ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the deployment of diegetic music in the 1993 Merchant-Ivory film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's celebrated novel The Remains of the Day. A character can be sentimentally drawn in a text through depiction of their emotional response to another character's need or predicament. The novel can in this way be read as contrapuntally voiced, indeed rather dissonantly so. The analysis of the use of two songs in the film will further explore, as Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler put it, how sentimentality and masculinity can be ‘mutually constitutive discursive formations’. Chapman and Hendler urge a scholarly counter to the prevailing ‘feminization’ of sentimentalism. Stevens's master, Lord Darlington is a figure who relates to the context of interbellum European élites recently analysed by Dina Gusejnova. The ultimate function of these performative clues is to confirm the cultural value of filial connection, personal belonging, and broader community.
