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Very busy just now: Globalization and harriedness in Ishiguro's The Unconsoled
Comparative Literature, Fall 2001 by Robbins, Bruce
READERS OF Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day (1989) will have no trouble remembering the novel's case against professionalism. "Our professional duty is not to our own foibles and sentiments" the butler-protagonist tells Miss Kenton, "but to the wishes of our employer" (149). Professionalism, the explicit center of the butler's belief-system, seems responsible both for his personal sacrifice of love with Miss Kenton and for his moral failure in backing his employer's pro-Nazi diplomacy. Lord Darlington convenes a conference of European diplomats at Darlington Hall in March 1923 in order to make "a strong moral case for a relaxing of various aspects of the Versailles treaty, emphasizing the great suffering he had himself witnessed in Germany" (92). In the years and pages that follow, we see Lord Darlington as an open anti-Semite whose efforts to stop the approaching war with Germany align him with the fascists. In case we miss the point, the 1923 conference is also the moment when the butler's father, lying upstairs gravely ill, has a stroke and dies while Stevens himself, who has been warned that the end is near, refuses to interrupt his professional attentions to the diplomats downstairs. Told that his father has passed away, he remarks that he is "very busy just now."1
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It does not seem accidental that Ishiguro's case against professionalism, which leads the butler to serve Lord Darlington's ends so blindly, is simultaneously a case against cosmopolitanism. Each is presented as an unnatural detachment from ordinary emotions: erotic love, love of country. Each also offers substitute emotions, re-attachments, and these substitute emotions are reciprocally reinforcing. Lord Darlington's cosmopolitanism, the novel suggests, stems from his aristocratic status; rather than indifference, it expresses a positive solidarity with his German fellow aristocrats that's more compelling to him than the interests he shares with fellow Englishmen of the lower orders. "`He was my enemy,"' Darlington observes of a German diplomat, "`but he always behaved like a gentleman. We treated each other decently over six months of shelling each other. He was a gentleman doing his job and I bore him no malice"' (73). A gentleman doing his job: skipping forward in time, one is tempted to say that doing your job competently has become the modern equivalent of feudalism's pre-national gentility. For it too overrides the moral obligations of national membership by conferring the moral privilege of trans-national membership: the privilege of being treated decently despite shelling or other forms of long-range aggression. One can speculate, in other words, that professionalism has replaced aristocracy in providing a social glue and ethical grounding for cosmopolitanism. This would explain why, for example, Alvin Gouldner sees his "New Class," a forerunner of the Ehrenreichs' "professional-managerial class" and Robert Reich's "symbolic analysts," as encouraging "a cosmopolitan identity, transcending national limits and enhancing their autonomy from local elites" (2).2 With its peculiar ability to produce bonds among detached, institutionally scattered subjects, bonds that are suffused with affect though not always created or sustained by the frequent face-to-face engagements of the same-site work group, professionalism would seem well suited to new trans-national demands for loyalty and solidarity at a distance, whether corporate or quasi-governmental. The question is whether this is any cause for celebration.
Common sense would suggest, with Ishiguro's apparent blessing, that it is anything but. In his book Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa, Alex de Waal strikes a representative note of cynicism when he suggests that "the struggle against famine has become professionalized and institutionalized" (5). It has been taken over, that is, by a "cosmopolitan elite of relief workers, officials of donor agencies, consultant academics and the like" (3-4), and these people are mainly concerned with establishing "moral ownership of famine" (xvi), "widening the scope for humanitarian and human rights organizations to intrude (in certain ways) into the affairs of African nations" (xv). Quoting Ivan Illich, who advocates the abolition of schools and hospitals in the name of peasant self-sufficiency, de Waal proposes that "`to help [is] to interfere"' (5). He suggests that "the intrusion of humanitarian institutions represents, in an insidious but profound way, a disempowerment of the people directly engaged in the crisis, which drains their capacity to find a solution... external involvement, however well-intentioned, almost invariably damages the search for local political solutions" (xvi).
People like ourselves tend to be ambivalent about professional activities, including our own, and about any activities that cross national borders, especially when they claim to serve purely humanitarian interests. Given the inequality of access to trans-national mobility and to credentials, as well as the many reasons to distrust those humanitarian, altruistic rationales that cosmopolitanism and professionalism share, and given that warm affective ties within the profession are no guarantee of its ethical value from the perspective of those outside it, such ambivalence is probably on the whole a good and necessary thing. Still, people like ourselves should also suspect the general eagerness to view all professional claims to the "common good" as solely and inevitably a devious form of selfinterest. Consider what the model of professionalism-as-disempowerment would suggest about such features of the social welfare state as-to take a pertinent example-taxpayer-supported public education. According to this model, public education would have to be seen as a conspiracy of the Powers That Be to create teaching jobs for the professional-managerial elite while also de-educating and mis-educating the masses. It could not be seen, alternatively, as a political compromise arrived at in large part because working class people demanded free public education for their children and actively fought for it. It's as if providing jobs for middle-class teachers could only be a zero-sum game whereby working class families lost out for each teacher hired.
