If "recognition is the misrecognition you can bear," then perhaps reading is simply the misreading a text permits, and misrecognition the experience the text sows. I suggest that the novel's object and animal figures afford scenes of sensual communion, even as direct communication or understanding fails.
To cushion the stated risks of misrecognition as sheer fantasy, I turn to Renu Bora's elaboration of TEXTURE/TEXXTURE:1
We find Bora's oppositions of shiny/matte, gleaming/dull, smooth/rough, polished/crude in the containing forms of Never Let Me Go: a pencil case that is "shiny like a polished shoe" (46), a medical center's gleaming white tiles that are almost like mirrors (16), the "sun glinting on a muddy surface" (8). Like Bora, I'm interested in textures like these, which cannot necessarily be parsed by the vocabulary of fetishism (arriving through histories of pathology). Subject-object relations are neither so illusory nor so pathological when we shape and are shaped by them.
Texture serves as the medium for misrecognition between human and allegedly nonhuman subjects in Never Let Me Go. Here we can refract Ishiguro's commitment to "learning how to read and write at a higher not just functional level."2 The clones dismantle purely functional reading and free us to imagine what higher reading might look and feel like.
In Never Let Me Go, the clones are not quite human. They are called "mad animals" and "poor creatures"; they are continually "crouching like animals"; their paintings are of animals; they characterize their guardians in terms of animality: Nurse Trisha is Crow Face, Miss Lucy is "squat and bulldoggy." The animal figure elaborates a friction between metonym and metaphor, contiguity and similarity. The animal is sentient, a moving vehicle; one's sense of being an animal is always mediated by live association. When a group of clones swarms around Madame, Kathy recognizes: "The real dread that one of us would accidentally brush up against her...she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn’t been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders" (35-36). In Jorie Graham's poem, "The Geese," spiders evoke this Yeatsian dread:
things will not remain connected
will not heal
and the world thickens with texture instead of history,
texture instead of place.
Yet the small fear of the spiders
binds and binds
the pins to the lines, the lines to the eaves, to the pincushion bush
- Bora writes that though the distinction is "extremely complicated, even false at times," TEXTURE, "the first meaning, signifies the surface resonance or quality of an object or material. That is its qualities if touched, brushed, stroked, or mapped, would yield certain properties and sensations that can usually be anticipated by looking...TEXXTURE, another meaning, refers not really to surface or even depth so much as the intimately violent pragmatic, medium, inner level (at first more phenomenological than conceptual/metaphysical) of the stuffness of material structure. I name it TEXXTURE to signal the way it complicates the internal. This texture is even more intrinsically narrative or temporal than TEXTURE, though both suggest perception, creation, and responsive processes." "Outing Texture," Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 98-99.[⤒]
- Ishiguro, Shaffer, and Wong, Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, 215.[⤒]
- Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 122.[⤒]
- Ibid., 124.[⤒]
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