“Certainly forbidden” subjects: Race,migration,and the vanishing points of post-imperial British security

Abstract

This article examines the post-imperial migration and racial anxieties that underwrite fantasies of national security in postwar British fiction. Focusing on the autocratic educational institutions featured in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), the article identifies the school as a fraught ideological site wherein conceptions of national insularity collide with the complex pressures of British globalization. Spark’s Marcia Blaine School and Ishiguro’s Hailsham masquerade as microcosms of a homogeneous British nation only through a rigorous process of racial redaction. By adapting Joseph Slaughter’s concept of the “vanishing point”, the article traces two nonwhite immigrant characters whose brief, silent appearances unsettle the novels’ optics of power, thereby intimating a vast history of racial violence disavowed in the name of bodily, cultural, and political security. Connecting the novels’ vanishing acts to the discursive lacunae perpetuated in the war on terror, the article also considers the imperial residues that continue to shape the contemporary security state.

The measure of post-9/11 fiction, it would seem, rests in its willingness to look terrorism in the eye. In their special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on “Fiction After 9/11”, John N. Duvall and Robert P. Marzec employ this criterion to sort between politically engaged and politically tepid post-9/11 literature, distinguishing between works that unflinchingly contemplate the phenomenon of global terrorism and those that glance away (2011: 383–93). Whereas the former variety of fiction yields portraits that attend to the full complexity of the terrorist Other and to the network of racial, institutional, and economic forces that shape his or her actions, the latter employs terrorism as mere set dressing to what are essentially private, domestic narratives. ¹ Their conclusion is that effective terrorism fiction beholds its subject, while ineffective terrorism fiction shirks its representational task by averting its gaze. Duvall and Marzec are not alone in their assessment. Much of the criticism that has been levelled against the less political variety of post-9/11 fiction addresses perceived shortcomings similar to those Duvall and Marzec identify — including its agnosticism, whitewashing, and refusal to engage with the political implications of terrorist activity and the security state — without asking why it looks away or what we might glean from that choice.

Part of the problem rests in the category of “post-9/11” culture, which by definition casts its objects in relation to a moment of trauma, thereby delimiting the available lexicon for conceptualizing their lacunae. ² Read within this framework, literature either gets on with the business of representation or else remains trapped in a crisis of traumatic unnarratability. By wresting contemporary terrorism fiction from the “post-9/11” rubric, however, we can begin to shift our attention from breaches in modern security to the security apparatus itself, seeking the origins of fiction’s narrative gaps not in the terrorist event per se, but in the culture of securitization that terrorism ruptures. This essay proposes a model for reading contemporary terrorism fiction by turning to two literary works about postwar British security that contemplate what it means to turn a blind eye habitually to threat. Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) hardly qualify as terrorism literature, but they can teach us how to read it.

At first glance, the two novels appear far removed from the modes of terror and security that attend our contemporary moment. Set in privileged, idyllic educational institutions that betray few signs of defensiveness outwardly, the novels obfuscate at the level of content their deep investment in the modern security state. Nevertheless they register at the level of form their immersion in a condition of total securitization, a concept I adapt from Kent Puckett’s (2008) analysis of the formal grammar of total war in mid-century film. ³ Total securitization names a state of political and ideological policing so impenetrable that it is perceived only in its minor instabilities. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Never Let Me Go, securitization takes the shape of a willed insularity as students and educators create hermetic social circles wherein civic affect and group affiliation are honed and guarded against the threat of corruptibility. The novels’ formal signs of strain — registered in defensively cheerful narration, elaborately constructed group-speak, persistent monitoring of thought and speech, and ruthless conformity — hint at the effort that maintaining insularity requires. Yet the full implications of the security measures in the two novels, and the ways they are tied both to British postwar politics and to the contemporary war on terror, become apparent only in brief narrative moments that betray the mounting sense of racial and national vulnerability against which educational institutions like Spark’s Marcia Blaine School and Ishiguro’s Hailsham stand guard.

Beneath the homogeneous surfaces of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Never Let Me Go run deep threads of racial violence and xenophobia that intimate the global geopolitical forces connecting the novels’ exercises in vigilance to the forms of enhanced security that shape the present. Spark’s and Ishiguro’s works challenge the unseen transgressions committed under post-imperial securitization, in two senses of the post-imperial: as a latter twentieth-century temporal category coextensive with the breakup of the British Empire, and as an increasingly worldwide brand of phenomena that proceeds from decolonization. On the one hand, the novels are firmly tethered to the postwar era — the late end of Spark’s narrative timeline and the early end of Ishiguro’s timeline meet in the 1950s — and pulsate with repressed anxieties about British decolonization and the prospect of wide-scale reverse migration. On the other hand, the works anticipate the ways that discrete exercises in state securitization spill over, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, into labyrinthine global networks of international surveillance, military outsourcing, and neocolonial economic interests that operate under the banner of anti-terrorism.

