A Pale View or a Cryptic View

ABSTRACT

Narrative gaps and the ghost motif are frequently discussed in current studies of A Pale View of Hills. The two gaps revolving around Keiko’s suicide and Etsuko’s words-to-deeds discrepancy can be mapped onto Keiko’s evasive ghost and, as the paper attempts to show, Etsuko’s cryptological haunting of Keiko. The causal relationship between the absence of knowledge and the presence of haunting warrants a cryptonymic reading in line with the psychoanalytic theories of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Two strands linking mother and daughter retroactively emerge from Etsuko’s cryptic narrative. First, Keiko’s suicide can be viewed as an effect of her suffering from the phantom transmitted unconsciously from her mother Etsuko. Second, Etsuko’s incorporation of her lost mother in the first place begins to make sense once the critical gaze is turned from the maternal pair of Etsuko and Sachiko to Etsuko as a child and her curiously absent mother. The latter point is further supported by Ishiguro’s more general thematic concern with the orphaned adult in this and other novels. Identifying gaps in Etsuko’s knowledge of the ghost and her reticence about her mother, the paper illuminates Kazuo Ishiguro’s weighted gaps and the work of haunting in this novel.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Andrew Bennett, my hosting supervisor at University of Bristol, for providing guidance and feedback that helped shape the essay. Thanks also go to my domestic supervisor Arleen Ionescu for her unwavering support and to China Scholarship Council for the Grant (202306230318).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I am referring here in particular to two unresolved matters that Ishiguro himself has respectively acknowledged as a “gap” in this interview. Although the interview also covers other potential gaps, such as the relationship between Etsuko and Sachiko (a point that I will pursue in the following), they are not identified explicitly by the author as “gaps”.

2. Striking parallels emerge between Keiko and Mariko as neglected and troubled children. For instance, the probability for Mariko to take her own life and Keiko’s suicide “overlay one another like shadows” (Annan, “High Wire”); “the textual transference between Keiko and Mariko” is obvious (Lewis 35); and the little girl whom the pregnant Etsuko has chased after “could have been either Mariko or Keiko” (Wong, Kazuo Ishiguro 31).

3. The term “cryptophore” refers to the carrier of a crypt. See Abraham and Torok’s elaboration on the question of “[w]hat does it mean to be a cryptophore? How does such a condition occur?” in The Shell and the Kernel (158–59); and Derrida’s references to it in his preface to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word (xviii-xix, xxxv, xxxviii, xxxix).

4. On comparison between this short story and A Pale View of Hills, see Lewis (27–28).

5. When Gabriele Annan touches upon this point, she also adds that “the hint … is so faint that it may not be there at all” (“High Wire”).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China Scholarship Council under Grant [202306230318].

Notes on contributors

Zengjing Li

Zengjing Li is a PhD candidate in English literature at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China) and a Visiting Postgraduate Research Student at University of Bristol (UK, 2023-2024). At present she is working on her doctoral thesis on spectres of mourning in contemporary British fiction. Her latest article, “Teletechnologies of Death and Mourning in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Nicholas Royle’s Quilt”, appears in Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics (ESCI).