Writing with Care: Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go"

Author(s): ANNE WHITEHEAD

Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 52, No. 1 (SPRING 2011), pp. 54-83
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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 ANNE WHITEHEAD

Writing with Care: Kazuo Ish

Never Let Me Go

Not for Profit (2010), Martha Nussbaum has diagnosed that

alongside a global economic crisis, a less visible, more insid-
ious catastrophe is also affecting Western societies, namely

against the increasing commercialization

baum sets out a vision of the arts, and
central to the functioning of a healthy
because they underpin skills of reason
tique, and secondly because they cultiva
and empathie citizens. Nussbaum's pa
humanities coincides, and to some deg
emergence of the medical humanities ov
Tying the notion of the "healthy" socie
health-care institutions and systems,
have pointed to a contemporary crisis of
that emerges out of a number of factors
bureaucratization and privatization o
fragmentation of the patient among su
thus diagnosed an ailing system of h
I would like to thank the following individuals for inv
paper at various stages of the drafting process: Patrici
at the 'Thinking with Feeling" seminar series at Durham
Jacobus, for inviting me to participate in the "Critici
Cambridge University in spring 2009; and Ulrike Tanc
me to give a keynote address at the conference "Contem
Violence, Trauma, and Loss," held at the Johannes G
October 2010.

Contemporary Literature 52, 1 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/11/0001-0054

© 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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 humanit
erature
ing bett
developi
be valua
practitio
of those
Nussbaum and the medical humanities, is a nexus of concern
with a prevailing "health" crisis (whether of democracy or of
systems of care), for which the revitalization of the humanities
emerges as the necessary panacea, because the arts, and espe-
cially literature, make us more enlightened and sensitive citizens
and/or professionals.
It is not my intention to make light of the current crisis in the
arts and humanities that Nussbaum identifies. My point of con-
tention in this essay is rather with how predominant responses
to this crisis are positioning literature as productive of an
empathie sensibility, and such a sensibility as an inherently
moral virtue. This approach has been recently and persuasively
critiqued by Suzanne Keen, for example, who is highly skeptical
of the current received wisdom about the ethical effects of novel-
reading, in particular - namely, that imaginative engagement
and identification with works of fiction can help us to become
more sensitive and altruistic individuals. Directly contesting
Nussbaum' s claims that reading leads consequentially to empa-
thy, compassion, and social justice, Keen asserts:
I do not assume from the outset that empathy for fictional characters
necessarily translates into. . . "nicer" human behavior. I ask whether the
effort of imagining fictive lives, as George Eliot believed, can train a
reader's sympathetic imagining of real others in her actual world, and I
inquire how we might be able to tell if it happened. I acknowledge that
it would be gratifying to discover that reading Henry James makes us
better world citizens, but I wonder whether the expenditure of shared
feeling on fictional characters might not waste what little attention we

1 . At the forefront of the strand of medical humanities that privileges reading as empa-
thy is Professor Rita Charon's narrative competency course, run as part of the clinical
skills program at Columbia University. Her vision of a narrative-based medicine is most
fully explicated in Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (2006).

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 56 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

have for others on nonexistent entities, or at b

readers are simply endowed with empathetic d
(xxv)

Keen does not dispute, then, that readers bring empathy to their
encounters with fiction; what is at issue for her is whether this
attitude then results in altruistic, caring actions on behalf of real
others. To require that reading literature yields immediate and
measurable ethical and political effects is, she concludes, to put
"too great a burden on both empathy and the novel" (168).
These contemporary debates regarding the value of the arts
and humanities, and the empathetic effects of literature on read-
ers, are central to Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go
(2005). Narrated by thirty-one-year-old Kathy H., the novel looks
back to her life at the boarding school of Hailsham and the close
friendships that she developed there with her fellow school-
mates Tommy and Ruth. The education at Hailsham is firmly
rooted in the arts, with the students regularly producing art-
works and reading literature, with a particular emphasis on the
Victorian novel. As the plot unfolds, Ishiguro appears to offer a
defense of the humanities that is akin to Nussbaunťs. The stu-
dents are, we learn, being trained as professional "carers," and
their literary and artistic education seems to underpin their
undeniably close affective bonds and their altruistic behavior
toward one another. According to the logic of the teachers, or
"guardians," at Hailsham, the humanities also humanize the
cloned students, making them more "like us" (240); indeed, the
final section of the novel portrays Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth as
loving and sensitive individuals, even if they are not accorded
the status and rights of citizens within the dystopian political
system that has brought them into being. This essay argues, how-
ever, that Ishiguro's novel complicates this vision of the human-
ities and to a large extent unravels the connections that
Nussbaum makes between reading, empathy, caring, and the
healthy society. Ishiguro's alternative England requires absolute
passivity and acquiescence from the clones, whom it has created
entirely for the purposes of organ harvesting once they reach
maturity. Although reading works of Victorian fiction - in par-
ticular, of Nussbaunťs favored author George Eliot - may culti-

