Kazuo Ishiguro, Freud’s day-residues, and the novel that was named by accident
On an Australian beach, a Dutch poet offered Kazuo Ishiguro a word of Freud’s for the scraps a day leaves behind for dreams to work on. Put into English on the spot, it became the title of his most famous novel. Ishiguro took it for the atmosphere. The word kept its other meaning anyway, and that meaning is the method of protagonist after protagonist.
Some time before The Remains of the Day was finished, Kazuo Ishiguro sat on a beach in Australia with four other writers and tried to find out what it was called. He told The Paris Review the story in 2008. There was a writers’ festival on, and the group on the sand was Michael Ondaatje, Victoria Glendinning, the Dutch poet Judith Herzberg, and Robert McCrum of Faber, who had given Ishiguro the advance that let him finish his first novel. They were playing what Ishiguro called “a semi-serious game of trying to find a title for my soon-to-be-completed novel.” Ondaatje proposed Sirloin: A Juicy Tale. “It was on that level,” Ishiguro said. “I kept explaining that it had to do with this butler.”
Then Herzberg mentioned a word of Freud’s. Tagesreste, Ishiguro recalled, “which he used to refer to dreams, which is something like ‘debris of the day.’ When she translated it off the top of her head, it came out as ‘remains of the day.’ It seemed to me right in terms of atmosphere.”
That is the whole account, and it has the shape of the stories writers tell about titles: a happy accident, a phrase that sounded right, a book that grew into it. It is also, read a second time, something else. Tagesreste is Tag and Reste, day and leftovers, and “remains of the day” is as literal a rendering as any translator of Freud has managed. James Strachey, in the Standard Edition, gives “the day’s residues.” A. A. Brill, in 1913, gave “remnants from the day.” Herzberg, off the top of her head, gave the plainest of the three. The translation was not loose. What the English phrase has that the German term lacks is a second sense, of evening and of what is left of a life, and that is the sense Ishiguro took. The Freudian sense was not lost on the beach. Herzberg offered the word as Freud’s, and Ishiguro’s account glosses it as his term for dreams. What his account does not record is anyone remarking what the Freudian sense had to do with the book.
Freud’s day-residues are the trivial scraps of waking life that a dream picks up because they are safe enough to carry what cannot be said. That is a description of Stevens the butler. It describes protagonist after protagonist in Ishiguro’s novels. The fit went unremarked, and the title was truer than the man who accepted it took it to be.
I The Day’s Residues
Freud’s claim about trifles is in the fifth chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, in the section on recent and indifferent impressions, and in Brill’s English it has the force of a rule: “The dream never concerns itself with trifles; we do not allow ourselves to be disturbed in our sleep by matters of slight importance.” Since his own dreams seemed full of trifles, the rule sounds like a denial of the obvious, and the next sentence says what it means: “Whatever one may dream, it is either manifestly recognisable as psychically significant or it is disfigured.” The trifle is never the point of the dream. It is the disguise the point wears. A botanical monograph glimpsed in a shop window turned up that night as the subject of a dream, and when he followed the associations back, the monograph led to a colleague, the cocaine episode, his wife’s favourite flowers, a reproach. The trivial thing was the entry point. The dream, he wrote, “preferably takes up into its content non-essential experiences,” and the reason it prefers them is the point of the book: the essential thing is under guard, and the trivial one is not.
The mechanism is stated most fully in the seventh chapter. The dream, Brill has Freud say, “gathers up the indifferent remnants from the day,” and it does so because “the dream process more easily takes possession of recent or indifferent material which has not yet been seized by the waking mental activity.” The forbidden wish cannot show its face. It borrows one. The borrowed face is some scrap the day left behind: an overheard phrase, an unfinished errand, a window display. In the German those scraps are Tagesreste, and Freud’s whole theory of what a dream is can be put as a sentence about them. A dream is a wish wearing the day’s remains.
Freud’s account of dreaming has not survived as science. Most clinicians abandoned the wish-fulfilment theory long ago, and the neurology of sleep has gone elsewhere. What survives is the account’s grammar: the small safe thing standing in for the large forbidden one, the charge travelling from where it cannot be expressed to where it can. That is a theory of narration, whatever it was meant to be, and it is the part Ishiguro took, without needing it as theory. He had already found it somewhere else.
