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摘 要

英国移民文学是移民文学的一个重要组成部分。近年来，移民写作日益受到关注，移民作家群体也获得了越来越多的肯定。石黑一雄与奈保尔、拉什迪并称“英国文坛移民三雄”。作为移民作家，石黑一雄被认为是英国文学与日本文学的双重代表，同时他自诩为一个国际主义作家。他关心的不是外部世界，而是人复杂的内心世界。

石黑一雄属于相对年轻的作家，虽然在国外颇受关注，但国内学界对其作品的系统性研究却明显不足。对其作品的解读也往往局限于后殖民与文化批评的视角，鲜有对其笔下主人公个体生存状态的诠释。由此，本文旨在以创伤理论为依据，分析石黑一雄处女作《远山淡影》中主人公悦子与其大女儿景子所遭受的创伤，以此来探讨石黑一雄作品中反复出现的主题：回忆、伤痕与逝去的童年。主人公悦子在经历战争的创伤后从日本到英国寻求新的生活，却忽略了动荡不安的生活经历对女儿景子的童年所带来的伤害。如同石黑一雄多部作品中的人物一样，景子在童年失去了父母、家庭的关爱，这对她后来的人生造成了巨大的影响。最终景子在曼彻斯特的家里自杀，悦子也因此陷入悔恨的情绪中，加剧了她的创伤。小说展现了受创者努力忘却，但无法忘记的挣扎与痛苦，凸显了创伤经历给她们带来的影响，从而传递了作者的强烈同情与深切共鸣。

关键词：石黑一雄；《远山淡影》；创伤；记忆

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i

English Abstract ii

Chinese Abstract iii

Introduction 1

Kazuo Ishiguro’s International Reputation 1

An Extraordinary First Novel—A Pale View of Hills 2

Literature Review 3

Chapter One: Traumatic Memory—Etsuko 5

1.1 The definition of Trauma 5

1.2 Etsuko’s Narrative Memory and Traumatic Memory 5

1.3 The Features of Etsuko’s Traumatic Memory 7

Chapter Two: Projective Identification—Sachiko 9

2.1 Sachiko—Etsuko’s Dark Side Projection 9

2.2 Mariko—Keiko’s Substitute 11

Chapter Three: Transgenerational Phantom—Keiko 13

3.1 Keiko’s Life in Japan 13

3.2 Keiko’s Life in England 15

Conclusion 17

Works Cited 19

Introduction

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan, on 8^th November 1954. He moved with his parents to England when he was five years old. Since the publication of his first novel, A Pale View of Hills in 1983, he has produced to high acclaim seven novels so far. The academic researchers majorly focus on Ishiguro’s Booker Prize winner The Remains of the Day and another novel When We Were Orphans. Yet there have been few literary criticisms on his first novel A Pale View of Hills. There is even less research carried out in Mainland China. But it does not mean his first work is of less importance than his other works.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s International Reputation

Kazuo Ishiguro is a master storyteller, in a class of his own making.

—The Independent

As an immigrant to the developed world, Kazuo Ishiguro, along with Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, is known as one of the three literary giants in post-war British emigrant writing. As to his writing career, Ishiguro said, “As soon as I started to write fiction, I almost immediately met with success.” (Eckert 77) He has developed his international literary reputation through his first three novels: A Pale View of Hills which won the Royal Society of Literature’s Winifred Holtby Prize; An Artist of the Floating World which received the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1986; and The Remains of the Day which won the British’s highest literary award Booker Prize in 1989.

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most famous contemporary emigrant writers. His works have been translated into more than forty languages and are highly acclaimed by readers and critics all over the world. His masterpiece The Remains of the Day has been adapted to movie by Merchant-Ivory Productions, assuring the author an even wider global following. (qtd. in Li 1)

As far as his works are concerned, Ishiguro is categorized as a spokesman for post-colonial studies or as a writer full of Japaneseness. (Lu 70) However, Ishiguro himself does not agree with the view. He considers himself as an international writer. He said, “I had no obvious social role, because I wasn’t a very Englishman, and wasn’t a very Japanese either.” (Li 134) In this circumstance, he considers his work more as a representation of universal human experiences.

