Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Edition: The Satanic Verses: A Novel

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Satanic Verses was published in 1988 (Rushdie's fourth novel). Its publication met with great controversy, resulting famously in a fatwa placed against Rushdie by leaders of radical Islam like the Ayatollah Khomeini. Rushdie's portrayal of the prophet Mohammed (as Mahound) was particularly controversial and considered to be blasphemous.

SUMMARY:
I. The Angel Gibreel
Two men, Gibreel Farishta, and Saladin Chamcha, are the sole survivors of a hijacked plane, the Bostan AI-420 bound for London, miraculously falling from the sky and emerging unscathed. Gibreel was a famous Indian actor, who had little regard for the women he bedded down with. One woman, Rekha Merchant, plunged to her death from a tall building along with her children in an act of protest against Gibreel. As he falls from the plane, Gibreel sees Rekha on a magic carpet, vowing to follow him with her vengeance. This section gives details on Gibreel's childhood and rise to fame, his spontaneous recovery from spontaneous hemorrhaging, among other things. Chamcha's history is one of rejecting his homeland, desiring to leave behind his past and become a true Englishman after one particularly traumatic encounter of sexual abuse. After a few years of education in London, Chamcha becomes estranged from his Indian parents, particularly his father. Chamcha's mother dies choking on a fishbone while refusing to hide during a Pakistani air raid; no one had come to her rescue because they were all hiding. Chamcha's father re-married another woman of the same name, and Chamcha goes of to settle permanently in London, becoming a voice-actor (and unable to land screen roles generally due to racism). Chamcha, bent on his own Anglicization and assimilation, marries a white, English girl, Pamela Lovelace. On a trip back to Bombay, a woman named Zeeny Vakil tries to "convert" Chamcha back to his roots but fails, despite a love affair that the two embark on. Chamcha is on his way back to London from this trip when the plane crashes.

II. Mahound
In a town called Jahilia, "built entirely of sand," the poet and satirist Baal is forced to write verses for the Grandee Abu Simbel against the prophet Mahound and his followers. Mahound's primary disciples are Khalid, a water-carrier, Salman, a Persian immigrant, and Bilal, a slave. Mahound preaches monotheism against the primarily polytheistic town and so does not have much luck. Abu Simbel suggests to Mahound a compromise: if his all-powerful Allah will accept three of the city's lesser Gods, he might win more followers and continue to live there. Mahound's uncle tells him he should consult the archangel Gibreel. Mahound goes in search of the archangel, who is reluctant to be summoned by this demanding Mahound. Hardly knowing what he is doing, Gibreel delivers the message that Lat, Uzza, and Manat are  to be accepted gods, not on the level of Allah, but under him. When Mahound returns to the city, the message is met by taunts and rioting; he is rescued by Hind, Abu Simbel's wife, who tells him that Al-Lat demands equality with Allah. Mahound sees Gibreel again, and this time he gets the idea that the first message was actually from Shaitan, the evil archangel (Gibreel knows that it was him both times, actually). He goes back to Jahilia to reveal this new message. Again, Mahound and his followers are persecuted, and forced to leave the city altogether.

III. Ellowen Deeowen
Rosa Diamond, a woman of 88 years, claims to see ghosts, so she isn't all that surprised when she picks up Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha (both transformed into a kind of good angel, bad angel during their falls). Gibreel has a sort of halo surrounding him, and Chamcha has horns. The police come and arrest Chamcha, and for some reason, Gibreel is transfixed by Rosa and does nothing to help Chamcha. The central story in Rosa's life has been her brief encounter with one Martin de la Cruz, a married man with whom she had a brief tryst in Argentina, while herself being married to Henry Diamond. The narrative strongly suggests that Gibreel was Martin in a past life, and that is why Rosa has such power over him. Gibreel stays with her for a while, even making love to the old woman a little bit before she dies. Meanwhile, Chamcha is taken to a hospital detention center where he is shocked to discover that there are other changes to his form other than the horns (including new hoof-like feet). It turns out that there are other animal-men in the ward, and together, they hatch up a plan of escape. After the escape, Chamcha returns to his wife, Pamela, whom he finds in bed with his friend, Jumpy Joshi, a frail man who had always been unpopular with the ladies. Gibreel, after Rosa's death, gets on a train, where he runs into a man named Maslama, who recognizes him as Gibreel Farishta, famous actor but also treats him like some kind of deity. The scene shifts to Allie (Alleluia) Cone, a woman who climber Mount Everest with whom Gibreel is in love. In a classroom-full of young girls, Allie thrills them with stories of her climb and ghosts in the mountains. Gibreel finds Allie in London.

