Empathy and the ethics of posthuman reading in Never Let Me Go

Sloane, Peter (2023) Empathy and the ethics of posthuman reading in Never Let Me Go. In: Kazuo Ishiguro: Twenty-First Century Perspectives. Twenty-First Century Perspectives . Manchester University Press, Manchester. ISBN Hardback: 9781526157539 Paperback: 9781526182555 eBook: 9781526157522

Text Final PK SLOANE P - Ishiguro Sample Chapter.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (443kB)

Abstract

This chapter examines a range of novels that explore the scientific creation of posthumans, notably Frankenstein (1818), Brave New World (1932), and Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976), to provide a continuum within which to situate a more focused discussion of Ishiguro’s novel, in turn interrogating whether the presence of affective response in the reader is either a sufficient or necessary condition to confer the nebulous status of human onto other entities. Indeed, N. Katherine Hayles has suggested that ‘the age of the human has given way to the posthuman’, that ‘the concept of the human has given way to its evolutionary heir’, while Armstrong, seeing a comparable paradigm shift in literature, proposes that the contemporary novel ‘confront[s] us with forms of human life so innovative as to make it next to impossible for us to recognize ourselves in them’ (2016: 247; 2014: 442). With the aid of Martha Nussbaum’s work in Frontiers of Justice (2006), this essay is also an attempt to think through the literary implications, the ethics of reading in a world in which the human subject is, demonstrably, becoming a more fluid species. Much influential criticism of Ishiguro’s novel assumes a human reader, and so, as I will argue below, participates in both the anthropocentricism and human exceptionalism which it attempts, at least in principle, to challenge. I argue here that the novel as a form has always posed questions about human nature and human identity; that empathising in and with novels does not extend to real world altruism; and, that Armstrong exemplifies a strand of criticism which assumes a human reader (ourselves) of the posthuman (other), placing an implicit bias on reading as a human. Armstrong powerfully demonstrates her thesis, that ‘novels featuring an apparently damaged, subhuman, or insufficiently individuated human being prepare us to attempt the kind of sympathetic identification that novels have traditionally offered readers. They do so in order to turn a critical eye on all such person-to-person relationships’ (2014: 442). However, the contemporary novel aspires to more than simply ‘person-to-person’ relationships: both text and reader are undergoing an epistemological and even ontological resituating in relation to the refiguration of the humanities to the posthumanities in what Francis Fukuyama somewhat anxiously refers to as the ‘“posthuman” stage of history’ (2003: 7). Indeed, one might consider Ishiguro to be advocating for a neo-humanism, a recognition of species fluidity alongside a commitment to extending both empathy and rights to the traditionally post or non-human.

Actions (login required)

View Item