his account admits the presence of another closed door at which he gazes, behind which, screened from his view, matters of great import are taking place. It is there that he is hurrying, in fact, when he pauses outside Miss Kenton’s closed door for a moment on the night of her engagement. This other door leads to the drawing room where, it is implied, Darlington is meeting secretly with the British prime minister and foreign minister, and with the German ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop, in pursuit of closer ties between Britain and Nazi Germany:

The fragmentary remembrance of standing outside Miss Kenton’s door, which Stevens, with difficulty, reattaches to the painful memory of her engagement is, in this reading, itself a screen memory that displaces the other, now more psychically difficult event of that day. Stevens has restored one memory to its proper place, but cannot discern the “symbolic or similar links” that connect the upstairs/downstairs and political/personal dramas of that selfsame evening. The “peculiar sensation” that Stevens cannot identify or explain when he recalls standing before Miss Kenton’s door would thus correspond to the “deep feeling of triumph” Stevens experiences as he stands watch over the doors to Darlington’s meeting.Footnote ¹³ Unanalyzed “at the time,” Stevens’s memory of triumph at his proximity to power now sits uneasily alongside the memory of the political ends for which that power exercises itself. It is on that same evening that the “young Mr Cardinal” (whose arrival punctuates his memory of standing before Miss Kenton’s door) challenges Stevens’s willingness to “just let all this go on before you . . . and never think to look at it for what it is” (212). The screening-off of Stevens’s sight by these closed doors invokes this political and moral blindness, even as Stevens’s preoccupation with this “vivid” image of the past enables his historical blindness in the present.

I am suggesting, then, that the dynamics of displacement and association characteristic of a screen memory may illuminate the (missed) connections between Stevens’s belated reckoning with fascist appeasement and his own political quietism in the 1930s on the one hand, and, on the other, the current crisis of empire that threatens the structures of national and imperial feeling he cannot quite dislodge. Such a reading entails treating screen memory as a historical trope (rather than as a psychic strategy for contending with personal memories, as Freud initially theorized). Such a repurposing has been very appealing to cultural critics—indeed, Freud himself subsequently suggested screen memory’s social and collective implicationsFootnote ¹⁴ —and it has been a favored figure among scholars of cultural memory to describe the dynamics of political and ideological contestations over what is remembered and commemorated.Footnote ¹⁵ In particular, critics have repeatedly turned to the structure of screen memory to describe a peculiar or suspect asymmetry in the mnemonic and commemorative energies afforded to apparently distinct histories; colonial and postcolonial histories as well as American slavery, they allege, have been subordinated to the memory of European fascism and antisemitism.Footnote ¹⁶ Most recently, scholars have sought to trace and restore connections between these historical narratives, unfurling their metonymic and associative dimensions rather than diagnosing where they might screen or block one another.Footnote ¹⁷ Such projects depend in part on establishing an archive with which to demonstrate the entanglement of supposedly distinct histories, and we can think of Ishiguro’s novel as belonging to a body of literary, cinematic, and philosophical works that not only attend to the relationship of European fascism and Europe’s overseas empire but that anticipated the current scholarly emphasis on understanding memory as “multidirectional” (Rothberg), “transferential” (Schwab), “connective” (Hirsch), “palimpsestic” (Silverman), and as “memory-in-complicity” (Sanyal).

Each of these terms or concept-metaphors proposes a figure for understanding the formation and workings of cultural memory as it draws together and cuts across historical narratives often treated as clearly separable. However, these figures also denote corresponding strategies of reading. What these strategies share, in my view, is an implicit commitment to the mode of reading that Edward Said termed “contrapuntal.” As Said develops it in Culture and Imperialism, a “contrapuntal perspective” designates an intellectual stance that draws together and relates—Said’s favored term is “connects”—“experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and place of development” (32).Footnote ¹⁸ As a strategy of reading or interpretation, it depends upon a paired movement; the recognition, first, of silences, asymmetries, displacements, and omissions in the cultural archive, imposed by “metropolitan history” or the “dominating discourse (51). And, second, the restoration of those elided narratives, effected by “extending our reading . . . to include what was once forcibly excluded” (67), in order to show how “knotted,” “overlapping,” and “interconnected” these experiences have been all along (32).