An Extraordinary First Novel—A Pale View of Hills

A Pale View of Hills is Ishiguro’s maiden work. The most significant topic in this novel is memory. The memory of reality and the memory of the past are the two separated types of timing in the story. At present, Etsuko’s second daughter Niki comes back home from London to accompany her because Etsuko’s first daughter Keiko committed suicide in her apartment in Manchester. The narrator’s thoughts then went back to the past memories of her young life in Japan. She told Niki the past story about her friend named Sachiko who has a daughter called Mariko. However, from the novel the readers can simply notice that Mariko is a substitute for Etsuko’s lost daughter Keiko. And the story of Sachiko is actually the story of Etsuko herself. The story of the past which she told Niki is actually her own story about how she left Japan and finally settled down in England. The narration from Etsuko reveals the painful effects of the traumatized memory and guilt and sadness after she lost her first daughter Keiko.

The novel is written in the first-person narrative and the protagonist Etsuko is the only narrator, which forces the readers to understand the story of the past only through Etsuko’s narration. The traumatized memory is not all reliable and the readers should piece the story together themselves. By using this kind of narrative strategy, Ishiguro successfully explores some universal feelings of all mankind after experiencing trauma. Also, recollecting the traumatized memories is a way for Etsuko to somewhat heal the trauma of losing her elder daughter Keiko and leaving her hometown after the World War II. Etsuko to some extent has the courage to face the traumatic past and get out of the shadow of Keiko’s suicide by recalling her past and telling the story to her second daughter Niki.

Literature Review

As mentioned above, there are ample researches in Ishiguro’s later works, especially in The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled and Never Let Me Go. However, the number of the research on his maiden work A Pale View of Hills is quite limited. Besides, the related foreign researches are comparatively more systematic than domestic researches.

Ishiguro’s works are critically acclaimed in western countries. The research contents are extensive and also in-depth. There are six monographs and three collections of theses for the moment. Critics do their researches on Ishiguro’s novels from different perspectives, such as sociology, psychology, philosophy, colonialism and post-colonialism.

Some critics focus their researches on the characters and relationships between the characters in the novel. For example, Sheng-mei Ma states that Etsuko is a “self-deluded” mother and “defuses” her role in Keiko’s death. Peter Childs believes that the novel emphasizes the importance of the relationships between children and their parents, and adults’ relationships with themselves in the childhood. Wai-chew Sim points out that in this novel the protagonist sees herself in another person. To be specific, the relationship between Etsuko and Sachiko makes the readers suspect “a doppelganger relationship between these two women, as well as their daughter.” (Sim 113)

As for the theme of the novel, Cynthia F. Wong holds the view that Kazuo Ishiguro wrote his first two novels because he wanted to “put together all these memories, and all these imaginary ideas I had about this landscape which I called Japan” (2) Guo Deyan discusses the theme of trauma of World War II in Ishiguro’s fiction from a historical view. Molino Michael analyzes the ambiguous narration in his thesis Traumatic Memory and Narrative Isolation in Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills in 2012.

The researches of Kazuo Ishiguro’s works start rather late in mainland China, so there are fewer books than theses and articles published. It is not until the publication of the Chinese versions of Ishiguro’s works that more and more critics begin to start research into the writer and his works. However, critics pay relatively more attention to Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans. Few researches focus on his debut work, A Pale View of Hills. Also most critics do their researches into this novel from the perspectives of post-colonialism and neo-historicism. Some critics study the theme of memory of the protagonist Etsuko and hold the view that it represents the author Ishiguro’s effort to conjure up fading memories of his homeland Japan.

