Bureaucracy and narrative possibilities in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Abstract

This article examines the use of bureaucratic narrative — that which poses the subject as an administrative subject and emphasizes the depersonalized and routinized repetition of formulaic rhetoric — in Never Let Me Go (2005) and its suggestion that the language of regulation and job requirements pervasively shapes the seeming impossibility of a critical stance towards a system that is patently and determinedly cruel. By reframing Kathy’s and Tommy’s dystopian–bureaucratic narrative as a romance pushing against the boundaries of bureaucracy and by situating the reader as a sympathizing character within the text, the novel makes visible the contours of neoliberal rationalities. I argue that Never Let Me Go illustrates that the bureaucratic state is experienced as an array of narratives that structure interpersonal interactions, not just as a set of material and spatial practices. This means considering bureaucracy as an interpretative frame, not just material apparatuses or structures of management.

One of the most striking elements of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go, is its carefully, even cautiously neutral narrative voice. The novel tells the story of Kathy H. and her friends, clones in a parallel vision of post war Britain, and the process through which they are raised, donate their organs to their “originals”, and, ultimately, die. The subtlety characteristic of all of Ishiguro’s work, and the cruelty this style attempts to make palatable, becomes all the more heightened with his move into speculative fiction. Yet, while Ishiguro’s emphasis in previous works on the resigned acceptance of repressive and hierarchical social relations continues here, Never Let Me Go’s language also points to myriad ways in which a particularly bureaucratic narrative style — one that poses the subject as an administrative subject and emphasizes the depersonalized and routinized repetition of formulaic rhetoric — signals both the possibility of making these social relations visible and of finding ways for manoeuvring within them. In contrast, for instance, to the forever deferred romance between Stevens and Miss Kenton in The Remains of the Day (1988), deferred because it disrupts too seriously the narrative of service that allows Stevens to give meaning to his actions, Never Let Me Go offers the possibility of narrative interruption or manipulation. Ishiguro has long taken seriously the shaping role that narrative provides but in previous instances the coldness of the narrative seemed deliberately designed to alienate readers from his characters. Yet, in Never Let Me Go, hardly a warm and welcoming novel, Ishiguro actively encourages, through forms of narrative address, the reader to implicate themselves alongside his characters. The use of bureaucratic narrative in the novel suggests the way that the language of regulation and job requirements pervasively shapes the seeming impossibility of a critical stance towards a system that is patently and determinedly cruel. By re-framing Kathy’s and Tommy’s dystopian–bureaucratic narrative as a romance pushing against the boundaries of bureaucracy, ¹ the novel interrupts the teleological inevitability of bureaucratic cruelty, making visible the contours of neoliberal bureaucratic rationalities. The narrative forms characteristic of bureaucracies, then, both work to internalize neoliberal values ² and to disrupt these same hegemonic practices. I follow, here, from John Marx’s claim for the “administrative turn” in twentieth–century imperial fiction, where “novelists helped forecast a world after European imperialism by identifying problems with empire’s administrative strategies and by laying the conceptual foundation necessary to generate new schemes” (2012: 1). I therefore situate Never Let Me Go in the category of “twenty-first-century novels [that] have inherited that legacy and continue to criticize existing policies in order to formulate best practices on a global scale” (Marx, 2012: 1). Put differently, in the novel’s interrogation of bureaucratic narrative, it takes part in past and ongoing postcolonial critiques of the administration of populations.

The flexible potential of bureaucracy — and particularly, its narrative forms (the form, the performance review, the employee handbook, and their logics of meritorious service and simultaneously hazy definitions of merit) — suggests another way of reading Ishiguro’s critique of the modern welfare state, compellingly outlined by Bruce Robbins. Robbins argues that Ishiguro asks

us to consider caring here as possibly conflicting with caring there [...] to consider the welfare state as a distanced, anger-bearing project in which the anger is a necessary part of a genuine concern for people’s welfare. This vision demands we look beyond the welfare of those immediately around us, even if the glance away from the here-and-now can look like, and can be experienced as, cruelty. (2007: 301)

The controlled anger and displaced cruelty of the welfare state is, for Robbins, central to the ethical project of social mobility, which seeks to manage the exigencies of capitalism. I similarly contend that we might read the novel as offering an “expansive and counter-intuitive political vision” (Robbins, 2007: 301) that grapples with the violence that undergirds the modern liberal nation-state. However, I argue that Never Let Me Go illustrates that the bureaucratic state is experienced as an array of narratives that structure interpersonal interactions, not just as a set of material and spatial practices that manage (what appears to be) cruelty. This means considering bureaucracy as an interpretative frame, not just material apparatuses or structures of management. ³ Indeed, the calm and cruel insidiousness of Never Let Me Go emerges from the very familiarity of the narrative structures used by Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth to make sense of their world and their places within it.

