Reading Ishiguro + the Middle East

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favorite contemporary novelists. His six novels to date share one notable feature: they are all written in the first person, narrated by a character who is in the process of unravelling a profound and often troubling memory that is clearly affecting the way he or she is living their life at that present moment. His characters grapple with what Freud called "the return of the repressed" (a thought or memory that we try not to deal with, but the more we repress it the greater its strength when it inevitably comes back to haunt us). Perhaps the best-known of Ishiguro's characters is the butler, Stevens, from "The Remains of the Day" (which was later made into an Academy-award winning Ivory-Merchant movie, starring Anthony Hopkins as the tight-lipped, overstarched butler).

Stevens is not a bad man or an evil man. In fact, he prides himself on his professionalism--particularly his 35 years of selfless service to one of the most important aristocrats in 1930's England, Lord Darlington. Unfortunately, Darlington was also a Nazi sympathizer, an admirer of the British fascist Oswald Mosley, and a personal friend of Herr Ribbentrop, Foreign Minister of the Third Reich. Stevens has spent his entire profesional life denying this essential fact. What makes a great butler, after all, is their ability to keep their eyes fixed on the task at hand (serving drinks, removing plates, tending to the welfare of guests). "The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost," he reasons; "they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing." He calls this a "staff plan"--every good butler needs one.

The repercussions of living a life predicated on such obvious denial will eventually catch up with Stevens and cause considerable psychological anxiety. At then end of the novel, he suffers a minor breakdown--asking himself whether or not his entire life has been a waste because he invested all his moral energies in a man of questionable integrity. "I trusted in his lordship's wisdom," he confesses poignantly. "All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. . . . what dignity is there in that?"

I was reminded of Stevens this week-end when reading comments made by U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, about the latest flare-up in the Middle East. Asked whether or not she would use the United States' considerable leverage with Israel (given that the U.S. provides $3 billion of military aid and sells over $6 billion of weapons a year to Israel) to help bring about an internationally-backed ceasefire that would alleviate the suffering of innocent civilians in southern Lebanon, not to mention Haifa and Nazareth, her response was worthy of a line from any Ishiguro novel: "What I won't do is go to some place and try to get a cease-fire that I know isn't going to last," she said. "After all," she continued, "that would would be a guarantee of future violence."

I recognize a Stevens moment when I see one and this was surely a classic example. Like Stevens, Condoleeza Rice does not appear to be a bad person or an outright villain. Like Stevens, she seems to pride herself on an unswerving loyalty to her commander in chief. Yet like Stevens, she has a staff plan that clearly overlooks the fundamental cause of the suffering of thousands of innocent civilians in the Middle East. I just wonder whether, like Stevens, she might not, one day in the future, look back and regret her inaction, whether she might not, like Stevens, see this as a wasted opportunity that she would lament for the remains of her day.