NLMG + Frankenstein comp essay #1

3 LOAs for responses to adversity:

1. Conformity → Creature attempts to conform (+ gives up), Clones try to conform (+ persist)

2. Victor feels great rage → Clones show a quiet + submissive endurance

3. Finding community →

3 LOAs for the importance of hope:

1. hope sustains the Creature + the Clones

2. hope derived from knowledge → (the clones have their hope crushed by knowledge, whereas it is experience that crushes the Creature’s hopes)

3. highlighting the effects of a dwindled hope (look at Part 3 of NLMG and the Creature’s crushed hope)

3 LOAs for threat:

1. passivity

2. knowledge

3. societal expectations

Ishiguro + post-war disillusionment:

• born in 1954 → Nagasaki

• bombed in August 1945

• grew up in a post-WWII generation affected by loss, memory, and regret

• reflects NLMG’s mediations on time → + finding community in adversity

Ishiguro + immigration:

• born in Japan

• raised in Britain

• characters often experience a quiet alienation, reflecting his detached Britishness

Dolly the Sheep

cloned in 1996 + ethical debates in the 1990s - 200s about organ donation, designer babies, and medical consent

Human Tissue Act

2004 → sorted out logistics for organ donation

Neoliberalism + Commodification:

critiques neoliberalism, and the ignorance of the values that underly it

2 dystopian novels to compare NLMG to:

1984 (1949)

Brave New World (1931)

reflecting a quiet, bureaucratic control

how old was Shelley when she wrote Frankenstein?

18

names of Shelley’s parents:

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley + William Godwin

Milton + Frankenstein:

Paradise Lost (1667)

Creature sees himself in both Adam + Satan (this could reflect postmodern fragmentation!)

UN declaring that human cloning should be banned:

March 2005

Locke’s memory theory

• one’s identity only exists as far as their consciousness

• e.g. the clones are just that - clones → identities are erased

• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

key Edexcel concepts for science + technology:

1. scientific hubris

2. technological control and bioethics

3. moral implications of scientific advancement

4. loss of identity/humanity through technology

5. utopian / dystopian consequences of innovation

KI’s father:

Shizuo Ishiguro → research oceanographer → at the forefront of scientific advancement, inventing the storm surge machine now in the Science Museum in London

who were KI’s favourite singers?

• Bob Dylan

• Leonard Cohen

• Joni Mitchell

• KI and his friends argued and critiqued each others songs → like the clones + art!

• wrote about peaceful rebellion after times of war

• taught himself guitar at 14

which thinkers/authors influenced Ishiguro?

Proust → memory + objects! The Search of Lost Time (1913) → memory’s unreliability and emotional resonance → Kathy’s retrospective and homodiegetic narration undercuts the story with an absence of hope

Franz Kafka → narrative’s calm tone masks existential horror

claustrophobic + institutional control → The Trial (1925) AND The Castle (1926) → the futility of hope → K + T’s hope is denied by the system

who were Ishiguro’s other literary inspirations?

1. Charlotte Bronte → Kathy’s narration?

2. Dostoevsky → moral anguish + existential crises

3. Tolstoy → how people live morally in the face of death !! The Death of Ivan Ilyich

4. Chekhov → drama of the ordinary → subdued emotional tone + bleak realism

Ishiguro + films:

• appreciates

• served on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994

• wrote the film The Saddest Music in The World in 2004

Ishiguro on his identity:

his Japanese name and face act as a “straitjacket” → only Asian on the outside, and British on the inside.

Ishiguro + memory:

interested in the “texture of memory”

the genres of NLMG:

• dystopian

• science fiction

• psychological realism

• cautionary tale

• bildungsroman

• postmodern

• abolitionist

what is the ‘hyperreal’?

signs + images that do not correspond with the realities they are supposed to represent

what is the ‘loss of the real’?

the questioning + blurring of lines between reality + simulation, and a difficulty in finding stable meaning / truth → lack of details surrounding the real world

what is a skeptisism towards ‘grand narratives’? (postmodernism!)

→ sceptical about overarching narratives → Kathy’s narration!

what is a ‘simulacra’?

a copy without an original → Baudrillard

Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act

2008 → Ishiguro’s novel anticipates a world where scientific legality overtakes moral sensitivity

Kathy on mannerisms from the TV

“so many of their mannerisms were copied from the television”

Ruth on hitting Tommy:

“I must have just picked it up”

Kathy telling Ruth not to hit Tommy:

“It’s not what people really do out there, in normal life”

the clones + their lives being set out:

“your lives are set out for you”

clones complying, not asking why at Hailsham:

“ she was dying for someone to ask: Why? Why is it so much worse for us?”

clones staying silent:

“so why had we stayed silent that day?”

Kathy hating to be naughty:

“Kathy hates to be naughty. So we’d better not go and visit him” p148

the clones being unable to let each other go:

“fearful of the world around us, and - not matter how much we despised ourselves for it - unable to quite let each other go” p118

the clones + referring to each other:

“when you referred to one, you also referred to the other, as in ‘Chrissie and Rodney’ and ‘Ruth and Tommy” p125

a separate set of rules applying to Hailsham stuents:

“a separate set of rules applied to us Hailsham students” p143

Guardian interview on deceiving children:

All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.'

galvanism or “animal electricity” → dates + people

Luigi Galvani → 1780s → revitalised dead frogs…

not luigi galvanism:

Giovanni Aldini → 1803 → reanimated a corpse using electrical currents at Newgate Prison

Anatomy Act

1832 → allowed unclaimed bodies for dissection. before this (frankenstein), they were criminals!

Mary Wollstonecraft’s book:

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

Shelley’s dad’s book:

William Godwin → Political Justice (1793) → argued for reasonability through education

French Revolution

1789 → turned violent → loss of faith in radical change, and a warning of overreaching!

year without a summer

1816 → in Geneva with Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Locke

Tabula Rasa → An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

Prometheus

Titan → the overeacher → inhumane → consolidating the idea that Victor’s ambition is punishable

Mary Shelley’s classical education:

→ provided by father

→ Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Plutarch

“God created man in His own image”

Genesis 1:26-27

Jean Jacques-Rousseau

Discourse on Inequality → corrupted by society

Ishiguro on imaginary Japan

“imaginary Japan”

Creature on expectations to be Adam

“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel”

the puddle

“Perfect forms of my cottagers. […] I was terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool”

Victor killing the role of the mother!

“I held the corpse of my dead mother”

Creature on being benevolent + good

“I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend”