Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “Never Let Me Go” (2005) presents a new interpretation of an old theme in popular culture ― technophobia. From Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein” (1818) and H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Doctor Moreau” (1896) to contemporary movies like “The Matrix” (1999) and “The Island” (2005) ― technophobia, or, the fear of technology, has been a recurrent theme in the cultural imagination throughout the ages of the modern world.

In Ishiguro’s dystopian sci-fi novel, we follow three young characters ― Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth ― who eventually discover that they are not normal human beings, but clones raised and nurtured for the purpose of organ donation. Their lives are pre-determined, their time is short, and their possibilities are limited to a grim, illusory choice between either donating every organ until their bodies collapse, or become carers for the dying donors ― until they too are ordered to donate their organs.

One of the intriguing aspects about “Never Let Me Go” ― and which makes it markedly different from more orthodox technophobic representations ― is the absence of technology. The book contains no mad scientists, no covert underground facilities, and no sinister government plot.

In fact, Ishiguro’s text is conspicuously devoid of concrete facts that would have enabled the reader to form an idea of what kind of society these clones inhabit; what kind of ethics underlies all this. Devoid of concrete details ― e.g. descriptions of rampant, futuristic machines or post-human oddities ― the world of “Never Let Me Go” looks uncannily familiar. Nothing, it seems, separates this world from ours. That is, except the cloning motif; but since the clones have been molded in the image of humans they too look uncannily familiar.

A crucial genre feature of the technophobic fantasy is the clearly demarcated boundary that separates the human from the nonhuman. Each has his or her specific characteristics ― often demonstratively signaled through physical traits, costumes or gestures ― and although the boundary that separates the two is often questioned, or even transgressed, it is usually restored at the end.

In another sense, the boundary does much more than merely separate; it constructs an idea of what is distinctly human and what is distinctly nonhuman. Without this clearly defined boundary, the genre implicitly seems to suggest, there would be no natural idea of the human ― and, thus, no natural right legitimizing the actions of this particular group of life forms.

It is this implicit genre suggestion that Ishiguro’s novel pursues by creating a disturbingly mundane world inhabited by clones that happen to be disturbingly mundane and normal as well; they dream, hope, fall in love, remember, feel loss, regret ― like any other human being.

By conjuring up a world that is at once recognizable and unrecognizable, “Never Let Me Go” not only questions or transgresses the boundary that separates the human from the nonhuman, but in a crucial sense attempts to preserve the idea of the human through the nonhuman body ― in a world that seems to have lost all its humanity.

Published in 2005, “Never Let Me Go” presented a vision of the human in an age that had seen a number of major biotechnological breakthroughs, including the momentous birth of Dolly the sheep; an age during which the boundary between the human and the nonhuman had seriously begun to erode.

The novel’s bleakly reversed perspective ― clones as humans, or, clones more human than humans ― can be seen as the ironic culmination of a development that stretches all the way back to the emergence of the European enlightenment period, the age of reason.

In the book “Dialectic of Enlightenment” (1944), the German philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer write that progressive thinking “has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”

Whereas Hegel believed that human reason gradually progressed toward greater and greater levels of insight, Adorno and Horkheimer had come to believe that the opposite was the case. Writing in exile, at a time when Europe and its population had been destroyed by Nazism, they argued that at the core of the rationalization process ― or the enlightenment project ― there was a liberating ethos that gradually reverted to its opposite.

According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the history of human beings is driven by an overarching desire for freedom ― the emancipation from nature. Reason, science, and technology gradually enable human beings to achieve this goal. The reversal, Adorno and Horkheimer argue, occurs when human being itself becomes the object of this rationalization process ― an object to be weighed, measured, rationalized, optimized, regulated, and controlled. Whereas human beings on the one hand emancipate themselves from nature via reason, reason ― or the very means by which emancipation is achieved ― eventually takes over and becomes a goal in itself.

Thus, the original goal of human emancipation ironically leads to enslavement ― a blind, inhuman ethos of quantification, rationalization, calculation, abstraction. The obscene result ― or, the legacy of the enlightenment thought ― thus becomes the rationally organized death factories in Nazi Germany.

In a world where we have increasingly lost sight of the original goal of emancipation, the human body merely becomes yet another quantitative entity ― nothing but the sum of individual parts, any of which may be used more rationally in other contexts.

Technology holds up the alluring ― almost divine ― promise of cure, regeneration, and prolongation. The current public debate on cloning and organ donation ― which by now is so advanced and many-facetted that one is tempted to suggest that the genre of technophobia has become superfluous ― indicates the possibility that the daunting biotechnological prospects may soon prove too tempting to resist.

Ishiguro’s novel captures the melancholic undercurrent of this ongoing debate, the melancholia buried underneath all the mesmerizing technological potential that seems to be within our grasp these days. For what “Never Let Me Go” essentially explores ― albeit in an ironic way ― is the desire for emancipation; the clones’ desperate attempt to avoid their fate as organ donors for humans.

Kathy and Tommy have heard a rumor that if they truly love each other, the humans will let them go. Near the end of the novel, the clones declare their love in front of the person in charge of the donation program ― only to be told that there is no way they will ever be free. Soon after Tommy dies while Kathy starts donating her organs.

The novel ends here ― with the inconsolable verdict that clones are nothing but spare parts; that the purpose of their lives is to provide human beings with organs so that the latter might live longer, healthier, and ultimately more rationally. In another sense, of course, the novel suggests that the technological is nothing to fear ― nothing to fear at all since the clones might very well be the ones rescuing the idea of the human while we are busy exterminating all traces of it. 

By Eli Park Sorensen

Eli Park Sorensen is an assistant professor in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought and cultural studies. ― Ed.