LILIAN R.

F U R S T

Memory's Fragile Power in Kazuo Ishiguro's

Remains of the Day and W. G. Sebald's
"Max Ferber"

T
he vagaries (vagrancies?) of memory continue to fasci-
nate scientists and humanists alike, perhaps precisely
because memories are so fragile, still so resistant to com-
plete understanding. More than a hundred years have
now passed since Freud, following partly in the footsteps of his
immediate predecessor, Jean-Martin Charcot, the eminent nine-
teenth-century French neurologist, presented his theories of the
workings of memory. While subject to emendation and at times to
misinterpretation, they remain vahd. The assimilation of the con-
cept of "repression" testifies to the widespread acceptance of the
role of the unconscious in our everyday experience of remembering
and forgetting; selectivity, far from being random, may form a dis-
cernible pattern.
The Freudian view of memory has recently been complemented,
though by no means wholly superseded, by biological models. A sig-
nal attempt to meld the two approaches is made in Mark Solms's
article "Freud Returns." It underscores the relevance of Freud to cur-
rent neuropsychiatry. Among the biological models, two books by
the Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter stand out for both their
capacity to order and their provocativeness. In Searching for Memory:
The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (1996), Schacter argues that memory
is liable to sundry "imperfections" because "our memories are
not just bits of data that we coldly store and retrieve, computerlike"
(3,4). In an age familiar with the concept of false memories, we have
come more to distrust memory and to acknowledge the possibility of

Contemporary Literature XLVIIl, 4 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/07/0004-0530

© 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
 FURST • 531

its fallaciousness. We may misremember in various ways: by distor-

tion through over- or understatement, by partial forgetting, by
biased elaboration of past experiences. Memory is a crucial but a fal-
lible, certainly a "fragile" power of the human mind, as Schacter
describes it in his opening chapter
In a subsequent book that is at once more specific and more
controversial. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets
and Remembers (2001), Schacter classifies the different paths
whereby memory becomes fragile. He names them transience,
absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and per-
sistence (4). The first three he describes as "sins of omission," in
which we fail to bring to mind a desired fact, event, or idea.
Transience comes from "a weakening or loss of memory over time."
Absentmindedness "involves a breakdown at the interface between
attention and memory" so that the desired material is never prop-
erly "registered" (4). Blocking "entails a thwarted search for infor-
mation that we may be desperately trying to retrieve" (5). The other
four are designated "sins of commission," in which either an incor-
rect or an unwanted memory is present. Misattribution "involves
assigning a memory to the wrong source: mistaking fantasy for real-
ity, or incorrectly remembering" what has been said by a friend.
Suggestibility stems from the implantation of possibly erroneous
comments or leading questions "when a person is trying to call up
a past experience." Bias reflects the strong influence of "current
knowledge and beliefs" in remembering the past. Finally, persis-
tence denotes repeated recall of disturbing information or events
that we would prefer to banish from our minds altogether
The primary objection to Schacter's second book must center on
his choice of the word "sins." It has a moralistic, judgmental conno-
tation that is totally out of place in a consideration of the involun-
tary processes of memory. A more neutral term, such as "flaw" or
"lapse," suggesting a degree of failure but without the overt con-
demnatory overtones of "sins," would be preferable. Nevertheless,
Schacter's categories offer a usable theoretical framework for an
analysis of the fragility of memory. Admittedly, the problem turns
out to be more complex than his definitions imply. For the sake of
his argument and for didactic purposes, Schacter cites rather simple
examples of the seven types of memory flaw, taken from the trivial
 532 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

happenings of daily life, such as blocking names. He sets great store

by the physical findings of neurobiological tests, to the detriment of
the factors derived from depth psychology that play so decisive a
role in more extensive and fundamental memory lapses. The earlier
book. Searching for Memory, does comprise a chapter, "Islands in the
Fog" (218-47), devoted to psychogenic amnesia, which deals briefly
with repression and inhibition together with dissociation (233-36),
but later Schacter moves increasingly away from this aspect. Even
as he denies that memories are stored like bytes in a computer,
Schacter favors recent scientifically measurable explanations over
the more enigmatic but nonetheless highly valuable interpretations
of the apparent caprices of memory put forward in the later nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. The adoption of Schacter's
schema of seven shortfalls must be accompanied by these earlier,
more intutive insights into the workings of memory if justice is to be
done to the complicated, often puzzling phenomena of forgetting
and remembering.

The vagaries of memory have frequently been explored in literary

works. The classical instance is obviously Proust's A la Recherche du
temps perdu, whose title projects simultaneously a loss {perdu) and
hopes for the possibility of retrieval {recherche). The dubiousness of
memories is raised in a particularly acute form in frame narratives,
where a narrator relates his or her recall of bygone events.^ Emily
Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness are prime examples of frame nar-
ratives in which readers have no direct access to the central happen-
ings and are instead dependent on the mediation of witnesses. The
trustworthiness of the testimony as transmitted to readers remains
an open question. The concept of the unreliable narrator has, of
course, become a commonplace in literary criticism since Wayne C.
Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). So we have learned to ask, to
what extent is the narrator, in Schacter's terminology, prone to tran-
sience, bias, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, or persistence?

