Half-Read Books: Whole Lessons

Recently I leant the book Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach, by Paulo Freire, to a friend who either currently or in the past taught elementary school. When I found out she was a teacher, I quickly remembered this book, one that I had been required to read in my senior year of college, for an education class I reluctantly took to fill a credit requirement. I had found it thrilling, heart pounding, and comforting. She returned it to me recently, delicately sealed in a plastic baggie, and commented that she didn't read the whole thing, but found it intellectual, stimulating, and effective in bringing up memories from her past experiences with her students, teaching them poetry, etc.

I smiled with some understanding and sadness that she didn't finish it, and that she found it intellectual. It is true that Freire's work is not easy to understand. There are also cultural differences between his teaching experiences with children and illiterate young adults and adults in South America, and teaching mostly American and Mexican-American children in Southern California. However, Freire always speaks in generalities, using terms and references that indicate his letters are meant for the world, meant for humankind in various states of government and organization. Even still, this book is a work of theory; this work is information meant to challenge and argue, to draw out ideas and examine them, even to mercilessly scrutinize ideas until new perspectives are identified. I realize that I smiled with sadness because I wanted to see a spark in her eyes, a light of new hope, or some intense, childlike energy. I wanted to share my love of this work with someone, especially a teacher.

She did enjoy what she had read. I suppose I was disappointed at the idea that she felt the intellectual nature of the book was too much for her. Yet, I understood. How many times did I read theory in college and feel like crying (fine, maybe I did cry a few times), feeling that I would never understand such concepts. I still feel this way when I read theory. I begin to sense an energy, a rush of anticipation at devouring new information or new ideas, and then it comes, the fear. The fear that I don't understand everything. The fear that I'm outside of the intellectual circle, and that even if I wasn't, what I have to offer the circle isn't good enough.

These fears used to be very real to me, but now, a couple of years after college, I am not so intimidated nor so afraid of ideas. However, I am still afraid of not being good enough for academia. I see how I am saddened by my friend's fear, by the ease with which she explained that she didn't read the whole book, because I see my own fears, the ease with which I say that I'm not planning on going to graduate school, that I haven't written anything on Moby-Dick in over a year, that I haven't read any theory in just as long.

Freire has a chapter in his book entitled "Don't Let the Fear of What is Difficult Paralyze You." Freire states, simply, and reassuringly, that

"[s]tudying is a demanding occupation, in the process of which we will encounter pain, pleasure, victory, defeat, doubt, and happiness. For this reason, studying require the development of rigorous discipline, which we must consciously forge in ourselves. No one can bestow or impose such discipline on someone else; the attempt implies a total lack of knowledge about the educator's role in the development of discipline. In any case, either we are the agents of this discipline, or it becomes a mere appendage to ourselves. Either we adhere to study with delight or accept it as necessity and pleasure, or it becomes a mere burden and, as such, will be abandoned at the first crossroads.

The more we accept this discipline, this more we strengthen our ability to overcome threats to it and thus to our ability to study effectively."

He goes on to exhort his readers to never "stop at the at the level of emotions, of intuitions," when reading a text. I feel my heart blossom in the freedom of his exhortation. Does this mean that I am free? Free to love books, not because they are great, or classics, or literature, or funny, or important, but because I love words and stories? I am consistently afraid that I am not allowed to love literature. I am tired of being paralyzed by fear. I am tired of being panicked that my love of literature makes any of my scientific observations more vulnerable to attack and dismissal. I am tired of thinking that my love of literature could be taken from me as it is inevitably revealed that my ideas are not important, relevant, or high enough for others to enjoy.

All of this insecurity has troubled me since the day I walked into my first English class, in Fullerton, at 23. I carry a terrible shame about going to college with an eighth grade education. I battled this shame with bravado, superior attitudes, insistence that my reading list outranked most college graduates in terms of greatness and literature. I hid this gnawing rat of shame that my intelligence is and always will be linked to those dark years of "teenage wasteland." It loomed constantly over my experiences in college, when every B was a travesty, when I would have miscommunications and struggles with instructors or texts. And even as I was walking in procession during my university commencement, I couldn't be happy with any of the recognition without telling myself, yes, I suppose it's pretty good for the girl who left school at 13.

