Back when the direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTC-GT) company 23andMe was just getting started, my wife’s medical school decided it would offer a free DNA test to every entering student. Since practitioners might soon be confronted with patients who had gotten DNA tests and would then want to know what they meant, the school thought it would be a good idea – maybe even a fun icebreaker – to let first-year medical students see for themselves what consumer genetics had to offer.
As a professor of law, medicine, and bioethics who was also directing their required course in genetics, my wife thought it would be the responsible thing to do to take the test herself. But even before she received the results, she began to have second thoughts. How much did she really want to know about whatever 23andMe’s (rather limited) panel of results might reveal? What privacy protections did they have in place? Did she really want to know the company’s estimate of her risk for future health complications? She already knew she did not want to learn about Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and so opted out of receiving risk scores for those conditions. It didn’t help when she began reading studies that showed wide differences in results obtained from the three best-known DTC-GT companies.
The night she found a call on our answering machine from a stranger in another state claiming kin, she grew affirmatively disturbed. Something about the voice on the machine felt a little creepy. She was bothered to realize that she had voluntarily offered up private information about herself to a third party – in fact, like everyone else who uses these services, she had actually paid a corporation to take her personal data. And now she was feeling vulnerable.
Over the years, as news has come out about police departments submitting DNA samples under false names to gain information that would allow them to identify suspects in crimes and about 23andMe’s contract with the pharmaceutical company Glaxo Smith Kline to share de-identified health information about subjects in 23andMe’s database, enthusiasm for DTC-GT services has begun to wane. To be fair, 23andMe offers its customers the option to opt out of having their data used in for-profit drug development, and it has always had one of the better privacy policies in the business, but like almost all End User License Agreements, it reserves the right to change its privacy policy at any time.
Some of the things that go on in the largely unregulated world of DTC-GT might astonish you. Few people are aware that there are some ninety DTC-GT companies operating in the United States alone. Many of them have appallingly bad privacy policies or no policy at all.1 Still fewer people are aware of the practice of surreptitious genetic testing in which customers take DNA samples from their spouse or children without their knowledge and submit them for analysis in order to help discover potential infidelities or to aid in a divorce or child custody case. Twenty-seven DTC-GT companies allow or explicitly encourage the submission of surreptitious samples – one advertisement helpfully suggests that you send in discarded cigarette butts, chewing gum, used condoms, dirty underwear, or lipstick stains.
Not all apprehensions about these services concern the protection of personal data. Another troublesome aspect of commercial genetic testing is the problem of what consumers will do with their data once it is returned. Even with the aid of glossy explanatory brochures, many people find themselves needing to pay an additional company to interpret their results, racking up further costs for information that rarely is very useful in a clinical setting. Primary care physicians, in turn, report not having the expertise to know how to interpret detailed genetic data and so often end up referring patients to specialists – an economic burden on society even for those patients who have the means or insurance coverage to afford it.
Most of all, there can be unexpected psychic costs. Long before the phrase “trigger warning” had entered the lexicon, I learned from my students that I needed to be careful about how I approached novels that dealt with breast cancer or Alzheimer’s disease because those books could be disturbing for students with relatives who were afflicted with these conditions. More than once, a student approached me after class to ask whom they should talk to about their own risks or to explain why they did not want to get tested.
Invariably, the anxiety that students were experiencing had a temporal dimension. Here was a test that could reveal their future – or so they (mistakenly) thought – and it was disconcerting to consider that a sequence of letters could open a vista on a danger that lay decades ahead. What would such knowledge do to them in the interim? How would they be changed? After such knowledge, what … relief? despair? This, it seems, was the curse of data in the age of genome time.
My first encounter with genome time may have been in a science fiction story I read as a teenager in the Nebula Award volume for 1969, Samuel R. Delany’s “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.” The title intrigued me immediately, as it did the American composer Marc Satterwhite twenty-five years later when he tried to capture in music the “images of dazzling, swirling brilliance” that Delany’s words evoked. Satterwhite’s piece for violin, clarinet, and piano attempts to mimic in its formal construction the symmetry of the helix, which he describes as “ever spiraling outward and changing, yet ever the same” (Satterwhite).
The idea of a spiraling narrative, changing yet formally the same, is at the core of Delany’s award-winning short story, a work that was seen at the time as a landmark of the New Wave movement in science fiction, later rechristened by Delany and others as “speculative fiction.” Evoking the double helix of genetics, Delany constructs a narrative that is simultaneously linear and recursive. In the story, the advent of something called “hologramic information storage” allows officers of the Special Services to discover and predict everything a suspect has done or will be doing at any time in the past, present, or future. Hence, every episode in the story is always known (both before and after the fact); every moment is only the manifestation of a preordained time. Yet the narrative moves forward in a chronological order spanning fifteen months, a linear timeline marked each month among members of the criminal class by a new password, a changing shibboleth of semiprecious stones.
This chapter explores Delany’s striking conception of a data structure that enables probable assessments of past and future events as a way of elaborating on the temporal implications of genomics. Juxtaposing Delany’s vision of “hologramic information storage” with the “information metaphor” (Keller, Refiguring Life 18) in genomics reveals new dimensions of the temporal logic at work in the latter and reveals some of the social consequences enabled by this logic.
Delany’s helical narrative, like Satterwhite’s spiraling musical composition, might be seen as the aesthetic correlative of another helical structure, the double helix of DNA. As I have argued throughout this book, genomics possesses a distinctive time signature, a paradoxical embrace of both linearity and simultaneity. Delany’s narrator is a con artist who changes his name as often as Melville’s Confidence Man or HCE in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (from whom Delany borrows the initials for each of his aliases). Heretofore, the narrator has survived by his wits on the margins of interplanetary society, but a Special Services’ hologram has traced all his past deeds and identities, and at the same time, has discovered that he is about to graduate from petty larceny to burst on the scene as a major criminal. This forecast is as much a revelation to him as it is to the enforcement agencies that now must synchronize their movements to his calendar. Month by bejeweled month, Special Services and HCE (as I will call him) play cat and mouse, their movement through time coordinated by an information system that identifies from nearly infinite possibilities the one that will occur next.
The Special Services agent explains the unique qualities of “hologramic information” this way: “hologramic information storage simply means that each bit of information we have – about you, let us say – relates to your entire career, your overall situation, the complete set of tensions between you and your environment” (224). The parallel with the genetic information contained in each cell of the body is striking. Today, one can read out a person’s entire genome from a tiny tissue sample, thereby gaining knowledge of a multitude of physical and behavioral traits.
With the exception of single-gene disorders such as Huntington’s disease, however, genomic analysis deals with probabilities, not certainties, and so, it turns out, does Delany’s vision of hologramic information. Despite the Special Service agent’s claim to know everything about HCE’s future actions, he always manages to stay one step ahead of the police. As with genomics, hologramic sequencing does not actually predict (still less, determine) one’s life course. Rather, it generates a quantitative distribution of probabilities to forecast future outcomes. A character in the story cautions that people should not take such forecasting at face value. “You must remember … that if everything, everything were known, statistical estimates would be unnecessary. The science of probability gives mathematical expression to our ignorance, not to our wisdom” (232).
The fantasy of an information system in which “each bit of information we have … relates to your entire career, your overall situation, the complete set of tensions between you and your environment” (Delany 240) is the dream behind genome time. It fosters the illusion that data encoded in your DNA relates to your entire life – not only where you came from but what you will become – and that it is knowable from a single test in the present. Instead of Delany’s “hologramic information storage,” think whole genome sequencing, and you have the idea. Linear as jewels on a string, yet endlessly spiraling, ever the same, genome time claims to consolidate in a moment of revelation all times and places, all nature and nurture, “the complete set of tensions between you and your environment” (Delany 240).
Double Temporality: Nanoscience, Climate Science, and Queer Time
Genomics is not the only twenty-first century science that exhibits a double temporality, but the powerful symbolism of the double helix may make it the most memorable. Nanoscience is another field that has inspired models of time that combine eventfulness in the present with a synchronic perspective that encompasses past and future. Colin Milburn relates the temporal logic of nanotechnology to the Christian figural interpretation of history. Comparing the time of nanotech to Biblical typology, Milburn quotes Eric Auerbach’s famous description of typology’s dominant trope, figura: “The here and now is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events, it is simultaneously something which has always been, and which will be fulfilled in the future.” (Milburn 207n38, quoting Auerbach, Mimesis, 74).1 Milburn’s insight may be derived from Donna Haraway’s extended discussion of technoscience as “a millenarian discourse about beginnings and ends, first and last things, suffering and progress, figure and fulfillment” (Haraway, Modest Witness 10). Haraway begins with Auerbach’s concept of figura as well, noting that “The discourses of genetics and information sciences are especially replete with instances of barely secularized Christian figural realism at work” (10).
The social scientist Cynthia Selin, however, argues that there is not “a temporal logic inherent in nanotechnology” but rather “a temporal dimension coded in the way that nanotechnology is framed and represented” (122). Selin believes that
the dreamy aspect of nanotechnology … makes it an apt case for looking at the role of time and technology. Since the term was coined and the field first began to take shape, nanotechnology has been saturated in futuristic promises and threats. Both the uncertainty and expectancy of nanotechnology lend a certain degree of fantasy or science fiction to most characterizations.
Her conclusion is that “time is embedded in the representations of the technology” (131). Whether one accepts Milburn’s account of nanotechnology or prefers Selin’s more cautious formulation, the distinction between a temporality inherent in genomics or one only contained within our representations is harder to maintain, even though representations of genomics have proliferated in realist fiction (Roxburgh and Clayton 22) and science fiction since the 1990s (Slonczewski and Levy; Yaszek and Ellis; Schmeink 9–10). The temporal logic of the genome is so deeply imbricated with the science itself that it is hard to distinguish what is inherent in the concept from what is metaphorical. Lily Kay makes this point on the opening page of her influential study, Who Wrote the Book of Life?: “the ‘language of DNA’ is not merely a popularization or rhetoric of persuasion, but rather a representation qua intervention with operational force” (1).2
A third scientific project that has led to profound re-theorizations of time is the effort to understand climate change. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty writes, “The crisis of climate change calls for thinking simultaneously on [two] registers, to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capital and species history” (220). The chronology of capital, for Chakrabarty, is the linear history in which the world is immured, whereas “species history” is a time scale of such magnitude that it requires a different relation to time. A prominent scholar of climate fiction, Ursula Heise, also argues that climate change has engendered “a particular kind of temporality, a dual and seemingly contradictory emphasis on slowness and speed” (“Extinction” 55), with “slow” corresponding to the ungraspable durée of geological time and “speed” gesturing toward the historical onrush of impending climate disaster. The science of climate change is an outlier, however. It appears to have largely purged the millenarian impulse that still haunts other twenty-first century fields such as genomics and nanotechnology. The extinction of all life on earth that shadows climate change seems to have discouraged eschatology.
I will come back to this difference between the sciences of climate change and genomics, but first I want to range even further afield to consider a social and political model of time that is prominent in the humanities, “queer time.” The comparison of queer time with Delany’s narrative seems relevant, even urgent, because Delany’s story emphasizes what the queer theorist José Muñoz has called “queer relationality” (6). Crucial developments in “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” depend on queer relations from the narrator’s past, which remain unspecified in the present, yet shape future events decisively. Fleeing from his first encounter with the Special Services, HCE runs across a friend he has not seen for several years, a boy named Hawk. This boy is one of the celebrated Singers of the City, a band of oral storytellers whose gift for singing stories of vital importance to their worlds make them revered throughout the planets. Their power comes from immediacy, an art that stands apart from the avalanche of media, advertisements, and fake news: “it was a spontaneous reaction to the mass media which blanket our lives” (Delany 235). What makes these Singers exceptional is that their songs may be heard only once. They are unique performances, and interplanetary law prohibits recording any of their spontaneous recitals.
The Singers have the kind of aura Walter Benjamin famously attributed to the work of art before the age of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin 217–53). Delany, however, emphasizes the figure of the Singer, not the song. Male or female, old or young, the Singers are auratic figures. Their aura comes from performances that listeners find too compelling to ignore. “What makes them Singers is their ability to make people listen,” Delany writes (234). Once identified, a Singer becomes a node in a network of trusted meanings. “Hundreds of people stopped to listen; a hundred more; and another hundred. And they told hundreds more what they had heard” (234). The media theorist Alan Liu relates this capacity of oral storytellers to function as nodes in communities to contemporary information systems that work through “store-and-forward networking” (Liu 13). Delany has something similar in mind, unlikely as a return to oral storytelling might seem in the context of global information networks. Indeed, this idea may be the most improbable conceit in Delany’s sweeping science fiction story. But the notion that an interplanetary civilization would grow so weary of untrustworthy media that it would put faith in Singers allows the story to connect Hawk’s queer aura to a different order of time.
Liu’s account of oral storytelling can help clarify the status of Delany’s Singers in an information age. Liu writes: “The time of the voice was simply a different order of time. It was legendary time: so was the world in the beginning; so it is for us now” (15, italics in original). With the advent of writing, we lost the ability to understand how storytellers could function as nodes in a network, how their ephemeral performances could persist and spread. With writing, “permanence changed into a new kind of renewable permanence: reproducibility … or the reliable reappearance of the same text in multiple copies” (Liu 16). The very facility of this diffusion of information changed our relation to networks. The nodes in contemporary information systems became more functional – not people so much as industries, professions, and technologies – publishers, printers, distributors, book sellers, news vendors, and ultimately, media channels.3 Delany wagers that a postmodern, posthuman, post-everything society might just grow so suspicious of the cacophony of disembodied information channels that it would reembrace legendary time, reinvest faith in an embodied performance whose immediacy and power catalyzes oral storytelling as “store-and-forward networking.”
