Becoming Posthumous

Foreword—On Becoming

“Becoming” usually means “coming to be” or “developing into” or “qualifying as” or “being accepted as” or even, for a fortunate few, “being decorous” (see Concise Oxford Dictionary). It has also evolved into a term of judgment in certain forms of academic writing. In some cases, it is better to be thought of as in process of “becoming” rather than as “being.” For example, in their discussion of autoethnography, Pithouse-Morgan et al. (2021, pp. 217–218) identify their approach as one of having “a greater focus on becoming than on being.” In a similar vein, though somewhat more difficult language, Gale and Wyatt (2022) argue that their form of writing is a matter of “bringing into play the fluidity of becoming by making movements away from ontology toward ontogenesis” (p. 80). It’s the fluidity that appears to count here: But what is that? Easily flowing? Moving with skill and grace? Being changeable or unsettled or even unstable? My aim in this micro-memoir, however, is to show how I became posthumous while still trying to be an active (and wonderfully skilled and graceful!) academic. I call my text a memoir in the sense used by Helena de Bres:

The writer and the reader of memoir are out not merely for truth, nor merely for art, but for artful truths. It’s that sly conjunction that makes the endeavour both the philosophical minefield and the rich source of pleasure and insight that it is. (de Bres, 2021, p. 17).

So I write like an artful dodger while becoming, trying to develop into, a qualified, if not quite decorous, skilled and graceful, post-academic. My art is modest but my dodging is as sly and as cunning and as tricky as I can make it. Whether it is a source of pleasure and insight is another matter entirely.

And I wouldn’t call this a process of ontogenesis: It is, more simply, in my case, a movement away from the prehumous toward the posthumous. I think.

On Becoming Posthumous/Posthumus

Posthumus Leonatus is a character in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, one of John Keats’s favorite plays. Typically and theatrically playful himself, Keats adopted the persona of Posthumus when he realized that his consumption, his tuberculosis, would prove terminal. Indeed, he wrote to a friend that he had a habitual feeling of his real life having passed and that he was leading a posthumous existence. The term appears to show that Keats was writing as if he were already beyond the grave. This sounds rather tragic but the playful Keats was also a mimic, a punster, and a trickster so that writing as if he were posthumous may well have been an example of his gallows humor and a form of self-parody. Alternatively, it might also have been an act of resistance. His posthumous existence, perhaps, should be read as both a tragic recognition and a comic revelation of the way Keats managed his own decline. The Posthumus/posthumous pun shows him becoming a tragi-comic (con-)fusion (see Theune, 2020).

On Becoming a Posthumous Academic

I began transitioning, as we now say, into becoming a posthumous academic when I was first diagnosed with End-Stage Renal Failure in January 1979. I interpreted “end stage” not just as a clinical diagnosis but also as a serious career prediction. When, exactly, would I reach an actual academic “end stage”? When would my real and academic lives fully pass away? The renal consultant assured me that he would manage my physical decline through continuous monitoring of my condition before deciding whether I needed dialysis and/or a transplant. I should, alternatively, manage my own decline as an academic as best as I could. His wish was that I should enjoy the rest of my life. My hope was that I could find ways of enjoying what was left of the academic aspect and at the same time plan for a not too uncomfortable post-academic future.

I was then, like Keats, about to endure and/or enjoy a posthumous existence. Between 1979 and 1998, I endured only a few tragi-comic episodes. My particular form of renal failure is called Focal Segmental Glomerular Sclerosis (FSGS) (I didn’t like the sound of the sclerotic bit at all especially as a good friend and former colleague had suffered and died from Muscular Sclerosis). My Focal Segmental Glomerular Sclerosis (FSGS) makes me susceptible to various infections needing treatment by antibiotics. On one occasion I reacted so adversely to a dose of penicillin that I turned into a version of the highly inflated Michelin Man. I spent a whole week in hospital mainly drinking water to flush out my poisoned system. I was well flushed and went straight home to mow the lawn. I was bold and foolhardy in those days. I claim.