Together, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Never Let Me Go offer an object lesson in locating, through the most minute narrative instabilities, what Anne McClintock has called “those established but concealed circuits of imperial violence that now animate the war on terror” (2009: 89). The buried racial histories that attend and attenuate securitization in Spark’s and Ishiguro’s novels appear not in flashpoints of violence but through minute “vanishing points”, narrative moments that, Joseph Slaughter argues, “make invisibility itself visible” by showing the traces of individuals whose presence has been effaced and written out of the record (2010: 211). Like their formal counterparts in painting, literary vanishing points anchor the narrative order, granting the “illusion of tidiness” while violently disavowing the crucial yet unseen, or barely seen, elements that make such tidiness possible (Slaughter, 2010: 217). For Slaughter, who focuses on acts of torture committed in the name of American counter-terrorism, the exclusions exposed in narrative vanishing points are almost uniformly political in nature and almost uniformly violent, whether figured by the censor’s redactions or by the limits of the frame. They mark the moment at which one (torturous) story is stifled so that another (reassuring, national) story can proceed. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Never Let Me Go, vanishing points take the bodily form of two racially marked immigrant men who appear only briefly and are not granted the privilege of speaking, but whose epidermal difference and unflinching gazes threaten to destabilize the novels’ optics of power. Leveraging a glimpse of the disenfranchisement and instrumentalization that secure the fantasy of post-imperial security itself, Spark’s and Ishiguro’s migrant men inflict irreparable damage in the instant before the characters — and indeed the narration itself — can manage to look away.

A tale of two gazes

The racial vanishing that transpires in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie occurs early in the novel, in a moment of recognition that falls away from the rest of the narrative. The Brodie set, a group of hand-picked private school girls under the tutelage of the charismatic Jean Brodie, travels to Old Town Edinburgh on one of Miss Brodie’s many extracurricular trips. The Old Town was a “reeking network of slums” during the 1930s, and during the trip the Brodie girls witness for the first time radical class difference (Spark, 1961: 48). ⁴ The protagonist Sandy imagines the group’s arrival into Edinburgh’s central square as “[her] first experience of a foreign country, which intimates itself by its new smells and shapes and its new poor” (49). Yet Edinburgh is Sandy’s home. The foreignness is figurative, raw alienation channelled into a familiar structure of national difference. Throughout the excursion, Sandy’s narration follows a formal pattern wherein the naturalistic accumulation of unfamiliar detail tips over into some metaphor that can grant it meaning — a dole queue becomes a dragon; a troupe of Girl Guides is likened to “rival fascisti” (48) — with one glaring exception. Early in the tour, one of the girls, Mary Macgregor, is found “staring at an Indian student who was approaching”. Miss Brodie chastises Mary for lagging behind the group. All Sandy can do is to admonish her classmate to “stop staring at the brown man” (44). Racial difference marks the limit to Sandy’s figurative imagination. In this moment of perceived vulnerability, Sandy turns on the group’s scapegoat, Mary, issuing a pointed injunction to look away. The early encounter in the Old Town, while never revisited in the novel directly, proceeds to shape the internal censorship that guides the remainder of Spark’s work as it probes the perilous extremes of group loyalty and social exclusion without ever naming the word race. As the adult Sandy and her former classmates process their memories from the vantage point of the 1950s, it is telling that both they and the narrator studiously avoid linking the fascistic insularity of the Brodie set to the reactionary xenophobia of the postwar era, effectively disavowing the post-imperial afterlives of the racial and socioeconomic alienation the girls first encounter in their Old Town outing.

A similar moment of racial recognition precipitates a similar admonishment in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Late in the novel, the adult protagonist Kathy H. is caught by one of her former schoolteachers while on a reconnaissance mission to ascertain the whereabouts of their former school administrator: “[Y]ou certainly didn’t recognize me”, declares the teacher, Miss Emily. “You glanced at George, the big Nigerian man pushing m[y] [wheelchair]. Oh yes, you had quite a good look at him, and he at you” (Ishiguro, 2005: 256–7). ⁵ What seems an innocuous comment is, in fact, a crucial admission. Emily’s statement provides the sole mention of race in a novel that begs to be read in light of racial difference. Ishiguro’s novel presents an alternative history of the British postwar era in which scientists discover the ability to clone humans for spare organs. The resultant organ programme, into which the cloned Kathy is born, raises clones to early adulthood in state facilities until they undergo a compulsory series of euphemistic “donations” — operations to remove vital organs — that culminates in death. Ishiguro’s fictional system asks fundamental questions about biomedical rights and humanist ethics, all the while abstracting those questions away from the actual bodies that have borne and continue to bear the burden of medical advancement. The programme’s administrators go to great lengths to prevent the clones from considering the social fault lines that dictate who provides organs and who receives them, to significant success: the novel’s cloned characters only briefly entertain the notion that class difference structures the system, and they never once mention race. It is therefore all the more important that Miss Emily identifies her caretaker by his nationality, and thus by his race, thereby raising it as a key factor in his and Kathy’s shared glance. Emily clearly disapproves of Kathy’s behaviour, which is accompanied by several other violations of the system’s regulations, like skipping work and snooping into the private lives of the programme’s authorities. Laced into her comment is an implied warning not unlike the one issued to Mary Macgregor. Kathy and her fellow clones must not simply avoid speaking of race or the system’s other potential divisions; they ought not to even give them “quite a good look”.

Like the unnamed Indian student in Spark’s novel, George disappears into Ishiguro’s novel after the scene, never to resurface. His significance to the work, however, bears a weight entirely out of proportion to his brief physical presence in it. George and the “brown man” function as unnarratable, revelatory remainders in narratives that otherwise purposefully avoid the issue of race. The two men’s lived experiences as migrants, which the novels never detail, are certain to have differed dramatically: Indian students studying in the UK in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries experienced coerced acculturation and racial conflict (Lahiri, 2000), but their voluntary and often temporary migration to pursue educational opportunities contrasts sharply with the more dire relocation of Nigerian migrants to Britain from the 1960s onward, as well as with forms of legal restriction, social exclusion, occupational constraint, and economic privation aimed increasingly at immigrants since the postwar era. Yet despite their significant differences, the two characters receive almost identical narrative (mis)treatment. As their near-total excision from the novels intimates, immigrants’ presence in and lived experiences of Britain must be suppressed rigorously if fantasies of incorruptible homogeneity, like those perpetuated by Miss Brodie and the organ programme, are to remain intact. What seem like surface similarities in the scenes featuring George and the “brown man” prove to be deep narrative correspondences: two taboo gazes identified by stern third parties who are invested in obscuring the racial recognition that underwrites them.

Through the brief appearance and subsequent vanishing of the immigrant men, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Never Let Me Go portray the institutional concealment of race at key historical junctures when racial difference was threatening to unsettle British security. Although the bulk of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie focuses on the Brodie set’s interwar education, the novel moves proleptically to the late 1950s, and it is here — in a tense historical climate of both rising post-imperial xenophobia (Ittmann, 2013; Paul, 1997) and intense post-Holocaust racial reckoning (Stonebridge, 2012) — that the novel’s narrative vantage point and introspective energies are most firmly anchored. Meanwhile, Never Let Me Go gestures to two different historical contexts rife with racial import. It locates the origins of the fictional organ programme in the early 1950s, when Britain’s newly arrived migrants became key subjects in the testing, developing, and shaping of the welfare system (Bailkin, 2012); and it is narrated from the vantage point of the late 1990s, when discoveries about the racial politics of global organ trafficking and biological labour were threatening sacred fictions of biomedical colourblindness (Scheper-Hughes, 2002). Yet Spark’s and Ishiguro’s novels omit at the level of content the racial politics that inform their subjects and settings, thereby recapitulating the myopia that attends the culture of securitization they fictionalize. Racial considerations are admitted only — and briefly — at the level of form. Spark’s “brown man” and Ishiguro’s black caretaker disrupt the tidy fantasies of cultural holism cultivated by Miss Brodie and the organ programme, respectively, intimating instead the countless invisible, silenced, and racialized bodies upon which fictions of security are built.

Insular fictions and “education factor[ies]”

In Spark’s novel, the extracurricular trip to Old Town Edinburgh, undertaken in early 1931 during the girls’ first year under Miss Brodie’s instruction, serves to bind the exclusive social set’s early loyalties. If the stated purpose of the excursion is for the girls to witness a site of their nation’s history, the effect is that they band together more tightly through the alienating experience. Following the excursion, considerations of class and race disappear from the girls’ education: Miss Brodie never again mentions the Edinburgh slums, and the girls do not dwell upon their experience there. Having exposed her protégées to the sheer difference represented by the Old Town poor and the “brown man”, Miss Brodie proceeds to draw the group’s identity more narrowly by pitting her girls against increasingly familiar enemies: the school’s conservative headmistress, their classmates, and finally one another.

Nevertheless, the incident remains with Sandy, who comes to recognize it as foundational in securing the “group-fright” that binds the Brodie set (48). During the excursion, although it is she who admonishes Mary Macgregor for staring at the Indian student, Sandy finds that she, too, cannot help but look at the subjects before her. For instance, when confronted with the dole queue, Sandy “felt that she was not staring across the road at the endless queue of brothers, but that it was pulling her eyes towards it” (59). The fear and the urge that accompany looking at what is different from oneself are important to the novel, especially at this formative moment early in the girls’ education. What went felt but unarticulated earlier in the novel becomes clear for Sandy in the Old Town: that in the face of a foreign threat, the Brodie set operates as a corporate body, “with Miss Brodie for the head” and the girls “in unified compliance to the destiny of Miss Brodie, as if God had willed them to birth for that purpose” (46). Bodily control and autonomy give way throughout the Old Town excursion to the shock of raw difference and, in turn, to the consoling, autocratic magnetism of their teacher, who fashions the girls into what Sandy recognizes as her own “fascisti […] all knit together for her need” (47).

It is only later as a teenager that Sandy demands the authority to direct her own gaze, rebelling against Miss Brodie and her social class by revisiting “the certainly forbidden quarters of Edinburgh”. There Sandy would

look at the blackened monuments and hear the unbelievable curses of drunken men and women and, comparing their faces with the faces from Morningside and Merchiston with which she was familiar, she saw, with stabs of new and exciting Calvinistic guilt, that there was not much difference. (159–60)

Not much difference, indeed: what the older Sandy delights in recognizing during her illicit excursions is a class division as flimsy as it is inflexible, built upon cultural and physiognomic differences that dissolve when looked squarely in the face. Discovering the fact is tantamount, for Sandy, to challenging the very premises of Miss Brodie’s classist regime. Yet, for all that her later walks through the Old Town parallel and deconstruct that frightening first excursion, the older Sandy nevertheless neglects to revisit the encounter with the “brown man”. No new brown faces appear amongst the “blackened monuments”, and none of the men and women she encounters inspire her to reflect back upon the Indian student and recognize his face, too, as “not much differen[t]” from her own. That is, Sandy comes to understand that the fears motivating her sheltered upbringing and the Brodie set’s insularity are based in class difference, but she is never able to acknowledge the possibility that they may also be based in racial difference.

The Indian student is never mentioned again, an oddity in a novel where nearly everything from the past is revisited with obsessive insistence. Instead, he stands out as ocular evidence of the novel’s racial repressions. It is telling that he appears in the Old Town episode alongside the traumatizing sight of the dole queue. When viewed together from the perspective of the 1950s, which stands as the late end of Spark’s narrative timeline, the two elements reveal a common racial denominator in anxieties about reverse colonization and its potentially disastrous effects. Although Sandy’s frightened reaction to the queue can be attributed to the visual logic and psychological effects of Miss Brodie’s lessons — her image of the men as “all of a piece like one dragon’s body which had no right to be in the city and yet would not go away and was unslayable” resembles the corporate imagery of Mussolini’s fascisti whose photographed formations the girls study and, pitted against the equal but opposite corporate body of the students, encapsulates the Manichean logic of the groupthink Brodie engineers (60) — it also intimates growing concerns about immigration and the distribution of resources. As Karl Ittmann argues, “Fears about the potential threat of migration from overpopulated areas of the empire […] first appeared in the 1920s” (2013: 198). By the postwar period, immigration had come to be seen “as a by-product of overpopulation in the underdeveloped world”, thereby spawning alarmist anti-immigrant literature decrying the supposedly “limitless queue of people waiting to enter Britain” (Ittmann, 2013: 195). The connection — whether causal or correlative — between the “brown man” and the unemployed men with “no right to be [there]” may have slipped unnoticed past the 11-year-old Sandy, but it takes a wilful act of narrative repression to make the same omission from the vantage point of the late 1950s.

Just as the narration resists linking the Brodie set’s exclusivity to xenophobia in pre- and post-imperial Britain, it also omits the genocidal legacy of the fascist regimes that their teacher admires. Miss Brodie spends several summer holidays in Italy, returning each time to teach her students about the “splendid things” Mussolini’s fascisti were accomplishing there; later in the novel she travels to Germany “where Hitler was become Chancellor, a prophet-figure like Thomas Carlyle, and more reliable than Mussolini” (65; 143). Yet the narration, like Brodie herself, turns a wilfully blind eye to such fascist dalliances, offering as sole apology Miss Brodie’s flippant retrospective admission that “Hitler was rather naughty” (179; emphasis in original). The novel’s silences about the Holocaust’s racial atrocities prove especially egregious given that it was written and published amidst the highly publicized capture, trial, and execution of Adolf Eichmann, a former Nazi SS commander. Spark followed Eichmann’s capture in 1960 and his trial in the subsequent year, even travelling to Jerusalem in July 1961 to attend several days of the proceedings. Like the international community whose horror and opprobrium the trial had roused, Spark was deeply affected by the testimony and the moral questions raised in its wake, and scholars have identified the Eichmann trial as a constitutive experience in the development of Spark’s fiction, important especially to its negotiation of her part-Jewish heritage (McQuillan, 2011; Stevenson, 2010; Stonebridge, 2012). Although her 1965 novel The Mandelbaum Gate is the first and only of Spark’s works to address the trial directly, the Eichmann events already form an absent presence in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which was published in The New Yorker on 14 October 1961, exactly two months after the trial adjourned. The historical climate of post-Holocaust racial reckoning surrounding the publication of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie countermands silently the easy absolution proffered by Brodie’s students and the novel’s otherwise wickedly ruthless narrator, who neglect to make her answer for her support of fascism. ⁶ Nevertheless, it is the Indian student alone, who in his brief, crucial appearance provides a fleshly and formal corrective to more generous readings of Brodie’s intentions. While clearly not Jewish, the “brown man” constitutes the only evidence of the novel’s racial consciousness and the single reminder that the political models Miss Brodie invokes committed unspeakable atrocities in the name of racial purity.

The “brown man” functions as a vanishing point in Spark’s novel, a formal element of the text that, Joseph Slaughter argues, “mak[es] apparent the […] screen that stands between the […] reader and the obliterated subjects who speak behind the scenes” (2010: 211). No accidental remainders or incidental features of the text’s design, vanishing points paradoxically reveal in their near-absence the fundamental role they play in securing the narrative order. In his analysis of W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” and the Pieter Brueghel painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus upon which it is based, Slaughter argues, “The painting, like the poem, suggests that some suffering that may appear either incidental or antithetical to modern civilization may in fact be central to it, perhaps even essential (in some scandalous way) to its smooth operation and security” (2010: 216). Slaughter reads the vanishing point of Icarus’s barely-noticed drowning, as well as the unseen “torturer” and torturee referenced in Auden’s poem, as crucial in maintaining the otherwise pleasant social landscape depicted in the works:

[S]pots of suffering, [Auden’s] poem suggests, are not incommensurable with the ordinary business and pleasure of civilization; they are interlinked: the invisible work of the selfless torturer echoes and enables the mundane, viable work of the self-absorbed ploughman, fisherman, shepherd, and trader. With this subtle shift in perspective, the relationship between suffering and satisfaction (or security) turns from poetic to narrative; the narrative conjunction (“because”) displaces the poetic preposition (“with”) [in Brueghel’s title], making the relationship causal rather than casual: Landscape because of the Fall of Icarus. (2010: 216)

A causal rather than casual relationship between suffering and security also emerges through the vanishing point of Spark’s Indian student. The immediate suffering in Spark’s novel is more muted than it is for Auden and Brueghel: one young girl stares shamelessly at the student, hinting at a range of racial exclusions and indignities suffered by people of colour in 1930s Edinburgh. Yet the single occasion opens out into a vast history of disavowed violence and racial suffering that makes possible the “mundane, viable” work of the social order, which the novel knows is incalculably fragile, but which the characters imagine as fully secure.

The novel’s racial exclusions enable Miss Brodie to dissolve her racist proclivities into a more sanitized culturalist agenda. Brodie frequently articulates her mission to fashion “girls […] not of cultured homes or heritage” (73) into what she terms “the crème de la crème” (15). Wielding a cosmopolitan worldview, she goes to battle with both the school’s “authorised curriculum” (10) and with the “education factory” ethos of its administrators (15). Her conversion of a racialized fascist worldview into a purely cultural regime illustrates what Paul Gilroy calls culture’s function as an “alternative descriptive vocabulary” (2000: 281). According to Gilroy, one dangerous consequence of Nazism’s legacy is the disappearance of race from political discourse. Gilroy argues that “the raciology that had been discredited by the wholesale implementation of industrialized racehygiene” becomes replaced in the postwar era by a culturalism that looks benign but whose “varieties of violence and brutality […] [are] no less barbarous than genocidal expressions of biopolitics had been” (Gilroy, 2000: 281).

Through the elitist fantasy perpetuated by Miss Brodie, Spark reveals what may be most dangerous about sanitized conceptions of cultural superiority: their ability to write race out of the history of social violence altogether.

The racial repressions of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie function to defuse the fascist xenophobia that incubates under Brodie’s care, thereby preserving in the novel what Jed Esty calls an “insular romance” of a benevolent and fully knowable nation (2004: 8). ⁷ In the end, the troublesome group’s brief career at the Marcia Blaine School is treated not as a totalitarian eruption but merely the product of an imbalance in the institution of marriage, fully correctable. Generated from the marriage economy’s surplus — Miss Brodie is one of many well-bred “war-bereaved spinster[s]” — the set absorbs ideas from their teacher that threaten to disrupt the marriage-bound ends their education is purportedly to secure (62). Miss Brodie urges her girls to embark on affairs with married men. She prompts them to imagine a “prime” of life in their 40s, inconsistent with marriage and peak reproductive years, and she distracts them from useful subjects with her unauthorized curriculum. Ultimately, the troublesome spinster is thwarted narratively, fired from the school, then delivered to an early death. The marriage economy rights itself as the girls, once released from Miss Brodie’s spell, enter into sober marriages, convents, or are killed off by various means. In the fantasy space of the Marcia Blaine School, the threat of fascist xenophobia is defused, rendered the mere plaything of a self-absorbed Edinburgh spinster. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie secures its insular romance only by writing out both its racial and racist discontents (the “brown man” and Brodie’s fascism, respectively). The nation in Spark’s novel, even its political fringe, remains fully knowable and fundamentally secured.

Deracinating the body politic

In Never Let Me Go, Miss Emily’s blatant naming of George’s race stands out against the many euphemistic ways that the programme describes hierarchies of power. With the exceptions of George and a “French or Belgian” administrator, individuals’ race and nationality are never broached (32). Yet the various participants in the system are otherwise classified, and classify themselves, with ruthless precision. “Students” are segregated from their cloned peers who have begun their adult labour within the system as nurse-like “carers”; and “carers” are carefully distinguished from the more advanced organ “donors”, for whom they provide pre- and post-op care. Together, cloned individuals remain architecturally and socially segregated from the general non-cloned population, although they interact with a few liminal figures like their “guardians” or educators-cum-guards, and the “whitecoats” or doctors who perform the organ extractions. Were it not for the novel’s brief racial vanishing points, we might read the fictional programme as governed by epistemologies of difference entirely separate from our own. However, Miss Emily’s identification of George as Nigerian shatters the illusion, revealing instead the system’s near-total silence about racial and national difference.

The brief appearance of George differs from the incident with Spark’s “brown man” in one key respect. Whereas Mary Macgregor’s staring in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is presented as a unidirectional act, the illicit gaze between Ishiguro’s Kathy H. and George hinges on its reciprocity. “[Y]ou had quite a good look at him, and he at you”, declares Emily, and her syntax helps to delimit the range of possibilities informing the shared glance (257). Were it only Kathy looking, we could read her recognition in several ways: as a recognition of George’s racial difference from herself (a difference she must not encounter within her sheltered life in the organ programme, or that she has only encountered within the system and never outside it); as a recognition of their shared though different forms of “care”-giving labour (she as a caretaker of death-bound clones, he as Emily’s aide); or as a recognition of the homology between George’s race and Kathy’s social status as a clone, what Robbie B. H. Goh calls “an implicit recognition of kinship, of the similar role played by migrants and clones in this economy” (2010: 66). Yet none of these scenarios would explain why George returns her gaze. He would have no reason to do so based on their racial difference — that is, if she is white, a race George is presumably accustomed to seeing on a daily basis. ⁸ The novel also makes it clear that clones are not visibly different from uncloned individuals, for they pass as “normal” in the outer world, so George’s gaze cannot be attributed to an acknowledgement of their shared labour or lower status in society. Therefore, given Miss Emily’s emphasis on George’s nationality, the most plausible explanation for her reciprocal syntax (“you […] at him, and he at you”) is that Kathy and George recognize in one another some form of similarity as racial minorities.

There is no further direct evidence to be found in the novel supporting the claim that Kathy is not white, but neither is there evidence of Kathy’s whiteness. ⁹ The paucity of proof for either scenario highlights how formidable it is to discuss race in Ishiguro’s novel when racial consciousness is repressed at every turn. Sheng-Mei Ma locates a similar challenge in addressing ethnicity in Ishiguro’s earlier works, arguing that the “suppression of ethnicity” proves so complete that it is detectable only in the “tremendous tension” it generates (Ma, 1999: 72). Whereas Ma reads such suppression as a symptom of Ishiguro’s reaction against Orientalist expectations, I see in Never Let Me Go a searing critique of the racial repression that attends the fictional biomedical regime and the process of securitization more generally. I use the term race in contradistinction to Ma’s term, ethnicity, in order to highlight the specifically biological forms of difference informing the fictional organ programme in Never Let Me Go. ¹⁰ While Miss Emily’s accusatory comment to Kathy — the novel’s one overt allusion to race — anchors my reading of the organ programme as potentially organized by racial difference, the work’s other redactions reveal the full measure of its racial consciousness.

Two such redactions can be glimpsed in the racial history of postwar British welfare and in late-century revelations about the global traffic in organs and bodily assets, both of which Kathy’s narration omits studiously, but which the novel insinuates through its subject matter and chronology. Ishiguro’s fictional cloning programme begins in the 1950s, when real-world British welfare and immigration policies were being shaped by the study of postcolonial migrants, around whom arose a culture of academic expertise (Bailkin, 2012). Disciplines like medicine, anthropology, and sociology that had grown up with imperialism turned, in the postwar period, to address the issue of migration, “creat[ing] elaborate classificatory systems to understand the populations that were moving to and from the metropole” (Bailkin, 2012: 24). Their findings influenced policies aimed at enhancing migrants’ health and welfare or, in other cases, at controlling and repatriating them. It is no coincidence if we hear in Bailkin’s description of “elaborate classificatory systems” an echo of Benedict Anderson, who describes nineteenth-century colonial institutions in similar terms. Anderson argues that the map, museum, and census aimed to “regulate, constrict, count, standardize, and hierarchically subordinate” indigenous people and traditions so as to order the “objects of [empire’s] feverish imagining” (1991/1983: 169). Ishiguro reveals his novel’s deep racial undercurrent by drawing the fictional programme’s contemporaneity with — yet never acknowledging overtly — a period wherein colonial systems of scientific knowledge were being refashioned into postcolonial ones. Similarly, the novel omits the divisions governing modern-day organ trafficking and medical care, even though the programme continues through, and Kathy narrates from the perspective of, the late 1990s. As Nancy Scheper-Hughes argues:

The global traffic in organs follows the modern routes of capital and labor flows, and conforms to the usual lines of social and economic cleavage. In general, the organs flow from South to North, from poor to rich, from black and brown to white, and from female to male bodies. (2002: 45; emphasis in original)

Nonetheless, Never Let Me Go remains wilfully off-kilter with the realities of organ-trafficking and the biopolitics of bodily labour like surrogacy, pharmaceutical testing, and the selling and donating of bodily products. Ishiguro’s fictional programme perpetuates the illusion of its impartial benevolence, dissociating itself from the racial and gendered hierarchies that attend biomedical advancement.

The deliberate friction between the novel’s deracinated content and its formal admissions of race — in George’s brief appearance and in the chronological congruencies with real-life postwar racial histories — intimate an organ programme structured by racial divisions that are disavowed rigorously in the name of biomedical security. ¹¹ The system, it would seem, cannot afford for either the recipients or the suppliers of organs to think about the deep disparities that govern the line between prolonged life and certain death. The measures it takes to secure the clones’ consent are largely successful insofar as they never consider the racial dimensions of the system they inhabit. They do consider, however, its disavowed class dimensions in one pivotal scene wherein Kathy’s friend Ruth insists that her counterparts question the programme’s operations. In contradistinction to Kathy who, as Bruce Robbins argues, clings to the fantasy of upward mobility in order to ignore the system’s manifold abuses (2007: 201–5), Ruth dares to entertain the question of the clones’ lowly origins. Ruth articulates a theory, never confirmed in the novel but likely indeed, that she and her fellow clones are “modeled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren’t psychos”. She warns her friends, “If you want to look for possibles” or persons from whom they are cloned, “then you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, that’s where you’ll find where we all came from” (166; emphasis in original). Like Spark’s Sandy, Ruth stops short of contemplating race, omitting from her list racially marked types of human detritus like migrants, refugees, and aliens. Yet they are fully consistent with her theory: Ruth suspects the programme of operating according to a utilitarian fantasy of securing the nation’s health by putting to work its least productive citizens. She envisions a frugal welfare system wherein the least productive members of society (and, not coincidentally, those perceived as most likely to abuse the welfare system) are made to contribute to society by giving their DNA for cloning. The DNA, in turn, produces cloned bodies that supply productive, tax-paying welfare contributors with spare organs. Thus imagined, Ishiguro’s fictional state bears an innate flexibility: it can attempt to rehabilitate trash or, at the very least, render trash usable.

