Kazuo Ishiguro wanted to explore the extent to which a person will refuse to run away from their fears with his novel "Never Let Me Go." If there's one thing nobody can run away from, it's death, so it makes sense that "Never Let Me Go" is a novel that explores the ways in which a person confronts death without fleeing from it.
Early on in the novel, we learn that the children at Hailsham live only to give their up their organs at the peak of their life and die. Grim stuff for readers, grimmer stuff for fictional children. But there's brainwashing afoot at Hailsham, and it seems expressly designed to make fatal organ donation a reasonable way to confront one's own fears of death. Dying young becomes a means of leaving behind a living legacy. Ironic, but this is literature, so what did you expect?
The best way that we know how to grapple with our imminent death is to try and create things that will live on after we pass away. Having children is the main way of doing this. But in "Never Let Me Go," the cloned children can't have kids. My interpretation is that having children would give the Hailsham gang a more enticing means of "life after death" than giving up their organs. The children are brainwashed to replace one greater purpose and genetic legacy for another.
But let's say you're the sort of person who wants to leave a legacy but doesn't want children. Art becomes another viable outlet. Art requires that you put something of yourself into a work with the hopes that that work will exist in the cultural conversation long after you're dead. Here's the weird thing; the Hailsham lot is encouraged to create art, even as they're unable to have children.
But they're encouraged to create art for a different reason than the one that, according to yours truly, keeps them from having children. While having children would give them a way to live beyond death that doesn't involve them selling their bodies (the oldest profession reinterpreted for the sci-fi crowd, ha!), art functions in a different way. In their various exchanges and references to Madame's gallery, art exists to help the children understand how to give something personal. Creating art and losing art is just training them for the big leagues.
The ways in which these two core ideas develop changes. As the children become teenagers, sex eventually replaces art, but never to the same extent; it's sex without children. The act without the creation. What's sex without children? Probably a question for someone smarter than I. My gut says, "just a lot of fun," but how much fun can you possibly have with a vital organ donation looming on the horizon? Maybe it's just for comfort.
Just like Bridget, the part of the book in which Kathy and Tommy question the gallery stuck with me. Madame’s connection with the student is a lingering question throughout the book, as are many other questions which Ishiguro never fully answers. Looking back, I still don’t fully understand the humans’ reason for being in the society. It seems a bit of a waste and extraneous resource. I really like Lauren’s idea that Halisham was attest to see if the clones were truly human and the closing of the locations signifies that they failed the test. Halisham is a hidden oasis and it’s fascinating that once you leave, you can never go back. It was interesting to me that even Kathy couldn’t find it after she left, no matter how hard she might track it down. This line stuck with me, “"Driving around the country now, I still see things that will remind me of Hailsham. I might pass the corner of a misty field, or see part of a large house in the distance as I come down the side of a valley, even a particular arrangement of poplar trees up on a hillside…Then I see it's impossible and I go on driving, my thoughts drifting on elsewhere."
ReplyDeleteI agree art requires giving a piece of yourself and served as a brainwashing mechanism for Hailsham students. However, I do not believe Madame and Miss Emily encouraged creativity for purposes other than building awareness of the clones' humanity. To put it succinctly: their intentions were pure. If there is anything we can learn from history, current events, or literature, it is that there are unintended consequences for everything. My reading of the novel left me with the conclusion that Miss Emily and Madame were as kind as human nature can allow. Sure, they were uncomfortable in the clones' presence and did not make a habit of developing personal relationships with their students, but in the end they were acting on a societal ill. I do not deny that the importance of creativity was formative for the childrens' psyche, but I do not think it was Madame and Miss Emily's motivation. They built and maintained Hailsham to improve clone livelihood, not to contribute to their psychological confinement.
ReplyDelete