Jessica Oliver
Writing Sample
The body in all its physical detail is a preoccupation of much contemporary
writing. With reference to Jackie Kay’s Trumpet and Jim Crace’s Being Dead,
discuss how and why the body is represented.
In his essay ‘Art as Technique’, Victor Shklovsky claimed ‘Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.’1 As far reaching
and as influential as defamiliarization has been across the arts, it is no more relevant
than when considering the most prosaic and immediate of objects: the human body.
Contemporary artists of all mediums have taken inspiration from the challenge of
depicting the body in unworn ways. For many, it has produced provocative works that
operate on a purely sensationalist basis, which gain notoriety through shock-value,
rather than recognition for their aesthetic power. Jago Morrison commented that
‘...what we see in contemporary writing is a polymorphous rethinking of the body and
its relationships to identity and experience.’2 This indicates a trend towards using the
body as a canvas for wider debate, whilst avoiding the pitfalls of exploitative detail. The
novels Trumpet and Being Dead feature confrontational presentations of bodies that
parody, and then negate sensationalism. The bodies of Celice and Joseph, Crace’s
protagonists are delineated in their animated and dead states in such an explicit way
that critic Richard J. Lane describes the novel as ‘a series of post-mortems’3, yet the
novel defies such a reading. Trumpet offers Joss Moody’s body as a semiotic mine-field,
challenging notions of identity and expectation.
The novels share a secular, contemporary setting. In Trumpet, the era is heralded
by Colman Moody as ‘the anti-fucking-evolution age (p.166)’. The tabloid journalist
Sophie Stones adds that it is ‘obsessed with sex, infidelity, scandal, sleaze, perverts
(169).’Being Dead uses grandiose, cosmic terms to evoke its permeation: ‘the universe
could not care less (11).’ In a world described as being without spirituality or cultural
inspiration, even flesh is deprivileged to commodity. This bleak outlook suggests that
the novels themselves will follow a sensationalist, almost pornographic aesthetic of the
Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, in Modernism: An Anthology, ed. Kolocotroni, Goldman and Taxidou
(Edinburgh UP: Edinburgh. 1998), p. 219
2 Jago Morrison, 'Bodies, Genders' in Contemporary Fiction, (Routledge, London. 2003), p.42
3 Richard J. Lane, ‘The Fiction of Jim Crace’, Contemporary British fiction, ed. Richard J. Lane, Rod
Mengham, Philip Tew (Polity Press: Cambridge. 2003), p.35
1
1
Jessica Oliver
Writing Sample
body to fulfil the impulses of the times. However, it is the aesthetic of the flesh that
salvages and provides resolution. The view expressed by the morgue clerk in Being
Dead: the body has ‘no poetry’ is what Kay and Crace evade. In both instances, the body
is ‘poetry’: aesthetic and discursive as opposed to objective.
In Trumpet’s opening, Millie uses arresting images of bodily displacement to
express her grief: ‘I am no more myself than a rabbit is itself trapped in front of glaring
headlights. The rabbit freezes and what you see most on the road is fear itself, not a
furry rabbit.’ (3) In Millie’s thinking, physical objects can be replaced entirely by the
abstracts of extreme feeling. She continues this play between mind and body: ‘I don’t
know what is real and what is not, whether the pain in my side is real or imagined. (4)’
Being Dead echoes this idea of severance in the murder scene. The anonymous killer has
no incentive: he fixates on Celice’s hair to motivate himself: ‘the crown and white roots
of the woman’s hennaed hair. The target for his blows. The detail that he’d chosen to
inflate his anger; her white roots (31). ’ The absurdity and waste of the killings hang on
this detail: that the body can be entirely isolated from the sum of its parts, and that the
act of objectification can produce such a degree of de-humanization.
This idea of displacement poses a hovering ontological question : what does it mean to
be in this bodily sense? The title Being Dead playfully acknowledges this concern: on a
linguistic level there is no ‘being’ in death: it is the negation of being: but this logic is
suspended through the fictionalization of the mortal body. The novels appear to posit
the possibility of some kind of afterlife within time through the activity of the
decomposing body. Lane describes this as ‘the body outlast(ing) its temporary living
narratives and meanings, offering- eventually- putrefaction as the final signifier or
emission.’4 Two chapters from Trumpet and Being Dead take place in morgues, focalized
through two characters whose livelihoods revolve around working with bodies, and
feature extensive detail on the ‘life’ they have after death.