IV. Ayesha
In Gibreel's dreams, an exiled Imam (likely based on Ayatollah Khomeini) in London. Gibreel carries him to Desh, where he wars with the Empress Ayesha. Gibreel fights on the Imam's side, and defeats Al-Lat, Ayesha's deity. The rest of this section is about Mirza Saeed in London on his fortieth birthday, and how he sees outside of his window a beautiful girl named Ayesha eating butterflies in the garden. He is filled with great desire, and out of guilt, commences on a period of making love passionately to his wife Mishal. Mishal gets breast cancer, and has little time left to live. At the same time, Mishal has struck up a close friendship with Ayesha. Ayesha eventually says that the angel Gibreel has told her that the town must take a pilgrimage to Mecca, and that the Arabian Sea will part for them as they walk across. Mishal's cancer will be cured if she goes on the pilgrimage, Ayesha promises.

V. A City Visible but Unseen
Mishal in this section is the daughter of one Muhammad Sufyan, the proprietor of Shaandaar Cafe. His wife's name is also Hind. Sufyan and Hind have a rather unhappy marriage, characterized, among other things, by bad sex. Chamcha arrives before this family looking for a place to live; they allow him to stay. He talks to Mimi, his previous co-worker, on the phone to see if he might get a job again. The show which he had been on, The Aliens Show, was unfortunately cancelled. Gibreel, on the other hand, has been making new films, including one where he is an archangel in a city of sand, conveying messages to a prophet. Gibreel has told the media that he is alive because he never got onto the plane. During the time of Chamcha's stay, Mishal (who is just seventeen) confesses that she has been having sexual relations with a lawyer named Hanif Johnson. Both Mishal and her sister Anahita are fairly considerate of Chamcha, beauties tending to a beast. Eventually, Chamcha grows too big for the house and must leave--by this time, he has made quite a splash in London, a sort of devil-cult has grown up around him, his image plastered onto various commercial venues. Chamcha is moved to a nightclub where there is more space. The narrator offers Allie Cone's history in this section: her father was of Polish ancestry, and like Chamcha, wanted to blend in so he changed their names from Cohen to Cone. Allie had a sister, Elena, who had become a successful model but who had died in an "acid bath" at the age of twenty-one. Allie's career capitalized on her image as the "ice queen," and like Gibreel, managed to have many rather meaningless sexual liaisons. Allie found a different sort of passion with Farishta, however. Gibreel soon thinks that he hears God telling him to do work for him, to leave Allie. He commences on some delusional attempts to convert people, humorously thinking that he will redeem the city, a London A-Z map in his pocket. Rekha continues to show up to mock him. Eventually, Gibreel ends up once again with Allie after being hit by a car during his "missionary work." The man who hit him, Whisky Sisodia (who has a stutter), a filmmaker who thinks that Gibreel should return to the big screen. Gibreel is soon fully back in the business at Sisodia's urging, though Allie and Gibreel become more estranged as a result of his career. The doctors generally think that Gibreel's "visions" are due to schizophrenia.

VI. Return to Jahilia
This section is again narrated as part of Gibreel's dreams. Many changes have come to Jahilia; it is now no longer a "city built of sand," but a rather destitute, "prosaic" town. Hind has not aged at all, though her husband Abu Simbel has--she is the de facto ruler. Salman, the Persian immigrant, is telling Baal the poet that Mahound will soon return from exile. Salman's account of Mahound is now negative, having lost faith in the prophet's power because the rules that he receives from Gibreel always seemed so oddly convenient to him. Salman had tested the "word of God" by replacing words in Mahound's verses as he wrote them down to see if Mahound would notice. He didn't. After Mahound's return, Jahilia is subject to a number of new, strict rules. Baal spends a lot of time behind The Curtain, a whorehouse. The whorehouse happened to have twelve whores, and Mahound twelve wives. The members of the brothel decide to each act the part of one of Mahound's wives and to receive visitors as such. Baal is charged with marrying all of them, and thus becomes a gross parody himself of Mahound. Eventually, the brothel is shut down. The madame commits suicide, and the girls are taken to prison. Baal confessesto what has been happening behind the Curtain, and is sent to be beheaded. Soon afterwards, however, Mahound falls ill and dies.

VII. The Angel Azraeel
Chamcha finds his way to Pamela's house again and insists that he live there. She doesn't resist, though they don't rekindle a relationship--Chamcha allows Jumpy Joshi to continue to live there with his wife. Chamcha continues to work hard to reinstate his good-old English life, but generally fails. At a meeting where people were giving testimony in hopes to exonerate a man named Simba, Chamcha realizes that he lusts after Mishal Sufyan. He thinks he sees the angel Azraeel behind her though, signaling that she's off limits. Chamcha approaches Gibreel at a strange party (themed Dickensian times) and goes over to face his adversary, thinking to take revenge on him for betraying him at Rosa Diamond's. Before their encounter, the narrator embarks on a rather long exegesis on good and evil, and of how the two of them might be "different types of self," Gibreel a type which wished to remain continuous, and Chamcha a type which constantly preferred and selected for discontinuity. The actual encounter is a bit anticlimactic after all of this; Chamcha pretends to be an old friend, telling Gibreel about how his wife had left him for Jumpy Joshi. Gibreel, who had recently become very jealous because his career prevented him from watching Allie's every moment, goes after Joshi and hits him over the head and throws him into the Thames river (he survives). Chamcha is later invited into Allie and Gibreel's temporary home in Scotland. Chamcha works to make Gibreel crazy, impersonating voices of Allie's supposed lovers over the phone. Gibreel had been revealing many things in confidence to Chamcha about Allie's body when they made love, so Chamcha made the best of this information in his calls. Gibreel is particularly disturbed by Chamcha's impersonation of a poet who composes verses that suggest Allie is cheating on him. He can't get them out of his head and pretty much goes insane. The rest of the section is the scene of apocalypse: Simba is wrongly accused of being a murderer of Grandmothers (the Granny Ripper) and dies in jail. Race riots break out and buildings burn down. Gibreel takes on the role of Azraeel, angel of destruction, blowing his trumpet all over London. Gibreel and Chamcha meet again in the burning Shaandaar Cafe, where Gibreel forgives Chamcha and rescues him. In the fires, Joshi and Pamela die, as do Hind and Muhammad Sufyan.

VIII. The Parting of the Arabian Sea
This section returns to Ayesha's pilgrimage. Mirza tries to stop the pilgrimage, especially as it becomes clear that his wife is exhausted. Eventually, the old start dying, including Khadija, Sarpanch Muhammad Din's wife, and Ayesha says that there is no time to give her a proper burial. As more and more people die on the journey, doubts increase. There is a flood, and many of the pilgrims disappear afterwards. Mirza is about to convince Ayesha to give up, when miraculously, a bunch of butterflies bring back all of the remaining pilgrims. Doubts surface again, however, when Ayesha allows a baby found in the road to be stoned to death because it was likely "illegitimate." Desperate to make sure his wife is okay and an unbeliever, Mirza tries to make a deal with Ayesha, saying that he'll find a way to fly all of the pilgrims to Mecca--he suggests that she ask Gibreel, having the sneaking suspicion she'll give in because she might not be as confident about her notion that the sea will part as she was at the beginning. Ayesha resists the offer, and they reach the sea. As the pilgrims walk into the sea, they become dead, drowned bodies, but afterwards, eyewitness accounts by the survivors said that they had indeed seen the sea part. Mirza is the only one who did not see the sea part. Mirza subsequently starves himself to death, and on his last night of life, (fancies that) he sees the sea splitting apart, himself joining the rest.

IX. A Wonderful Lamp
Chamcha is called back to Bombay to see his estranged father who has only a few days to live, having contracted cancer. On the plane, Chamcha runs into Sisodia. Back in his childhood home, father and son are reconciled. Changez, Chamcha's father, dies with terror on his face for a moment, but then his mouth curved up into a smile. Chamcha wonders what it all means. His father's rather "radiant death" brings Chamcha together with Zeeny--he somehow feels that he has found himself and no longer needs to take on multiple identities. He joins Zeeny in a Communist Party event: a human chain of people linking hands throughout the whole city. This demonstration is interrupted by the news that Gibreel and Allie Cone were in Bombay, and that Allie had been thrown out of a window, and Sisodia shot, while Gibreel disappeared once again. Chamcha (the inheritor of his father's wealth) finds Gibreel in his house. Gibreel tells him in garbled and broken sentences how he had been plagued by the verses that he heard and that it was not he that pushed Allie over the edge but Rekha. At the very end, Gibreel takes Chamcha's father's (magic) lamp, which contains a gun. Gibreel places the gun in his own mouth and shoots himself. The novel ends with Zeeny calling Chamcha away, telling him, "Let's get the hell out of here" (which has a double meaning given Chamcha's association with the Satanic).  

CRITICAL APPROACH:
Rushdie himself offers perhaps the most helpful comments as to how to read his book:

"If The Satanic Verses is anything, it is a migrant's-eye view of the world. It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity."

Rushdie's comment does the work of linking post-colonial concepts (migrancy, uprooting, metamorphosis) with post-modern concepts (disjuncture, metaphor for all humanity). As many critics have noted, perhaps the aesthetic achievement of The Satanic Verses is proving that a post-colonial novel can be simultaneously post-modern, implying, more importantly, that the lives of post-colonials might actually serve as not marginal, but central and universal. The multiply hybrid nature of these characters (on almost every imaginable level--race, culture, class, gender, religion, sane/insane, human/animal, human/angel) represents the instability of identity in a post-modern world. It isn't at all a story of center and margin, the results of the colonial encounter. Characters in Bombay and London in The Satanic Verses feel equally migrant, uprooted, and in a word, unstable in a world where individuals just can't be pinned down by systems previously believed to be stable like Culture or Language.

The Satanic Verses goes even further, however, than to deconstruct the ways in which people identify themselves by culture or language. Its radicalism is in its deconstruction, through magical realism, of man's very material being--Rushdie's novel takes post-modernism to its logical extreme. If such categories as culture or language fail to identify us for who we really are, then perhaps what we believe to be the very materiality of our bodies can't identify us for who we really are either. The concept is radical, but it is also funny (Rushdie himself has noted the intended playfulness and comic elements of his work). Gibreel's surprise when the questions of Mahound intrude upon his body or Chamcha's horrified discovery his new goat's body in the hospital detention center are comic scenes wherein human bodies realize that what they thought to be fixed boundaries in fact were not. Immaterial bodies like Rekha's ghost, for example, are also decidedly comic rather than horrifying; she keeps showing up at Gibreel's side, nagging and mocking him but not being particularly scary.

What might be the function of comedy and playfulness in this work? In the scene before Chamcha and Gibreel's confrontation at the "Dickensian Times" party (also funny), the narrator breaks in to offer a suggestion:

"What follows is tragedy. --Or, at least the echo of tragedy, the full-blooded original being unavailable to modern men and women, so it's said. --A burlesque for our degraded, imitative times, in which clowns re-enact what was first done by heroes and the kings."

Essentially, the tragedy of good versus evil to be played out between Gibreel and Chamcha has been repeated so many times that there isn't room for anything else but imitation and parody. Relatedly, the post-modern divorce between sign and signified and the rejection of the possibility of getting to any sort of stable Truth claim about the Human Condition which the divorce perpetuates prevents belief in grand struggles of good and evil. Everything then becomes rather light and playful, when the depths of Truth either don't exist or aren't accessible to the world.

Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Edition: The Remains of the Day
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Remains of the Day was published in 1989 and won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction. The novel is Ishiguro's third novel.

SUMMARY:
The story is told from the first-person point of view of Stevens, the butler at Darlington Hall, as he embarks upon a four-day excursion into the English countryside in July of 1956. His new employer, an American by the name of Farraday, has suggested that Stevens take a vacation; Stevens, whose "professionalism" defines nearly his entire personality. Stevens tells the reader that he decides to take the trip only after an old housekeeper during the great days at Darlington Hall before the war, formerly Miss Kenton and now Mrs. Benn, had written to him with a tinge of nostalgia and news that her marriage wasn't so great. Stevens goes into great detail about how a faulty "staff plan" after Farraday's paring down of the staff was the culprit for some minor errors which he had committed lately. Stevens has in mind that Miss Kenton might return to Darlington and solve these minor problems.

The time during which Stevens writes his story is confined to immediately before, during, and immediately after his trip, but the story itself follows no particular chronology and seems to spontaneously pour out of Stevens's head as a set of flashbacks and philosophical musings. One of his first anecdotes he offers is an account of Farraday gently teasing him about visiting a lady friend; this anecdote launches him into a longer musing on the requirements of "banter" which his new employer requires, and which he can't seem to get a hang of. On the road to Salisbury in Farraday's Ford, Stevens is told by an old man to take a view of England atop a hill, and he does so, thinking on how "great" the landscape of "Great Britain" really was. This catapults him into reflecting on what makes a "great" butler, and he answers that a great butler must have "dignity." To describe dignity, which he defines as an "ability to inhabit [a] profeesional role and inhabit it to the utmost," Stevens gives a few examples from his own father's career: one time, when his father was a butler in India, shot a tiger under a dining room table without disturbing the occupants of the drawing room; another time, his father compelled a couple of drunk men he was driving to settle down just by force of his own silence; and yet another time, his father maintained his composure while serving the haughty general who had given bad orders resulting in the death of Stevens's older brother.

On the morning of the second day (Stevens is still in Salisbury), Stevens re-reads Miss Kenton's letter and has a long flashback to their mutual arrival at Darlington Hall in 1922. Miss Kenton had been pointing out that Stevens's father had been making more and more errors. Stevens has rude responses to Miss Kenton and basically won't believe her. Soon however, his father's decline simply can't be ignored; following a fall, Stevens tells his father curtly (and "professionally," Stevens thinks) that his duties will be abridged. He ignores the old man's protests. Here, the reflection ends and Stevens doubles back to talking about his approach to Salisbury, and how he had nearly run over a chicken. Abruptly, he returns again to talk about his father, thinking it important to justify his treatment of his father as the reader might think him harsh. To give further examples that his behavior was simply professional (and, ostensibly, "dignified"), Stevens narrates the events of the conference of 1923 at Darlington Hall. Stevens regards this moment as a proud one of his career because he thought that it illustrated his own coming-of-age as a butler. It was an "unofficial" conference at Lord Darlington's which would essentially bring about the relaxing of terms against Germany in the Versailles Treaty (the "official" conference, Stevens tells us, is merely a front for what has already happened in private settings such as Darlington's home). As the reader knows, this relaxation of terms was the appeasement policy that would largely enable Hitler's ascendancy. Stevens, though, seems negligently unconcerned about this, simply using the occasion to talk about his own equanimity even though his father dies during this event. Stevens callously ignores his father's deathbed question as to whether he's been a good father to him or not and delusionally imagines that his father would want him to continue his duties. During the conference, the foreign diplomats that Darlington has assembled seek to convince M. Dupont, a French gentleman of interest, of the need for relaxed terms because it is the "gentlemanly" thing to do after war. M. Dupont comes around, and the only dissident is Mr. Lewis, the American. After Stevens's father died, Darlington remarks that it seems as if Stevens has been crying, but Stevens, of course, shrugs this off.

In the afternoon of this same day, Stevens reaches Mortimer's Pond in Dorset. He continues reflecting on the question of what makes a "great" butler, and launches into a nostalgic consideration of his own generation of butlers, whom he imagines as being part of the hub of a wheel: the metaphor is that important decisions which change the course of history are made from the hubs (great houses like Darlington) and the fanning out of the spokes represents the widespread effects of such decisions. Thus, the butlers at these great houses were at the center of historical change. Stevens returns to an incident on his journey, in which he notices a strange noise coming from his car. He manages to find someone to help at a garage. Strangely, Stevens finds himself lying to the man at the garage about his association with Lord Darlington, and we find out that this is something that he has lied about before. The reader becomes increasingly aware of Stevens's hidden desires to distance himself from the name. On reaching Taunton, Somerset, Stevens recalls an episode which substantiates Darlington's loss of his good name after the war. It seems that Darlington had received hospitality from the Nazis during his pre-war trips to Germany, and had also received to his own home members of the "blackshirts." Stevens is quick to defend Darlington, however, saying that he cut off associations with the Nazis and the blackshirts as soon as he realized what they represented.

On the evening of the third day, Stevens has reached Moscombe, a small village near Tavistock, and he doubles back to answer charges of anti-semitism leveled against Darlington. Apparently, Darlington had dismissed two of their Jewish housemaids at one point--this became a point of contention between Stevens and Miss Kenton. Miss Kenton felt it to be wrong and nearly resigned on principle while Stevens maintained that such decisions by "great men" did not concern them. The hiring of a new pretty housemaid named Lisa becomes an occasion for Miss Kenton making fun of Stevens for having a "curious aversion to pretty girls being on the staff," suggesting his repressed sexuality. Stevens, of course, denies this. It seems increasingly clear, however, that Miss Kenton and Stevens has a much more intimate relationship than Stevens would admit. Stevens then reveals that he had been so deep in thought that he has gotten lost, resulting in his running out of Petrol. He had found lodging with a nice couple, the Taylors, at Moscombe. After this bit of information, Stevens offers another recollection which has preoccupied him of late: the time that Miss Kenton discovered him reading a sentimental romance novel. His excuse at the time had been that such novels were helpful in perfecting his gentlemanly English, though he does admit getting some "incidental enjoyment" out of reading them. He thought that this incident may have led to a change in his relationship with Miss Kenton; things seem increasingly strained between the two of them when he refrains from comforting her when her aunt died. Going back to his stay at the Taylor's, Stevens tells of how the various members of the small village came to know about his arrival and many of them imagine him to be a "gentleman," voicing to him their opinions on political involvement and wishing to gain his attention. Stevens doesn't let on that he is just a butler, but says that he has encountered the likes of Mr. Eden and Lord Halifax. The question as to whether those who are not "great men" should have strong opinions and a say in politics comes up, and Stevens is uncomfortable. He ends this section with an extended excuse about how butlers can only be good butlers if they don't question the decisions of their employers. Thus, Stevens concludes, "it is quite illogical that I should feel any regret or shame on my own account."

