Escape from Responsibility: Ideology and Storytelling in Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

Only in the frankly invented tale about events did man consent to assume responsibility for them, and to consider past events as his past. (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism)At first sight there appear to be some striking homologies between Arendt's account of the poUtical role of meaning and the textual poUtics of contemporary cultural and Uterary theory, even if these similarities are valued differently in each case. Where the "linguistic turn" in literary and cultural studies has displaced "history" as the key social determinant and accorded discourse an extraordinarily expansive political agency through its role in constituting subjectivity, so George Kateb has identified what he sees as a similar animus in Arendt's conception of meaning in The Origins of Totalitarianism, although rather than being celebrated it is judged a source of weakness. On this reading, Arendt accords far too much weight to the determining power of ideology in the rise of totalitarian movements, overemphasizing the role of ideas and the search for meaning and ignoring more prosaic and wordly factors (Kateb 2002, 324-26). Equally, where contemporary literary theory has distanced itself from the referential capacity of language and has emphasized the free play and undecidability of textuality, Kateb complains that Arendt is similarly unconcerned with "truth," and "makfes] no attempt ... to distinguish between historical accounts and fictional accounts" (2002, 335; see Lyotard 1984, 73-79). And just as the contrast between the homogeneity of "grand narratives" and the inventiveness of "Uttle narratives" or "petit recit" has been offered as a means of political orientation in contemporary literary and cultural theory, so Kateb sees in Arendt a similar framework, which opposes the productivity and plurality of "storytelling" to the all-consuming narrative of "ideology" (Lyotard 1984, 60, 65; Kateb 2002, 331, 351-52).However, the occurrence of such an apparently close homology between Arendt's writing and contemporary concerns in literary and cultural studies should give pause for thought. That we find an image of present concerns in the past we interpret within the parameters of the present is, of course, not so surprising; and while not necessarily worthless, the immediacy of such apparent homologies risks erasing the nonidentity of the past and its potential for illuminating the present. Although enthusiasm for the textualism of postmodernism has waned in the Anglophone academy in recent years, the opposition of master and micro narratives has entered into the basic conceptual vocabulary of contemporary cultural and literary theory, becoming woven into the nexus of inteUectual assumptions which, in making contemporary critical discourse possible, tend to go unexamined. However, according to the editors of a recent coUection of theoretical essays on postcolonial studies, the automatic rejection of grand narratives and the assumption of the inherent political productivity of micro narratives may not be so straightforward. Indeed, they argue that in order to address the global inequalities of power and resources, we may "need to keep alive particular metanarratives" and the coUective subjectivities they sustain (Loomba et al. 2005, 34). It is therefore worth exploring the extent to which Arendt's conception of storyteUing may diverge from contemporary assumptions about the political character of narrative.This essay suggests that Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day provides a significant site for exploring the parameters of the identity and nonidentity between Arendt and contemporary critical assumptions. As Gillian Rose observes, the political questions raised by The Remains of the Day clearly connect with Arendt's concerns, perhaps most immediately with the figuring of subjectivity and retrospection in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1996, 5156). Yet at the same time, the novel has frequently been identified as a postmodernist text, an interpretation which would appear to be endorsed by Ishiguro's insistence that the fictional world it conjures needs to be read not in realist or representational terms but as "a pastiche" - one of the central terms in postmodern theories of fictionality (Ishiguro, Herzinger, and Vorda 1991, 138; Jameson 1991, 1-54). …