I have been given the opportunity to see, through the sad and dismissive eyes of my friend, who sealed this book of generous encouragement in sanitary plastic, my own abandonment of education, largely due to the shame I willingly carry about my upbringing and childhood experience. This is what hit home for me. Usually, I would judge her as not courageous enough to finish the work, or lazy, but now, with a clear mind I see myself. I see how I have mostly given up on graduate school.

But maybe all is not lost. Before putting the book away, back with its comrades in theory, in my own personal theory section in my library, I quickly read the introduction, which moved me to tears, and inspired me to write this post. Written by Joe L. Kincheloe, esteemed professor, author, and rigorous critic of pedagogue, the introduction speaks about an experience Kincheloe had as an undergraduate in which a professor claimed that a beloved researched paper Kincheloe has slaved over was not original work, and without any proof stated it must be plagiarized. The professor blasted him with: "I know that someone like you is not capable of such work." Kincheloe explains, "In retrospect I think he was referring to my Appalachian markers: the Tennessee mountain accent, cheap clothes, the nontraditional scholarly persona." And yet, what Kincheloe did next hit me right in the heart. He tells, "I walked over to the library and returned to the works...the ideas soothed my agitated mind like an opiate." Returning to the work has always been a saving grace for me. Even fighting myself, fighting my own voice that would oppress me and have believe the lie that there is no place for a 32 year-old female adult-child with an eighth-grade education in university academia, I have always returned to the work. I return to Melville, to Faulkner, to Jonathan Culler, to Derrida, to Freud, to Kirkengard, to Gilbert and Gubar.

Perhaps it's time to get the thirteen year-old dropout alcoholic off my back, and return to the work.

New Bunk on Dick

Sometimes I wonder when Melville wrote the first chapter on Moby-Dick. Did he begin with it? Did he revise it many times?

There are so many little chapters that have beginnings which inform you that this tale is off the cuff; there are things like chapters with paragraphs that begin with lines like, this is a good a time as any to tell you about whale digestion, etc. The story is so electric and alive that it is as if the encyclopedic information, the biological asides, the historical interjections are all fighting for recognition. Yet, not all asides and background information are arranged equally.

There are thirteen short consecutive chapters in which the majority of the text adheres to Ishmael's narrative, then chapter fourteen decides that the narrative has grown stale, and some historical backstory is due

Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it.

Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by the red-men.

Moby-Dick reads like an attempt to synthesize all knowledge about whaling as an American enterprise, formal knowledge, and then subvert this knowledge with informal organization and presentation. As recently as this year a respected Harvard academic was still asking, what constitutes literature? And the usual is advertising, movie scripts, or comic books literature arguments ensued. Melville, with Moby-Dick, integrates all forms of writing into Moby-Dick, even including dream imagery and symbolism, news paper headlines, native American oral tradition, advertising, his contemporaries' fiction, paintings, poetry, and drama. Before the great debate over reading Shakespearian drama as literature, Melville insists that dramatic format be included as part of the text in Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick is almost beyond revolutionary as a novel. The narrator is also so struck by the novel itself, as the story digresses to emphasize extremes that you might have overlooked, or not been smart enough to appreciate. In chapter 65 the narrator "fishes" you directly

That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it.

Is this and the chapter that ensues the stuff of an adventure novel? Or is it the desperate synthesis of a crazed philosopher, made mad by the compounding crimes of a consumer-mad capitalist country? "The Whale as a Dish" is amazing. What is the tone of the text? Consuming animals is the stuff of Moby-Dick. Hunting whales, real whales, is what the story is about, from all angles. And yet, to look at all angles at the same time is more than our three-dimensional perspective can really absorb. It is like a story translated from the higher dimensions.