On the afternoon of the fourth day, Stevens has reached Little Compton, where he will meet with Miss Kenton. While sitting at his hotel before their meeting, Stevens reflects on an episode in which Mr. Cardinal, a journalist and the godson of Lord Darlington, berated Stevens for refusing to see that Darlington was a pawn for Hitler. During this visit, Miss Kenton also revealed to Stevens that she was getting married and leaving Darlington Hall. In these fraught moments, Stevens chooses to maintain his "sense of duty," showing little to no evidence of a moral struggle or of emotion. The account closes with Stevens's retrospective account of his meeting with Miss Kenton, in which she had revealed to him that she and her husband were in fact fine and that she had reconciled with him. She hints at the life that Stevens and she could have had together, and Stevens even admits that his heart was breaking as he heard this. He bids her to be happy, however, and takes his leave. In the final scene, Stevens is before the pier in the evening. There, he meets another butler and in his reflections to this other butler, begins to realize some of his own errors. Sadly, he reflects on how Lord Darlington at lest "chose a certain path in life," though "it proved to be a misguided one," but that he himself "cannot even claim that." As Stevens begins to think that there is no dignity in that, his companion tells him to stop, and to enjoy the evening, the remains of the day. In the end, it seems that Stevens reaches a more humanistic understanding as he looks out on the groups of people "bantering" in the evening, thinking how perhaps "in bantering likes the key to human warmth."

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Like Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, Ishiguro's first person narrator's story emerges out of a disjointed account which temporally jumps around in such a way that the account is as much a story as a psychological portrait of a disturbed individual. The account primarily oscillates between the past and the present; the overall structure is that something in the present catapults the narrator into either some recollection from his time as a butler under Darlington or some extended philosophical reflection on his career or the changing times more broadly.

At the heart of this story is the psychological portrait of a person who does progress, who gradually comes to realize his own inhumanity: in the reflective oscillation between past and present which his time off from work enables, he does get closer and closer to admitting the mistakes of his past. The scenes that he revisits from his past are ones that clearly bother him, even as he re-justifies them with the same rationales that he had used at the time. In doing so, he gradually realizes their emptiness, culminating in his admitting to himself his love for Miss Kenton (in describing his heart-break) and affirming the importance of "human warmth" at the end of the day.

What makes Ishiguro's novel greater than just a psychological portrait of a man who learns that he has sacrificed his own humanity to the abstraction of "professional duty" is its contextualization within the social changes from the pre-war to the post-war period. Stevens's being unaware of human suffering through his idealization of Darlington's English gentlemanliness and his own professional dignity is shot through by the unawareness of the whole world as it stood by while Hitler came to power. Since Stevens's realization of his own mistake sneaks up on him and isn't anything climactic, Ishiguro seems to remind us that the attitudes that comprise appeasement have a much deeper root than "political policy," it seems to be an attitude which pervasively extended its influence from high to low society. That someone like Stevens, a butler, could accept as part of inhabiting his "profession" that he was incapable of making moral distinctions and that such decisions should be left to the more capable elites indicates that appeasement was written into the entire structure of English society. Stevens's attitude and revisions of his own past at the end of the novel also doesn't seem to owe much to his own moral merit, but changes in English society after the war. As he looks out on the pier, he meets a butler enjoying his retirement and groups of people enjoying the evening after work. This "new" kind of professional, unlike the old professional who "inhabits" his role all the time, takes of the "role" that s/he inhabits at the end of the day, and has time for "human warmth," even if it is only at the end of the day. In acknowledging this change from new to old professionalism, Stevens again sort of goes with the flow.

