Tag Archives: Colson Whitehead

Taylor Swift and the Zombie Apocalypse

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So why have you never heard of all these great bands? Two reasons: 1) you and that band run in different rabbit dens, and 2) Taylor Swift.
 

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“If you chase two rabbits,” Swift told USAToday, “at some point you end up losing both.” By rabbits she means commercial markets, and for her maximizing revenues requires an allegiance to the larger bunny, pop, as her jilted country fans hop away. “I needed to pick a lane,” Swift said, criticizing her 2012 album, Red, because it featured “mandolin on one track, then a dubstep bass drop on the next song. You’re kind of thinking are these really on the same album?” So her new album, 1989, chases pop fans straight down the “80s synth-pop” lane. This, according to one of her collaborators, is evidence of Swift “relentlessly pushing herself to be unafraid of taking chances.”

Now I’m not seriously criticizing USAToday for its lack of cutting-edge journalism. The Taylor Swift article is an advertisement, and the soundbites are her corporate interests talking. Mixing mandolin and dubstep was taking a chance, the dubstep half of the album yielded Swift’s first No. 1 single, and so now she is “unafraid” to solidify that pop base. Even the year 1989 signals risk aversion. By the late the 80s, the pleasant chaos of the New Wave upheaval had been absorbed into predictable pop formulas. Devo and the Talking Heads had devolved into the Bangles and Tear for Fears.

Swift’s one-rabbit approach also runs counter to some of the best mandolin-dubstep fiction of the 80s. Margaret Atwood, then an acclaimed novelist of the purely narrative realism mode, published her first speculative novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, in 1985. Toni Morrison won the 1988 Pulitzer for chasing those same two rabbits, speculative and realism, with Beloved, a literary horror novel. And Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen put comic books on the literary map for the first time in the 80s too. Superheroes, ghosts, dystopic futures–you’re kind of thinking are these really in the same genre?

Jon Caramanica in his New York Times rave of Swift’s new album provides one of the best working definitions of genre I’ve seen in a while: “It’s a box, and a porous one, but a box all the same.” Caramanica also calls calls 21st century pop “overtly hybrid” and country a “hospitable host body,” one that the body-snatching alien Swift has sucked dry and discarded. That’s a lot of genre metaphors to juggle at once, so I’m going to stick with cars and rodents for now. Despite Swift’s relentless push down the pop lane, the 21st century literary highway has seen some major additions to the two-rabbit playlist. My course, 21st Century North American Fiction (I know, not as catchy as any of Swift’s titles) features a list of authors straddling “literary” (meaning “artful,” not “set in the real world”) and “genre” (any of those formerly lowbrow pulp categories of scifi, fantasy, horror, mystery, romance, etc.).
 

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At first it sounds like a marketing wet dream: combine two genres and double your audience. You like zombies? You like literary fiction? We’ll you’re going to love Colson Whitehead’s literary zombie novel, Zone One! But instead of bringing two diverse readerships together, a two-rabbit novel often appeals only to that sliver-thin, Venn diagram cross-section of readers willing to straddle both categories. Instead of expanding your audience, the mandolin-dubstep approach can decimate it.

Before assigning Zone One to my students, I tried to get my book club to read it, but one of our group’s economics professors (we have two) despised it. In addition to his expertise in business, Professor MacDermott is a zombie aficionado (which has also resulted in our forming a Zombie Club splinter group). I asked him to write up his critique of Whitehead for my class:

“While it may have some literary merits, I don’t read zombie books for literary anything. Contrary to just about everyone’s opinion, the book did not strike me as terribly well written (unless well written = slog). I saw one review that said the “language zings and soars.” Criminy – that’s heavy handed. Perhaps I am a bit of a grunt when it comes to ‘good writing’ but I didn’t see it. The biggest knock against it in my mind is that very little happens and what does happen is all over the place. Most of the zombie / dystopian books I have read (and that is a shamefully large number) are stuffed with action … probably too much. This one had very little. . . .  So, I guess in the end my recommendation would be to not read this book because while some may find the writing compelling, there is not much of a story (yeah … blah blah blah social commentary … blah blah blah). I took a look at the reviews in Amazon and found I agreed with several of the 1-star reviews (those written by the troglodytes).”

In the end, he likened it to handing The Iliad to someone because they said they liked war books. “That,” he said, “is what it is like to hand Zone One to a zombie-phile.”