1. See Beth Newman's "Narratives of Seduction and the Seductions of Narrative: The
Frame Structure of Frankenstein," for an excellent discussion of this topic.
 FURST • 533

Inconsistencies in the narrative presented may occasionally alert

readers to some of these possible flaws, but by and large we have to
rely on what is reported. Our hesitancy results in an uncertainty
often amounting to unease. However, that very unease is also the
source of the endless fascination of these works whose mysteries
can never be unraveled with definitude. Memory, a fragile power in
human life, is a potent tool in literature.
Unease is the ultimate impact of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of
the Day and W. G. Sebald's "Max Ferber," as readers are left unsure
of the truth quotient of the events as recounted. In fact, a realiza-
tion of the fragility of memory forms the salient link between these
two works, which at first sight seem to exhibit more disparities than
similarities. Yet both works, notwithstanding their authors' foreign
origins, are essentially English not only in their settings but also in
the literary traditions in which they have been sited. It is surely no
coincidence that Ishiguro has been related to the Anglo-American
tradition in comparisons to John Milton, Daniel Defoe, Thomas
Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, Edith Wharton, John Fowles, and Michael
Ondaatje.^ Similarly, Sebald has been aligned with Laurence Sterne
and Vladimir Nabokov.^ Moreover, both works pivot on the Second
World War and anti-Semitism, although neither foregrounds them.
Still, these politico-social events, while barely articulated openly, are
obliquely the engines of the plots. Because these fundamental paral-
lels are not directly voiced. The Remains of the Day and "Max Ferber"
have so far not been subjected to direct comparison.
Indeed, the two works' divergences are initially more striking,
even in genre. The Remains of the Day being a novel while "Max
Ferber" is the last of the four stories that make up Sebald's The
Emigrants.''^ Ishiguro's account of an elderly English butler's short
vacation trip from a country mansion in the vicinity of London,
where he has long headed the staff, to Cornwall, to look up a former
fellow employee, is very far removed indeed in subject matter from
Sebald's story of the encounter between a young German, newly

2. See Baer, Davis, Jirgens, Robbins, and Trim.

3. See Kilbourn and Lennon.
4. The German title of Sebald's text is DieAusgewanderten. I am working from the original
language for the sake of accuracy but citing from the translation for readers' convenience.
 534 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

arrived in the north of England, and a refugee painter, also origi-

nally from Germany, whom he runs across in a studio on one of his
Sunday walks. Although both works are set in England, they take
place in contrasting areas, the pastoral verdure of the south of
England in The Remains of the Day as against the desolation of a
despoiled industrial city in "Max Ferber" Their respective social
levels, too, are at opposite ends of the spectrum—the aristocratic
luxury of the mansion that Stevens runs in his capacity as butler in
contrast to the spartan, marginal existences of the painter and his
interlocutor Nor do their temporal parameters coincide: the present
time of the action in The Remains of the Day is 1956, but it reaches
back to 1922, whereas "Max Ferber" opens in 1966, moves forward
to 1991, and casts back to before the turn of the century.
It is in their common lengthy time spans that the parallel between
The Remains of the Day and "Max Ferber" is strongest and literally
most telling. For the extensive periods of time covered in these
works provide the opportunity for the exercise of memory and the
revelation of its quintessential fragility. Both, moreover, have first-
person narrators, so that the subjectivity of the perceptions is a basic
condition. In The Remains of the Day it is consistently the voice of
Stevens that carries the narrative, with just a few intercalated dia-
logues and scenes, all without exception focalized through his eyes.^
During his six-day drive from Darlington Hall to Weymouth,
Stevens recalls various high points in the course of his service
between 1922 and 1956 to Lord Darlington and his successor, the
American who has recently bought the estate.
The disposition of "Max Ferber" is more involuted. After his ini-
tial meetings with Ferber in 1966-67, the anonymous narrator loses
sight of him until 1989, when he reads a magazine article about an
exhibition of Ferber's paintings that prompts him to look the painter
up again. In their resumed conversations, Ferber tells the story of his
childhood in Munich and his coming to England in 1939. Before
their last meeting in the early 1990s, when Ferber lies dying in a hos-
pital, he gives the narrator a package containing his mother's hand-

5. In this respect, the 1993 film departs from the novel by inserting some scenes, such
as the meeting between Miss Kenton and her future husband, at which Stevens is not
present.
 FURST • 535

written memoirs, penned in 1939-41 prior to her deportation to

Riga, where she perished. In this memoir of nearly one hundred
pages, Ferber's mother writes of her own childhood in the little
town of Steinach, the family's move to Kissingen in January 1905,
when she was sixteen, life and customs there. World War I, her suc-
cessive engagement to two young men who were killed at the front,
and her marriage to Ferber's father, an art dealer. Sebald's story is
therefore constructed in a Chinese-box design as a series of narra-
tives within narratives, all ultimately transmitted by the narrator As
in The Remains of the Day, the first-person narrator acts as a unifying
thread holding the many segments together
Both works are cast in the format of journeys. Again the journey is
simpler in The Remains of the Day, in which the frame structure is
linear, divided into the six days and locations of Stevens's progres-
sion to Cornwall. The narrator in "Max Ferber" shuttles restlessly
between England and the Continent, where he eventually visits the
places evoked in the memoirs of Ferber's mother as well as the sites
of Ferber's own childhood and adolescence. The journeys have a
picaresque quality in their spatiality and above all their temporality,
so that they serve to foster the exploration of memories.
In both works, memory is overtly thematized through the inser-
tion on almost every page—and sometimes more than once—of
phrases that act as reminders of the reminiscing nature of what is
being told. So a kind of chorus frames and punctuates the entire
action, as memories are dredged up—vividly, tenuously, or perhaps
mistakenly—in accordance with the fluctuations of the mind's
fragile powers. Stevens not only constantly resorts to the words
"remember" and "recall" but even elaborates on such moments:
"I am pleased to recall the memory of that moment" (73); "I recall,
then, it was only an hour or so" (83); "once, shortly after lunch,
I recall" (96). Mostly he seems assured of what he remembers:
"I remember it coming up one last time" (150); "I can recall spotting
from some distance" (151); "I remember our often breaking off from
our respective activities" (152); "I certainly do recall her saying"
(165); "I recall quite clearly the very last time we met" (173). In the
slight boredom induced by days of driving, Stevens regresses more
and more into the past, indulging in his recollections of the glory
days of Darlington Hall in the 1930s, when his lordship hosted
 536 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

many highly important foreign visitors on secret political missions.

But inadvertently, as it were, Stevens discloses chinks of uncertainty
about some of his memories. The appearance of the particle "as"—
"as I recall" (145, 157)—insinuates a small amount of doubt.
Furthermore, Stevens comes to admit the limitations of his memory
at several points: "It is possible this is a case of hindsight colouring
my memory" (87); "it is hard for me now to recall precisely what I
overheard" (95); "I cannot recall precisely what I said" (167); "I
believe I may have been a little confused about this matter" (212).
These admissions of memory shortfalls in some instances are not
surprising in an aging man conjuring up events from up to thirty
years back. Nevertheless, these sporadic defects in Stevens's mem-
ory do have the effect of casting a shadow over what he claims to
recall well. How much credence can be invested in his version of the
happenings at Darlington Hall? To deem it a "version" is already to
entertain the possibility of an alternative. Furthermore, Stevens's
proclivity to mistakes is suggested by the series of small errors that
have lately occurred in the household, to his considerable dismay,
as well as by his mishaps on the journey: he loses his way and runs
out of gas off the beaten path.
Similar misgivings are aroused in "Max Ferber," although they
spring from rather different sources. Here too the central fragility of
memory is mooted from the very outset when the narrator states, "if
I remember correctly" (maybe he doesn't?) and "(as I now think
I remember)" (158). Such phraseology imdermines confidence in his
ability to recall the past with accuracy. Even more openly than
Stevens, this narrator confesses, "I no longer remember how Ferber
came to tell me" (166). The frame itself appears to be shaky here.
And it becomes a double frame that distances readers increasingly
from the central events in space and time. For just as "I remember"
and "I recall" is the refrain in The Remains of the Day, in "Max
Ferber" it is "said Ferber" that recurs with utmost insistence, as the
narrator reports what Ferber had told him. Ferber's memories are
transmitted by the narrator as reported speech, so that a dual filter,
that of Ferber's memory as well as the narrator's, intrudes between
the action and the reader A further distancing in time enters with
the memoirs of Ferber's mother, who writes between 1939 and 1941
of her youth almost fifty years earlier. Moreover, the distress suf-
 FURST • 537

fered by Jews in Germany at that period may also affect her mem-
ory, leading her to idealize the past as a foil to the ominous present.
From the narrator, the internal reader, her recollections are passed
on to us, the actual readers. It is as if successive layers of the past
were being excavated in an archaeological quest, to use Freud's
metaphor of his investigation of his patients' memories. Ferber him-
self is liable to extreme variations in his powers of recall. So at
one time he refers to a "flood of memory, little of which remains
with me now" (171), or he admits: "I no longer remember. All
I now recall. . ." (172). Yet suddenly he can retrieve "another old
memory that had long been buried" (172), that of his trip to
Switzerland with his father in 1936. Some things "had disappeared
entirely from his memory" into a "lagoon of oblivion" (174),
whereas other "fragmentary scenes that haunt my memories are
obsessive in character" (181). The processes of memory are more
spasmodic, more fragile in Ferber than in Stevens; and it is as if this
greater instability were configured in the added complexity of the
literary disposition.
At the heart of the story, the precariousness of memory is intensi-
fied by its context in a disagreement of interpretation within the
Ferber family. Max's uncle, Leo, a schoolteacher dismissed by the
new Nazi regime, maintains that the picture of the book-burning in
Wurzburg on May 10,1933 is "a forgery," "a fake" (183) because the
event had taken place after dark, so that it could not have been pho-
tographed in the form in which it appeared in the newspapers on
the following day. Smoke had been superimposed on the picture of
the square. Leo takes this as "vital proof" that "everything else
[about the new regime] has been a fake, from the very start" (184).
Ferber's father shakes his head in denial. When the narrator himself
avows his skepticism about Leo's hypothesis, the fragility of mem-
ory seems to be confirmed, but in another twist, the narrator's dis-
belief is dispelled by his subsequent research in a Wurzburg archive
that supports Leo's postulate. So paradoxically, the apparently most
far-fetched memory in "Max Ferber" turns out to be verifiably true
through the evidence of historical documentation extraneous to the
fiction. As a result, the criterion of plausibility has to be discounted.
The memories that form the substance of The Remains of the Day and
"Max Ferber" can never be wholly trusted; they may unexpectedly
 538 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

prove to be correct but generally are unmasked as patchy, partial,

tainted—in short, shaped by at least some of Schacter's "sins."
The interplay of sharp remembering with phases of fuzziness or
forgetfukiess reflects the oscillation between transience and persis-
tence. Transience is most forcefully exemplified in the disjointed
design of both works, constructed as mosaics which the reader has
to cobble together. The narration jumps disconcertingly from one
period to another, drifting associatively in a discontinuous move-
ment that is the literary correlative of a mental stream of conscious-
ness. The effect is one of fragmentation, as the time-line leaps
between the various segments of Stevens's memories in The Remains
of the Day and those of the narrator, Ferber, and all the way back to
Ferber's mother in "Max Ferber" Sometimes the reader is bewil-
dered at the rapid shift from one episode to the next, episodes
loosely linked in the narrating subject's mind. Only gradually and
bit by bit do the pieces coalesce into a more or less coherent sce-
nario. For example, Ferber first gives the narrator no more than an
"extremely cursory version of his life" (166; note that it is a "ver-
sion"). Like his paintings, which he systematically erases, Ferber
remains "unknowable," a "ghostly presence" (162) to which the
narrator thinks back with some difficulty. Only some twenty-three
years later, in 1989, is Ferber able to retrieve his early life, by then
fifty or more years back, in a series of what Schacter calls "pop-ups"
{Seven Sins 78): his visit to Montreux with his father when he was
twelve, the parades and demonstrations in his native Munich from
1933 onward, and his parting from his parents at the Munich airport
in May 1939.
The retrospection is partnered by a projection forward when the
narrator refers to "the months to come" (160). However, mistrust of
his mercurial memories is further heightened by a striking factual
error on his part: having opened with a description of his arrival in
Manchester in autumn 1966 (149), he then refers to a summer
evening he spent with Ferber in 1966 as "nine or ten months after
my arrival in Manchester" (165). This minor error in timing is dis-
proportionately jarring insofar as it adumbrates unreliability in the
narrator's memory. While memories of the broad contours of our
lives are generally accurate, confusions or failures may creep in
about specific events; such a confusion may be due to a binding fail-
 FURST • 539

