In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Time that Remains: Organ Donation, Temporal Duration, and Bildung in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
  • Matthew Eatough (bio)

I half-closed my eyes and imagined that this was the spot where everything I’d lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure on the horizon would appear across the field, and gradually get larger until I could see Tommy, and he’d wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that—I didn’t let it—and though the tears rolled down my cheeks, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited for a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off wherever I was supposed to be.

Never Let Me Go, 288

So ends Kathy H.’s narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel that follows the lives of several young students who have been cloned for the express purpose of donating their organs to “normal” humans. But if the tears streaming down Kathy’s cheeks seem to end her tale on a note of pathos, we must also pause to observe what exactly is causing Kathy’s grief. Kathy’s tears are not for herself or her impending death. Instead, she weeps for the friends that she has “lost” and the privileged life they once lived, a life that now exists only “in [her] head.”1 Kathy refuses to consider that her role as a living, breathing organ farm is a cause for emotional distress and even goes so far as to find comfort in the demands of her job. She braces herself after her emotional outburst, insisting that she was never “out [End Page 132] of control,” and then calmly drives off to wherever, according to her occupation, she is “supposed to be.”

This essay examines the conjunction between affective indifference, vocational proficiency, and quality of life that we see emerging within Never Let Me Go. What is the role of affect with respect to organ transplantation? How and why does Kathy’s profession enable her to “control” her affect? And how does the “quality” of one’s life become mediated through affective and vocational categories? In order to answer these questions, I will be placing Ishiguro’s eccentric Bildungsroman into dialogue with biomedical studies that deal with patients’ quality of life. These studies aim to quantify the impact that certain physiological impairments have upon the subjective well-being of the patient under consideration. To this end, quality of life studies utilize preference-based psychometric tools such as questionnaires and tests that measure psychological abilities and attitudes, and then compare those states to a normal, fully functioning human being. The rationale behind such studies is that scientific advances have made ends-oriented criteria such as survival rate and life expectancy somewhat obsolete, and that renewed focus needs to be directed at how dangerous and costly surgeries change patients’ day-to-day lives. In shifting away from ends-oriented criteria and towards subjective psychometrics, quality of life studies propose that a patient’s quality of life must be determined in relation to his or her affective preferences, and that these affective preferences in turn present an index that can chart a patient’s distance from full health.

My purpose in bringing together quality of life studies and the Bildungsroman genre is to see under what sociocultural conditions affect, vocation, and quality of life can become legible. As a coming-of-age narrative that integrates its protagonist into a national community, the Bildungsroman form is ideally suited to investigating how wider social structures become legible to people within that community. The self-education that the protagonist undergoes in these tales depends upon being able to situate oneself within a given community, and this community in turn respects the singularity of the protagonist and allows that person’s individual talents to reach their full capacity. In Never Let Me Go, the inner cultivation and socialization of Kathy and her fellow students takes place within the realm of affective labor: caring, nursing, and mediating interpersonal relationships constitute the primary activities in...

pdf

Share