This is an outlandish wager – more outlandish than interplanetary travel, far more outlandish than the notion of a “hologramic information system.” After all, many people believe whole genome sequencing already constitutes such a total information system with all the temporal consequences that entails. But the improbability of a near-future society putting its faith in Singers should not obscure Delany’s insight – that to know our past and future all at once, whether in a hologram or a genome, returns us to something like legendary time.
Delany’s story underlines the queerness of this conception of time by queering it in explicitly sexual terms. Years ago, our narrator “did something for [his friend]” (240) that left scars on the Singer’s body and a debt of love. Everything turns on how the Singer repays that debt – all the foreordained events in the story spiral out from that effaced “something” that happened years before. But the nature of their bond remains too queer to be easily expressed. Hawk’s struggle to articulate his feelings is riddled with gaps: “Look … you touch a person softly, gently, and maybe you even do it with love. And, well, I guess a piece of information goes on up to the brain where something interprets it as pleasure. Maybe something up there in my head interprets the information in a way you would say is all wrong …” (240) [ellipses in original].
The ellipses in the story – both the absence of details about what happened between the two men and Hawk’s struggle to find words to explain their bond – accords with the ideas of another queer theorist, Elizabeth Freeman, who notes that queer relationality “fold[s] subjects into structures of belonging and duration that may be invisible to the historicist eye” (xi). Such bonds, according to Freeman, evoke “an affective register irreducible to traditional historical inquiry, what has been forgotten, abandoned, discredited, or otherwise effaced” (3). Freeman’s contrast between normative time and the “invisible,” “abandoned, discredited, or otherwise effaced” moments of queer time helps us understand why Delany chose to represent the bond between HCE and Hawk through ellipsis.
Not surprisingly, Delany’s writing is invoked by some of the most influential theorists of queer time. Both Muñoz and Jack Halberstam adduce Delany’s works as important touchstones.4 Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place (2005) offers one of the most influential definitions of queer time. For Halberstam and many theorists who followed, queer time refers to those “models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (6). It offers alternatives to the “time of reproduction [that] is ruled by a biological clock for women and by strict bourgeois rules of respectability and scheduling for married couples” (5). Most queer theorists, including Halberstam, focus on Delany’s theoretical writings and autobiography, not his science fiction. Delany’s autobiographical Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) is crucial for Halberstam in articulating “the relations between sexuality and time and space” (13). Delany’s volume dramatizes how “queers use space and time in ways that challenge conventional logics of development, maturity, adulthood, and responsibility” (Halberstam 13). But these words could easily be applied to Delany’s earlier story. The unconventional logic of Hawk’s development, his boyish maturity, and the iconoclastic way he bears his adult responsibility as a Singer of the City all attest to Halberstam’s insight.
With adolescent glee, Hawk revels in using “space and time in ways that challenge conventional logics.” To help HCE unload some precious stolen goods, Hawk decides to take him, univited, to an elegant party held in the penthouse of one of the most exclusive buildings on the planet. Here is how Hawk enters the cordoned-off space of the ultra-rich and politically connected: barefoot with black grimy feet, “very dirty black denim jacket, no shirt beneath; very ripe pair of black jeans” (226). He attracts the frowns of guests from clear across the lobby: “A cluster of men and women in evening dress were coming out. Three tiers of doors away they saw us. You could see them frowning at the guttersnipe who’d somehow gotten into the lobby … [but] one of the men recognized him, said something to the others. When they passed us, they were smiling” (230). Their entrance to the party creates a similar stir. Hawk refuses to introduce his guest, leaving the host grasping at hints to discover if HCE is “a miscellaneous Nobel laureate … or a varlet whose manners and morals were even lower than mine happen to be” (231).
The story’s style, in its postmodern dislocations, winking allusions to both high and low culture (Joyce, Henry James, Just So Stories), and poetically intensified descriptions violated the expectations of science fiction readers too, who at the time were more accustomed to formulaic plots and conventional character types. The literary critic Tyler Bradway has astutely analyzed Delany’s commitment to “queer experimental writing” as a vehicle for subversive politics (1–50). Here, Delany’s experimental style not only violates the genre norms of science fiction but also brands the story as New Wave, a consciously iconoclastic movement of the 1960s that provoked outrage and prizes in equal number.
But the question remains. How do the queer dislocations of plot, character, time, and style in Delany’s story relate to the helical time structure of contemporary genomics? My answer requires distinguishing between two broad currents in theories of queer temporality. The first includes the figures from whom I have been quoting, Halberstam, Muñoz, and Freeman. These theorists all speak of queer time in terms of potentiality and possibility, not foreclosed futures. Halberstam writes of the “potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing” (2). Muñoz values “queer relationality” because it serves as a form of “encrypted sociality” and promises a “utopian potentiality” (6). Freeman embraces “embarrassing utopias” and other fugitive “forms of being and belonging” (xiii). This emphasis on relationships, sociality, utopian possibilities, and belonging is an affirmative conception of queer time. It is an example of what Eve Sedgwick called the “reparative” impulse in critical thinking, a precedent all three theorists invoke. Like Sedgwick, they celebrate the healing, reparative nature of a queer time that insists on “potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (Muñoz 1).
Muñoz contrasts his perspective with what he characterizes as “antisocial queer theories,” theories he identifies with the work of Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. Muñoz calls their ideas “antirelational,” and he rejects the rhetoric of “no future” that Edelman develops in a book of that name, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004).5 Writing in a polemical vein, Muñoz argues that “antirelational approaches to queer theory are romances of the negative, wishful thinking, and investments in deferring various dreams of difference” (11). Instead, he insists “on the essential need for an understanding of queerness as collectivity” (11). It is this vein of queer relationality, I maintain, that is cherished in Delany’s story and modeled in his helical narrative.
The contrast between these two models of queer temporality can help us contextualize the difference mentioned previously between genome time and the temporality of much thinking about climate change. In the writing of Chakrabarty and others, the time of climate science chimes perfectly with Edelman’s rhetoric of “no future.” The “current crisis,” Chakrabarty writes, “disconnects the future from the past by putting such a future beyond the grasp of historical sensibility” (197). Faced with the prospect of human extinction, the queer objection to conceptualizing our future largely in terms of a reproductive logic makes a new type of sense. Edelman and Bersani developed their ideas in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. Writing for and about a queer community under threat of extinction, they paired their rejection of reproductive futurity with a celebration of erotic self-shattering. They answered the prospect of “no future” by reveling in ecstatic moments that disconnect the present from any thought of futurity. Outside a queer context, in countless apocalyptic movies, we have seen a hackneyed version of this response – the scenes of rioting and sexual abandon that Hollywood seems to think would be the inevitable outcome of learning the world was coming to an end. But Edelman and Bersani reframe the erotics of “no future” in terms of its effect on the subject, a self-shattering, not an indiscriminate riot, that represents a viable mode of living in the absence of reproductive futurity.
Delany signals his affinity with a reparative vision of queer time by the story’s invocation of an open future, full of possibility, and its explicit rejection of paranoia as an “occupational disease,” a “dilly of a delusional system” (257–58).6 Near the end of “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” HCE shares a moment with a major rival, someone he anticipates having to fight against for survival in the high-status criminal circles he now occupies. The two rivals muse over their interlaced futures, speaking philosophically of their inevitable conflict. The conclusion of their conversation is not angry or fearful, but hopeful: “‘If you can fight me off long enough … we’ll get to the point where it’ll be worth both our whiles to work together again. If you can just hold out, we’ll be friends again. Someday. You just watch. Just wait’” (257). The ending, like the story as a whole, describes queer ways of inhabiting time in spite of probabilities that would seem to foreclose possibilities. “We’ll be friends again. Someday.”
Double Temporality in Other Contemporary Fiction
Other novelists have aligned genome time with queer relationality. In an earlier chapter, I explored David Mitchell’s image of time in Cloud Atlas as nested Matryoshka dolls, each present moment “encased inside a nest of … previous presents” (393). But Matryoshka dolls are only one of Mitchell’s many images for genome time. Others spill out in a love letter that a young composer, preparing for suicide, writes to another man. The composer has just finished his masterpiece, “Cloud Atlas Sextet,” a work for six musicians that spirals circularly around six repeated motifs. Like Satterwhite’s composition, “Cloud Atlas Sextet” aspires to capture both linear and cyclical conceptions of time. As experienced by the characters, the events of their lives are unique, charting a linear course through history, but history itself, Mitchell proposes, operates according to a principle of “Eternal Return” played on “Nietzsche’s gramophone.” “Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortés’ll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later … you and I’ll sleep under Corsican stars again, I’ll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you’ll read this letter again, the sun’ll grow cold again” (471). The sextet, with its melancholy echoes of other artists but also its startling originality, mirrors the structure of the novel in which it appears, and it links Cloud Atlas to a beautifully reparative vision of queer time.
The queerness of genome time is not always aligned with queer sexuality, however. In fact, there are some accounts of genome time that are heteronormative in orientation, such as Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) with its tender evocation of married, heterosexual lovemaking. But sexuality – whether normative or non-normative – is not essential to the representation of genome time as paradoxical. Novels do not have to talk about sexuality at all to provide powerful musings on the queerness of genome time.7 Hence, there are novels that multiply other analogies for its dual temporality. One of the earliest novels about genomics, Richard Powers’s magisterial The Gold Bug Variations (1991), found musical, seasonal, and spatial analogues for genome time’s paradoxical structure: the fourfold patterns in Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the four seasons of the year, the four-letter code of DNA, and the four-part poem, composed in quatrains, which serves as the novel’s epigraph. The most memorable analogy for genome time in Powers’ work is that of the fractal. In fractals, self-organizing forms reveal similar patterns of organization at every level of scale. Snowflakes are the classic example – each crystalline shape replicates the same pattern at every power of magnification. Powers’s articulation of this principle comes late in his novel:
The double helix is a fractal curve …. [E]very part – regardless of the magnification, however large the assembled spin-off or small the enzymatic trigger – carries in it some terraced, infinitely dense ecosystem, an inherited hint of the whole…. The code is universal. Here, this city, me, the forest of infection on my hands, the sea of silver cells scraped from the inside of my mouth. Every word I have, … every predication, every sculpted metaphor.
“An inherited hint of the whole” – the phrase connects the scalar thinking of fractals to the concept of genome time. Inheritance is set free from exclusively linear conceptions of historical time. Now an alternative presents itself: recurrence can be thought of intrinsic to life cycles not just different members of a series. Delany’s “hologramic information storage” worked this way too. An operative of the Special Services explained: “even if you have a square centimeter of the original hologram, you will have the whole image – unrecognizable but complete” (115). This enables the Special Services Department to translate a tiny data point from an individual – a sample as small as a cheek swab – into a model of the whole. And not just the whole in the present moment but its past and future as well. Forensic geneticists possess this capability already. They can use it to reconstruct the likely appearance of an extinct species from fragments of ancient DNA or to build models of the (probable) appearance of suspects or missing children from decades old genetic material (Aldhous; Evans, Skrzynia, and Burke).
We find this scalar thinking elsewhere in contemporary responses to genomics. As we saw in Chapter 1, McEwan’s narrator analogizes the scalability of genomic information to the city of London. The city is “a biological masterpiece – millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef” (McEwan 3). The analogy spirals out from the protagonist’s city square to encompass the largest historical event of the day, the impending invasion of Iraq. The leap from DNA to cell to organism, and from there, to consciousness, literature, London, the war with Iraq, and beyond is breathtaking. Yet this scalar movement recurs frequently when one turns to twenty-first century novelists who care about science.
The common thread that unites these images and distinguishes them from nineteenth-century attempts to come to terms with deep time is the concept of scalability. Chakrabarty sees the two perspectives on time of climate change as “immiscible,” but genomics, like the queer temporality of Delany’s story, sees the two ways of perceiving time as a matter of scale. Up close, one sees only contingency, but zoom out to a level where one can see the entire hologram or whole genome, and the pattern becomes clear. Providing a DNA sample or outwitting an agent of the Special Services are punctual moments in a linear sequence, but each moment yields data that, seen in its entirety, becomes a microcosm of the whole.
Mark McGurl shares my sense that scalability is one of the keys to recent literature’s interest in science.8 Writing about “the turn toward science” in literary studies, he comments: “The appeal of fractal geometry … would appear to be what Albert-László Barabási called its ‘scale-free’ nature – the same lovely (and appealingly organic-looking) patterns repeating themselves at all levels of observation” (535–36). Later in the same article, McGurl expands this generalization to apply not just to current trends in the humanities but to “all literature,” which tends “to facilitate this recursive sequence of scaling up and scaling down” (541). That is what we see in Delany’s hologram, McEwan’s London, Mitchell’s love letter, and Powers’s fractal curve – genomic fictions that trace the dynamics of genome time at every level of magnification.
