ABSTRACT
In Maylis de Kerangal’s 2014 novel The Heart, twenty-one-year-old Simon is declared brain dead – in the original French, en mort cerebrale – after a car accident. The corpse of a loved one is a cognitive challenge, a trauma that reality inflicts upon reason. When life-sustaining intensive care became much more effective with developments in mechanical ventilation in the 1960s, a new imperative emerged to challenge the mourner's rational capacities: the people must accept that a loved one's apparently still-living body is effectively already a corpse. When Jahi's body did not decompose as the clinicians and ethicists had predicted, media reports began questioning that key component of brain death: its irreversibility. Greenberg quotes Howard M. Nathan describing the campaign to encourage people to reject a long-accepted concept: It took the reader years to get the public to understand what brain death was.
