Dolly is dead. But the quiet demise

About why we don’t just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.
私達がちょうど’ tをなぜについてそれらがだったかもしれないものが着るか1日を目覚め、未加工から部分にすべてを行き、蹴るすすり泣き、叫ぶことを、通りの下で決してある私達の生命の完全に個人的な感覚激怒する。

Dolly is dead. But the quiet demise, sick and early, of the world’s most famous sheep has not stopped art from illuminating the scientific journey she embodied, a journey which will surely end with a cloned human.
About why we don’t just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.What has changed is that our collective contemplation of the increasing industrialization of life is no longer confined to B-movie plots, but has become the dominant metaphor in works by serious artists and thinkers. As the prospect of an engineered human becomes more likely, there has been a change in perspective among cultural commentators from simply viewing cloning as a cheap pop culture plot device that entertains the masses, to regarding it as a tangible future event whose ethical and emotional ramifications deserve serious analysis and a public introduction, not least from the clone’s point of view.
Instead of cloning the science fiction genre wholesale, such artists focus on the human heart, that most vital of vital organs. Using the profound emotions of love and grief, this new consciousness of cloning addresses our mechanized culture in which individuality itself seems lost.
And by focusing in on the clones’ humanity they are really exploring how science and mass culture have deadened and homogenized the rest of us.
Unflinching English playwright Caryl Churchill’s A Number depicts a series of confrontations between a man, Salter, his son, Michael, and two cloned versions of his son. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it is the all-too-human protagonist, the father, who is the monstrosity.
It seems at first that Salter had his dead son cloned, but Churchill has tinkered with the cloning genre’s “bad seed” convention and it turns out that the father sent the boy away and had him replaced so he could start afresh after doing a lousy job of raising him. By recasting the clone as the good seed she highlights contemporary culture’s need for perfection: the father literally discarding his child for an unblemished version.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go is narrated by Kathy, who recalls her clone-hood at an exclusive English boarding school where extensive medical checks, student myths of dismembered bodies in the woods, and a feeling that everything they own is secondhand all lead to a realization and meek acceptance that they have been created so that their organs can be harvested for “real” people. The clones’ mundane dreams – of working in an office or planning a future together – are lost in a steady erosion of hope and a blank incomprehension about the workings of the society that created them. They live in a prolonged limbo, whose endgame is dissembled in Orwellian tones that speak of “donating” rather than losing organs, and “completing” rather than dying. Ishiguro’s story ends the way it was always going to end – with a haunting resignation that recalls the bleak sort of acceptance Holocaust victims were said to have exhibited as they stood patiently waiting in line to be gassed.
Infused with a sense of loss, these works are not about the B-movie clichés of sinister twins and deranged clone armies, but rather about the fragile fate of every individual under the collective weight of a cloned culture. As writer M. John Harrison puts it, “About why we don’t explode, why we don’t just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.”
And in that sense, is it really possible for any of us to tell apart the sheep from the sheep with souls?
_Maria Hampton