Jon Bannan
ENG 209: Short Essay Final
Dr. Brown
3/12/12
The Living Dead: On the Rise
There has been a rising trend, literally and figuratively, in the world
of literature. That trend is the rise of zombies. Zombies are quickly
becoming the new symbols for a new era in literature. They can be used
as symbols for almost everything; fear, death, mortality, emotion and
even life after death. With zombies quickly becoming symbols that can
represent so much the amount of literature about them and around them
has dramatically increased. They can make the most mundane story into
one of intense suspense and horror on the emotional level but there is
something deeper going on that you truly must look into the
sub-conscious of what the zombies actually mean.This essay will focus on the aspect that not many scholars have focused on before, how does the rise of zombie literature effect the human view of mortality in contemporary literature? There has been much academic discussion about what zombies themselves mean as symbols but there has been almost no academic discussion on these zombies/symbols have effected not only the characters view of mortality in their works but also how it effects the human reader of the novels’ view of their own mortality. In this paper I will examine the evidence presented in three very different formats that display and give explanation as to how this can and has effected the way humans who now read this new literature. The three primary works I will use as my examples for this paper are; World War Z by Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks, and The Living Dead, a collection of short stories edited together by John Joseph Adams. Each book presents the living dead in a very different and interesting interaction between what we would consider humans and zombies. The interaction finally shows us that humans have found an object, “the zombie”, to define the afterlife which until this literature rose had a certain unknown factor that is scarier to humans than zombies.
For
this paper we will define human as one “who has the ability to reason
and does not actively participate in the act of cannibalism.” For the
definition of zombie in this paper we will use the definition of “a
human who has 1. been declared legally dead and 2. has come back to
life and now has the desire to participate in the act of cannibalism.”
For the rest of this essay that is how we will define the terms human
and zombie. There are several different definitions floating through
the academic conversation on zombies. The definition I provide above is
what I understand zombies to be, so it is important to refer to this
farther on in the paper. Next we will take a look at the three main
texts I will use in this paper to define and clearly show how the
evolution of zombies in contemporary literature has effected the nature
of humans’ views of their own mortality.
The first text is World War Z
by Max Brooks. The books is set in the near future after a zombie
apocalypse has occurred. The world is a very different place from the
one we would know, the “author” starts out telling us that he is an
United Nations official. The books original intent was to be an
official report on what had come to be known as “World War Z”, the
author states this in the beginning that when he told his boss that
“these stories couldn’t die”(Brooks 2). His boss then tells him, “Then
don’t. Write a book. You’ve still got all your notes and the legal
freedom to use them. Who’s stopping you from keeping these stories
alive in the page of your own (expletive deleted) book?”(Brooks 2, 2009)
This books is conducted in an interview type style with the author
asking questions to several different types of people including;
doctors, soldiers, pharmacist, and politicians. The book covers from
the very start of the infection to the last days of the infection when
the war was considered to be over. We will come back to this book after
the introductions of the other two primary texts.The next primary text we will be using to study the subject of the zombie’s affect on human views of mortality is The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From The Living Dead by Max Brooks. This book says that “It is for them that this survival guide is written- private citizens, people with limited time and resources who nonetheless have refused to be victimized”(Brooks xiv, 2003) The book itself is packed full of different survival techniques depending on where you live but that is not what I will be using in this paper. With these survival techniques, it also includes several mindset techniques and psychology tips to keep oneself sane during the zombie apocalypse, again we will refer back to this tips and techniques later in the paper after the introduction of the last text I will be using.
The final text I will be using is The Living Dead a collection of short stories edited together by John Joseph Adams. The collection features some of, what are considered to be the best, zombie short stories by a wide range of authors from around the world. Due to this, when some of these stories are referenced accompanying them may be some cultural background information to explain cultural view points. This collection also offers an interesting perspective because not all of the stories are told from the human perspective, many stories are told from the perspectives of the zombies themselves. This adds an interesting detail because the people writing these stories are obviously human, so how they perceive what a zombie’s thought process or views is an interesting one and one that is critical to my argument. To understand how these works function we will first look at how they address the nature of being human.
All three works address the human condition in a very different way. World War Z clearly shows that at one point humans feel that they are the superior beings on Earth. The character that clearly shows this is a Chinese doctor named Kwang Jingshu as he discusses what he saw when he was first made aware of the rising situation. He has been called out to a small village because the villages said they have had some kind of an accident. He leaves his large city hospital and as he heads toward the small village he says what can be considered to be the most revealing line of how humans feel about themselves and their nations. “After centuries of foreign oppression, exploitation, and humiliation, we were finally reclaiming our rightful place as humanity’s middle kingdom. We were the world’s richest and most dynamic superpower, masters of everything from outer space to cyber space.” (Brooks 6, 2009) Clearly Dr. Jingshu thinks that humans are superior to everything in nature. Other characters in this book have very similar view points. Another very interesting view point that is presented come from the character Grover Carlson, who was an assistant to the US president at the time of the outbreak. He states this clearly when he says, “Can you “solve” disease, unemployment, war or any other social herpes? Hell no. All you can hope for is to make them manageable enough to allow people to get on with their lives.” (Brooks 61,2009) Clearly we can see that he is saying that humans just manage things in nature enough to live with them or use them to their own advantage not detriment. All you have to do is look at recent history to see that this is clearly a trend in the human/nature relationship, one of the best examples of this is the oil use. Clearly this is an example of how humans feel they are superior to their natural environment. This is where what we define zombies as become very important when we look at the human zombie relationship.
According to the Zombie Survival Guide’s definition of zombie, they are, “1. an animated corpse that feeds on living human flesh 2. a voodoo spell that raises the dead.”(Brooks 1, 2003) Clearly according to this definition zombies are a man made phenomenon that effects man in a negative way. Yet according to World War Z the phenomenon of humans rising from the dead is initially attributed to “African rabies” (Brooks 56, 2009) then later in the book the disease is properly named “Solanum”. The Zombie Survival Guide uses the same disease to explain what causes zombies. The disease solanum source is unknown and according to the survival guide, “Unfortunately, extensive research has yet to find an isolated example of Sonlanum in nature. Water, air, and soil in all ecosystems, from all parts of the world, have turned up negative, as have their accompanying flora and fauna. At the time of this writing the search continues.” (Brooks 3, 2003) Clearly we see that man in the contemporary zombie literature does not understand the natural world around him any more. We can see this in our every day life, we have moved away from the hunter-gather societies we used to live in to be a supply and demand lifestyle. Humans live in huge cities will almost all evidence of nature removed from their daily lives. There are very few places left on this earth, that nature truly rules by itself, good examples of these places are the South American jungles and the vast plains, jungles, and deserts that make up Africa. This is clearly part of why humans fear zombies so much, they are a part of nature that humans can not control. So now that we have laid the ground work for the human-zombie relationship we can dive into the complex world that is the human psyche and how the fictional horror monster effects what humans perceive as their own mortality.
The view of mortality varies by person to person but there are some general overall beliefs that each person should be able to find within their range of view on their mortality. Many of these views would only hold true in a developed country with established health services because this is where humans belief of mortality is first taught to them. The health systems in most countries teach you that can prevent the decline of your body by eating the right things, exercising at the right times and keeping your life generally germ free. So indoctrinated are these humans into this system in developed countries, that they rarely consider death an event that can occur to younger people. Death is also taught with a certain finality about it, once you are dead your body stops functioning and eventually that body will decay away to nothing. There are a number of things that humans believe can happen to their spiritual selves depending on what religious if any beliefs they subscribe to but for the sake of this paper we will not be getting into a spiritual debate about religion but more of a debate on what we can percieve as effects on the human mind and how this changes the human view of itself.
According to Julia Tanney in her article “On the Conceptual, Psychological, and Moral Status of Zombies, Swamp-Beings, and Other 'Behaviourally Indistinguishable' Creatures.” “For if a creature could be physically, functioning, and behaviorally indistinguishable from humans (in the rich sense implied) yet lack conscious experience, then the theories of mind that tie the nature of the mental too closely to physical, functional, or behavioural conditions will seem to have left something crucially mental out of their theories.”(Tanney 174) Clearly Tanney shows us how conscious experience plays such an important role in helping humans define who they are not only as a species but also as an individual within a species. This is where we can see what really disturbs humans about the entire zombie literature. Zombies have no individuality for most of what is written out there. They are mindless, un-stopping eating machines. We, as humans, are raised to believe that we are each individuals with our own identities, personalities and experiences. To be faced with a creature that was human and now is just a mindless pawn in what is a greater horde of mindless creatures is just to much for some people to bear, so they ignore it. This is truly a scary thought, however we have seen some groups try to “humanize”(for lack of a better term) zombies. In a report done by CBS News titled Zombie popularity on the rise produced by Michelle Miller, we see discussion of how zombies are quickly becoming a pop-culture icon because of their rise in contemporary literature. They show a “zombie parade” in which people dress as zombies, this is where we see the culture trying to soften the blow of what is a potentially very damaging realization. Zombies would not act this way, the humans are aware of one another and tailor their behavior accordingly. Zombies would not do this, their would be no “group mentality” there would only be natural instinct and humans today can not understand or choose to try to comprehend this concept.