Some critics argue that most of Ishiguro’s work is full of traumatized memory and consider his works as “trauma fiction”, a term firstly used by Anne Whitehead in her book Trauma Fiction. However, only one thesis discusses the holism of trauma in A Pale View of Hills. The trauma of Etsuko is mentioned but there is no exploration about her daughter Keiko’s trauma. Consequently, studying the trauma of the protagonists is still a new and complementary dimension to analyze the novel and it is worth more attention and research.

Therefore this thesis is divided into five parts. The introduction part introduces Kazuo Ishiguro and his first novel. Also it presents the researches and studies about A Pale View of Hills from home and abroad. Chapter one will discuss the traumatic memory of the main character—Etsuko through her own narration. This chapter will mainly focus on what’s traumatic memory, what’s the difference between narrative memory and traumatic memory and what are the features of traumatic memory. Chapter two will discuss the relationship between Etsuko and Sachiko and draw a conclusion that Sachiko is Etsuko’s projection who represents the dark side of Etsuko. Sachiko’s daughter Mariko is a substitute for Etsuko’s daughter Keiko. Chapter three indicates that the trauma passes down through generations. Keiko does not experience the bombing, but she still suffers because of her mother’s malpractice. To some extent it causes her suicide. The conclusion part summarizes the contents from the last three chapters and highlights the importance of the theme of trauma and memory in Ishiguro’s works. Again it confirms that Ishiguro is more like an international writer who explores mankind’s common feelings in his novel.

Chapter One: Traumatic Memory—Etsuko

1.1 The Definition of Trauma

The beginning of contemporary trauma studies could be dated back to the 1980s. However, it was when the American Psychiatric Association put forward the term of “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that the public has paid their attention to trauma studies. “Trauma theory” was brought out by Cathy Caruth, one of the most well-known contemporary trauma theorists. She gives her definition of trauma in her work Unclaimed Experience as:

Trauma is an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the events is often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena. (Caruth 181)

The most important symbol in A Pale View of Hills is the memory which haunts the protagonist Etsuko all the time. To Cathy Caruth’s view, the traumatic effect is not only produced by the experience, but also by the remembrance of the experience. She states that:

Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on…The historical power of trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all. (Caruth 19)

1.2 Etsuko’s Narrative Memory and Traumatic Memory

In this novel, Etsuko is stuck in the illusion of her past memory and the reality of the present because trauma has brought her two different kinds of memories. Pierre Janet divides human memory into two kinds of memories, one is narrative memory and the other is traumatic memory. What people remember about the daily life is their narrative memory. Unlike the narrative memory, traumatic memory is always buried deep in people’s mind and they cannot trace their traumatic memory like they recall their normal ones. Janet believes that people who suffer from trauma understand the circumstance that they are trapped in the past but they cannot change the situation because they lose their adapt capacity. (Berger 572) In this circumstance, many traumatized people live in the real world and traumatic world simultaneously for a long time and they cannot connect the two worlds together. That’s why there are two separate time threads in A Pale View of Hills. The real world is presented to the readers when Etsuko’s second daughter Niki visits her after Keiko’s death and spends five days with her. And the traumatic world emerged from Etsuko’s memory back in Nagasaki twenty years ago. As a survivor, Etsuko did not try to recollect her the days which she spent in Nagasaki. On the contrary, she tried to conceal her memory about the painful experience and get away from it. Even the news of her elder daughter Keiko’s suicide could not bring back her memory of Nagasaki and Sachiko:

…but on hearing of her suicide, the first thought that ran through my mind—before I registered even the shock—was to wonder how long she had been there like that before they had found her…I have found myself continually bringing to mind that picture—of my daughter hanging in her room for days on end. (Ishiguro 54)

Etsuko just could not help herself thinking about Keiko’s death, but it did not trace back her memory. And she did not try to retrieve her memory by memorizing Sachiko and Mariko. “I never knew Sachiko well. In fact our friendship was no more than a matter of some several weeks one summer many years ago.” (Ishiguro 11) In fact, what made Etsuko start to retrieve her memory was her night dream about a little girl “playing on the swings.” (Ishiguro 47) Trauma theorists Bessel Kolk and Onno Hart argued that traumatized people cannot control trauma, they would only recollect their traumatic memory under certain conditions. And some typical symptoms of traumatic memory are insomnia, flashback and nightmare. After seeing the little girl that afternoon, Etsuko started to have dreams about her constantly:

At first it had seemed a perfectly innocent dream; I had merely dreamt of something I had seen the precious day—the little girl we had watched playing in the park. And then the dream came back the following night. Indeed, over the past few months, it has returned to me several times. (Ishiguro 47)

From the conversation Etsuko has with Niki, readers can also see Etsuko is obsessed with insomnia and gets up at four o’clock in the morning. At the end of the conversation Etsuko said, “The little girl isn’t on a swing at all. It seemed like that at first. But it’s not a swing she’s on.” (Ishiguro 96) It is connected to the child murders in Nagasaki. Police finds a small girl hanging from a tree. And Etsuko’s eldest daughter Keiko commits suicide by hanging her in her room. It can be seen that after experiencing trauma, Etsuko believes that she was responsible for Keiko’s death unconsciously. Therefore she has connected the little girl in the dream with Mariko, who readers can see was a substitute for her eldest daughter Keiko.

“The little girl playing on the swings” is the cue to Etsuko for tracing back her memory. “…that the dream had to do not so much with the little girl we had watched, but with my having remembered Sachiko two days previously.” (Ishiguro 55) Readers can easily figure out the little girl in Etsuko’s dream is Sachiko’s daughter—Mariko. And Etsuko herself admits it when she has a conversation with her second daughter Niki. But Niki thinks the little girl who’s in her mother’s dream is Keiko, which connects the dream to Keiko.

Niki looked at me again. Then she said;” I suppose you mean it was her. Keiko.”

“Keiko?” I laughed a little. “What a strange idea. Why should it be Keiko? No, it was nothing to do with Keiko.”

Niki continued to look at me uncertainly.

“It was just a little girl I knew once,” I(Etsuko) said to her(Niki). “A long time ago.” (Ishiguro 95)

“A little girl I knew once” here refers to Mariko. From this moment Etsuko starts to recollect her traumatic memory back in Nagasaki.

1.3 The Features of Etsuko’s Traumatic Memory

In Etsuko’s narration, she continuously repeats her recollection again and again. It is a coercive behavior for her to verify her memory’s reliability. However, no matter how she intends to believe her own memory, there are still several inconsistencies in her narration:

I can recall quite vividly that afternoon at the tram stop…We were to become friends that summer and for a short time at least I was to be admitted into her confidence. I am not sure how it was we first met. (Ishiguro 13)

It is possible that my memory of these events will have grown hazy with time, that things did not happen in quite the way they come back to me today. But I remember with some distinctness that… (Ishiguro 41)

When Etsuko is narrating and recollecting, she uses “recall vividly”, “remember with distinctness”, “I cannot remember”, “hazy”, “I cannot be sure” all the time, which shows her uncertainty and self-contradiction. On the one hand traumatized people do not want to retrieve their traumatic memory again because they would not like to suffer again. So when they discourse their traumatic experience, they do not tell their story in a straightforward way. On the other hand, the theme of traumatic memory emerges from the narrating of Etsuko spontaneously. Freud thinks that memorizing becomes an action to the traumatized people. When they tell their stories, they are not recollecting but acting out. (Tao 120) Etsuko repeated her memory neurotically to confirm her memory but she did not realize that she was doing it all the time. Etsuko could not integrate her memory after being traumatized and she considers the real world and traumatic world separately. Also she had a kind of “schizophrenia” when she told the stories about her and Sachiko and their relationships back in Nagasaki twenty years ago. The detailed discussion about Etsuko’s relationship with Sachiko will be conducted in the next chapter.

