Childhood in Action: A Study of Natality’s Relationship to Societal Change in Never Let Me Go

Introduction

“Children are our future.” This phrase is used so often that it is generally considered to be a cliché, devoid of any insight. If taken seriously, however, it points to the stakes involved in raising and educating society’s youngest members. In her theorizing on the political realm, Hannah Arendt posits that children hold the key to renewing the common human world because of their newness, an idea she explains through her concept of natality. Arendt’s understanding of political renewal through the actions of new humans places tremendous importance on children. At the same time, the idea that children will inherit stewardship of the political realm can be threatening to adults, which is another of Arendt’s insights. These new humans, strangers to the world, require high levels of care and attention because of their dependency and vulnerability, but as they grow up they will make claims on the common human world and will act to change it. Here is a reminder to adults of both their fallibility and their mortality. Given these dynamics, then, it is unsurprising that so many debates and controversies rage over the best ways to raise and educate children. Hanging in the balance is nothing less than the future of the political world itself.

To explore these dynamics, I turn to Arendt’s writings on the functioning of the political sphere. I ask how children’s initial vulnerability and dependency on adults for survival affects their role in society. I highlight Arendt’s view, as formulated in The Human Condition and Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, that natality, the fact that humans are born as radically new creatures, is what gives them the ability to do something new in the common world. However, Arendt also cautions that the child is not yet in a position to put this natality to use in the public sphere; she must be protected from the harsh judgments of that realm and in turn the public realm must be protected from the disruptive newness of the child.¹ I also draw on Deborah Britzman’s interpretation of natality in her text The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions. Britzman highlights the relationality of natality: the infant is formed by her first experiences of life through her relationship with her first other (usually her mother) and this sets the stage for her future modes of relating with the world.

In order to delve into the implications of natality for society, its unsettling power, and its incredible fragility, I turn to the sketch of human clone children in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. This novel is a particularly interesting literary object for the study of natality because it depicts a world that will likely seem familiar in some basic ways, with one key difference that is both subtle and striking: the existence of human clones. The uncanny world of the novel thus provides an opportunity for the reader to reflect on the significance of natality because it conjures up characters who live in a similar world to ours but who lack the straightforward relationship to natality that comes from being born to human parents and having experienced the intimate first relationship necessitated by the helplessness of the infant. Technology may change the ways humans arrive in our world in the future, but for now all humans have entered the world as infants from the wombs of human mothers. Thus the novel provides a scenario that can be used as a test case, one whose fictionality can nonetheless illuminate the significance of natality in the world outside the novel. After all, these characters are not some radically new type of creature, completely unrelated to human beings as we understand them. Rather, they are exact genetic copies of humans; they appear to be basically the same kind of beings as the people who live in the cities and towns outside of Hailsham and those who exist in the world the reader inhabits. At its most basic and...