Burns 1 Andrew Burns ENGL 109H-015 Mr. Seliger October 27, 2009 Mr. Stevens‟ Bad Faith Relaxing in a guest house in Salisbury, on his way to meet Miss Kenton in Weymouth, Mr. Stevens recalls memories from his childhood. The first is a story his father used to tell him about a butler who travels to India with his employer and is confronted by a tiger beneath the dining room table. The butler quietly leaves the room, asks his employer for permission to use the “twelve-bores,” fires three rounds into the tiger, and returns to tell his employer that “dinner will be served at the usual time and I am pleased to say there will be no discernible traces left of the recent occurrence by that time” (Ishiguro 36). The second is of his father, voluntarily “suffer[ing] intimate proximity for four days” with the General responsible for his older son, Leonard‟s, death (42). It would appear that at a very early age, Stevens had already developed his definition of “great butler.” A great butler is an unflappable man, utterly dedicated to his job, totally disconnected from his personal self. Upon his arrival at Darlington Hall, Stevens considers himself part of a new, “more idealistic generation [of butlers]” ready “to serve great gentlemen who were...furthering the progress of humanity” (114). Over the years, Stevens finds comfort in his position—it is safe and secure and close to the hub of power, but it also forces him to carry out orders not particularly in keeping with his youthful idealism. To cope with his extensive list of undesirable actions and the dissonance between his youthful preconceptions of a great butler, and his discovered reality, Mr. Stevens slips into the dangerous state of mauvaise foi, or bad faith.
Burns 2 Jean-Paul Sartre coined the term mauvaise foi to describe a particularly baneful form of deception. Not the baleful deception that Stevens practices when he lies to several individuals about his relationship with Lord Darlington, but the more pernicious form of deception from whence these lies originate—self-deception. Sartre divided bad faith into patterns: the positivistic pattern, the stoical pattern, and the ontological pattern, and argued that these patterns represent different “mental and behavioral mechanisms which place the [practitioner] at a distance from his real condition as a free being and…disengage [his] consciousness from an awareness of [his] possibilities” (Hayim 24-6). In all cases, the practitioner utilizes these mechanisms to cope with freedom and its concomitant anguish (24). Stevens engages in all three forms of bad faith—he denies himself all practical freedoms as his coping mechanism for his anguish at the growing disparity between his youthful idealism and reality. He justifies his flight into existential slavery by harkening back to his childhood memories of the tiger-killing butler and his father, memories that he interprets incorrectly as endorsements of the dignity of bad faith, or which he subsequently reinterprets as endorsements of bad faith to promote cognitive consistency. A practitioner of the positivistic bad faith “assumes himself to be compelled to act in certain ways by forces beyond his control” (24). When Stevens contemplates talking to Miss Kenton about firing the Jewish women, Ruth and Sarah, he is initially repulsed by his lordship‟s order, but he couches his acquiescence in his duty: “Nevertheless, my duty in this instance was quite clear, and as I saw it, there was nothing to be gained at all in irresponsibly displaying such personal doubts” (148). Stevens argues that this outside compulsion—duty—denies him the will to object to Lord Darlington‟s order. But of course, in reality, Stevens does possess this ability to reject his employer‟s outrageous request, though in exercising it, he risks dismissal. Rob
Burns 3 Atkinson, writing in the Yale Law Journal, provides an excellent response which Stevens could have readily provided Lord Darlington in rejecting the anti-Semitic order: I'm terribly sorry, Sir, but I consider it part of my duty, in discharging an employee, to give an account of why he or she is being dismissed. I feel a duty to my profession, and to the individuals personally, to rehabilitate if possible those who have fallen short. Moreover, I have a duty to my employer not to convey to anyone, of whatever station, the impression that my employer has acted without good reason, much less arbitrarily or dishonorably. Since I cannot understand why you have chosen to fire these employees, I cannot explain their firing to them, and thus I cannot, as a matter of professional duty, dismiss them. Indeed, Sir, I cannot help but remark that this dismissal is worse than unaccountable to me; it seems to me contrary to a central principle of my profession, rewarding merit evenhandedly. And that, Sir, I have always taken to be my obligation under the spirit of fair play incumbent upon English folk of every rank, from the lowest to the Crown (Atkinson). That dismissal is a possible outcome of rejecting Lord Darlington‟s request does not preclude that option as invalid or improper. Had Stevens responded as Mr. Atkinson advises, he would have, at the very least, behaved with “dignity in keeping with his position” and might, in fact, have preserved the wholesomeness of his lordship‟s “moral status.” Indeed, had he responded as Mr. Atkinson advises, Stevens truly would be a great butler. Unfortunately, the model of dignified butler Stevens constructs as his ideal—a fantastic Frankenstein of the tiger-killing butler, his father, and Adolf Eichmann—distorts the individual significance of his childhood memories. The tiger-killing butler demonstrates the poise and wit of a great butler, solving a