The Temporality of Ancestry Tests
Lest this discussion leave readers with the impression that the temporality of genomics is only a theoretical question of little practical importance to our lives, I want to conclude with an example of its impact on public policy, for the temporal assumptions embedded in genomics have consequences of importance to society. Haraway attributes problems like “genetic fetishism” and genetic determinism, in part, to taking the temporality of genetics too literally: “The fetishist ends up believing in the code of codes, the book of life, and even the search for the grail” (Modest_Witness 146). The prominence of Christian imagery and figural structures by commentators on genomics reflects the continuing force of religious paradigms even in secular, scientific contexts. The fictions we have examined in this chapter dismantle these religious paradigms, acknowledging the power of genome time but reframing that power in demystified terms.
Literature, music, and the arts were among the first to perceive the social implications of the temporality of genomics, insistently reflecting on the paradoxes at the heart of our identities as biological beings. Mortality and continuity, the individual and the species – art personalizes these dual temporal frames, giving us intimate glimpses of how we live on both planes at once. Art speaks to our most profound intuitions of why our lives matter, transient though they may be in the shadow of infinitely longer cycles of flourishing and extinction.
Throughout the last two centuries of western civilization, art has had only one real competitor for addressing these mysteries, and that is religion. That competition represents one of the reasons for the emergence of art, in an age of growing skepticism in the nineteenth century, as a substitute for religion – a displacement we saw in the work of Matthew Arnold and many others. But today, a strange reversal has occurred. Politicians and policy makers who address fundamental questions about life and death do so almost exclusively in religious terms.
One immensely consequential example of the reach of religion in setting genetic policy comes from George W. Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics (now replaced by the President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues). The numerous and vocal religious conservatives on the panel successfully framed the debate on stem cell research in moral terms drawn from the Judeo-Christian tradition. The only counterarguments that garnered much attention were those made by devoted secularists – most notably, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins – who were not on the Council.9 Secularist arguments such as theirs, which foregrounded their commitment to atheism, have rarely gained much traction in US public policy. Purely materialist arguments seem to have been too stark to persuade those who create the policies that regulate crucial scientific endeavors. The secular resources of art and culture – great wellsprings of symbols and meanings, which provide a different mode of access to what often seem imponderable mysteries – have scarcely been tapped by bioethicists who oppose religious restrictions on science. We should remember the example of Thomas H. Huxley, who in an age of fierce debate between religion and science, did not rely on brute materialism to convince a public worried about the implications of evolution but instead drew upon a panoply of cultural resources – Greek myth, Eastern religions, ancient philosophy, art, and poetry.
Today, policy analysts or policy makers rarely invoke the resources of literature and the arts when they struggle to address moral and religious arguments against genetics. When issues are framed in moral terms, as they often have been in this arena, the neglect of literature and the arts has impoverished the debate, reducing the public responses to a stark choice between secular science and religious dogma – with the latter increasingly carrying the day. By contrast with fundamentalist movements, literature and the arts are more likely to prize human aspirations than to proscribe behaviors. This difference is on display in a reparative work like Delany’s “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” – or, indeed, in the other affirmative visions we have glanced at in this chapter, Saturday, Cloud Atlas, and The Gold Bug Variations. Imagine how Delany’s vision of queer relationality, for example, speaks of the deep rhythms of time to an audience unwilling to endorse more restrictive understandings of human relationships. It could – and should – speak to policy makers too.
With much religious thought about genomics preoccupied by opposition to specific forms of genetic research, the absence of cogent guidance in this sphere has had unfortunate social consequences. One striking example of these consequences is the unthinking use of direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTC-GT) services, which I mentioned in the introduction to Part IV of this book. At first, it may seem unclear what genome time has to do with the trend toward sending your DNA off to companies which, for a price, claim to be able to disclose all the mysteries of your ancestry, your race, and your geographical origins, as well as your future risk of developing a growing number of health conditions. But companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com rely on genome time for their very existence. They have built their business models on the promise of genomics to reveal the mysteries of a customer’s past and future, ready to hand via a simple spit test. If these companies needed marketing help, they could sell their wares as real-life time travel. Some perhaps would were it not for another sleight of hand that hides the temporal nature of their product – the spatial and alpha-numerical nature of genomic data, a visual display that condenses diachronic movement down to the synchrony of the code. DTC-GT companies hardly need further marketing assistance. According to the MIT Technology Review, by the end of 2019, more than 26 million people had paid to have their DNA sequenced by a commercial entity (Regaldo).
The innocent act of using a DTC-GT company to sequence your genetic information can have far-reaching social consequences. Sometimes these consequences can be gratifying – uniting adopted children with their biological parents, finding unknown relatives, revealing treasured details about one’s cultural heritage. Alondra Nelson highlights African Americans who “use genetic ancestry testing with the hopes of shedding light” on ancestral ties that were obliterated by “the Middle Passage and racial slavery” (5). For this group, genetic analysis has the potential to “contribute to community cohesion, collective memory, or social transformation” (8). For others, particularly those in LGBTQIA+ relationships, locating genetic strangers can aid in establishing alternative kinship networks more accommodating of difference, the process Donna Haraway calls “making kin” (Staying 99–103; see also Casey and Clayton). But often the social consequences can be destructive. As a growing number of people are discovering, genetic information has the potential to reveal private details not only about the customer who submitted a DNA sample but that of family members, more distant relatives, and even total strangers. A disturbing but little-known consequence of seeking information about one’s ancestry is that this act may disclose to an ever-widening circle of people private details that one might never have imagined making public – children born out of wedlock, the infidelity of partners, a criminal past, unwanted kin, and more. The fact is that revealing data about one person’s genome unavoidably reveals information about the DNA of their parents and children, their cousins, and their cousins’ cousins, extending outward to hundreds of people, many of whom might be total strangers. A single disturbing revelation can have rippling consequences for others who never agreed to have their DNA sequenced or dreamed that someone else’s decision might have an impact on their lives. And these are merely the personal risks that one runs by taking a simple genetic test. Most people have by now heard of the risks of surveillance by government agencies, ranging from law enforcement to immigration control, that come with depositories of genetic data, whether collected by the government or uploaded by well-meaning relatives to open-access databases.10 In 2018, it was estimated that 60 percent of white Americans could be identified by existing ancestry databases and that within three years, that number will have risen to 90 percent (H. Murphy).
Public trust in the revelations of genomics is truly astounding. Travel to the past via genetic ancestry research carries enormous credibility for many people and institutions. Newspapers have reported cases of adoptees and donor-conceived children jettisoning life-long relationships in favor of their newly revealed biological “family.” In their book Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin (2018), Rosanna Hertz and Margaret K. Nelson document numerous examples of “genetic strangers” bonding on the basis of nothing more than data about their biological kinship, sometimes at the expense of the families that have raised them. The nation’s courts have also been open to the revelations of genetic sequencing. Despite some studies that show that DNA evidence is not always reliable, courts often accept its testimony about the past – sometime to exonerate, more often to condemn (Hoeffel).
Travel to the future is equally widespread. Consider the faith that consumers place in genetic tests to reveal their risk of acquiring future medical conditions. Since 2017, 23andMe has received FDA approval to market genetic health risk reports for an ever-growing list of conditions: late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, hereditary thrombophilia, and several types of cancer, including those associated with the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes (“FDA allows marketing”). Despite the high percentage of false positives in direct-to-consumer genetic tests (Tandy-Connor et al.), the varying results from one company to another (Huml et al.), and the protests of clinicians who are confronted with data about genetic probabilities that they are unprepared to interpret (E. Clayton, “Be Ready”), consumers still flock to DTC-GT companies for what they regard as information about their future. Our nation’s courts, too, have flirted from time to time with considering genetic evidence concerning a suspect’s propensity to commit future crimes, a topic that I discuss in detail in the next chapter (Greely and Farahany). The prophetic power of DNA continues to be trumpeted as if genome sequencing were one of the golden horns of Revelations blowing on judgment day.
We should not blame a gullible public for believing in the power of genomics to reveal our past and future. Such assumptions are deeply embedded in the temporality of genomics itself. Some of the most astute critical minds to take up problems such as genetic essentialism and genetic determinism – Richard Lewontin, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Lily Kay, among others – have made little headway against these assumptions. Perhaps the resources of secular scientific reason are not sufficient to overcome such wellsprings of belief. Speaking logically against temporal belief structures that have persisted through millennia of myths, ritual practices, and religious traditions may not suffice. Literature and the arts take up the burden of these belief structures, usually in secular terms, but they do not dismiss the enormous power of such temporal structures to give meaning to lives. Knowledge of the presence of our past and the promise of a future – whether for ourselves, our descendants, or even our species – has been an inexhaustible resource for as long as there has been literature.
The opening line of Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story satirizes one of the central concerns of a genre we might name biodystopia: longevity research. “Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die” (Shteyngart 3, italics in original). With this bravado gesture, Lenny Abramov commits himself to a lifetime of expensive “dechronification treatments” (181) provided by the company for which he works, Post-Human Services. He will re-grow his liver, replace his circulatory system with smart blood full of nanobots, halt the loss of telomeres in his DNA, and stick with a low-cholesterol diet and massive supplement regimen for the rest of life, which he rashly expects to be eternal. Composed in alternating chapters of Lenny’s self-pitying diary and his girlfriend’s obscene text messages, the novel brilliantly satirizes the top agenda of the transhumanist movement – live forever through biotechnology and a heart-healthy lifestyle.
Shteyngart’s novel is a recent entry in a long line of biodystopias, descended as we saw in Chapter 5, from a group of British writers who surrounded J. B. S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, and most notably, Julian’s brother, Aldous Huxley. The legacy of Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) has been taken up in the last few decades by a powerful group of biodystopias, beginning with the influential film Blade Runner (1982) with its genetically engineered replicants stalking a dystopian Los Angeles. Another milestone of the genre is the 1997 film, Gattaca. I have written about both of these films elsewhere, but it is worth noting the impact of their visions on the biodystopias that followed. In both cases, dystopian societies are seen as stemming directly from inappropriate uses of genetic technologies. The echoes of Nazi Germany in Gattaca’s genetic discrimination, eugenic policies, identity cards, secret police, Fascist architecture, and WW II-era fashions powerfully associate genetic engineering with the atrocities of National Socialism.
Biodystopian novels similarly construct nightmare societies shaped by the consequences of unethical uses of genetics. A list of just the most memorable of these books is impressive: Brave New World (1932), of course, Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation (1992), P. D. James’s Children of Men (1992), Walter Mosley’s Futureland (2001), Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003, 2009, and 2013), the near future chapters of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2017), Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017), and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black (2018).
The conventions of biodystopia differ little from the dystopian novel generally. An isolated hero struggles against an oppressive social order whose restrictions reach into all corners of life. The “bio” prefix simply marks the internalization of dystopia in every cell of the subject’s body. It registers the penetration of what Foucault termed “biopower” throughout every institution of the state and civil society, every familial and personal relationship, every aspect of work and play. The setting is the near future with recognizable roots in present-day social problems, and the forces arrayed against the protagonist are overwhelming. The plot generally ends in defeat or death except in the recent craze for Young Adult versions, where the youthful protagonist prevails at the end of a best-selling trilogy.
Unlike classic dystopias, however, the most daunting opposition comes not from the state but from within the protagonist. Shteyngart’s Lenny Abramov, for example, has so internalized society’s technoconsumer longings that he courts his own oppression. The incentive structures for obtaining genetic enhancements from Post-Human Services, nicely captured by a public ladder board of employee health rankings, shackle Lenny to the corporate goals of his employer, a supposed friend who turns out to be his nemesis. Lenny’s convoluted desire for the very commodities that nearly destroy him results in a manic satire, more akin to Black Comedies like Catch-22 (1961) than the somber vision of a work like Nineteen Eighty-Four. As literature, Shteyngart’s novel is a hilarious achievement, but it also serves as a thought experiment, extrapolating a dire scenario from looming bioethical questions. The near future it imagines stands as a powerful indictment of the present.
Biodytopia should be distinguished from a closely aligned genre, which is also enjoying a vogue (Alter) and often features genetic disasters: postapocalyptic fiction. The boundaries are sometimes hard to distinguish, but postapocalyptic novels take place after society has been destroyed by genetic plague, nuclear holocaust, climate change, alien invasion, terminators, or zombie attack. David Mitchell highlights the distinction by bracketing the postapocalyptic far future in the central section of Cloud Atlas with two chapters set in a near future biodystopian society. In Chapter 4, I characterized the postapocalyptic heart of Mitchell’s novel in which the planet has been ravaged by nuclear disaster, and the last remnants of humanity, except for a handful of Prescients, have regressed to primitive tribal existence. The near future chapters, by contrast, depict a thriving but horrific society exploiting a slave labor force of clones whose organs are harvested as needed by citizens, and at the end of their useful lifespan, are decapitated and recycled like Soylent Green as food for the still-living clones.
The most significant differences between dystopia, biodystopia, and postapocalyptic fiction are the protagonists’ relation to society. In dystopia, the protagonist is defined by resistance to the social order and is often overwhelmed by the crushing isolation of this predicament. To find a kindred spirit is an ever-present temptation, one that may guide the plot and endanger the protagonist – think of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451, or The Handmaid’s Tale. In biodystopia, by contrast, the protagonist may have little awareness of oppression. Shteyngart’s hapless Lenny Abramov fills his days with frenzied sexual pursuit of a teenage girl, decades younger, which partially motivates his hunger to turn back the biological clock. Until almost the end, Lenny has little thought of resistance, and only when his world is collapsing around him does he begin to free himself from his former desires, including the desire to live forever.
