The Spiritual Dilemmas Of Nomadic Subjects In A Pale View Of Hills

The first novel of Japanese-born British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro,A Pale View of Hills,takes the memories of the Japanese woman Etsuko now living alone in England as the mainline,presenting the ethical constraints,territorialisation of Japan’s old values and the lack of kinship suffered by the survivors in Japanese society after the war,which reveals the spiritual dilemmas faced by them.Survivors attempt to produce differences from the real life by constructing rhizomes,deterritorialization and becoming others,thus freeing themselves from the enclosed and orderly artificial territorialization,entering open and disordered nomadic space,and becoming undefined nomadic subjects.In this process,survivors have been suffering from the spiritual dilemmas of stagnation in the past,ideological imprisonment and barren mind.Based on Deleuze’s nomadic theory,this paper explores the spiritual dilemmas of survivors in postwar Japan’s society according to the concepts of rhizome,deterritorialization and becoming in nomadic theory.The second chapter analyzes that Etsuko,her daughter Keiko and Niki and the adult survivors in post-war Japan’s society suffer from the spiritual dilemma of stagnation in the past due to the ethical shackles in the rhizome structure.First of all,there are three kinds of rhizome structures in the novel: the first one is the creation of heterogeneity in the relationship between mother and daughter.When Etsuko is pregnant with her daughter Keiko,they compose an organic whole,however,Etsuko keeps a depressed state of mind,ignoring and loathing the presence of the baby in her belly,constituting a non-homogeneous existence in the rhizome compared with the baby in her belly.It breaks the traceability of the homogeneity of mother and baby,reflecting rhizome’s characteristics of principles of connection and heterogeneity,thus creating a rupture of the mother-child relationship.However,the reality of her close connection with the baby in her belly makes her deeply trapped in the despair of the future.The second one is that keiko and Niki emotionally alienate their mother,Etsuko,and hold different values with her,trying to strip off the mother-daughter relationship with Etsuko.However,their kinship with Etsuko’s blood is thicker than water,which makes them suffer from the alienation of mother-daughter relationship.It reflects the helplessness and dilemma of the “progeny” being broken from the “parent”.The third one is that adult survivors in Japanese society after the war attempt to vent their dissatisfaction with society by murdering and treating children indifferently,however,their genealogical connections with children make them face the mental breakdown of losing hope when they attempt to eliminate fixed genealogical relationship.The third chapter discusses that Etsuko,Sachiko,Jiro and Shigeo Matsuda regard Japan’s old values as a kind of spiritual territorialization and the confinement of territorialization has resulted in their spiritual dilemma of ideological imprisonment.Etsuko and Sachiko are in unequal status in their respective marriages and both of them try to find the line of flight to realize the deterritorialization of Japanese thought of male superiority to female.In the process of seeking the line of flight,they suffer from the depression of losing their self-value in their unequal marriage relationship.Jiro and Shigeo Matsuda hold new values for the post-war Japanese society.Facing the opposition of the old values represented by Ogata-San,they seek various ways to get rid of the shackles,which cause their dissatisfaction with their new values being blocked and assimilated.The fourth chapter studies the spiritual dilemmas of barren mind faced by Etsuko and Mariko due to the lack of kinship in their process of trying to become others in spirit.Etsuko highly overlaps her subject identity with her Japanese friend Sachiko.She takes the initiative to spiritually become Sachiko who is eager to marry to America,attempting to obtain spiritual comfort.In the process of becoming,she falls into the guilt and pain of her daughter Keiko who has committed suicide when she faces Sachiko’s neglect and dereliction of duty to Mariko.Mariko tries to become cats in spirit by imitating the behaviors of cats,playing with cats and all kinds of behaviors related with cats.In the process of becoming the cats,compared with cats,the warmth that she lacks from her family makes her suffer from the loneliness and longing in her spiritual world.At the same time,a woman who drowns her child and then commits suicide always appears in the illusion of Mariko.For Mariko,this woman is imperceptible who is mysterious and dangerous in real life.Mariko wants to understand her but she can not.Mariko attempts to connect herself with the woman by illusion so that she is able to become imperceptible to perceive what happens to the woman.In the process of continuous becoming,her lack of security makes her spiritual world always surrounded by fear and collapse.Through becoming others,the characters in this novel realize the free nomadism of their desire,revealing the spiritual dilemmas of unsatisfied desire in real life faced by them.The rhizome,deterritorialization and becoming model of the novel express the dilemmas and pursuits of survivors in post-war Japanese society,reflecting their desire for diverse nomadic space,and revealing their yearning for multiculturalism in post-modern society.