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 vate go
their contact with the Victorian novel also offers the clones an

inappropriate imaginative template of social advancement that

raises false hopes in a society that denies them any future.
Reviewed in this light, the humanities education at Hailsham is
at best a deception or lie, and at worst, complicit with the system
of political oppression to which the clones are subject. Reading
literature, like the activity of care itself with which it is closely
paralleled, is seen to offer minor compensations at the expense
of broader political vision, and therefore to restrict rather than
enlarge the imaginative capacities of its readers. In addition,
I propose that empathy is rendered morally ambiguous by
Ishiguro, so that it no longer represents - as in Nussbaum - an
inherent virtue. I investigate, in particular, the paradoxical basis
of the entire system of organ donation in a mode of care or empa-
thy, which seeks to reduce the pain and suffering of family and
friends. Here, then, one of the key moral dangers of basing a
society or politics on empathy is exposed: it is often governed
by identity and similarity, and hence is prone to exclusion and
ethnocentrism. Empathy, in other words, is not unambiguously
beneficial, and it can lead as readily to exploitation and suffering
as to more altruistic behaviors.
Where, then, does this leave us in terms of the central question
that I posed at the outset - namely, the value of the arts and
humanities, and more particularly of literature? In the closing
sections of this essay, I turn to the question of why we might
invest time (and money) in reading a novel such as Never Let Me
Go; through this analysis, I also seek to reflect more broadly on
how we might define, and defend, the "value" of contemporary
literature. I contend that reading contemporary fiction does have
incontrovertible value, but not in as instrumental a manner as
Nussbaum might suggest. I draw on Derek Attridge to propose
that the performative element of the contemporary novel is par-
ticularly crucial to its mode of intervention.2 I examine first

2. Attridge bases his argument largely in the fiction of J. M. Coetzee; nevertheless,

while sensitive to the South African dimension of his fiction, Attridge also positions
Coetzee as representative of the ethical importance of contemporary literature and as

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 58 • CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Ishiguro' s use of second-person address

device commonly used in Victorian fic
thetic connection. In Never Let Me Go, h
unsettle the reader, and to call into que
is indeed positioned in relation to Kat
detailed analysis of the ending of Ishigu
gest, Ishiguro stages the act of reading i
the reader's experience of finishing the b
Kathy' s own closing action of moving o
behind. At the same time, the resonan
paragraph holds our attention, as Kath
while before getting into her car and d
difficulty of "letting go" of that past
enacted by both Kathy and the reader
occupy an uneasy position, caught betwe
holding on and letting go, and is thereby
erful and unresolved dilemma of care or
In arguing for the value of contempora
ing of Never Let Me Go therefore leads a
platitudes of a behavioral model such as
in turn, unsurprisingly, grounded in a
nineteenth-century literature - to end u
tion that historian Dominick LaCap
"empathie unsettlement" (41-42). Fo
describes a mode of identification that
of victims' painful experience, while it ca
sibility in ourselves of behaviors that
resemblances to those of perpetrators; I
Ishiguro deliberately destabilizes our ide
and the other clones and raises uncomfo
ing our proximity to those who benefit fro
The importance of such complex, uneasy
identification - which, coupled with a la
guidance, characterize a great number of

central to current debates within literary studies. I dra

own reading of Ishiguro's performative textual device
within an important strand of contemporary fiction, a s
Coetzee himself.

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 fiction -
ductive
they sel
readers,
tions of
and care.

Locating a Language of Care

On the opening two pages of Never Let Me Go, the word "carer"
is repeated no fewer than nine times as the narrator, Kathy H.,
reflects on her own capacities in this role. The word itself has
recently taken on a distinct resonance: defined by The Oxford
English Dictionary as designating a "family member or paid
helper who regularly looks after a child or a sick, elderly, or
disabled person," its first recorded usage in this sense, as John
Mullan notes, was in 1978 (108). Although the word "carer"
therefore designates a category of labor, it nevertheless slides
between paid employment and the work of those obliged
through familial responsibility to look after those who can no
longer meet their own needs (in which case, is it also affective
labor, and is the affect necessarily positive, or is the work some-
times resentfully undertaken?). Kathy' s opening remarks locate
the word within discourses of professionalism and competency.
Looking back over her eleven years as a carer, she considers that
she has been good at her job, both in her own judgment and in
the eyes of her employers, who are designated simply as "them."
Her abilities are measured by her charges (or "donors") achiev-
ing swift recovery times, and through her capacity to prevent
them from becoming "agitated." Although she acknowledges
that there are inconsistencies in the professional system ("I can
think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years
despite being a complete waste of space"), she nevertheless
regards her own extended term of employment as a deserved
reward for her "great record" (3). As Kathy proceeds, however,
the occupational discourse begins to give way to a more affective
register. She acknowledges that where she has been able to exer-
cise choice, she has acted as carer for "[her] own kind" (former

