A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning: “Vibrant Death” in Jim Crace’s Being Dead

ABSTRACT Since its publication in 1999, literary scholars have paid continuous attention to Jim Crace’s Being Dead, observing especially the novel’s varied materialist and anti-exceptionalist implications. Nevertheless, Crace’s distinct reconciliation of posthumanist allusions with human mourning anticipates exploration. Correspondingly, Nina Lykke’s theoretical work on death studies, Vibrant Death: A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning (2022), offers a novel framework to explore Crace’s re-ontologisation of death and mourning from a post-anthropocentric perspective. Being Dead is about a middle-aged couple, Celice and Joseph, both zoologists, who are murdered and consequently left exposed to the elements at a beach which holds emotional and professional significance for them. The novel interposingly narrates the events of these characters’ lives and transcorporeal afterlives at the beach within a continuum; by doing so, Being Dead not only complicates life/death, mind/matter and human/nonhuman divisions, but also carries out a posthumanist practice of mourning and commemoration for the deceased in which affected readers participate. In other words, in place of pervasive and often anthropocentric perceptions of death and the afterlife, Being Dead instead reimagines commemorative mourning as one of the means of continuing/(re)vitalising the dead with emphasis on the entangled roles of various nonhuman and human agents – including dead bodies as vibrant material entities – in this process. Thereby this article reads Being Dead as a narrative of posthuman mourning that resonates with Lykke’s phenomenological reconfiguration of death and what follows as vibrant.