Science and the cultural imaginary: the case of Kazuo Ishiguro'sNever Let Me Go

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/050328crbobooks1, 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/showₚrint. php? id=62509 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 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 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/fromᵢshiguroₐcautinoaryₜal…, 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-UHLDuden. 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? storyᵢd=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, ModestWitness@SecondMillenium. FemaleMan©MeetsOncoMouseTM (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.