ure, when an event or action is not properly bound to the time and
place when it took place. This is likely the case in the narrator's
memory of Ferber—that it is fundamentally accurate, with just a
confusion about a specific timing. At the very least, the narrator's
mistake in "Max Ferber" detracts from confidence in the precision
of his account.^
Transience appears to be less pronounced in Stevens, although
this may in itself be deceptive, a product of the patina of self-
assurance and unremitting control of every situation that is the core
of the professional profile he foregrounds. Stevens's life history is
much less traumatic than Ferber's, so that he gives the impression of
having less trouble concealing from himself its distressing aspects.
But this impression, too, may be unwarranted, an integral aspect of
the pose he maintains.
If the transience of memory entails a (temporary) forgetting, its
persistence is the continued graphic recall of salient experiences.
For Stevens, this undoubtedly revolves around the crucial confer-
ence held at Darlington Hall in 1923.^ In its successful organization
and accomplishment Stevens feels that he has really become "wor-
thy of . . . being placed alongside the likes of the 'great' butlers of
our generation," so that "whenever I recall that evening today, I find
I do so with a large sense of triumph" (110). The entire sequence is
carnivalesque in its indiscriminate jumbling of the trivial and the
consequential, as well as the comic and the tragic. For it is not only
time that is scrambled in this set of memories but also levels of sig-
nificance. Stevens regards the luster of the silver as a matter of the
utmost seriousness, an emblem of the standards upheld in the
household and a means to impress visitors. Of his achievement in
having the silver polished to the highest glitter he is extremely
proud, to the point of thrusting aside the significance of the visitors.
Although he knows that they are "figures who held real influence in
British life: politicians, diplomats, military men, clergy" (138), he
glosses over them in favor of the incomparable shine of the silver:

6. For extended analysis of the memories of the book-burning and similar episodes,
see Furst, "Realism."
7. For a historical account of the event on which Ishiguro bases this conference, see
Kershaw.
 540 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

"But I drift. I was in fact discussing the silver, and how Lord Halifax
had been suitably impressed on the evening of his meeting with
Herr Ribbentrop at Darlington Hall" (138). These names are
dropped casually, without any hint of the implications of this top-
level foreign-policy meeting. What persists in Stevens's memory is
the importance of polishing the silver to perfection. An even more
gross disproportion is evident in his recall of two problems that
occur simultaneously on that evening: the blisters on the feet of
M. Dupont, the cantankerous French delegate, and the death of his
father. To attend to Dupont's comfort by bringing bowls of water,
bandages, and salve takes precedence over going upstairs to see his
father in his dying moments. Stevens obviously puts his obligations
as butler over any personal feelings he may have. The doctor, called
to certify his father's death, is dragooned to examine the blisters. In
Stevens's memories of the conference, persistence is allied to tran-
sience to a disturbing, indeed grotesque, extent.
A parallel conflation of the persistent with the transient is experi-
enced by Max Ferber as he recalls his parting from his parents at the
Munich airport in 1939:

The drive seemed endless to me, said Ferber, probably because none of us
said a word. When I asked if he remembered saying goodbye to his par-
ents at the airport, Ferber replied, after a long hesitation, that when he
thought back to that May morning at Oberwiesenfeld he could not see his
parents. He no longer knew what the last thing his mother or father had
said to him was, or he to them, or whether he and his parents had
embraced or not. He could still see his parents sitting in the back of the
hired car on the drive out to Oberwiesenfeld, but he could not see them at
the airport itself.
(187)

As if in compensation for this central scotoma, Ferber can picture

the myriad details surrounding his departure with "fearful preci-
sion" (187): the aircraft with swastikas on their rudders, the open
hangar, the fence with a privet hedge around it, the cannon at the
airfield's perimeter, the Lufthansa Junkers 52 with the name Kurt
Wusthoff and the number D-3051, the passenger next to him wear-
ing a blue Tyrolean hat, and out of the window after takeoff a "flock
of sheep and the tiny figure of a shepherd" (187-88). All this Ferber
 FURST • 541

still sees in his mind's eye with "painful clarity" fifty years after the
event (188), but the image of his parents is as if they were wax fig-
ures, already dead. In this incident, memory functions dually—and
paradoxically—as confession and veiling. Ferber himself provides
the clue to this extraordinary pattern of persistence and transience
in the adjectives he uses, "fearful" and "painful." He has banished a
moment too painful to remember and has instinctively, subcon-
sciously filled the gap with trivia devoid of emotional content. The
mechanisms that Schacter designates as encoding and retrieval are
clearly governed by underlying psychological pressures and repre-
sent vital adaptive features of memory.
While transience and persistence define the incidence of memories,
other Haws, such as bias and misattribution, determine their actual
content. Stevens is much more liable to suggestibility and bias than
Ferber, perhaps because he has always worked in a group setting
where he is likely to be exposed to and influenced by others' opin-
ions, whereas the painter in Sebald's story is the quintessential iso-
late. Stevens's openness to suggestibility is shown near the outset of
The Remains of the Day, in his lengthy reflections on the qualities neces-
sary to be a great butler, a topic fervently discussed when he gets
together with his counterparts from other leading mansions. In that
self-designed schema, Stevens opts for dignity as the decisive crite-
rion. Whether a great butler must be in the employ of old wealth or
whether he could serve a newly rich businessman is another major
issue, one that is left open. Stevens indulges in memories of the great-
est butlers of recent years on whom he models himself and against
whom he measures his own performance. He thereby engages in
stereotyping and in what Schacter terms "congruity bias" {Seven Sins
156) in his sustained endeavor to conform to the paradigm of the
great butler So his actions, his conduct, his bearing are all geared to
his preconceived notion of how a great butler should behave. His
clinging to his chosen role prompts Miss Kenton, the housekeeper, to
ask in exasperation, "Why, Mr. Stevens, why, why, why do you
always have to pretend?" (154). It is a question that he laughs off ner-
vously, but to readers the answer is quite clear: he always has to pre-
tend because he is fulfilling a role implanted in him by suggestion.
Stevens's exclusively retrospective posture also creates the aura of
anachronism that envelops him. For his ideal springs from memories
 542 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