Chapter Two: Projective Identification—Sachiko

The relationship between Etsuko and Sachiko is worth reader’s attention. In Etsuko’s narration about her recollection in Nagasaki twenty years ago, Sachiko and her daughter Mariko were merely a mother and a daughter remembered by Etsuko. Etsuko said in the very beginning of her narration, “I never knew Sachiko well. In fact our friendship was no more than a matter of some several weeks one summer many years ago.” (Ishiguro 11) However, sometimes readers can notice that in Etsuko’s narration she becomes Sachiko at one point and Sachiko’s daughter Mariko would become her elder daughter Keiko.

Mariko once witnessed a woman drowning her own baby when they still lived in Tokyo. Sachiko told Etsuko that Mariko began to hallucinate about the woman since then. Sachiko always talked about how important her daughter’s happiness was. However, she could not give up the opportunity to go to America with Frank. Sachiko did not allow Mariko to bring her favorite kitten with them and Sachiko was planning to drown the animal. Sachiko told her unwilling child that, “It’s not your little baby, it’s just an animal, just like a rat or a snake.” (Ishiguro 165) From the word “baby”, what Sachiko did was the same as the woman who drowned her baby in Tokyo. Then Sachiko put the kitten into the water and “without taking her hands from the water, Sachiko threw a glance over her shoulder towards her daughter. Instinctively, I followed her glance, and for one brief moment the two of us were both staring back up at Mariko.” (Ishiguro 167) At this moment in the novel Sachiko and Etsuko became the same person. At last Sachiko dropped the soaked kitten back to the box and held the box down the water. “…and we both of us watched the box.” (Ishiguro 168) The image of Etsuko and Sachiko overlapped the image of the woman who drowned her baby. They all killed their own child in a sort of way.

2.1 Sachiko—Etsuko’s Dark Side Projection

Readers may think that Etsuko had similar experiences like Sachiko. Actually Sachiko is part of Etsuko. To be more specific, Sachiko represents the dark side of Etsuko. The trauma caused by Keiko’s suicide made Etsuko reluctant to face the cruel reality. Etsuko still felt guilty and responsible for her daughter’s death in her sub-consciousness. So Etsuko used Sachiko and Mariko to fulfill her story. Sachiko is a “recipient” of Etsuko’s projection. Psychologist T.H. Ogden states that:

The projector fantasies ridding himself of an aspect of himself and putting that aspect into another person in a controlling way. Projective Identification is a type of defense by which one can distance oneself from an unwanted or internally endangered part of the self, while in fantasy keeping that aspect of oneself ‘alive’ in another. (363)

Etsuko tried to convince herself that she always put Keiko’s happiness in the first place. Niki also told Etsuko that she should have “no regret” for those choices she once made. In short, Etsuko reassures herself that “she was not responsible for Keiko’s death”. (Ishiguro 11) However, Etsuko still could not forgive herself and she could not face the miserable reality. So Etsuko projected the guilty part of herself into Sachiko and pretended to be a good mother. In Etsuko’s narration, Sachiko was always busy with her own things, flirting with the American soldier—Frank, hoping to go to America with his help. She cared little about her daughter Mariko and Mariko was dropping out of school and always fighting with the boys in the neighborhood. There is a scene in the novel where Etsuko told Sachiko about Mariko’s fighting with two other children and Sachiko said, “I’m rather busy just now. I have to go into Nagasaki.” (Ishiguro 15) And Etsuko, on the contrary, was more concerned about Mariko than Sachiko. Etsuko looked after the little girl Mariko when Sachiko was in town, and Etsuko even went out at night with Sachiko to look for Mariko when Mariko was missing. It is easy for readers to understand that Mariko is a substitute for Etsuko’s daughter Keiko. What Etsuko did for Mariko in her narration was her trying to make up for Keiko. Etsuko could not get over her elder daughter Keiko’s death and she felt guilty for bringing Keiko to England, which Etsuko believed had caused Keiko’ suicide. The projected Sachiko and Mariko in her memory made Etsuko an onlooker and to some extent relieve her pain and trauma.

2.2 Mariko—Keiko’s Substitute

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