Daft Punks

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It is in fact the nonhuman that magnetized the author towards the science fiction genre, a foreign pole: "I don't find futuristic landscapes very exciting. And I didn't want to write anything that could be mistaken for a prophecy."1 If Ishiguro's focus is learning and development, his loyalties are to genres where species station is secure. In much of science fiction arrival is not assured. The genre often trains readers to constellate an allegory from a work's conceit. Ishiguro wishes the opposite: metaphors that are "just felt," readers who don't "have to stop, circle around, and then puzzle it out."2Yet when Ishiguro pivots the species status of his characters, his thesis about the human condition doesn't seem to budge. In an interview, the author characterizes one clone, Ruth, as someone who is "not very good in context, but she's human," as in, compassionate yet flawed.3 Ishiguro's extratextual comments make fiction and science fiction, human and inhuman into binaries, but his novel implies a spectrum of, and a queerer relation between, categories.

In its final iteration, Never Let Me Go is populated with students who cannot have reproductive sex and are supposedly cloned from human "junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps."4 Our narrator, Kathy H., and her two intimates, Tommy D. and Ruth, are among a minority of clones privileged with a humanities education at a school called Hailsham. The school year is punctuated by Sales, events where students can buy the discarded commodities of humans, and Exchanges, events where students trade the art they've worked on the prior season. In the Sales, discarded beings trade discarded objects that nonetheless "become special: a jacket, a watch, a pair of craft scissors never used but kept proudly next to a bed" (41). Every so often, the school's administrator, Madame, purchases the best student artwork, collecting it to exhibit to the rest of human society in what she calls The Gallery, in order to say: "Look at this art! How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully human?" (262). Yet despite their pedigree, artwork, and even rumors that couples "properly in love" (153) might be granted deferrals from death, our protagonists are eventually consigned to the fate of all clones: donation of four vital organs to the human community. First, the clones must serve as "carers" for their dying peers. Then they donate their own organs until their eventual "completions," their deaths.

Mandatory donation may seem a barrier to proper human status, but the very notion of "proper" human status (contingent upon narrow definitions of language, culture, intelligence, and sensitivity) also props up the donation system. Hailsham students accrue privilege as they fulfill humanist criteria, that is, until they exceed their lot and overturn the scale entirely. As former school administrators explain at the end of the novel: "We demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being... But a generation of created children who'd take their place in society? Children demonstrably superior to the rest of us? Oh no, that frightened people" (261). When the educators announce the failure of their social justice project, they reveal by proxy the deficits of Ishiguro's. In "Art: A Foreign Exchange," David Palumbo-Liu contests the meeting of the novel's humanist message with its sci-fi premise, contending that Ishiguro responds to cloning innovations with "an anachronistic liberal sentimentality."5 For Palumbo-Liu, the novel "portrays art as offering a 'bubble' in which to live in productive blindness to death,"6 a lesson "predicated on erasing two key distinctions, that between the human and nonhuman, and that of the precise relation of exchange between those two groups."7

What Palumbo-Liu calls an erasure of distinctions and relations is in fact a slippage. The protagonists of Never Let Me Go, like its author, seem keen to operate according to what is proper to the human. Inherited notions of what constitutes "proper sex" (59), the "proper couple" (97), how to be "properly in love" (117), even the "proper place to work" (110) hustle the characters through impoverished life stages. But by tinkering with improper affiliations between human and nonhuman, the novel opens up "scene[s] of ethical sociality."8 These interactions become sites for pressing against the fence of language as a signifying structure, offering a mode of sensuous misrecognition that riffs on Lauren Berlant's poetics in Cruel Optimism: