Thank you all for your well wishes while I worked my way through the Eye Incident of 2009. I am approaching Ishiguro with some trepidation, there are some things I have to say that may not sit well, but say them I must:
In my opinion, the phrase "I don't know how it was where you were" refers to the clone-farm at which you were hatched. I think that one of the most important matters that the "where you were" phrase focuses our attention upon is that Miss Emily and Madame (and thus Hailsham) were, if not the vanguard of a new approach to clone farming, then they were certainly major material contributors to the idea that - if you will - treating your veal nicely before you eat it will produce better veal. Kathy is referring to the conditions at clone-farms around the whole of England when she uses this phrase. The assigned donors have fallen under Kathy's care after having been fatted under many types of conditions.
Clearly, Madame and Miss Emily participated in the 'softening' of the farming techniques of their time. We are never given the reasons for the temporary softening of the farming methods, but we are definitely given a historical summary that pre-dates the time of our narrative, "After the war, in the early fifties, when the great breakthroughs in science followed one after the other so rapidly, there wasn't time to take stock, to ask the sensible questions. ... And for a long time, people preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere, or at most that they grew in a kind of vacuum" (262); an entire range of conditions under which a clone might be produced and brought to harvesting time existed in this story, Hailsham, apparently, represents the apex of what was then possible.
When Ben and I last met, he mentioned that the absences of the story garnered a lot of attention from our class, and I would like to touch on that for a moment. To me, Never Let Me Go is a memorial to the fictional history of cloning. Kathy provides us with first person, eyewitness testimony to what most of us would (I hope) call an atrocity. Much like the Shoa, the crime against humanity which is the history of cloning defies description. Ishiguro has written what a victim of this Shoa might have said, had the history been true. Modern attempts to describe things like the concentration camps of the Holocaust and A-Bomb attacks have produced texts which are full of absences.
Ask yourselves, how would you design a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust? You only have two choices: literal and figurative. A literal memorial to the six million dead Jews of Europe would mean six million statues, some ovens and gas chambers perhaps. A literal memorial to the scores of thousands of victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, vaporized in an instant - how would you propose a literal memorial to these people be designed and constructed? All that remains in the face of our inability to construct literal memorials are figurative memorials, memorials which exist today and which leave the interpretation to the viewer's/visitor's discretion. Today we must memorialize ideas and ideologies, entire races missing, because the evil done in the name of an ideology is too immeasurable to encompass with a statue of a guy on a horse holding a sword.
The absences in this book are representative of the inability to come right out and say that, in the story, science found a way to address many of the worst health problems of the day; that the way science addressed those problems included cloning; that the clones were, for all intents and purposes, humans; that the clones were farmed and mass produced, raised to maturity, and then harvested like beef; that this was acceptable to a majority of "humans" of the day and that the ideology of the time allowed for this idea.
Ishiguro has done an amazing job of providing us with enough absence in this book to allow for the reader to reach a conclusion about this fictional possibility. Had he given us literal descriptions of inhumane clone-farms, behind concertina wire and machine-gun towers, places where the clones were only allowed to eat, drink, and (occasionally) fuck, we would have had the interpretation fed to us. Instead, we are given the story of one woman's life who was raised at the best and most humane farm (which still gives me shivers), and who was given a lot of extra time to avoid her slaughter. An example of absolute irony is the fact that Kathy's human behavior and empathy are the very traits which delayed her slaughter.
I will close with this weakness in Ishiguro's premise: there is no way that the ethics of physicians and biomedical researchers would have been able to be swayed so much, in such a short period of time. Whatever you do or do not believe about the Hippocratic Oath, or the dogma to 'do no harm' adhered to by most in the medical sciences, no person of good conscience could have allowed for this in their ethics - or could they? Let's talk about the mysteriousness of the idea that humans can be farmed and harvested, and that we can benefit from the harvest. Let's talk about why the clones might not have just run away and blended into the culture of the time. Why didn't they arm themselves and rise up against their guardians? Where was their free will and their survival instinct?
random abuse of blog:
ReplyDeleteIf you're going to change your name to refer to your Condition, you should go with Polyphemus, because he's both a cyclops and a creation of Homer.
I think the weakness in Ishiguro's argument you talk about is a good indication that this book was not written to literally talk about the ethics of cloning. Because it is unthinkable that any physician would go so far beyond the do no harm to the extent that it becomes a systemic abuse of human life, I would argue that this book is more generally positioned. It holds the mirror up at our seeming indifference toward the suffering of others simply so we can live a better life. Of course not everyone is happy with the idea of donors, like miss lucy. But her attempts to do anything about it were feeble and half hearted.
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