II Learning the Mechanism
He found it among homeless people. After university Ishiguro worked with homeless people in west London, and the job was mostly listening. “I’d spent a lot of time working with homeless people,” he told the Review, “listening to people’s stories about how they’d got to this place, and I’d gotten very sensitive to the fact that they weren’t telling those stories in a straightforward way.” The example he gave is the method before it had a name. “Let’s say somebody is talking about a mutual friend, and he’s getting angry about this friend’s indecisiveness about a relationship he’s in. He’s getting absolutely furious. Then you realize that he’s appropriating the friend’s situation to talk about himself. I thought this was an interesting way to narrate a novel: to have somebody who finds it too painful or awkward to talk about his own life appropriate someone else’s story to tell his own.”
That is A Pale View of Hills. Its narrator, Etsuko, is a Japanese widow in England whose elder daughter has hanged herself. The suicide is announced at the start. Then, instead of the daughter, Etsuko remembers a summer in Nagasaki after the war, and a neighbour called Sachiko with a neglected child. “I thought the reader would think, Why the hell are we hearing about this other thing?” Ishiguro said. “I hoped readers would start to realize that her story is being told through the story of her friend.” Sachiko is a day-residue the size of a novel: the adjacent, safer story that carries the one Etsuko cannot tell.
Ishiguro’s verdict on the book is severe. “I’m very fond of it, but I do think it’s too baffling.” The ending, where a scene in Japan blurs into one that happened much later, he calls “quite gimmicky,” and he gives the reason: “I didn’t know how to create the texture of memory.” He had the displacement. He did not yet have the dream-work, the way one time slides under another so that the reader feels the substitution happen rather than being told about it.
The dream-work arrived in 1983, in bed. In his Nobel lecture, Ishiguro described a spring when “I came down with a virus and spent a few days in bed” and read Proust. “I became completely riveted by the Overture and Combray sections.” What held him was not the famous sentences but the way the narrative moved: not by chronology but by association, one memory calling up another across decades. He saw that in his own fiction “I could place a scene from two days ago right beside one from twenty years earlier,” and that doing so would let him show “the many layers of self-deception and denial that shrouded any person’s view of their own self.” That is Freud’s dream-time applied to a novel. The dream does not know what order things happened in. It knows what belongs next to what.
The lecture ties the discovery to the book he was about to write: “I could suddenly see an exciting, freer way of composing my second novel.” An Artist of the Floating World was that novel, and Stevens was not the first narrator built the new way but the second. Masuji Ono is a retired painter in a Japanese city after the war, and what he talks about is the negotiation of his younger daughter’s marriage, the house he won in an “auction of prestige,” his old pupils, a bridge, a bar. What he does not talk about, until the talk about everything else has worn thin, is what he painted during the war and what he did to a pupil who would not. Ono’s trifles are the first ones Ishiguro arranged with the dream’s sense of what belongs beside what.
III Stevens’s Trifles
The Remains of the Day is the third novel. In July 1956 the butler of Darlington Hall is lent his new American employer’s Ford and sent on a motoring holiday to the West Country. His account is divided by day and place: Salisbury, Mortimer’s Pond, Taunton, Moscombe, Little Compton, Weymouth, and there is no Day Five. He has a purpose, which he presents as professional: the house is short-staffed, and a former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, now Mrs Benn, has written a letter that seems to him to hint that she might come back.
What he writes about is the following. A staff plan. The polishing of silver, and the claim that the state of the silver at Darlington Hall once softened the mood of a visiting statesman. The question of whether a butler can learn to banter, since Mr Farraday banters and expects it returned. A porcelain figure, the novel’s “Chinaman,” left in the wrong place, and what that revealed about his father’s decline. A conference held at the Hall in March 1923, which Stevens remembers as the summit of his professional life, because he served the guests faultlessly while his father was dying upstairs. Each is small, each is safe, and each is standing exactly where something larger is not allowed to stand. The staff plan stands where Miss Kenton stands. The silver stands where Lord Darlington’s politics stand, the appeasement and the dismissed Jewish maids and the ruined name. The conference stands where the father stands. Stevens’s narrative is a dream of the six days, assembled from the remains of three decades, and the remains have been chosen the way Freud said they are chosen: because they are the material the waking mind has not put under guard.
Then the guard fails, twice. The first time is at a bus stop, after the meeting with Miss Kenton. She tells him she sometimes thinks about the life she might have had with him, and his reply to the reader is the plainest sentence in the book: at that moment, his heart was breaking. He says nothing of the kind to her. On the evening of the sixth day Stevens sits on the pier at Weymouth, waiting for the lights to come on, and a stranger who turns out to be a retired butler draws him into talk, and the talk goes where none of the account has gone. He gave his best to Lord Darlington, he says, and he cannot even claim to have made his own mistakes. The stranger offers him a handkerchief, and tells him that the evening is the best part of the day. Then Stevens does the thing the book has taught the reader to watch for. He takes the stranger’s remark and reduces it to a residue. He resolves to practise bantering, so that he can surprise Mr Farraday on his return.
