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When might the source of sorrow be the expectation of alleviation itself? How could the very prospect of solace effectively morph into a jeopardizing moment from which one wants to flee or, in wishful desperation, to forestall? And in such situations, whether immediate or remote, what other resources of emotional rescue are at our disposal when consolation wears out its welcome? Chapter 5 takes up these questions with the help of writers who combine retrospection with expectant threat and anticipated mourning. After an introduction centred on the recent short stories of Graham Swift, it turns to an unequivocally bleak work that offers a stark forewarning of the perils of biotechnology: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). The chapter argues that this speculative novel about state-authorized cloning shows how, through its depiction of what some critics have deemed futile, institutionalized forms of care, Ishiguro provokes readers to reflect on their own parameters of sympathy and judgment—most notably, on our grounds for subjecting to critique what his characters utilize to console.

This chapter examines the following works: Ian McEwan's Black Dogs, J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, and Ian McEwan's Atonement. These works, written twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, assess the magnitude of the events labeled “1989”.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go follows a group of genetic clones who are created as wards of the British health service because they serve a utilitarian function: They are manufactured for the purpose of having their vital organs harvested until their death. The world he envisions of a grouping of humans reproduced to be a living warehouse of organs while certainly dreadful is nowhere near as horrific as when organ transplantation and global uneven development intersect in our neoliberal present. Ishiguro shows how humans who view their humanity instrumentally expedite a world that is ready to slice them into shares, monetizing all the parts along the way. Through Ishiguro’s text, I diagnose the reification of the body as an aggregation of fungible body parts. Human reification challenges bioethicists and cultural critics alike to reflect on how human dignity and bodily integrity no longer serve as barriers for marking the species-limit due to new advances in biotechnology.

Chapter 4 focuses on fiction which responds to the prospect of human cloning following the birth of Dolly the sheep. Eva Hoffman’s novel The Secret deploys the trope of the clone to figure the sense of inauthenticity experienced by many second-generation Holocaust survivors and goes on to examine cloning’s potential to dislodge sexual reproduction as the cornerstone of the social order. Drawing on the work of Catherine Malabou, the chapter follows Hoffman’s representation of the clone as a figure portending the disruption of genealogy. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is read in the light of Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of ‘bare life’ and ‘states of exception’ and the novel’s clones are seen to represent those who are relegated to the category of bare life in contemporary global biopolitics, notably refugees and asylum seekers. The clones are also linked with Agamben’s understanding of the enigmatic relationship between the human and the animal and his concept of indifference and emphasis on a subjectivity which precedes the construction of identity and difference.

This chapter takes up the question of empathy’s intersection with medicine in the era of biocapitalism. The first section, ‘Emotional capital’, considers the concept of emotional capitalism; a culture in which emotional and economic practices mutually shape and constitute each other. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s analysis of ugly feelings, I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s representation of narrative voice in Never Let Me Go not as affectless, but as symptomatic of what happens when emotion is placed in the service of the marketplace. The second section, ‘Life stories’, moves on to the question of cloning, asking what kinds of life stories are produced in and through biotechnological interventions and arguing for Ishiguro’s interest in their political, as well as social and ethical, implications. ‘Ishiguro and biopolitics’ addresses the novel’s treatment of the global organ trade, asking how models of flow and exchange affect the capacity to care for others. The final section, ‘Empathy and art’, probes Ishiguro’s critical treatment as art as a vehicle for empathy, arguing that empathy becomes, in his vision, the ultimate realisation of the neoliberal subject.

Chapter 4 reads Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) as a thought experiment about the ethics of humane farming. In this novel cloned human beings are raised as sources of organs for noncloned human beings; they are killed in the donation process early in their adulthood. The government homes where most of the cloned human beings live in “deplorable conditions” suggest factory farms, while the boarding school at which our protagonists live evokes a humane, organic farm. These parallels raise issues of animal ethics. Is it enough to have, as influential food writer Michal Pollan believes, a good life and a respectful death even if that life is dramatically shortened? This chapter demonstrates the cognitive dissonance and logical incoherence inherent in the fictional scenario and illuminates the ethical contradictions of the humane meat movement.

The conclusion of this book turns to the realist novel in the age of posthumanism, looking for what Michel Foucault calls the “dream … of a new age of curiosity.” By examining the fiction of Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro in light of theorists like Foucault and Donna Haraway and works of speculative fiction, we see the other side of curiosity. The opposite of the curious heroine, it turns out, isn’t someone who doesn’t want to know; it is someone, as Foucault could have told us, who doesn’t care. Fiction is at the end only a made thing, an optical device, a device for feeling—but it is also a curiosity cabinet in the oldest sense, a place where everything that once had meaning can have meaning again, can be cared for, can even be loved.