It is precisely such a shuttling movement between apparently “discrepant experience[s],” in order to reveal their historical entanglement and even mutual constitution, that characterizes recent attempts to recover a more expansive memory of events whose interconnections may have been matters of critical indifference, or have been conceived in terms of blockage, substitution, or displacement (32).Footnote ¹⁹ We can think, then, of the efforts to establish a “multidirectional” or “connective” account of the histories of European fascism and overseas colonialism as collectively engaged in a project of what we might call contrapuntal memory, thus underscoring the affiliations of such an approach with a postcolonial hermeneutics concerned with the figuration and interpretation of historical asymmetry, displacement, and entanglement.Footnote ²⁰

There is a significant difference, however, between Ishiguro’s novel and the way I am reading it, and contrapuntal reading as Said describes and practices it in Culture and Imperialism. The itinerary of Said’s contrapuntal method entails a symptomatic reading that identifies “what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented” in the cultural archive, in order to pair and complete it with a reparative gesture that seeks “to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice” to “those other histories” that are displaced by but resistant to the dominant discourse (Said 66, 51). There are two things to note here. First, contrapuntal reading’s reliance on both symptomatic and reparative interpretive practices complicates those recent critical descriptions of the affects and operations associated with suspicious or symptomatic reading, formulated by literary scholars intent on challenging the supposed overrepresentation of these practices among the methods of literary analysis. Said’s description of a contrapuntal practice would seem to leave room for—indeed, to require—both of the ethical or affective postures toward the text that Eve Sedgwick describes as, variously, paranoid and reparative.Footnote ²¹ It’s worth noting that Said in fact specifically tries to distinguish his approach from what he characterizes as the understandable sense, among like-minded critics, that “what seems most appropriate for the decolonizing scholar is . . . a hermeneutics of suspicion” (255). Indeed, Jonathan Arac goes so far as to observe that although “the counter in counterpoint is a term of opposition,” “contrapuntal criticism is loving; it joins.”Footnote ²² (Though surely the aggression and love that Arac identifies with oppositional and contrapuntal criticism, respectively, can no more be kept apart than Sedgwick’s paranoid and reparative critical styles.) The upshot here is that although postcolonial readings of colonial literary texts are deeply vested and practiced in the hermeneutics of suspicion, contrapuntal reading suggests at least one version of a “critical hermeneutics” (I take the phrase from Heather Love) that would seem self-consciously to resist, at least in its aspirations, the contagious and monomaniacal (“mimetic” and “strong,” in Sedgwick’s terms) tendencies of a paranoid style.Footnote ²³

But, second, although Said’s account of contrapuntal reading productively complicates some of these descriptions, Ishiguro’s treatment of the postcolonial symptom draws our attention to questions about the different interpretive methods that characterize reading for the symptom in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature (that is, colonial literature), as Said does, and in Ishiguro’s postcolonial text. I unfold both of these points at length in the second part of this essay. To lay the ground for this discussion, it remains to say a little more about the status of the symptom in The Remains of the Day.

Stevens’s narrative, I have suggested, exemplifies a defective worldliness that cannot recognize the entanglement of European fascism and imperialism, and the shared forms of attachment and shame that attend them. But while the limits of Stevens’s knowledge and his profound narrative unreliability function to dramatize and heighten the reader’s distance from him, I am not implying (nor, I should think, is Ishiguro) that we read The Remains of the Day simply to make the character of Stevens an object of opprobrium for his historical blindness. Equally, my close reading of how the structure of screen memory manifests in the novel is not a symptomatic reading, in the sense of revealing that which the text does not know.Footnote ²⁴ Rather, I am proposing that the novel thematizes and theorizes the logic of Freudian screen memory, representing it formally in order, first, to reflect on it as a historical symptom (or, better, trope) and, second, to stage the problem of the symptom and how to read it. We might say, then, that the novel offers an allegory of symptomatic reading. Ishiguro shows how Stevens remains blind to screened memories, even as the novel makes available to the reader—screens for us—the recognition that such blindness is at work on the narrator’s part. This is a case where the English translation of Deckerinnerung opens up a meaning the original does not offer. “Screen memory” suggests an ambiguity, for although a screen can veil something from sight or screen it off, so that it is behind something else, the phrase is not limited to the figures of depth and dimensionality embedded in the German Deckerinnerung, or “cover memory”—a screen, of course, is also a surface off of which we read. As such, the novel’s form both invites a reading that restores the relation of the historical scenes of fascism and imperialism in a contrapuntal fashion and also demands a reading that acknowledges and accounts for the text’s screening or resurfacing of the symptom. It is to this latter question that the essay now turns.

