Corporate Watch
By Amelia H. C. Ylagan
Kazuo Ishiguro was in his kitchen writing e-mail when the phone rang. The Swedish Academy notified the surprised Ishiguro that he had won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, for his seven best-selling novels, body of short fiction, some screenplays and even song lyrics written over the past 35 years (The Guardian, Aug. 17, 2017).
Ishiguro, who with his pure-Japanese parents (his father was a physical oceanographer at the British National Institute of Oceanography) came to Surrey, England in 1959 when he was just 5 years old, is a British national, raised and educated in Britain (Bachelor of Arts with honors in English and Philosophy, Master of Arts in Creative Writing.
Yet if you read Ishiguro’s most famous novel, The Remains of the Day, you might imagine you were reading Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility (1811) or Pride and Prejudice (1813) — in the languid prose of the English classics that described the lives of the landed gentry, their peers, and subalterns.
But after Austen’s biting irony and underlying social commentary on the 1800s, come Ishiguro’s stiff-upper lip innuendoes on the declining English gentility in post-war England (1930s to the 1950s) in The Remains of the Day, when personal values and loyalties were tested in new and hitherto unorthodox practicalities of political and social compromise.
The Nobel Institute described Ishiguro in its citation as a writer “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” (Washington Post, Oct. 05, 2017).
The simplest connection in Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day would have been, factitiously, the man-servant relationship of Lord Darlington and his butler Stevens. But blind loyalty to his master and to “the dignity” of his profession shackled Stevens — such that he could not indulge his unadmitted love and the proffered reciprocation by Ms. Kenton, the housekeeper. On the other hand, Lord Darlington, the nobleman for whom Stevens worked, wrongly chose his “connections” by siding with the Nazis — because of blind loyalty to his friend Herr Bremann, who committed suicide in specious defense of his own loyalties. Darlington tried to influence British and German heads of state on the outcome of the Treaty of Versailles for the more lenient sanctions on Germany — but only his butler, Stevens, did not judge Darlington traitor to England and the nascent democracies.
After World War I, the League of Nations was formed for the arbitration of international disputes; after World War II, the United Nations was created to uphold human rights of citizens and to achieve ‘higher standards of living’, addressing ‘economic, social, health, and related problems,’ and ‘universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion (Christopher N.J. Roberts. “William H. Fitzpatrick’s Editorials on Human Rights, 1949).
And after the fall of the Berlin Wall that stood to divide East and West ideologies there was even more the wanting of nations and societies to connect and belong (which is Ishiguro’s recurrent theme in his writings). No more the master-slave, colonizer and colonized, rich and poor nations. In unity, there is strength, as alliances made equalized and maximized political and economic links.
Now three dominant trading regions or blocs whose member countries together account for over 90% of global trade are the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA-1994); European Union (EU-1998); and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC-1989) (dpcdsb.org).
NAFTA negotiators met in Mexico last Friday for the fifth of seven planned rounds that are due to wrap up by the end of March (Reuters, Nov. 18, 2017). US President Donald Trump, who says NAFTA is a “disaster,” has frequently threatened to ditch the pact unless big changes are made — a five-year sunset clause for NAFTA to self-destruct and details such as boosting the North American content of autos to % from the current 62.5% (Ibid.)
In his recent 12-day Asia trip, Trump spoke at the APEC Leaders’ conference in Vietnam, hitting on China and other countries he blamed for predatory economic policies, accusing them of having “stripped” jobs, factories, and industries out of the United States (The Guardian Nov. 10 2017).
In The Remains of the Day the English butler, after the death of his old master, has to contend with the idiosyncrasies of the new owner of Darlington Hall, a rich American, Mr. Farraday.
Despite the seemingly more democratic relationship Farraday wanted — as in his predilection for constant informal “banter” with Stevens — the butler struggled with respecting the ascendancy of the new master and wanting to keep his own dignity by the more defined lines of duty and the measurable deliverables in the performance of his job.
“What is dignity? What is greatness? What is Englishness?” Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses, 1988) asked obliquely to verbalize his take of the essence of Ishiguro’s message in The Remains of the Day (The Guardian, Aug. 17 2012).
And this humble reader/writer might think of the uncanny parallel of the United Kingdom still trying to find itself in the global political-economic community, as it had voted on June 23, 2016 to leave the European Union on March 29, 2019 (bbc.com, Nov. 13, 2017).
After the historic Brexit vote, Ishiguro wrote in an opinion piece “that the UK is now very likely to cease to exist” as a result of the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum (Financial Times , July 1, 2016).
Keep calm and carry on, Ishiguro.
That betrays the pathos of those who allow the stiff upper lip to quiver, as Steven the butler wrestled with the changes in his life. The UK will prevail:
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.
— William Shakespeare
Amelia H. C. Ylagan is a Doctor of Business Administration from the University of the Philippines.