A second episode occurred when I was studying a faculty development project at Miami-Dade Community College. I had rented an “efficiency” in North Miami Beach which conveniently enabled me to jog most mornings and to swim in the late afternoons. All went well with the studying and the jogging and the swimming until the last couple of days when I could hardly walk because of a swollen and excruciatingly painful foot. I then needed help to get to the airport, suffered agonizingly during the flight to London and then had to be collected like a tattered parcel when I finally landed at Heathrow. I thought I must have broken my foot and so went off to hospital where I was X-rayed and seen by a doctor. He just said “No fracture. You have gout!” and prescribed Allopurinol which I still take. I complained that gout only came to old men like Lord Tennyson who drank too much port. “Yes, to an extent” said the doctor who then told me about a colleague of his who had come back from an Alpine holiday with an attack of gout. In his case, it was caused by too much “aprés-ski” (probably more champagne and cognac than port). In mine, given my FSGS condition, it was probably dehydration. Being ultra-careful about my fluid intake is still a crucial feature of my odd posthumous existence. Too much and I flood my lungs. Too little and I dry out like The Painted Desert. But not decorously.

One further example of endurance: My renal consultant phoned me at work and asked me what time I would finish that day. I asked why he wanted to know and he replied that a recent blood test had shown that I had a high potassium level. “How high?” I asked.

Too high . . . Dangerously high . . . You had better come now straight to the ward and prepare to spend the night. We will have to put you on a calcium drip. Too much potassium could give you a heart attack.

I went though not without a little trepidation. I still owned two failing yet functioning kidneys but didn’t relish the idea of a faulty heart too. Dodgy kidneys, dodgy knees, and dodgy ticker? Becoming posthumous was not much fun.

But was there no enjoyment at all in my posthumous existence? I tried to make my working life more varied especially by strengthening my outside activities and interests. As an academic developer I played a ghoulish part in various regional and national organizations and also became more involved in study abroad and other international educational bodies. This often entailed conferences and other engagements throughout Europe and occasional visits to North America. I tried to combine academic business with personal pleasure. For example, I enjoyed symphony concerts in Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Geneva, Helsinki, Miami, Paris, Salzburg, San Francisco, Stockholm, and Washington, DC. And, time permitting, I visited galleries and museums and theaters. I might have looked ghostly and ghastly but I tried to enjoy rather than haunt my own end stage.

This relatively happy phase of my posthumous existence began to fade away during the mid-1990s. My renal decline manager (aka renal consultant) finally decided I needed dialysis, a process that required three 4-hr sessions per week attached to a machine that sucked out my blood, cleansed it, and then pumped it back into me. This process is not without its tragi-comic aspects. First, each session has to begin with the patient being needled. Two rather large needles must be inserted into an especially constructed fistula (usually in the arm or neck). The procedure doesn’t always go painlessly. On one occasion, the nurse-needler took 14 attempts to affix the needles. “Being needled” can also mean “being provoked.” I often was. On another occasion, my needles didn’t stay properly attached during dialysis so that the machine pumped my blood in powerful jets across the ward and up the walls. What a bloody mess!

I decided to make use of my on-machine time by writing a (virtually posthumous) PhD thesis. Even though I had published regularly, and had already been made a professor, I had neither the time nor the motivation to join in the PhD racket (as Saul Bellow once called it: Bellow described his first two novels—Dangling Man and The Victim—as his MA and his PhD. Quite right too). Under the university’s existing regulations, I was able to submit an analysis of 15 published articles for the relatively underused (my effort was only the second one attempted in the university) degree of PhD by Published Work (see Badley, 2009). I did most of the initial writing of the text in a reporter’s notebook precariously balanced on the right arm of the dialysis couch. I, too, was precariously balanced between the apparently prehumous and the virtually posthumous.