Bureaucracy and the narrative accumulation of rationality

Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy continues to be central to thinking about this way of organizing work and life. He identifies 10 key criteria that characterize “bureaucratic administrative staff:” (1) They are “subject to authority only with respect to their impersonal official obligations”, (2) They are “organized in a clearly defined hierarchy of offices”, (3) Each office “has a clearly defined sphere of competence”, (4) The office is “filled by a free contractual relationship”, (5) “Candidates are selected on the basis of technical qualifications”, (6) They “are remunerated by fixed salaries”, (7) The office is treated as the “sole [...] occupation of the incumbent”, (8) The office “constitutes a career”, (9) The official “works entirely separated from the ownership of the means of administration”, and (10) They are “subject to strict and systematic discipline and control in the conduct of the office” (1947: 333–4). A recurring phrase across these criteria (present even when just implicit) is the centrality of “clearly defined” roles, responsibilities, and remunerations. Indeed, Weber goes on to conclude that “formalism” is one of the general characteristics of bureaucracy as it prevents leaving “the door [...] open to arbitrariness” (1947: 340).

The rational predictability Weber attributes to bureaucracy in its ideal form is, for him, its greatest virtue:

The whole pattern of everyday life is cut to fit this framework. For bureaucratic administration is, other things being equal, always, from a formal, technical point of view, the most rational type. [...] The choice is only between bureaucracy and dilletantism in the field of administration. (1947: 337). ⁴

The emphasis on rationality and clear expectations points to the central role that narrative plays in the smooth operation of bureaucratic life: in order for responsibilities to be clearly defined, there must be a variety of documents that work to define them as part of the organization’s sense of itself. As Weber notes,

bureaucratic organizations, or the holders of power who make use of them, have the tendency to increase their power still further by the knowledge growing out of experience in the service. For they acquire through the conduct of office a special knowledge of facts and have available a store of documentary material peculiar to themselves. (1947: 339)

Robert Merton continues this emphasis on clear definition of roles and the necessity of narrativizing it in some fashion in his articulation of the “bureaucratic personality”. He suggests that:

formality, which is integrated with the distribution of authority within the system, serves to minimize friction by largely restricting (official) contact to modes which are previously defined by the rules of the organization. Ready calculability of others’ behavior and a stable set of mutual expectations is thus built up. (1949: 151)

Yet, as Merton observes, the rationality and narrativity at work in bureaucracy is dependent upon Foucauldian disciplinary structures that internalize the values of the form:

discipline can be effective only if the ideal patterns are buttressed by strong sentiments which entail devotion to one’s duties, a keen sense of the limitations of one’s authority and competence, and methodical performance of routine activities [...] in order to ensure discipline (the necessary reliability of response), these sentiments are often more intense than is technically necessary. (1949: 154)

He goes on to observe that “adherence to the rules, originally conceived as a means, becomes transformed into an end-in-itself; there occurs the familiar process of displacement of goals whereby ‘an instrumental value becomes a terminal value’” (1949: 155; emphasis in original).

As Merton and many others suggest, bureaucracies rarely operate in the rationally idyllic way that Weber outlines. Charles Perrow, for instance, argues that we should view bureaucracies as tools, highlighting “the possibility that what we see as incompetent performance or policy really reflects what some leaders wanted all along” (1986: 13) and reminding us that “organizations are tools for shaping the world as one wishes it to be shaped” (1986: 11). ⁵ What interests me in this paper, however, are not the virtues or failings of these ways of organizing work life; instead, I want to consider how the novel itself becomes enmeshed in the perpetuation of bureaucratic common sense (and, more specifically, the way that Never Let Me Go attempts to “interrupt” it). Bureaucratic narrative, therefore, is that which “entails separation of individuals from the instruments of production [and] which almost completely avoids public discussion of its techniques” (Merton, 1949: 152–3). These are narratives that use the carefully neutral language of the bureaucratic form and handbook (which are, ostensibly, designed to avoid bias and preference), internalize the hierarchical structures of bureaucratic command, and suggest the disciplined inevitability of a life arranged by management. The overlap between these characteristics and other narrative forms is not a coincidence: the novel, like bureaucracy, is tied to the rise of modern liberal capitalism. What I suggest, then, is the usefulness of thinking about the way narrative works to both internalize and critique the bureaucratic narratives that infuse contemporary life in a variety of ways; Never Let Me Go demonstrates particularly effectively the way that the surface rationality and security of bureaucracy might extend beyond our working lives, into subject formation itself and interpersonal interactions more largely.

Narratives of bureaucracy

From the very beginning of the novel, Ishiguro situates the novel’s primary narrative voice within the ontological boundaries of bureaucratic systems and regulations:

My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year… Now I know my being a carer so long isn’t necessarily because they think I’m fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who’ve been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space… But then I do know for a fact they’ve been pleased with my work. (Ishiguro, 2005: 1) ⁶

While the specifics of Kathy’s comments speak to the idiosyncratic world of the novel, the broad gestures here are decidedly reminiscent of the language of annual reviews and the particular dialect of the government employee (or anyone who works for a large employer). ⁷ The mysterious “they” who ultimately determine one’s fate, the seeming disconnect between skill, merit, and promotion, the predetermined length of one’s career: all of these are familiar to the many of us who work within large bureaucracies.

One of the things the novel makes clear is the way that bureaucratic narratives like Kathy’s opening narration work to naturalize and neutralize sovereign power. As Foucault notes in Society Must Be Defended, “biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem” (2003: 245). Biopolitics takes “control of life and the biological processes of man-as-species and [ensures] that they are not disciplined, but regularized” (2003: 246–7). Foucault and others suggest that biopolitics is the primary modern experience of sovereignty; bureaucracies, therefore, which are established to administer life, then become the visible — yet simultaneously invisible and unspeakable ⁸ — arm of the sovereign. As Pieter Vermeulen observes, “biopower [...] is a power that tends to pass itself [off] as mere management or bureaucracy” (2012: 384). Indeed, Kathy’s opening articulation of bureaucratic life reveals its all-encompassing scope: there is no life outside bureaucracy and its narratives here. Even one’s affective responses to the world — which in their very unpredictability might, at least provisionally, seem to exist in complicated relation to the limits of full biopolitical maintenance — are here bounded by the regulation of bureaucratic systems: just as there is no life outside bureaucracy, there is no language to express affects outside those which are bureaucratically administered. Kathy’s dispassionate summation of her life so far (a tone exemplified in this first paragraph) — a narrative about which we would expect some form of affective engagement — reveals the affective bounds that contour the available responses to bureaucracy in the novel. ⁹

As Kathy continues, the narrative limits of bureaucracy and its connection to the affective relationships between subjects are further emphasized as her skill is emphatically linked to her ability to care for her “donors”:

I’ve developed a kind of instinct around donors. I know when to hang around and comfort them, when to leave them to themselves; when to listen to everything they have to say, and when just to shrug and tell them to snap out of it. (1)

The skills Kathy lists, the “instinct” she develops, suggest a regularization of interpersonal interactions: there is a particular response available and identifiable for each scenario she encounters. ¹⁰ If in the opening pages of the novel, Kathy suggests the mutual imbrication of aid, comfort, and bureaucracy in general terms, we can see this link more specifically at work in her later role as carer to both Ruth and Tommy. For instance, in describing her time with Ruth, she notes “I’d always time my evening visits so that we’d be able to spend a half hour or so out there, watching the sun go down over the rooftops [...] I’d bring mineral water and biscuits, and we’d sit there talking about anything that came into our heads” (17). Kathy frames her interactions with Ruth here as a social visit between old friends, not a visit administered by an official health care functionary, exnominating the biopolitical nature of her ministrations (she visits, after all, to ensure that Ruth remains healthy enough to continue her donations, a bureaucratic task that doesn’t particularly require personal connection). And while Ruth and (later) Tommy are admittedly special cases for Kathy, given her long friendship with them, the pastoral and romanticized language of this description glosses Kathy’s and Ruth’s actual role in this scenario. Indeed, Kathy goes on to suggest that

the centre Ruth was in that time, it’s one of my favourites, and I wouldn’t mind at all if that’s where I ended up. The recovery rooms are small, but they’re well-designed and comfortable. Everything — the walls, the floor — has been done in gleaming white tiles, which the centre keeps so clean when you first go in it’s almost like entering a hall of mirrors. (17)

