13 Ways of Looking at a Zombie

I

That “indecipherable cause” to which Wallace Stevens alludes is his poem: might that be zombie?

Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was on the eye of a zombie. etc.

Find and replace in the rest of Stevens’s poem: blackbird for blackbird, zombie for zombie. Discuss zombie as a gloss on Stevens’s birds. How are all those indecipherable birds—in Hitchcock’s film, too—really the quintessence of Z?

That uncountable, indecipherable Not-I belongs to Z. Cog-Z-to ergo non. The Z ≠ you. Until it isn’t. Then, still: the Z ≠ you. The grievance is that there’s no zomb-cogito. Z is always less than (<) human, less than non-Z; and, then the point is (the ironic reveal) that Z is less than and equal to (≤) non-Z. In its most distilled form, the Z-morality/mortality tale as tragedy runs in three acts:

Act One: not-Z ≠ Z

(they’re not us; the absolute other, living death)

Act Two: not-Z > Z

(they’re us, in ruined form)

Act Three: not-Z ≥ Z

(“we’re them, they’re us”; we’re ruined)

The answer to infection may be in this first zombie research plan.

II

Diminished, mysterious yet machine-like in motility, Z is that play-thing on the doorstep. H. P. Lovecraft has much to say about gooey juvenile attachment—attachments that tend to run to fanboyish nerdcore—but, for that matter, so does the official “bio” on the Lego website. When the Lego Zombie Minifig arrives on the doorstep, you have nothing to fear, the web copy says:

Slow in speed and even slower of mind, the lumbering [Zombie Minifig] may look a little scary, but he’s completely harmless in every way…. The only thing that seems to motivate him is his cherished turkey leg—if you dangle it in front of him, he’ll stretch his arms out toward it and follow it wherever it goes.

III

Z makes an issue of speed. Mindless and repetitive, slow Z are like old people, only older. Z never learned to program the VCR. Nor is Z deep Googling the Internets. Grandpa Zimpson: the Z with a cane in Romero’s Day of the Dead; Z on a mobility scooter. Compare fast Z. Even when fast, Z is slow. Ever more numerous and persistent, the individual Z is a tortoise. As demography, Z are like rabbits. Z is a cipher of demography.

IV

Wither the Z pronoun? Is it ever a he or a she? Can we talk about a punitive regime of Z gender stereotypes? Does gender matter to Z? Who’s the other of the Z? What about their other folkloric cousins from the tail end of horror alphabet, the vampire, perhaps, or the werewolf, or the yeti, for that matter? On a syncretic vampire substrate in the Z corpus, see Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend (1954), for instance, Romero’s inspiration, where hope is pinned on vampirism playing out as a treatable contagion. Before the human “I” gets washed out in the rising seas of evolutionary change, the “I” achieves a heroic moment of singularity (we’re all living in an a capital “I”) before a V court of law. Poe’s “Facts in the Case M. Valdemar” (1845) cancels the human “I” another way—in the language of a proposition that can’t be spoken, according to Roland Barthes: “I’m Zombie” means “Kill me!”

V

On the possibility that Z can be “lived with” as pets, see Fido (2006) or Shawn of the Dead (2004). Consider Heidegger’s notion that animals have no grasp of being-towards-death. Or, the assumption that Z don’t eat each other. So filthy is Z, Z won’t even eat Z. This bears on the ontological otherness of Z even unto themselves. They eat next to—they parasite, to invoke Michel Serres—but Z are finicky eaters. The relation is not reciprocal. That “turkey” leg in the hand of the Lego Minifig points to the relentless zombiacal drive for food sources. Does Z get...