The phrase 'fears of' confuses our (human) fear of the spiders with whatever the spiders' own fears might be. "The real dread that one of us would accidentally brush up against" Madame in Never Let Me Go might as well describe this jerky tango of human and spider (35). The small, binding fear of the spider (their fear, our fear, our fear of each other) threatens that "things could fall further apart" and "nothing" "could help them recover their meanings."
But fear, driving spiders from us, also materializes their silken trails. Though cobwebs are an inherently ephemeral feature of the landscape, they texture and color our vision of the world with their translucent silk; when struck by a sunbeam, a fresh spider web cascades a scene with hues. A web begs to be touched (or swatted); while tactile engagement destroys it, its viscous fibers linger on the fingertip. If spiders achieved their goals, they would thicken the world with texture. Against the visual logic of the first encounter with Madame, the novel closes with the possibility that touch is the bridge for a generous engagement across difference. When Tommy and Kathy enter Madame's apartment to request a stay from donation, it is "covered with cobweb traces" (250). Kathy sees Madame "stiffen—as if a pair of large spiders was set to crawl towards her," echoing the arachnoid encounters at Hailsham (248). So, there is a sense of ethical triumph when: "Madame reached out her hand, all the while staring into my face, and placed it on my cheek. I could feel a trembling go all through her body, but she kept her hand where it was" (272). An evolving attitude towards clones is marked by willingness to touch and be touched. But is a reluctant stroke of the cheek more ethical than a childish strike of passion?
Early in the novel, Kathy recalls Tommy standing in the tall grass, hoping to be picked for a football team. When he isn't, he "bursts into a thunderous bellowing...a nonsensical jumble of swear words and insults," an asignifying rage that magnetizes him to animality (9).1 When she sees him stomp "brown specks" of mud onto his polo shirt, she starts "to drift over towards him" (10); in blind fury, he slaps her.2 The touch again involves misrecognition, yet is prompted not by awareness, but by a brief lapse in awareness, a fugue. Tommy's tantrum on the sports field suggests to Kathy something "comical... something that made you think, well, yes, if he's going to be that daft, he deserves what's coming" (9). The OED offers three definitions for daft:
1) mild, gentle, meek, humble
2) silly, foolish, stupid [said of beasts, of persons wanting in intelligence]
3) of unsound mind, crazy, insane, mad.3
The word "daft" appears in the novel no fewer than forty-two times: poems are "hysterically daft" (17), fantasies of a Lost Corner in Norfolk "all sound daft" (54), and Kathy tells Ruth that "it looks daft, the way you copy everything" other couples do (124).
Tommy, later bullied with "a daft version" of his posture (19), is the novel's quintessential daft figure. But Tommy is also a punk, insofar as punk "has always been the stylized and ritualized language of the rejected."4 In my reading, a "daft punk" is capable of an apprehension of others that honors difference; he evinces a silly style of unlearning what's "proper," an unlearning that doesn't shrink from animality or abjection.5 Raging in the grassy field, Tommy's peers call him a "mad animal," and a "layabout." He looks both like a "like a dog doing a pee" and like he is rehearsing Shakespeare (10). He is a noisy, almost ecological presence in the novel, who enters scenes with "thunderous footsteps" (69) and "a face like thunder" (74). His feral style disrupts the pastoral mutedness of the school. The Hailsham community shivers before him like a cat before an earthquake. While others are "standing in a pack in the mud," Tommy, "in his excitement, seemed already to be going full pelt" (8). Pun intended? After he skins his elbow, he takes off the dressing "to reveal something at just that stage between sealing and still being an open wound. You could see bits of skin starting to bond, and soft red bits peeping up from underneath." This spectacle prompts the other students to lie to him, saying that if a gash is "right on the elbow like that, it can unzip. All you have to do is bend your arm quickly. Not just that actual bit, the whole elbow, it can all unzip like a bag opening up" (68). Unnerved by his bestial subversions in the classroom and the field, the students mock Tommy's ingenuousness by drawing him into relation with the gutted animal.
- Animality might be considered "not a matter of the creatures that we 'know' to be nonhuman, (for instance, the accepted logics of pets or agricultural livestock and our stewardship of them), so much as a flexible rubric that collides with and undoes any rigid understanding of animacy." Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 104.[⤒]
- Coincidentally, Bora uses this precise article of clothing to explain that "the texture of a pique polo shirt seems on the verge of being visually a pattern of the weave, so what texture means may be perhaps not TEXTURE, but TEXXTURE, an intimate sponginess." "Outing Texture," 101.[⤒]
- "daft, adj." OED Online. June 2014. Oxford University Press. <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/46858?redirectedFrom=daft>.[⤒]
- Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 153.[⤒]
- Robert McRuer, Abby Wilkerson, and Mel Chen write about "a resistant sense of "desiring disability," unlike fetishizations of disability, that embraces "practices that would work to realize a world of multiple (desiring and desirable) corporealities interacting in nonexpoitative ways." Chen, Animacies, 215.[⤒]
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