Disabled by Design: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

What the state wants, it gets: Anindita Charles Xavier explores the representation of disability, state control, and body politics in Ishiguro’s novel, examining how dystopian narratives can illuminate real-world structures of coercion, exclusion, and exploitation.

The kids at Hailsham – a boarding school run by the state in Never Let Me Go (NLMG) (Ishiguro 2005) – are just infrastructure supporting the implementation of a 1952 medical breakthrough. Their bodies are used to manufacture cures for previously incurable diseases and are responsible for extending the population’s average life expectancy to beyond 100. They are told their bodies are special, that they are essential for everyone’s survival, despite being kept away from society. They are the face of humanity that will belong to the future, participants of a strategic organ competition – an example of the success of an ideological apparatus of the state. The boarding school, in plain language, is a clone factory – and its students are clones for a certain group of people that the state considers its ‘true’ population.

The book institutionalizes the production of exclusion – designs a dystopian England with architecture like schools, dormitories, hospitals and even roads that create physical separation between the clones and the central system. What NLMG depicts is a serial wreckage of lives, subservient human beings who lack visible markers of their lowly status. Their bodies become the primary site of exploitation, thereby creating a class surviving at the fringes of human civilization (Chatterjee 2019, 123). 

The boundaries of Hailsham, and later the Cottages where young adults in the system live, serve as mechanisms to enforce passive compliance. The children are manipulated through fabricated stories of ghosts and murders, designed to instill fear and prevent rebellion. Hailsham student Ruth remarks, “Who’d make up stories as horrible as that?”, unaware that these narratives are strategic tools employed to deter resistance. The children are intentionally conditioned to be intellectually and emotionally oblivious, remaining unaware of any alternatives to their situation.

The novel contains a biotechnological horror factor, which forces readers constantly to question morality’s role in power. Any form of unstable environment is more prone to state-sponsored violence to create a sense of control and order, and according to Karl H. Colin, during such times individuals become infrastructural markers and are accessible to authority at all times (Kahl 1998, 80).

From a very young age, the myriad regulations and dilemmas force the young clones in NLMG to form complicated relationships with their bodies, which are both their own and also belong to others. Curtained by coercion and domination throughout their entire lives, they do not prioritize any external acts of rebellion. What this means is, their bodies do not matter to them. While their purpose is articulated – to keep themselves healthy to be eligible for donation – this remains poorly understood by the children. 

In NLMG, an unapologetic system rears a community of children who happen to be disposable. They do not comprehend what life is, nor do they get a chance to. Their knowledge about their bodies is sparse, and they are made to believe that they have chosen to grow up to their tragic end. They are engineered to not reproduce, ensuring they remain isolated from the ‘possibles’ (the humans they are cloned from). The state’s control over their bodies results in them not recognizing the violence that’s done to them. The only hope for the students of Hailsham is terrible compliance because their exploitation is not marked by overt violence; coercion is an invisible device throughout the book that extends the dynamicity of power and its harm to the corporeal aspects of those who eventually become disabled.

The role of disabled people in capitalist production

Ishiguro’s novel offers a lens to explore the role of Persons with Disabilities (PwD) in capitalist production and how they contribute to stabilizing an economy when disability is, in a literal sense, constructed by the state. From a postcolonial-capitalist perspective, this is a combination of two histories: the repetition of exploitative practices and the capitalizing of disabled people for the preservation of the abled community. 

The dystopian society in NLMG shows how the biological balance of the environment contributes to political security and maintenance of power structures. It introduces a recognizable world that disquiets the audience because of the proximity of the past to the future the book depicts.

History has been harsh for individuals with disabilities, extending beyond Hitler’s concentration camps or Stalin’s forced institutionalization. Notably, the Willowbrook State School conducted unethical medical experiments on children with intellectual disabilities in the 1950s. Additionally, in the early 20th century, the United States sterilized thousands of disabled individuals without their consent. Postapocalyptic and/or politically vulnerable economies heavily rely on performance, and the role of disabled individuals within this framework remains ambiguous. Consequently, PwD face isolation and exclusion from the production process, as the implementation of inclusivity measures is perceived as economically burdensome with comparatively diminished returns, suggesting that production is sustainable without PwD’s participation. 

Beth Linker states that disability was the prime mover for technological invention and debates for eugenic cleansing (Linker 2013, 503). Paul Abberley, according to Helen Meekosha, is one amongst many scholars to refer to disability as a ‘social product, ,a consequence of dangerous working conditions in Britain producing industrial diseases and injuries (Meekosha 2011, 668). This proves that unwarranted medical interventions are not so unfathomable in dystopia. They not only contribute to iatrogenesis but also rob individuals of the opportunity for natural life experiences. 

Incidents of this nature unfold not only in speculative realms but also in the real world, as seen in the above-mentioned examples. It can be argued that speculative narratives serve not as imaginative departures but rather as amplified reflections of the tangible world. It seems to be rooted in political motives, where minorities, notably individuals with disabilities, are compelled to mirror the abled selves they inherently differ from. In these cases, isolation is the only viable choice as these perceived shortcomings risk modernity’s aspirations to control the future (Garland-Thompson 2017, 59).