Reading the clones’ potential racial origins in Britain’s migrant population complements the class divisions that Ruth believes lurk within the system, but it also elevates the perversity of the programme’s ideological efforts to secure the patriotic cooperation of those whose lives it sacrifices in the name of the common good. For, if the programme’s institutional silences are meant to gloss over not only class but also race — if, for instance, its naming conventions (generic first names, last initials as needed) function as a bureaucratic act of racial sanitization, the conversion of potential Kwames into Tommys and Radhikas into Ruths — then the entire premise of the organ donors’ social and civic education takes on a perversely neo-imperialist dimension. Never Let Me Go, like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, locates an insular fantasy of national holism within the iconic setting of the British school. Ishiguro’s novel traces the maturation of Kathy and her friends, who grow up not in one of the state institutions dedicated to the task but at Hailsham, a privately funded pilot programme for the humane raising and educating of future organ donors. Housed in a bucolic boarding school in the English countryside, Hailsham provides its inhabitants an idyllic childhood. By the time of Kathy’s narration, Hailsham has closed its doors but continues to evoke the aura of national nostalgia that E. M. Forster attributes, in his 1920 essay “Notes on the English Character”, to the institution of the boarding school. The hallmark of the school system, according to Forster, inheres in the insular fantasy of the English nation that it produces. Students “[are] taught that school is the world in miniature, and [believe] that no one can love his country who does not love his school” (1936/1920: 4). ¹² Ishiguro’s Hailsham inspires a similarly telescoping understanding of school-as-country-as-world. The institution operates as a “world in miniature” in part because of its geographic obscurity, isolated in the English countryside and cut off from the outer world, save for deliveries of food and basic supplies. It also functions as a societal microcosm through its arts curriculum, which functions as an enclosed economy that furnishes otherwise undifferentiated clones with purchasing power (via tokens awarded for artwork), belongings, social status, and identities. So effective is the curriculum that students stay on school premises willingly, loving and remaining loyal to Hailsham because all their value is created within its walls. Yet the educational regime bears an insidious ideological undercurrent. By recapitulating the insular logic of the organ programme at large, Hailsham reinforces the clones’ dedication to its fantasy of plenitude. That is, the school’s “world in miniature” prepares its students to believe in, and die for, the organ programme’s own version of a “world in miniature”: a nation where all bodily regeneration comes from within.

One need look no further than Norfolk for evidence of the students’ ideological attachment to the nation that will eventually slaughter them. Born of a running joke from geography class — Miss Emily frequently overlooks the county in her lessons, then later dubs it “something of a lost corner” of England — Norfolk becomes an important imaginary site for the students (65). According to Kathy, Emily’s comment inspires a profoundly literalist fantasy:

A lost corner. That’s what she called it, and that was what started it. Because at Hailsham, we had our own “Lost Corner” up on the third floor, where the lost property was kept […] Someone — I can’t remember who it was — claimed after the lesson that what Miss Emily had said was that Norfolk was England’s “lost corner,” where all the lost property found in the country ended up. (65–6)

The analogy of Norfolk to Hailsham’s lost-and-found proves particularly comforting to the children because, Ruth claims, “when [they] lost something precious […] then [they] didn’t have to be completely heartbroken. [They] still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day […] [they] could always go and find it again in Norfolk” (66). This literal, deeply affective tie to an idea of Norfolk binds the clones to the nation in the manner that Lauren Berlant describes in The Anatomy of National Fantasy. There, Berlant explains that national symbols (like Norfolk-as-lost-corner) [harness] “affect to political life […] through the images, narratives, monuments, and sites that circulate through personal/collective consciousness” (1991: 5). For Berlant, political affect is embodied. It is for Ishiguro’s clones, too, and not only if they entertain the grotesquely literalized image of internal organs piling up in Norfolk. The students believe in the fantasy of plenitude that their own deaths engender, the fantasy of a nation that needs never to lose anything or anyone. What the children’s Norfolk fantasy reveals are the perverse consequences of granting sacrificial clones a nationally oriented education: they come to believe in the nation that slaughters them, and to house their wildest fantasies firmly within its bounds. ¹³