of the past. His uncompromising rootedness in that past finds

its telling incarnation in his curiously stilted speech. In 1956 Stevens
still upholds the dated locutions of twenty to thirty years ear-
lier, using words that have become obsolete and that he strings
together in long, formal sentences now redolent of an unmistakable
pretentiousness: "motoring," "touring," "consorted," "retiring" (for
going to bed). In his conversation with the villagers at Moscombe
(180-93), where he spends the night in a private home after running
out of gas, the contrast between normal language and his orotund
expressions is particularly crass. In his odd turns of phrase Stevens
shows an invariable bias toward what he regards as the lofty, aristo-
cratic term, in accordance with the prototype he cherishes of the
high-class butler His difficulty in dealing with his new American
master's tendency to "bantering" and his own perplexed inability to
respond in a similarly relaxed manner is symptomatic of his embed-
dedness in an antiquated mode of conduct as well as of speech. His
enthrallment to memories of the past is an increasingly disabling ele-
ment as the years go by and he has to cope with a world growing
more and more incomprehensible to him, a world that can hardly
accommodate great butlers.
Stevens's problem with his new master's bantering, another
aspect of communication, is a prime indicator of his entrenchment in
the norms of a previous era. Jocularity had not been the appropriate
tone for a master addressing his butler Lord Darlington certainly
does not speak to Stevens in anything other than a formal, almost
solemn mode, giving his orders with brevity and authority. Stevens
therefore harbors a well-defined notion of the behavior proper to a
gentleman, based on his memories of Lord Darlington and of the
other men (and a few women) of that commanding class whom he
has encountered. Here again suggestibility and bias come into play,
most of all in his boundless glorification of Lord Darlington, who
can do no wrong in his eyes, not even when he dismisses two Jewish
maids, who had loyally served the establishment for six years, in
order to gratify Ribbentrop and his entourage.
In this incident. The Remains of the Day moves from the lesser
memory defect of suggestibility to the graver one of misattribution.
In Stevens's case, misattribution takes the form of misinterpretation.
His devotion to Lord Darlington is such that he fundamentally mis-
 FURST • 543

interprets his secret negotiations with the Germans. His lordship's

motives are undoubtedly noble, but his activities are underhanded,
and in his concession to German prejudices in regard to the maids,
he crosses the line into moral injustice.* Stevens is portrayed as
strangely naive, unfamiliar with world politics, and easily duped on
account of his wholehearted faith in his master The episode where
he is questioned by some of Lord Darlington's guests on economic
and political problems of the day as a test of the opinions of the
average "man in the street" underscores his utter ignorance. His
reiterated, "I'm very sorry, sir, but I am unable to be of assistance on
this matter" (195) highlights both his limitations and his characteris-
tic assimilation of all his experiences to his duty to serve.
Such suggestibility is far less apparent in "Max Ferber." Uncle
Leo's assertion that the photograph of the book-burning has been
faked is rejected with skepticism ("Father shook his head without
saying a word" [184]). Similarly, Ferber's family "remained largely
silent about the reasons why my grandmother Lily Lanzberg took
her own life" (183). This family's dominant style is one of avoidance
and denial in the face of the Nazi threat: "of those things we could
not speak of we simply said nothing" (183). Ferber's father, on his
release from a six-week imprisonment in Dachau, "said not a word
about what he had seen and experienced" (186).' This front of
silence is meticulously upheld: "Not once," Ferber recalls, "was
there any talk of leaving Germany, at least not in my presence, not
even after the Nazis had confiscated pictures, furniture and valu-
ables from our home. . . . All I remember is that my parents were
particularly affronted by the uncouth manner in which the lower
ranks stuffed their pockets full of cigarettes and cigarillos" (185-86).
Ferber's memory is here playing the same trick as Stevens's in
regard to Dupont's blisters and his father's death—foregrounding

8. Ian Kershaw's recent biography of Lord Londonderry, the model for Lord
Darlington in this novel, argues that it was Londonderry's memories of the carnage he
had witnessed in the Battle of the Somme in World War I that inspired his sincere paci-
fism and his ardent desire to avoid another war.
9. Those few still released from Dachau in the early days were bound to silence.
Nevertheless, word did spread surreptitiously about beatings and other horrors, so that
just the word "Dachau" was said to those who complained of the bad conditions of their
existence, as a reminder of how much worse things could be.
 544 ' C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

