“Sights from Various Corners of the Globe”: Cosmopolitan Pressure and Paradoxical Mobility in The Remains of the Day

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article intends to shed new light on the well-trodden theme of Englishness in The Remains of the Day by situating it within a cosmopolitan context. This article argues that this novel is not confined to the static concept of Englishness featuring butlerdom, the landed aristocracy, and the rural landscape, but exhibits how individuals react to an altered cosmopolitan milieu where Englishness falters and struggles to survive. Stevens’s motor tour is exactly a personal response to cosmopolitanism in the 1950s in the form of American cultural colonisation. His six-day expedition creates anti-cosmopolitan discourses by summoning up the national landscape ideology represented by the interwar automobile pilgrimage and Romantic pedestrianism. However, such an ideology is ironically dependent on cosmopolitan touristic mobility and subtly laced with cosmopolitan pressure. Stevens’s mobility is thus paradoxical, as it simultaneously affirms anti-cosmopolitan narratives and recognises the ubiquitous presence of cosmopolitan burdens. The paradox of mobility in a cosmopolitan context finds echoes in Ishiguro’s other fiction in a more general sense.