Robbins notes of this scene that “the sentence structure seems engineered to guarantee that the best will always be made of a bad situation, with no acknowledgement that the situation will always be bad because the same system has also begotten it” (2007: 296). Yet where Robbins reads this scene as a reflection on the constrained rewards and inherent limits of upward mobility, we might also read this as illustrating the narrative limits of bureaucratic life and their constitutive role in shaping everyday life; it is a “hall of mirrors” which refracts and distorts the lived reality of the apparatus, akin to the “common sense” of biopolitics which substitutes rhetorics of power for rhetorics of care. Ishiguro here uses bureaucratic rhetoric to reflect on the boundaries of interpersonal interactions that exist under neoliberal rationalities. Bureaucracy and bureaucratic lives becomes the imaginative limit here as the only possible interactions available for Kathy and Ruth are indexed to the job requirements — both rhetorically and practically — of the carer. Kathy cannot imagine a life beyond bureaucracy, to the extent that it forms the scaffolding for her interactions with both her patients and her friends.

Bureaucracy as narrative limit within the novel is also demonstrated by the discussions in the novel about “possibles” — the people who might be the characters’ biological antecedents. The role and significance of possibles is hotly debated amongst the clones, with “one big idea behind finding your model was that when you did, you’d glimpse your future [...] you’d get some insight into who you were deep down, and maybe too, you’d see something of what your life held in store” (140; emphasis in original). Possibles are understood, at least provisionally, as the ontological determinant of the clones’ lives. As Kathy notes, not all the clones believe this: some think “our models were an irrelevance, a technical necessity for bringing us into the world, nothing more than that” (140). The clones here replicate long-standing philosophical and political debates about the role of fate and free will in determining a subject’s sense of self — a reiteration that forms part of Ishiguro’s characterization of the clones as a mirror to non-clone human society. Nonetheless, Kathy observes that “all the same, whenever we heard reports of a possible — whoever it was for — we couldn’t help getting curious” (140). Kathy’s grudging investment in the myth of the possible further illustrates, then, the way that the myths of their particular bureaucratic life shape the possibilities for imagining life, even beyond the apparent limits of the bureaucracy: for the clones, not just the material experience of life and death is shaped by bureaucracy, but also the imagined escape. ¹¹

Similar narrative limits operate throughout the novel; limited horizons are not, in other words, used simply as an expression of Kathy’s idiosyncrasies and her internalization of hegemonic norms, but something that is actively maintained in the clones’ socialization. When Miss Lucy, one of the teachers at Hailsham, the boarding school where the novel’s main characters are brought up, explains to the students the established limits for their lives, Kathy notes that there “was surprisingly little discussion about what she’d said [among the children]. If it did come up, people tended to say: ‘Well so what? We already knew all that’” (82). The echoes of the bureaucratic inevitability familiar from any encounter with a large organization where one must capitulate to arcane patterns of behaviour are unmistakable. She goes on to say that “it feels like I always knew about donations in some vague way [...] It was like we’d heard everything somewhere before. One thing that occurs to me now is that when the guardians first started giving us proper lectures about sex, they tended to run them together with talk about the donations” (83; emphasis in original). Bureaucracy, the future, and sexual hygiene all become blurred here. The clones’ ability to imagine futures for themselves is fundamentally structured by bureaucratic forms. The bureaucratized discussion of safe sex becomes a vehicle for transmitting ideological common sense about donations and the horrors therein; the guardians use the biopolitical rhetoric of self-maintenance and control to perpetuate the relational and aspirational limits between and for the clones. ¹² Kathy states that “and even though, as we knew, it was completely impossible for any of us to have babies, out there, we had to behave like them. We had to respect the rules and treat sex as something pretty special. Miss Emily’s lecture that day was typical of what I’m talking about. We’d be focusing on sex, and then the other stuff would creep in” (84; emphasis added). ¹³ Bruce Jennings notes of this scene, that the “Hailsham children rationalize the situation, neutralizing the implications of the small bits and pieces of the truth that they are told by the ‘guardians’” (2010: 18) — a reminder of the way that narrative allows unpalatable realities to come to appear inevitable. Kathy here encapsulates the complex matrix the novel establishes between bureaucracy, biopolitical sovereignty, and narrative.