the trivial as a self-protective means to displace the more grievous

loss. But in contrast to Stevens, who is a cautionary example of the
dangers of suggestibility, Ferber's parents represent the opposite
peril of deliberately disregarding what events suggest. Ferber's
inhibitions about speaking of his past are partly a continuation of
the family tradition of silence and avoidance and partly connected
to his "loss of language" in the dual sense of having forgotten his
mother tongue and his associated lapse into "oblivion" (182). In
both Stevens and Ferber, the articulation of their memories is
embodied in their rhetoric: Stevens's is high-flown, as he thinks
befitting a great butler, whereas Ferber's is lapidary, a reflection of
his desire not to think of or to recall many things.
Such directed forgetting is at the heart of blocking, the most
important manifestation of memory's fragile power in Stevens and
Ferber alike. In this area, the defectiveness of Ferber's memory is
more obvious, and the reasons for it readily apparent. He needs to
avoid pain by not dwelling on early, life-changing losses: the confis-
cation of the family's property is naught compared to the deporta-
tion and extermination of his parents, whom he never sees again
after their parting at the Munich airport. Only his perspica-
cious Uncle Leo, who does confront reality, escapes to America.
Significantly, Ferber declines his uncle's invitation to join him in
New York because "I did not want to be reminded of my origins
by anything or anyone" (191). He decides to "begin a new life in
Manchester, from scratch; but instead, Manchester reminded me of
everything I was trying to forget. Manchester is an immigrant city,
and for a hundred and fifty years, leaving aside the poor Irish, the
immigrants were chiefly Germans and Jews" (191).^° Ferber's strong
urge to forget helps to explain his highly idiosyncratic mode of
painting, which the narrator calls "this exercise in destruction"
(180), as Ferber erases and turns to dust what he has painted only to
start over again, just as he had restarted his life.
Ferber's blocking of his memories of his early years in Germany is
compounded by the appending of his mother's memoir At first this
seems a puzzling coda to the story, but through its rendition of life

10. The German immigrants included Charles Halle, founder of the illustrious Halle
orchestra.
 FURST • 545

for the Jews in Germany before 1933 and then the narrator's visit to
the little towns where Luisa had grown up, Ferber's memories are
framed in the larger, poignant picture of the terrible deterioration
that had since taken place. Luisa writes of the contented entente
between Germans and Jews in both the commercial and the social
spheres around the turn of the century. Her father had supplied the
army with fodder, she herself was awarded the Ludwig Cross for
her volunteer work in the hospital during World War I, and she was
even engaged successively to two non-Jews—admittedly to her
father's displeasure, for the family observed all the festivals, and he
feared that she would be cut off from her faith. Luisa's memoir
reveals how far the trend to assimilation had gone during this hal-
cyon phase and also its potential danger. Darlington Hall in the
1920s and 1930s in Remains of the Day and Steinach and Kissingen in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in "Max Ferber"
are projected as seemingly safe havens. The contrast to the situation
Sebald's narrator finds on his visit in June 1991 brings a dismal clo-
sure to "Max Ferber": the Jewish population has been exterminated,
the synagogue was vandalized at Kristallnacht and subsequently
destroyed, and the Jewish cemetery is "a wilderness of graves, ne-
glected for years, crumbling and gradually sinking into the ground
amidst tall grass and wild flowers" (223). To cap these distressing
discoveries, "Max Ferber" ends with the narrator's memories of an
exhibition he had seen in Frankfurt the previous year of photo-
graphs found in 1987 in an antique dealer's shop in Vienna, pho-
tographs taken in 1940 of the ghetto at Lodz, an industrial city
dubbed the Polish Manchester The ghetto contained one hundred
and seventy thousand people, crammed into "an area of no more
than five square kilometres" (236). Ferber has good reason to block
out much of the past.
Stevens, too, practices blocking, even more obdurately than
Ferber, although—or perhaps precisely because—his situation is
rather different. What intensifies his need to block is his active con-
doning of a course of action that has proven to be mistaken. His
stance illustrates the possibility of our blindness to the fundamental
truths of our lives. There are two mitigating factors for Stevens's
behavior: the one is his documented ignorance of world affairs and
hence of the ramifications of Lord Darlington's dealings with the
 546 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

Nazis; and the other, more potent and immediate one is his uncon-
ditional loyalty to his master, which he sees as a prerequisite of his
employment. He believes that it is not proper for him to criticize or
to query Lord Darlington's decisions even in the privacy of his
thoughts. Seen from this angle, Stevens emerges as a pathetic,
almost tragic figure, as he is brought down by an exaggerated
adherence to his positive qualities. He comes eventually to admit to
himself that "the passage of time has shown that Lord Darlington's
efforts were misguided, even foolish," but he asks, "How can one
possibly be held to blame in any sense . . .?" (201). He has shut
his mind, blocking out all that was uncomfortably in conflict
with his creed of loyalty to Lord Darlington. Even when he is told
point-blank that "[h]is lordship is in deep waters" (221), that "[t]he
Nazis are manoeuvring him like a pawn" (222), he counters these
warnings with his standard response: "It is not my place to be curi-
ous about such matters" (222). A butler's duty, he insists, "is to pro-
vide good service. It is not to meddle in the great affairs of the
nation" (199).
These excuses later ring hollow in light of the fact that, by 1956,
Stevens patently feels shame at having been in Lord Darlington's
employ. He conceals, even denies, his connection with him.
However, in his heart of hearts he continues to try to defend him,
maintaining, for example, that he is "able to refute ... with absolute
authority" (145) the charges of anti-Semitism against his lordship.
His overblown rhetoric at this point—even more so than usual—
("absolute authority," "absurd allegations," "ludicrously"), as well
as the classic rebuttal that Lord Darlington had "Jewish persons"
among his guests indicates by means of overstatements that come
across as ironic the degree of Stevens's self-deception. Miss Kenton
emphatically exclaims that it is "simply—wrong" (149) to dismiss the
Jewish maids and threatens to leave; nevertheless, despite her gen-
uine outrage, she herself does nothing, either, thereby also colluding,
at least to some extent, in the injustice. Later Lord Darlington con-
cedes, "It was wrong, what occurred" (151). Only Stevens cannot
bring himself to any such avowal. When Miss Kenton mentions at
their last meeting in Cornwall that she "had read of the unsuccessful
libel action" (235), Stevens replies that "his lordship's good name
was destroyed," and that "some truly terrible things had been said
 FURST • 547