Postapocalyptic fiction, however, differs in significant ways from both dystopia and more recent biodystopia. In postapocalyptic works, reconstituting a social order is almost always a central motivating force. If the protagonist is isolated at the outset of the narrative, this solitude is often only a preliminary condition. The goal of building a new community is paramount, frequently literalized by creating a physical sanctuary, as in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) or David Brin’s The Postman (1985). Postapocalyptic novels are more often about recovery than despair.1 Hence, their plot structure owes less to naturalism with its deterministic narrative arc than most dystopian tales.2 Oddly enough, postapocalyptic fiction is generally more optimistic than dystopia. Readers gasp at catastrophe and are comforted by hope at the end.
Having said this much, let me add a caveat: genres can shift their boundaries like a river carving a course through alluvial plains. Great literature often views conventions as limits to be transcended, and genre-mixing is a powerful source of literary innovation. Thus, it would be wrongheaded to view genre categories as pigeonholes or straightjackets. Instead, I think of them as heuristic constructs, useful for posing the kind of questions I want answered. Sometimes it makes no difference at all whether one thinks of a novel as dystopian or postapocalyptic – or science fiction or utopian, for that matter. But if one is interested in literature and public policy, genre categories make a great deal of difference, for the implicit message sent by a novel’s conventions has as much impact on society as its explicit themes.
Super Sad True Love Story communicates its irreverence toward genre in its very title. The mocking tone of “true love story” takes an ironic stance toward genre conventions while the novel itself dazzles with its command of multiple genres: biodystopia, satire, diary, and emails, a twenty-first century mode of epistolary fiction. In what follows, I turn to two further biodystopias that mix and match genres with élan. One has not received the attention it deserves, Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation; the other, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, has been hugely influential. But both turn to recent discoveries in genomics to create chilling biodystopias.
Philip Kerr, A Philosophical Investigation
Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation (1992) mixes detective fiction with biodystopia in a near future London that has been shaped by the misuse of pervasive genetic screening. Citizens have their genome embossed as a bar code on their driver’s license. Elaborate databases are compiled on every man, woman, and child, including medical information, criminal record, employment history, credit rating, address, phone number, photograph, and other personal data in a central repository accessible to authorized users throughout the European Community.3 Hence, “for the first time ever,” a police memo triumphantly reports, “the machinery was now in place which enabled Government to track the individual before he offended at all” (44). Years before Tom Cruise starred in Minority Report (2002), Kerr imagined the consequences of believing that biological markers could identify violent criminals before they committed a crime.
In A Philosophical Investigation, the British government has legislated strict safeguards for the protection of privacy and has made their genetic screening program entirely voluntary. The protections in place in this imaginary future are far more rigorous than those in the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), which the United States Congress finally passed in 2008 after nearly a decade of debate. But these safeguards turn out to be largely ineffective. Hacking into the most secure databases is a common occurrence in the novel because the huge number of access terminals required by such a national, all-purpose databank makes carelessness, human error, blackmail, bribery, and deceit almost inevitable. This vulnerability is one that biobanks today have to confront, but the problem is made worse in our world by the rise of commercial repositories outside of heavily regulated government, hospital, and university settings. Today, biobanks are being set up by pharmaceutical corporations, patient groups, and others. Even in medical centers, the ubiquitous availability of computer terminals with access to patient records makes private medical information vulnerable to hacking.4 Security experts are aware of the challenge to protecting the privacy of medical data and are working hard to design greater safeguards, but the expectation that disclosure of these data can be completely prevented is increasingly understood to be unrealistic (Yan et al.).
In the novel, a serial killer gains access to information about his future victims by logging onto a hospital computer. More disturbing, the police and members of the medical profession in the novel are repeatedly shown violating their own regulations. In the course of an investigation, Jake, the female chief inspector who is the protagonist of the novel, feels no qualms about having software developed that would circumvent the privacy rules governing an ultra-secret database, which even she is forbidden to access. When she seeks permission from her superior to undertake this illegal search, her boss interrupts her by saying “Spare me the technical explanations” (109), a comment that reflects the way in which our reluctance to learn about the inner workings of technology makes us vulnerable to its abuse.
The most interesting feature of Kerr’s novel is its conception of an international project called the Lombroso Program. This initiative is named after Cesare Lombroso, the nineteenth-century criminologist and social Darwinist, who believed that it was possible to detect criminality on the basis of physical characteristics and who theorized that the so-called criminal personality was an atavistic throwback to primitive racial types. The program’s name underlines the danger of reviving nineteenth-century scientific racism for the genome age. The Lombroso Program involves screening males for a biological condition that increases a tendency toward aggression. The novel imagines that by 2010, the neurological determinants of violence will have been isolated in the brain. The ventro medial nucleus (VMN) has been found to inhibit aggressiveness in males, but a tiny percentage of men (0.003) turn out to lack this center. Men without this center are labeled by the novel VMN negative.
The possible role of the VMN in aggression has a scientific basis. According to the Dictionary of Psychology, there is a possible relationship between lesions in the VMN and “aggression or rage,” resulting in a condition called “ventromedial hypothalamic syndrome” (Colman). The existence of a syndrome, however, does not imply a causal relationship – it merely indicates that there is a correlation between VMN lesions and increased aggressive tendencies. In the years leading up to the publication of A Philosophical Investigation, research on the genetic factors involved in this syndrome culminated in plans for a conference on Genetic Factors in Crime at the University of Maryland. When word of this conference got out to the news media, the idea that scientists were investigating a genetic predisposition to criminal behavior provoked widespread criticism, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) ultimately withdrew funding for the meeting (Goleman). Although organizers later explained that the conference would have included discussion of the bioethical issues raised by the topic, some critics accused Health and Human Services of trying to launch a “violence initiative,” which would include testing of inner-city school children – most of them African Americans – for genetic markers associated with a higher propensity for violence (Stone 212–13). A study led by Avshalom Caspi at King’s College, London in 2002 took another step toward uncovering a gene associated with aggression. Caspi and his colleagues identified a particular version of a gene linked to low levels of the enzyme MAOA. They found that boys with a deficiency of this enzyme were more likely to respond to childhood abuse with antisocial behavior than those with a high level.
The paper by Caspi and his colleagues was heralded by the media as a discovery of the “gene for violence.” Caspi immediately responded that there was no such thing as a gene for violence and that speaking of genes “for” any behavioral condition betrayed a profound misunderstanding of the nature of scientific correlation, which only suggests an association between a gene and a given trait, not a causal relationship. In this effort, Caspi joined a long line of scientists and bioethicists who have tried to drive home a similar message. Richard Lewontin is perhaps the most prominent geneticist to protest against the mistaken notion that genes “cause” anything (“In the Beginning” 1264). Horace Judson, author of a valuable history of genetics, has put the point forcefully: “The phrases current in genetics that most plainly do violence to understanding begin ‘the gene for’: the gene for breast cancer, … the gene for schizophrenia, the gene for homosexuality, and so on” (769). Robert Plomin, one of the most eminent figures in the field of behavioral genomics, has stressed for a number of years that no interesting behavioral condition can be explained by pointing to a single gene – that all complex behaviors in humans depend upon the interplay of environmental factors and multiple genes. Drawing on his studies of identical twins, Plomin and his coresearchers have discredited the notion that one can locate a “gene for” such traits as “aggression, intelligence, criminality, homosexuality, [or] feminine intuition” (McGuffin, Riley, and Plomin, 1232). But the belief that personality traits are caused by individual genes continues to be spread by sensational newspaper accounts of recent genetic discoveries as well as by some geneticists themselves.
A dramatic example of geneticists proclaiming the existence of genes for behavioral conditions accompanied the landmark issues of Nature and Science that published the draft sequence of the human genome back in 2001. David Baltimore, then president of Cal Tech and a Nobel Prize winner in the field of genomics, was perhaps the most unrestrained in his visionary prognostications. Writing in Nature, he promised, with scarcely any qualification, that the “analysis of [the genome] will provide us with the power to uncover the genetic basis of our individual capabilities such as mathematical ability, memory, physical coordination, and even, perhaps, creativity” (816). Svante Pääbo, writing in Science that same week, suggested that racism would disappear when society came to understand that humans shared 99.9 percent of their genome with one another. Pääbo emphasized that individuals from the same region, who share superficial traits such as skin coloring, hair type, and facial features, may be less closely related to one another genetically than they are to people from distant regions who look very different. Thus, Pääbo wrote, “genome-wide studies of genetic variation among human populations may not be so easy to abuse – in terms of using data as ‘scientific support’ for racism or other forms of bigotry – as is currently feared” (1220).
Although such sweeping claims are less common now among scientists, even the most responsible voices in the scientific community occasionally fall into their own hopeful speculations. Plomin and his colleagues predicted that “advances in genetics” will reduce the stigma associated with mental disorders because “identifying genes involved” with mental illnesses “will do much to improve public perception and tolerance” of these disorders. Thus, he thinks that “some of the ethical specters raised by the advent of behavioral genomics probably have little substance” (McGuffin, Riley, and Plomin 1249).
Kerr’s novel imagines a very different outcome from future advances in identifying mental predispositions toward undesirable traits. But why should we care about what a novel suggests might happen? Because the optimistic prophecies of Baltimore, Pääbo, and Plomin are no less imaginative acts than Kerr’s fiction. Despite appearing in scientific journals, the predictions of these geneticists are not based on evidence. Researchers have conducted studies of how public attitudes are affected by genetic information, but the editorializing of these genomic scientists does not refer to this research – and it could not, because the results of empirical studies actually give reasons for concern, not optimism. In truth, the prophecies in Nature and Science that accompanied the draft sequence of the human genome cannot lay any more claim to authority than fiction. And, in a novel, readers can at least assess the caliber of the author’s worldview, judge the logic of extrapolation, and weigh the motivations that drive behavior. The scientists’ predictions are efforts at world building, attempts to envision a future that we might soon inhabit, and as such, less substantial than the worlds imagined by accomplished novelists. As world building, the real aim of such pronouncements is to bring about the state of affairs they confidently predict. This aim is noble, although it sometimes is little more than wishful thinking. Hence, it is important to understand when the impulse toward world building is shaping one’s ideas. Sketching a desired future as though it were implicit in one’s experimental results may hide potential dangers from view.
If scientists find it hard to resist speculating beyond what their results show, how much harder is it for the media? Despite all the denials that Caspi’s research did not reveal the existence of a gene for violence, none of that prevented the press from spreading the word. And such misunderstandings have real-world consequences for race relations and criminal justice. My colleagues at Vanderbilt University have documented that research on the MAOA gene’s link to aggression has already moved from the news media to the courtroom, where defense lawyers have invoked this research in criminal cases (Bernet et al.). Apparently, no matter how many times one repeats that there is no gene for violence, people will believe there is. Hence, the warning in Kerr’s novel about the possible consequences of a society that thinks it has uncovered the biological bases of violence becomes relevant, as pertinent for our moment as Brave New World was for the 1930s.
In Kerr’s novel, a government-sponsored screening program has been initiated to identify members of the population who are VMN negative. Everything has been done to protect the civil liberties of the subjects of this screening program. Socially conscious scientists and bioethicists could not ask for more scrupulous policies governing the use of the information than those in the novel. The test is (supposedly) voluntary, and the subjects are guaranteed anonymity. Those who test positive are offered the option of psychological counseling and drug therapy but are not compelled to take either, and the counselors are governed by principles of medical confidentiality. Further, the results of the test cannot be used as evidence in a criminal case. Police will be notified if a suspect in an investigation is VMN negative, but the test itself is not admissible in court. Most important, the medical authorities repeatedly counsel the public that the condition establishes only an increased risk of violence; it does not determine or cause anyone to commit a crime. That is, they assert exactly what Robert Plomin and Avshalom Caspi’s research shows to be the case with all complex behaviors, which is that multiple gene systems, interacting with environmental factors, result in a quantitative distribution of probabilities for a given trait. There is no “gene for” violent crime, not in Plomin or Caspi’s research, nor in the imagined world of A Philosophical Investigation.
Despite all these safeguards, the Lombroso Program proves to be an ethical disaster. The notion that the test is voluntary quickly becomes a sham, because a daunting array of social and economic pressures are brought to bear, making it difficult for citizens to exercise their right not to be tested. The novel’s depiction of these pressures amounts to an incisive critique of similar forces today, which could transform voluntary screening programs into mandatory gateways. In the early years of the Lombroso Program, advertising campaigns and cash incentives combined to make taking the test seem attractive. “It wasn’t long,” the novel observes, “before employers in the public sector began to insist on tests for all their employees. And these were swiftly followed by health and insurance companies” (46). The inability to find employment or obtain health insurance without these “voluntary” tests would make life very difficult.
Ethical, legal, and social problems proliferate in A Philosophical Investigation. For example, there is the disturbing way in which the society uses statistical profiling. On the trail of a suspect, the chief inspector is free to use a technique called “systematic composite profiling” to identify “the type of man responsible, as distinct from the individual” (111). Although the courts in the novel have ruled that “genetic population tests are inadmissible as evidence on the ground of their obvious racism” (193), they have allowed composite profiling as part of police investigations. Hence, the detective is permitted to search the central database using filters for the probable race, sex, age, and religion of a “typical” serial killer to narrow the range of suspects. Statistical profiling using categories that US courts have designated as “protected classes” raises a strong suspicion of structural bias. There have been disturbing reports of a widely used algorithm that mistakenly flags African American criminal defendants as twice as likely to commit future crimes as white defendants (Crawford).
The most distressing effect of the “geneticization” of this future society is the rampant stigmatizing of people with a genetic predisposition toward any conditions that have become socially undesirable. Men identified by the Lombroso Program rightly fear that they will suffer discrimination of the sort that initially affected people who were found to be HIV positive. In the novel, one character opines that “at some stage we’re going to round them all up and put them in a special prison hospital” (109); another worries about “some sort of deportation order – maybe even to quarantine people like me” (239). The serial killer, who has himself been identified as VMN negative, argues that the underlying logic of the screening program is itself eugenic. Why else identify this dangerous population if the ultimate goal is not to eliminate the group? He defends his killing spree, which targets other VMN-negative subjects, as merely fulfilling the eugenic implications of the state’s own screening policy.
Plomin’s wishful belief that advances in genetics will improve public tolerance of individuals with behavior disorders contrasts vividly with Kerr’s biodystopian fear that exactly the reverse will occur. In Kerr’s novel, the world has become so accustomed to the statistical generalizations of genetic research about populations that characters feel free to engage in wholesale racial, ethnic, and sexual stereotyping. The novel is full of racial epithets, sexism, and homophobia, which sometimes make for uncomfortable reading.5 Although it is a mistake to equate quantitative distributions of traits across populations with racial categories, that is exactly what the public does – in the novel and in our world today. Population geneticists insist that populations that share traits are not the same as races, but doctors continue to use race as a proxy for determining at-risk patients. The point Kerr seems to be trying to make by depicting a hyper-racialized culture is that “geneticization” may actually desensitize society. The very kind of probabilistic distributions that Plomin hopes will prevent us from misusing research about the influence of genes on behavior is seen by Kerr to be a potential cause of racial intolerance and open discrimination.
I have barely begun to scratch the surface of this intriguing novel, which maintains a running intertextual play with the details of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s biography and philosophy; the tradition of the detective genre, including works by Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, and Sara Paretsky, as well as such classic essays on English murder as Thomas de Quincey’s “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” and George Orwell’s “The Decline of the English Murder”; other dystopias, including A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-Four; classical literature, particularly the Aeneid; and the Frankfurt School of criticism. I will end, however, by noting the novel’s self-reflexive dimension, which turns a detective inquiry into a philosophic inquiry of the nature of knowledge. Against the certitude that is the goal of detectives – and of all-too-many readers of the human genome – the novel poses its “atmosphere of absolute uncertainty, of continuous change” (Kerr 247). The novel’s ironic, self-reflexive structure opposes the deterministic thinking that believes there is a “gene for violence.” Instead, it proposes “that all knowledge is merely provisional” (247) and that there are no easy answers to be found in the genome.
Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam Trilogy
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy – Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013) – fuses elements of biodystopia with postapocalyptic motifs familiar from numerous novels and films. The dystopian sections exhibit a full array of the biomedical horrors that haunt society in the age of genomics: illegal experimentation with human subjects, designer babies, direct-to-consumer genetic modifications, a genetically engineered pandemic, the cloning of a posthuman species, and a world overrun with transgenic animals like the pigoon, rakunk, and wolvog. Further, the catastrophe that brings down civilization is caused by bioterrorism. The blend of biodystopia and postapocalypse works well to dramatize current biomedical fears and to portray a world in which corporate Compounds have replaced the state, society is divided between privileged enclaves and lawless Pleeblands, and violent internet porn, sexual exploitation, and class oppression exceed all bounds.
Oryx and Crake tells story of Jimmy (aka Snowman), an isolated survivor of the pandemic, and a collection of posthuman creatures – called “Crakers” – left under Jimmy’s care. Crake, who designed this new species, wanted to free them from all the woes that humanity is heir to, from violence and racism to sexual competition and greed. They are vegetarians who live on grass and leaves. The females mate every three years when they go into heat, choosing four males with whom to copulate so that the offspring belong to the group rather than an individual father. Children mature in just four years because of accelerated growth factors in their DNA. They have no body hair, ultraviolet resistant skin of all shades, and a citrus odor that repels insects. The males’ urine is chemically programmed to ward off predators so that their daily ritual of territory marking keeps them safe from wild animals and gives the males a valuable role in the tribe. The females can purr at a frequency that heals wounds. After an illness-free life, all the Crakers die painlessly at age thirty.
The Year of the Flood, the second volume of the trilogy, focuses on other survivors of the plague, particularly two women, Toby and Ren, who had known Jimmy and Crake at different periods in their lives. The women are members of an ecoreligion called God’s Gardeners, who are preparing for the end of the world in what their leader prophesizes will be a second flood, but without water this time. The stories from the two novels come together near the end of Year of the Flood when Toby and Ren stumble upon Jimmy during the events that had climaxed Oryx and Crake. The final book of the trilogy, MaddAddam, follows all the characters from the earlier books – Jimmy, the Crakers, Toby, Ren, and other surviving members of God’s Gardeners – as they make war against a pair of brutal criminals and make peace with the pigoons, transgenic pigs made with human DNA to serve as a source for organ transplants. Together with the Crakers, pigoons appear destined to inherit an earth largely cleansed of humanity.
Atwood’s allusive texts invoke the tradition of biodystopia and postapocalypse repeatedly. What Fredric Jameson says of utopias is equally true of these genres: they are marked by their “explicit intertextuality … the individual text carries with it a whole tradition, reconstructed and modified with each new addition” (Archaeologies 2). The two most sustained intertexts for Atwood are H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), both of which feature biomedical creations that have run out of control.6 Wells’s novel about chimeras anticipates Atwood’s pigoons and other transgenic animals. Like Wells’s Beast People, the Crakers also are chimeras whose genome has been modified with nonhuman DNA. The Crakers’ mating signals come from the monkey family (“a trick of variable pigmentation filched from the baboons, with a contribution from the expandable chromosphores of the octopus” [Oryx 164]), the ability to digest grass and leaves “from the Leporidae, the hares and rabbits” (Oryx 159), and their therapeutic purring from cats (“Once he discovered that the cat family purred at the same frequency as the ultrasound used on bone fractures and skin lesions … he’d turned himself inside out in the attempt to install that feature” [Oryx 156]).
Atwood notes that all of the biotechnologies in her text were possible at the time or could be developed in the near future, and as far as transgenic animals are concerned, she has a good case. As we saw in Chapter 2, pig-human, monkey-human, and mouse-human chimeras have been created in laboratories since the mid-1980s. But the pigoons’ legacy from Wells’s Swine Men is unmistakable. The most significant resemblance is the use of religion to control the creatures. In Wells’s novel, Dr. Moreau invents a religion with laws forbidding the eating of meat to suppress his Beast People’s carnivorous instincts, but Moreau is unable to prevent them from reverting to savagery. Crake tries the opposite course, attempting to eliminate the God-gene from his new species. Almost immediately, however, they revert but in the opposite direction. They spontaneously reinvent religion for themselves with Crake as a sky deity who controls the thunder and lightning, and Crake’s girlfriend Oryx as a protective earth deity.
John Wyndham’s cold war-era science fiction classic, The Day of the Triffids, shares even more motifs with Atwood. Both authors portray people who erroneously think they are the only survivors of the catastrophe; both emphasize the role of unintended consequences of scientific developments in bringing on ecological disaster; both follow the fortunes of a remnant of survivors who band together to form intentional communities in the hope of reconstructing civilization on a better footing; and both dramatize religious orders that strive to hold back the tide of destruction. Still other motifs reflect their shared interests in bioengineering. Wyndham does not use the vocabulary of genetics (Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helix was still two years in the future), but his prescient concerns with mono-crop agriculture, biofuels, the escape of artificially created species into the environment, and biological warfare have been transposed to the genomic world and thoroughly reimagined in Atwood’s trilogy.7 Wyndham even has characters discuss whether they should fabricate a myth of how the world ended, “Something like the Flood, again” (Wyndham 204), looking forward to the “Waterless Flood” (Year 312) of Atwood’s second volume.
The fusion of biodystopia and postapocalypse is facilitated by the innovative temporal structure of the three novels, particularly the first. Oryx and Crake is structured by alternating chapters that deploy cyclical and linear time structures simultaneously. For the first half of the novel, the odd-numbered chapters narrate the events of a single day in Jimmy’s life after the Fall. Written in the present tense, they record the painful tedium of survival as Jimmy scavenges for provisions and watches over the Crakers. The diurnal rhythm of morning (Chapter 1), noon (Chapter 3), and night (Chapter 5) emphasizes the universal cycle of nature that persists even after apocalypse, and at the same time, the fear, boredom, and encroaching madness of an individual as the hours drag along. For the remainder of the book, the odd-numbered chapters continue to evoke a cyclical perception of time by narrating the remaining days of a week, one day per chapter up until the sixth day, after which the story breaks off. It makes sense that there are only six days in Oryx and Crake because this Creator is anything but divine. A terrible boy-genius, this avenging figure unleashes a plague on humanity and fashions a new species with the aid of imprisoned fellow scientists. Hence, Crake seeks death, not a day of rest, when his labor of creation is complete.8
The even-numbered chapters follow a very different time scheme. Narrated in the past tense, they consist of Jimmy’s memories of growing up. Wholly linear in structure, they form a twisted bildungsroman for the appointed guardian of the Crakers. Chapter 2 begins with Jimmy at age five; Chapter 4 covers his preteen years, and Chapters 6, his high school infatuation with Oryx. The remainder of the even-numbered chapters continue Jimmy’s history until their narrative line catches up to the sixth day in the present. In the final two chapters of the book, the separate timelines come together, merging in the novel’s provocative, if open-ended, climax.
Intertwining both cyclical and linear conceptions of time, I have argued, is the signature of “genome time.” Of course, novelists hardly need to be thinking of genomes to grasp for themselves the power of braiding universal and particular storylines into a single strand, a narrative helix if you will. But everything about Atwood’s trilogy indicates that she had genomics in mind. The time schemes of Year of the Flood and MaddAddam are not so intricate as that of Oryx, but they both manage to evoke this braided temporality in their alternating structures. The Year of the Flood captures the cyclical dimension by beginning each chapter with a sermon by Adam One delivered in the past before the flood. Each sermon is keyed to a day in the Gardeners’ liturgical year, a cyclical structure common to many religious traditions. The body of the chapter then shifts to the same day of the liturgical calendar in the postapocalyptic present. As in Oryx, the timeline of the sermons eventually catches up with the main story. In MaddAddam, the cyclical dimension is encoded in the ritual stories Toby tells the Crakers about what their human predecessors had been like, a ritual continued by a Craker child named Blackbeard after Toby’s death.
Both the dystopian society and the apocalypse that destroys it are seen as stemming directly from unethical exploitation of genetics research. Corporations creating genetically modified organisms (GMOs) largely rule society. GM varietals have replaced conventional species in agriculture. Jimmy’s father works at OrganInc Farms, which modifies organisms for medical purposes. Jimmy and Crake go to high school in the HelthWyzer Compound, a corporation that markets cosmetic genomics through its NooSkins subsidiary as well as pursues more nefarious activities such as intentionally unleashing genetically modified viruses in its health supplements for which only HelthWyzer possesses the pharmacogenomic cure. As an adult, Jimmy works first at AnooYoo Spa, and later, with Crake in RejoovenEsense, responsible for the BlyssPluss pill. (The emphasis on life and beauty-prolonging treatments brings to mind Shteyngart’s satire of the rejuvenation treatments marketed by Post-Human Services.) BlyssPluss is advertised as protecting against all known STDs, working as a super-Viagra for both men and women, and prolonging youth; its less publicized properties include sterilization and serving as the vector for the pandemic disease that annihilates nearly all of the human species. In the Pleeblands, an even more free-wheeling market for illicit human gene mods thrives.
One of the most frequently voiced concerns of contemporary critics of GMOs is the danger of modified genes escaping into the wild. Atwood’s novels dramatize this danger with startling power. Escaped pigoons represent continual threats to the characters not only because of their enlarged size and strength but because the human genetic material mixed in their DNA has enhanced their intelligence. They hunt in packs, learn to set ambushes for the unwary, engage in sabotage, and develop sophisticated strategies to aid them in their conflict with the armed humans. In Chapter 2, we looked at some of the ethical questions raised by creating human/nonhuman chimeras, paying especial attention to the problems with splicing human neuronal cells into nonhuman animals. One of the principal dangers, according to several bioethics committees and Wells’s Doctor Moreau, was that enhancing the cognitive abilities of a nonhuman animal would raise its ethical status. The conclusion of one bioethics group was that “more humanlike capacities” would give an animal a “greater capacity for suffering” (Greene et al. 385). This is exactly what happens to Atwood’s pigoons, a realization that is brought home to the human survivors when they observe the transgenic animals developing mourning rituals for their dead (MaddAddam 326). At the conclusion of the trilogy, the human community comes to terms with the new moral stature of this companion species, which had been so recklessly created by the huge “BioCorps” (MaddAddam 56). Ultimately, the surviving humans realize that they must collaborate in building a new civilization not only with the Crakers – with whom they have already begun to interbreed – but with chimerical pigs.