So much for droves of zombie fans flocking to Whitehead. And many literary readers are equally repulsed. Shenandoah recently published a Noir issue, opening the door to a blog discussion of the relative merits of genre and literary fiction and their hybrid love children. Editor R. T. Smith drew a line in the literary sand:

“Hard-boiled, thriller, mystery, crime – following the spoor of these labels will draw an investigator into the territory where I think noir simmers. It’s a somewhat different direction from super powers, paranormal events, zombies, weredogs, closet monsters, witches, alien storm troopers, time travelers. These are terms more likely to lead away from my noir zone, where characters who metamorphose don’t grow fangs, fly away, deflect bullets or sport tails with stingers. The gumshoe’s revolver may somehow fire eight rounds without being re-loaded, but it doesn’t spew bats or emulsify anyone. Neither physics nor metaphysics are problematized, though the emphasis may be on aesthetics and ethics. It’s an old personal preference – naturalism over supernaturalism, physics and metaphysics over hocus-pocus and the “black box” – a question of conventions and confidence.”

Poet and historical-mystery author Sarah Kennedy articulated the anti-zombie stance too:

“For me, the problem with a great deal of literature about monsters and other non-human characters is that they become formulaic or silly in their attempts to prove that they’re doing something “serious” when in fact they’re just retailing the old conventions. Zombies are horrible looking and they eat human flesh. Even if a writer gives a zombie a science-fiction virus or (ick) a heart of gold, the character is still going to have all the signs of the formula: scary, grisly-looking, flesh-eating. It’s probably going to walk a bit oddly (what with those bits and pieces falling off). It’s going to be hard ever to convince me to take that seriously.”

And this includes Whitehead’s cross-bred literary zombies: “I have tried Zone One but frankly found it both pretentious and tedious and couldn’t finish. There is no story there, at least not one that engaged me.”

Kennedy’s and MacDermott’s definitions of “story” may be opposites, but neither was satisfied by Whitehead’s mandolin and/or dubstep skills. Trying to satisfy both can mean satisfying neither. And it’s not just literary zombies getting run down by one-lane readers.
 

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My class is also studying Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club, a literary novel that rode the “chicklit” wave up the best-seller charts in 2004. Despite Fowler’s winning the 2014 PEN/Faulkner (an award controversially denied Morrison’s Beloved), her novel still carries a non-literary taint. My department’s Austen expert hasn’t read it and looked at me suspiciously when I suggested she might. Another colleague, Professor Pickett, observed one of my classes for my tenure review and wrote in her evaluation afterwards:

“I had specifically asked Chris if I could observe a class devoted to this particular novel, both because I had started reading it myself over the summer and also because (as a result) I was curious about how he would handle the challenge of teaching a book I would unthinkingly have assigned to my own idiosyncratic genre of “airport bookstore” novel–one “light” enough to read in a distracting environment but “respectable” enough not to be embarrassed if caught reading–basically trade paperbacks for the 30-something female.”

Even my students are wary of the novel. One, Libby Hayhurst, wrote in a homework response:

“this is by far the most entertaining book we’ve read, which makes me instantly mistrustful. While literary fiction can entertain, this is surely not its point. I have found myself reading this book only enjoying the plot and the characters, and without the desire to even take a stab at the deeper meaning . . . I am not sure the Jane Austen Book Club falls under ‘literary fiction’ (although I AM hesitating, but is this just because I’m reading it in an English course?).”

This despite Michael Chabon opening the course with his appeal:

“Entertainment has a bad name. People learn to mistrust it and even revile it. . . . Yet entertainment—as I define it, pleasure and all—remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of from everybody else. The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience, and the universal hunger for connection.”

Personally I don’t find Taylor Swift entertaining, but I am entertained by plenty of popular and non-popular music. I don’t have a problem with Swift, just her claim to chance-taking and her repudiation of albums that appeal to more than one kind of rodent. Mandolin-strumming and dubstep-dancing rabbits are more than roadkill on opposing lanes of entertainment traffic. I hope 1989 isn’t our only future.
 

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Zombie Assimilation

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How do you turn a zombie story into literary fiction? Make it really boring. At least, that’s Colson Whitehead’s solution in Zone One, and it has a certain, simple brilliance to it, as well as a comic flair. All the zombie-standard beats are there — the gross-out cannibal gore, the sudden bloody shocks, the piles of dead, the foolish hopes bloodily dismembered — but all slowed down and anesthetized with self-consciously arty lit fic prose and meandering stream-of-consciousness flash backs and flash backs within flash backs. What if Henry James had been a pulp writer? the book asks, and then proceeds to spend gobs and gobs of paragraphs on a split second zombie attack, the teeth reaching for the throat with the leisurely upper-crust nonchalance of a Bostonian meaningfully twitching his well-groomed facial hair. Apocalypse takes on the breakneck rhythms of afternoon tea.