The one theme that we see repeated over and over again but is almost never stated is the theory that “the reason humans fear zombies so much is their lack of individual purpose, they lack a self-awareness that has been ingrained into normal humans”. This is one of the theories that I have come up with after reading much of what is considered to the more popular works of zombie fiction in contemporary literature. The realization of this thesis came to be when the character of General D’Ambrosia stated the following “For the first time in history, we faced an enemy that was actively waging total war. They had no limits of endurance. They would never negotiate, they would never surrender. They would fight until the very end, because unlike us, every single one of them, every second of every day, was devoted to consuming all life on earth.” (Brooks 273, 2007) The concept of total war, for those who are unaware, is the concept that every individual of a society is only taking actions that will help with the war effort. Clearly if one studies just one war from world history or even our own American history of wars, we can see that total war is impossible, there are and will always be objectors to war, with zombies in literature this is none of this. Clearly this bothers humans because as a species we are able to choose what we devote our lives, talents, personalities, and minds too. Zombies are not allowed to make this choice, they are devoted to one cause and one cause only. So clearly we see that this is what the fear of zombies plays off, the lack of individually.
This individually is what allows us as humans to choose what we believe in this life, religion and our morals that we live by. According to Chiquita Collins and David Williams in their article “Segregation and Mortality: The Deadly Effects of Racism?” “Each individual makes the judgement of race and moral basis on how they where reared and who surrounded them”(Collins 519) This is evidence clearly shows that by the time we are adults we have a clear sense of who we are, and this defines how we view our own death and what we expect out of the after life. With each individual having their own concept of their mortality it has become a highly idealized concept that is characterized as distinctly human. This is where we can see how zombies create so much fear.
The one accepted fact of this mortality view is that eventually this body that we inhabit will no longer function. Science tells us that this is a known fact and religions tell us that this is the pivotal turning point in becoming closer to God in the after life. So how does a rational human being with their own sense of mortality deal with a creature that is physically identical to a human but has no high concepts of mortality or anything else for that matter? This is the question that humans ask when they read zombie literature, how can these creatures essentially be the same species as I, yet they act so much more animistic than a normal human? When a human reads this literature and asks themselves this question that can lead to a very disturbing answer, at the end of the day we like to believe that we have put behind or are able to control our animal instincts. The zombie takes this theory and completely destroys it. Zombies show that with one little tweak of our biological bodies, the animalistic nature of ourselves can be released uncontrollably and the only way to stop it is to destroy the only thing that we as humans understand to separate us from the animals, our large brains. One of Max Brooks characters even comments on this realization in World War Z, “Funny isn’t it? To destroy the animal that is a zombie, we have to destroy what we consider to put us above the animals, our brain.”(Brooks 152, 2007) Clearly the fear that zombies now generate and that the culture is now trying to soften the blow of is that, at our basic levels we are all animals, our high brain function allows us to suppress our animal instincts but we still have them. When our high thinking patterns are destroy we revert to our most basic animal instincts with no morals or sense of our own mortality that we like to think puts us in a class above the animals.
In conclusion we can clearly see how the questions that a normal, rational human being would naturally raise during the reading of any type of zombie literature would bring into question their own morality. The zombie inhabits a special place in this society because it reminds us of how developed we are as humans, yet at the same time zombies show how close humans truly are at the basic level to the animals they feel they rule over everyday. The fear that we see generated from zombie is not from fear of an actual creature in nature, it is the fear of what the zombies in contemporary literature show our basic nature to be. When readers see this basic nature revealed to them is such a shock because in other types of literature at the basic level all those characters have some shred of human mortality in them, in contemporary zombie literature there is no shred of humanity left. That is why we see these “Zombie parades” as reported in Michelle Miller’s report on CBS as mentioned above, they are clearly our society’s attempt to put a humanized face on these creatures that are physically so much a like us but at the end of the day they shows us what we are truly afraid of. That when it comes down to it all of our thoughts about morals and our own mortality can all lead us to believe that we are superior to animals because at the end of the day we are still animals and we possess all of our animal instincts. We have just been able to suppress them with our high thinking and theories. This is how zombies effect our human thinking about our mortality, the literature truly reveals to us that we must remember that our mortality views are only worth so much in this world. This is why when reading contemporary literature about zombies, humans have truly started to question what their mortality means to them.
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