POLITENESS STRATEGIES IN KAZUO ISHIGURO S THE REMAINS OF THE DAY AND AN ARTIST OF THE FLOATING

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1 POLITENESS STRATEGIES IN KAZUO ISHIGURO S THE REMAINS OF THE DAY AND AN ARTIST OF THE FLOATING Lorena MIHĂEŞ 1 Abstract The aim of this paper is to present narrative unreliability from the vantage point of pragmatics, namely Brown and Levinson s Politeness Principle. My claim is that narrative unreliability always encodes a face-threatening act to the narrator s face, one he would evade no matter what. Politeness strategies allow the narrator to perform such an act while saving face at the same time in front of his narratee his interlocutor in the fictional world. While Stevens politeness strategies in The Remains of the Day are mainly directed at maintaining his negative face, Ono in An Artist of the Floating World is especially concerned with saving his positive face. To put it differently, Stevens makes claims to his territory, personal preserves and rights to non-distraction, while Ono is interested in creating a positive consistent self-image in the eyes of his fictional interlocutor. Both strategies result in a less conspicuous, more natural unreliability of two narrators who seem to be partly conscious of the difficult position they are in when narrating their guilt-ridden past. Keywords: negative face, positive face, unreliability, maxims, face-threatening act, hedges. 1. Chapter 1. The Politeness Principle and Narrative Unreliability Generally speaking, politeness is aimed at maintaining social cohesion by the maintenance of the individual s public face. The speaker, a rational agent with a face, chooses the best strategy to communicate in a certain context, by assessing the seriousness of the face-threatening acts he has to perform. My claim is that narrative unreliability always encodes a face-threatening act to the narrator s face, one he would evade no matter what. Politeness strategies allow the narrator to perform such an act while saving face at the same time in front of his narratee his interlocutor in the fictional world. Politeness can be addressed by going either on-record or off-record. I argue that on-record strategies, with their overt nature, are part of the communication established between the narrator and his narratee. The narratee in Ishiguro s fiction is never a highly individualized person he is not given the floor, he cannot react and speak his mind. He is a mere listener, more like a rhetorical device. Thus, Ishiguro s narratee should be seen as restricted to the realm of objectively observable information. (Shaw 2005: 302). This comes as no surprise because the very act of mentioning a narratee makes him part of the story and therefore subject to prerogatives analogous to those exercised by the narrator over all the other characters (Moore 2000: 214). Whatever form of indirection the text may feature, it is to be related to the reader s subsequent interpretation and not to the narratee s. Hence, off-record strategies belong to the extrafictional level of communication where they become implicatures which the reader should infer so as to reconstruct the reasons behind the narrator s indirectness and account for the violation of Gricean maxims. 1 Lorena Mihăeş, Teaching Assistant PhDc, Spiru Haret University, lorenamihaes@gmail.com

2 2. Chapter 2. Negative Politeness in The Remains of the Day Much of Stevens s behaviour can be accounted for by his concerns with the negative face. The negative politeness strategies he employs are characterized by self-effacement, formality and restraint. The face-threatening acts he has to perform are mainly related to the partial admission of his professional fiasco (he has served an unworthy man) and his personal fiasco (he has chased away the woman he loves). The narrator has two strategies at his disposal in order to minimize the threats posed to his own face: on record (making his communicative intention clear to his narratee but with redress) and off record (no clear communicative intention can be attributed to the narrator). He goes off record with threateningness by hiding it in hints, understatements, contradictions, ironies or metaphors thus inviting implicatures at the extrafictional level. The payoffs of going off record are enormous especially when the author makes the narrator reveal uncomfortable truths. A more dangerous and potentially harmful strategy is going on record always with redressive action and never bald-onrecord (directly and without minimalizing the threat) because this would amount to the narrator admitting his unreliability and turning reliable eventually. Going on record has its own benefts the speaker gets the chance to be regarded as honest, credible and trustworthy as well as to show demonstrable non-manipulativeness (Brown and Levinson 1987: 72), in other words to gain the audience s trust and sympathy if possible. Narrative unreliability results from the interplay between the two strategies with the narrator performing face-threatening acts (henceforth FTAs) that damage his negative face but mitigating these damages, and the same narrator doing FTAs indirectly and leaving it up to the addressee to recover the intention. I argue that while on record strategies belong to the intrafictional level, off recordness is part of the higher level of communication between the author and the reader. There is also a third strategy a narrator can employ, namely not doing the FTA at all which consequently leads to an inhibition of communication (Goatly 2010: 164). This last strategy corresponds to what Grice calls opting out of communication and blocking the communicative channel consequently. Stevens s addressee in the fictional world is a younger less experienced fellow butler who can be taught the lesson of what is a great butler? (Ishiguro 1999: 32) every now and then. Stevens is obviously in a position of superiority with respect to his narratee although they are on an equal footing socially speaking, Stevens has a certain degree of power over him due to his age, experience and high butler status Stevens claims for himself. This results in the possibility of imposing his own plans and self-evaluation (face) at the expense of those of the hearer (Brown and Levinson 1987: 77). The rank of the imposition Stevens has to perform is relatively high as confessions in general are powerful threats to the speaker s face. Therefore, in order to minimize face risks, the narrator will choose several strategies, most of them related to the preservation of his negative face. Negative politeness corresponds to rituals of avoidance (Brown and Levinson 1987: 129) and maximizes social distance by not claiming a common ground (Stevens wants to remain his narratee s superior up to the end). To sum up, Stevens s unreliability stems from the negative politeness strategies he brings to bear in order to save face when performing FTAs which are harmful to the image he claims for himself. Narrative unreliability actually resides in the way these acts are done never directly but obliquely. If the author had allowed Stevens to perform them boldly, without redress and thus to efficiently communicate the message to his narratee, he would have been unreliable no more. Instead, Stevens uses negative politeness on record, off record with redress and sometimes he opts out by not doing the FTA at all. The on record strategies equal going public with the threat intention but this intention can be packed in such ways that face damage is softened down. One way of going on record is by impersonalizing the speaker. Stevens s style is characterized by the overabundance of the indefinite pronoun one which replaces the personal I: Naturally, one disapproved of the dismissals. One would have thought that quite self-evident. (Ishiguro 1999: 162, emphases mine). The lack of overt reference to the subject has a distancing effect as the speaker dissociates himself from the FTA. What is interesting about this impersonalizing rhetoric, besides the impressive rate of its use, is the deeply subjective character of the topics the narrator dissociates from. Thus, unreliability stems from the proclaimed objectivity resulting from the impersonalization of extremely personal matters.

3 Another on record strategy is hedging which softens the impact of the FTA. Hedging was first described in linguistic terms by G. Lakoff (1973) who was interested in the logical properties of the so called fuzzy concepts such as a sort of, very, rather, pretty, in essence, strictly speaking, etc. which function both as detensifiers and intensifiers. He comes to the conclusion that in natural languages, truth is not absolute but it is a matter of degree (G. Lakoff 1973: 491). Latter on, hedges have been described with respect to their communicative value in that they do not simply downtone inside elements but they show lack of commitment to the propositional content of an utterance (Vande Kopple). Fraser captures both definitions by stating that hedges indicate lack of full commitment to either the full category membership (content mitigation) or to the intended illocutionary force (force mitigation) (Fraser :201). Brown and Levinson regard hedges as a means of achieving politeness and their definition is close to Lakoff s: a hedge is a particle, word or phrase that modifies the degree of membership of a predicate or noun phrase in a set; it says of that membership that it is partial, or true only in certain respects, or that it is more true and complete than perhaps might be expected. 2 (1987: 145). Hedges are important for the speaker s face-preservation because their impreciseness and mitigation of truth-commitment to the utterance allow the speaker, if proven mistaken, to claim previously stated non-involvement. Or, to put it differently, The surer a speaker feels about his/her own position vis-a vis the interlocutor, the less need there is for hedging for the purpose of self-protection. (Markkanen and Schröder 1997: 8). Stevens s narrative mode has been labeled oratorical autobiography (Hammond 2011: 100) or a sort of apologia pro vita sua (Furst 2007: 549). His obvious purpose is to convince his narratee of the rightness of his actions and decisions. He needs a protective shield against certain things that might damage his negative face and hedging offers him the opportunity to detach himself from most of the narrated events. He uses hedges at such an impressive rate that they become the very texture the novel is made of and create a general semantic uncertainty of the novel (Patey 1991: 147). Stevens s favourite technique is hedging Grice s maxim of quality which implies that the speaker is not taking full responsibility for the truth of his utterance (Brown and Levinson 1987: 164) and the illocutionary force of his utterances. More often than not, doubt is cast by the unreliability of memory. The greatest part of Stevens s narrative is made up of recollections and the temporal distance between the narrated past and the narrating present may be considered to account for many distortions and gaps as any act of retrospection is, to