Atwood’s novels have had a strong impact on public fears about genetics. Some of this impact might be seen as merely alarmist, akin to the conspiracy theories common in thrillers at the multiplex. Here is an exchange from The Year of the Flood, alleging that Toby’s mother had been experimented on by HelthWyzer, the pharmaceutical company for which she worked, possibly as a reprisal against her husband for refusing to sell his house to the corporation:
“Did it ever occur to you, my dear,” said Pilar, “that your mother may have been a guinea pig?”
It hadn’t occurred to Toby, but it occurred to her now.
“Now, promise me that you will never take any pill made by a Corporation,” said Pilar. “Never buy such a pill, and never accept any such pill if offered, no matter what they say. They’ll produce data and scientists; they’ll produce doctors – worthless, they’ve all been bought.”
“Surely not all of them!” said Toby.
“No,” said Pilar. “Not all. But all who are still working with any of the pharmaceutical corporations. The others – some have died unexpectedly.”
While the dystopian world of Atwood’s novels justifies such a passage as part of the social fabric, it is not the sort of insight that would lead to thoughtful reflection on bioethical issues in our own world. Other aspects of the novels, however, have articulated important concerns, which have played a role in public policy debates. Where bioterrorism is concerned, we have unusually direct evidence of the kind of influence Atwood’s fiction has exerted. The prominent jurist and legal theorist Richard Posner cites Oryx and Crake as the origin of his study of how our society should prepare for future disasters, especially those that could be caused by bioterrorism. (Posner’s invocation of Atwood is ironic since he is a vocal critic of the law and literature movement.) In Catastrophe: Risk and Response, Posner writes:
The germ of the book is a review I did of Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake …. I was curious whether there was any scientific basis for her dark vision – and discovered that there was and that the social sciences were not taking it as seriously as it deserved. The law was paying no attention at all, because law is court-centric and there have been no cases involving catastrophic risks in the sense in which I am using the term, and because a cultural gulf separates lawyers from scientists.
Posner sets out to correct an inadequacy in two fields far removed from the literary – economics and the law – because of his alarm at the scenarios that Atwood portrays. Posner’s extensive research convinces him that “the law’s conventional methods for resolving science-laden legal disputes” are inadequate and that the “law is indeed lagging dangerously behind an accelerating scientific revolution” in biotechnology (vi–vii).
The catastrophes caused by bioterrorism in Atwood’s novels range from anarchistic acts of sabotage by the MaddAddam group, which releases genetically engineered mice that eat the insulation on electric wiring, weevils that attack only GM coffee beans, microbes that eat the tar in asphalt, wasps with a modified form of chicken pox specific to ChickieNobs, to Crake’s apocalyptic plot to eradicate the human species.
Perhaps the most influential aspect of the trilogy has been its vision of genetically modified organisms. Worries about GMOs loomed large in the public’s mind during the decade Atwood was publishing her trilogy (2003–13) and are still widespread.9 Government agencies and bioethical groups have studied the issue extensively, and news coverage, social media, and protests (especially in Europe) are prominent. There is evidence that Atwood’s fiction is doing its part to shape these attitudes. An internet search for “Margaret Atwood” and such topics as “environmentalism,” “genetics,” and “GM foods” yields hundreds of thousands of hits, many of them pointing to environmental organizations advocating public policy in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
According to a 2010 Congressional report on “Biotechnology in Animal Agriculture,” about half of US citizens surveyed oppose the use of biotechnology in the food supply. Two-thirds express discomfort with cloning animals for food, “more of them out of religious or ethical concerns than food safety concerns” (Cowan and Becker 16). Finally, “A majority of respondents to [a] Pew survey believe that regulators should take into account ethical and moral considerations” (16). But there is broad disagreement about whether federal regulations should be based solely on scientific findings about safety and environmental harms or whether they should take into account public opinion, ethical issues, and cultural attitudes. European agencies have tended to weigh the negative views of the public toward GM foods while also arguing that the science is not settled in this area, whereas US regulatory agencies have largely taken the position that the science is what matters. For example, the FDA’s risk assessment of the safety of meat and milk from cloned pigs, cattle, and goats, issued in 2008, concluded that these products were as safe for human consumption as food from conventionally bred animals and that the risk to the environment or the animals themselves from this procedure was no greater than other methods of food production. The FDA emphasized, however, that it did not consider “the social and ethical aspects of cloning or consumer acceptance of cloned animal products” in arriving at its conclusion (FDA, Guidance 10).
Numerous commentators on the topic have argued that the United States too should assess ethical and cultural values in the area of GMOs, especially when the science is unsettled. For example, Winickoff and his collaborators, writing in the Yale Journal of International Law, maintain that “GMOs fall into the class of risk situations characterized by both low certainty and low consensus” (Winickoff et al. 83) and thus that “value judgments and public participation” should play an important role in regulating them. “In practice, effective and reliable risk assessment diverges from the simple science-based models promoted by the United States” (Winickoff et al. 84). A 2007 article called “Dolly for Dinner?” in Nature Biotechnology reaches the same conclusion, stressing the “need to develop frameworks for considering the ethical aspects of animal biotech as well as the importance of participatory deliberation with the public” (Suk et al. 53), not just rely on the science.
I agree with Winickoff and Suk in principle, but assessing the desires of the public may not be enough to prevent misuses of biotechnology. Opinion surveys and “participatory deliberation” may be insufficient tools for forging policy in this context. Atwood underscores the difficulty of relying on cultural values to determine regulations in an area where false beliefs and overwhelming desires are already sedimented in the practice itself. What makes Atwood’s biodystopia so unsettling is the eagerness with which consumers seek the modifications that are bringing on ecological disaster. As in Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, the majority of the world’s population in Atwood’s trilogy have internalized the values that give power to the corporations. The BlyssPluss pill is a perfect example. The pill is an ideal vector for Crake’s virus because of consumers’ overwhelming desire for its benefits – great sex and a long life.
GM foods, of course, are far more ambivalently coded than the BlyssPluss pill. GMOs are vectors for fears and religious beliefs, for corporate profits and consumer convenience, but also for potential research breakthroughs, health benefits, and hunger relief. As passionate as Atwood is for ecological justice, her novels make it clear that simply relying on current values and public opinion will not resolve such vexed questions.
If assessing public attitudes is not sufficient to ensure sound regulation of biotechnology, what is? In my view, the conclusion of Atwood’s trilogy shows us at least part of what is needed. The vision of a future shared by humans, pigoons, and posthuman Crakers is a parable, extreme perhaps, but instructive. The survivors realize that a viable future for the planet depends on reconceptualizing humanity’s place among the other species. The parable speaks of reconciliation with the Other, interspecies harmony, and respect for the environment. It speaks of modesty in a universe where the human may not be the sole arbiter of value. Such attitudes do not come easily, but they are essential for survival in the era of climate change.
Literature gives us a space in which to cultivate this kind of understanding. Rather than an answer, it provides a stimulus to reflection. It challenges us to think and to imagine rather than simply react. Literature can assist us to a more thoughtful conversation about biotechnology – or indeed, about most important topics, whether public or private. Although it may exaggerate in the interest of a good story, it also enables us to judge for ourselves the kind of world we would like to inhabit. In the end – at the end – Atwood’s trilogy does more than dramatize the potential dangers of genomics. It shows us the importance of working thoughtfully in the present to create a shared future for our planet.
What if I were to tell you that I could take a scraping of skin from your finger and create another Ezra Lieberman?
Doug Kinney is about to get the one thing he needs more of – himself!”
A human was cloned. That human was you. Kind of takes the fun out of being alive, doesn’t it?
It made another me! How cool is that?
Of the several dozen movies and television series featuring clones that I have watched over the years, one of the most accurate is the earliest – a star-studded film made in 1978 from Ira Levin’s novel, The Boys from Brazil. In seven minutes of surprisingly effective exposition, a scientist explains to Ezra Lieberman, a Nazi hunter played by Sir Laurence Olivier, the procedures involved in “mononuclear reproduction” or “cloning.” Strikingly, the scientist also explains the necessity of reproducing the environment of the original if one hopes to duplicate its character, something missing from the overwhelming majority of films about clones. When Lieberman exclaims, “It’s monstrous, doctor!” the scientist replies, “Why? Wouldn’t you want to live in a world full of Mozarts and Picassos?” The exposition reaches a climax as Lieberman reiterates what they have learned about the cloned boy’s background: “Not Mozart, not Picasso, not a genius who will enrich the world, but a lonely little boy with a domineering father … Adolf Hitler.”
The emphasis on environmental factors in the development of an individual is a step in the right direction, but the film still misses a fundamental truth about human cloning – that everything the clone encounters, from its epigenetic programming to the household and society in which it is raised to the very air it breathes, would be different from those of the original. In an amusing essay occasioned by the cloning of Dolly the sheep, Stephen Jay Gould points out that identical twins “are far better clones than Dolly and her mother” because twins share the same mitochondrial genes, maternal proteins, womb, and historical time period (“Dolly’s Fashion” 46–47). If someday a human clone is created, it will be a unique individual with its own personality, not a carbon copy or automaton.
Few films even gesture toward environmental influences on the developing child. On the contrary, most present audiences with fully grown adults, the actor doubled before our eyes through the magic of a green screen. Newly minted copies of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Keaton, and the cartoon figure Bart Simpson pop up whenever the action – or comedy – demands.1 What should we expect, though? Science in popular cinema is usually little more than a transparent excuse for the action. We are so inured to scientific gobbledygook in films and television that it makes us wonder if anyone takes such nonsense seriously. Yet research shows that some people do.2 The worry that movies about cloning will spread misconceptions about genetic engineering and stem cell research is a valid concern. Unsurprisingly, the most pervasive misconception about clones is the belief that cloning would produce a soulless version of the original, a grown-up automaton equipped with the same personality, desires, opinions, and even memories.3 The persistence of memory is occasionally justified in movies (as it is in The 6th Day) by some form of technology for uploading a person’s consciousness intact, but more often, memories come in flashbacks, dreams, or feelings of déjà vu, episodes that call to mind Samuel Butler’s conviction back in the 1870s that unconscious memories were passed down from one generation to the next.4
In the first chapter of this book, I noted that studying such misrepresentations is a common approach used by social scientists to measure the effects of popular culture on public attitudes toward science. Using discourse analysis, surveys, focus groups, and semistructured interviews, social scientists have examined the impact of everything from films and television to online advertising and social media networks. This kind of research is regularly funded by the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) program of the NIH and cited in policy reports. But the methods of social scientists are not a viable option for literary scholars, for they make little use of our particular set of skills. One does not need graduate training in literary studies to expose the distorted science that appears in the thrillers, superhero pics, and horror movies that make up the majority of the nearly 150 films and TV shows that involve cloning.5 Moreover, the very idea of looking for factual distortions is problematic in literary criticism because the object under investigation – fiction – complicates any simple relationship between representation and reality.
I am beginning this chapter with films about cloning to highlight an interesting contrast. It turns out that many of the most prominent literary works involving clones view them more sympathetically than most movies. Whereas films usually “send in the clones” to provoke horror, dramatic action, or laughter, a number of prominent novels and short stories use the idea of human cloning to challenge readers to think about what makes us human.6 The works I have in mind include titles that have come up repeatedly in this study – Cloud Atlas, the MaddAddam trilogy, Never Let Me Go – as well as other interesting texts, all published since the landmark 1975 Asilomar Conference on recombinant DNA: Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis (1987–1989), Fay Weldon’s The Cloning of Joanna May (1989), Eva Hoffman’s The Secret (2002), Nancy Kress’s “Sex Education” (1996), Martha Nussbaum’s “Little C” (1998), Jenny Davidson’s Heredity (2003), Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper (2004), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). In most cases, the stories reflect real-life problems with an immediacy that reinforces a sense of realism rather than science fictionality.7 As a result, the clones are easily read as analogues for marginalized groups in current society – racial or sexual minorities, women, people with disabilities, the poor, the homeless, the displaced and stateless. They excite empathy and political awareness. Sorrow, not terror, is a dominant emotion.
Of these texts, one stands out for the amount of critical attention it has attracted in the relatively brief time since its publication, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. A survey of the relevant bibliography yields more than seventy-five full-length articles in English (there are a dozen or so more in other languages) that discuss the novel, not to mention reviews, interviews, and feature pieces. As one would expect, much of this attention is due to the merit of the novel. But much also stems from the work’s bearing on four topics that have been central to this study: dystopia, posthumanism, temporality, and bioethics. I touch on these topics again in the four sections that follow. But I have additional reasons for devoting my final chapter to Ishiguro’s novel.
First, Ishiguro’s nightmare vision of clones created as sources for human organs can illuminate the principles often used to set organ donation priorities, enriching public discourse on this topic. Second, the novel’s self-conscious relation to nineteenth-century realism rounds off this study by returning us to some of the questions we explored in Chapter 1. Like McEwan’s Saturday, Ishiguro’s novel invokes canonical nineteenth-century literature to deepen our understanding of the social implications of genetics. Highlighting the arc that leads from Darwin’s theory of evolution to twenty-first-century genomics, both Saturday and Never Let Me Go explore the value of literature to guide us as we think about the urgent questions that arise in a scientific age.
Bildung in Dystopia
The science of cloning a human never appears in Never Let Me Go. Instead, the novel exploits a variant of the Bildungsroman – the boarding-school novel – to focus attention on the environment in which three friends, all clones, are raised. As the novel opens, our narrator, Kathy H., is talking to a patient, a fellow clone, who is recovering from surgery. Kathy is a “carer,” a companion who assists organ donors before and after their operations. The occupation is one that all clones pass through before beginning their own career as organ donors. She has been a carer for eleven years, an unusually long period, and feels proud of her skill at calming those under her charge. In January, she will begin the final stage of her life, giving up her organs for others. She is thirty-one years old but knows she has only a year or two of life ahead of her. Some donors do not make it past their second operation, and none are expected to survive their fourth. They call this final donation “completing,” as in fulfilling one’s purpose on earth.