In Trumpet the funeral director Albert Holding says of his job: ‘It takes quite a bit of
talent and ingenuity on the undertaker’s part to talk them into being dead. (104)’ In
determining this element of verbal bargaining, Kay is fully engaged with the notion of a
textualized body. The aesthetic of the body detailed is perverse in its liveliness: ‘Most
people die with the same personality that they were born with, only in extreme form
4
Richard J. Lane, ‘The Fiction of Jim Crace’, p.27
2
Jessica Oliver
Writing Sample
(103)’. Holding’s belief that ‘There is life long after the heart has stopped beating (105)’
is played out through the physicality of the corpses: ‘There are people that deny death
to such an extent that their corpse tries to feign life. Those are the corpses that sit up
and burp and suddenly open their eyes to stare at you. (102)’
Conversely, the conceit of Being Dead’s textualized bodies is the element of ‘deep
disguise’ and artifice made inevitable by death: ‘The one-and-all-time fat man had
become a hermit monk, thinned by prayers and fasting, hollow-cheeked. (137)’
Holding’s distinctive personalities contrast completely with these arted bodies, which
resemble ‘A flesh and plastic tribute to Picasso. (138)’ The cubist corpses left to the
morgue here are ‘beautified: ‘masked by theatrical cosmetics, panstick and rouge. (139)’
Crace’s morgue population retain none of their character: they sink and bloat, and are
made artificial through living intervention: they are ephemeral pieces of art, unhinged
from their former inhabitants.
Having established the strange, arbitrary nature of the relationship between the body
and what it signifies in both novels, it follows to examine the body in terms of its
structural properties. Lane comments of Being Dead:
the attention here is upon the aesthetic act as a redemptive force; while Crace
explores, parodies and ridicules the holding on to the symbolic in a ‘semiotic’
world, his aesthetic is a recoding of the semiotic via the symbolic...’5
In terms made clear in the novel, there is a tension between realist and mythical modes
of the body. One example of this struggle is in an image of Celice and Joseph:
‘waterlogged, two flooded chambers, two leather waterbags. (67)’ The analogy works
on a suggestive level, effectively evoking the material state of the bodies. However, its
implications frustrate the image of the body as having any symbolic value at all. In
choosing to associate the body with the hollow ‘waterbag’, Crace creates an image of
being that is all surface and skin. Another strange allegorical passage infuses the
landscape with bodily traits:
The sun’s forehead is peeking at the day, its face still indigo from sleep, its cloudy
head uncombed and tumbling its vapour curls on to the skyline of the sea. (206)
5
Richard J. Lane, ‘The Fiction of Jim Crace’, p.37
3
Jessica Oliver
Writing Sample
What makes the image of the sun so anomalous is its purely symbolic nature, and its
tone: so unsubtle in its allusions, and so opposite to the starkness and violence of the
bodies they mimic.
In Trumpet, this wavering liminality is embodied by Joss. The central question of the
novel is whether Joss’s assumed gender/body is the symbolic or the semiotic. Albert
Holding is the only character who poses questions near enough to this conclusion:
All his working life he had assumed that what made a man a man and a woman a
woman was the differing sexual organs. Yet today, he had a woman who
persuaded him, even dead, that he was a man, once he had his clothes on. (115)
An obvious source to turn to is Judith Butler’s theories on gender difference: that
symbolic and semiotic statuses are disputed as they are filtered through society:
‘the “reality” of heterosexual identities is performatively constituted through an
imitation that sets itself up as the origin and the ground of all
imitations...heterosexuality is always in the process of imitating and
approximating its own phantasmatic idealization of itself – and failing.’6
On failing to find Joss’s penis, Holding feels ‘terribly anxious, as though he had done
something wrong. (110)’ This anxiety is produced by symbolic and semiotic dislocation:
what he has been informed to expect is thwarted. The second generation characters, Syl
and Colman, further this sense of angst. Being the products of the secular, ‘scandal’
chasing era, it is perhaps not surprising that both wish to see it all, have that visual
proof. As Colman puts it: ‘I won’t believe he’s dead, you know, until I see him in the flesh.
