Our country invented the road trip. And a road trip in post-war American literature looks a lot like what we ourselves imagine / insist / dream of our own road trips, when we pile into the car. Open road, adventure, sun, stereo, strange turns, youth, sex. A quick account: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Travels with Charley, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The American roadtripper might not have a destination or even an atlas, but who gives a fuck? The road is it's own reward; even detours prove themselves adventures. In On the Road, as he embarks on the archetype of all road trips, we're talking major Route 66 Kicks here, Sal Moriarty salivates: "Somewhere along the line I knew there would be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.” The pearl. Handed almost effortlessly; notice how the sentence's passive construction eliminates any kind of agent: there's no pearl keeper. The jewel is simply handed over. Keep the window open and the volume up, and the pearl will come. Thanks, road.
Mr. Farraday has something like this in mind, when he suggests his recently acquired British butler, Stevens, take road trip. I'm switching now to the book that currently concerns our gang: Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day. Farraday is an American of the nouveau riche variety, his slick new Ford itself a pearl, he wholly subscribes to his native Road Trip = Pearl Theory: "Why don't you take the car and drive off somewhere for a few days?" he asks Stevens. "You look like you could make good use of a break." What better cure for a bummed out butler? This is 1957, not quite ten years since Moriarty took his own trip west. But the roads just aren't quite the same, on this side of the Atlantic. This is a subtle move by Ishiguro, but it sets up the wider scope of the book. America is a country in the ascendant; meanwhile, the Great Britain's role in the wold has diminished; even more prescient in this book: it's class system is collapsing, and ruins reveal the structural rot.
As Stevens pours carefully over his road atlas, driving gently through the countryside, he isn't so much driving into a future as he is facing his own repressed and misspent past. His journey is not about getting the pearl; it's an account of how the pearl was disallowed a person of his status, how it was stolen from him, denied to him, and in some cases, dropped by him. The British system that Stevens grew up in was no open road: it was more like jail cell (in fact, his room in Darlington Hall is described as a cell twice in the novel). As Stevens drives into the countryside, his insistence that his life was well spent on serving the noble Lord Darlington is belied by the overwhelming evidence that Lord Darlington was a fascist prick. But what makes Stevens interesting is that you can't excuse him, not for ignoring his father as the man lay dying, or spurning Miss Kenton, the one and only person who understands (and is somehow sexually interested in) him. His roadtrip is the inverse of the American version: the trip occurs at the end of his life; the girl he's chasing let's him know he blew it a long time ago, and the vision he's left with rings as an indictment of both the class system of the British Empire and Stevens' very soul:
"I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality is, surely that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of the great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services."
So, he's lost the girl, spent his life serving a man more evil than good... How should he restart his own engine? What to do with the rest of his day? He decides to to learn how to banter, to better please Mr. Farraday. Oh, Stevens. You missed the sign: Wrong Way.
-Jason