a certain degree, unreliable. Yet, somehow surprisingly, a homodiegetic narrator can be labeled over-reliable (Zipfel 2011: 123) about his past. Any reader may have wondered at one point or another in the reading process How comes that the narrator remembers so precisely events and dialogues that took place long before when I can hardly remember a dialogue I had a few days/weeks ago?. Doesn t this superhuman memory in a context where no supernatural elements are involved, automatically qualify the narrator as unreliable? Actually, it does not and this departure from human limitations is to be understood as a mere convention of homodiegesis and not as a prompt for inferring unreliability. Stevens goes to great lengths to remind his narratee that he is recollecting things and therefore he might be mistaken about the truth of those events. Almost every page contains such a remainder and, as Furst opines, I remember and I recall is the refrain in The Remains of the Day. (Furst 2007: 536). Though Steven insists on his credibility as a speaker and shifts the blame of untrustworthiness to the unreliability of memory, his obsessive turning to memory as a justification for the potential misremembering ( It is possible this is a case of hindsight colouring my memory Ishiguro 1999: 90) is in fact part of his complicated rhetorical strategy of talking his narratee into believing his story and eliciting his sympathy. An analysis of the episode of Miss Kenton s invasion of his pantry (roughly five-page long) shows the way in which Stevens packages the scene in which she catches him reading romances. The language he uses serves a double purpose: it reveals that there is a sentimental part in him (an admission which is a face-threatening act) but, at the same time, it helps him to take redressive action by means of hedges. Stevens states from the very start that he cannot remember with certainty (Ishiguro 1999: 173) the purpose of Miss Kenton s visit to his pantry a quality hedge which is 2 Just like Lakoff, Brown and Levinson regard hedges as both intensifiers and detensifiers but they are mainly interested in those hedges that attenuate either the semantic value of a proposition or the full force of a speech act. This paper deals with attenuating hedges and is not concerned with intensifiers.

4 reiterated later on: I cannot recall precisely (Ishiguro 1999: 176). There follows a series of hedges on illocutionary force which attenuate the full force of that particular speech act. These include (all quotes from Ishiguro 2005): - modal verbs: I have a feeling she may have come bearing a vase of flowers but then again, I may be getting confused (173); There may well have been other more fundamental developments (178); - modal adverbs: perhaps I am confused in believing this (173); Perhaps I said something to this, I do not know. (174); - introductory phrases which hedge the quality maxim: as far as I am concerned (173); I believe it was around this point (176); I suppose I should add (176); It is my view I do not know if you will agree (176). By hedging the maxim of quality as well as the illocutionary force of his utterances, Stevens engenders certain perlocutionary effects in the reader who interprets the narratorial discourse as vague (the speaker does not convey the information with the expected precision) and evasive (the reader s expectations are not met) (Fraser : 26-27). Though important, on-record strategies such as hedging or impersonalization are not enough to deem a narrator unreliable. They are meant to be recognized by the audience, be it fictional or extrafictional. It is off record strategies that really lead to considering unreliability as an explanation for the indirectness of the language used by the narrator. Off-recordness comes in different shapes depending on the violated maxim. Unreliable narrators are fond of violating the quality maxim which is related to the commitment to the truthfulness of the speaker s account. Watts adapts this maxim for the fictional world: In the fictional world created by the author, the narrator is constrained to report narrative events which he believes to be true. (Watts 1981: 156). What is peculiar about Stevens s style is that he actually seems obsessed with observing the maxim of Quality when, in fact, all he does is to break it. He is apparently on the lookout for truthfulness, accuracy and objectivity and he wants to draw his narratee s attention on that by stating that he is regarded by his underlings as one not prone to exaggerated statements (Ishiguro 1999 : 81). As indirect as it may be, this is one of the few instances in the novel when the artful narrator allows an outside perspective on himself. It marks one of the main differences between Stevens and Ono while Stevens seems to be confined to his own point of view, Ono is interested in the way others regard him. Every once in a while, however, not everybody seems to agree to Stevens s description. Miss Kenton admonishes him for lying: Why, Mr Stevens, why, why, why do you always have to pretend? (Ishiguro 1999: 162). By the end of the novel, Stevens is compelled to admit that he has been deceitful but his excuse is that he has not done it on purpose: It wasn t my intention to deceive anyone, sir. However (Ishiguro 1999: 218). Despite Stevens s claiming the contrary, it is obvious he does not abide by the maxim of Quality. His account contains many contradictions and inconsistencies which the reader should reconcile at the extrafictional level in order to make sense of the story. The very beginning of the book is marked by such a contradiction when the narrator feels the need to justify his motoring trip. Drawing up a good staff plan is part of the art of a good butler, a category to which he proudly considers himself to belong. He even boasts with this skill: I have myself devised many staff plans over the years, and I do not believe I am unduly boastful if I say that very few ever needed amendment. (Ishiguro 1999: 6). But then he quickly adds: And if in the present case the staff plan is at fault, blame can be laid at no one s door but my own. (Ishiguro 1999: 6). He contradicts what he has just said and he is even ready to lose face in order to divert attention from the real purpose of his trip: a love interest. Yet, Mr Farraday voices what he tries to hide: My, my, Stevens. A lady-friend. And at your age. (Ishiguro 1999: 14). Stevens senses the peril of exposing himself even more, so he decides to opt out of the conversation, musing upon his master s bantering habit to which he remains rather unsure as to how I should respond. (Ishiguro 1999: 15). By the same token, the readings of Miss Kenton s letter are quite contradictory. If in the beginning he seems very sure that the letter contains distinct hints of her desire to return here and I should make clear there is no possibility I am merely imagining the presence of these hints on her part. (Ishiguro1999: 10), later on he reluctantly admits that I am inclined to believe I may well have read more into certain of her lines than perhaps was wise. (Ishiguro 1999: 189). The passage from absolute certainty to mere possibility casts doubt over the veracity of his account. Self-corrections and disclaimers go in the same direction although they cannot be exactly considered instances of maxim violations but rather maxim floutings: But now, having thought further, I believe I may have been a

5 little confused about this matter (Ishiguro 1999: 223); Incidently, now that I come to think further about it, it is not quite true to say there was no dispute as to who were the great butlers. (Ishiguro 1999: 29-30). A reliable cooperative narrator is also expected to abide by the maxim of Quantity which, in narrative situations, requires the narrator to include within his narrative turn as much evaluation as is required to make the narrative turn interesting for the audience and not include within his narrative turn more evaluation than is required. (Watts 1981: 92). Stevens s discourse seems to swing between understatement and overstatement as ways of violating this maxim. Both strategies invite implicatures as the reader has to consider why the narrator provides less or, on the contrary, more information than required (Brown and Levinson 1987: 217). The conjoint use of understatement and overstatement create an interesting pattern which generates irony as there is a clear discrepancy in what regards the quantity of what is being communicated and the reader s expectations. His technique is to understate what is of great import for his narrative and what actually justifies it (his love for Miss Kenton) and to overstate minor matters which take on huge hyperbolic proportions (such as the greatness of being a buler). Stevens s reluctance to communicate the actual state of affairs generates a text world in which the salient is always avoided, hidden or downgraded and left lurking beneath the surface while the unimportant is seen through a magnifying glass and becomes the very texture of Stevens s discourse. According to Vianu, The whole novel is built upon the rock of a huge understatement. (Vianu 2005: 315) his never mentioned love for the former housekeeper whom he now tries to bring back for what he declares to be professional matters (Ishiguro 1999 : 5). For that, he sets off for the trip of his life (he has never been much of a traveler) and the terminus point the meeting with Miss Kenton whose declared purpose is to persuade her to come back is understatedly described as an innocent passing by (Ishiguro 1999: 20). This type of understatement called meiosis consists in replacing a term with another which is by far lesser in nature, thus diminishing its importance (Ruiz 2009: 55). Understatement is resorted to whenever Stevens remembers scenes of his relationship with the housekeeper. Miss Kenton s marriage and departure from Darlington Hall is just a professional loss of some magnitude (Ishiguro 1999: 180) a formulation which contains a litotes ( some magnitude ) with a view to avoid direct admission of the importance of what is being communicated. Differently from meioses which have a rather roundabout nature and require a greater effort in drawing the necessary implicatures, the effect of litotes is more direct as they actually intensify what is linguistically communicated in a moderate manner. The text is interspersed with other such modest assertions (Ruiz 2009: 54) (all quotes from Ishiguro 1999, all emphases mine): - I was not unperturbed at the prospect of telling Miss Kenton I was about to dismiss two of her maids. (156) a double negation which in fact has a stronger effect than its positive unmarked counterpart (perturbed); - the administration of a not inconsiderable sum (7); - Miss Kenton s confession of the impossibility of her return together with her admission that she has not forgotten him create a certain degree of sorrow (251) within him; in fact, as he himself confesses, his heart was breaking (252). By choosing a point much below the real state of affairs, Stevens is obviously engaged in deterring loss of face. The effect is similar when he