Life in Death: Narratives of Decomposition in the Work of Jim Crace

Life in Death:

Narratives of Decomposition in the Work of Jim Crace

Ivan Callus (University of Malta), Sandro Lanfranco (University of Malta)

If only he could call on chemistry and

then biology, unsentimental disciplines,

calculating, tidy and precise.

- Jim Crace

Science has the answers every time …

- Jim Crace

Introduction

The epigraphs to this paper come from Jim Crace’s Six, and set up this double act in which

we speak from our roles within the study of literature and biology respectively. A double act

at a conference is always curious and risky. You’ll therefore be relieved, or perhaps

disappointed, to learn that we’ve prepared no sophisticated choreography. More simply, we

wanted to see how we might set up an interdisciplinary response to a feature of Jim Crace’s

work that has often been commented upon : the ‘scale effects’, to use a phrase of Timothy

Clark, that across his writing zoom in and out of the natural world with forensic yet poetic

familiarity, in the kind of negative pastoralism referred to by Philip Tew in his keynote

address this morning. Those extensions range from the miniscule to infinitude, so that it can

seem like an appropriate critical approach could position itself within a study of traditions

going back at least to Gilbert White and forward to ecocriticism, or, since our topic today is

‘In the Wilderness’, alongside the Nature Writing of authors ranging from Barry Lopez to

Peter Mathiessen, from Jon Krakauer to Annie Proulx. We’re interested, morbidly enough, in

decomposition and how this is figured in Crace’s work as nature’s undoing and redoing.

While decomposition could be seen as a recurrent metaphor in Crace’s writing, it is also

rendered with unsentimental, calculating, tidy and precise tones in Being Dead and

Quarantine but also, and in different ways, in texts like The Gift of Stones or Harvest that

appear minded to reveal, to go with Simon Critchley, that ‘things merely are’. Crace’s writing

is attuned to the tensions between human desires and memory and nature’s immemorially

unfastidious ways with life and death, living and dying. Yet there is a strange affirmation in

that tension. As Philip Tew, writing on Being Dead, has said, ‘it is from the quotidian, the

observable, the prosaic and relentless mechanisms of nature that Crace establishes his neo-

Darwinistic and yet curiously optimistic view of finitude’, turning on ‘the un-beatific form of

… scavenged flesh’ that ‘subverts the body’s spiritual potential’. The larger project to which

this paper tends studies further narratives of decomposition in literature and science, and the

way in which they prompt posthumanist reflection on the insensible yet capturable memory

of a being that perdures. Our purpose, accordingly, is to move past Science Studies and

Ecocriticism to see what occurs when a literary critic and a biologist contrive, in their joint

turn, what Tew refers to as a ‘mediation of the scientific and the illusory’ on the basis of

‘narrative reflecting the universalizing forms of nature’. Up for analysis, then, is the

representation in Crace of death-supported life, which is what decomposition’s micro-

wildernesses always amount to: the biology of nature’s thanatography, so to speak. To start

with, a word from biology.

Biological Death

Narratives of life, and of its cessation, are generally grounded in the notion of the individual

as a ‘physiological island’, a self-contained entity that is identified with the ‘organism’.

Under this notion, death of the organism is constructed as an abrupt transition between one

known state and another, less well-defined one. The identification of this transition is

dependent on biological definitions of ‘life’ as a property of matter, but is also dependent on

the definition of the boundaries of the organism. Biological death of the organism is initially

defined by absence of indicators rather than by their presence. The preliminary criterion of

biological death is the absence of the indicators of life which, at a later stage, is followed by

indicators of structural chaos and disorder. As such, biological death cannot be defined unless

‘life’ is defined first. Our definitions of what constitutes ‘life’ are imperfect, and are, on a

general level, based on the observation of easily identifiable ‘vital signs’. A system that

exhibits these vital signs is ‘life’ whilst a system that does not is ‘non-life’. This functional,

yet oversimplified, approach suggests a sharp dichotomy between the two states with no

intermediates. In practice, this dichotomy seldom operates; life and biological death should

be considered as two extremes of a continuum, with optimally-functioning organisms at one

end and sub-optimally functioning organisms at the other. Moreover, the lack of observable

indicators, as a criterion of biological death, does not take into consideration the state of other

indicators that are not as easily observed and that may indicate otherwise. Extrapolating the

definition of ‘life’ to all domains of the tree of life, to hold with that immemorial metaphor,

reinforces the perception that our definitions of life, as opposed to non-life, and which are

based in vital signs, are not always satisfactory.