Narrative as disruption

Yet, while Never Let Me Go demonstrates how bureaucratic narratives naturalize and make invisible the hegemonic realities of biopolitical arrangements of the human, it concurrently illustrates the disruptive potential of supplementary narratives. This disruption follows two general patterns: narrative as form of escape, and as the “redistribution of the perceptible”, to follow from Rancière. Narrative, therefore, provides solace but also gives language to anger and horror. For instance, the escapist narrative of romantic love is shown to fuel and make visible the horror story narrative: the horror of the narrative becomes heightened by the love story as both forms of narrative return subjecthood to the characters who are, under the bureaucratic narratives, pawns in a larger story. The agency these characters gain through rewriting their narratives as romance and horror draws attention to their (quite literal) objectification under bureaucracy. These narratives, thus act as instances of political activity, as defined by Rancière, as they “introduce new objects and subjects onto the common stage [and] make visible what was invisible, [they] make audible as speaking beings those who were previously heard only as noisy animals” (2011: 4).

One such example of extra-bureaucratic narrativization is Ruth’s search for Madame’s address, in the hopes that Kathy and Tommy might be able to defer their own donations. In giving the slip of paper with the address to Tommy, Ruth says, of discovering it, “it wasn’t easy. It took me a long time, and I ran a few risks. But I got it in the end, and I got it for you two. Now it’s up to you to find her and try” (233). Ruth makes clear that this is information obtainable only beneath the surface of the boundaries of the clones’ world. Under the narrative frame of bureaucracy, not only is the deferral an impossibility, but so too is knowledge of the system itself: the power at work in this system is obscured under the language of bureaucracy. If this system works to elide the horror of what actually happens to the clones, Ruth, here, seeks a way to narrate the system against its rules. While we might attribute Ruth’s declaration of the “risks” she ran as part of her typically self-aggrandizing rhetoric (she becomes the self-sacrificing hero at the centre of a dangerous adventure), it also tracks with the novel’s sense of the horrors beneath the surface of bureaucratic rules (knowing the basic structure of one’s society shouldn’t require heroic actions).

Yet it is also notable that Ruth takes these risks in order to re-align her understanding of Kathy and Tommy as being part of a grand romantic narrative, and to locate herself within this narrative as a past obstruction to their love. ¹⁴ Indeed, she explicitly attributes her actions to an attempt to atone for past treatment of the two: “I’d like you to forgive me, but I don’t expect you to [...] I kept you and Tommy apart [...] That was the worst thing I did [...] I wanted us all to do this trip, because I wanted to say what I just said. But I also wanted it because I wanted to give you something” (232–3). She obtains this something she wants to give them — Madame’s address — not because they have asked her, not because the rules allow her to, but because she wants a tangible symbol of her regret and desire for their happiness, an affective response that is ineffable in a system that figures casual cruelty as natural and inevitable. This is significant, in part, because it marks one of the few demonstrable instances of Ruth’s care for Tommy and Kathy, but it follows her assertion that “I think I was a pretty decent carer. But five years felt about enough for me [...] I was pretty much ready when I became a donor. It felt right. After all, it’s what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it” (227; emphasis in original). The text juxtaposes Ruth’s seemingly orthodox articulation of the narrative of bureaucratic responsibility and adherence to expected and predictable outcomes with her transgression of this same narrative to demonstrate affection. Kathy’s response to these two moments is telling. In response to Ruth’s seeming orthodoxy, she tenses up: “I wasn’t sure if she expected me to respond to this. She hadn’t said it in any obviously leading way, and it’s perfectly possible this was a statement she’d come out with just out of habit — it was the sort of thing you hear donors say to each other all the time” (227). While Kathy worries that the statement is intended to antagonize her because she has been a carer for 14 years, she also recognizes it as a standard statement, part of the bureaucratic script of how donors and carers are to interact. However, in response to Ruth’s request for forgiveness, Kathy begins to sob. Indeed, Kathy initially rejects Ruth’s offer of the possibility of deferral, saying, while crying, that “It’s too late for all that now… It’s stupid even thinking about it. As stupid as wanting to work in that office up there. We’re all way beyond that now” (233). Kathy links her emotional response to bureaucracy here, referencing the younger Ruth’s desire to be an office worker, a desire which Kathy had earlier internalized. But her tears and her reminder of her earlier desires, tied to a life outside the bureaucratic limit of clone-dom, suggest the inability of bureaucratic narratives to fully contain interpersonal interactions and comfort and the efficacy of Ruth’s reframing of Kathy’s and Tommy’s past in causing both to rethink their present.

Reframing bureaucratic narratives in order to disrupt (or, at least, attempt to do so) cruelty only becomes further elaborated in the novel’s climactic confrontation between Tommy, Kathy, Madame, and Miss Emily. ¹⁵ Here, Tommy and Kathy seek a deferral of Tommy’s future donations, a deferral they hope to achieve through the demonstration of the love the two share; they narrate their existence through grand romance and exceptionality, rather than the language of meritorious reward that accompanies Kathy’s opening summation of her job performance and its reflection of her subjectivity. Tommy and Kathy plan to demonstrate, through Tommy’s artwork, that the two of them are in love, a relationship that exceeds the administrative narrative of carer–donor interaction. Kathy, in making their case, states that “we know that you must get tired of it, all these couples coming to you, claiming to be in love. Tommy and me, we never would have come and bothered you if we weren’t really sure” (252). She distinguishes Tommy and herself, then, from the other couples she assumes have asked for a deferral, by stating the “truth” of their love: their feelings are authentic, in comparison to the uncertain feelings of others. The authenticity of these feelings would, then, in Kathy’s arguments, justify treating them as exceptional, as outside the typical rules of their bureaucratic life: their love story is a true love story. Kathy’s and Tommy’s romance narrative, therefore, both provides Ruth solace from the recognition of her impending death, and a point from which Kathy and Tommy can articulate their own anger about their dehumanization and impending violent deaths.

These extra-bureaucratic narratives are perhaps somewhat uncritically treated in the novel: they are the expression of “authenticity” and “true” humanism, in contrast to sovereign and authoritarian bureaucracy. This would seem to replicate the atomizing nature of neoliberalism, whereby the individual becomes the standard unit of social measure. Yet, as with the bureaucratic narratives in the text, Ishiguro demonstrates a multi-layered approach to these narratives, suggesting the varied ways they impact individuals and larger, collective narratives about society. This becomes visible in the moments where characters articulate an understanding of themselves as characters in horror narratives. As Robbins notes, through these narratives “Ishiguro is urging us to perceive the horror that floats just beyond the horizon of our daily routine” (2007: 294), emphasizing the horrors that the welfare state seeks to obscure and suggesting that bureaucracy might shape affective horizons in order to protect the subject from the necessary horrors of everyday life under capitalism. But focusing on the horror obscures the ways that the routine is just as important as and enmeshed in the perpetuation of our responses to the horror; indeed, the routine gives narrative meaning to the horror.

The transformation of bureaucratic narratives into horror is made most visible in the rumour of ongoing donations, post-carer:

How maybe, after the fourth donation, even if you’ve technically completed, you’re still conscious in some sort of way; how then you find there are more donations, plenty of them, on the other side of that line; how there are no more recovery centres, no carers, no friends; how there’s nothing to do except watch your remaining donations until they switch you off. It’s horror movie stuff. (279) ¹⁶

The suggestion of a kind of life “after” completion, the novel’s euphemism for death, evokes a kind of zombification of the donors, in contrast to the full humanity Ishiguro affords them prior to this. Without the accoutrements of bureaucratic systems, the lives of the donors become the stuff of horror movies — yet so are the rest of their lives, even with carers. Ishiguro draws our attention, then, not just to the horrors that structure everyday life, but to the systems that enable us to recognize (or not) them as such. We might recognize this as an expression of sovereignty: just as the sovereign has the right over life and death, so too does the sovereign make the related determinations of what is pleasurable, and thus tolerable, and what is horrific, and thus intolerable. For Ishiguro, this distinction between the tolerable and the intolerable is one mediated by narrative and where the seemingly neutral narratives of bureaucracy are almost impossible to recognize as constructed and compelled.