Burns 4 major logistics problem with care and ease—Stevens interprets his actions as encouraging extraordinary sacrifices for one‟s employer; his father acts with professionalism and in a spirit of forgiveness, donating his gratuity to charity—Stevens interprets his behavior as a promotion for the strict subjugation of personal emotions (42). Neither condones iniquity nor advocates subservience to external forces. Adolf Eichmann, however, carries out atrocities, attributing his actions to his kadavergehorsam—corpse-like obedience—which he ascribes to his childhood and a variety of externalities (Adolf Eichmann 010-04). Moreover, though like the tiger-killing butler and his father, Stevens handles the matter expeditiously, like Eichmann, he is doubly selfdeceptive—contemporarily and retrospectively. First he pretends that, despite his “personal doubts,” he is compelled to act, and attributes dignity to acting contrary to these “foibles and sentiments” (148-9); then, in retrospect, he refuses to acknowledge the wrongness of his actions, reaffirming his lack of free will with words like “demanded” (148). That Stevens‟ world is one wherein all his actions are products of externalities is further evinced in his discourse at the pier with the retired butler: Lord Darlington wasn‟t a bad man…He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship‟s wisdom…I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can‟t say I made my own mistakes. Really—one has to ask oneself—what dignity is there in that? (243) Stevens disclaims any knowledge of possible consequences of his actions, describing everything that went poorly as the result of Lord Darlington‟s misguided path. All of his actions are predicated on an all-consuming trust in his lordship, a peculiar trust whereby these reciprocated actions are involuntarily extracted. In reality, Stevens has ample opportunity to reject Lord
Burns 5 Darlington‟s path. He chooses to follow Lord Darlington—the dark side—not out of trust but out of ambition, an ambition to get “as close to [the] hub of power as possible” (115). The dissonance between this ambition, his youthful idealism, and reality motivates his positivistic bad faith. Moreover, his retreat into positivistic bad faith and his emphasis on his inaction, and the lack of dignity implicit therein, reveals that he finds a firm belief in his own guiltlessness more critical than dignity (Marcus 144-5). What this dignity actually consists of is mostly glossed over. It requires an awareness of one‟s comportment, and a consciousness of one‟s appearances, yet disregards emotions and bodily urges. Great butlers, according to Stevens, must be more aware of external than internal processes, but must also erect walls to separate them from the externalities: “great butlers will not be shaken by external events” (43). Externalities are always the cause of events and the dampener of possibilities; however, their consequences must never alter the thought processes, beliefs, feelings, etc. of a butler beyond that which is required for a reflexive reaction—updating schedules, preparing for unplanned guests, handling any number of other contingencies—or a perfunctory professionalism—polite apologies, expedient responses, unquestioned agreement, etc. Thus, while Stevens constrains his choices to those offered by Lord Darlington, he simultaneously compels himself to believe that he is emotionally disconnected from his interactions with his father, Miss Kenton, and his lordship; that he has chosen instead to operate on the level of intellectual transcendence—stoical bad faith. As his father lay dying, a victim of a stroke precipitated by Stevens‟ miscalculation, or rather denial, of his deteriorating condition, Stevens quickly flees from his father‟s room to avoid facing the growing discrepancy between his conceptual model of his father, the great butler, and the actual frailty of his father, the person. When Lord Darlington notices that Stevens “look[s] as though [he is] crying,” Stevens, who
Burns 6 believes that dignity requires he operate within a higher sphere of intellectualism, reasons this emotional manifestation to be the product of “[t]he strain of a hard day” (105). Stevens is not intentionally dishonest—he represses all emotions, believing them to be a sign of weakness. The flood of emotions precipitated by his father‟s critical condition are repressed mentally, but not physically—he maintains a divide between his intellectual and corporeal beings. Similar mechanisms are at work years later when Stevens receives a letter from the former housekeeper, Miss Kenton. He feels compelled to travel to Weymouth to visit her, but he refuses to identify this compulsion as a personal desire. Instead, he imagines that certain parts of her letter intimate a desire to return to her former post (10). He hastily concludes that these imagined intimations indicate her marriage is in shambles and her desire to return to her former position (48). At that time, he judges his motives unimpeachably professional and reasonable in nature. Later, however, he begins to question the existence of Miss Kenton‟s hints, and eventually concludes that he has “read into certain of her lines more than was wise.” (180). Yet even in conceding that Miss Kenton‟s letter did not, in fact, contain any of the overtures he had once believed it to contain, he attributes everything to an error in reasoning rather than to personal desire. His actual motives, however, remain transparent nonetheless, and despite his self-deceptive practices, even Mr. Farraday understands these deeper motivations: “My, my, Stevens. A lady-friend. And at your age” (14). Stevens‟ habit of repressing romantic feelings toward Miss Kenton is not new, though. Several years earlier, when Miss Kenton began receiving numerous letters from her future husband, Mr. Benn, Stevens grew alarmed and turned to Mr. Graham, a fellow butler, for advice. Mr. Graham advised him that Miss Kenton‟s peculiar behavior indicated she soon intended to marry and leave her position. Now reflecting on the origins of his concern, he reasons that his particular interest in Miss Kenton‟s increased postal volume and her frequent trips from
