Never Let Me Go: Cloning, Transplanting, and the Victorian Novel

Artistic Reproductions

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005) is, at one level, a horror story of bio-commerce: set in an alternate-universe England of the 1990s, clones are reared by “guardians” (5) at a boarding-school-like institution called “Hailsham” (4) for future live organ donation.¹ Yet, at another level, it is also a story of Victorian literary trafficking. The narrator, who goes only by Kathy H., reveals that her final essay “topic was Victorian novels,” and confesses that she considers “going back and working on it [. . .]. But in the end [supposes she’s] not really serious about it” (115–16). Her statement is ironic, given that her entire narrative reworks the Victorian novel. Ishiguro’s experiment with speculative fiction pays homage to Victorian Gothic conventions, but also navigates the terrain between Bildungsroman and female school story. Kathy H. is a narrator every bit as private and withholding of information as Jane Eyre or Lucy Snowe, and small wonder: her ‘school’ is a total institution in the tradition of Jane Eyre’s Lowood and Villette’s Pensionnat, its clones the haunted shades of Charlotte Brontë’s degraded surplus population of teachers and governesses. And like those Brontë characters, Ishiguro’s student clones produce artwork that is co-opted by their institutional masters as an index to their souls. Plots and characters of other familiar nineteenth-century novels are grafted on throughout, as are particularly Victorian questions of community, authority, self-possession, and the nature and purpose of artistic production.

Ishiguro’s Victorian tendencies prompt us to ask: what does reading do to us and for us? This question also lies at the heart of recent literary discourse. Academics have addressed it in various ways, such as Leah Price in How To Do Things With Books, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus with “Surface Reading,” Franco Moretti with Distant Reading, and, most recently, Anna Kornbluh and Benjamin Morgan in their call to conceive “a new openness to presentism: an awareness that our interest in the period is motivated by certain features of our own moment.” The question is implicit in popular science, like neurological studies that compare the activity of the brain when reading a book versus a tablet (Goldman; Raphael), and in educational studies that correlate the amount of time children spend reading for pleasure with the likelihood of educational achievement (Ludden). The question is raised through decorative art like ‘book-carving,’ where old books are carved into intricate patterns that show scenes and characters rising like ghosts from the pages (McLean). In these and any number of other examples, we are seriously asking whether reading itself is still a viable technology. It is a question full of concern about the future of liberal arts education, which is based in great measure on the art and science of reading, and on corollary beliefs that reading helps bridge the division between the personal and the communal, and even that it is one thing (of many) that makes us human. Therefore, if literature of the past still matters—if we have not transcended these plots, characters, ideologies and problems, as well as their material houses (i.e. books)—then whither next? In light of declining English majors nationwide, such questions are neither axiomatic nor sentimental.

In drawing attention to our literary networks, I seek to reinforce literature’s special role in problematizing ‘communities’ of all kinds. This essay is part of my larger work in progress about the connections between Victorian and contemporary literatures. The project treats twenty-first century British novels that transplant Victorian literature into a contemporary literary body. More specifically, these novels draw from moments in Victorian literature that are about reading; their authors create characters and narrators, like Kathy, who read and reread Victorian literature, “going back and working on” Victorian plots, genres, and characters over the course of their own narration (115). I would suggest that this novelistic practice, while akin to Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality (“Word, Dialogue, and Novel”) or Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism (“Epic and Novel”), results...