Daft Punks

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The other students rationalize tormenting Tommy as retribution for his refusal to try to be human: he "never even tried to be creative, how he hadn't even put anything in for the Spring Exchange" (10). While most student "masterpieces" at the Exchanges are realist depictions of animals, his work is both more abstract and more animalistic. "Tommy had done this particular watercolour," Kathy explains, "of an elephant standing in some tall grass -and that was what started it all off" (16). The work feels backward to Kathy, "exactly the sort of picture a kid three years younger might have done" (17).1 Grazing in fields of animality, playing like a child, Tommy muddles the boundary between abjection and intention: he claims his elephant picture was "a kind of joke" (17). His artful aimlessness throws a monkey wrench into Hailsham's gears of 'proper' value: of the human, of art, and of language. Kathy thinks he does things just "to cause a stir. And when [he's] asked to explain it afterwards, it doesn't seem to make any sense." Only after Tommy slaps her on the field, Kathy writes, does he become aware "of the others, of himself, of the fact that he was there in that field...then I saw surprise register on his face that I should know about his feelings" (11). Taking on yet another animal affect, Tommy glances at her "sheepishly" and his expression is described thusly throughout the novel (104, 138, 170).

To sign sheep in American Sign Language, you hold your forearm in front of you as if you're clutching the creature close to your chest. You form two fingers into a pair of scissors and run them up your arm, emulating the act of shearing. Scissors, at once singular and plural, evoke the origin of the word clone from the Greek clonizo, to cut twigs. The gesture, like the unzipping of the clone, concentrates bodies, tools, and textures. To sign sheep is to conjure the animal and the act of shearing its coat. "The sign performs 'sheep' as a human/ animal/ technology/ commodity mixture," Sarah Franklin explains, representing the "complex affective economy" that attends the animal.2 The sheep moves "in and out of leaky categories: inside and outside, tame and wild, privilege and abjection, and above and below through everyday objects made of sheep products."3 Sheep register excesses of vulnerability, deficiencies of agency. Yunxiang Yan argues that the stigma of stupidity and absurdity trailing the sheep indicates the Western impulse to "equate individualism with intelligence, originality, and leadership."4 These dialectics of the sheep animate the discourse around Never Let Me Go.

Rebecca Walkowitz asserts that criticisms of the novel's chatty style ignore how Ishiguro critiques "the logic of originality and Romantic genius" to argue that "works of art, like people, should be valued for the social life they help to establish."5 Her central piece of evidence is Kathy's admiration for four identical desk-lamps "not to buy, but just to compare with my ones at home" (208). Walkowitz extrapolates that Kathy is not admiring them for use-value, but as an occasion to "to contemplate similarities and differences."6 Indeed, she has a strange sensitivity within her expansive solitude, her hours spent with "only the roads, the big grey sky and my daydreams for company" (208). Ishiguro's prose registers this drifting mood when Kathy runs over hand over "these ribbed necks you can bend whichever way you want" (208), a movement and texture that metaphorize the flexibilities of the clone body. Kathy juggles long hours with her donors and eventually will become one. For now, she takes episodic and sheepish pleasures.

Moments of "sheepishness" and "drifting" recur across the novel, as the characters and the prose seem to graze around the page. This animal affect articulates a mode of being, offering an elegant nexus of the novel's stylistic and conceptual bearing. At one point, Kathy and her friends "spread out" (162) in a seaside art gallery: "We'd all wandered into different corners. I wasn't the only one who drifted into a bit of a dream in there." Voices "seemed to fill the entire space," and the characters go on "shuffling around" until "bit by bit, something started to change...a feeling that grew among us almost tangibly." This opaque atmosphere extends to textural descriptions. "You'd see a bit of fishing net or a rotted piece from a boat," near a "wooden sign hanging" in a gallery suffused with a "sheer peacefulness." The gallery's curator punctures the lull by trying to fix the characters' status: she asks if they are art students, to which Tommy replies: "Not exactly...we're just, well, keen." Our protagonists exchange taxonomical security for an alternative sensitivity to the world, an oddly daft keenness.