Probing the meaning of humanity through the eyes of a ‘sub-human’ group

In NLMG, the donors are strictly looked at as aliens – devoid of emotions and creativity. With each donation, they become emptied bodies, their existence serving as an unspoken narrative. Yet their purpose lies precisely in this design–their bodies functioning as life support for their organs. Violence is something that is introduced in their lives very early on. As Carl Jung explores in Man and his Symbols (Jung 1964), the personal unconscious absorbs traumatic incidents subliminally, and they do not disappear completely. They influence the individual in the form of complexes, affecting behavioral patterns. This could explain Hailsham student Tommy’s excessive rage or Ruth’s bitter insistence that they are modeled from trash (Schwetman 2017, 640).

Existing as passive participants with restricted access within a social system that is seemingly oriented towards personal development, there is minimal space for resistance for Hailsham’s children. It is also part of human nature to not deviate from the expected, hence taking a step away from conventions require years of unlearning. This means that resignation to their fate is the most realistic response. Hesitancy is a significant ally of the center because even if people from the margins scream, only their echoes reach the authorities.

When the making of an unconscious self is not considered a type of disability, there will be no narrative evidence on oppression or any accidental resistance against abuse. Ivan Stacy identifies the process of erasure as a defense against being impelled to acknowledge the atrocity in which they are complicit (Stacy 2015, 240), and this is repetitively seen in NLMG. 

So, imagining a group of people with disabilities that has been a subject to abuse, neglect, and physical separation in remote institutions located in rural spaces (Harris 2019, 917) fighting for their self-respect and representation in the economy is almost tyrannical. James Charlton believes that PwD believe consciousness-raising is the real appreciation of oneself and not the values bestowed upon them by the dominant culture (Charlton 1998, 16). Today’s world is all about identity politics and the body has a huge role in it, and when that autonomy is taken away from a person/group, they lose. 

The book probes the meaning of humanity through the lens of a ‘sub-human’ group. The rare moments when the donors get to interact with the people for whom they were created become occasions marked by strenuous attempts to assimilate. They struggle to momentarily escape the unperson-hood that confronts them daily. During these interactions, they grapple with the intense anxieties associated with television, newspapers, restaurants, and office spaces—domains that human lives are tied to. To identify someone else’s experiences requires an understanding of what it means to be a human, a gap found by Kathy and her friends during their stay in the Cottages. As replicated creatures, they mimic mundane habits like laughing at sitcoms, flirting over the stove, or squeezing their lover’s arms as they walk past them. But it all feels fake to them. They do not know how to do it. And they hate it. 

It’s almost satirical because what’s happening here is a venture towards mastering the behaviors of people who are concerned about themselves. Tichener used the word to describe a physical process in which infants between birth and 10 months begin to mimic the nonverbal expressions of those around them (Omdahl 1995, 25). Known as motor mimicry, this nonverbal bodily process is understood to exemplify the instinctive and physiological basis of shared feelings. So here is Ruth, from Hailsham, copying gestures from television shows that her friend Kathy, observing, believes don’t happen in real life. 

Vladimir Nabokov commented that beauty and pity are the closest elements to art. Pity exists where there’s beauty simply because beauty must die, it always does. And that’s all Never Let Me Go is about (Jones 2010, 33). The book never meant to showcase organ banking for shock value, or capitalize on power-hungry physicians, money-crazed titans of commerce, and other conventions of the genre; rather it’s about the emotional quotient of the participants of this dystopic world – the characters, setting, dialogue, and the institutions. It’s about the danger of humans who are not in power becoming a new tool to combat dreaded diseases and the consequent demand for their sacrifice.

About the author

Anindita Charles Xavier is a first-year PhD scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, specializing in South Asian Writing and Body Politics. Her research explores how bodies are navigated and monitored at airport landscapes. She is analyzing the friction between architectural ‘non-places’ and the racialized lived experience, drawing parallels between biometric surveillance and dystopian literature to critique the algorithmic management of identity in transit. 

References

Charlton, James I. 1998. Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment. University of California Press.

Chatterjee, Arnab. 2019. “Exploring an Anti-Utopian Subtext in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 21(2) : 109–24. https://doi.org/10.5325/intelitestud.21.2.0109.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2017. “Building a World with Disability in It.” In Culture – Theory – Disability: Encounters between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies. Edited by Anne Waldschmidt et al. Transcript Verlag.

Harris, Jasmine E. 2019, “The Aesthetics of Disability.” Columbia Law Review 119 (4) : 895–972.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. 2005. Never Let Me Go. Faber & Faber.

Jones, Kristin M. 2010. “Childhood’s End.” Film Comment 46 (5) : 32–33.

Jung, Carl G. 1964. Man and His Symbols. Doubleday.

Kahl, Colin H. 1998. “Population Growth, Environmental Degradation, and State-Sponsored Violence: The Case of Kenya, 1991-93.” International Security 23 (2).

Linker, Beth. 2013. “On the Borderland of Medical and Disability History: A Survey of the Fields.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87 (4) : 499–535.

Meekosha, Helen. 2011. “Decolonising Disability: Thinking and Acting Globally.” Disability & Society 26 (6) :  667-682.

Omdahl, Becky Lynn. 1995. Cognitive Appraisal, Emotion, and Empathy. Lawrence Erlbaum.

Schwetman, John David. 2017. “’Shadowy Objects in Test Tubes’: The Ethics of Grievance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 19 (4) : 421–40.

Stacy, Ivan. 2015. “Complicity in Dystopia: Failures of Witnessing in China Miéville’s The City and the City and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 13 (2) : 225-250.