A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro. Empathy and the Unsaid

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore the function of empathy in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, A Pale View of Hills published in 1982. The concept, as the author uses it, is not meant as substitution but as projection. Ishiguro initiates the empathetic process as a moment of interaction, that is, as mutual influences between the protagonists he describes. In the novel, the empathetic interaction is rather complex, a product of words —said and unsaid— as well as of gestures and silence, reducing, sometimes, the privileged role of words. In A Pale View of Hills, Ishiguro seems to undermine the dialogic method by transforming it into a relational dimension giving emphasis to individual aspects, and problematizing the relationships mainly between the female protagonists. The imaginative construction begins with the observation and analysis of elements of the outer world and culminates in the psychological. The author, in fact, gives substance to images and states of mind, thus generating the creative process, and moving to reality which emerges in the comparison with the inner world. In synthesis, Ishiguro’s work constitutes precisely a combination of fundamental elements in which impulses are fused with emotions. In other words, and following Martha Nussbaum’s theory, we immediately understand how the empathetic process caused by the author falls within Nussbaum’s definition: “it involves a participatory enactment of the situation” (Nussbaum, 2008, p. 336).