Kathy grew up as one of the privileged children raised at Hailsham, a boarding school dedicated to giving its students a full, humanistic education in a nurturing environment. They were watched over by a staff of teachers called “guardians,” told they were “special” (43), and sheltered from understanding what their future as organ donors entailed. At first, readers are sheltered too. In the early chapters, most readers do not even realize the children are clones unless they have been told ahead of time. The realization dawns slowly, as if we are groping toward some facet of adult knowledge, some recognition essential to mature acceptance of the world, just as are the children themselves. How does the novel pull off this feat?
By beautifully marshaling the elementary literary techniques that E. M. Forster years ago named “aspects of the novel.” The point of view is handled deftly by a speaking voice addressing an unidentified “you”; temporal shifts are managed with colloquial ease, sentence by sentence in the cadence of a conversation; the familiar genre of boarding-school novel slides easily into its accustomed grooves as memoir and Bildungsroman, its melancholy tone a natural outgrowth of growing up, the small losses, childhood grievances, schoolyard cliques, and crushes on teachers developing into lifelong bonds among friends; and the main characters, our narrator Kathy, and her childhood companions, Ruth and Tommy, deepen into psychologically complex adults, rounded individuals possessing that half-glimpsed, mysterious realm we call “interiority” – all these deeply recognizable “aspects” of the novel are arranged with such skill that at first one hardly notices that the alternative England in the novel is a biodystopia in which cloned children are raised to have their organs harvested for strangers.
The word “clone” is virtually taboo in the novel. It appears only twice, both times to register the stigma associated with the term. The guardians at Hailsham always preferred the word “students” (261) as a way of glossing over the reality of what lay before their charges. Society as a whole does not want to be reminded of that reality either – hence, the near invisibility of science. Genetics only crops up once in the novel, in a conversation near the end of the book, when something called the “Morningdale scandal” (258) is mentioned. Kathy and her lover, Tommy, have tracked down the head guardian from Hailsham, Miss Emily, and are entreating her to explain some of the things they found puzzling about their upbringing. They have heard rumors that Hailsham students who are truly in love can obtain “deferrals” of their surgeries for a few years (258). Miss Emily, however, crushes those hopes, telling them that the rumor is false. Worse still, Hailsham has been shut down, and the situation of cloned children is even more deplorable than it was before. The end for Hailsham came when a scientist named Morningdale was discovered in a remote region of Scotland conducting illegal experiments involving genetically enhancing clones.8 “What he wanted was to offer people the possibility of having children with enhanced characteristics. Superior intelligence, superior athleticism” (263–64). But his plan blew up, causing untold damage. Miss Emily explains: “It reminded people, reminded them of a fear they’d always had. It’s one thing to create students, such as yourselves, for the donation programme. But a generation of created children … demonstrably superior to the rest of us? Oh no. That frightened people” (264).
The outcry brought unwanted attention to something the public had been successfully repressing for decades – that their health system depended on heartless procedures that created an exploited underclass. Before the Morningdale scandal broke, “people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren’t really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter” (263). The parallel with apologists for slavery in the nineteenth century is inescapable, as it is with doctors who performed medical atrocities in Nazi concentration camps and the Tuskegee syphilis study.
But you must try and see it historically. After the war, in the early fifties, when the great breakthroughs in science followed one after the other so rapidly, there wasn’t time to take stock, to ask the sensible questions. Suddenly there were all these new possibilities laid before us, all these ways to cure so many previously incurable conditions …. And for a long time, people preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere, or at most that they grew in a kind of vacuum.
The brevity of this explanation is revealing – WW II, the early 1950s, a vaguely “long time,” and suddenly the characters are in the present, inhabiting a society dependent on unspeakable barbarities perpetrated on a class of “untouchables” for the sake of nearly miraculous cures for fully entitled members of society.9 To grasp how completely Ishiguro’s novel buries the science of cloning, contrast the preceding passage with Atwood’s depiction of genetic engineering. Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy dramatizes the growth of entire industries devoted to producing genetically modified (GM) animals, diagnoses the forces that gave the giant Biocorps power, depicts a character genetically engineering an extinction-level pandemic, details the diverse genetic sources of her chimeras, describes the method of distribution for the pandemic’s vectors, and enumerates the nonhuman traits Crake splices into the DNA of a cloned species designed to replace humanity. By contrast, Ishiguro’s story is not about astounding scientific advances but about the normalization of science, about how biodystopia becomes accepted as the price of medical marvels. Even the victims of this system, the clones, accept this state of affairs as the norm. They never think of rebelling. Once they become adults and leave Hailsham, they encounter no restraints on their free movement, no covert surveillance. “Why don’t they just run away?” my students invariably ask. The answer comes readily to hand: because they have completely internalized the conditions of their oppression.
Their failure to lash out at an unjust social order departs from a standard plot convention of dystopia but is unsurprising in biodystopia, which is distinguished from the former by this very process of internalization.10 As we saw in the prior chapter, biodystopia transposes the structures of domination into the self. The focus of the novel’s early chapters on the children’s education gives us a step-by-step illustration of how such internalization occurs. At Hailsham, the cultivation of self, or Bildung, cannot be disentangled from the socialization of the children for their destined fate. Both at the institutional level, in their classes, counseling sessions, sports events, and facilities, and on the personal level, as they respond to peer pressure, vague fears, and emerging desires, an education designed to foster humanistic values simultaneously prepares them to accept their future as organ donors. Sadly, this is no paradox.
The classical Bildungsroman, or novel of education, narrates the story of how a young person develops into maturity by navigating a series of adolescent crises to find, at last, his or her true calling as an adult. The telos of this process is a mature acceptance of one’s destiny and place in society, even when this role represents a diminishment of one’s youthful dreams. Franco Moretti has pointed out that for the last two centuries, this destiny has coincided with finding a professional vocation, an occupation that fulfills a place within the social order. That this occupation in the clones’ case means sacrificing their lives for the good of others does not prevent them from accepting their fate, any more than it might a well-trained soldier. But their very lack of dissent forces the reader to think again about the project of Bildung. Is cultivation of selfhood in service of vocation always praiseworthy? The answer depends on two crucial factors: the roles a society affords its citizens, and even more important, who counts as a citizen.
Matthew Eatough explores the challenge Never Let Me Go offers to Bildung as a way of raising policy concerns about a current strategy for assessing patients’ suitability for organ transplants. Eatough demonstrates that the understanding of Bildung, or character development, governing the treatment of the clones in Ishiguro’s novel is similar to that used in quality-of-life studies, which are often a factor in decisions about who receives organ transplants. Quality-of-life studies attempt to shift the debate over expensive surgeries and the allocation of scarce organs away from cost-benefit calculations focused exclusively on survival rates and toward measures that weigh participants’ affective responses to their condition. The goal is to use affective preferences to “establish an objectively measurable scale … that can translate subjective states into a calculable, comparative metric” (Eatough 145). Patients are asked to say whether they would prefer a longer life in reduced health or a shorter life in better health. Using preference-based psychometrics, researchers then “quantify the difference between certain medical conditions on the basis of participants’ affective responses to those states. This procedure yields what is called a ‘quality-adjusted life year’ (QALY), a number … that designates the difference between an individual’s reduced quality of life and that of a fully functional individual” (Eatough 140, italics in original).
Eatough asks several questions about this number. First, what defines a “fully functional individual”? The answer turns out to be the same one offered in Never Let Me Go and in the Bildungsroman generally: a “fully functioning individual” is defined as someone with the ability to pursue a chosen vocation. The unintended result of this definition is that patients’ affective investments in their vocation play a role in the calculation used to determine their eligibility for organ transplantation. For the clones, the reverse is also true. Trained at Hailsham to value the cultivation of the self above all else, they have no difficulty choosing their “professional oriented Bildung … as organ donors” (Eatough 142) over the continued healthy functioning of their bodies. Second, what are the consequences of considering “the body’s physical well-being … only to the extent that it impacts the patient’s affective experience of the time period under consideration” (Eatough 143)? One is that patients and medical personnel alike are prompted to become less responsive to the body, to discount its suffering as an adequate measure of well-being. This lessening of regard for the body can have distinct drawbacks. For medical professionals, the admirable effort to attend to quality-of-life measures paradoxically results in devaluing of bodily trauma. For patients, the effort requires one to choose between the time of the body and the time of Bildung – that is, between the time one has to live and the life one wants to live in time.
As a literary form, the novel has traditionally excelled at registering the variable meanings to individuals of different temporalities. A work of fiction like Never Let Me Go can bring home to readers the intensity of felt time, the dilation of what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” the remembrance of temps perdu. In this respect, the form simultaneously honors the transient personal apprehension of time and the shared cultural meanings of a longer durée. This is one of the great achievements of Never Let Me Go – its power to imbue both temporalities with a full measure of meaning, our fleeting time on earth and our intimation of times that extend beyond the self.
Eatough’s article shows how the study of an individual novel can bring added value to the conversation about an important policy issue. As an example of a literary study that holds as much interest for public policy makers as for readers of fiction, Eatough’s work is unusual but not unique. In Chapter 1, I listed some of the other pioneers in this effort. Another literary scholar claims our attention here because his work has also focused on organ donation. Robert Mitchell is a literary critic of Romanticism who has coauthored with Catherine Waldby a book-length study of organ transplantation policy, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism. Waldby and Mitchell’s book highlights contradictions within the gift-giving economy that governs organ donation policy in the United States. Their work, like Eatough’s, deserves to figure into conversations about how we make decisions in an exchange fraught with conflicting needs, values, and emotions – an exchange that involves deeply held cultural beliefs about the value of human life.
Humanism and the Human
Perhaps the most common function of clones in literature has been to challenge traditional definitions of the human. Are artificially created beings individuals; if so, do they have souls; do they have rights that must be respected by the state? The clones’ experience at Hailsham is premised on demonstrating their essential humanity. Yet the instinctive revulsion that even some of their committed advocates feel in their presence shows the tenuousness of this conviction. Moreover, the emphasis on artistic expression in the novel asks us to reconsider the traditional link between art and humanity. From earliest childhood, the clones are encouraged to treasure artistic expression and to cultivate their imaginations by creating poetry and drawings for a gallery that, we discover, is intended to prove that clones have souls. But the failure of the gallery after the Morningdale scandal and the collapse of the nascent abolitionist movement on behalf of the clones cast doubt on the persuasive power of art.
Interwoven with these reflections on the human are scenes that provoke one to reflect on humanism as well.11 Respect for education and faith in the creative imagination as a sign of human worth are only two of many humanistic values that the guardians of Hailsham endorse. In search of a more just polity, the guardians denounce prejudice and inculcate principles of tolerance, sympathy for others, and humane treatment for all. Miss Emily, the former director of Hailsham, believes that her cause was just: “Together, we became a small but very vocal movement, and we challenged the entire way the donations programme was being run” (261). She urges that “Hailsham was considered a shining beacon, an example of how we might move to a more humane and a better way of doing things” (258) and that Kathy and Tommy have “turned out well” (256). She has sacrificed her own comfort and most of her possessions to the cause, and she is consoled by “the knowledge that we’ve given you better lives than you would have had otherwise” (265). In the end, however, her reformist movement racked up only isolated victories before being swept away by the negative wave of reaction to the Morningdale scandal. Whatever successes she achieved were short lived and confined to the personal realm; they did not touch the material conditions of the clones’ existence, whether political, economic, or biomedical. Structural change proved beyond Miss Emily’s reach, perhaps even her imagination.
What do we make of the crushing failure of Miss Emily’s liberal, reformist movement and the humanistic values that inform it? Shameem Black sees the failure of art and liberal reform as an indictment of humanism and Romantic conceptions of sympathy in favor of the more radical potential in posthumanism. Black writes, “the novel indicts humanist conceptions of art as a form of extraction that resembles forced organ donation” and “the concept of the soul invokes a fundamentally exploitative discourse of use value” (285). These contentions seem wrong to me, or at least overstated. Art as forced organ donation? The concept of the soul as an exploitative discourse of use value? Most readers’ experience of the novel involves intense empathy for the humanity of Kathy and the other clones (Groes and Lewis 2). Like the Romantic predecessors to Ishiguro’s characters from Frankenstein’s creature onward, Kathy’s painful growth to adulthood, poignant losses, and imminent death mobilize the repertoire of sympathetic response and gradual insight that is another strength of the realistic novel – mobilize it to impress us with her shared humanity.
Yet despite Black’s overstatement, her larger point seems reasonable, that liberalism’s answer to coercion is tainted by its acceptance of the values that determine who qualifies for rights – the values that determine the human. Invoking Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” Black notes how the boundaries of Hailsham, a protective environment, are also depicted in terms that remind us of the Nazi concentration camps. Like the prisoners in those camps, the clones are stripped of “any forms of political identity [and] denuded of citizenship” (Black 789). I agree. Ishiguro’s novel severely qualifies any simple affirmations of art, humanism, and the sympathetic imagination. The failure of these values to counter the dystopian conditions of a society that is all but identical to contemporary England represents a powerful critique of this belief.12
There is a difference between challenging a naïve faith in humanism, which is what I think the novel does, and abandoning the human as a measure of basic rights. Abandoning the human as a metric is an increasingly prominent ethical position, advocated in other contexts by writers such as Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe, and Jane Bennett, but it is not a position this novel endorses. Nothing in the story suggests that the cloned organ donors are anything but profoundly human individuals, deserving of the same human rights as all other people on the planet. Instead, Ishiguro’s novel asks us to expand our conception of the human to encompass categories of people and states of being that have too often been excluded.