Burns 7 Darlington Hall was not the product of an unprofessional romantic jealousy, but rather, proof of his concern for the operation of the house (171). Clearly, he cannot admit that his alarm originated from a romantic attachment to Miss Kenton, as emotions detract from dignity, so instead, he whitewashes his motives in professionalism, comforting himself with the knowledge that his concerns evidenced his dedication to his profession: “it was my duty to think about the welfare of the house in the long term, and if indeed these signs tended to support Mr. Graham‟s notion that Miss Kenton was contemplating departing for romantic purposes, I clearly had a responsibility to probe the matter further” (171). Stevens‟ existential ailments do not merely entail these small tablets of self-deception. Were it that simple, Stevens could count himself among the millions who systematically lie to themselves and rationalize poor behavior every day. Stevens suffers not simply from the superficial ailments of positivistic-and-stoical-patterned bad faith, but from the significantly more devastating ontological bad faith, the form Sartre considered to represent the “most extreme form of human inauthenticity and unfreedom” (Terestchenko 82). A practitioner of this pattern of bad faith chooses to lose his identity by totally identifying himself with a social role, i.e. that of a butler. “The expectations of others actually become his desires, and almost come to constitute his own nature” (Hayim 25). Stevens obsesses over the qualities of great butlers, and the dignity that they must possess: “[great butlers wish] to serve the great gentleman of our times in whose hands civilization had been trusted” (Ishiguro 116); and “[great butlers] where their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear a suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstance tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is…a matter of „dignity‟” (43). He spends pages elaborating on the qualities of butlers of yesteryear and pooh-poohing contemporary “great”
Burns 8 butlers as mediocre pretenders: “[y]ou will notice I say „what‟ rather than „who‟ is a great butler; for there was actually no serious dispute as to the identity of the men who set the standards amongst our generation…I am talking of the likes of Mr. Marshall of Charleville House, or Mr. Lane of Bridewood” (29); and “now I do not doubt that Mr. Neighbours had good organizational skills…[b]ut at no stage did he ever approach the status of a great butler” (30). Stevens‟ complete fixation on greatness approaches pathology, and represents the single most destructive aspect of his persona. His discussion of the nature of dignity and the qualities of a great butler proceeds entirely from ontological bad faith, and, because he models his entire life around this “dignity,” his entire life proceeds in ontological bad faith (Terestchenko 82). When Sartre examines this pattern in his book, Being and Nothingness, he asks the reader to imagine an overly waiter-ly waiter—a waiter who moves just a little too carefully, accepts orders just a little too eagerly, who walks away “trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton” (59). This waiter is not merely working as a waiter, but rather trying to be a waiter—“The waiter plays with his condition, not to emulated those in the profession, but in order to realize his condition along with theirs” (emphasis added) (Phillips 24). Likewise, Stevens seeks to “realize his condition” as a butler. He believes being a butler is like being a table—a table is a table, a person is a person, a butler is a butler. Tables do not transform into butlers, and butlers, likewise, should not transform into people: “The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit them to the utmost” (Ishiguro 42-3). Stevens criticizes the average butler as a person lacking in dignity, who “will abandon [his] professional being for the private one at the least provocation…one small push, a slight stumble, and the façade will drop off to reveal the actor underneath” (42). Like the waiter, Stevens exists solely to perform his duties—he tries to be his duties (Phillips 30). The devastating consequence
Burns 9 of his efforts is that he crowds out any space to be himself, circumscribing his horizons to those within the purview of a butler. In his youth, he “harbour[s] the desire to make [his] own small contribution to the creation of a better world” as a butler. As he stands outside Lord Darlington‟s drawing room “pondering the events of the evening—those that had unfolded and those still in the process of doing so,” he imagines these events as the summary of his life and is uplifted by a “sense of triumph” as a butler (Ishiguro 227-8). In his old age, he commits to “developing [his] bantering skills” for the benefit of his employer as a butler. All his aspirations, all his ambitions revolve around his position as a butler. He pursues nothing else. When Miss Kenton asks when he will settle down, he replies: “my vocation will not be fulfilled until I have done all I can to see his lordship through the great tasks he has set himself” (173). Stevens‟ singular focus denies him life‟s pleasures. No love and companionship, no hobbies, no retirement. Now he sees his abilities slipping away—his ambitions no longer suffice to maintain his exacting standards. He recognizes this gradual deterioration, a deterioration not too unlike his father‟s, and like his father, he remains obstinate in facing the inevitable. Just as he glimpses a “different life, a better life [he] might have had,” the sun is setting on the remains of his day (239).
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