Resurfacing Symptomatic Reading

My argument for the novel’s self-conscious relationship to symptomatic reading emerges in part from the complexities that correspond to what I earlier described as the elision of the Suez crisis in Stevens’s narrative. Of course, this provokes a question as to how the reader is able to date his journey in the first place. The novel is organized into eight parts, all but one of which bears a title page specifying a segment of Stevens’s journey, the time of day, and the place, for instance, “Day One ∙ Evening Salisbury.” Only the title page of the first section, which reads “Prologue ∙ July 1956 Darlington Hall,” deviates from this organization: it identifies a part of the book, rather than a time span within the novel’s narration, and it specifies a date that locates the novel’s action as historically coincident with the crisis of empire. The date’s hermeneutic interest is partly a consequence of its uncertain origins, its ambivalent enunciation. The appearance of a date indexing Suez on a title page labeled “Prologue” sets it in a presumably extradiegetic space. As the only element of the text outside the ambit of Stevens’s narrative, this self-conscious reference implies an author, whose “discreet” inclusion of the date prospectively corrects or reframes Stevens’s narrative, anticipating its profound unreliability. It is as though the novel’s form signals to the reader, over Stevens’s head, as it were, what Stevens cannot see or refuses to know.

The uncertain character of this reference complicates a reading of Suez as the novel’s repressed “other setting.” To illustrate why this is so, let me turn again to Culture and Imperialism—this time to Said’s seminal reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, in which he makes the case for the repression of the colonial scene and the corresponding necessity of a contrapuntal reading particularly forcefully. Austen, Said famously suggests, indicates that the world of Mansfield Park depends on the extraction of profit from Sir Thomas Bertram’s colonial holdings in Antigua, yet suppresses, by and large, any representation of the Antiguan plantation and what transpires there. Sir Thomas is absent from Mansfield Park but “is never seen as present in Antigua”; as such, Antigua and the master’s trip there serve only to facilitate, in both narrative and economic terms, the events at Mansfield Park that are the novel’s focus (Said 90). The “hidden or allusive” imperial context of Mansfield Park, Said argues, is characteristic of canonical nineteenth-century texts, which we find “in the main as resisting or avoiding the other setting, which their formal inclusiveness, historical honesty, and prophetic suggestiveness cannot completely hide” (94, 96). It is from this representational imbalance that Said derives the contours of his reading, arguing that it is “precisely because Austen is so summary in one context, so provocatively rich in the other . . . [that] we are able to move in on the novel, reveal and accentuate the interdependence scarcely mentioned on its brilliant pages” (96).

Said’s description of “mov[ing] in on the novel” is startling because it announces a purposeful, even aggressive, bent to his interpretive method. Such a “strong” interpretation, together with attentiveness to the asymmetry between the barely manifest and its potentially abundant significance, are the cornerstones of a symptomatic method which, in Fredric Jameson’s description, entails pursuing those elements that have “remained unrealized in the surface of the text, which have failed to become manifest in the logic of the narrative, and which we can therefore read as what the text represses.”Footnote ²⁵ Said’s approach to Austen’s text would thus seem to construe “critical activity as . . . wresting truths from the hidden depths of resisting texts” and to announce its “confidence in the value of exposure.”Footnote ²⁶ True, when Said concludes that the artlessness with which characters mention the Antiguan plantation, if they mention it at all, “reveals [Austen] herself to be assuming (just as Fanny assumes, in both senses of the word) the importance of an empire to the situation at home,” he is presupposing that author and character, text and narration, share the same limits of knowledge and of critical and imaginative capacity. In fact, critics have challenged Said’s reading on precisely this score, charging that his excessively forceful symptomatic reading overlooks potential nuances and ironies generated by the non-coincidence of text and narrative.Footnote ²⁷