chooses to exaggerate this state of affairs. In the context of the novel, overstatement can be regarded as a compensatory technique instead of reading a book about the quest for a lost love, the reader is presented with an unexpected story about the illustriousness of butlerhood. The informational inadequacy is solved at the extrafictional level, with the reader inferring the narrator s reasons for augmenting his importance as a butler while belittling the love story which is kept in the background more often than not. The importance which Stevens attaches to butlerhood rivals that of a military leader. Part of the off record strategies is the violation of the maxim of Manner. This maxim adapted for narrative situations requires that the narrator should avoid obscurity, ambiguity or make any part of the narrative so long that it will incur the audience s disfavour while he should present his narrative events in an orderly sequence. (Watts 1981: 91). Vagueness allows the speaker to avoid clearly pointing to an act which might damage his face. Stevens describes several episodes in his past as turning points (Ishiguro 1999: 185) though he fails to provide a proper explanation for his terming them this way. These episodes include the pantry scene, his cancelling the cocoa meetings and his choice of not comforting her at the news of her aunt s death. It becomes obvious at the

6 extrafictional level that all these episodes have in common Stevens s incapacity for showing his feelings for Miss Kenton, a fact which leads to the erosion of their relationship and eventually to her decision to leave Darlington Hall and marry another man. All these maxim violations mainly for politeness reasons indicate that Stevens wants to mitigate the self-imposition he undertakes by narrating scenes from his past, i.e. by performing a series of face threatening acts which would inevitably cast an uncomplimentary light over him. His choice of negative politeness strategies, be they on or off record, allows him to either perform the FTA but with redress, or to opt for a more indirect and therefore less obvious way of delivering the FTA. 3. Chapter 3. Positive Politeness in An Artist of the Floating World Masuji Ono, the first-person narrator in An Artist of the Floating World, resembles Stevens in many ways: they both have some skeletons in their cupboard which are likely to fall out when they indulge in memories so, in order to mitigate the damage to their face, they choose to boost their selfimages. Moreover, the two novels share the visit pattern which triggers the chain of memories in both narrators: driven by love interest, Stevens sets out to pay a visit to the former housekeeper while Ono is visited by his elder daughter on the occasion of his younger daughter s marriage negotiations (the miai). While Stevens is very territorial and protects his negative face in front of potential threats such as being intimate with either his father or Miss Kenton, Ono wants to preserve his positive face at any cost and does his best to create a self-image which is far from what the story actual world suggests to the reader. Even if both Stevens and Ono share this obsession with their self-importance, they do it for different purposes: the former uses it to avoid admitting his personal and professional fiascos, whereas for the latter, it is an end per se for which he is ready to sacrifice anything, including part of his positive face (his late admission of guilt and responsibility). By doing this, Ono has a bigger gain in view: to convince his narratee, who may be new to this city (Ishiguro 2005: 7) and therefore unfamiliar with his professional standing, that he was once a prestigious artist who has made a difference and who has done everything in the best of faith (Ishiguro 2005: 202) even if it finally turned out to be a wrong cause. Ono s unreliability does not stem from his reluctance to accept his past errors as it is with Stevens. His gradual admission of the erroneousness of his past decisions does not eventually turn him into a reliable narrator. On the contrary, Ono smartly uses these mistakes to manipulate his narratee into believing that he was once a man of great importance, a kind of local celebrity adulated by his pupils and much respected by all the citizens in his town. Only a man of such stature could have made such terrible political mistakes that have borne serious consequences on the lives of others. Ono is self-deluded not about the rightfulness of his path but about the greatness he claims for himself. He seems to suffer from a sort of folie de grandeur (Wood 1998: 176) which urges him to inflate his significance as an artist by using all possible means. Just like Stevens, he remains entrapped into the circle of unreliability up to the very end. Shaffer opines that of all Ishiguro s narrators, Ono comes the closest to admitting his past mistakes and false ideals. (Shaffer 1998: 39). This may be true, but he does it with a clear agenda: to depict a complimentary self-portrait, though, ironically, he himself comments: I cannot recall any colleague who could paint a self-portrait with absolute honesty. (Ishiguro 2005: 67). Ono is guilty all right yet the seriousness of his mistakes does not come from his having been so important but from his pettiness and desire to do to others the same things that have been done to him. His daughter, Noriko, remembers that he used to be a tyrant who ordered us all around. (Ishiguro 2005: 13) quite the opposite of what he pretends to be. Masuji Ono, who in the narrative present is retired and is currently engaged in marriage negotiations for Noriko, his younger daughter, remembers his glorious days as a painter and political propagandist for the imperialist Japan. His very first memory is related to the auction of prestige (Ishiguro 2005: 9) which made him the owner of a house much beyond his material means. He was chosen to become the new owner on account of his moral conduct and achievement (Ishiguro 2005: 10) rather than the sum of money he could afford to pay for it. Thus, he introduces the major theme of the novel: prestige. Ono wants to be ratified and admired as a great public figure. This is the main source of unreliability: the discrepancy between the two levels of communication. At the

