Yasın Posthuman Fenomenolojisi: Jim Crace’in Being Dead Romanında “Canlı Ölüm”

Abstract

Jim Crace’in ilk kez 1999 yılında yayınlanan ve 2004 yılında Ölürken başlığı ile Türkçeye çevrilen Being Dead romanı günümüze değin pek çok akademik çalışmaya konu olmuştur ve araştırmacılar özellikle eserin maddeci ve eşitlikçi temaları ile ilgilenmişlerdir. Bununla beraber, Crace’in posthuman fikirler ile yas ritüellerini buluşturan özgün yaklaşımı halen irdelenmeyi beklemektedir. Nina Lykke’nin ölüm çalışmaları alanındaki Vibrant Death: A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning (2022) isimli eseri ise Crace’in yas ve ölümü insan merkezcilikten uzaklaştırarak yeniden nitelendiren bu yaklaşımını anlamak için elverişli bir teorik bakış açışı sunmaktadır. Being Dead orta yaşlı bir çift zooloğu konu eder. Celice ve Joseph romanın başında, onlar için mesleki ve duygusal anlam taşıyan bir sahilde cinayet kurbanı olurlar, çift polisler tarafından bulunana değin altı gün geçer. Roman, Celice ve Joseph’in ölümlerini takiben sahilde geçirdikleri doğal dönüşüm süreçleri ile müttehit biçimde, onların hayat ve aşk hikayelerini de bir bütün ve devamlılık içerisinde anlatır. Böylece Being Dead yaşam/ölüm, bilinç/beden, insan/insan dışı gibi ayrımları karmaşıklaştırır ve Celice ve Joseph için okurun da kendini etkisel olarak içinde bulduğu posthumanist bir yas ritüeli kurgular. Bir başka deyişle Crace, ölümün görmezden gelinen “canlılığına,” yani çeşitli ölüm sonrası devamlılıklara işaret eder ve bu devamlılıklardan veya canlılıklardan en az biri yas ile mümkün kılınır. Dahası ölü bedenler, insanlar ve insan dışı varlıkların yas sürecindeki dolaşık eyleyiciliklerine dikkat çeken Crace alışıla gelmiş insan merkezci ölüm anlayışlarına meydan okur. Dolayısıyla bu makale Being Dead’i, Lykke’nin ölüm sonrası canlılıklara, yani “canlı ölüme” fenomenolojik yaklaşımı ile uyumluluk gösteren bir posthuman yas romanı olarak değerlendirir.

Keywords

• Jim Crace
• Being Dead
• Posthuman Fenomenoloji
• Canlı Ölüm
• Yas
• Ölürken

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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• Being Dead
• Jim Crace
• Vibrant Death
• Posthuman Phenomenology
• Mourning

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