This chapter explores the revival of various forms of the essay in fiction written in Great Britain from the 1970s to the present day. Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro are shown to integrate speculation and reflection into experimental narratives that open up spaces for these notionally old-fashioned strangers. Under the disguised and perhaps indirectly borrowed aegis of Jorge Luis Borges, these writers ask questions about time, history, laughter, invention, and much else. Dark fantasy in Carter, unreliable knowledge in Barnes, trauma in Sebald, memory and forgetting in Ishiguro all give rise to stories that think, and thinking that can’t do without stories.

The knowledge of the murder of the European Jews was a public secret in the Third Reich. What is a ‘public secret’? How does it shape or reshape a society? The answers to these questions are key to understanding the Holocaust and other genocides. However, the public secret is elusive because of its nature: when it is at its most powerful, it cannot be explicitly discussed; when it no longer holds such power, people deny their knowledge of it and complicity in its concealment. Both the ‘subjective experience’ of the public secret and its wider meaning are beyond the limits of the discipline of history and are better elucidated obliquely through a work of fiction: in this case Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel which reflects on the past in the way historians cannot. Significantly, the public secret and the consequences of complicity are important concepts for understanding the post-Holocaust world.

The hyphenated terms—African American, Asian Canadian, and Asian American—were good transitional designations for the last few decades of the twentieth century for writers whose works were concerned with “claiming America” or with exposing the discrimination of the mainstream culture’s treatment of ethnic citizens. This chapter argues that the hyphenated designation is no longer adequate because of the way writers like Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro locate themselves and because of their subject matter. It concludes by presenting two categories of global narratives: the narratives by Asians in the diaspora whose works fall outside of the hyphenated paradigm of Asian plus adopted country, and the narratives by Asians in the diaspora that deliberately position themselves outside of their adopted countries.

This chapter analyses the second, constitutive pole of biopower, simultaneously transitioning from the second- to third-order simulacrum: simulation. Exemplary of this pole and order is Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go (2005) as well as its 2010 film version directed by Mark Romanek — both versions develop their biopolitical themes differently. Regardless, Never Let Me Go imagines an alternative England in the late 1990s in which a cloned population is born and reared for the sole purpose of having their organs harvested for therapeutic use by humans, or ‘normals’. From here, the chapter reveals the labour and surplus-value of ‘necrocapital’, the negative image of biocapital, and how the system itself cancels the difference between the dead and the living, and kills only to resurrect.

This chapter is an exploration of moral identity, as both a psychological and a philosophical concept. It begins with the phenomenon of an identity crisis, employing Mr. Stevens, the butler from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, as an illustration. The chapter develops an account of moral identity that seeks to be consistent with psychological conceptions while also generating the normative authority and regulative efficacy necessary for moral identity to function as a moral ideal. The chapter argues that person’s moral identity is not separable from her other practical identities and standpoints, and that it derives its content from her efforts to work out how to live well within the normative structures of those other identities. It also argues that an individual’s moral identity is intertwined with her social context in ways that shape the content of that identity and her ability to live in accordance with it.

This chapter explores how Enlightenment arguments about the creation of imitation human beings affected thinking about literary imitation. The creation of an imitated human would at once testify to the Promethean skill of its creator and threaten the notion that human beings were more than an assemblage of mechanical parts. The chapter opens with Descartes’s efforts to distinguish between human and mechanical beings, and goes on to consider La Mettrie and early automata, including those of Jacques Vaucanson and the Jaquet-Droz family. The ‘Promethean skill’ of such imitators of human life takes on a new form in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the New Prometheus, a work which itself imitates Milton, and in which Mary Shelley herself imitates Milton’s Eve in particular. It is argued that the monster, a vast and shadowy being that is also alive, grows out of the centuries-long debate about whether an imitator generated a living imitation of an original or a mere simulacrum. That opposition is then shown to run through twentieth-century representations of cloning, including Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The ability to create digital and biological replicants, the chapter argues, has led in late modernity to an inflated valuation of supposedly ‘human’ and ‘inimitable’ qualities such as creativity. It concludes by arguing that if imitation is regarded not as direct replication or as textual copying but as a process of learning practices from prior agents it might counteract the pessimism of postmodern discussions of cloning and copying.