Kazuo Ishiguro’s opus is dominated by unreliable memory, which is permeated with a sense of nostalgia, a sentimental yearning for a past period or a return to a place, involving the retrieval and selection of memories. The Remains of the Day (1989) is an English butler Stevens’s evocation of service years between wars at Darlington Hall, but it suffuses the poignancy of disillusionment and nostalgia for the old empire. The settings of historic moments in vicissitudes provide different social frameworks of collective memory in which anachronistic characters bittersweetly long for the idealised past. A textual analysis of landscape descriptions and cultural customs will examine how Stevens’s individual memory is constructed within a social framework of nostalgia, despite the emotional restraint, rigid social hierarchy, and arduous labour that characterised the past. This paper examines Stevens’s nostalgia for the old British Empire through collective memory by Maurice Halbwachs and cultural memory of Englishness through cultural memory by Jan Assmann in The Remains of the Day despite emotional constraints and rigid hierarchy. Halbwachs exemplifies the collective contextualisation of individual memory and embarks on the idealisation of the past with nostalgia and memory reconstruction. Assmann develops Halbwachs’s collective memory into cultural memory that attaches to substances and practices to preserve the past beyond temporal limitation. This paper shows that nostalgia transfigures Stevens’s memory into idealised memory due to the dysfunction of constraints within the past social framework, while cultural memory provides a prescribed cultural script internalised into Stevens’s memory. It also exhibits Ishiguro’s sympathy for ordinary figures in historical fluctuations. 

Keywords: collective memory; cultural memory; Kazuo Ishiguro; nostalgia; The Remains of the Day

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