Disrupting narrative bounds

Another striking feature of Never Let Me Go is the discursive incorporation of the reader into the donor population. On one hand, the reader’s identification with the protagonist is familiar to readers: we often identify or imagine the possibility of identifying with the protagonist in some fashion, no matter how different he or she is from ourselves. Yet, readers might be expected to identify more typically with the recipients of cloned organs, rather than the cloned bodies that produce these organs. Never Let Me Go, thus, makes use of the expected conventions and results of narrative — particularly those about sympathy and identification — but inverts them to invite readers to express new forms of sympathy, crafting new narratives of responsibility and connection, suggesting, once again, a complicated and ambiguous matrix of consent and dissent in terms of narrative possibilities. What Never Let Me Go creates, then, are the conditions of possibility — both inside and outside the text — for re-writing familiar patterns of bureaucratic and biopolitical allocations of humanity. The text makes visible what we might call a “radical sympathy”, offered as a catalyst for rethinking the politics of biopolitical bureaucratic sovereignty.

By evoking the clash between bureaucratized and extra-bureaucratic narratives that I outlined earlier, Never Let Me Go requires its readers to think differently about the narratives that structure how they consider subjects fundamentally other to themselves. Mike Marais suggests of the realist novel, that “the political significance of [the] reduplication in fiction of the Enlightenment attempt at establishing an apodictic subjectivity, is that it enabled the novel to conceal the subject’s situatedness in culture” (1997: 2); as a result, “it presents as pure a relation which is, in fact, mediated and thus transformative, a relation in which the subject constitutes the other as an object by negating its alterity” (1997: 2). Marais argues that

by inscribing an apparently transcendental subject and constructing a seemingly seamless correspondence between this subject’s representations and what is presented as the “outer world”, the novel disguises the fact that it can only ever produce that which has already been transformed into the same. (1997: 3)

What Never Let Me Go offers, by way of contrast, to what Marais posits as endemic to novel form, is a disruption of this “seemingly seamless correspondence” — despite, in fact, Ishiguro’s famously seamless prose. In other words, Ishiguro suggests the centrality of the material violence — which Marais characterizes as primarily epistemological (1997: 3) — necessary for the transformation of the other into the same. The horror at the heart of this novel, arguably amplified by its very dispassion, demonstrates the limits to the liberal sympathy long linked with the rise of the novel. Rae Greiner notes, of sympathy, that it “succeeds in inspiring us to feel with others, [but] it does so because we have undertaken the difficult task of thinking in particular ways about them first” (2012: 4; 8). ¹⁷ Sympathy, in Never Let Me Go, is intrinsically linked to the bureaucratic narratives that negotiate and delimit how characters — and readers — can think about their affective relationships to others; yet by finding radical forms of sympathy in narratives that bypass or reorient these prescribed sympathetic discourses, Ishiguro offers a complex critique of the political manipulation and possibilities of sympathy.

The primary narrative technique used in the novel to establish a sympathetic link between reader and character is its mode of address. Throughout the book, Kathy addresses her reader as “you”, implying a connection between herself as narrator, and reader as audience; she evokes, throughout the novel, a personal relationship between narrator and reader. Moreover, these “you” statements are often ones that suggest that the reader is part of and familiar with the rules of her world. For instance, at the beginning of Chapter Two, she states “I don’t know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham we had to have some form of medical almost every week” (13). Not only does she suggest that the reader knows how her world works — at this point in the novel, the contours and details of this world have been alluded to but not explained — but that the reader is, like Kathy, part of the donor population. The reader not only understands the discourse of donation, but was somewhere like Hailsham, part of the insular and isolated community of clones; the reader is suggested to have an intimate familiarity with the upbringing of the donor, an intimacy that suggests that one is a donor, not just aware of the process. Kathy makes a variety of similar pronouncements throughout, suggesting a kind of accumulative effect whereby the reader imagines themselves as participants within the system that she describes. ¹⁸ Kathy’s method of linking the reader to her through the second person pronoun suggests forms of sympathy that rely, firstly, on an affective response, as a way of producing larger effects. ¹⁹ Shameem Black notes that “to cross borders productively, works of fiction encourage both vivid affective responses to the lives of others and nuanced learning about their predicaments [...] Identifying invisible structural problems matters as much as acknowledging the palpable pain of the person before us” (2010: 63). Kathy assumes, in the reader, the kind of information that Black presumes that sympathy might teach. ²⁰