On Becoming Even More Posthumous

My sister Joan, noting my deterioration, offered me her second-best kidney (forgive the Anne Hathaway allusion) in 2003. On the morning of the transplant, I was again collected like a ripped parcel and then trolleyed off the ward to the operating theater (another stage for an enactment/entertainment). A fellow patient, a minister of the Established Church of England no less, called out: “The condemned man wasn’t given breakfast or even a last wish.” More gallows humor, I suppose. When I became conscious in the intensive care unit, I wasn’t sure whether I was pre- or posthumous. If the former, I believed those in the white coats were trying to kill me. If the latter, then they had succeeded, much to their own satisfaction. By all accounts, especially my wife’s, I was a lousy patient. I remembered the epitaph reportedly inscribed on Spike Milligan’s headstone: “I told you I was sick.” I really was.

After the transplant I soon felt I had really been fully transitioned into the posthumous existence identified by John Keats. How could I best endure/enjoy such a weird condition? And for how long? Keats had asked his doctor “how long will this posthumous life of mine last?” When I asked my transplant surgeon he said “about five years.” So I had to decide how to live my life after virtual death. My decision was almost instantaneous: Carry on, follow the advice, take the pills, undergo the post-transplant tests, and adopt a counterlife for myself in the global playhouse. This allowed me to be my own actor, director, manager, and scriptwriter—a posthumous imposter no doubt but now enabled through my experimental writing to say my own lines, weaving texts which a few other humans might find interesting or even useful (see Badley, 2019).

Afterword—On Un-becoming

I could now imagine myself as a slow, posthumous post-academic trying at times through my conversational texts to help expose and subvert the neo-con-men who dominate the neoliberal dystopia they have constructed. If appropriate and capable, I could play a kind of Shakespearean serious fool in trying to speak truth to power. My counterlife would not be a rehearsal for an afterlife but rather a transition into it. In my counterlife writing during my end-stage posthumous existence, I even aspired to being dangerous (see Badley, 2020). Indeed, writing posthumously has been lavishly praised: The Nobelist Nadine Gordimer argued that serious (and I would add “playful”) persons should try to write posthumously because by doing so they would bypass the usual constraints of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public, and, perhaps especially, intellectual opinion. Writing posthumously could help all of us to inoculate ourselves against the intellectual and artistic viruses that try to infect us. So the best advice is:

write as if you were already dead

don’t censor yourself

don’t go along with the crowd

don’t be greedy

don’t be cheap

young as you are, play dead

so that your eyes will stay open. (after Eugenides, 2012)

One great danger of post-academic dotage or even becoming posthumous (imagine such a thing!) is amnesia. And one antidote to that disease is words and stories (even ghost stories and micro-memoirs), finding narratives, for words tell us what we, as a society and as individuals, believe the world to be. To resist their collective amnesia-like sickness, the citizens of Macondo in A Hundred Years of Solitude wrote out labels and hung them from beasts and objects: “This is a tree,” “This is a house,” “This is a cow . . .” (after Manguel, 2010, pp. ix–x). At the end stage, of course, we actually do transition from the prehumous to the posthumous: Death snatches us eventually. There is no antidote to that but we posthumous–post-academics can at least try to find joy in the transitional days we have left. If Manguel is right, then much joy can still be found—even by the ghastly, ghostly, decrepit, old guys we may have become—through reading and writing. We can still hunt for the words we need and gather them into texts of various kinds, texts that might just amuse our declining selves and even interest one or two others of our fractious tribe.

However, I am now no longer becoming posthumous. The sly and cunning micro-memoirist in me was a posthumous fake all along: a pretense, an actor, a sham, to get me through being post-academic, and being old and decrepit. I now face another transition: from being and becoming into an indecorous un-becoming. I’m way past my allotted 5 years of post-transplant quasi-posthumous existence. I might even make it to 20. Make the best of it: Read and write a bit, listen to more music, watch a few plays, amuse myself a bit (or, like jolly Jacques Derrida, beaucoup). Be serious and playful. Be human before becoming compost–humus (Haraway, 2016). Urge the fractious world to embrace solidarity.