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 60 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

students, especially from Hailsham) and th

job that the carer "feel for [her] donors e
(4). The novel therefore opens not only by
the word itself, but also by drawing out
and ambivalences that reside within it, be
competency and professionalism, on th
guages of affect and feeling, on the other.
As the plot of Ishiguro's novel unravels, t
the seemingly innocuous word also concea
that, within this alternative England, ch
raised in isolation from other children.3 O
hood, they become "donors," and their or
a series of operations and used to treat hu
ably, the clones make it through four don
they die, or "complete," in the euphem
novel. Before becoming donors, most o
period of time as "carers," traveling betw
centers across the country and tending to
making donations, both preparing them
advance of an operation for possible "com
them afterwards. Reread in this light, Kat
raises troubling and uneasy questions. H
she will stop being a carer after another ei
she will then become a donor herself. Her
professional success and with minor incon
tem mean that she is not addressing eithe
death or the larger inequities and injustice
viewed in this light, a form of labor th
because Kathy is making a positive diff
venting "agitation"), or - given the politic
guro's choice of word here - is it a m
resistance and unrest, securing passive com

3. Although Ishiguro's novel consciously works within a

dystopic fiction, which includes Aldous Huxley's Brave
Orwell's 1984 (1949), Never Let Me Go notably departs fro
extrapolating its alternative imagining of the present not int
past. I concur with Gabriele Griffin (653) that this device
tionality or continuity between the debates alluded to in

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 less, ex
Kathy's
regardin
of Kathy
efficien
creates h
as to wh
Ishiguro
recent p
England
yet as G
past is i
debates
particula
biotechn
and she
2000s w
agenda.4
disinter
actually
biotechn
Even as
thus beg
organs
direction
notes, m
differen
ing, org
preoccu
from th
question
Ishigur
tions su

4. These de
purposes of
case of Zain
successfully
baby's umb

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 62 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

novel is suggestive of a continuity into th

issues to which it alludes. In his diagnosis o
ills of the nation, Tony Judt indicates tha
are currently suffering from the effects of a
privatization": "[I]n the UK between 1979
Thatcher and Major years) the private sect
services contracted out by government ros
with the sharpest increase in residential car
dren and the mentally ill. Newly privatize
ters naturally reduced the quality of servic
order to increase profits and dividends"
continued unabated into the twenty-first c
public services into what Judt describes as "
out private providers" (119). Eva Feder Kitta
if we look at who engages in paid care work
is often supplied by migrants or noncitize
precisely the workers who tolerate the poor
or status, and long working hours.5 She th
exists a class of workers . . . who possess n
nor the protections of citizenship . . . but w
stitute a crucial part of the labor force that
work" (141). While Ishiguro's novel canno
be about such issues, he nevertheless portra
sion of them in his dystopic England of
Kathy repeatedly seeks to reassure herself
improvements to the recovery centers, th
minimum cost and maximum profit: she n
facility of Kingsfield, for example, which w
the 1960s, "a general feeling [that] they nev
converting the place" (199). A profit-driven
concertingly underpins, legitimates, and
creation of the "donation" system itself. Ex
care work as well as to end their own lives
isolated and run-down treatment centers,
engage questions of class concerning who i

5. Kittay's observation is made with particular reference

also has clear resonance in Britain and Europe, where (im)mig
the hands-on care work.

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 for" in
socially
in term
In Neve
manner the issues of care and of what it means to be a "carer/'

Bruce Robbins notes that Ishiguro' s dystopic version of British

society holds up for inspection "a welfare-state vision of life"
and questions whether it represents "social justice" or more
properly "the injustice enforced by capitalist competition" (204).
The novel asks whether, within a radically materialist society
that reduces humans to collections of organs or body parts, a
language of care can still be articulated, and if so, where such a
language might be located. Does a professional language of care
inevitably assume the bureaucratized discourse of efficiency and
targets? Can an affective register exist within an occupational
context of care, or have the two become mutually exclusive? In
reflecting on these questions in literature, Ishiguro notably also
meditates on the role and value of literature within a profit-
driven, materialist culture. Is it still possible, the novel asks, to
subscribe to the Romantic myth that literature can somehow
redeem us? Does art have a value beyond the merely utilitarian,
and how can that be assessed? Can literature express our inner-
most selves (our "souls"), and does the language of the sympa-
thetic imagination provide a helpful or an adequate vocabulary
to articulate relations of care? It is notable in this context that

