Jansy: BOTH novel (Booker Prize 1989) and title are very English. Ishiguro, like VN, is what you might call super-bi-lingual, but with the difference that he acquired English in England, his home since age six. In that respect, Ishiguro may be more imbued than VN with the quirks of upper-crust England and how its Butlers behave*. It’s a fine genre, witness the incomparable Jeeves! By one of those exciting coincidences, I’ve just iPodded from audible.com P G Wodehouse’s “Pearls, Girls, and Monty Bodkin.” I hope this doesn’t trigger spurious Pale Fire speculation!
“Remains of the day” is indeed an evocative phrase familiar to Anglophones; more literary, though, than as a practical expression for that vague period when night is falling, bed calling. A similar poetic phrase, rarely used conversationally, applies to the start of the next day: “false dawn” (“Dreaming when dawn’s left hand was in the sky ... “ Omar Khayyam)
“Remnants” has slightly different resonances from “remains” although they are synonymous in many contexts. The author’s nightmare of “remaindered” books, cast off like “remnants” of little value. VN’s “only picturesque ruins remained of the day”
Is wonderfully ambiguous. Only memories left to speak of? I also hear the Biblical warning: “Sufficient unto each day is the evil thereof.” That is, clean the slate before bedtime.
* I found this helpful quote:
“While some critics maintain that although Ishiguro’s setting is not Japan, the book retains a strong sense of the author’s Japanese heritage, Ishiguro is quick to disagree. He responds by saying that most of his life experience has taken place in England and that his fictional influences are Britain’s writers. Ishiguro’s choice of subject matter in this book—and the realism with which he depicts it—demonstrates the importance of England’s past and culture to him.”
[ from http://www.enotes.com/remains-day/ ]
skb
On 29/09/2008 14:38, "Jansy" <jansy@GLOBO.COM> wrote:
After the movie The Remains of the Day ( directed by James Ivory) , from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, I inadvertently began to notice sentences which were worded in a similar way by VN ( the title of this novel is in Japanese, I understand). The first time happened during one of my readings of ADA, due to its closeness to a scene where there is a butler opening curtains, just like Anthony Hopkins: Puffing rhythmically, Jones set one of his beautiful dragon-entwined flambeaux on the low-boy with the gleaming drinks and was about to bring over its fellow to the spot where Demon and Marina were winding up affable preliminaries but was quickly motioned by Marina to a pedestal near the striped fish. Puffing, he drew the curtains, for nothing but picturesque ruins remained of the day. Jones was new, very efficient, solemn and slow, and one had to get used gradually to his ways and wheeze. Years later he rendered me a service that I will never forget.
(What was the service puffing Jones rendered to Van? I cannot remember this part nor this butlerian name. The repetition ("puffing") and long-winded phrase about Jones' procedures astonishes me. There are tons of mosquitoes in Ada, but I haven't tried to spot them, yet...)
The "remnant-residues" image must be a strong one, or very familiar to English ears. While I was perusing "Lolita", searching for midges, I found another sample:
... save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her [ HH's mother] subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
Slanting rays of sun and midges are associated to a golden dust of the past that lingers on.
There are myriads of ways to read "Lolita", of course, but two trends seem to predominate. They depart from different "feelings" or "fictional levels": The first one brings us Lolita as a flesh-and-blood, normal pre-adolescent seduced by a pervert, who displays trendy, rather vulgar, tastes. A young girl, robbed of her inheritance, home and history who never questioned her rights to these and who marvelled at her step-father's generosity when he bribed her with four-hundred bucks ( I hope I got the facts straight). Here is the place for expanding moral indignation, examples of sexy fashions, porn sites, publicity.
The second is born through HH's style when he describes his thralldom by nymphets and all those recurrent golden midgets.
HH's repentance ( unless it is proven to me...then life is a joke) carried me back to the first level, the "real" Lolita, without effacing HH'sds perplexity in relation to this other emotional reality, one that is associated to a refusal do accept any kind of loss ( there is no "the past is past"). HH's incapacity to accept religious comfort as proffered by a merciful god is mingled with attempts to achieve an impossible atonement.
His words sound, to my ears, as a new kind of theological quandary. It is as if Humbert Humbert exclaimed: I'll only believe that God doesn't exist if He tells it to me in person...
....
Search the archive <http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu=en> Contact the Editors <mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu> Visit "Nabokov Online Journal" <http://www.nabokovonline.com>
Visit Zembla <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm> View Nabokv-L Policies <http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm> Manage subscription options <http://listserv.ucsb.edu/>
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.