(114)’ However, the effects of the visual do more to de-stabilize, rather than confirm,
any semiotic understanding. Colman’s reaction is an ‘ordeal to watch’, while Syl’s is
touching, yet equally incredulous: ‘her parents had surprised her this one time...they
had the power, on their deaths, to flush her heart – too late- with love.’ Syl can only find
acceptance when she replicates the symbolic positions of her parents: ‘She folded one
hand round the jar of teeth, and wrapped the other one around an ankle, spread her
fingers on the lower leg, held herself in place with just her fingertips, dug bitten nails
into her skin. (197)’ For Colman, the symbolic and semiotic meanings of his father’s
body are left equivocal. The potentially conciliatory text – Joss’s final letter to his son –
offers no solution: ‘You will understand me, or you won’t. (277)’ These second
generation characters and their reactions to the bodies guide the readers towards the
Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in The Judith Butler Reader, (Blackwell Publishing:
Oxford. 2004)p. 128
6
4
Jessica Oliver
Writing Sample
same conclusion: bodily proof is not what we are being ushered towards: it is the
understanding of the body’s necessary failure to provide these answers.
Being Dead and Trumpet, given their preoccupations with the human body, could
have been narratives of exploitation and sensationalism. However, the level of
understanding posited by both leads to a more profound examination of its function.
The body is treated, not as an object, but as a powerful discourse on literature itself. In
his essay S/Z, Roland Barthes explores an idea that the symbolic field ‘is occupied by a
sole object, from which it derives its unity...This object is the human body.’7 As the body
is a model for literature, so too is literature an extension of the psycho-somatic self. The
bodies of Celice, Joseph and Joss have a corporeal afterlife due to the pulses of evolution
sparked by language. As Peter Brooks’s understanding of Barthes suggests, writers are
‘forever striving to make the body into a text.’8 The bodies are intertwined indelibly
with the prose that harbours them for the effect of suspension: the reader never forgets
that literary presence, and sense of trajectory. In discussing Being Dead, Jim Crace
expressed a view that what he offers the reader through the examination of
decomposition is a ‘Narrative of Comfort in an increasingly non-religious world.’9 This
may appear incongruous with a book that details ‘debris of exploded cells (7)’ and
‘wickedly disfigured (12)’ forms, but the optimism to be found is formalistic, and bound
to art. A description of Joss playing his trumpet details a rapturous disembodiment that
is instigated by art: ‘All of his self collapses – his idiosyncrasies, his personality, his ego,
his sexuality, even, finally, his memory, All of it falls away like skin unwrapping. (135)’
To conclude, the contemporary body evidenced in Trumpet and Being Dead is presented
as an artistic achievement: an aesthetic abstract that encapsulates an informed and
passionate belief in art. The textualized body confers power onto fiction as evolutionary
agent that transcends the pessimism, ignorance and darkness of a society.
Roland Barthes quoted by Peter Brooks in ‘Narrative and the Body’, Body Works: Objects of Desire in
Modern Narrative (Harvard UP: USA. 1993) p.6
8 Peter Brooks, ‘Narrative and the Body’, p.6
7
Unpublished Question and Answer session with Jim Crace, University of East Anglia, 20th April
2010
9
5
Jessica Oliver
Writing Sample
Bibliography
Primary Texts:
Crace, Jim, Being Dead, (Penguin Books: London. 1999)
Kay, Jackie, Trumpet (Picador: London. 1998)
Secondary Sources:
Brooks, Peter: ‘Narrative and the Body’ in Body Works: Objects of Desire in Modern
Narrative (Harvard UP: USA. 1993) pp. 1-27
Butler, Judith: ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ in The Judith Butler Reader,
(Blackwell Publishing: Oxford. 2004) pp. 119-135
Crace, Jim: Unpublished Question and Answer session, University of East Anglia, 20th
April 2010
Lane, Richard J.: ‘The Fiction of Jim Crace’ in Contemporary British fiction, ed. Richard J.
Lane, Rod Mengham, Philip Tew (Polity Press: Cambridge. 2003), pp.27-39
Morrison, Jago: 'Bodies, Genders' in Contemporary Fiction, (Routledge, London. 2003),
pp.40-51
Shklovsky, Victor: ‘Art as Technique’ in Modernism: An Anthology, ed. Vassiliki
Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou (Edinburgh UP: Edinburgh. 1998), pp. 217221
6