A factor that may constitute a strong criterion for ‘life’ is entropy, a measure of the

‘disorder’ of a system. The human organism is an ‘ordered system’, where the maintenance

of ‘order’ in structures and processes requires constant inputs of energy. When the processes

that create ‘order’ cease, then the system starts increasing in entropy, with a gradual erosion

of the ‘organism’. The increase in entropy that accompanies the state of biological death of

the organism does not imply death of the superorganism. In death, as in life, the host

organism provides its attendant biota, the other components of the ‘superorganism’, with

nutrients, water, shelter, and habitat, sometimes for a considerable time after its own demise.

Organism and superorganism

The complex of structures that are identified with the ‘organism’ generally represent the

visible framework of a more complex ‘superorganism’, in which the organism functions as

habitat, substrate and symbiont. The human organism, identified as the group of structures

encoded by human DNA, is, in both cellular and genetic terms, a minority player in the

human superorganism. Only 10% of the cells and less than 1% of the genes in the human

superorganism belong to the organism, the other cells and genes being mostly bacterial. This

human system is moreover a habitat for bacteria, fungi, and, depending on the circumstances,

various invertebrate parasites, commensals and amensals. From this perspective, the

boundaries of the organism, both spatially and temporally, are indistinct, and any analysis of

biological death and its aftermath would require this to be taken into consideration.

Aftermath of ‘biological death’

Death of the organism and death of the superorganism are therefore not synonymous; the

human biomass, no longer functioning as a coherent system, functions instead as an organic

substrate, sustaining a diverse heterotrophic food web. This food web, subject to the Laws of

Thermodynamics as is any food web, is a medium through which matter is recycled and

energy dissipates.

Nonetheless, this superorganism, now deprived of the intrinsic regulation of entropy by

the host organism, will persist for only as long as the scaffolding of the host organism

persists. Erosion of the host organism starts from within, as the bacterial communities, no

longer kept in check by the immune system of the host, now multiply and digest its tissues.

Concurrently, the absence of any behavioural defence or avoidance mechanisms encourages

scavengers to exploit the host as a proximal source of nutrients, as nursery, or as nest. In this

sense, life goes on. The entropy of the organism-turned-substrate now increases and its

energy content decreases, whilst the superorganism persists, even if temporarily. The atoms

which, for a brief time, were part of the organism disperse over the environs and into other

organisms. In the meantime, the unsustainable exploitation of the host organism leads to an

inexorable decrease in its resource base and consequently in its attractiveness to potential

colonisers. As the resources of the host-turned-habitat diminish, the exploiting organisms

experience an increase in the intensity of interspecific and intraspecific competition. The

carrying capacity of the host decreases, promoting dispersal of the other organismal

components of the superorganism into fresh territories. With time, the habitat divrsity of the

remaining fraction of the host organism also diminishes. Erosion through biological attack,

through physical change and through chemical change all contribute to a decrease in the

effective volume of the resource pool offered by the host and to an increased blurring of its

former boundaries.. The gradual dispersion of the host tissue and their merger with its

surrounding habitat, central to Jim Crace’s writing, marks the point where the decomposition

process is complete or almost so.

Statistical constraints

Although studies on the aftermath of biological death in the human superorganism have been

carried out, the quantity and quality of such studies depends on the availability of ‘dead’ host

organisms and on the duration of this availability. In most cases, this duration is brief, lasting

only until ritual dispatch of the host. Understandably, contexts where the decomposition

process is allowed to run its course under supervision are far fewer. The reasons for this are

multiple, including ethical or spiritual considerations concerning the fate of the host

organism, concern about disease, and the natural, inherent aversion that many have to being

in the immediate vicinity of departed members of one’s own species. What studies in

comparative thanatology have shown, in fact, is that this aversion is transhistorical and

transcultural to very significant degrees. In the midst of that factor, and in view of the other

factors mentioned and others that are easily foreseeable, the sample size of studies on

biological death is relatively small compared to the statistical population, and characterisation

of the processes that occur cannot always be generalised across the species.