Never Let Me Go repeatedly stages acts of storytelling and read-

ing. The clones tell each other various stories of who they are or
might be. They also read works of literature, especially the Vic-
torian novel. They are encouraged at Hailsham to produce art-
work, around which stories are then articulated both by the
clones and by their guardians. In what follows, I argue that
Ishiguro does not provide a single (or simple) answer as to the
valence of art in a bioconsumerist society. Although Kathy places
belief in the notion that art can save her, this premise is revealed
to be a false faith. Ishiguro also implies that any politics or ethics
based on empathy and identification is problematic in its
assumption of a receptive audience or listener. Yet the novel, it
seems, cannot altogether abandon hope in the literary enterprise:

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 64 - CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

for all of the potential pitfalls and problem

enable us to relate ourselves to others and
however tentatively, a language of care; a
a displaced version of our own social enviro
us not only with relations of empathy bu
fortable questions of implication and com

Relating Stories

Of central importance in Never Let Me Go

clones as "like" or "unlike" us, which in tu
what it means to be human and how far relations of care extend.
Within the society depicted in the novel, the clones are regarded
as nonhuman and are treated accordingly. They are raised in
isolation from "ordinary" people, and in the brief adulthood that
is allotted to them, they continue to inhabit a world that is at a
social remove: Kathy leads an insulated existence, either staying
in various recovery centers or traveling between them on indis-
tinguishable stretches of motorway. There is, however, some
political desire to see the clones as more "like us," and this is
represented through the institution of Hailsham where Kathy is
brought up. In depicting the clones, Ishiguro performs a delicate
balancing act that affords no easy resolution of their status. They
are repeatedly described using animalized imagery - arguably
most evident when Madame, one of the few outside visitors to
Hailsham, who arrives once or twice a year to take away the best
of the students' artwork, reacts with instinctive repulsion toward
the students, as if they were spiders. This reflex first occurs when
she unexpectedly encounters a group of students at Hailsham
and is repeated when Kathy and Tommy approach her years
later to request a deferral. Ishiguro makes clear that Madame' s
is not merely a personal response through former Hailsham
teacher Miss Emily's subsequent acknowledgement: "We're all
afraid of you. I myself had to fight back my dread of you almost
every day I was at Hailsham" (246). The reaction of fear itself
offers competing interpretations, however, and is ambivalently
suspended between a natural repulsion toward the clones them-
selves and a denial of the illness and mortality that they represent.

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 At the C
of form
clones co
believe t
dence" o
tomatic
In sugge
reveals
another
them in
first-pe
she is a
a certain
holding
us to th
such abs
man." In
in her r
we thin
relate to
in turn
more co
the "non
Let Me G
the very
that the boundaries between "human" and "non human" are
blurred or contaminated, because "their [the clones'] organs sur-
vive in others' bodies" (652).
The question of relationality, and its attendant concern for the
extension of care or compassion, is intimately related by Ishiguro
to the question of art and its value. At Hailsham, the students
produce artwork, a selection of which is taken away from the
institution by Madame, who puts it in her "gallery." As the stu-
dents grow into adulthood and move closer to becoming donors
themselves, they build on rumor and remembered half-truths
from Hailsham to create the myth of "deferral": that if two Hail-
sham students can prove that they truly love each other, they can
request that their donations be put back for a number of years.

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 66 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Kathy and Tommy believe that their artw

the light of who they are: they subscribe
that it is an expression of their "souls'' or
so would reveal whether a couple who app
loved each other. Tommy accordingly ob
Kath, what [Madame's] got reveals our s
students learn, however, through thei
Madame and Miss Emily, is the harsh truth
significant not for who it reveals but for its
Miss Emily corrects the students' misconc
tating precision: "We took away your ar
souls at all " (238). Within the materialist c
them, the students can be seen only in th
nonhuman binary. In what Griffin has ter
the material" (655), the guardians - wel
they may be - demonstrate that they are
conceptual limitations as those whom t
namely those who would rear the clones i
tions because they would deny them "s
humanity. Although they classify the c
other side of the binary, and therefore as
tected childhood that Hailsham is constr
guardians, too, reduce the students to cat
difference. Their reading of the students
assumes that its value is purely utilitarian
logical "evidence" that will then be used t
own political ends or gains); for them, it se
redemptive purpose.6

6. This account of the guardians' reading of the pictu

Tommy's artwork at the Cottages has been described. As
of animals initially seem very mechanical: 'The first imp
if you took the back off a radio set: tiny canals, weaving
wheels were all drawn with obsessive precision" (171). On
the drawings speak to Kathy of "something . . . vulnerab
worried as he created them about "how they'd protect the
us through his description of the drawings to read them in
do the curious, mechanistic animals suggest an artist w
cannot adequately represent his interior or "soul," or doe
Tommy's own fears and desire for protection? When w

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 Kathy a
iniscent
sizes th
who determine the narrow confines within which their lives can

be lived. The highest authority to whom they can appeal is their

former guardians, and they learn that they are (and have always
been) powerless to intervene on their behalf. The scene recalls
Jean-François Lyotard's différend, in which a damage is claimed
but refused recognition. As Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg
point out, although judgment is called for in the différend, "there
is no shared ground or language from which the judgement can
be made" (231). The lack of common language between the
clones and their guardians is first represented by Ishiguro
through the incompatible interpretations of the students' art-
work. It is subsequently reinforced in the impasse between
Kathy's and Madame's readings of Judy Bridgewater's song
"Never Let Me Go." For Kathy, the song represents the combined
happiness and anguish of holding an imagined baby close to her,
and it speaks of her unfulfillable "human" desire both to have
babies and to have experienced an intimate connection or bond
with a mother. Madame, however, can see only her own dream
of holding onto an older, kinder world, which is embodied in
the institution of Hailsham. There is an aporia between Kathy's
story of who she is or might be and Madame's myopic preoc-
cupation with her own political cause or agenda of demonstrat-
ing that if the clones were raised in a humane and cultivated
environment, they would become "fully human," defined for her
as being "as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human
being" (239). This gap between the two interpretations of the
song not only cannot be bridged, but also tragically fails to reg-
ister that the students' true creativity lies in the narratives of
possibility (whether of "deferral" or of an unattainable maternal
bond) that they relate to themselves and each other, and finally
to her. The absence of any terms of understanding or reciprocity
between the clones and their guardians warns of the hazards of
placing too much faith (as Kathy and Tommy do) in processes

guardians' misreading of the artwork for what it can tell us about the clones' status, there
is arguably an unsettling sense of recognition and complicity.

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 68 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

of empathy and compassion; where, the

faced with misrecognition and refusal?
In the intimate love between Tommy an
the quiet compassion with which Kathy, T
tiate their relationships in the little time
Ishiguro leaves us with little doubt that
"human" feeling than those who brought
who impose the system of donation upon
however, that it is not only in their affec
mitments that the clones reveal affinities t
particularly in the stories that they tell -
turn underpinned by their affective driv
larly powerful in the novel is the myth o
culates at the Cottages. As Griffin observe
locus of messiness or categorical indistinct
betrays that the clones "are made from a
they actually 'embod[y] the closest relatio
it also speaks eloquently of the clones7 desi
and belonging. The search for "possibles,"
a trip to Norfolk to investigate rumors of
nal, can accordingly be closely related t
conception of "relating narratives." For Ca
of us a fundamental desire to tell others
narrative of ourselves which is also necess
needing to tell the story from its beginnings
others to inform us about our birth or
words: "Autobiographical memory always
is incomplete from the beginning. It is n
the narration told by others, in order for th
where it really began; it is this first chapter
narratable self stubbornly seeks with a
Kathy tells her own story as she prepares

7. Griffin quotes Debbora Battaglia (506). As Griffin no

also one of the sections in the novel when Ishiguro's indi
cloning works becomes particularly marked. He presents
dents' speculations but deliberately does not resolve thei
thought you should be looking for a person twenty to thi
the sort of age a normal parent would be. But others clai
They could have used babies, old people, what difference

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 stage of
describe
ries" (34
this as a
What is
has regi
birth an
adopts t
not "a p
focus is
relative
all there is: she does not have a surname because she does not

have a family, and her relationships with her fellow students

accordingly take on the strength and ambivalence of family rela-
tions. Their shared memories of Hailsham and the Cottages pro-
vide the sticking points which both create tensions to be
overcome and glue them inextricably together.
In the clones' search for "possibles," their stubborn desire to
fill in the missing "first chapter" of their stories is movingly
revealed. In the absence of all natural connection to others, the
clones seek to create or invent their pasts through speculativ
relations and connections. In part, this is an exercise in self-
realization and in imagining who they might have been - a nar-
ration of the lives they have the potential to lead. Kathy
accordingly explains, "all of us, to varying degrees, believed that
when you saw the person you were copied from, you'd get some
insight into who you were deep down, and maybe too, you'd
see something of what your life held in store" (127). Ruth's "pos-
sible" therefore corresponds closely to the idealized future that
she has imagined for herself, based on an advertisement for an
office job. In her frustration at having her desires disappointed
Ruth subsequently articulates a very different sense of who the
clones are and where they have come from, but this, too, is an
alternative reimagining of the lives that could be theirs, as well
as an angry recognition of how they are viewed by society: "If
you want to look for possibles, if you want to do it properly, then
you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins. Look down the
toilet, that's where you'll find where we all came from" (152

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 70 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

53). It also notably corresponds with Kat

yet fully articulated, narrative of her own
represented in her feverish scanning of
porn magazines for signs of recognit
Cavarero indicates, however, the content
tive" is less important than the very att
inadequate, to make a story of oneself, t
rative of who one is and could become; t
reveals a fundamentally human need,
evokes in the reader what Mullan has t
principles of human sympathy" (113). Th
powerfully encapsulate the clones' reachi
with ordinary people, and they accordin
rocal echo in us.8 If Ishiguro thus critique
pathetic imagination within the dystop
(Madame and Miss Emily have no share
understanding with Kathy and Tommy u
pathetic imagining could be founded), it
is only to reinstate such a literary mo
reader.