about his lordship." It is a measure of Stevens's intransigent alle-

giance to Lord Darlington, as well as of his obstinate blocking, that
he perseveres in his defense of his former master: "Lord Darlington
wasn't a bad man," although he may have made "mistakes" (243).
Ultimately, the crux of the matter is that "I trusted. I trusted in his
lordship's wisdom." This confession is at once touching and devas-
tating, for Lord Darlington lacked wisdom. Stevens blocks the recog-
nition that he has himself been a victim and a victimizer
Several of the shortfalls in Stevens's memories of Lord Darlington
also mar his (non)relationship to Miss Kenton. Again he becomes at
once victim and victimizer as a result of his chronic blocking. He per-
suades himself that theirs is a purely professional relationship, that
the purpose of their regular evening meetings over cocoa is solely to
discuss household business. So he recalls her in a highly selective
manner that repeatedly emphasizes her outstanding competence as
the housekeeper She is a great housekeeper just as he is a "great but-
ler," although he would never acknowledge the parity of her status
with his in so many words. Nonetheless, his admiration for her pro-
fessional excellence is a recurrent leitmotif of his memories of her. In
his concept of her, as of himself, he follows what Schacter calls a
stereotypical self-schema that privileges certain aspects to the exclu-
sion of others. His perception of Miss Kenton is as biased as his
attitude to Lord Darlington; in both instances he projects a unidimen-
sional image. It is in pursuit of his wish to lure Miss Kenton back to
Darlington Hall that Stevens undertakes the journey to Cornwall,
where she now lives, under the pretext of seeing the beauties of the
English countryside. He is reluctant even to acknowledge emotion-
ally the reality of her marriage, continuing to refer to her in his mind
as "Miss Kenton," although to her face he addresses her correctly as
"Mrs. Berm." Nostalgically he hopes to be able to restore the former
luster of Darlington Hall, symbolized by the silver's incomparable
polish, by attracting Miss Kenton back into service. This fantasy is
prompted by his misreading of a letter he has just received from her
in which there are hints of problems in her marriage. But on reread-
ing it he begins to realize that his interpretation may be an exaggera-
tion, an expression of what he wants to hear—in other words,
misattribution, as indeed it turns out to be. The marriage has for sure
had its fair share of downs; Mrs. Benn has left her husband for short
 548 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

periods several times, including recently. However, she has not the
slightest intention of returning to Darlington Hall, especially now
that she is about to have a grandchild.
Stevens's ardent desire—almost a fixation—to have Miss Kenton
back working with him suggests that more may be at stake than the
need for a reliable housekeeper Yet he adamantly represses any
other way of thinking of her This is where he repeats the position of
victim and victimizer that he enacted toward Lord Darlington; by
blocking the possibility of a human relationship between them, he
shortchanges himself as well as Miss Kenton. He keeps their
exchanges on a strictly formal level, largely limited to the discussion
of domestic issues.
Since the narration is consistently from Stevens's angle. Miss
Kenton's view of their rapport can only be surmised. Her feelings
toward him seem to be conflicted. At times she is irritated to the
point of losing her temper at his phlegmatic rigidity; at other times
she is warm, not only in such small gestures as bringing to his office
a vase of flowers, which he gruffly rejects, but also truly compas-
sionate in caring for his father. Stevens, for his part, ignores her
kindnesses as effectively as Lord Darlington's "mistakes." He
recalls their spats and inveighs against housekeepers who move
from house to house in search of romance. Yet he himself reads
romances on the sly, and when Miss Kenton catches him at it, he
maintains that he is merely trying to extend his vocabulary. A streak
of hypocrisy is apparent here, together with shame at having any
interest in such matters; the evident attraction of romance for him
can perhaps even be seen as a vicarious means to partake in feelings
he suppresses or certainly banishes. On Miss Kenton's announce-
ment of her engagement, he can hardly bring himself to congratu-
late her even peremptorily. Instead he finds some petty reason to
reprimand her, a fairly obvious displacement of his vexation at her
leaving service. He envisages her departure from Darlington Hall as
"a professional loss of some magnitude, a loss Darlington Hall
would have some difficulty recovering from" (171). The difficulty,
we suspect, will be as much his own as Darlington Hall's, for he has
come to rely on her Miss Kenton has become an integral part of his
landscape, yet the persona he has fashioned as the "great butler"
contaminates and warps all his personal relationships. Hemmed in
 FURST • 549

by the constraints of his calling, he seems to have forfeited any kind

of emotional spontaneity. However, the persistence and vividness of
his memories of Miss Kenton more than twenty years after she has
left Darlington Hall betray a deeper attachment than he can allow
himself to acknowledge. In contrast to his self-assurance in the pro-
fessional realm, he has a rather curious timidity toward women.
Without digressing into psychoanalytic speculation, it is worth not-
ing that his mother is never mentioned, whereas his father, also a
butler, has acted as a decisive role model.
All Stevens's memories add up to a sort of apologia pro vita sua, a
biased self-justification aimed to emphasize how right and admirable
he has been all along. Whether he ever realizes the failures in his life
beneath its surface success remains an open question. Miss Kenton
does have a moment of truth. Waiting in the bus shelter in the rain
before their final parting, she tells Stevens that she had got to "think-
ing about a life I may have had with you what might have been"
(239). Indeed, she adds that leaving Darlington Hall had been "sim-
ply another ruse, Mr. Stevens, to annoy you." Her words and their
implications reveal a strength of feeling on her part that had only
been adumbrated before. In Stevens they trigger "a certain degree of
sorrow." "Indeed," he goes on, "—why should I not admit it?—at
that moment, my heart was breaking." But he rapidly resumes his
mask and reverts "with a smile" to his customary impassive posture
with the trite comment, "it is too late to tum back the clock" (239). He
cannot let his defenses down; even when he "perceive[s] that her
eyes had filled with tears" after she has told him that he is "so kind"
(240), he simply goes on smiling. Her remark is a provocative ambi-
guity: does her praise of his kindness refer just to the immediate situ-
ation of his driving her to the bus shelter in the drenching rain, or did
she think him capable of kindness, of "human warmth" all along
(245)? Are her memories now deceiving her by suggesting to her, in
light of her husband's lack of kindness, that Stevens had possessed
qualities which he could never express? Or was it once more his
blocking of emotion that aborted the potential romance?