7 fictional level, Ono goes to great lengths to state his artistic significance, whereas at the extrafictional level, the reader learns something quite different: he did not count as an artist; he was just a minor informer nobody remembers in the narrative present. In an interview by Matthews, Ishiguro describes him as follows: to a certain extent is his tragedy, that he wasn t remarkable enough to stand outside of that generation and moment, during the war. He s just being swept along with the tide. (Matthews 2009: 115). The narratee, Ono s fictional interlocutor at the fictional level, plays an important part in the construction of the story. Though not very often mentioned, the narratee becomes a character in his own right who contributes to Ono s rhetorical purpose. Ono repeatedly stresses that the narratee is alien to the city in fact this is his only distinctive feature. Consequently, he has to take the narrator s account for granted. Ono seems to take advantage of the narratee s ignorance and progressively imposes his perspective on him though cautiously preserving the epistemic modality of uncertainty when addressing him: If you were to come out of Mrs Kawakami s as the darkness was setting in, you might feel compelled to pause a moment and gaze at the wasted expanse before you. You might still be able to make out through the gloom those heaps of broken brick and timber, and perhaps here and there, pieces of piping protruding from the ground like weeds. [ ] you may be able to make out the dark clusters of birds [ ] (Ishiguro 2005: 27). When his narratee s ignorance no longer serves him, Ono smartly includes him into the connoisseur group of art consumers, be it propagandistic or not. This way, he attends to his interlocutor s positive face by claiming common ground and reducing the distance between them: The Okada-Shingen Society no longer exists today one of many such victims of the occupying forces but quite possibly you will have heard of it (Ishiguro 2005: 88); For it is possible you are acquainted with my painting, Eyes to the Horizon which, as a print in the thirties, achieved a certain fame and influence throughout this city. (Ishiguro 2005: 168). At the same time, Ono indirectly points to his worldwide fame if even a stranger may (preserving Ono s deferential uncertainty) be familiar with his art. Ono s unreliability is more straightforward than Stevens s as there is a very clear-cut line between Ono s private world as he renders it to the narratee and the story actual world. Besides being an important artist, Ono is purportedly a modest person ( I have never had a keen awareness of my own standing. Ishiguro 2005: 21) who is always taken by surprise by the high regard he is held in and a supportive and caring friend and sensei who has helped his peers and pupils when necessity has arisen. The image that the reader gets is that of artist with no extraordinary talent, an ambitious, revengeful and treacherous person with a guilty consciousness. The fair warning that Ono s parents had from the wandering priest regarding his character may have come true after all: Masuji s limbs were healthy, he told us, but he had been born with a flaw in his nature. A weak streak that would give him a tendency towards slothfulness and deceit. (Ishiguro 2005: 45). Ono s most striking characteristic seems to be his obsession with his artistic significance, his prestige that seemingly goes beyond the artistic world to all walks of life (Ishiguro 2005: 25) and beyond the boundaries of the city he inhabits. He uses discussions with other characters and the way they attend to his positive face wants to create the portrait of an artist of impressive proportions. His prestige is always confirmed from the outside while he simply marvels at the extent of it. It seems that most characters are simply full of admiration for him and they can hardly wait to express it. In order to increase the effect, he counterpoises the others praises with his own amazement at them. To put it differently, he uses Leech s Maxim of Modesty to minimize praise of self (Leech 1983: 132). It is, in fact, a recurrent pattern of false modesty despite the fact that the Modesty Maxim has more regulative power in Japanese society than in British society. In order to preserve self-image and therefore attend to his positive face wants, Ono is ready to break all the other maxims of politeness listed by Leech: Tact Maxim, Generosity Maxim, Approbation Maxim, Agreement Maxim and Sympathy Maxim. Contrariwise, all the other characters do their best to obey these maxims when speaking with Ono. Sometimes, however, the conversation ends with the interlocutor blatantly attacking his face, whether positive or negative. The whole narrative is made up of a fabric of exquisite politeness interwoven with unexpected threads of sheer impoliteness.