Finally, what could Ishiguro's revisitation of such pre-war to post-war changes have to do with the moment of The Remains of the Day's publication? The fall of the Berlin Wall comes to mind, naturally, as the most salient association with 1989. The fall of the wall was a symbolic end to post-war Germany, and the hailing of a new era of democracy and freedom, and so Ishiguro's meditations might be a kind of elegy and reminder of what has come before. Certainly, obvious lessons might be drawn--don't be a drone and accept blind ideologies, maintain your individual moral compass so that this new democracy might last--but I don't think it's quite so simple that, since Stevens's coming to realize his own humanity isn't really his triumph as an individual but simply his being carried on by the "times." Still, though perhaps we're all slaves to the "times," Ishiguro's novel does engage readers in a meta-critical exercise  which reflects on what it might look like to be one particular slave to the times, in hopes, perhaps, to lessen the extend of our own blindness to our times.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Edition: Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Waiting for Godot was originally written in French in 1948, and its first stage production was in Paris in 1953. Beckett himself undertook to translate the play into English, and subsequently the play was produced in London (1955), the United States (1956), and worldwide thereafter.

SUMMARY:
Act 1: The setting is a country road with a tree in the evening. Estragon is trying to take off his boots as Vladimir is talking to him. Estragon is annoyed that Vladimir won't help him; Vladimir takes off his hat and makes as if to shake something out but nothing comes out. When Estragon succeeds finally in getting his boots off, they launch into a conversation about repetance, the Bible, and how strange it is that only one of the four apostles thought that one of the two thieves on the cross with Christ was saved. Around this point in the conversation we learn that the two of them are waiting for Godot. They can't decide, however, whether or not they came to the same spot yesterday to wait for him, nor can they quite decide what day it is.

The men seem to have no small degree of affection for one another, they have pet names for each other, Gogo and Didi. They decide that they should hang themselves while waiting but the plan is aborted after some discussion of who should go first. Vladimir gives Estragon a carrot to chew on. Soon, Pozzo comes on stage with Lucky. Pozzo has Lucky on a rope and whips and chokes him when Lucky does not do as he bids. At first, Estragon mishears and thinks that it is Godot. Vladimir and Estragon are indignant at the way Pozzo treats Lucky. Pozzo eats from a basket that Lucky has brought and casts aside his chicken bones, which Estragon hungrily goes after. Pozzo tells him the bones belong to Lucky and so Estragon should ask Lucky if he wants them or not. Lucky is silent, so Estragon takes the bones.

Vladimir asks why Lucky doesn't put down his bags. Pozzo gives the strange explanation that Lucky doesn't want to because he wants to keep Pozzo around as a master. During Pozzo's explanation, Lucky starts crying and Estragon approaches Lucky to wipe his eyes, but Lucky kicks him. Pozzo thinks me may soon take his departure but asks if he can do anything for the men. Estragon would like some money, but Vladimir is ashamed of Estragon for asking. They agree instead that Lucky will entertain them by doing a dance. After Lucky dances, they decide to have Lucky to "think" and when Vladimir puts a hat on him, Lucky launches into a long stream of consciousness speech which does not stop until the hat is removed. Pozzo and Lucky depart shortly thereafter, and a boy appears as a messenger to let Vladimir and Estragon know that Godot will not be coming that night but will come tomorrow. At the close of the act, the two men decide to leave but somehow they still remain there.

Act 2: At the opening of the act, the conversation between Estragon and Vladimir suggests that Estragon has been beaten up by ten people the night before. Conversation about the motive is deflected though. Estragon seeks comfort in being together with Vladimir, and for a moment they say they are happy together, but then they wonder what comes next. They discuss conversation as a way to keep off the abyss of death. They talk about how they are unsure if they were in this same place yesterday. Vladimir suggests Estragon show him his leg wound from yesterday (when Lucky struck out at him) and Pozzo's language infects Vladimir's as he calls Estragon a pig. To pass the time further, Estragon tries on the boots that are on the stage (he isn't sure if they are his from before). Again, the men seem happy with each other for a moment, Estragon remarking: "We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?"

