(Many thanks to Matt for a very useful follow-up to my earlier post on Gore and Heidegger, as well as to David at GreenCine and to Chris in recent carnival for referencing the same post. Thanks, also, to Helmut for an interesting discussion of my preceding post on masochistic performances. Building on these questions of the ethical status of worldly representations, together with the implications of bodily desecration, I now turn to Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel about cloning and organ harvesting, Never Let Me Go.)
In History in Three Keys, Paul Cohen discusses the curious fact that there were an abundance of
terrifying rumors circulating in China during the spring and the summer of 1900, at the height of the Boxer Rebellion—rumors which were not only unsubstantiated, but furthermore were actually worse than the admittedly dire reality which inspired them. When faced with terrifying, chaotic circumstances, it would appear to make sense for people to create hopeful rumors as a means of reassuring themselves, but why create and circulate rumors which are even worse than the actual circumstances themselves?
Cohen suggests that the answer to this dilemma may lie in the terror of the unknown—the possibility that, when faced with a lack of knowledge concerning what is going on, there is a natural impulse for people to fill that vacuum with something, anything, even if it be something of nightmarish dimensions. For instance, Cohen cites Paul Fussell’s observation (in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War) that
It is easy to understand why soldiers require constant good news. It is harder to understand why they require false bad news as well. The answer is that even that is better than the absence of narrative. Even a pessimistic, terrifying story is preferable to unmediated actuality.
This role of rumor as filling in a perceived vacuum, an “absence of narrative,” meanwhile, has its precise inverse in the specific content of the actual rumors circulated among the Boxers at this fin-de-siècle moment, many of which contended that Westerners were trafficking in human organs, including human eyeballs (for photography), women’s nipples, little boys’ testicles, or taking Chinese orphans and “cutting out their vital organs and severing their limbs.” That is to say, inspired by a litera vacuum of understanding, these rumors revolve around a paranoid fantasy of the emptying out of the human body—yielding, in effect, a “body without organs” which, as Deleuze and Guattari would argue, can then be “peopled” and “populated” by new “intensities.”
Chinese rumors of organ trafficking are, of course, not new, and can be dated back at least to the Song dynasty (10th to 13th century). As recently as 2001, the US House of Representative held hearings on whether the Chinese government was harvesting the organs of executed criminals. These fantasies are else evident at the level of popular culture, as in the “Hell Money” episode of the X-Files (March 29th, 1996) featuring a group of Chinese immigrants to the US who had to pay off their snake-heads by entering a lottery—a lottery which was periodically held to determine which of them would have to donate one of their own organs to sell on the black market (curiously, this is one of the few episodes of the series which does not appeal at all to the supernatural—as thought the exoticism of the Chinatown was somehow already exotic enough).
This theme of organ donation is also at the heart of Never Let Me Go, the latest novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (author of Remains of the Day). Set in 1990s England, Never Let Me Go features a community of human clones who have been created, it is gradually revealed, for the purpose of ultimately donating their organs (as many as three or four, which they donate serially while being carefully kept alive).
Never Let Me Go is structured like a rumor, in more ways than one. For instance, the novel is narrated from the perspective of the young clones themselves, who only gradually learn the details of their situation as they grow up. In fact, the clones gradually come to suspect that this information is deliberately fed to them (and, consequently to us as readers) in bits and pieces (as a rumor), so that there is constantly a sense of belated recognition as the puzzle gradually comes together.
Never Let Me Go is structured like a rumor in another respect as well. The topic of human cloning has received tremendous attention in the news lately, from the South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-su who “cloned” (and, indeed, falsified) his own cloning research results last year, to the Raelians’ (uncorroborated) announcement in 2004 that they had succeeded in cloning a human being (Claude Vorilhon, the head of the Raelians, also claims that he is descended from extraterrestrials). In this flurry of controversy, however, there appears to be an important disconnect between the kind of “cloning” actually being proposed by legitimate scientists, on the one hand, and the popular sci-fi scenarios of cloning humans for the purpose of harvesting their organs (as seen not only in Ishiguro’s novel, but also Michael Bay’s 2005 movie The Island, Nancy Farmer’s 2004 novel The House of Scorpions, etc.), on the other.