To summarize the function of memory in The Remains of the Day and

"Max Ferber" is no easy task. Memory's fragile power lies at the
 550 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

heart of both narratives, but to denote it as either their "core" or

"foundation" implies too solid a basis. These words are inappropri-
ate because memory proves to be so brittle. It might be more fitting
to deem memory the inspiration or the impetus to the unfolding of
the stories. For readers, the centrality of memory is contradictory in
effect: on the one hand, its waywardness, its fragmentation, its con-
tradictions can be bewildering, even downright trying; on the other
hand, it is a spur to readerly curiosity—and participation in the con-
struction of the tale—through its hints, its often partial revelations,
and hence its implicit invitation to fill the gaps by reading between
the lines. The narrative of memories is thus simultaneously chal-
lenging and enticing.
But memory is more than a very flexible organizing principle in
both these works. By mounting individual memories onto world
events, these narratives merge private and public history. The
Remains of the Day is anchored temporally in 1956, the year of the
Suez crisis, a landmark in the dissolution of the British Empire and
in Great Britain's decline as a major colonial power. It is surely not
by chance that the era oi great butlers coincides with the dominance
of Great Britain. The backdrop to "Max Ferber" is the Holocaust and
the developments leading from World War I to World War II. When
Ferber's mother recalls the "huge shadow [that] suddenly fell upon
us" (212) when she had just turned twenty-one (that is, in 1910), she
is referring literally to "a gigantic zeppelin" but also figuratively to
the stirrings of unrest preliminary to the 1914—18 war and the associ-
ated breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Huge shadows of
political history hang over both Ishiguro's and Sebald's writings. It
is pertinent to invoke at this point the commonality of their biogra-
phical background as members of nations defeated in World War II
(Japan and Germany), living in self-imposed exile and looking back
to earlier periods which shaped their current worlds.
Narratives such as The Remains of the Day and "Max Ferber"
belong to a subgenre identified by James M. Lang, in a thought-
provoking article, "Public Memory, Private History: Kazuo
Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day," as typically postmodern histori-
cal novels. Other examples named by Lang include Pat Barker's
Regeneration trilogy (1991-95), Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959),
and Ishiguro's first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1981). To these
 FURST • 551

I would add Ishiguro's other novel set in Japan, An Artist of the

Floating World (1986), and much of Sebald's writing, especially his
monumental novel Austerlitz (2001), as well as Aharon Appelfeld's
Badenheim 1939 (1980) and The Age of Wonders (1981), Giorgio
Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1965), and John Banville's
The Untouchable (1997). Diverse though their subjects and settings
are, all these works fuse microstoria with macrostoria, the stories of
ordinary, private figures with events of public record. In this respect
they parallel and reflect the new direction of social history which
privileges commoners over the battles, treatises, and doings of
rulers that were traditionally the stuff of history. The creative writer,
unlike the social historian who has to draw on parish registers,
unpublished letters, and diaries, has greater liberty in the elabora-
tion of his or her figures; they do not need actually to have existed,
although they must be firmly rooted in known history if they are to
carry conviction." Lang asserts that these narrators "appear to
arrive closer at uncovering some missing version of truth about that
period" (144). Granted that he writes "appear" and "missing," it is
more accurate to argue that they offer an alternative version, a view
from within and beneath, instead of the conventional historical
account from without and above.
By switching the viewpoint from the public to the private, the
postmodern historical novel "explicitly lays out contrasting por-
traits of the world-making events" underlying the narrative (Lang
151). Stevens and Ferber alike are severely restricted in their percep-
tions of the political forces driving the period in which they live,
albeit for different reasons—Stevens because of his ignorance of
world events and his unquestioning loyalty to Lord Darlington,
Ferber because of his youth and the ingrained habit of silence in his
family. Their renditions of their experiences as they recall them
therefore "resist the backshadowing effects of public history" (Lang
155). Lang uses the term "backshadowing" to denote the retrospec-
tive interpretation of happenings through hindsight knowledge
of both the dynamics of the overall situation and the implications of

11. Max Ferber is modeled on the German refugee painter Frank Auerbach, whose life
and work share many features with the fictive figure; in the original German text he is
called Max Aurach (Furst, Random Destinations 76).
 552 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

every detail for the whole picture. So in public history, the negotia-
tions between Ribbentrop and Lord Darlington in The Remains of the
Day are an underhanded act almost of treachery, not a matter of
organizing a house party to perfection, as Stevens remembers it.
Similarly, in "Max Ferber" the faking of the photograph of the book-
burning is a sinister portent of the Nazi manipulation of facts, not
merely the provocation to a family dispute, as Ferber remembers it.
Stripped of backshadowing, reduced to no more than domestic
issues, these episodes forfeit their global significance. In compensa-
tion, however, they provide insight, indeed some understanding of
the reactions of those immersed in day-to-day happenings and
innocent of their political ramifications.
So where in this contrast between public memory and private his-
tory is the truth located? Lang believes that "it lies somewhat
uneasily between two competing accounts—public and private—of
the past" (163). With greater caution, Kathleen Wall, in examining
theories of the unreliable narrator implicit in The Remains of the
Day, places the word "truth" in quotation marks; she maintains that
"Ishiguro foregrounds the problem of 'truth,' perhaps challenging
us never to figure out 'what really happened'" (30). To raise the
question of truth, even self-consciously in quotation marks, in rela-
tion to The Remains of the Day and "Max Ferber" stems from a funda-
mental oversight—that both these narratives rest on memories. And
memory is shown to be a fragile power whose truths cannot be
other than relative.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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