Estragon falls asleep, dreams, and is comforted by Vladimir when he wakes up. Vladimir never wants to hear Estragon's dreams though. They find Lucky's hat, and they go through some complicated moves in which they switch and reswitch the hats they have (Lucky's, Vladimir's, and Estragon's). Next, they "play" at Pozzo and Lucky, but as Vladimir pretends he is Lucky, Estragon goes off, suddenly thinking he's being chased. Vladimir proclaims that Godot has come but he's wrong of course. Estragon hides behind the tree, then soon comes out and says he will try not to lose his calm again. They get into an argument about who should speak first when they accidentally speak out at the same time. They shower each other with insults, culminating in Estragon calling Vladimir a "Crritic!" They make up.

Pozzo and Lucky arrive again, but this time Pozzo is blind. Pozzo falls (and can't get up), and Vladimir and Estragon talk about helping him up. Then Vladimir makes a speech about doing something "while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed." Suddenly, it seems that even their "waiting for Godot" seems purposive. Vladimir helps the fallen Pozzo, and Vladimir also falls and can't get up. He asks Estragon for help but Estragon says that he's going. Estragon stretches out his hand finally but also falls. While down, Vladimir and Estragon get annoyed with Pozzo, and Vladimir kicks Pozzo in the crotch. This seems a bit harsh and so after Pozzo crawls away, they call him back, and to pass the time, try some other names on him (specifically, Abel and Cain). Eventualyl, Vladimir and Estragon discover that they can actually get up on their own. They then help Pozzo up, and Pozzo wonders where "his menial" is so Estragon goes to fetch Lucky. Pozzo tells him to kick Lucky, and Estragon does. Pozzo doesn't remember their meeting yesterday, and he and Lucky exit.

Vladimir and Estragon are left unsure whether that was Pozzo or not. Vladimir starts to expect a sort of cycle, and when he sees the boy arrive again, he expects that the message is that Godot won't come but will come the next day. Vladimir tells the boy to tell Godot that he saw him (though this might be impossible since the boy doesn't remember him from before). Estragon is asleep during this exchange. Night falls, and Estragon wonders what would happen if they "dropped" Godot. Vladimir says that he would punish them. Again, they consider hanging themselves, but they have no rope and Estragon's belt is not strong enough. They agree to hang themselves the next day unless Godot comes and saves them. The play closes with Vladimir telling Estragon to pull his pants on, Estragon mishears him saying that he wants his pants off, but then discovers his pants are already off. They decide to go but as before, they do not move.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
As many have noted, Waiting for Godot evades conventions of narrative through the lack of what would traditionally be considered "incident" in stories. There are no cause-effect links, and such questions as why they are waiting for Godot are conspicuously absent. The setting has no historical, cultural, or geographical specificity. It cannot even be said that things happen, since the characters repeatedly express their uncertainty about "yesterday." Waiting for Godot rejects plot, causality, setting, happenings, as well as any sense of the past or the future.

James H. Reid points out that Frederic Jameson's exegesis on postmodernism, though more focused on the historical effects of late stage capitalism, bears many connections to the effects explored in Beckett's Waiting for Godot: 

• Embedded in Godot are major elements of Jameson's postmodernist discourse: negation of linear historical time and action and imprisonment within an ahistorical, saturated, and commodified discursive space. But whereas Jameson calls this spatialization a real historical totality and attributes it to a necessary ruse of  capitalist history, Godot attributes it to a purely discursive strategy that its characters construct and deconstruct" ("Allegorizing Jameson's Postmodernist Space," Romantic Review).

In other words, in Waiting for Godot the characters, through what they say (and what they don't say), create the conditions of ahistoricality which Jameson says that late capitalism produces.    

I am not sure whether or not Waiting for Godot is a kind of allegory for the postmodern condition; it seems that any such critical position on Godot is resisted by Estragon's strident denunciation of "crritics!" I guess I'll just end with something I felt about the text as I was reading: the withholding of narrative conventions didn't just seem to "annoy" me but rather I think it made the moments where narrative potentiality surfaces to be more poignant in a tragic sort of way (maybe this is where the "tragicomedy" comes in). The audience desires the "relief" of narrative, or perhaps even to give narrative to these deeply unhappy characters who keep returning to wanting to hang themselves. But of course, just as Godot, narrative just never actually comes. One such moment of narrative potentiality is at the very end, when Estragon asks what will happen if they "drop" Godot. Vladimir provides this "cause" with an "effect"--that Godot will punish them. They then decide that they will hang themselves unless Godot saves them, setting up a conditional cause-effect chain. The audience has been trained though, by the rest of the play, that Godot won't come, and that here it seems that Vladimir and Estragon, in talking about punishing and saving have confused Godot with God. The moment feels tragic, I think, because of the sudden narrative potentiality amidst a landscape where nothing can happen.