The Nobel lecture says where the yearning came from, though it names no scene. In March 1988 the novel was finished, and Ishiguro had kept his butler’s defences up to the last page. Then, as he was listening to a record, “Tom Waits began to sing a song called ‘Ruby’s Arms,’” a ballad about “a man, possibly a soldier, leaving his lover asleep in bed,” sung “in the voice of a gruff American hobo utterly unaccustomed to revealing his deeper emotions.” Midway through, “the singer tells us that his heart is breaking.” Ishiguro saw what it meant for his book: “I had to reverse that decision.” Just for one moment, towards the end of the story, the butler’s armour had to crack, to “allow a vast and tragic yearning to be glimpsed underneath.” The lecture does not say which moment. At the bus stop, Stevens tells the reader, in nearly the song’s words, that his heart was breaking, and tells Miss Kenton nothing. Glimpsed, not stated. The wish shows its face for a page and then puts the mask back on, and on the pier the mask it chooses is the smallest residue in the book.
One more thing about the residues, from the interview. Asked whether he did research on service, Ishiguro said he had tried, and found that almost no servants had written about their lives. “So most of the stuff in The Remains of the Day about the rituals of being a servant was made up. When Stevens talks of the ‘staff plan,’ that’s made up.” The trifles were not found and used. They were invented to be trifles.
IV The Grammar of Dreams
Shortly after The Remains of the Day was published, Ishiguro and his wife, Lorna, were “sitting in a greasy spoon,” he told the Review, talking about how to write for an international audience, and she said that “the language of dreams is a universal language. Everyone identifies with it, whichever culture they come from.” He spent the following months asking a question: “What is the grammar of dreams?”
His own example is the best short description of it. “Just now, the two of us are having this conversation in this room with nobody else in the house. A third person is introduced into this scene. In a conventional work, there would be a knock on the door and somebody would come in, and we would say hello. The dreaming mind is very impatient with this kind of thing. Typically what happens is we’ll be sitting here alone in this room, and suddenly we’ll become aware that a third person has been here all the time at my elbow.” And then the sentence that joins this to west London and the sickbed: “I started to see parallels between memory and dream, the way you manipulate both according to your emotional needs at the time.”
Over some months, he said, he built up a folder full of notes, and the book that came out of it was The Unconsoled, five hundred pages in which a pianist named Ryder arrives in a Central European city to give a concert that everyone believes will heal the city, and is unable to get from one room to the next without being waylaid by people who have been at his elbow all along. In the interview he does not mention Freud in connection with it. He says dreams. The book that had been named for the day’s remains off the top of a poet’s head was followed by the book that set out to do, in the open, what the dreaming mind does.
It was received as a catastrophe. The Review’s introduction recalls James Wood writing that “it invents its own category of badness,” and Anita Brookner coming round to call it “almost certainly a masterpiece.” Ishiguro’s own account of the reception is calm. “It’s never my intention to be willfully obscure. The novel was as clear as I could make it at the time, given that it was meant to follow dream logic.” And: “I wouldn’t change a word of The Unconsoled.” The pattern is this. The Remains of the Day hid the dream’s grammar inside a realist surface, a butler, a Ford, a road through Somerset, and won the Booker and sold, the Review noted, more than a million copies in English. The Unconsoled took the surface away and let the grammar show, and was told it had invented its own category of badness. The dream-work is tolerated when it is hidden. Shown, it reads as a mistake.
V The Same Book Three Times
The interviewer, Susannah Hunnewell, told Ishiguro that readers who had followed him from Nagasaki to Darlington Hall “had a psychedelic moment.” He declined the compliment. “I don’t think it is that chameleon-like. What I’m saying is I’ve written the same book three times. I just somehow got away with it.” Asked why the English setting had astonished people, he answered, “That’s because people see the last thing first.” Readers who arrived at the butler took the setting for the essence. The essence had not moved. “For me, the essence doesn’t lie in the setting,” he said, and then, with the care of a man explaining a technique, “the choice of narrator and setting are deliberate. You do have to choose a setting with great care, because with a setting come all kinds of emotional and historical reverberations. But I leave quite a large area for improvisation after that.”