Preservation of ‘self’

The process of loss of chemicals is not exclusive to post-life, as it also occurs during life.

The regulatory mechanisms of the host organism sustain the integrity of the body during life,

promoting replacement, rather than loss of material. A reduction in the efficiency of these

processes during the life-phase leads to a higher rate of loss than of replacement, eventually

compromising the integrated functioning of the whole organism. If the physical components

that make up the organism are replaced throughout the course of life, then what preserves the

identity, the sense of ‘self’?

A reductive focus on the biological can be crowded in by the large questions: mind,

consciousness, cognition, self, identity, personhood, the superorganism’s sense of its being if

it can objectify itself in thought. Am I that brain?’: this sentence, which provides the title to a

recent review article by Stefan Herbrechter, captures the reluctance of thought to identify

with its reduction and containment in organicity and its process. Stepping outside organicity –

brain – in order to think mind enables the supposition that further forms of extra-bodily being

and experience are possible. Preservation of self beyond the super-organism’s span of time

becomes a conceit to work with, to live with, perhaps to die to. Short of this is the humbler

pragmatism that holds to a sense of self, or at least of apprehended continuity, even in

awareness that the physical components that make up the organism are replaced throughout

the course of life.

The rest of this paper considers briefly some of the ways of literature with the rawest

evidence of the stayed life of the super-organism. It looks particularly at how the biological

gaze upon decomposition is given literary treatment. What happens at the incongruity

between the two discourses’ encounter around this theme provides intriguing prompts for

reflection.

Decomposition in Literature, Art and Popular Culture

The supposition that the poet may be less unflinching than the biologist in looking upon the

death of the super-organism is not borne out by the evidence. Some of Shakespeare’s most

famous lines in the Tempest are about the super-organism’s transformation after death and

decomposition: “Full fathom five they father lies / Of his bones are corals made / Those are

pearls that were his eyes / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into

something rich and strange.” It ties in with what was said earlier: the gradual dispersion of

the host tissue and its merger with its surrounding habitat marks the point where the

decomposition process is complete or almost so. We shall comment further on this later.

Dante’s ways with decomposition in the Inferno, meanwhile, are curious in that they

perpetuate or indefinitely postpone its onset. Punishment thereby becomes the impossibility

of death and oblivion, with definitive release to decomposition never being a prospect. Such

deprivation of human death and decomposition thereafter is not confined to Dante. Before

him the Greek myths, with the instance of Prometheus’ gnawed liver regenerated daily, or

Ovid, with the transformation within an instant of human being into a different organicity,

provide other examples. It is probably Edgar Allan Poe, however, who provides literature’s

most matter-of-fact gaze upon decomposition. In that well-known sequence from the end of

‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ where M. Valdemar has already uttered the

impossible sentence, “I say to you that I am dead,” the story is brought to a close with this

report:

[H]is whole frame at once -- within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk

– crumbled – absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that

whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putridity.

Any aversion before this accelerated decay could be played back against the ubiquity of

decomposition in contemporary popular culture. Zombie narratives, where putrescent

humanity recovers automatism if not life, together with the various TV series featuring

forensic pathologists whose work on decayed bodies is filmed with carefully syncopated

faithfulness, suggest that there is generally less coyness about the theme than might be

thought. Painting, with its range of anatomy lessons from Rembrandt to Francis Bacon, had

long discovered the facticity of popular fascination with lingering looks upon death, and

Gunter von Hagens’s public autopsy in 2002, later screened by Channel 4, only confirmed it.

Nor should the techniques and outcomes of controlled decomposition in ancient civilizations

and present-day laboratory practices be forgotten. They remind us that the distinction drawn

by thinkers like Blanchot and Derrida between death and dying overlooks the way in which

the aporetic is negotiated through the demourance of decomposition. Like the famous

unpublished seminar of Derrida on la vie la mort, such work is too minded to the

autothanatographical and the overcoming of organicity to look squarely, as Crace does, to the

actuality of being dead, that being dead is being and not deadening.

The Biological Gaze in Jim Crace’s Being Dead

Being Dead is about the decomposition of the bodies of a middle-aged married couple,

Joseph and Celice, both of whom happen to be zoologists. What happens after their murder is

described with a precision they might have professionally endorsed.

The epigraph to the novel sets the tone. It is from a text called ‘The Biologist’s

Valediction to His Wife’, by one Sherwin Stephens. It reads:

Don’t count on Heaven, or on Hell.

You’re dead. That’s it. Adieu. Farewell.

Eternity awaits? Oh sure!

It’s Putrefaction and Manure

And unrelenting Rot, Rot, Rot.

As you regress, from Zoo. to Bot.

I’ll Grieve of course,

Departing wife,

Though Grieving’s never

Lengthened Life

Or coaxed a single extra Breath

Out of a Body touched by Death.

In fact, Sherwin Stephens is Crace’s invention, as unreal as many of the life forms in the

novel. The wry insistence on putrefaction and manure and on the regression from zoological

to botanical capital contracts the scope for otherworldly sentiment. It prefigures the line taken

by Celice, who in a lecture she delivered that the reader sees in flashback warned her

students: “[M]ake yourselves companionable with death if any of you want to flourish as

zoologists”. In prefiguration of a different kind of wilderness, the reader is told that ‘[s]he

meant that fear of death is fear of life, a cliché among scientists, and preachers too. Both want

to give life meaning only because it clearly has none, other than to replicate and decompose.”

Celice talks to her students on ‘SENESCENSE’ and ‘THANATOLOGY’, i.e. ‘natural

ageing’ and ‘the study of death’. The definition of the former recalls our point earlier on the

trajectory from optimally-functioning organisms at one end and sub-optimally functioning

organisms at the other: “Senescence is the track on which most creatures run their lives.

Including us.” (37-38)

As Celice lies dead on Baritone Bay, it seems that her body becomes the subject of a

demonstration of her lesson. “The bodies were discovered straight away,” we read. “A beetle

first. Claudatus maximi. A male.” (37) It is this point of view that the novel turns to for a

space:

It’s only those who glimpse the awful, endless corridor of death, too gross to

contemplate, that need to lose themselves in love or art. His species had no poets. …

He had not spent, like us, his lifetime concocting systems to deny mortality. Nor had

he passed his days in melancholic fear of death, the hollow and the avalanche. Nor

was he burdened with the compensating marvels of human, mortal life. He had no

schemes, no memories, no guilt or aspirations, no appetite for love, and no delusions.

The woman had destroyed his light. He wanted to escape her, and to feed. This was

his long-term plan, and his hereafter.

Before this happened, the passing of her husband’s super-organism is dispassionately

recounted. “Joseph was being gathered in by death, cell by cell by cell. He came to be half of

himself, and then a quarter of himself, and then a fraction of himself, which was too slow to

measure.” (8) Readers may wish to compare this with the rather less clinical account of the

apprehending of oncoming death in John Williams’s Stoner, toward the end of that novel.

Celice’s death is more instantaneous, and surgically recounted.

There were still battles to be fought but these would be post mortem, the soundless,

inert wars of chemicals contesting for her trenches and her bastions amid the debris of

exploded cells. Calcium and water usurped the place of blod and oxygen so that her

defunct brain, almost at once, began to swell and tear its canopies, spilling all its saps

and liquors, all its stored immersions of passion, memory and will, on to her scarf, her

jacket and the grass.

As a later remark puts it, ‘This was not death as it was advertised: a fine translation to a better

place”. It is, rather, by an irony almost as fine, “the world as it had always been, plus

something less which was once doctors of zoology” (67-68). For “Joseph and Celice would

have turned to landscape, given time. Their bodies would have been just something extra

dead in a landscape already sculpted out of death. They would become nothing special. Gulls

die. And so do flies and crabs. So do the seals. Even stars must decompose, disrupt and

blister on the sky. Everything was born to go. The universe has learned to cope with death.”

This inevitability of death – its vectors but also its cycles, where the finality of a world

becomes more world, but differently – makes closure in any reflection about decomposition

problematic. Crace’s resolution is very apt, however:

And still, today and every day, the dunes are lifted, stacked and undermined. Their

crests migrate and reassemble with the wind. They do their best to raise their backs

against the weather and the sea and block the wind-borne sorrows of the world. All

along the shores of Baritone Bay and all the coast beyond, tide after tide, time after

time, the corpses and the broken, thinned remains of fish and birds, of barnacles and

rats, of molluscs, mammals, mussels, crabs are lifted, washed and sorted by the

waves. And Joseph and Celice enjoy a loving and unconscious end, beyond

experience.

These are the everending days of being dead.

The elision of the initial n from what would have been the word neverending effectively

conveys the everending circuit of life at risk, or senescence as Celice calls it in her lecture,

where super-organisms move to being the “physiological island” we referred to at the start of

this paper. The biological gaze can look away, confirmed in the view that life, in theory, in

practice, is everending.

What, however, of the poetic gaze?

The Poetic Gaze in Jim Crace’s Being Dead

Being Dead goes as far as a novel might in rendering the biological gaze. Yet it remains a

novel, not a field report. It bears dispassionate and clinical prose about dying, death and

decomposition. Yet it seems compelled by vitality. It is, certainly, a novel of life, as well as

death. It just so happens that the life scaled up and down to is nonhuman. It tests the nerve of

discourse, like posthumanism’s, that invoke non-anthropocentrism. Here, it says, if it’s what

you really want, is a hard look at that: up close and impersonal.

The result is a novel that does not flinch from observing “the by-products of

decomposition – methane and ethium” and their effect upon the super-organism, cast in

phrases like “leaking lymph” (166). Even so, the precision of the prose cannot suppress the

poetic reference to death, or the effect of that final line of the novel, where execution is oddly

affirmative. The end of Joseph and Celice may be “unconscious”, but the novel cannot stay

the intrusion of that word, loving. One is reminded, irresistibly, of Philip Larkin’s “An

Arundel Tomb”. The stone tomb of the Earl and Countess buried at Chichester Cathedral

prompts this reflection by Larkin: “Time has transfigured them into / Untruth. The stone

fidelity / They hardly meant has come to be / Their final blazon, and to prove / Our almost-

instinct almost true:What will survive of us is love.” Crace’s Being Dead is written in the

space opened up by that doubled almost. It recalls also the speculation over which version of

that other line in “September 1, 1939” W.H. Auden, for his part, intended: “We must love

one another or die,” or “We must love one another and die.” Crace’s novel recognises that

even if it is a case of and, connoting inevitability, rather than or, connoting timelessness, the

narrative of a life, a death and a decomposition must speak of mind and memory if it is to be

complete. Being Dead, in fact, intersperses chapters on the process of decomposition with

chapters on the recollected life of Joseph and Celice. Commemoration proceeds, in the air

above the depths where decomposition takes place. This is where it is apt to remember that in

the Tempest Ariel finished his song, quoted earlier, with these lines: “Sea-nymphs hourly ring

his knell: / Ding-Dong / Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.” It is not altogether

certain this Ding-Dong is the best note on which to end a reflection on decomposition. It

seems rather flat, until it is recalled that Ariel’s sounding of it is in fact as much a taunt as a

reassurance. Ferdinand’s response to Ariel’s song is wistful, wishful: “This song’s about my

dead father. It couldn’t be sung by mere mortals.” It does indicate that decomposition is not

really over until, outside the super-organism, all trace and memory recede. That could occur

when, as in the end of The Gift of Stones, the voice of disembodiment tries ‘to fill the air with

human sounds’, only to fall on ‘spray-wet rocks and stones reflecting all the changes in the

sky, and no one there to notice or applaud’. This requires us to take our look further than we

have today, to the longer version of this paper: to memory in biology and memory in poetry,

to the physics of that memory in the apoptosis of monocellular life and swarm life, but also in

culture and society. At the end of that look, poised between the scientific (which has the

answers of the analytical) and literature (which has the solutions of the illusory) we might

want to conclude that being dead is as much about recomposition as decomposition, in

biology and beyond. The question is whether we honestly can.