8 Ono has a conversation with the Tortoise (they were both working for Mori-san painting pleasure district women but Ono had turned to imperialist propaganda and was secretly painting Complacency, the painting that would cause the break up with his master). The Tortoise expresses the admiration for his colleague s art: Indeed, Ono-san. And it s been a privilege to work so close to one of your talent. More than a little humbling at times, but a great privilege nonetheless. You exaggerate, I said, smiling and continuing to paint. Not at all, Ono-san. Indeed, I feel I would never have progressed as I have over these years without the constant inspiration of seeing your works appearing before my eyes. No doubt you ve noted the extend to which my modest Autumn Girl owes itself to your magnificent Girl at Sunset. One of many attempts on my part, Ono-san, to emulate your brilliance. A feeble attempt, I realize, but then Mori-san was good enough to praise it as a significant step forward for me. (Ishiguro 2005: 162). The Tortoise attends to Ono s positive face by expressing admiration for his talent ( a privilege to work so close to one of your talent, magnificent, brilliance ) and by humbling his own positive face. He also uses the Japanese honorific san which, in the context, encodes recognition of difference in professional status rather than social status. The use of san after the interlocutor s family name is in itself a positive face-oriented strategy. Again, Ono modestly rejects the tribute paid to his positive face. Interestingly, this conversation which contributes to Ono s positive face wants has an unexpected end after Ono decides to show him the painting Complacency which marks his passage from art-for-art s sake aestheticism to propagandistic art: Ono-san, he said, in a near whisper, you are a traitor. Now please excuse me. (Ishiguro 2005: 165). This is forthright impoliteness, a direct face-attack which casts doubt upon the trustworthiness of the positive facework that the Tortoise has taken pains to attend to. He has either said everything out of courtesy or Ono is misreporting his words. Before narrating this conversation the memory of which is triggered by his son-in-law s mentioning of one of his work colleagues nicknamed the Tortoise because he never met deadlines, Ono makes a general statement about the Tortoises of this world : While one may appreciate their plodding steadiness and ability to survive, one suspects their lack of frankness, their capacity for treachery. (Ishiguro 2005: 159). Elsewhere, Ono remembers an episode after he wrote a letter of recommendation for Shintaro s brother. They both come to his house to thank him: It is the height of impertinence for us to come to your house like this. The height of impertinence. But we could not remain at home any longer without thanking you. [ ] For the first time, the young man stopped bowing and looked up at me nervously. Then he said: I will be grateful to you for the remainder of my life. I will exert every particle of my being to be worthy of your recommendation. [ ] Really, it was nothing. It s no more than you deserve. [ ] Yoshio, we have imposed enough on Sensei as it is. But before we leave, take a good look again at the man who has helped you. We are greatly priviledged to have a benefactor of such influence and generosity. (Ishiguro 2005: 20-21). Shintaro and his brother want to satisfy Ono s positive face by conveying that he is admirable and generous. Yoshio performs a FTA to his own negative face by repeatedly expressing his gratitude to Ono. At the same time, Shintaro begs forgiveness for having come to disturb him on his territory (a tribute paid to Ono s negative face). In order to mitigate the imposition on his negative face, Ono feels constraint to minimize Yoshio s debt by rejecting his thanks. Later on in the narrative, Ono has a completely different conversation with Shintaro, ironically on the same topic but with a small difference - no longer a request for a letter of recommendation (by means of which one associates his name and prestige with another person s) but one of disassociation, an act which amounts to threatening Ono s positive face by indicating that his former pupil evaluates it negatively. Having applied for a teaching position, Shintaro asks him to write a letter to the high school committee, disassociating him from Ono s influence: You must know, Sensei, that my

9 respect for you is of the very highest. I have learnt so much from Sensei, and I will continue to be proud of our association. (Ishiguro 2005: ). Then, Shintaro reminds him about his disagreement over the China crisis posters: I beg you, Sensei, to try and recall that little disagreement. Grateful as I was and still remain for the wealth of things I learnt under your supervision, I did not always, in fact, concur with your view. Indeed, I may not be exaggerating to say that I had strong reservations about the direction our school was taking at that time. (Ishiguro 2005: ). Though both Shintaro and the Tortoise actually convey the same meaning that Ono has been a traitor by choosing the path of propagandistic art, they do it differently. While the Tortoise goes on record with the FTA without redressive action he unambiguously labels Ono as traitor, Shintaro minimizes the