The more I read the novel, the further it travels from my grasp. I find it more and more along the lines of the work of Walt Whitman, who wrote to fuse romance and science, sexuality and philosophy. I used to find Moby-Dick saturated with dread, and I still believe that there is a vast amount of existentialist nausea that overpowers the different narrators as they try to reconcile knowledge and experience, the past and the present and the unknown, but now I'm starting to really cave to the idea that this is Melville's Odyssey, his allegory of sexuality and psychology, his to be or not to be, with no real answer, and no homecoming.

Sometimes I see such a loathing in Melville's work, such a terrifying cynicism that I translate to mean that he feels America is doomed -- orphaned and generating more momentum than it can control.

No Help At All

I recently decided to read the novel The Help for a ladies' book club I infrequent. I found the novel useless, demeaning to black people, the civil rights movement, and dangerously uplifting and soothing concerning deadly serious social issues of black people in the south in the 1960s. The novel perpetrates the myth of the mammy, and strips the black community of the dignity it reserves for its white villains and heroes.

Thankfully, the Association of Black Women Historians has written an open letter to the fans of The Help, which I will quote here:

An Open Statement to the Fans of The Help:

On behalf of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), this statement provides historical context to address widespread stereotyping presented in both the film and novel versionofTheHelp.

The book has sold over three million copies,and heavy promotion of the movie will ensure its success at the box office. Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are specifically concerned about the representations of black life and the lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism.

During the 1960s, the era covered in The Help, legal segregation and economic inequalities limited black women's employment opportunities. Up to 90 per cent of working black women in the South labored as domestic servants in white homes. The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy—a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.

Both versions of The Help also misrepresent African American speech and culture. Set in the South, the appropriate regional accent gives way to a child-like, over-exaggerated “black” dialect. In the film, for example, the primary character, Aibileen, reassures a young white child that, “You is smat, you is kind, you is important.” In the book, black women refer to the Lord as the “Law,” an irreverent depiction of black vernacular. For centuries, black women and men have drawn strength from their community institutions. The black family, in particular provided support and the validation of personhood necessary to stand against adversity. We do not recognize the black community described in The Help where most of the black male characters are depicted as drunkards, abusive, or absent. Such distorted images are misleading and do not represent the historical realities of black masculinity and manhood.

Furthermore, African American domestic workers often suffered sexual harassment as well as physical and verbal abuse in the homes of white employers. For example, a recently discovered letter written by Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks indicates that she, like many black domestic workers, lived under the threat and sometimes reality of sexual assault. The film, on the other hand, makes light of black women’s fears and vulnerabilities turning them into moments of comic relief.

Similarly, the film is woefully silent on the rich and vibrant history of black Civil Rights activists in Mississippi. Granted, the assassination of Medgar Evers, the first Mississippi based field secretary of the NAACP, gets some attention. However, Evers’ assassination sends Jackson’s black community frantically scurrying into the streets in utter chaos and disorganized confusion—a far cry from the courage demonstrated by the black men and women who continued his fight. Portraying the most dangerous racists in 1960s Mississippi as a group of attractive, well dressed, society women, while ignoring the reign of terror perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, limits racial injustice to individual acts of meanness.
We respect the stellar performances of the African American actresses in this film. Indeed, this statement is in no way a criticism of their talent. It is, however, an attempt to provide context for this popular rendition of black life in the Jim Crow South. In the end, The Help is not a story about the millions of hardworking and dignified black women who labored in white homes to support their families and communities. Rather, it is the coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own. The Association of Black Women Historians finds it unacceptable for either this book or this film to strip black women’s lives of historical accuracy for the sake of entertainment.

Ida E. Jones is National Director of ABWH and Assistant Curator at Howard University. Daina Ramey Berry, Tiffany M. Gill, and Kali Nicole Gross are Lifetime Members of ABWH and Associate Professors at the University of Texas at Austin. Janice Sumler-Edmond is a Lifetime Member of ABWH and is a Professor at Huston-Tillotson University.

