Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Science and the cultural imaginary: the case of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360903000570

1470-1308

Gabriele Griffin,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Louis Menand, ‘Something about Kathy’ New Yorker, 28 March 2005, at http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/050328crbo_books1, accessed 22 May 2006. M. John Harrison, ‘Clone alone’ The Guardian, 26 February 2005, at http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,5134641-99930,00.html; David Kipen, ‘Ishiguro imagines love among clones’ San Francisco Chronicle, 14 April 2005, at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/14/DDGRTC72MV1.DT; James Browning, ‘Hello, Dolly: When we were organs: Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro pens a “1984” for the bioengineering age’ Village Voice, 29 March 2005, at http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=62509&page=browning&iss; Jim Barloon, ‘The downside with designer genes’ Houston Chronicle, 27 May 2005, at http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/ae/books/reviews/3200043, all accessed 22 May 2006. Harper Barnes, ‘Ishiguro's chilling tale rooted in SF’ STLToday [St.Louis Today], 10 April 2005, at http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/emaf.nsf/Popup?/ReadForm&db=stltoday%5Centert…, accessed 22 May 2006. Alex Clark, ‘Never let me go’ The Guardian, 19 February 2006, at http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,1712898,00.html, accessed 22 May 2006. Susan Squier, ‘From Omega to Mr. Adam: The importance of literature for feminist science studies’, Science, Technology, and Human Values 24.1 (Winter 1999), pp. 132–158. p. 153. Eugene Thacker, ‘The science fiction of technoscience: The politics of simulation and a challenge for new media art’, Leonardo 34.2(2001), pp. 155–158. Donald MacLeod, ‘Cautious revolutionary’, The Guardian, 26 July 2005, at http://education.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,5246916-108966,00.html, accessed 22 May 2006. See for instance Claire Truscott, Elizabeth Stewart and agencies, ‘Fertilisation bill will undermine fathers, says cardinal’, The Guardian, 19 November 2007, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,331301564-110418,00.html, accessed 29 November 2005. I do not propose to outline that history here but much writing on the science fiction which deals with the creation by humans (usually presented as done by ‘mad’ or over-reaching scientists) of other human-like creatures by ‘unnatural’ (=non-hetero-procreative) means starts with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus of 1818. For one example pertinent to the context of Never Let Me Go, see Michael Mulkay, ‘Frankenstein and the debate over embryo research’, Science, Technology, and Human Values 21.2 (Spring 1996), pp. 157–176. Mulkay here discusses the ways in which parliamentarians from different political quarters, in debating the parameters of permissible embryo research, drew directly and indirectly on the Frankenstein myth. Mary Warnock, A Question of Life: The Warnock Report on Human Fertilization and Embryology (London: Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1984). See also Susan Squier, ‘Reproducing the posthuman body’, in Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, eds., pp. 113–132. Nigel Cameron, ‘The challenge of the biotech century’, The Guardian, 21 May 2005, at http://education.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,5198902-108233,00.html, accessed 22 May 2006. See, for example, Nic Fleming, ‘Use IVF to create more saviour siblings’, The Telegraph; David Derbyshire, ‘NHS pays for designer baby treatment’, The Telegraph, 26 November 2004, at http://www.telegrapgh.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/11/…, accessed 2 December 2007. Roger Highfield, ‘After the mavericks and cults, this cloning could mark a turning point’, The Telegraph, 13 February 2004, at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main, accessed 6 December 2007. The practice of encouraging poor people from third world countries to provide organs such as kidneys against payment was the object both of media debates (e.g. Jonathan Watts, ‘China bans buying and selling of human organs’, The Guardian, 29 March 2006, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329445217-108142,00.html, accessed 22 May 2006) and featured in films such Pretty Dirty Things (dir. Stephen Frears, Buena Vista, 2003). Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, eds. Posthuman Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 18. Nicholas Wroe, ‘Living memories’, The Guardian, 19 February 2006, at http://books/guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1417665,00.html, accessed 22 May 2006. The obvious ones are, of course, The Handmaid's Tale (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986) and Oryx and Crake (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2003). Margaret Atwood, ‘Brave New World’, The Washington Post, 1 April 2005, at http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2116040, accessed 22 May 2006. Barthes' ‘death of the author’ has been the object of sustained critique which I do not intend to rehearse here. See Catherine Belsey, ‘Textual analysis as a research method’, in Gabriele Griffin, Research Methods for English Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2005, pp. 157–174) for a discussion of this issue. Of course all science is on one level mediated in that it is created as symbolic form. But by ‘mediated’ here I refer to a process of transformation that removes science from its lamination to procedure and shifts it into the realm of implication and effect. Lewis Wolpert, ‘Who's to blame?’ The Guardian, 11 March 2002, at http://education.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4372308-108238,00.html, accessed 22 May 2006. See for example James Meikle, ‘NHS prepares for adult living liver transplants’, The Guardian, 8 November 2005, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,5328319-110418,00.html, accessed 29 November 2007; Declan Walsh, ‘Transplant tourists flock to Pakistan, where poverty and lack of regulation fuel trade in human organs’, The Guardian, 10 February 2005, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,5123373-103681,00.html, accessed 2 December 2007; Jo Revill, ‘UK kidney patients head for China’, The Guardian, 11 December 2005, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,5353215-108142,00.html, accessed 2 December 2007. Although Squier made this comment in 1995, much of it continues to hold. Lewis Wolpert, Professor of Biology at University College London argued in 2002 that ‘I am against cloning as it carries a high risk of abnormalities.’ And on moving to the Queen's medical research institute at Edinburgh University to undertake further research on cloning in 2005, Ian Wilmut, talking entirely in terms of human cloning for therapeutic purposes, suggested that little had happened in terms of advancing knowledge about nuclear transfer (transferring the nucleus of one cell into another) since the cloning of Dolly the sheep. See Susan Squier, ‘Reproducing the posthuman body: Ectogenetic fetus, surrogate mother, pregnant man’, in Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, eds. Posthuman Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). D. Mooney and A. Mikos, ‘Growing new organs’, Scientific American 280.4 (November 1993), p. 62, reported in Thacker, p. 157. Anthony Atala, Stuart B Bauer, Shay Soker et al., ‘Tissue-engineered autologous bladders for patients needing cystoplasty’, The Lancet 367 (15 April 2006), pp. 1241–46, p. 1241. See also Sarah Hall, ‘Bladders engineered in laboratory help combat disease’, The Guardian, 4 April 2006, at http://guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329449807-110418,00.html, accessed 27 June 2006. Peter Kemp, ‘Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro’, The Sunday Times, 20 February 2005, at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1485652,00.html, accessed 22 May 2005. John Mullan, ‘A life half lived’, The Guardian, 18 March 2006, at http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookclub/story/0,,1733475,00.html, accessed 22 May 2006. Gail Caldwell, ‘From Ishiguro, a cautionary tale that doesn't quite add up’, The Boston Globe, 10 April 2005, at http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2005/04/10/from_ishiguro_a_cautinoary_tal…, accessed 22 May 2006. C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1959); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1973). Duden, p. 5. Barbara Duden, ‘The euro and the gene – perceived by a historian of the unborn’, The Ursula Hirschman Annual Lecture on Gender and Europe, 7 May 2002 (Florence: European University Institute), at http://www.iue.it/RSCAS/WP-Texts/200504-UHL_Duden.pdf, accessed 22 May 2006. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid, p. 8. See Charles Arthur, ‘Mapping the individual – cheaply’, The Guardian, 24 April 2008, Technology Guardian, pp. 1–2, for a discussion of the genetic textification of individuals and its political, ethical and economic consequences. Ibid, p. 15. See also Deborah Lynn Steinberg, Bodies in Glass: Genetics, Eugenics, Embryo Ethics (Manchester University Press, 1997) for a discussion of techno/logical determinism. Warwick Anderson, ‘Introduction: Postcolonial technoscience’, Social Studies of Science, 32.5–6(Oct–Dec 2002), pp. 643–658. p. 644. Never Let Me Go, p. 3. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 127. Alexandra Chasin, ‘Class and its close relations: Identities among women, servants, and machines’, in Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, eds., pp. 73–96, p. 78. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., pp. 84–5. ‘Organ failure’, The Economist, 17 March 2005, at http://www.economist.com/books/PrinterfFriendly.cfm?story_id=3764275, accessed 22 May 2006. Thacker, p. 156. On 3 December 2007, as I wrote this text, the BBC reported a study carried out by Oxford University regarding illegal sex selective interventions in pregnancy, according to which UK Indian women travel to India to have sex-selected abortions of female foetuses, a practice which is illegal both in India and the UK. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7123753.html, accessed 4 December 2007. Peter Widdowson, ‘“Writing back”: Contemporary re-visionary fiction’, Textual Practice 20.3 (2006), pp. 491–507, p. 492. Thacker, p. 157. Ibid., p. 158. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). In an interesting way, Never Let Me Go in this respect bears a certain similarity to other novels fictionalizing the notion of schools as potentially humanizing institutions for those that are ‘not like us’ such as Peter Høeg's Borderliners (London: Harvill Press, 1994). Never Let Me Go, p. 239. Eluned Summers-Bremner, ‘“Poor creatures”: Ishiguro's and Coetzee's imaginary animals’, Mosaic 39.4 (December 2006), pp. 145–160. Never Let Me Go, p. 227. Debbora Battaglia, ‘Multiplicities: An anthropologist's thoughts on replicants and clones in popular film’, Critical Inquiry 27.3 (Spring 2001), pp. 493–514. p. 503. Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseTM (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 142. Eleni Papagaroufali, ‘Donation of human organs or bodies after death: A cultural phenomenology of “flesh” in the Greek context’, Ethos 27.3 (Sept. 1999), pp. 283–314. p. 294. Never Let Me Go, p. 238. An interesting fictional example of this is John Fuller's Flying to Nowhere (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) in which a monk kills fellow monks and dissects them in an attempt to find (the seat of) their soul. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004), p. 141. Battaglia, p. 497. Ibid., p. 501. Never Let Me Go, pp. 255–256. Battaglia, p. 506. Ibid., p. 507. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). Judith Butler, Precarious Life, p. 22. See Steinberg, p. 118. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964). In The Guardian's bookclub John Mullan reported that ‘the issue of this failure to rebel has provoked the most animated questions and disputes.’ This, in fact became the basis for his article ‘Positive feedback’, The Guardian, 1 April 2006, at http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookclub/story/0,,1744265,00.html, accessed 22 May 2006. Lewis Wolpert, ‘Who's to blame?’, The Guardian, 11 March 2002, at http://education.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4372308-108238,00.html, accessed 22 May 2006. This issue was interestingly explored in Caryl Churchill's play A Number (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002) which explores multiple clones' relation to their ‘father’ and each other. Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘Future imperfect’, The Guardian, 25 March 2006, at http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookclub/story/0,,1739103,00.html, accessed 22 May 2006. See, for example, Halberstam and Livingston, eds., op cit.