Castration Desire: Less Is More in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

ABSTRACT

According to orthodox psychoanalysis, “castration” is always negative: to lose the “phallus” is to lose everything. Against this account, this article argues that “castration desire” offers a model for sustainable relationality on an imminently eco-apocalyptic earth. Using the novel Never Let Me Go (2005) to explicate castration desire, this article posits that Kazuo Ishiguro's organ-donating clones – in acquiescing to their own diminishment, and thereby signalling a more other-oriented relationality – teach a comparatively privileged reader how to desire castration. This article moreover demonstrates how the less-is-more ethic of castration desire can help theorise the intersection of the environmental humanities and queer studies in order to help unpick the acquisitive logic of a globalised world that otherwise has us on a track to ecological ruin.

KEYWORDS:

• Kazuo Ishiguro
• Never Let Me Go
• castration desire
• climate change
• environmental humanities
• queer

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Nathaniel Myers, Angel Daniel Matos, Susan Cannon Harris and the peer reviewers for their helpful feedback on this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Johansen, for example, remarks that a “striking feature of Never Let Me Go is the discursive incorporation of the reader into the donor population”; see Johansen, 425. On this point, Lochner remarks, “This dual perspective of the reader, as clone and as human, is crucial to our becoming aware of the shared precariousness of life as a foundation for an ethical relation with the other”; see Lochner, 102. See also Spiegel and Spencer: “As something akin to eavesdroppers, we, the book's readers, become even more implicated in her [the narrator's] fate than if she were addressing us directly”; see Spiegel and Spencer, 31.

2 Toker and Chertoff, 164; and Griffin, 657.

3 Gill, 848.

4 Eaglestone, 17.

5 Valle Alcalá, 49. For Nancy Armstrong, Hailsham likewise recalls nothing so much as “the Nazi death camps”; Armstrong, 452.

6 Valle Alcalá, 37. For an additional dystopian reading, see Robbins who argues, “The organ-donation gulag, tucked away from public view and yet not kept secret, has its obvious real-world counterpart in what we call class. Doesn't class divide just as effectively, allowing some of us to expect a reasonable return on our career investments while deviously ensuring that little will come of any expectations the rest may have?” see Robbins, “Cruelty Is Bad,” 292. Similarly, Black writes, “While Kathy and her classmates prefigure a futuristic world of genetic technology, they also reflect an existing late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century reality of growing economic imbalances”; see Black, 796. Diverging from Robbins’ and Black's class metaphor, Goh posits, “The clone's hollow body is the most fundamental and totalizing of discriminations, being independent of and prior to any socioeconomic positioning and individual choice in matters of behaviour, manners, language, belief, and other acquired and conditioned factors”; see Goh, 63–4, my emphasis. Goh does eventually concede, though, “The clone in narratological terms turns out to be not just a ‘test-tube’ genetic reconstruction but also an ideological double, standing in proxy for all the groups that are treated as ‘spare parts’ and ‘rubbish’ within the emerging ‘new world’”; see Goh, 67–8.

7 Ryle, 70.

8 Stamirowska, 61.

9 Jerng, 386. Jerng's argument emerges in the context of a comparative analysis between Ishiguro's novel and Michael Bay's film The Island. For other essays that feature comparative work on Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, see Goh, who reads it with Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome; Townsend, with Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Marks, with Eva Hoffman's The Secret; Jennings, with Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Summers-Bremner, with J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace; Stacy, with China Miéville's The City and the City; Storrow, with Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper; McDonald, with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Tsao, also with Shelley's Frankenstein as well as Milton's Paradise Lost; Elliott, with Cormac McCarthy's The Road as well as Yann Martel's Life of Pi; and Roos, with Andrea Camilleri's La gita a Tindari, Etienne van Heerden's In stede van die liefde as well as Stephen Frears's film Dirty Pretty Things. For an essay that sees Kathy's narration as modeled on Scheherazade and Odysseus, see Camacho and Pérez.

10 Bersani, Thoughts, xi.

11 Bersani, Rectum, 43.

12 Eatough, 148.

13 Bersani, Rectum, 55.

14 Ibid., 56.

15 Butler, Senses, 6–7.

16 Murphy, “Castration Desire,” 189.

17 Ibid., 187–8.

18 Ibid., 189.

19 Robbins, 5.

20 Ibid., 3, 134.

21 Ibid., 154.

22 Murphy, “Castration Desire,” 189.

23 Mann, 512.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 511–12.

27 Ibid., 515, 517.

28 Ibid., 517. In a brief response essay, psychoanalyst Francis Grier expands Mann's account by proposing that castration desire is actually father-orientated rather than mother-orientated: “I think that such a longing [castration desire] is not so much a wish to be like the mother as a desire to be utterly the object of the father's love, which seems to the child necessarily to involve not only the need to become like a woman or, rather, in phantasy to become a woman, but further to blot out the mother from both his and his father's mind and so to fulfill his desire to become his father's primary object by taking his mother's place”; see Grier, 306.

