Thomson

''The headmistress, Ishiguro tells us in the novel, addresses Tommy and Kathy as poor creatures,^ alluding to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Ishiguro 2005, 254). The French teacher reveals to the couple that, despite the care and education they received, there have always been questions about whether these healthy human specimens were properly human^ (263). In fact, she goes on, We’re all afraid of you. I myself had to fight back my dread of you almost every day I was at Hailsham…I'd feel such revulsion…^ (269). For all of their normate function, capability, and appearance, Kathy and Tommy are irrevocably repulsive. Revulsion and fear are, of course, stock responses of the supposedly able-bodied to the supposedly disabled, the stock figures of eugenic rhetoric. The headmistress and teacher steadfastly retain their position of superiority in this perverse quartet as benevolent caretakers of the poor creatures.^ The sacrifice of the carers, the donation of their labor for the benefit of the ungrateful and undeserving recipients of care, is another stock disability narrative that is both enforced and reversed in the narrative confusion of donors and recipients, worthy and unworthy, human and inhuman''.

"Never Let Me Go is no sci-fi thriller, however, but rather an elegy haunted with a melancholic longing for the lost innocence of the idyllic childhood lived at Hailsham, as well as the lost companions, friends, and lovers who have completed^ by the end of the story — as the narrator herself will soon do. The novel and film press us to consider who we let go, why we let them go, and how we let them go. The program at this haunted English boarding school, we come to understand as the story unfolds, cultivates the so-called students’ well-bred beauty, intelligence, and their artistic, athletic, and interpersonal qualities. This grim reversal of the accepted criteria for the fully human becomes poignantly apparent as we come to identify with the clones and against their caretaker/captors, who increasingly display a perverse efficiency reminiscent of Nazi eugenicists and death camp bureaucrats. Our own melancholy develops as we realize that these talented, capable, and sensitive young people will die before they can fulfill the potential that their careful upbringing and natural gifts promise. Moreover, these sensitive, capable youths are resigned to their eventual fate, confinement, and limitation, apparently accepting it all as inevitable. The lonely Kathy H. accedes to the duties of "carer,^ which is a short reprieve from donation as she attends to donors whose organs are harvested until they eventually complete^ while still in the prime of youth and health (Ishiguro 2005, 2-3). The arc of the narrative forces them — and us — to realize that no matter how amply they demonstrate their humanity, their capabilities, and their valued qualities, there is no possibility of "deferral,^ no reprieve from organ donation for clones (Ishiguro 2005, 151). The predetermined fate — the absolutely closed future for the kinds of people we think of as having an absolutely open future — creates a quietly tragic memento mori to all of our fates. By inverting the positions of normate and disabled, Never Let Me Go makes the world of the narrative strange, thus calling into question the reigning logic of our ordinary world. So, the suddenly confusing world of the story challenges several assumptions fundamental to the ability/disability system. Perhaps the most perplexing and therefore arresting of the story’s strange inversions is that the uber-fit and healthy young Hailsham donor clones Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy — the main triangle of the story — are biologically fiercely able-bodied but socioculturally disabled in the disordered world of the story. In other words, they paradoxically possess normate embodiment and disabled status. These reversals make apparent and challenge three interrelated assumptions about the lives of disabled people and the lives of normates that are transmitted and received through acculturation and circulated through attitudes and public discourse so as to seem sensible, true, and self-evident.10 The work of the broad disability rights movement has been to question these widely accepted premises and show how such narratives contribute to a culture of discrimination against people with disabilities. These assumptions are, perhaps, most harmful in that they underpin the eugenic logic of eliminating disability and people with disabilities from the world. The first commonplace assumption about normate and disabled lives that Never Let Me Go challenges with its strange reversals is the belief that a meritocracy based on ability, physical and intellectual capital, and accomplishment structures the social order. This belief in a just universe, organized either by a higher power or Darwinian survival of the fittest, both blames and credits people for their status in the ability/disability system. In this worldview, normate and disabled status seem to be deserved states of advantage or disadvantage. Normate status — according to the logic of meritocracy — is earned privilege, whereas disabled status, even when it is not understood as volitional, confers natural inferiority and indisputable biological disadvantage. The Hailsham world initially appears to be a meritocracy, as any typical elite institution claims. However, the school turns out to be a perverse laboratory that first sets up and then reverses our understanding of a proper meritocracy. In fact, Hailsham is part of a system that reverses meritocracy’s logic by victimizing the healthy and fit — those who most closely approach normate status. Indeed, in the Hailsham world, neither achievement nor ability will redeem these deserving, accomplished donors from their ineluctable fate — from ending up at the very bottom of this social hierarchy — even while they possess all the bodily and intellectual capital that might put them at the top of the social order. The Hailsham world turns around the fundamental premise of eugenic world building by sacrificing normates for the benefit of people with disabilities. The second assumption about disabled people and normates that Never Let Me Go confounds is the conviction that the quality of life for people with disabilities is lower and that people with normate status enjoy a higher quality of life. The human variations we think of as disabilities are imagined to significantly reduce the quality of one's life due to functional limitations, bodily conditions, and/or physiological/psychological impairments. In other words, one’s bodily state is understood to be the source of life quality for people with disabilities and normates. In the strange world of Never Let Me Go, however, the clone donors — who are bred, treated, and nurtured from conception foreword to be hypernormates — have a substantially lower quality of life than the disabled recipients of their donations. Despite the fact that life at Hailsham is idyllic and amply provides basic life needs, such as good food, comfortable shelter, healthcare, and sustaining interpersonal social networks, the clones are essentially orphans with no sustaining family structure or capacity to make decisions for their own lives. They lead restricted lives, segregated from the public sphere, and have no access to the rights or obligations of citizenship that the larger population of potential recipients or caretakers can exercise. A group from which they are excluded on the basis of physiological distinctions determines the shape and content of their lives. The border between donors and recipients is absolute and structures the quality of life for both groups. In contrast, the citizen recipients of the clones’ donations, represented in the story by the Hailsham headmistress, have access to the resources and opportunities of full citizenship, social and geographical mobility, self-determination, and health decisions. Indeed, the fundamental premise of the narrative in which the healthy and fit clones are sacrificed for the benefit of disabled and unfit citizens reverses the traditional hierarchies of social value in which disabled people are taken to have lower quality of life and life chances while nondisabled people are imagined to have higher quality of life and increased life opportunities. Regardless of the clones’ embodied capital — their wide array of physical, appearance, and educational capital — they occupy a very low status position in the inverted order of Never Let Me Go. Their confinement and lack of agency to determine the course of their own lives isolates them completely from full members of the society. As adults, they don't know how to interact with nonclones or to use public space in any way. In the film, they wander around the town, incompetently looking in windows trying to figure out how other people who seem like them act, interact, and use the larger the world of the village. On the other hand, the supposedly disabled, who are the recipients of the clones’ biological capital, do not heavily bear the stigma of disability because their disabilities will supposedly be cured by the harvesting program that will deliver them back to normate status. Thus, those considered fully human in the world of Never Let Me Go will only ever be temporarily disabled. So even though the reigning majority will eventually transition into the category of disabled, the stigma of that status is relieved, or even removed, through the potential to shift back toward normate status as they literally take on the bodies of the clone donors''.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson