Abstract
Neither completely human nor solely matter, the ontological status of the corpse is complex, to say the least. Both subject and object, both human and not, the corpse is a liminal (non)human entity that viscerally testifies to the material entanglements that have always composed and comprised the human subject. Consequently, decomposition—the biological mechanism through which the transformation from human to matter is graphically enacted—is a process through which anxieties surrounding (non)human agency and its ramifications for the human subject are regularly expressed and navigated. Mobilising Stacy Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality (2010), this chapter explores how Jim Crace’s award-winning novel Being Dead (1999) depicts decomposition as a visceral manifestation of (non)human agency that reveals the complex entanglements of love, death, and the environment. In doing so, it reveals how Crace’s affectionate necropoetics of decay provides a strategic lens through which to explore and problematise literature’s capacity to stage imaginative encounters with (non)human agency and the material world.
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Notes
- 1.
This particular inscription has been used throughout the chapter to typographically demarcate the ambiguity by which the human subject is both distinct from, yet irreducibly connected to, the corpse. The alternative notation ‘nonhuman’ has also been deployed in reference to noumenal subjects that exist entirely separate from the human.
- 2.
For more on intra-activity see Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007, 138–139).
- 3.
- 4.
Alaimo herself regularly performs her transcorporeal analysis with reference to the sea (see “Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism and New Materialism at Sea” [2014] and “States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea” [2012]), leading Bracke to speculate that “water [is] one of the most pervasive agents of transcorporeality” (2018b, 223).
- 5.
Alaimo performs just such a management by supplementing her insistence on “the need to cultivate a tangible sense of connection to the material world in order to encourage an environmentalist ethos” (2010, 16) with the recognition that “even as we attempt to formulate new understandings that do not isolate the human from the flesh or from nonhuman nature, we need to mark the limits of our own ability to render the material world through language” (42).
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Gardiner, N. (2021). Hopeless Necromantics: Decomposition and Transcorporeal Love in Jim Crace’s Being Dead. In: Liebermann, Y., Rahn, J., Burger, B. (eds) Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79442-2_8
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