Dystopia, Trauma, and Resignation: A Reading of Perec's W, or the Memory of Childhood and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

This essay represents an attempt to interpret the configuration of the dystopian imagination. My hypothesis is that what makes literary dystopias archetypal situations—that is, more than mere descriptions of unjust regimes—is that their subjects are deprived of agency. While dystopia is traditionally defined as a "non-existent society . . . that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived," I would like to add here that most dystopias describe societies in which human subjectivity has been reduced to pure passivity.¹ It is, therefore, not only coercion but an ineluctable compliance with coercion that stands at the core of dystopia. Here I illustrate this argument through a reading of two texts, W, or the Memory of Childhood by the French writer Georges Perec, and Never Let Me Go by the British author and 2017 Nobel prize recipient Kazuo Ishiguro.

W, or the Memory of Childhood and Never Let Me Go differ in almost all respects.² The first is semiautobiographical; the second is pure fiction. The first retraces the loss undergone by the author, who survived the Holocaust as a child. The other is a sci-fi or quasi sci-fi dystopia about human clones, and like many stories of clones, cyborgs and robots, raises the topic of self–other relations.³ The books seem to be poles apart, and there is no evidence of Ishiguro having read Perec. The two authors, however, have been compared several times. Kemp, for instance, notes a similarity in their use of game-playing and puzzle-solving.⁴ Veyret underlines that their common central theme is absence, or, more exactly, "that which is no more, yet lasts, with a 'différance'; that which cannot be said but nevertheless refuses to disappear, but remains indefinable."⁵ My deconstructive reading of W and NLMG reveals that they use the same three narrative stages—quest for truth, fight for survival and surrender to the horror—to express absence, trauma and the loss of the ability to act. Read together, these books suggest that powerlessness stands at the heart of dystopia.

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt famously claims that what makes human life specifically human is "action," which is the expression of individual distinctiveness embedded in a web of relationships.⁶ Action is the ability to change what is, through which the agent both reveals herself and transforms the society she shares with others. Action must therefore be distinguished from activities needed for survival—those designed to sustain life rather than modify its conditions. In her analysis of the processes that crystalized in twentieth-century totalitarianism, Arendt underlines the modern tendency to emphasize biological needs—reproduction and consumption—and, hence, to reduce the domain and the value of action. Overlapping with Arendt in a way that has been emphasized by Giorgio Agamben and others, Michel Foucault understands the development of liberalism and the welfare state as a double process of discipline and biopower, namely, as a deepening of control (rather than violence or harm) over the physical aspects of life.⁷ Prisons, hospitals, schools are the modern institutions of a "normalizing power" performed on bodies that soon become a "biopolitical reality."⁸ In Foucault's thought as in Arendt's, the increasing identification of the modern subject with his or her biological needs leads to increased regulation of subjects' bodies, and, hence, to a diminution of freedom and agency.

In what follows, I read W and NLMG together to show that their constructions epitomize, albeit in literary form, the processes conceptualized by Arendt and Foucault. In W and NLMG the shared sequence of quest, fight for survival and surrender exemplifies the consequences when constraints over life are taken to their extreme. It constitutes a dystopian metanarrative that says the following: the essence of reality emerges through a quest that reveals an ineluctable certainty, which can be neither escaped nor transformed. Subjects struggle in the hope of survival until they understand the futility of hope and...