Jai Agrawal
Mr. Bazzett
NLMG Response
December 17, 2018
Truthfully Blinding
I would like to respond to Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro by proposing that the book is an extended metaphor of key philosophical questions facing our present-day society, especially as they relate to the intersection of life with technology, the purpose of art, and the meaning of love and death. The narrative recounts the memories of 31-year-old Kathy as she learns life lessons in an idyllic boarding school, known as Hailsham, located in England during the 1990s. The key element that distinguishes Hailsham from other institutions is that it purportedly places a great deal of emphasis on learning art and creativity – since art has the capacity to kindle and nourish the souls. However, underneath this “benign” narrative, boarding school students are unknowingly being bred for organ donation through regulated cloning.
In Never Let me Go, Ishiguro constructs an exaggerated version of the lives of students imposed within such a worldview. In doing so, Ishiguro exposes the meaninglessness of a blind embrace of technology and forces us to rethink the distinctions between humans and non-humans, reminding us how these distinctions are constantly in flux.
Throughout the novel numerous passages unmask the truth about Hailsham's students, thus exposing the falsehoods of their world. Ishiguro presents Hailsham as an unusual institution, where clones are mysteriously brought in as students. In their day-to-day lives, the students are constantly bombarded with a rhetoric, providing them with a false sense of being special. However, in one instance, when Miss Lucy (a guardian of the students) notices how the students are freely imagining alternate futures, she divulges the real truth of their lives, when she says: “The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way. But I’m not. If you’re going to have decent lives, then you’ve got to know and know properly. . . . Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults . . . and before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do” (81).
Hailsham’s manufacturing of clones to harvest organs is undoubtedly extreme, however, the passage above can also be seen as a critique of our exclusive educational institutions in the real world. These institutions often demand loyalty and conformism through programs and packaged curriculums that often pre-determine a person’s entire life. In addition, our current educational systems also tend to focus on career pathways and promote examples of success that produce individuals who are driven on their career paths almost like robots and are often not in touch with their human selves.
This irony is underscored by Hailsham’s emphasis on creativity and art. In the novel, students are encouraged to create and sell art at auctions called “Exchanges.” The best artworks are collected and exhibited by Madame, a prominent figure at the Hailsham boarding school.
Ishiguro masterfully explores the irony in the way art’s ability to touch human souls is co-opted in the school’s agenda through an opaque narrative, when he writes: “The gallery Tommy and I were discussing was something we’d all of us grown up with. Everyone talked about it as though it existed, though in truth none of us knew for sure that it did” (31).
The irony in the above passage lies in that clones are being humanized through an emphasis on creating art. Their collector, Madame, is an activist who believes in the rights of clones. The enigma surrounding the gallery, on the one hand, refers to the ability of art to encourage and propel inquiry and self-expression amongst the students, even amongst clones. On the other hand, however, the enigma skillfully masks the lack of freedom in the lives of the students at Hailsham. The reference to the “gallery” once again resonates with our contemporary condition: the way in which institutions, such as museums, create a worldly aura through their rhetoric related to art history with which a common everyday person has a hard time connecting. Such artistic institutions indirectly legitimize the miseries of everyday life by distancing themselves by living in an insulated vacuum created through their enigma and rhetoric.
The book does a terrific job of narrating a camouflaged story of a seemingly amazing institution and then undoes this narrative by revealing inconsistencies and bringing to the surface the ultimate sham that Hailsham is. As the story progresses, moments of ruptures and pause in the narrative become important. Towards the end, Tommy reveals to Kathy how he thinks that Miss Lucy was correct in revealing the truth to the students about their existence. At one place in the text, Ruth, who is Kathy’s friend, reveals that students are “modeled from trash” (166), exposing how marginalized populations are targeted for cloning. Through a similar lense, Kathy wonders if Tommy’s tantrums as a child were a symptom of the dissonance within him. She wonders if Tommy has known the truth all along while she had denied it to herself by living in a world of false fantasy and emotional clinging.
One particularly powerful moment in the book which touches a cathartic power of art is when Kathy and Madame deeply connect through Madame’s act of crying, when Kathy narrates, “I froze in shock. Then within a second or two, I began to feel a new kind of alarm, because I could see there was something strange about the situation. The door was almost half open . . . but Madame hadn’t nearly come up to the threshold. She was out in the corridor, standing very still . . . . And the odd thing was she was crying. It might even have been one of her sobs that had come through the song to jerk me out of my dream (71).
When Kathy recounts the “sobs that had come through the song to jerk me out of my dream,” she is pointing to the moment when she awakens to a truth: a falsehood of longing and clinging that she has developed for her life at Hailsham. For Madame, this is a moment of the awareness of the ultimate darkness for what she sees in Kathy – a girl clinging to her old past and singing and pleading to never let it go. The unfolding and “letting go” remains a central theme of the book, and surfaces toward the end when Tommy before completing his fourth donation expresses the need to accept their ultimate separation. He recounts,“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end, it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart” (282).
The unfolding and acceptance of this realization is evident when Kathy accepts their separation and drives back to Norfolk shortly after Tommy’s completion. Even though she has lost everything, she has finally come to terms with the truth and has stopped fantasizing. While she cries for her loss, her crying is within her control. She is at peace and gets back to her car and drives away. In this last chapter, the acceptance of death, surfaces as the ultimate truth, and its ability to transform a fantasizing clone and bring her to a level of grounding once again poses the provocative question about the blurring of boundaries between clones and humans.