What travels from Etsuko to Ono to Stevens is the residue mechanism. A protagonist holds a small thing and talks about it so that the large thing need not be said, and the novel is the reader’s slow discovery of what the small thing is standing in for. The later books keep the mechanism and change the thing. In When We Were Orphans, the detective Christopher Banks returns to Shanghai in 1937 to solve the disappearance of his parents, and Ishiguro describes “a peculiar elision in Christopher Banks’s mind between solving the mystery of his parents and stopping the Second World War”: a private loss displaced onto a public one, which is the furious friend from west London scaled up to a war. In Never Let Me Go, Kathy H. narrates her years at Hailsham through the Gallery, the collection of pupils’ artwork taken away by a woman called Madame, and the rumour that a couple truly in love could win a deferral; the students talk about the Gallery and the deferrals because they cannot talk about what they are for. In The Buried Giant, an old couple set out through a mist that has taken the country’s memory to visit a son in a village a few days off, and the journey is what they can talk about; what the mist has taken, the son’s fate and their own part in it, waits at the end for a boatman to draw out. And in Klara and the Sun, the narrator is an artificial friend who has watched a sick child and concluded that the Sun, which revives a beggar in the street outside her shop window, can be asked to heal her. Klara’s Sun is the purest residue in the late work: a thing seen through a window, indifferent, picked up by a mind that needs somewhere to put a hope it cannot otherwise hold.
VI Never Believe the Author
The interview ends, more or less, with a warning. Hunnewell asked why his characters, one after another, miss the essential thing in their lives, and Ishiguro answered: “Without psychoanalyzing myself, I can’t say why. You should never believe an author if he tells you why he has certain recurring themes.”
He has his reasons, and they are about damage. Publicity, he said, takes a third of a writer’s working life, and much of that time is spent “being quizzed by often very insightful people. Why is there always a three-legged cat in your stuff, or what’s this obsession with pigeon pie? A lot of what goes into your work can be unconscious, or at least the emotional reverberations from these images might have been unanalyzed. It’s difficult for these things to remain that way when you do a book tour.” He used to think honesty was better. “I’ve seen the damage that this does. Some writers get quite screwed up.” The danger is that the writer starts to narrate himself: “You sit down to write and you think, I am a realist and I suppose I am a kind of absurdist as well.”
The rule is narrower than it sounds, and the narrowness matters. Ishiguro will tell you how. West London, the sickbed, the greasy spoon, the staff plan that was made up: nearly every account in this essay is an account of method, given freely and in detail. What he will not tell you is why, and the interview shows him declining to, when asked why his characters, one after another, miss the essential thing. The how is on the record. The why is the thing the how is standing in for.
The story of the title rests on Ishiguro’s telling to The Paris Review in 2008, the only telling consulted for this essay. Nothing turns on that; a writer’s account of how he named his own book is his to give. The other half is different. Judith Herzberg, who supplied the word, has not said, in any English- or Dutch-language source consulted for this essay, whether she had the novel’s method in mind when she offered it, or only a phrase for a game on a beach. The claim of this essay is that the fit between Freud’s word and Ishiguro’s book went unremarked on the beach. The one person who could say whether she saw it has not said. The fit stayed where Freud said such things stay, in the material nobody had seized.
So the beach, a second time. Five writers, a game, a joke about sirloin, a Dutch poet offering a word of Freud’s, a word that meant one thing in Vienna and was used, on a beach, for another. Ishiguro took the sound of it, evening and the leftover life, and wrote a novel in which a butler drives for six days through the remains of his, talking about silver. The word had been doing that all along. The remains of the day are what the dream is made of. They are also what is left of the day, and of the life, when the dream is over.
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Sources: Kazuo Ishiguro, interviewed by Susannah Hunnewell, “The Art of Fiction No. 196,” The Paris Review 184 (Spring 2008); Kazuo Ishiguro, “My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs,” Nobel Lecture, December 7, 2017. Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1900), for Tagesreste; The Interpretation of Dreams, chapter V, section (a), “Recent and Indifferent Impressions in the Dream,” and chapter VII, section (e), translated by A. A. Brill (New York: Macmillan, 1913), at Project Gutenberg; and James Strachey’s rendering, “the day’s residues,” in the Standard Edition, vols. IV–V (1953). Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989), The Unconsoled (1995), When We Were Orphans (2000), Never Let Me Go (2005), The Buried Giant (2015) and Klara and the Sun (2021). Tom Waits, “Ruby’s Arms,” Heartattack and Vine (1980). James Wood’s and Anita Brookner’s judgments of The Unconsoled as quoted in the Paris Review interview’s introduction. Drafted with Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.5; literary and copy editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; cold read by Claude Fable 5.1, as outside literary editor. All images generated by Gemini Argon.