Word Count: 766

Suggested Reading:
Fiction: Like one of the Family: Conversations from A Domestic’s Life, Alice Childress The Book of the Night Women by Marlon James Blanche on the Lam by Barbara Neeley The Street by Ann Petry A Million Nightingales by Susan Straight

Non-Fiction: Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household by Thavolia Glymph To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors by Tera Hunter Labor of Love Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present by Jacqueline Jones Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody

Any questions, comments, or interview requests can be sent to:
ABWHTheHelp@gmail.com

I am so thankful for this letter.

Sandra and Susan: Monster Vaginas and Moby-Dick's Teeth

I took a few personal days in Big Sur last month, taking with me The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. I got through the first two chapters, around ninety pages. I dog-eared seven pages, and cursed myself for not bringing post-it notes. While at present I have nothing more to say except yes, yes, YES, here are some of my favorite insights, so far, with a bit of commentary:

...if as death angel the woman suggests a providentially selfless mother, delivering the male soul from one realm to another, the same woman's maternal power implies, too, the fearful bondage of mortality into which every mother delivers her children.
The Queen's Looking Glass, pg. 26

Ahhhhh, here I began to see the image of the woman as life/death giver that I have been struck with over and over again in Moby Dick. While women are almost non-existent as characters in the novel, I feel Moby-Dick is permeated with imagery and allusions to a nameless dread.

...the female monster is a striking illustration of Simone de Beauvoir's thesis that woman has been made to represent all of man's ambivalent feelings about his own inability to control his own physical existence, his own birth and death...male dread of women, and specifically the infantile dread of maternal autonomy, has historically objectified itself in vilification of women...
The Queen's Looking Glass, pg 34

Emblems of filthy materiality, committed only to their own private ends, these women are accidents of nature, deformities meant to repel...
The Queen's Looking Glass, pg 30

Some of the most sexually pervasive and grotesque imagery in Moby-Dick emerges in the form of a giant squid. It is described as "the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but it undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life...with a low, sucking sound it slowly disappeared again." Further, Melville comments that "few have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish the sperm whale his only food...the sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it."

The sperm whale, so often described in the novel as "ramming," "attacking" can easily, I think, be symbolic of male sexuality; nothing new there. However, this description of a cream colored faceless mass, with curly arms numberless, clutching and sucking, submerging and unseeable, is not a bad abstract explanation of female genitalia. It's referred to as a spectre, a ghost, portentous, mysterious, and finally, a monster.

The information given about Ahab in the beginning of the novel describes a wife and a child, conceived after one night's conjugal union. It is immediately after this union that Ahab begins his encounters with Moby-Dick, and let's not forget that Moby-Dick bites Ahab in a particularly debilitating way, sexually. This is and other references to reproductive activity, intimacy, death, and dread accessorize Moby-Dick into a tale of the inescapable doom cycle of reproduction and death, down to the vortex into which the ship and its crew are swallowed. The pursuit of an all-male human society is not enough to escape, and can still result in death. A cautionary tale? Of course this doesn't even begin to explain the numerous threads that run through Moby-Dick. But it may be enough for an article.

Melville also uses the concept of "negative space" in a feminist way -- see Queequeg (Ishmael's spouse) and his coffin (Infection in the Sentence, 88). This may be the moment to highlight the novel's jovial way of dealing with female/male interchangeability, and its confusing way of jumping back and forth between what Gilbert and Gubar call male/female authority. A conflict in the narration comes from the inability to perceive if the perspective is male or female. Here is where more Queer theory would probably enlighten me.

I think the gender transcendence that occurs throughout the novel necessarily rests upon its insistence that human male-female unions result in a tragic and futile mortality, but I don't think Melville was especially hopeful concerning same sex intimacy. I do believe that these are major theme in the work. More theory is in order.

