The Symbolic Fiction of Mr. Stevens: A Lacanian Reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

Abstract

It is not surprising that Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day has solicited several psychoanalytic readings. The novel’s central character, Mr. Stevens, exhibits symptoms of someone afflicted by an acute form of repression. Critics, cognizant of the compatibility of theory and text, have thus turned to Freudian psychoanalytic concepts to explain Mr. Stevens’s motivations, drawing on the theory’s hydraulic understanding of libidinal energy. Brian Shaffer, for example, has described the novel as “one of the most profound representations of repression masquerading as professionalism” (87). He cites a litany of examples to illustrate Mr. Stevens’s constant evasions of circumstances that will force a confrontation with uncomfortable political and sexual issues, and how his repressed aggression and desires are sublimated into abstract ideals such as dignity and greatness. For Shaffer, the “most striking examples of sexual repression center around the Stevens-Kenton relationship” and he presents an interesting reading of their verbal jousts as betraying sublimated sexual desire. For him, it is clear that Stevens is “self-censoring [and] self-deceptive” (70). Utilizing the same theoretical resources but arriving at a radically different reading of the novel, Ruth Parkin-Gounelas argues that “there is no deception in Stevens’ act. The dictates of the superego do not repress Stevens’ emotions; they have replaced them” (41). For Parkin-Gounelas, Mr. Stevens has completely internalized the superego of both his biological father and his symbolic father, Lord Darlington. This dual introjection leads to the erasure of Mr. Stevens’s own ego. She contends that Mr. Stevens’s biological father stands for the “superego of the father” that he has internalized since childhood. As for Lord Darlington, Mr. Stevens’s substitute father, Parkin-Gounelas claims that he stands for “another kind of superego” (39). She suggests that it is through this manner that “Ishiguro explores the way the imperatives of deference and duty may rage with savage cruelty against the ego” (38). I am convinced that the difference in Shaffer’s and Parkin-Gounelas’s interpretation results from the absence of Mr. Stevens’s case history. Since the Oedipal https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005521