SOURCE: Bert Cardullo, "The Servant," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XLVII, No. 4, Winter, 1995, pp. 616-22.

In the following essay Cardullo compares the movie version of The Remains of the Day with the novel.

Milan Kundera once made a helpful distinction between two sorts of novels set in the past. There is, on the one hand, "the novel that is the illustration of a historical situation … popularizations that translate non-novelistic knowledge into the language of the novel," and on the other hand the novel that examines "the historical dimension of human existence." In the first case, cardboard cutouts are wheeled out to represent "the bourgeoisie" or "the last throes of imperialism"—in other words, important social tendencies in the historical scheme of things rather than individualized or self-determined human beings. Here, the background effectively replaces the foreground. In the second case, history is only one part of a multifaceted...