Oscars Grouch

Even though the Oscars seem to get more and more bland and predictable each year, I find myself compelled to watch. The usual hubbub draws me in, the dresses, the tuxes, the dates, the fancy party stuff, actors behaving poorly, actors behaving well, all of that rot. And while I have no real faith in the mysterious Academy or their ability to judge films, I'm always secretly hoping that my favorites will win.

This year's awards were quite boring, which is such a shame, as there were several exciting films up for Oscars, and the hosts were two young current Hollywood elite. Sadly, the show was a total snoozer. James Franco and Anne Hathaway have both proved their talent as actors, Hathaway most notably in Rachel Getting Married, and Franco in various roles ranging from the comedic absurd to the realistic/dramatic, but have yet to convince me they should be hosts. The chemistry between the two could be loosely described as the vivacious, bubbly beauty and the scrunchy-faced, wry, handsome straight. The trouble is, most of the focus was on beauty and handsome. The writing for these actors (not comedians) was bland and over-processed. It was a lot of speaking bologna and smiling. There was one "wild" moment where Hathaway came out in a tux, and Franco popped up in a dress, and that seemed to be the delight of the evening, but was overshadowed by the fact that it caused the show to peak too soon, and in a rather uninspiring way, considering Some Like it Hot was released in 1959 (which reinforces my theory that the fifties were the most radical decade in Hollywood filmmaking).

Coincidentally, the show's wildest character came in the form of the ancient stroke-damaged Kirk Douglas, whose comic timing blew both Franco and Hathaway out of the water. Even five seconds from Justin Timberlake, boldly and successfully riffing on Douglas's performance, made Franco and Hathaway appear to have all the charisma of anxious stage parents. Then, as if to truly bury their chances at successful hosting, the Academy chose to feature a few minutes, extraordinarily funny in comparison to Franco and Hathaway, of veteran Billy Crystal who introduced a hologram of Bob Hope. Oh, mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head... I believe that most of the responsibility for providing the energy fell on Hathaway, and while I don't think she was a total failure, I just don't think she has the experience in Hollywood to be as funny or as risky as an entertaining Oscars demands. She has at least a few years of work ahead of her, and after the debacle with her diamond-collar criminal ex-fiance, even if she had the goods to really rib her fellow actors and filmmakers, or even herself, she would have looked ungrateful and disloyal. It's a shame.

The Academy Award winners were all talented and deserving, but there were no surprises. I hoped with all my might that Darren Aronofsky would win for the brilliant Black Swan, but the Academy went with the guy that directed The King's Speech. I was a little perturbed at this, because I thought it was a much more spectacular feat to direct the young cast of Black Swan, with only Portman and Hershey as seasoned actors, in a complicated and unnerving plot, than to direct The King's Speech, with its cast of mega-talent and its no-surprises plot. I think a movie like The King's Speech could almost direct itself, and should have been awarded only for writing, art direction, and acting. Portman won for acting, but I was tons more impressed with Aronofsky's masterful interpretation of this complex story.

My favorite acceptance speech came from Randy Newman. He was charming, perfectly self-deprecating, and thankful. I loved it.

Between the awards and the show itself, I have to degrade my own writing by summing it up as blah. I do have suggestions, but have little faith they'll be rewarded. Firstly, I do believe that the Awards are better hosted by a comedian. And I enjoy when that comedian can fully accept the role as host, who has the difficult job of balancing an act which generates enthusiasm for the program as well as makes fun of it. I think Justin Timberlake is a possible candidate, as well as Neil Patrick Harris. I even still like Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, although they are less than relevant at this point. Also, I'm not sure that there need to be so many introductions. Let's cut out the pointless host introducing the actor who introduces the actor. I'm also willing to forgo the performances of all the songs up for an Oscar. No more strange montages, unless there is way to make them relevant to the rest of the show, or to the moment at hand. I still love the memorial montage. And I like it when last year's award winners award the winners this year. I don't know what to do about acceptance speeches that run over. Public speaking is difficult, and it's hard to pay attention to a clock. I can only recommend that anyone nominated prepare. It's the only way you aren't going to get played out.