That is to say, the human “cloning” technologies which are most immediate on the horizon involve, not the cloning of actual individuals, but rather the use of stem cells to create replacement cells or organs for patients, but research along these lines is very explicitly not attempting to clone entire individuals. (Chad Chowan and his colleagues at Harvard, for instance, are developing an interesting technique to accomplish this by reverting adult cells back to their embryonic form (thus obviating the need to destroy human fetuses. However, Cowan stresses that, “it would definitely not be possible to clone the person from which the adult cell came.")
Furthermore, even though the cloning of actual humans is theoretically possible, and although it would certainly present a host of very legitimate ethical concerns (see, however, Janet Stemwedel’s discussion of how many of the ostensible ethical concerns about cloning raised in the popular press are actually misplaced, or are not unique to cloning), there is no obvious need to link cloning to organ harvesting. That is to say, while there is a very real shortage of organs for transplant (Dubner and Levitt, for instance, had an interesting discussion of this issue in Sunday’s New York Times), even in the counterfactual situation that humans were raised specifically for the purpose of donating their organs, there is no apparent reason why these individuals would need to be clones (indeed, the current technological difficulties of cloning healthy individuals would make it much more economically feasible to simply use, say, the millions of frozen and discarded embryos already stored in fertility centers.
In linking together these themes of cloning and organ harvesting, therefore, Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go can be seen as part of a contemporary cultural phenomenon which parallels that of the nineteenth Boxer rumors. That is to say, faced with a combination medical advances which present a host of very legitimate ethical concerns, combined with a widespread ignorance about the implications of these advances, there is a tendency to exaggerate their potential implications, to create rumor-like scenarios which are actually far worse than anything on the medical or political horizon. (I would emphasize here that I am certainly not arguing that Ishiguro is writing his novel out of ignorance, but rather that he is building on a genre of science fiction whose appeal, and possibly origins, are closely tied to paranoid fantasies fed by a lack of understanding of the actual medical technologies involved).
This process of filling a vacuum (of knowledge) with exquisite, hybrid creations (rumors, paranoid fantasies, sci fi narratives, etc.), meanwhile, has a precise parallel within Ishiguro’s novel itself. Never Let Me Go centers around a group of children, all clones, growing up in a special institution to help cultivate their artistic creativity. These clones (clones of different people) include the protagonist Kathy and one of her friends, Tommy, who is consistently portrayed as an outlyer, prone to fits of anger, and accused, from early on, of lacking artistic creativity.
Despite the lack of support of his art among his teachers, Tommy nevertheless continues his drawings in secret, ultimately sharing them with Kathy near the end of the novel:
The first impression was like one you’d get if you took the back off a radio set: tiny canals, weaving tendons, miniature screws and wheels were all drawn with obsessive precision, and only when you held the page away could you see it was some kind of armadillo, say, or a bird….
For all their busy, metallic features, there was something sweet, even vulnerable about each of them.
Tommy’s exquisite little creatures, meanwhile, have a precise parallel in the toad which Rick Deckard finds in the middle of the desert at the end of Philip K. Dick’s futuristic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (on which Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner was based). Astonished because toads were thought to have been extinct, Deckard carefully places it in a box and takes it home to show his wife, who sees him enter cradling the box as if “it contained something too fragile and too valuable to let go of; he wanted to keep it perpetually in his hands.” She then takes the toad, examines it and, “still holding it upside down, she poked at its abdomen and then, with her nail, located the tiny control panel.” The toad, it turns out, is a robot, a mechanical clone, and Rick Deckard’s fascination with it speaks to his own implicit realization that he, the acclaimed android bounty hunter, is actually an android himself.
Both Deckard’s cyborg toad (which he cradles as though it were “too valuable to let go of”) and Tommy’s “sweet, even vulnerable” hybrid miniature creatures function both as doubles of their owners’ own “doubled” identities (Deckard is an android visually identical to a human, and Tommy is a human clone), as well as compensations for their owners’ perceived emptiness (by the time Deckard finds the toad, he has arguably already begun to realize that he is a soulless android, and Tommy’s drawings at the end of Ishiguro’s novel are placed against the background his own increasingly “organless” body—he has already made three or four separate organ donations—but also against his and his fellow clones’ longstanding belief that the school’s interest in their art was on account of its ability to “reveal [their] inner selves… [and] display [their] souls.”
By the end of each novel, therefore, their protagonists are in the process of becoming quite literal “bodies
without organs,” and their miniature creature surrogates represent the new potentialities which may fill the resulting vacuums (the same way that Dick’s and Ishiguro’s own novels could be seen as similarly fantastic and endearing creations helping to fill the knowledge vacuum which helped make them possible).
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