imposition. Thus, the threat to Ono s positive face (Shintaro no longer wants his sensei s wants) is counterbalanced by his attending to his negative face. Shintaro s strategy is to give deference to his interlocutor by raising him and thus acknowledging Ono s higher professional status ( my respect for you is of the very highest. I have learnt so much from Sensei ). As part of the same deference strategy, Shintaro uses the honorific Sensei in the first fragment as if the referent were a third person, so the respect conveyed is even greater. He mitigates the imposition (namely his disagreement with his teacher s views) by hedging the FTA. I may not be exaggerating to say is a quality hedge which stresses the commitment to the truth of what he says; not always hedges the quantity of information to which Shintaro commits himself; in fact is a hedge to the relevance maxim which marks and partially tries to soften the seriousness of the imposition he is about to make (he has not entirely endorsed his teacher s views). 4. Conclusions I have argued in this paper that while Stevens politeness strategies in The Remains of the Day are mainly directed at maintaining his negative face, Ono in An Artist of the Floating World is especially concerned with saving his positive face. To put it differently, Stevens makes claims to his territory, personal preserves and rights to non-distraction (love and filial feelings being major threats), while Ono is interested in creating a positive consistent self-image in the eyes of his fictional interlocutor (Brown and Levinson 1987: 61). Both strategies result in a less conspicuous, more natural unreliability of two narrators who seem to be partly conscious of the difficult position they are in when narrating their guilt-ridden past. References and bibliography Brown, P. and S. Levinson Politeness, Cambridge: CUP. Fraser, Bruce Hedging in political discourse: The Bush 2007 press conferences, in U. Okulska and Piotr Carp (eds.), Perspectives in Politics and Discourse, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company: Fraser, Bruce Pragmatic Competence: the Case of Hedging, in G. Kalenbock, W. Michatsch and S. Schneider (eds.), New Approaches to Hedging, Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited: Furst, Lilian Memory s Fragile Power in Kazuo Ishiguro s Remains of the Day and W.G. Sebald s Max Ferber in Contemporary Literature, 48.4 (Winter): Goatly, Andrew Explorations in Stylistics, London: Equinox. Hammond, Meghan M I can t even say I made my own mistakes : the ethics of genre in Kazuo Ishiguro s The Remains of the Day, in S. Groes and B. Lewis (eds.), Kazuo Ishiguro. New Critical Visions of the Novels, London: Palgrave Macmillan:

10 Ishiguro, Kazuo (1986). An Artist of the Floating World, London: Faber and Faber. Ishiguro, Kazuo (1989). The Remains of the Day, London: Faber and Faber. Lakoff, George Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts. in Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2: Leech, Geoffrey Principles of Pragmatics, London: Longman Group Limited. Markkanen, R. and H. Schröder Hedging: A Challenge for Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, in R. Markkanen and H. Schröder (eds.), Hedging and Discourse: Approaches to the Analysis of a Pragmatic Phenomenon in Academic Texts, Berlin: Walter De Gruyter: Matthews, Sean I m Sorry I Can t Say More : An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, in S. Matthews and S. Groes (eds.), Kazuo Ishiguro, London: Continuum: Moore, Gene Tristam Shandy s Narratees, in Bex. T., M. Burke and P. Stockwell (eds.), Contextualized Stylistics, Amsterdam: Rodopi: Patey, Caroline When Ishiguro visits the West Country, in Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell Università degli Studi di Milano 44: Ruiz, Javier Herrero Understanding Tropes. At the Crossroads between Pragmatics and Cognition, Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Shaffer, Brian Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro, Columbia: University of South Carolina. Shaw, Harry Why Won t Our Terms Stay Put? The Narrative Communication Diagram Scrutinized and Historicized., in Phelan J. and P. J. Rabinowitz, A Companion to Narrative Theory, Malden: Blackwell Publishing: Vianu, Lidia British Desperadoes at the Turn of the Millennium, LiterNet Publishing House, e-book. Watts, Richard James The Pragmalinguistic Analysis of Narrative Texts: Narratice Co-operation in Charles Dickens s Hard Times, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Wood, Michael Children of Silence: On Contemporary Fiction, New York: Columbia University Press. Zipfel, Frank Unreliable narration and fictional truth, in Journal of Literary Theory 5.1: The author Lorena Mihăeş is a teaching assistant at Spiru Haret University. She holds a B.A. degree in English and French and a M.A. degree in Translation Studies from the University of Bucharest. Her dissertation thesis was conceived as a literary magazine focusing on the analysis of A.S. Byatt s Possession from several perspectives. Her research interests are pragmatics, narratology and cognitive studies. She is currently pursuing a PhD under the supervision of Professor Lidia Vianu. Her doctoral thesis deals with the technique of unreliability in several post-modern novels.