I love movies, and fancy Hollywood stuff, and I'll always watch the Oscars. Still, I would like a simplified version, and a funny, relevant host. For now, I'm still a little miffed and underwhelmed, but happy to do it again next year.

Letting Go of Humanity: Lost Objects in Never Let Me Go (Rough Draft)

When telling your story, it is hard to determine what details are important. For Kathy H., the story teller of Kasuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go, the details rise to the foreground as the most compelling aspects of the tale.

How does one even summarize Never Let Me Go? It seems odd to tell the setting and idea of the novel straightforwardly. There is a school for clone children, who are raised and board together, and after their primary education they receive a sort of communal secondary education, through which they learn to drive and communicate with human society, and then comes the nursing (called "caring") and organ donating, and finally, "completing," when the clone has served its ultimate purpose, and dies. Ishiguro manages to pull out and focus on the details from a clone's life and weaves a compelling tale which frames beautifully ideas about purpose, individuality, and what it means to be in touch with our own feelings.

Part one deals mostly with Kathy H.'s time at Hailsham, the name of the boarding school where she and other clone children are educated and cared for by a rather stereotypical school master and other teachers, called "guardians." I find the name of the school intriuging. At first glance, I thought of Mrs. Havisham, the frightening woman from Dickens' Great Expectations. It's really not too far of a stretch, I think. There is a great horror associated with Mrs. Havisham, what with the spiderweb wedding cake, the unfulfilled desire, the rottenness of her body and home, and yet, the hope that she offered those who would behave according to her wishes. Her influence, as rotten as she was, allowed her a great persuasiveness, and even though we know, creeping through her house with Pip, taking in the grotesque scenery, that she is unwell and her words vitriolic, we find that perhaps she has a point, perhaps somehow we will be able to right the great wrong that was done here, our pity the catalyst for her power. Is something different going on at Hailsham? I'm not sure. The images and horrors conjured up by the association are eerie enough.

Then I looked at the name on a connotative level. Hail-sham. This stands out as more relevant now that I've finished the novel. There is a loyalty to the school to which the children cling desperately. We forgive them this, because they have never known anything else; still, their determination to trust the institution is always heartbreaking. As wizened Westerners, we know better than to trust the institution, don't we? But when we witness the trust of the children, and become aware that they can't leave the life prescribed for them, the life they were bred for, we experience the dread, the hopelessness that will surely overtake them as they come closer to realizing their fate. We are aware of the scam, the sham, from the beginning, and naming the place Hail-sham reinforces the the sadness experienced as the children salute and give reverence to that which has pulled the wool over their eyes.

Kathy H. doesn't ever come right out and say that there is no choice to walk away from the life of a donor. In fact, she rarely comes right out and declares anything. She remembers, she recalls, but even then, when suddenly in the story she is sobbing, it is shocking, for we aren't privy to her emotions. She rarely feels a certain way, she simply accepts whatever is expected of her, and when her personal choice is an option, she usually does the smart thing, or the reasonable thing, or the sensible thing. She is compassionate, to be sure, but she never shows distress, and this enables her to be a good hospice nurse for clones who are recovering from donations or are about to complete. There are times in the novel when I thought to myself, why can't you just run away? Why can't you defect? There is no information in the novel to suggest that they are tracked or micro-chipped, as in other works with the clone as backup setting. Thus, I believe that Ishiguro is suggesting that there is no need for such management. If you believe that you have a place in society, and that place is instilled in your consciousness as important, vital even, then you will not need to be monitored, or tracked. You will simply do as you're told. You won't walk away, because where would you go? You're inherently different, so who would accept you? The novel answers the Biblical question posed by Satan, what won't a man give up in exchange for his soul? The human society in Never Let Me Go has answered with a resounding nothing, deeming the clones a spiritual waste, a land ripe for harvesting. They have let the ethical question hang, and proceeded forward without investigation. It seems that once heart disease, cancer, and neurological disease were a thing of the past, the question of whether or not raising clones in order to slowly harvest their vital organs is ethical became a taboo question. So they live as a taboo, recognizable, but mostly unspeakable.