What is radical about Never Let Me Go is its critique of the institutions and safeguards of the modern state for having failed to prevent the exploitation of marginalized populations.13 What is radical is the exposure of the subterfuges of biopower, which blind the beneficiaries of an immoral medical system to the inequities upon which that system depends. For better or worse, there is nothing posthuman about the clones in Never Let Me Go, only the sad spectacle of what can be done to those disempowered populations who have been made to seem less than human.
Memory and Consolation
No aspect of Never Let Me Go highlights its vexed relationship to humanism more than the novel’s treatment of memory. From the first moment when Kathy confesses that she has given in to her patients’ frequent pleas that she tell stories about her childhood at Hailsham to the final paragraph when she closed her eyes and “imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up” (287), memory casts a melancholy, even elegiac tone over the book. Recollected in that strange tranquility that bewilders and intrigues so many readers, Kathy’s memories serve as her sole consolation for all she has lost. Matthew Arnold saw Wordsworth’s poetry of consolation as a source of his greatness, and the compensatory structure of Kathy’s memories recalls that poet’s most affecting passages.
Like Wordsworth, Kathy takes solace from the “memories [she] value[s] most” (Never 286). After all the deaths she has witnessed, she too finds “strength in what remains behind,” in the “thoughts that spring / Out of human suffering” (Wordsworth, “Intimations Ode” ll. 185–88). Her memories take a “sober colouring from an eye” that has literally “kept watch o’er … mortality” (“Intimations Ode” ll. 201–2). “For such loss,” Kathy believes, memory serves as “abundant recompense” (“Tintern Abbey,” ll. 87–88). In perhaps her most poignant affirmation of the consoling power of memory, she insists, “I lost Ruth, then I lost Tommy, but I won’t lose my memories of them…. I’ll have Hailsham with me, safely in my head, and that’ll be something no one can take away” (Never 286–87).
More than thirty years ago, in Romantic Vision and the Novel, I explored a compensatory structure common to Wordsworth, George Eliot, Dickens, and other Victorian novelists in which the loss of youthful intensity is replaced by a “higher” state of consciousness. These authors – or their characters – accept this compensatory exchange as recompense for what they have left behind, but they understand that such acceptance does not cancel out loss. Rather, loss is enshrined in the act of memory that provides consolation. Recently, David James has noticed that several “prominent writers from recent decades” have begun to theorize consolation, “often in the most unlikely genres and forbidding scenarios” (486), including Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic The Road (2006), W. G. Sebald’s postholocaust fiction Austerlitz (2001), and Ishiguro’s biodystopia. James notes that “the provision of solace in fiction can be coterminous with sorrow” (486), a paradox only partially explained by the bravery of acknowledging loss as the price of self-knowledge. Solace comes to the reader from understanding the loss as our own. Gerard Manly Hopkins gave expression to this insight in his beautiful, Wordsworthian poem about Margaret grieving over autumn leaves: “It is the blight man was born for / It is Margaret you mourn for” (“Spring and Fall,” ll. 14–15).
Three places focus Never Let Me Go’s elegiac power in the manner of Wordsworthian “spots of time”: Hailsham after it has been closed; a boat stranded in a field far from the sea; and a corner of Norfolk where the children pretend that all the things they have lost will one day be found. The memory of these spots flashes up unexpectedly from time to time, with startling power. “These moments hit me when I’m least expecting it, when I’m driving with something else entirely in my mind” (286). In Norfolk, she finds a copy of a cassette tape she had lost years before, and her emotions at this recovered piece of her childhood bring her the mingled pleasure and pain characteristic of Romantic melancholy. “Then suddenly I felt a huge pleasure – and something else, something more complicated that threatened to make me burst into tears” (172). The novel ends on another of these spots of time. Kathy stands before a windswept field in Norfolk and imagines that the rubbish tangled in a fence is where everything she has lost – her childhood and Ruth and Tommy – have come to rest. The first two times I read the novel, I found myself near tears at the end. “A good deal of fiction’s poignancy,” David James observes, “stems from its moving apprehension of what ultimately cannot be repaired” (484), words that nicely capture how Never Let Me Go intensifies the sense of our shared mortality. But Ishiguro turns away from pathos in the last sentence. Kathy straightens her back and returns to her car, “to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be” (Ishiguro 288).
The irony of these last few words underlines how thoroughly Kathy has internalized her professional obligations and speaks to her acceptance of her own death as the price of that calling. Just as important, the irony marks a distance from Wordsworth, a shift in tone that is as crucial to the meaning of the novel as is its pervading melancholy. Acceptance of loss as the price of maturity may be the burden of famous works by both authors, but how different the weary phrase “supposed to be” sounds from Wordsworth’s ringing endorsement of a “faith that looks through death” in the final lines of the “Intimations Ode” (l. 189). This ironic tone in Ishiguro is characteristic of a larger pattern in his works of capitalizing on the formal and thematic resources of nineteenth-century literature while simultaneously questioning some of the assumptions that that tradition has perpetuated.
Take, for example, the frequent invocation of George Eliot and Charles Dickens in Never Let Me Go. Kathy dedicates her final school project to a study of the Victorian novel, focusing particularly on George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and readers have been struck by the significant parallels between Miss Emily, headmistress at Hailsham, and Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations. The parallel becomes especially apparent during Miss Emily’s final appearance in the novel when her withered, wheelchair-bound form emerges from the shadows to justify her conduct to Kathy and Tom. Once again, however, the differences between Ishiguro’s novel and its predecessors are significant. At the end of Great Expectations, Pip demonstrates that he has put aside his childhood dreams and entered adulthood by embracing that most Victorian of all values, hard work. He dedicates himself faithfully to a career in the service of repaying his debts to his friend, Herbert Pocket, and gives up not only his former unrealistic dreams but also a family of his own. “I lived happily with Herbert and his wife,” Pip writes, “and lived frugally, and paid my debts, and maintained a constant correspondence with Biddy and Joe” (Dickens 489).
Dickens’s novel registers the sad diminishment of Pip’s expectations, but it does not turn aside from Victorian beliefs about the value of hard work, paying one’s way, and doing one’s duty. Instead, it sees the acceptance of loss as a sign of maturity. The satisfactions of fulfilling a professional vocation, however modest, are presented without irony, and the elegiac tones with which Pip remembers his foolish dreams and lost chance for love go uncontradicted in his final meeting with Estella, the woman around whom those dreams had revolved. The compensatory structure of Pip’s exchange of youthful hopes for mature self-knowledge is as clear in the concluding chapters of Great Expectations as it is in the final lines of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and “Intimations Ode.” And the same compensatory exchange structures the ending of Never Let Me Go. Only the last ironic line signals that Ishiguro means for us to question the trade-off that Kathy has accepted.
David James maintains that Kathy questions her own rationalizations, reinforcing the critical judgment that readers often make about Kathy’s submission to the society she lives in. Grounding his reading in a discussion of description’s power to contradict the explicit meaning of a passage, James argues that there are stylistic traces of “Kathy’s apprehension of consolation as an illusion” (498). This seems right, especially when James adds that the novel’s ending strengthens “our apprehensiveness about the gruesome destiny she’s now set to fulfilll” (498).
Where David James looks to description for traces of the “friction” between style and action (485), I want to turn to the novel’s unusual point of view for insight into a related tension, that between irony and the author’s affection for traditional realism. The novel’s conversational first-person narrative addressed to an unnamed “you” is in essence an extended dramatic monologue, a colloquial version of the form Robert Browning introduced in the nineteenth century. In Browning’s hands, the dramatic monologue forged a new mode of poetic realism, a lyrical narrative that led readers to sympathize with the subjective experience of the narrator even when they felt profoundly critical of his actions (remember the Duke’s inadvertent revelation of his murderous jealousy in “My Last Duchess”). Robert Langbaum identified the tension between “sympathy and judgment” as the distinguishing characteristic of dramatic monologues – readers experience a pull between the sympathy the narrator evokes and their powers of critical judgment (75–108). Although Kathy’s companionable voice does not resemble Browning’s taut verse, the novel uses the dramatic monologue form to similar ends. It solicits our sympathy for Kathy while provoking us at every turn to wonder about the narrator’s obvious evasions and suppression of self-knowledge. The narrative voice almost compels us to treat it symptomatically, to hear notes of critique in the very words that disavow it.
Observe, for example, the prominent use of deixis to smooth over the many temporal jumps in the story. “Deixis” is a lexical marker that points to a person, place, or time – a word or phrase that cannot be fully understood without reference to the speaker or listener: “I,” “you,” “here,” “there,” “then,” and “now” are standard examples. Inevitably, deixis will have a special importance in dramatic monologues in which the reader overhears a speaker talking to a particular person. In Never Let Me Go, phrases such as “Looking back now” or “My memory of it” occur throughout – I count more than twenty variants. References to Kathy’s listeners carry equal deictic force: versions of the phrase “I don’t know how it was where you were” occur often, implicating the unnamed listener (and momentarily, the reader) in the story being told. Deictic language plays an important role in autobiographical writings too, where it locates an event from the speaker’s life in relation to the moment of the telling. It anchors memory in relation to both past and present. In Ishiguro’s dramatic-monologue-as-bildungsroman, deixis is responsible as much as anything else for the prevailing mood of melancholy.
Yet deixis has a disruptive effect in a dramatic monologue that it does not possess in ordinary first- or third-person narrative. A phrase like “I don’t know how it was where you were” momentarily brings the reader up short, making us wonder if we are being addressed by the narrator. Anne Whitehead remarks: “Ishiguro’s use of second-person address throughout the novel, a device commonly used in Victorian fiction to enhance sympathetic connection … acts rather to unsettle the reader” (58). It “raises the question of the reader’s relation to the dystopic world that is depicted in the novel. Is Kathy addressing someone within her own world, or, finding no empathetic listener there, does she seek to bear witness to an unknown and unknowable future reader?” (Whitehead 73–74). This momentary confusion turns our judgment on biodystopia back on ourselves. How is it where we are? we ask, and the question prompts us to wonder whether the pleasures of realism have led us to overlook inquiries we ought to pursue – inquiries not only about the novel we are reading but about our own world.
To come to terms with Kathy’s society, we must come to terms with the voice of the character it has forged. In a novel where the point of view has been shaped by the conditions of abjection, the pull between sympathy and judgment becomes acute. We might say that the novel has found an ideal voice for biodystopia. The critical force of the genre is simultaneously displaced and channeled through the text’s odd repetitions, preternatural calm, and idiomatic phrasing. In a similar way, the tension between the pleasures of nineteenth-century realism and the irony about what those pleasures encode is rendered equally acute.
Time and Sorrow
Every sorrow has its own time signature. Some are short and sharp. These concentrate the present, blotting out any thought of a future without pain. Others prolong the present, stretching it out into what seems an interminable durée. Still others deepen the present moment, binding it to a cherished past and infusing it with borrowed meaning. This last is the sorrow that underwrites Kathy’s memoir.
In the nineteenth century, this sorrow went by the name of Romantic melancholy. Its compensatory structure still had the power to console, braced as it was by self-recognition in Wordsworth, George Eliot, Hopkins, and the late Dickens. Knowledge of the diminishment of life’s expectations was the sorrow these authors were willing to bear for the growth of a writer’s mind. But if Romantic melancholy can now seem maudlin or self-pitying, it is because the Romantics seemed to be mourning themselves as they remembered their past. We miss the irony with which Ishiguro chastens his characters’ sorrow.
For most of my life, this kind of sorrow has bound our collective present to a planetary future we wanted to avoid but feared we could not. During the Cold War, it was fear of nuclear holocaust and an end that Jonathan Schell memorably captured in his book on nuclear winter. Today, this future is mostly associated with ecological disasters consequent on climate change. It is not the present we mourn for but the future our children may not have. Or if we mourn the present, it is a present that encompasses past and future as well, a swollen, guilt-stained, accusatory present, implicated in all the misdeeds of the era we have come to call the Anthropocene and shadowed by all the extinctions to come. But the vast temporal apprehensions of climate change are not the form sorrow takes in Ishiguro’s novel. Just as Romantic melancholy is banished by irony, so large-scale planetary concerns are set aside by the intimate proportions of this bildungsroman.
The concept of genome time is an appropriate way to understand the short, sad lives of these genetic creations, the clones, made only to give up their bodies for others. Their sorrow is one that all creatures share, the sorrow of mortality, yet it is expressed differently in every person’s life. The personal scale of a life-form shaped by biotechnology, of memories that will be “lost like tears in the rain,”14 is well served by a spatiotemporal image that begins at the nanoscale and extends to all life-forms on the planet – perhaps most of all, to each of us. Ishiguro hardly refers to science at all, but the metaphor of the genome, shared by us all as our inheritance and our legacy, infinite yet unique, common as mortality yet exceptional in every case, encapsulates the sorrow this novel evokes.
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