Science Fiction and American Culture » October 9th: Zone One (Part II)

October 9th: Zone One (Part II)

Plan for the Day

  • Midterm Grades
  • Cultural Satire in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One
    • Zombies
    • The hero, anti-hero, and pseudo-hero (???)

We’re going to discuss Colson Whitehead’s Zone One today and finish up on Wednesday. In last week’s discussion post, many of you recognized the cultural work postapocalyptic* narratives do in reflecting our (possibly) collective anxieties about the environment, social collapse, machine automation, and mass somnambulism. Try to expand upon that by participating in class discussions. I haven’t read or watched EVERYTHING out there dealing with postapocalyptic themes, so your experiences are important to bridge unfamiliar texts with our course materials.

*post-apocalyptic vs postapocalyptic: come to ENGL 4183 “Editing with Digital Technologies” to learn about hyphens with similar words.

Zone One, “Friday”

We’re reading this book (and all our readings) to consider them from a cultural perspective. Yes, Whitehead wrote a cool story; yes, his language is poetic and stylish; yes, he hates Connecticut. But the bigger picture–how we can related this to contemporary American culture of the previous decade–provides us a much richer appreciation of the text. In order to maximize your appreciation, you need to read between the lines to locate the American values that Whitehead both highlights directly and comments on subtlety.

We’ve all lived through a “plague,” the COVID-19 pandemic, so I know you can make connections to that; however, let’s hold off (if possible) from commenting on COVID-19 today and save it for Wednesday. Remember, this was published in 2011: post-Obama’s election and post-2008 “Great Recession.”

Epigraph: “the gray layer of dust covering things has become their best part” (p.1)
From Walter Benjamin’s essay “Dream Kitsch.” For now, it’s less important to discuss Benjamin’s essay, but you should know what kitsch is. Those of you in art history have your time to shine!

  • p. 8: “[Mark Spitz] was adrift on that gentle upper-middle-class current that kept its charges cheerfully bobbing far from the shoals of responsibility.”
  • p. 10: “Two days into kindergarten, for example, he attained the level of socialization deemed appropriate for those of his age and sociological milieu…with a minimum of fuss.”
  • p. 14: “The mistake lay in succumbing to the prevailing delusions.”
  • pp. 20-21: On Human Resources–“…served the places where human beings were paraphrased into numbers components of bundled data to be shot out through fiber-optic cable toward meaning.”
  • p. 22: “An indivisible barrier surrounded his zip code, each opportunity to escape was undermined by his certainty that things were about to go back to normal.” (emphasis added)
  • p. 25: “They’d wrestled Mark Spitz out of his fatigues the way he’d pried meat out of claws, tails, shells.”
    • There is definitely a comment on eating meat that runs through many Zombie narratives.
  • p. 31: The monotony of “the dead.”
  • p. 35: On chain restaurants…
    • “Plenty of American restaurants with a majority American clientele served crap American fare.”
      • Think about Applebee’s
      • What about cream cheese in sushi?
    • The purpose of mentioning this isn’t to dwell on your likes and dislikes but to think critically about so-called ethnic restaurants in the United States.
    • Italian chain on American cuisine: Old Wild West … another report on the place.
  • p. 37: “[Buffalo was] keen for the sweepers to record demographic data: the ages of the targets, the density at the specific location, structure type, number of floors.
  • p. 39: “…servitude to the obsolete directives of an obsolete world.”
  • p. 42: The Grid–“The truths of the grids rectilinear logic….Gangs of high-rises in Southwest municipalities….tourist mills.”
    • What’s living “on the grid” and “off the grid”?
  • p. 45: “…his head was suddenly encased in lead and his vision went on the fritz.”
  • p. 69: “P-A-S-D”…past.
    • Think about one’s past and how your experiences in life make you who you are today.
    • Also, on this page, notice the way they refer to the dead body as “it,” yet they gender them before death. In fact, one might claim they eroticize the dead in some cases.
  • p.95: Flâneur

Now that I’ve got us started, continue to the end of “Friday” (p. 128).

“Saturday” (pp. 129-271)

The epigraph for “Saturday,” “the age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace,” comes from Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.”

Possible Set up for “Sunday”–the Final Section

There’s a World War Z (2013) scene “Escaping Israel” with a zombie horde that might be worth watching. Try to watch this not for the suspenseful action but what you can relate it to metaphorically. Notice the plane, the runway, the burning city…

Also, the section epigraph, “Move as a team, never move alone: Welcome to the Terrordome” (p. 273) comes from “Welcome to the Terrordome,” a song from Public Enemy’s 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet. This the last line of the last verse, proceeded by “Dropping a bomb, brain game, intellectual Vietnam.” That should take a while to unpack. Here are the lyrics from this 5 min 30 sec song,** which either concluded the 1990s or ushered in the 1990s…

**We had longer attention spans and better music 30+ years ago.

Next Class

We’re going to finish up Zone One on Wednesday, so make sure you read to the end to know how the aliens come to save Mark Spitz. Your Weekly Discussion Posts are due on Fridays at 11:00pm now, so don’t blow those off because they’re now worth 27.5 points each.