This narrative identification culminates in the passage quoted earlier about the rumoured future donations. This passage begins with the following address to the reader: “You’ll have heard the same talk” (279). I want to quote this passage again, to emphasize the preponderance of “yous” here:

How maybe, after the fourth donation, even if you’ve technically completed, you’re still conscious in some sort of way; how then you find there are more donations, plenty of them, on the other side of that line; how there are no more recovery centres, no carers, no friends; how there’s nothing to do except watch your remaining donations until they switch you off. It’s horror movie stuff. (279; emphasis added)

This “horror movie stuff” is not potentially happening to faceless characters, but to you. The “you” who has, thus far, been implicated anecdotally and conversationally is now part of the very horror that bureaucratic narratives seek to manage, and thereby efface. There is, therefore, an urgency attributed to these identifications. The final clause of the last sentence suggests that “most of the time people don’t want to think about it”.

Yet, in Kathy’s and Tommy’s earlier conversation with her when seeking a deferral, Miss Emily suggests that this desire to avoid thinking about the realities — actual or otherwise — of the clones’ lives is not limited to the clones and those with whom they immediately interact:

people preferred to believe those organs appeared from nowhere, or at most that they grew in a kind of vacuum [...] By the time they came to consider just how you were reared, whether you should have been brought into existence at all, well by then it was too late. There was no way to reverse the process. (262–3)

She goes on to observe that “the world didn’t want to be reminded how the donation programme really worked. They didn’t want to think about you students, or about the conditions you were brought up in. In other words, my dears, they wanted you back in the shadows” (264–5). There is a tension here between knowing and not-knowing that again is tied to available forms of narrative.

The problem, in other words, is not that the organ recipients do not know about the clones and the lives they lead or might lead; it is rather that the organ recipients refuse to share the narrative with those who are other to them, limiting their shared discourses to those most like themselves:

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. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren’t really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter. (263; emphasis added)

Sympathy, under this paradigm, while recognizable, works at the expense of other bodies that have been categorized as non-human; the cost of this is quite literal as the clones are required to give up their bodies in the maintenance of those with whom the rest of the world already sympathizes. ²¹ Moreover, it works to maintain the bureaucratic status quo. Jane Elliott observes that “because the types of choices generated under neoliberal rule — genuine, individual, self-directed, and wrong — are so difficult to map against our usual political categories that neoliberal governance manages to appear so transparent and blameless” (2013: 88; emphasis in original). She goes on to suggest that “we need a different imaginative lexicon of political experience, one capable of envisioning moments in which agential action and domination become intertwined with one another” (2013: 88). Yet where Elliott argues that this is a matter of recognizing the suffering agency of neoliberal subjecthood, I argue that what Never Let Me Go demonstrates is that a necessary precondition for the expansion of shared subjectivity necessary to (a certain vision of) politics is the ability to situate oneself in a shared narrative like Kathy invites the reader to do, rejecting the management of bodies that inheres in bureaucratic narratives. The sympathizing subject–recipient of cloned organs can afford to have limited sympathies: their bodies are not being mined for their constituent parts. But the novel does not allow its readers to imagine themselves at a similar distance.

This failure of narrative imagination on the part of the organ recipients, and the impossibility of this failure on the part of readers, ²² demonstrates the rupture the novel reveals between the subject and the world in which he or she exists. By Never Let Me Go’s invitation to sympathize with the subject of violence, readers are compelled to rethink the “cognitive distance between subject and object” (Marais, 1997: 2) typically at work in both novelistic and popular narratives of the subject’s relation to the world. While this does not inevitably produce a particular political response, it follows from Rancière’s characterization of political activity in broad terms as a narrative reconfiguration of the “distribution of the perceptible” (2011: 4). Through the interplay between narratives and bureaucracy, Ishiguro highlights one way that consent is obtained to biopolitical life, through its very invisibility, and possible ways to resist the terms of this consent. ²³