Kazuo Ishiguro’s gentle transgression of tradition, myths and stereotypes

Abstract

The present article aims to provide a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day that focuses on the author’s ‘gentle transgression’ of three local myths become international commodities: the myths of the English butler, the English country house and Englishness itself. It also examines how, in the process, the butler’s identity becomes an increasingly heterogeneous one, a “transindividuality” (Bessière 2010) potentially representative of a sedentary or “rooted” (Appiah 1997) form of critical cosmopolitanism. Ishiguro thus responds to the challenges of globalization, suggesting that a constantly questioned to-and-fro movement between the local and the global, each in turn enriching the other, might prevent the much-feared homogenization of cultures.