29 Mann, 516.

30 Snaza, 215. Whitehead likewise remarks on Hailsham's “advocacy of free-range over battery farming”; see Whitehead, 180.

31 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 242. All subsequent references to the novel are cited parenthetically by page number.

32 Hekman tracks the history of thinkers who established what we often refer to today as “new materialism”, a catchall term that points up to any number of conceptual approaches that seek to account for the earth's multitudinous relational matrix. See also Connolly.

33 Butler and Athanasiou, 34–5.

34 Muñoz, 25–6.

35 For an alternative take on the function of art within Never Let Me Go, see Dancer, 162: “For the clones of Hailsham, art has an almost entirely nonsignifying function”.

36 For Kathy, creativity manifests in a manner analogous to Tommy. While at Hailsham – her eyes shut, a pillow clung tightly to herself – Kathy dances alone to Judy Bridgewater's song “Never Let Me Go” from the album Songs after Dark, which album title serves to underscore the special place in Ishiguro's novel of art produced in – and ultimately projected out of – the dark. In this moment, Kathy explains, she imagines herself as a mother holding a baby. By some miracle, the fantasy went, barren Kathy managed to conceive a child and, under such improbable circumstances, wants nothing more than to never let the child go. Madame, who once seemed to express “dread” of the clones, witnesses Kathy's pillow dance, and is moved to weep. Yes, Kathy's miracle child is born in her imagination, but in Never Let Me Go, acts of the imagination move that which had been relegated to darkness into the light of conscious recognition. Here, Ishiguro has revised a canonical Biblical narrative; a clone-Mary, Kathy queers the originary drama of the Virgin tale. Carer-Kathy will go on to love her childlike caree-donors precisely because, like Mary's son, they sacrifice themselves for a global community of unseen others.

37 Bersani and Dutoit, 98.

38 Jerng, 382.

39 For another reading of Ishiguro's clones as queer, see Carroll. See, furthermore, Marks: “Human cloning would by definition reconfigure conventional lines of filiation: a ‘first generation’ human clone would be the genetic child of the parents of its ‘progenitor’ (nucleus donor). That is to say, its grandparents would also be its genetic parents. However, there is a fairly important proviso regarding the precise nature of a clone's genetic inheritance. The genetic make-up of a cloned individual comes primarily from the DNA contained in the nucleus, but the cytoplasm of the egg also plays a role, since it contains mitochondrial DNA. […] Human clones would inherit, potentially, genetic material from three individuals: the two individuals who reproduced sexually to produce the donor nucleus, and the mitochondrial DNA of the female egg donor”; see Marks, 334.

40 Lochner makes a similar point in her essay on Ishiguro's novel; see Lochner, 104.

41 Shaddox, 453.

42 For an alternative reading of this mirror scene, see Goh, 62–3.

43 Bersani and Dutoit, 5.

44 For Fluet, “The two elderly women appear to be ‘umbrellas’ – the Hailsham term for members of a same-sex couple”; see Fluet, 280–1.

45 See, especially, Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995), long stretches of his follow-up novel, When We Were Orphans (2000), The Buried Giant (2015), as well as his short story, “A Village After Dark” (2001).

46 In another telling passage, rife with shadow imagery, one of Ishiguro's Hailsham teachers relates, “How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease. So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you” (263).

47 Butler, Nonviolence, 41.

48 Jerng, 383.

49 Whitehead, 184.

50 Johnston, 45. As Groes similarly notes, “The image of the stranded boat crumbling away in the marshes gives us an image of historical time eating away at all material structures and of the earth swallowing up all evidence of human existence”; see Groes, 212.

51 Rajiva, 87.

52 Bersani, Thoughts, xii.

53 Ibid.

54 Muñoz, 189.

55 Neferti X.M. Tadiar has theorized the agentive capacity of “remaindered life”, i.e., the surplus populations who – like Ishiguro's clones – inhabit what she calls “zones of disposability”. For Tadiar, remaindered life consists “of a diverse array of acts, capacities, associations, aspirations in practice, experiential modes, and sensibilities that people engage in, draw upon, and invent in the struggle to make and remake social life under conditions of their own superfluity or disposability”; see Tadiar, 23. Tadiar's work is similar but different to my own. Where Tadiar is espousing a bottom-up politics – attending as she does to the agentive potential of “disposable populations” – my own theory starts with those at the “top” who must desire castration in order to help speed egalitarianism. I read Ishiguro's clones, then, not as capitalism's remainders, but as models for best-practice behavior for those of us in the capitalist centre.

56 Ibid., 185.

57 I've previously used this passage from Muñoz's Cruising Utopia to make a similar point; see Murphy, “Pain Comes in Waves,” 5.

58 Thank you to Ian Baucom for raising this point throughout his Cornell School of Criticism and Theory seminar, “Postcolonial Studies in the Era of the Anthropocene.”