In contrast, I am arguing that The Remains of the Day (which draws self-consciously on the tradition of the English manor house novel of which Mansfield Park is an exampleFootnote ²⁸ ) resists such a conflation, not only because of its narrator’s unreliability but also because the suggestive appearance of July 1956 at the edge of the novel’s diegesis complicates a symptomatic reading intent on unearthing the “latent,” “buried,” “absent,” or “silenced” aspects of the text.Footnote ²⁹ But if the novel confounds the suspicious interpretive mode that Rita Felski has characterized as “digging down,” it equally resists the attempt to draw a neat distinction between such an approach and one that would conversely attend to the text’s surface, understood (in Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s words) “to mean what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding . . . what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through.”Footnote ³⁰ Instead, if we recall the novel’s staging of screen memory as that which both screens from and for view, it becomes clear that the screen we are supposed to be looking at and the screen, or cover, we are supposed to be looking through are inseparable. Felski, Marcus and Best, and Love have all argued that part of what distinguishes suspicious, symptomatic, or deep reading from their approach is the latter’s willingness to approach the text in a spirit of receptiveness that makes space for “what the text itself is saying.”Footnote ³¹ On my reading, The Remains of the Day complicate such oppositions because what the text articulates is its own profound interest in and engagement with the symptom as an aesthetic and political structure.

Ishiguro’s interest in the symptom is coextensive with the work’s postcolonial ethos. As Graham MacPhee has noted, the novel is awash in a mood of “post-imperial melancholy.”Footnote ³² This has of course to do with Stevens’s tales of tigers coolly dispatched by intrepid English butlers in the British Raj and his staunch assertion that a man in service who has served the empire can consider his life well spent. But it is also a characteristic of the period in the 1980s when the novel was written and published. In his well-known 1984 essay, “Outside the Whale,” Salman Rushdie comments on the imperial nostalgia that has Thatcher’s Britain in its grip. The films and TV shows of the “Raj revival,” he suggests, are the most recent in that “long line of fake portraits” of the colonized world, produced to justify its domination.Footnote ³³ But unlike the earlier, finer works they seek to copy, the common characteristic of these is their kitschiness. They are the aesthetic corollary of a blatantly revisionist politics and the symptoms of a “cultural psychosis,” in which the past is made to compensate for a dismal present by displacing it.Footnote ³⁴

Rushdie’s formulation of the past that displaces the present recalls the dynamics of memory and temporality I have been discussing. We might say that the novel, which was widely received as a commentary on this politics, works to ironize it. More specifically, however, I want to suggest that Ishiguro ironizes the form of attention that characterizes the dynamic of screen memory and of “pre-occupation.” The novel’s attentiveness to pre-occupation as a structure of preemption and displacement does not just concern the relationship of fascist appeasement in the 1930s and imperial crisis in the 1950s, but also the recollection and denial of these periods in the era of the text’s publication. It is this quality that makes The Remains of the Day not just a post-Freudian novel but also a postcolonial one. It belongs to (and—in its attentiveness to Suez and the postwar paroxysms of empire—knows it belongs to) a moment of critical and historical disjuncture.