And yet this assessment, too, fails to cap

ity of Ishiguro's narrative mode. As m
(with telling frustration), Kathy is limit
imagination; in the words of Mullan, s
unreliable narrator, as an inadequate nar
rie likewise observes that although the no
reflecting on her limited future as a donor,
sense of development between beginning
tains throughout a tone of "cheerful opt
lack of maturity or growth is in particul
the Victorian novels that she herself read
the Cottages, which offer her a range of
of self-development and individual advan
these novels, Kathy appears in certain
encounter at Hailsham with "nineteenth-

8. Mullan interestingly adds that the allure of such a q

telling "in a culture that is preoccupied, in any number
discovery' of genealogy" (113).

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missed as "more or less useless" because it is consulted for the
purely utilitarian purposes of sex education (90). Kathy's sub-
sequent reading at the Cottages of George Elioťs Daniel Deronda
seems equally unpromising, becoming the cause of an argument
with Ruth, who insists on outlining the plot to her "just as I knew
she would" (111). It is notable, however, that Ishiguro holds our
attention on Elioťs novel: not only is its title repeated three times
in quick succession when Kathy initially outlines the quarrel, but
when she subsequently positions the incident as an important
turning point, the title is again invoked in her reference to "the
Daniel Deronda business" (115). In plot terms, Kathy's disagree-
ment with Ruth over the novel significantly provides the imme-
diate background both to the search for Ruth's "possible" and to
the myth of "deferral."9
Returning again to the (misplaced) stories of possibility that
the students tell to themselves and each other, we can discern a
certain leakage or porosity between these narratives and Daniel
Deronda, which suggests that something of the students' reading
is being absorbed and reproduced by them. Many works of Vic-
torian fiction concern orphaned children, and Daniel Deronda is
no exception. The eponymous protagonist is not only ignorant
of his true parentage but also feels that his ill-defined family
background deprives him of a clear future direction. In Daniel's
case, his state of ignorance and uncertainty is abruptly ended by
the arrival of a letter from his mother, informing him that both
of his parents were Jewish. Following this revelation, Daniel
begins to see the world anew, and we are informed, "It was as
if he had found an added soul in finding his ancestry" (745). The
clones' myth of "possibles," which follows shortly after Kathy's
quarrel with Ruth, is suggestive, I have already argued, of an
analogous desire to fill in the missing "first chapter" of their lives
and thereby to secure a sense of identity. Placed in dialogue with

9. In an interview with Sean Matthews, Ishiguro has denied giving particular signifi-
cance to the novel, observing: "I read Daniel Deronda years ago and I can't remember
what it is about, I don't remember enough about it to use it in that way. . . . Having said
which, if people want to [go and read the book and find echoes], that's fine with me"
(124). Certainly his repetition of the title of Eliot's novel implicitly invites the reader to
speculate on its particular significance to the clones' situation.

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 72 « CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

their reading of Victorian fiction, howev

novels themselves raise in the clones a fal
fulfilled: they are not orphans but clones
straightforwardly resolve questions of
Daniel Deronda is also a narrative of individual advancement.

Once Daniel has discovered his Jewish heritage, he marries

Mirah, stepping into the roles of husband and father. He also
assumes the patriarchal position of future religious leader with
the death of his former mentor Mordecai. This reassuring belief
in upward mobility, prevalent in so much nineteenth-century fic-
tion, finds alternative expression in the students' myth of "defer
ral"; their narrative articulates the belief that certain Hailsham
students can rise above the common lot assigned to the clone
and be exempted from the "donation" program. Here, then,
Ishiguro seems to complicate once again the question of the
value of literature, which falsely raises the aspirations of th
clones in a society that denies them any prospect of advance
ment. If the consoling fictions of "possibles" and "deferrals,"
built from the Victorian novels that the clones read, articulate
entirely misleading and inappropriate hopes and desires, to
what extent can literature be said to be complicit with, or at least
implicated in, the social structures of oppression to which they
are subject?
In considering this question, it is worthy of note that, in their
isolated condition, the clones can access only the novels that are
provided for them by their guardians, which suggests that what
they infer from reading nineteenth-century fiction is an intended
effect of their education. Does the production of false hope
accordingly serve the interests of Hailsham in protecting the stu-
dents from, or not allowing them fully to recognize, the reality
of the system in which they are confined? Returning with this in
mind to Kathy and Tommy's appeal for a deferral, we can see
that Lyotard's notion of the différend does not quite capture what
is at stake, for the clones are not entirely cognizant of the damage
or harm that has been inflicted upon them. In requesting defer-
ral, they cling to the belief, absorbed from their reading, that they
can be exceptions to the rule, that merit (whether in producing
artwork that is worthy of being in the "gallery" or in simply

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 loving eac
accordingly
the merit
being reco
Tightness
ing" (203).
promulgati
producing
system and
regard, lit
cussion of
Kathy wit
simultaneo
cates that
tion to up
false) ficti
uous activi
ful, when
others' live
ertheless p
("agitation"
out interro
that under
I have indi
at work in
with Kathy
through va
the "deferr
ates a stron
also observ
cated both
frustrating
ral, she qu
reprisal ag
also emplo
Kathy cons
which rais
world that

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 74 • CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

within her own world, or, finding no em

does she seek to bear witness to an unknown and unknowable

future reader? More broadly, Ishiguro raises not entirely com-

fortable questions concerning the reader's relation to and
complicity in the social injustices that he depicts. This important
aspect of the novel, which again troubles the myth of the sym-
pathetic imagination by highlighting and calling into question
the reader's desire to identify with the victim of injustice, will
constitute the focus of my next section.

Reading with Care

From the opening page of the novel, Kathy's narrative is con-
sciously addressed to an intended listener. She observes: "I know
carers, working now, who are just as good [as me] and don't get
half the credit. If you're one of them, I can understand how you
might get resentful - about my bedsit, my car, above all, the way
I get to pick and choose who I look after" (3). As Mullan notes,
the "you" to whom she speaks is immediately designated as
"someone like herself, a 'carer/ a former 'student/ another
'clone'" (107). This mode of address recurs throughout the novel,
for example in the repeated phrase "I don't know how it was
where you were" (12, 62), which again implies that her listener
is a fellow clone and carer, although not necessarily from a
"privileged" institution such as Hailsham. Kathy's assumptions
speak of her paucity of imagination and also of the insularity of
her life; how can she imagine difference when she has known
only others like herself? But what is its effect on the reader? To
what extent do we merge with the internal addressee, and what
is its intended function? Griffin has noted that the incorporation
of the addressee "gestures towards another disposition in con-
temporary culture - that of the witness, testimonial, confes-
sional, passivity . . . rather than intervention" (657-58). Instead
of "agitating" against the system, Kathy writes a confessional
narrative, an account of her life which, moreover, positions her
reader as a fellow victim and passive observer (preoccupied with
the same minor compensations and injustices as herself). Uncrit-
ical acceptance of the addressee position posited by the novel

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 therefore
or of not
that are ta
incorpora
Kathy's pe
world, so t
ers" throu
her story.
ardous in i
pliance wi
himself im
sponding f
Megan Bol
reading th
flective mo
witness to
empathize
implicated
the other
Let Me Go
relations i
recognition
and of the
These ques
with which
we are not
tion like o
her dystop
tion of where we in fact are. What is the relation between our
society and the dystopic England that Ishiguro depicts? To what
extent do suggested continuities between the two entail that we
remain implicated in his dystopic past, and how does it in turn
inform and critique the twenty-first-century social landscape?
Never Let Me Go is to a certain degree reminiscent of Ishiguro' s
best-known novel, The Remains of the Day (1989). Through the
limited and unemotional narration of the butler Stevens, Ishi-
guro revealed in his earlier work that the beauty and dignity of
the interwar British landscape concealed a shameful implication,

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 76 • CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

through Stevens' s employer Lord Darlin

thies, in the horrors perpetrated und
opening page of Never Let Me Go, the
termed a "mild chill" (291) around Ka
"carer" and "donation," and the subseque
harvesting eloquently communicate the
can be used both to disguise and no
bureaucratized ordinariness of the term
unavoidably calls to mind Hannah A
description of the "banality of evil," em
caust in such euphemistic phrases as "ev
and "Final Solution." Through historic
opens up in Never Let Me Go a critique
denial; the "donation" system is made po
those involved as both donors and recipie
ness and turn their heads away. Throug
the reader not to replicate Kathy's limita
understanding. He challenges us to becom
and as Tommy does only briefly and int
stirred to anger by the inequities that d
the lives of the clones. If Never Let Me Go therefore echoes The
Remains of the Day in evoking the history of the Holocaust as a
reminder of the dangers inherent in looking away, preferring not
to know, it notably departs from its predecessor in that its rele-
vance is primarily to contemporary political concerns: the practice
of organ harvesting, which is, in the words of McDonald, "a
largely unspoken but widely recognized fact of life" (76); the
cluster of biotechnological developments previously cited; and
the range of issues, earlier highlighted, arising out of a profit-
driven culture of care.
I have argued in the preceding paragraph that Ishiguro draws
the reader toward a critique of Kathy's perspective; the question
therefore inevitably arises as to whether readers can, or should,
adopt an alternative identification with the "humans" in the
novel. Does Ishiguro ask us to empathize with the oppressor,
and thereby to confront uncomfortable questions of implication
and complicity? Although Kathy's isolation from ordinary peo-
ple does not permit the reader much of a basis for identification,