I am a fan of horror films and I love Henry James, and watching the two thunked together is pretty enjoyable…for a while. At some point, though, you start to feel that the contrast between style and substance is more a gimmick than a necessity; a mash-up that never quite transcends its initial, “wouldn’t it be funny if..?” joke. Henry James’ novels are slow and byzantine because he sees the world as slow and byzantine; his characters long for and drown in artifice. The best zombie horror is a vision of humans as shambling meat monsters, comic, horrible, visible to the bone. Whitehead tries to merge the two…but they end up undermining each other. The horror in James’ world (like “The Beast in the Jungle”) is that nothing happens, a nothing that is seriously undermined when you’ve got gouts of blood gouting, even if only in slow motion. Similarly, if visceral viscera is what you want, detours into lit-fic’s grab bag of ironized nostaligia (here is a memory of parents having oral sex; here is a memory of a family restaurant) doesn’t take you there. The two modes don’t build on one another or clash in inventive ways; they just take the edge off each other. Instead of one thing or another, you’re left with a mediocre middle.

You could argue that that’s thematic I suppose; mediocrity is an important theme in the novel. The main character — only known by the nickname Mark Spitz — is defined as a kind of avatar of average; he mystical power of mundanity allowed him to slide through school without either failure or excellence, attaining B’s whether he studied or not, and then going on to nondescript jobs calling for his ideal lack of talent. His averageness stood him in good stead in the apocalypse as well.

He was a mediocre man. He had led a medicore life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect. He asked himself: How can I die? I was always like this. Now I am more me.

It’s a cute conceit — though, maybe again a bit too cute. Why exactly are we supposed to see a zombie apocalypse as a triumph of the mediocre, again? Maybe if these zombies were all, every one, the stragglers — infected people who just stand and stare vacantly, pursuing some sort of former moment in their lives — flying a kite, flipping a burger. But the hungry skels, or skeletons, aren’t mediocre; they’re ravening and awful and nightmarish and maybe ridiculous, but not bland unless you toss an awful lot of lit fic tropes at them, and even then not enough. Nor is the skill set of the surviving humans especially mediocre; at least, a talent for killing and surviving seems like it’s still a kind of excellence. Mark Spitz says he’s mediocre, but Whitehead doesn’t sell it. Instead, Spitz doesn’t seem so much average as especially talented at adaptation; he’s good at fitting in. He’s not a master of mediocrity, but of assimilation — as you’d expect, perhaps, from a black man named Mark Spitz.

Spitz’s blackness barely registers through the book; his race is only explicitly revealed towards the end, when he makes a kind of joke about his name and the fact that black people supposedly aren’t able to swim. The reticence here seems especially significant since the modern zombie iteration began with a black protagonist in Night of the Living Dead. Romero’s film plays with the divide between black and white and human and monster; the zombies become in many ways a ravening white horde, while, at the end of the film, the law and order forces cleaning up the dead casually shoot the good guy because they think he’s a zombie, and/or because he’s black. Romero’s apocalypse is bleak/funny/horrible (like Octavia Butler’s) in part because the end of the world actually doesn’t change anything; divisions of gender, of race, of class, still persist. Even at the end of everything, old hates continue to matter. Zombies don’t change us because zombies are us; even in death, people suck.

Whitehead, though, explicitly rejects that vision. For him, and for Mark Spitz, the zombie apocalypse is a new era. Everyone you meet in the book, of whatever class, seems to be pulling together, fighting the good fight; some are incompetent, some are weak, but to the extent that there’s stupid cruelty or violence of humans against humans, it’s all off to the side and bracketed as a kind of inevitable effect of trauma, not to be dwelt on or looked at closely. Even that old staple, lust, barely puts in an appearance. Instead,

There was a single Us now, reviling a single Them. Would the old bigotries be reborn as well, when they cleared out this Zone, and the next,and so on, and they were packed together again tight and suffocating on top of each other?

Spitz goes on to think that yes, old prejudices would be revived if civilization were to get up and running again. But (spoiler!) the whole point of the end of the book is that civilization is not revived; every human effort to return to normality is doomed to failure. The dead take back everything, and in their number “Every race, color, and creed was represented.” The world is not going back to normal, and as long as it doesn’t, equality wins.

Glen Duncan, in a New York Timesreview that is deftly lobotomized by its own condescension, seems to be under the impression that the zombie genre has no literary merit, and that Whitehead’s contribution is to bring the virtues of thematic depth to an otherwise crap pulp form. I’d argue, though, that Whitehead’s evasion of suspense and serious-writer-prose serve to obscure a poignant, but still unsatisfying glibness. Romero’s zombie stories trap you in the binary between self and other; you’re always trying to not be the monster and not being the monster makes you the monster, “the monster” here being, not just zombies, but blacks, whites, men, women — all the familiar, bleak faultlines of identity. Zone One, on the other hand, seems to be a zombie story for Obama’s post-racial America — a dream that at the end of all things, at least, at last, non-white folks will slip into the sea of the dead on equal terms. Henry James and George Romero both, I think, have a bleaker vision, in which, even after the apocalypse, the teeth of caste are not so easy to unlock.