Symptomatic reading is not just something that critics do to texts, but that texts provoke, engage, and even allegorize; a work like The Remains of the Day generates, we might say, something like a symptomatic writing. To make a wholly obvious point but one that seems to me insufficiently acknowledged in these recent accounts of postcritical reading: why ought we to assume that the critic’s and the aesthetic object’s orientations or intentions—in Marcus and Best’s sense of “what the text itself is saying”—diverge so profoundly or run counter to one another? Can we really so sharply disentangle the critic’s practice from that of the text’s or disregard the possibility that literature itself theorizes the symptom?Footnote ³⁵ After all, the specific politics of the aesthetic that these recent studies have suggested motivate, even impel, symptomatic reading, are distributed across what they treat as the separable realms of the literary and the critical.Footnote ³⁶ A postcolonial symptomatology, I am suggesting, is not just the province of critics but also of the texts they read with.Footnote ³⁷

The relevance of all this to a specifically postcolonial practice of reading and interpretation is two-fold. The skeptical accounts of symptomatic or suspicious reading that I have been discussing here repeatedly underscore the centrality of these reading practices to critical work on race, gender, queer studies, and trauma. Although postcolonialism is surprisingly little mentioned, in light of how many revelatory and seminal readings in the field are virtuosic examples of just this method, postcolonial literary interpretation has certainly been enabled by and extended the richness of these methods. One need only think of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Jane Eyre and Frankenstein, or Anne McClintock on H. Rider Haggard’s sexed cartography, or Jenny Sharpe on the figure of rape in the colonial discourse of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, or the many productive postcolonial readings of early-modern texts to get a sense of the body of work I have in mind.Footnote ³⁸ But these are all specifically readings of colonial texts—ones that seek “to interrupt,” in Sharpe’s words, the “long history” of colonialism’s narrative by “drawing attention to the lack of coherence in colonial explanations.”Footnote ³⁹ How does a postcolonial reading practice read—or read with—those works, like The Remains of the Day, that self-consciously situate themselves on the postcolonial side of the colonial/postcolonial divide?Footnote ⁴⁰ This is obviously a crude formulation, and I adopt it because it rephrases—now as a problem of interpretive method—the issue of the historical (dis)continuity of the colonial and the postcolonial that has so persistently attended the use and circulation of these terms.Footnote ⁴¹

To return once more to Culture and Imperialism, we find Said raising a version of this issue, and what it means, or ought to mean, for interpretive practice, when he assesses the bilious response to Rushdie’s “Outside the Whale” essay, which takes Rushdie’s criticism as proof that the British Empire is misunderstood by its ungrateful erstwhile subjects. About this response, Said observes: “how totalizing is its form, how all-enveloping its attitudes and gestures. . . . We suddenly find ourselves transported backward in time to the late nineteenth century” (22). To reproduce the totalizing idiom of the late-nineteenth century—“after decolonization, after the massive intellectual, moral, and imaginative overhaul and deconstruction of Western representation of the non-Western world, after the work of Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney”—is to try collapsing the present into the past as if nothing had changed in the interim (xx). Said’s critique depends on his assertion of a historical transformation and the corresponding divide it imposes—or should impose—on critical sensibilities. That divide corresponds to the end of the “age of empire,” which “more or less formerly ended with the dismantling of the great colonial structures after World War Two,” one marker of which was the Suez crisis (7).

But his point—and the force of his own critical practice—is to make clear that what he deems a nineteenth-century critical sensibility is no more appropriate for reading that period’s cultural archive than it is for the present. The continued resistance of critics in the present to attend to what gaps and elisions in the cultural archive might mean, Said suggests, need not take the form of overt rejections; it consists, too, of a studied inattentiveness to empire’s formal and historical saturation of works by Austen, Dickens, Conrad, and others. These interpretive habits may not be willfully disingenuous, but they are hardly innocent, not least because in his view, the traces of empire’s significance in these works are readily available, even obvious, if one is receptive to them. As he emphasizes, this literature is “manifestly and unconcealedly” a part of imperial processes and “makes constant references to itself as somehow participating in Europe’s overseas expansion”; thus, he can note with some incredulity of one reading of Howard’s End that it never mentions imperialism, “which in my reading of the book, is hard to miss, much less ignore” (xiv, 15, 65).

