Braaaiiinnnsss!: From Academics to Zombies

Cultural Narratives of Blood

71 Cultural Narratives of Blood Marina Levina Blood is liquid life. It is the most intimate liquid and a powerful medicine all of us can give and hope to receive. The idea of blood reaches deep into our consciousness. If you look at the history of blood, it is really the history of self-discovery of the human race. This series traces a long and bloody struggle to master the precious juice that flows inside us. Blood permeates all aspects of life, because blood is life. Blood has become a medical commodity and a miracle cure, but also a contaminated harbinger of death. For better or worse, if you control blood, you control life itself. (Red Gold: The Epic Story of Blood) It started off as rioting. But right from the beginning you knew this was different, because it was happening in small villages, market towns … and then it wasn’t on TV anymore. It was on the street outside . It was coming through your windows. It was a virus, an infection . You didn’t need a doctor to tell you that. It was the blood or something in the blood. By the time they tried to evacuate the cities , it was already too late. The infection was everywhere. The army blockades were overrun, and that’s when the exodus started. The Cultural Narratives of Blood 72 day before the TV stopped broadcasting, there were reports of infection in Paris and New York. You didn’t hear anything more after that. (28 Days Later) Zombies are everywhere. And we are trying to make sense of them. We create stories—fictional and not so fictional—to explain this yet-to-be-understood threat. To understand cultural narratives of zombie outbreaks, we must understand stories that we tell about blood itself. The dangers of zombies have been firmly connected in the public imagination with the fear of the “other” and possible contamination by their blood or essence. A zombie outbreak is firmly tied to the concept of tainted blood and illustrates the difficulty of containing an epidemic threat. Narratives of zombie outbreaks are tied to cultural fears that tainted or infected blood will contaminate our bodies and communities. In turn, fears of tainted blood are tied to a deep-seated, historical and cross-cultural understanding of blood as a source of our selves and our souls. Here, blood is life: a fluid that determines everything about our bodies and identities. Our humanity is seen as inextricably tied to blood and thus is unalterable, for blood penetrates every part of our body and cannot be easily replaced. Nelkin (1999, 275) identifies four repeated and related themes around which blood metaphors cluster: blood as the essence of personhood; blood exchange practices as a symbol of community solidarity; blood as a source of danger and risk; and, finally, “the concept of pure blood” as “extend[ing] well beyond the properties of a biological substance to include references to social relationships and moral as well as physical contamination.” Zombie outbreaks are portrayed as a struggle to keep our bodies, and by extension our identities and communities, safe from contact with dangerous, or tainted, blood. The war on zombies is therefore a war on infected blood itself. Blood was considered to be the seat of the soul and was viewed by many philosophers as the soul’s principal tool (Camporesi 1995). The body could also be rejuvenated through various forms of consumption of young, and therefore innocent , blood. For example, Camporesi notes, the sixteenth century surgeon Jean Tagault observed that flesh can be renewed Marina Levina 73 through consumption or transfusion of good blood, which is “vicious neither in quality nor in quantity” (19). According to Camporesi, around the same time physicians, apothecaries, charlatans, and great intellectuals [of the day] all agreed: the blood of a fresh, delicate man, one well-tempered in his humours, someone young, soft, and blooming with red, “bloody” fat—a fleshy man, of a “jovial” temperament and “cordial ” character, preferably having red hair [associated with the colour of blood]—enjoyed the indisputable primacy when it came to the slowing of the aging process. (17) The ancient Egyptians bathed in blood to regain youth and witches in the Middle Ages were thought to drink the blood of the young to keep their powers (Nelkin 1999). Nicolae Ceauşescu, the infamous and hypochondriacal Romanian dictator , was rumoured to keep little boys in...