engleski

Human(ism) on Sale? Materiality vs. Spirituality in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

This paper will deal with Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005), which explores the future of humanity, spirituality, and materiality in a number of ways. The rapid changes in Europe’s cultural sensibilities and the strong push toward scientific and technical thought at the expense of the arts and humanities call for a rereading of the novel in light of these new paradigms. Delving deeply into the field of post-humanism, more specifically transhumanism – defined by Joel Garreau as an all-encompassing improvement of intellectual, emotional, and above all physical capabilities of humans that allows for the elimination of illness and deferral of death – Never Let Me Go explores the complex aspects of human life in a technologically advanced society that creates new casts or classes of people in the form of human clones. The clones are created for the sole purpose of being organ donors and are consequently perceived as soulless sub-humans. When teachers at Hailsham, one of several boarding schools for clones, decide to give their students a more humane treatment and education that encourages art and artistic creation in order to show to the general public that clones are in fact real humans with a soul, just like the “originals”, the ethical complexity of the organ harvesting practice turns out to be too overwhelming. As a result, Hailsham is shut down and all programs that would encourage the donors’ (clones’) emotional and spiritual development are discontinued. In addition to this, the novel’s subtext is saturated with the implications of the materialistic background of the practice and the ever-presence of capital as the dominating social force, which Ishiguro never explicitly discusses, but which obviously represents a prerequisite for cloning, harvesting, and buying of organs. The paper suggests that Ishiguro’s novel raises important questions about the ethics of science and scientific research, as well as about the complexity of human life, which, although manifested through the material, is also (if not primarily) spirituality.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, dystopia, posthumanism, transhumanism

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