Religion

In the conclusion of Never Let Me Go (2005), Kazuo Ishiguro’s clone narrator Kathy watches pieces of rubbish accumulating on a barbed wire fence and briefly allows herself to fantasise about the restoration of everyone she has lost over the course of her short life. ‘I was thinking about the rubbish’, she says,

the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually would get larger until I’d see it was Tommy, and he’d wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that – I didn’t let it – and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.

(Ishiguro 2005: 282) It is tempting to read the poignant end of Ishiguro’s novel as a kind of metaphor for the fate of religion in the contemporary novel. After all, Kathy’s fantasy about the return of her beloved Tommy is curiously reminiscent of another image of the failed redemption of historical detritus: Walter Benjamin’s celebrated reading of Paul Klee’s painting of the ‘Angelus Novus’ in his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940). To recall Benjamin’s enigmatic thought experiment, the Angel of History ‘would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’. Yet, ‘a storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned’ and this storm ‘is what we call progress’ (Benjamin 1969: 257–258). Perhaps we might even see Kathy, the professional ‘carer’, as a kind of banal, secular equivalent to Benjamin’s angel – wanting to stay and redeem what has been lost – but equally powerless in the face of the ever-growing history of human catastrophes that is, at the same time, the history of scientific and medical advancement. If Ishiguro’s novel seems to deliberately open up the possibility of a religious reading, however, it just as quickly shuts it down: whereas Benjamin’s angel is propelled into the future against his will by the storm, Kathy decides to turns her back on the tragic scene of history because she knows that the idea of a messianic justice for her dead friends is nothing more than a fantasy. This essay asks what remains of the religious within a contemporary literary moment which has – whether by mobilising such classic 160concepts as false consciousness (Marx), ressentiment (Nietzsche) and infantile neurosis or illusion (Freud) or more recent theories like memetics (Dawkins and Dennett) – also tried to turn the page upon the Abrahamic archive. What is the future of the religious illusion in contemporary fiction?