Our Dirty Glass Castles

photo by Amy Brandon

 

"Why, Mr Stevens, why, why, why do you always have to pretend?"

~Miss Kenton in The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro is a beautiful introspectively retrospective novel, but I must admit I had a bipolar relationship with it.  For a while, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish it.  The entire novel is a narration of the past by Stevens the Butler, who is the opposite of woke.  I found myself losing patience with his cluelessness and his repression on more than one occasion. Steven’s memory is so colored and re-cast that much of it has become fallacy, a narrative he tells himself as a comfort, as a justification, sometimes almost a celebration, of his existence.  Instead of seeing things as they were, he assauges his own doubts by casting them in a muted, better light, which apparently was his habit throughout his life. Do we all do this, I wonder?  I suppose to an extent, we do.  I suspect forgiveness itself hinges somewhat on being able to forget or at least to temper our memories. How much do any of us have to find a way to excuse and/or justify the choices we have made over a lifetime?  This theme harks back to The Buried Giant, also by Kazuo Ishiguro, where a collective memory wipe was necessary for a group of people to live in peace. 

 

Poor Stevens works so hard to cast his father in the light of the ever-illusive patriarchal perfection and then strives his whole life to live up to the unattainable, imagined standard of a long-dead father. Eventually, Stevens ingratiated himself with me, and I found myself feeling sorry for him, in his bumbling cluelessness, as I often tend to do with bumbling, clueless people in real life.  But now I begin to wonder how much that kind of permissive, maternal sympathy is to blame for the liberal latitudes men have been allowed for centuries? It brings to mind the sociological issue of raising our daughters and loving our sons.  Men like Stevens the Butler want to live in a bubble, and they want the people around them to help them maintain that bubble.  When someone begins to prod at the flimsy walls of self-deception they’ve constructed, they shut down, run away, or lash out.  They use cluelessness or repression or denial or privilege or some combination of these defenses (See Roy Moore, Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK) to maintain their slick glass castles in the air, never bothering to look down to see the earth at their feet, where the rest of us stand bearing the burden of their fallacious facades.

 

The Remains of the Day  won me over eventually, and I have now come to miss the voice of Stevens the Butler, but I don't miss his infuriating habit of obsessing on all the wrong things or his constant attempts to justify and explain his past.

 

 

Fuzzy Thoughts Are Happy Thoughts?

photo by Amy Brandon

Could it be our love would never have grown so strong down the years had the mist not robbed us the way it did?  Perhaps it allowed old wounds to heal. ~Axl in The Buried Giant

I keep telling myself one of these days (soon, I hope, as I am well out of girlhood), I am going to get old enough to be comfortable telling my truth with no carefully chosen language.  I am amazed at how hard it is for me to offer anything that feels like criticism without feeling guilty and second-guessing myself.  My good-girl, hush-girl, smile-girl, play-dumb-girl, Southern Baptist rearing worked a little too well.  I mean for god’s sake I had to preface this blog post with a mini-psychological analysis just to be able to say that my reaction to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant was, well…meh.  How do I dare criticize a Nobel-prize winner?

I don’t mean to say I didn’t enjoy the book, or that I believe the book has no merit.  Not at all.  I have finally, at least, starting abandoning books I do not enjoy at all.  This book I finished in a week, which is a normal time frame for me.  I read a lot of different books at once, so I don’t usually finish a book in less than a week.  Also I think people who pride themselves on  speed-reading are compensating for something.  I don’t even care what. 

I understand  the symbolic lesson of The Buried Giant, and I like it.  If individual memory is a small-time con man, collective memory is an international pyramid scheme.  And the philosophical argument to be had over what’s best:  knowing the truth always versus sometimes maybe fooling yourself or being fooled to assure your own sanity, peace of mind, ability to be happy?  I get it.  I really do.  I suspect there is no constant, dual answer to this question.  The thematic concepts in this novel are great and are well worth the time spent thinking about them.  The presentation didn’t work for me though.  The plot felt disjointed, the dialogue contrived, and the characters just felt confused.  I guess it’s hard to write characters who can’t remember their own past without having them seem addled and confused, but that construct doesn’t do a lot for character development.  Has a character developed just because that character has reclaimed its own memory?  Who are we without our memories?  Ah…but see there we get back into one of the philosophical themes.  So maybe this is a brilliant book.  Maybe I just need to be more enlightened to see it.  Maybe that will come with age.  Oh wait, I’m already old.  So maybe not.