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 Miss Em
from th
their ow
not die
a long t
if they
like us"
society
tions of
whom
Avishai
itself: "
ego is co
form, f
caring f
nature,
who are
and fri
beyond
at anoth
potentia
and inte
represen
is a] los
gated co
ple (less
to ourse
(185). Th
inequali
spondin
not to c
raises: "
leges - i
diagnosi
if we, to
sense th
seeking
our eye

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 78 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

organs are being excised, and excised in

can go merrily forward" (202)? Althoug
be too strong a term for the reader's rela
people who profit from the clones in Nev
nevertheless invites us to examine our (co
them. We are thereby brought back ag
whether care is an inherent good (how
seeks the best for others?); or whether
ambivalent and troubling than this.

Literature, Performativity, and Ethics

As the reader comes toward the end of N
implications of being a "carer" have accum
negative significance: care work, it seems
for political "agitation," and it can perp
existing social inequalities. In his final mee
he asks her not to be his carer any more,
most explicit criticism of care work in the
Kathy' s belief in the "importance]" of
Although she defends her activity as "ma
to what a donor's life is actually like," To
that the harsh realities of the system rem
donors will all donate, just the same, and
(258). Are readers left, then, with a cri
Ishiguro also suggest the possibility of a m
driven language of care? If so, where m
exist? The focus of the novel's conclusion
between Kathy (as "carer") and the dying T
himself with the other donors once he learns that deferral is
impossible. Although Kathy and Tommy begin to be lovers only
when she becomes his professional carer, Ishiguro does not
thereby imply that the affective and occupational discourses of
care can be brought together. The most unselfish act in the novel
is Tommy's insistence that Kathy should not nurse him through
his fourth (and final) donation: "I don't want to be that way in
front of you" (257). His selfless letting go of Kathy recognizes
that the two aspects of her role as "carer," her emotional feelings

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 for him
ciled; as
profess
sion also
above, o
those clo
provided
is Tomm
alternat
needs of
sometim
The que
the endi
shortly
in Norf
the place
barbed-w
and tan
windblow
place of

It was lik
some of it
and these
see, flapp
was the on
the wind
a little fa
a couple o
the flappi
along the
spot wher
and I was

10. As child
corner" of
property fo
search for
Tommy fin
tape.

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 80 « CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across t

get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd w
(263)

Kathy briefly indulges the notion that Tommy, too, will wash up
here; but she does not allow her imagination to extend too far.
Even as she pictures Tommy advancing toward her, the hesitant
"maybe" intrudes, calling her back to reality. In the final line of
the novel, she leaves the field, and all that it represents, behind:
"I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to
wherever it was I was supposed to be."
The Norfolk field seems, powerfully, to designate the novel
itself: Kathy' s narrative has, like the wire, caught and held all of
the things that she has lost in the course of her life. According
to the materialist logic of Ishiguro's dystopic society, all of these
things, including Tommy and Ruth (and Kathy herself), repre-
sent a form of "strange rubbish": not only are the clones them-
selves eminently disposable, but Ruth has claimed that they
might also be cloned from the "trash" of society (152). Kathy' s
story seeks to reclaim this "rubbish," to assert that these lives
cannot simply be disposed of as so much matter or refuse, but
claim their own value, have their own dignity and worth. The
haunting beauty of Ishiguro's prose in the closing paragraph re-
creates the rubbish-strewn field as epitaph, in the same way that
Kathy' s narrative has caught and held the lives of what society
designates as trash, using art to redeem and regenerate what has
so thoughtlessly and carelessly been thrown away. If Madame
suggests to Kathy and Tommy that their faith in the redemptive
power of art is an illusion, the novel's ending seems, quietly but
decisively, to resist such a conclusion. Art cannot save us in any
straightforwardly utilitarian way, it is true; it cannot defer or
delay the donations. But Ishiguro's ending implies that art can
and does still matter in contemporary cultures of commodifica-
tion - indeed, perhaps now more than ever. As Attridge has
aptly noted, literature resists instrumental readings such as
Kathy, Tommy, and Madame perform at differing moments in
the novel: "literature . . . solves no problems and saves no souls"
(Singularity 4). Rather, the literary reorients us from expectations
of profit or gain toward questions of ethics. Literature achieves

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 this eff
takes on
observes
stood as
when w
as we re
Returni
I propos
reader;
powerfu
implicit
leaving
"suppose
us: "nev
disengag
with th
onto thi
concert
to "let [
novel's
more of
Kathy's
mode of
is to car
an abilit
closest t
in the c
like Kat
hold on
too poss
implies,
of its li
the nov
answers
asks us
ending s
somethi
to the e

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 82 - CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

how it is that we in turn are affected (or eff

the telling of stories.

Newcastle Universit

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