Yet how are we to reconcile this assertion of the self-evidence of empire with the repression of the colonial scene that he argues is also characteristic of this literature? A tension emerges between his sense that these works readily communicate their entanglement with empire and the interpretive strategies with which he elucidates their meaning. The literature he reads differs in the degree of its apparent interest in and acknowledgment of empire, and his readings suggest that these differences correspond to the growing importance and centrality of the empire in British public discourse and national culture. But the difference in the extent to which various works allow the evolving significance of empire into their formal and narrative signification also produces the particular texture of Said’s readings—that is, the variable interpretive force with which he reads a text in order to demonstrate its entanglement with empire, as well as the extent to which he is able to read it against the grain or reveal certain ambivalences about empire immanent to the text.

For instance, of Dickens’s Great Expectations, from 1861, Said observes that Magwitch’s degraded condition and the prohibition against his return from Australia depend not only on the colony’s penal associations and his criminal condition but also on an imperial logic that assures his illegitimacy. He differentiates this narrative configuration from the one that prevails by the end of the nineteenth century, when “the empire is no longer merely a shadowy presence, or embodied merely in the unwelcome appearance of a fugitive convict” but constitutes instead “a central area of concern” (xvi–xvii). If Said’s reading of Dickens turns on his elaboration of Magwitch’s status, which is shadowy and unwelcome but nonetheless central to the plot, he is able to derive from empire’s more robust appearance in Conrad, for instance, a proleptically critical quality in Conrad’s exclusion of the colonized from representation and his simultaneous allowance of empire’s historical contingency (25).

In contrast, if we work backward in time from Dickens, we come to Said’s reading of Mansfield Park, which produces his most forcefully symptomatic reading. Such a method is here authorized by what Said treats as the situation of the novel, in which history and representational style collude in a way that demands a particular reading. It is no coincidence that Mansfield Park belongs to what he calls a “pre-imperialist” historical formation when empire’s institutional forms are still developing and when it is considerably less central in national discourse. Unlike Conrad, who he argues is able to “date” imperialism, or Dickens, whose plot admits Magwitch’s return from the colonial repressed, albeit as a despised figure, Austen, in Said’s view, barely admits of such friction.

The slightness of empire’s appearance in Austen, which corresponds to her historical situation, effectively demands a different degree of interpretive pressure from the critic in order to make visible the colonial setting. This is also the place, however, where the contrapuntal gesture appears suddenly ungainly, or rings somewhat tinnily, as Said shifts from a geographical or spatial sense of the contrapuntal, on which he otherwise insists, to a temporal and historical register. It is here that Said makes the observation, which I have discussed at some length, that “in order more accurately to read works like Mansfield Park, we have to see them in the main as resisting or avoiding that other setting, which their formal inclusiveness, historical honesty, and prophetic suggestiveness cannot completely hide.” But while the “other setting” designates the colonial scene—that of Antigua, where Sir Thomas owns slaves and has “the power to come and go at will”—it also proves to be the scene of a temporality removed from Austen’s own. This becomes clear when Said follows this point by asserting that “in time there would no longer be a dead silence when slavery was spoken of, and the subject became central to a new understanding of what Europe was” (96). This avowal, which suggests a progression from past to present, loses something of the complexity of the contrapuntal, and especially of that mode of theorizing the entanglements and displacements of not just the past and present but of multiple intersecting histories that I have been describing as a contrapuntal practice of memory.Footnote ⁴² Or, to put it in slightly different terms, Said’s symptomatic reading of Mansfield Park sits uneasily alongside the attempt to fold Austen’s novel into a literary history whose increasing registration of the existence of empire suggests the possibility that “in time,” the symptomatic silence of the colonial will have given way.

Ali Behdad has suggested that “the critical incentive behind postcolonial anamnesia is to counter the nostalgic forgetfulness that obscures the genealogy of the science of imperialism and so allows for its return in new forms. The anamnesiac reading is therefore a ‘symptomatic’ reading, one that unveils what the object holds back and exposes what it represses in its consciousness.”Footnote ⁴³ In this essay, I have argued that The Remains of the Day offers a literary model of a contrapuntal engagement with the past without historical or interpretive closure, and an engagement with the structure of the symptom that, in its allegory of symptomatic reading, suggests the contours of both a postcolonial literary and interpretive practice.