A racially attentive reading of Ishiguro’s novel disrupts the organ programme’s sanitized, consolingly holistic fantasy of a nation sustained bodily from within (to which even its victims cling), reintroducing instead its disavowed racial discontents, which the novel admits only in the brief moment of their vanishing. To follow Miss Emily’s “big Nigerian” caretaker as he surfaces and then disappears into the narrative is to witness both the vast racial subtext of Ishiguro’s novel and its near-total concealment. It is to recognize the extent to which the expurgation of Britain’s others secures the insular fictions of the national body. It is also to acknowledge the ideological perversity of Hailsham’s curriculum, which bears the unmistakable imprint of imperial education. The imperial legacy is, I think, the ultimate reason that race remains nearly unspoken throughout the fictional system. For, envisioning Hailsham’s iconic grounds as populated with students cloned from nonwhite migrants, refugees, and aliens does more than simply evoke the history of Britain’s widespread efforts to educate and civilize its colonial subjects. It also and more fundamentally reveals the continued operation of such imperialist undertakings in a different domestic guise. Within the organ programme, all cloned donors regardless of race perform a kind of neo-colonial labour in order to secure the nation’s health, all the while being denied the privileges of citizenship. But of the programme’s various institutions, only Hailsham aims also to secure the clones’ consent and patriotic loyalty while extracting that labour. Cloaked in do-gooding liberalism, the educational experiment of Hailsham gives new life to a defunct imperial educational agenda, extending its modes of instruction and discipline to bolster the modern state of security. There is no economic reason to justify such a costly effort: the programme appears to operate seamlessly whether the clones are assimilated or simply imprisoned. The real motivation behind Hailsham’s nationally oriented curriculum must then be pleasure: the liberal pleasure of transforming the lowly and grateful, the godlike pleasures of creating others in one’s own image. Such pleasure, bound as it is to the long history of imperialism, can never be spoken aloud, for it may prove to be Hailsham’s most carefully concealed secret of all.

Post-imperial security and its discontents

As bookends to the era, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Never Let Me Go model the postwar transformation in racial thinking that Paul Gilroy details in Postcolonial Melancholia (2005). As Gilroy argues, the genocidal violence of the Third Reich discredited long-popular, imperially honed biopolitical paradigms of race, replacing them with cultural conceptions of difference that influenced postwar immigration debates and that have gained renewed urgency in the civilizationalist discourses of the war on terror. In Spark’s and Ishiguro’s novels, the dangers inherent in the culturalist conversion of racial thinking become apparent. While the educational authorities in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie whitewash pre- and postwar xenophobia by framing Miss Brodie’s reign as a purely culturalist experiment in elite education gone awry, the unseen programme authorities in Never Let Me Go obviate the racialized histories of postwar migration and biomedical advancement by peddling a nostalgic fantasy of national holism and medical plenty. The efforts undertaken by the novels’ institutional regimes to evade the question of race grant narrative shape to what Gilroy considers an overarching critical allergy to race that continues in our contemporary moment, coalescing with particular force in vehement post-9/11 “[d]ismissals of the idea that racism and colonial history are worthy of consideration” (2005: 10). Through the novels’ formal admissions of race, however, Spark and Ishiguro level a sharp criticism at culturalism’s sanitizing of imperial and post-imperial history. The vanishing points figured by the Indian student and the Nigerian caretaker not only reveal the submerged narratives that make the novels’ placidly culturalist surface fictions possible; they also cast an exacting, destabilizing eye back upon those fictions. For, in showcasing “the contingency, frailty, and vulnerability of the slivered narratives that evade expurgation”, Spark and Ishiguro also intimate the equal and opposite vulnerability of the consoling, insular national narratives such expurgations are made to serve (Slaughter, 2010: 211). The two immigrant men almost but not wholly erased from Spark’s and Ishiguro’s novels present microscopic challenges to the monumental deracination of post- and neo-imperial forms of violence that continue to dominate the public and intellectual spheres.

The ideologically unsettling force generated by Spark’s and Ishiguro’s human vanishing points, so disproportionate to the men’s dearth of actual power, finds a counterpart in the figure of the refugee. Giorgio Agamben writes:

If the refugee represents such a disquieting element in the order of the nation-state, this is so primarily because, by breaking the identity between the human and the citizen and that between nativity and nationality, it brings the originary fiction of sovereignty to crisis. (2000: 20)

Spark’s student and Ishiguro’s caretaker are refugees, too, in deed if not in name. Stripped of most rights, including the right to narration, these men nonetheless harbour the power to force fictions of security to a point of crisis. In their “disquieting” presence alongside, underneath, but never within the novels’ insular ideological regimes, the men give bodily form to what J. M. Coetzee has described as the danger of “how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it” (1983: 166).

Following Spark’s “brown man” and Ishiguro’s black health aide through the corridors of institutions and narratives that efface their presence, we begin to place into relief the imperial residues that linger in their fictional worlds as well as in our own. Consider Gilroy’s description of the forms that neo-imperialism takes within the modern security state. In “the export of many social and economic relations associated historically with colonial societies into the heartlands and hubs of overdevelopment”, and in the particular forms this export takes, we can hear echoes both of Ishiguro’s fictional programme and of the contemporary order of things:

The appeal of security and the related appearance of gated and secured residential spaces are two important components of this larger change [from imperial to neo-imperial relations]. The proliferation of service work and the reappearance of a caste of servile, insecure, and underpaid domestic laborers, carers, cleaners, deliverers, messengers, attendants, and guards are surely others. The segmentation and casualization of employment, health, and dwelling are the foundations on which these aspects of the privatization and destruction of the civic order have come to rest. (Gilroy, 2005: 45)

While Spark’s novel vigilantly avoids confronting traces of its colonial legacies, Ishiguro’s fictional universe throbs quietly with uncanny remainders of the imperial division of labour: gated “homes” and secured “donation centres”, servile labourers, insecure carers, minority attendants, segmented modes of living. As foundational to postwar narrative structure as they are to the architecture of the present, these residues of imperial race relations attenuate fictions of security all the while they are made to vanish in plain sight.