Abstract
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is an example of how trauma fiction might exploit Gothic convention to offer a solution to the ethical issues raised in earlier chapters. The protagonist, “Kathy H.,” struggles to voice the traumatic realization of her fate as a cloned organ donor, but rather than confront the horror that underlies her existence directly, Kathy’s Gothic narration, beyond giving voice to social anxieties around the ethics of cloning, harnesses these tropes self-reflexively to make readers feel increasingly uncomfortable with the responsibilities of witnessing. In doing so, Ishiguro’s novel conveys the process of working-through while denying readers the pleasurable discomfort of vicarious victimhood or place the last word on traumatic experience in the hands of anyone but the victims themselves.
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Notes
- 1.
See Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend’s contention, for example, that “[i]t has become somewhat of a critical cliché … to regard the Gothic as that which, at its most characteristic, conjures with the unbearable persistence of history, with a traumatic, painful and nightmarish past that, however deep our wishes, will not simply disappear” (2013, pp. xxxviii–xxxix). That the Gothic’s usefulness hinges on its ability to voice the otherwise unspeakable links the genre to trauma fiction in ways that could risk dwelling on what LaCapra calls “the paradoxical witness to the breakdown of witnessing ” (1998, p. 183).
- 2.
The term nostalgia is used here in the emotional sense as defined in the OED: “[s]entimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual’s own lifetime; (also) sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past” (2016).
- 3.
Atwood draws a comparison between the clones, who create and exchange art at Hailsham, and “art-making children in Theresienstadt,” as well as to “the Japanese children dying of radiation who nevertheless made paper cranes” (2005).
- 4.
The clones also lend themselves to analysis by way of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” originally a rejection of feminist essentialism that has since been applied to various other contexts, which calls for coalitions of “affinity, not identity” (1991, p. 155), and features the cyborg—the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” (p. 151)—as its central metaphor. The clone and the cyborg may be aligned with the Gothic in equally productive ways; Michele Braun, in fact, does just that, arguing that “although the mechanical nature of the cyborg body on the surface appears to differ significantly from the biologically-manipulated body of the clone … the relationship between body, soul and identity is complicated by the human intervention into the production and reproduction of the human in these two kinds of figures” (2010, p. 64). By virtue of their shared function “to re-imagine the experience of the outsider” (2010, p. 3), the cyborg is as much a Gothic subject as the clone, and that the clone could even be viewed as a subset of the cyborg (though this association is beyond the scope of this book). For a study of the cyborg as Gothic double and its function in post-humanist re-readings of various eighteenth-century Gothic texts, see Dongshin Yi’s A Genealogy of Cyborgothic: Aesthetics and Ethics in the Age of Posthumanism.
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Joyce, A. (2019). Witness or Spectator? Gothic Interrogations of the Reader-Witness in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go . In: The Gothic in Contemporary British Trauma Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26728-5_6
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