earticle

영어

This essay reads Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, focusing on what Paul Gilroy has termed ‘the pathology of greatness,’ or the melancholic attachment to greatness. Borrowing Slavoj Žižek’s insight that the melancholic misinterprets lack as loss, I posit that Ishiguro’s narrator, the faithful butler at Darlington Hall, is a melancholic subject who invents ‘the great past’ by confusing lack with loss. The butler’s narrative is a melancholic text that is driven by his pathological attachment to the fantasy of greatness. Unable to face the fact that Lord Darlington has never possessed greatness, the butler is determined to recollect his greatness as a loss, not a lacking object. I analyze the ways in which The Remains of the Day exposes greatness as an empty concept, or a void, by paying particular attention to its critical distance from ‘nostalgia industry.’ And then, I examine the butler’s over-identification with Lord Darlington who, he mistakenly believes, embodies greatness.