Click here to read the Guardian article I told you about: Salman Rushdie reading Ishiguro’s
beautiful but also cruel novel. Here you have a hint:
The real story here is
that of a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life. Stevens
is much preoccupied by "greatness", which, for him, means something
very like restraint. The greatness of the British landscape lies, he believes,
in its lack of the "unseemly demonstrativeness" of African and
American scenery. It was his father, also a butler, who epitomised this idea of
greatness; yet it was just this notion which stood between father and son,
breeding deep resentments and an inarticulacy of the emotions that destroyed
their love.
The Guardian, Friday 17 August 2012
This is the passage from the novel Rushdie is referring to:
The English landscape at its finest - as I saw
it this morning- possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations,
however superficially more dramatic, fail to possess …and this quality is best
summed up by the term “greatness”…it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land
apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of
restraint… the whole question is very akin to the question that has caused so
much debate in our profession over the years: what is a “great” butler?
A question formulated when little remains of the profession ...
