On being a slow reader: psychoanalytic reading problems in Ishiguro's Never let me go

Abstract

A novel can teach us about our act of reading. Ishiguro's Never let me go is analysed as an occasion for thinking about reading as an allegory of psychic development. Drawing on the work of Melanie Klein and Hannah Arendt, my psychoanalytic reading explores the discord between the signifier and the signified, seeing this conflict as belonging to language, development and social thought. I analyse the slow events of reading to illustrate two irresolvable conflicts animated and transferred onto the scene of reading: encountering what is illegible yet impressive in psychical reality and putting these impressions into language to speak and write about what is ambiguous and unknown in external reality. I suggest this novel of education may be read as a commentary on the internal world of object relations, where Ishiguro's characters stand in relation to our affective representations.