This blogpost is based on a discussion session run jointly
by the Fiction and Human Rights group at TORCH and the Law and Medical Ethics
discussion group from the Law Faculty.
I’ve tried to capture some of the main points raised by each of the main
discussants, who were: Dr Michelle Kelly (Faculty of English) and Dr ImogenGoold (Faculty of Law).
Imogen Goold
Imogen Goold focused on the theme of personhood, and what it
means to be a person. Never Let Me Go raises
an interesting legal conundrum where the clones, who appear not to have
personhood under the law in the novel, behave just like they are persons who do
have protection under the law.
She also raised the issue of the linguistic terminology in
the novel. The term ‘completing’ for dying is particularly interesting – both
euphemistic and suggesting that this is the purpose which Ruth Tommy and Kathy
have for their lives.
The characters in the novel are making organ donations, but
they are not really donations in that it is a case of forced altruism – doing
good for other people, but not choosing to be altruistic. Goold asks can it be
altruism if you have not chosen it? Another issue under the law is that these
are donations that lead to their death. Legally, this isn’t possible ‘IRL’. You cannot give a living donation that results
in death (which is a legal protection of people from themselves, eg a parent
who might willingly give a donation that led to their death if they were giving
life to their child).
So the law does direct people with what they can do with
their bodies. For the most part law has principle of autonomy; your choices are
the most important thing. This prevents society as moving towards a utilitarian
manner. (e.g. Tommy has four donations, that might save four people, therefore
it’s worth it). As a society we don’t take that into account even where it
might be the most utilitarian thing, with the greatest good for the most
people.
These protections are afforded to those who have legal
personhood – in the law you gain when you take your first breath, and retain it
to your death. Throughout the book there is the belief that if they can
demonstrate that they are in a real loving relationship (true love) they can
defer their donations, or (implicitly) that if they do higher quality art work;
if they can demonstrate the kind of qualities that legal persons have, they
will be allowed to be treated as having legal personhood, even if they don’t
realise that’s what they’re trying to do. That clones do not have personhood,
they are not capable of those things, is a fundamental assumption – but as the
book shows it isn’t true, they are just
people being treated badly.
Michelle Kelly
Kelly began by picking up on the language used in the novel.
It has a clear distinctive voice narrated through the character of Kathy. Ishiguro
harnesses ordinary language/the language
of altruism and care yoked to a rather gruesome reality. The gruesome reality
is normalised in the novel by the use of this language. This encourages us to
think about how language can normalise extreme, or horrible actions through the
banality of the language used to describe the medical horrors perpetrated in
the novel. The kind of language around donation and care and completion acts as
a kind of social immuno-suppressant.
Although Never Let Me
Go draws on the genre of sci-fi, the historical realism of the setting
situates it in the 1990s. Together with the normalising language this suggests
that shocking things are potentially coexisting with our own lived reality. This
opens the possibility of reading the novel
as an allegory for the inequality of our own society, for time and
production of different socio-economic classes under a system of inequality of
wealth, rather than as a dystopic near future or near past. Kelly raised the
idea of adoption or surrogacy or indeed the organ trade within the context of
the global south to north , and their inequality, as a parallel.
While cloning presents with enormous problems with ethical
and medical codes, we do already live with crude monetary estimates of value of
human life, and these are highlighted by the novel.
The easy identification for Never Let Me Go is with the form of Bildungsroman. The novel
clearly engages with this form: it features teenagers, a boarding school; and culture
and literature as means of improvement. However,
assimilation into society comes through
death rather than life: organs areliterally assimilated into the bodies of
others. It is a quantifiable improvement but that is at the level of population
rather than individual. In this it cannot be a Bildungsroman centred upon the
narrator – because her assimilation will come at the point of ‘completion’.
The book describes a population centred around long-lived
elite living at the expense of the lower class. If we’re locked into this as a
Bildungsroman with a single protagonist, it makes it difficult for us to look
at the problems that exist at the population level. Kelly suggested climate
change at being at this same level of things you can’t look at with the
individual novel. She also noted that the Bildungsroman form is central to
thinking about literature and human rights. [And I might personally introduce
the idea of Frankenstein as another
uncomfortable Bildungsroman.]
Kelly suggested that Ishiguro’s target in the novel is the
complicity and compliance of society as a whole.
The clones live a
constrained but rewarding life (culture etc). The novel suggests that culture
might coexist with a murderous regime; it might even enable it. The fundamental
idea at the basis of Hailsham is that the school feels that as long as they get
culture, it’s okay to kill them. This is the provocation of the novel: what is the
role of literature/ culture in enabling exploitation or resistance? We tend to
think of literature as a potential source of or provocation to social justice,
but in this it might be seen as a way of making the population happy to be
complicit.
Goold further suggested that there is a linguistic indoctrination as well
as a mental/ physical one – they are taught to be complicit – so that by the
time it dawns on them what they are for, they accept it because they are so
compliant – that is one of the shocking things about it, is how they accept it
fairly easily. Even when they go to find to the woman they think Ruth is cloned
from, they are not angry, they are
curious. This is part of what makes it so disquieting.
Kelly: in a way our
interpretation of personhood is a more emotional, reactive response to their
environment, so their lack of emotional reaction almost does make the clones
different, not-people – but in reality it’s a reaction to their
institutionalisation.
Goold went on to talk about the thought experiment by John Harriscalled the survival lottery. This is a real utilitarian approach in which you
opt in to the survival lottery, and if your number comes up, you die but all
your organs are taken to save, for example twenty other people. The reason you
would want to be in it is if you are, and you need an organ, you would get it. It feels uncomfortable. John
Harris argues that the rational thing to do is be in it. The difference from Never Let Me Go is that Kathy, Ruth and
Tommy have never opted in – nor will they ever get the option to benefit from
the system.
The discussion afterwards highlighted some more frightening
things about the novel. In particular, the uncanny parallels with our current
political situation. A member of the audience pointed out that naming something
allows it to become legitimate. Changing the word is a normalising mechanism,
which becomes embedded through repetition. The word that came to my mind was ‘altright’
– renaming white supremacy and neo-nazism in order to make it an acceptable
thing to be once more. We can be
programmed through language. Goold pointed out that this is the reason why
lawyers are so obsessive about words and definitions, because words govern what
space into which something can fall – they draw the bounds. Another audience
member point out that one of the very frightening things about the novel is
that there is nothing keeping them in place; we are all being conscripted and
forced to comply with something. A final frightening thought for teachers and
students alike: cloning is a redundant mechanism within the novel because it is
really about what we are being taught in schools, and how it indoctrinates us
into our society.
Posts