The novel sets this up, and then presents arguments against using the clones as donors. Obviously Kathy H.'s story is a testament to her humanity, however vague and remote her emotions seem. The fact that she even desires to tell her story is more human than anything else about her, including her search for her origins, her love of Tommy, and her protectiveness of Ruth. She has an idea of the infinite, as evidenced by the title of the novel, which is a reference to a song that moves her when she is a child. It's a song that she feels expresses the loss associated with infertility, and that in the event that an infertile woman was to have a miraculous baby, she would hold that baby to her chest and sing, never let me go. The idea that the clone would imagine such a thing is so ironic, for not only are the clones infertile, but their whole purpose is to ensure the health of the public. Humans can't bear to let each other go, so they grow surrogate humans to replace their diseased parts. Kathy H.'s attachment to the song reinforces her place in society. She doesn't desire to have a baby, but the scene shows her empathy for the society that created her, and the purpose for which she was "born." This underscores her humanity, but also demonstrates how important it is for the clones to identify with humans, to be subordinate to ones who need them. Kathy feels throughout the novel that she is accomplishing her work, her purpose, and she wonders only briefly if there were any alternative.

It is only later in the book that the mystery surrounding Hailsham is revealed. A few academics and scientists decided that instead of growing the clones in an animalistic way, in bad conditions, they should bring them up like proper school children. MIss Emily, the school master, and Marie-Claude, her partner, explain the school as an experiment in proving that the clones have souls and are as human as they come, aside from their all but guaranteed infertility (although it is not stated directly whether or not they are bred this way or if it is a side-effect of cloning). Miss Emily and Marie-Claude had the idea that to educate and culture their students would mean a better life for them, allow them to be "sensitive and intuitive." It gets quite muddled, and I expect that is what Ishiguro intended. The main argument for the failure of Hailsham is that the politcal climate changed, and during a time period when people were especially fearful of clones gaining human rights, their supporters vanished. Society did not want to compete with clones that were genetically altered, or bred for superiority. So, the donor program resumed as a government run institution.

This is of importance because Kathy H. has sought out a deferral; she thinks that she and Tommy can apply for a few years together, living as a natural human couple, before resuming their donations. This is a baseless rumor, and they are utterly defeated when filled in on their complete lack of any future other than that they have been raised to believe in.

I don't think Ishiguro wants his audience to admire Miss Emily, and my strongest evidence comes from the scene in which she is sitting with Kathy H. and Tommy, explaining about Hailsham, and the falseness of the deferral rumor. Before she discloses the information about Hailsham she mentions something about a piece of furniture that she is having moved that day:

Unfortunately, my dears, I won't be able to entertain you for as long as I'd like just now, because in a short while some men are coming to take away my bedside cabinet. It's a quite wonderful object. George has put protective padding around it, but I've insisted I'll accompany it myself all the same. You never know with these men. They handle it roughly, hurl it around their vehicle, then their employer claims it was like that from the start. It happened to us before, so this time, I've insisted on going along with it. It's a beautiful object, I had it with me at Hailsham, so I'm determined to get a fair price.

It's probably a high school-ish insight, but look at what care Miss Emily takes of her beautiful, wonderful object. She is going to make sure that no man abuses it and harms it, and she is very sentimental about it, and wants the full value of it's worth. I postulate that the disappointment Miss Emily and Marie-Claude feel about the failure of Hailsham is less about the eventual process of donation and completion the students will endure, but the dissolution of their pet project, the underestimation of their beautiful, wonderful students that have turned out so well.

I wonder if Ishiguro is simply, reasonably implying that whenever we objectify humans we cross an ethical boundary that undermines our ability to practice fairness. When we come to a cloudy grey area in scientific advancement, can't an argument be that if we proceed, if we calculate the benefit, the value of the advancement in dollars, or selfish gain at another's tragic loss, then, shouldn't we just stop, and be still? Of course we want a cure for cancer, for Alzheimer's, for heart disease, but isn't it mostly because we never want to let our loved ones go? And to the professionals whose aim it is to ensure the ethical treatment of humans and other animals, what is an obvious gauge of their success? Pain free, cruelty free, good conditions, safety. organic, needs met, and so on. But it's more like the novel, isn't it? It's truly gauged by the leaning of society at the time. And we are truly a society that refuses to accept death as inevitable, suffering as reality, and lifetimes as undetermined in length.

Ishiguro is willing to tell us that yes, if we pursue stem cell research and cloning experiments we will someday have the ability to live without fear of many diseases that plague us today, but many will still suffer, and the price has to paid. He suggests that the highest price we pay is within the forfeiture of our own ability to be still, to live free from harming others, and to let go. Their cost is incalculable, but permeate our existence, as the loss permeates the novel. Our ability to be compassionate, to exercise restraint, to truly love others will be lost, caught in the fences of some windy cosmic wasteland, never to return. The lies we tell ourselves to fill the ensuing void will be rejected like a faulty transplant, as nothing can replace our humanity.

Yet, what of the use and treatment of human beings as objects, and then as lost objects, as I think Ishiguro suggests? Foremost, the clones are objectified and harvested as unfeeling, unthinking non-humans. Their objectification is justified by the immense desire humans have to hold on to life, at any cost. The clones from Hailsham are lost, because these particular clones exist outside of the role ascribed to them by the government, that is, they attend a prestigious boarding school in which they are observed and tested to determine if they are indeed objects, or if, as the book says, they possess a "soul." They are not subjected to the inhuman conditions in childhood belonging to the majority of clones. They are not like the others of their kind, and they are certainly not like humans, and yet they, or at least Katherine, feels that as such, as a former student of Hailsham, she is of more, or better use to humans than her run of the mill peers. What gave her a seemingly better life only served to solidify her worth in the society that will continue to use her inhumanely. The end, the harvesting of her life, as well as finally her vital organs, is justified because she now means more to the clone program than ever. She has learned compassion, empathy, and these serve to make her a better carer and nurse, and girlfriend, and friend, and yet, she is still lost, because these qualities only serve to make her a better person, an a person she is not. She is a clone, with no rights, with no freedom. She sets off on a journey which ends where it began, a room filled with medical equipment, designed to prolong the lives of those true human beings with rights, and precisely empowered with the ability to strip clones of their utter humanity.

Paradoxically, what gives Katherine her intimate sense of self also blinds her to the utter injustice of her existence.

Motion

A good friend today asked me, aren't you in school? Aren't you going to USC? My grandmother asked me, aren't you in grad school? Sad face. I held it together, let them know that I had been rejected (following the one time that I sent in a half-witted application, which was probably late), and changed the subject. Oh, I'm still writing, I said. Oh, I'm working, I said. Aw, man, I felt.

Commitment. Investment. Hard work. Late hours. Scatterbrained. Selfish pursuit. I can't get these phrases out of my head as I think of going to grad school. I have some thinking to do. I need to get out all of my ideas about Moby-Dick. This is hard work. It's not fun, really. It's thinking. It's so fun and free and easy not to think, not to write, not to read much, even. It's intoxicatingly easy. But perhaps it's time to take myself seriously. Not seriously as in, what I want is serious, or my ideas are so grand, but in the sense that I seem to have an ability, why aren't I developing it? It's hard work, it's not drivel, it's not easy. I need to believe it's worthwhile. I need to stop looking for justification for against my doing this literary work. I need to keep a running fear of greatness, and at the same time determine to keep stretching toward my dreams. It's like trying to steel a vibrating dervish, trying to stay in perpetual motion while keeping the most extreme of focus, it's ice dancing, it's hysteria in a quiet, viscous calm. It's hard work.

Small goals, organization, things to which I am not well suited, but hopefully,to which I will someday rest on and rely.