Science Fiction and American Culture » March 20th: Zone One, “Sunday”

March 20th: Zone One, “Sunday”

Announcements

  • Extra Credit for A Braver Angel Debate: Is the American Dream Still Acheivable?
    (Details might change–I’ll update them)
    • Wednesday, April 9th, 3:00pm-5:30pm (at least come for an hour)
    • Student Union Room TBD
    • Food!!! Registration link: {coming soon}
  • Midterm Participation
    • On Canvas shortly
  • Next week and beyond!

Plan for the Day

  • Finish discussion Zone One, “Sunday” pp. 275-322
  • Focus on topics and how they relate to contemporary life
    • Nihilism
    • The Unexamined Life
    • Occupations
    • Relationships
    • Family
    • Familiarity
    • Walls…

Zone One, “Saturday”

There’s one place in “Saturday” that we should address before moving onto “Sunday.” Pages 265-271 discuss some motivations or rationalizations for killing the “skels.” Let’s go to the bottom of p. 265 and consider how Whitehead explains this:

The four survivors intended to continue their march through the dead world, as they had since Last Night. They terminated the skels, draping their disparate masks over the faces of the damned so they could be certain of who and what they were killing.

Whoa! That requires some unpacking. How do Gary, Kaitlyn, and Mark Spitz (and perhaps the Lieutenant) construct these walking dead? What social commentary is there in their respective constructions of these walking dead? What other text this semester had a similar commentary about supposed “useless” and “lazy” people?

Zone One, “Sunday”

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 (tagline: “The Counterattack on World Supremacy”). 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 1980s or ushered in the 1990s…

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

Some possible quotations to address:

  • p. 275: “Barricades collapsed with haste once exposed for the riddled and rotten things they had always been.”
    • p. 298: “The barrier was abut to fail. It was falling down as it always did.”
    • What are some physical and metaphoric “barricades, barriers, or blocks” in our lives?
  • p. 278: “These stores had opened every morning to serve a clientele extinct even before the plague’s rampage, displaying objects of zero utility on felt behind smudged glass.”
    • What are some useless objects on felt behind glass?
  • p. 282: “He sifted through the failed proofs of afterlife….What kind of cruel deity granted a glimpse of the angelic sphere, only to yank it away and condemn you to a monster’s vantage?
    • What are some other narratives (from class or outside of class) that play with this?
  • p. 285: “Anticiprant had been a second-tier antibiotic in the previous world…”
  • There has to be a COVID-era equivalent.
  • p. 288: There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.”
    • What is he referring to?
  • p. 296: “The terror plot remained the cover story…”
    • Conspiracy theories.
  • p. 300: “After all this time in the abattoir, the survivors were completely inured to the agenda of catastrophe.”
  • p. 302: Fabio in his office: “It doesn’t seem that bad from here.”
  • p. 311: Public relations.

Last Bit(e–ha!) on Zone One

Most of us (including my reading) read the narrator as an omniscient one. However, midway through “Saturday,” the narrator comments on Mark Spitz’s role as if this were a movie, listing some horror tropes, and writes,

I know it sounds crazy, but they came from the radioactive anthill, the sorority girls were dead when I got here, the prehistoric sea creature is your perp….
By his sights, the real movie started after the first one ended, in the impossible return to things before.

Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. Anchor, 2011, p. 166.

Perhaps “I know it sounds crazy…” is an internal monologue Mark Spitz is having that the narrator tells us and doesn’t challenge the omniscient narrator reading. It’s likely that Mark Spitz is actually a straggler going through the motions of clearing blocks. At the very end, we read, “On to the next human settlement, and the one after that” (p. 322). It’s possible the narrator is recounting Mark’s three-day adventure with all the memories that flood into his mind. Just something to consider.

Platonic Forms

Obviously, we English professors spend too much time thinking about words and their uses and their histories and the multiple meanings (polysemy). If we all just agreed on what words meant, we’d be much better off, right? At least some words have single, unambiguous meanings like rights, freedoms, democracy…

I think it’s worth going back–way back–to Plato for this discussion. You’ve no doubt heard of a “platonic relationship,” but are you aware of the platonic forms? Plato believed (or simply argued…more on this in another semester) there were perfect representations of things and ideas. Keep in mind that Plato (via Socrates) believes in absolute truth and that perfect types exist. However, it’s hard to know if Plato believed we could ever reach a full understanding of perfection or good. It seems that we can get close if we’re really devoted to philosophy.

“Plato sought a cure for the ills of society not in politics but in philosophy, and arrived at his fundamental and lasting conviction that those ills would never cease until philosophers became rulers or rulers philosophers.”

Hamilton, Walter. Trans. Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII. Radice, Betty. Ed. New York: Penguin, 1973: 1.

More from Hamilton’s “Introduction” (p. 17):

  • Platonic “Forms, of which shifting phenomena of the sensible world are imperfect imitations or copies…The Forms are in fact universals given the status of independent and absolute entities.”
  • “…there exists a Form for every class of things which can be embraced under a common name, beauty, for example, or triangle or horse.”
  • “The Forms, arranged in a hierarchy at the head of which stands the Form of Good, constitute the only true objects of knowledge….the business of the philosopher is to make use of the reminders of them furnished by a sensible world as a starting-point in [their] pilgrimage back from the changing world of sense and opinion to the eternal world of reality and truth.” (italics mine)

Notice the capitalized words: Forms and Good. Any comment?

Next Week

On Tuesday, March 25, we’re going to have a writing discussion. Your Essay #2, due April 3rd, 11:00pm, has guidelines on Canvas. Come to class with essay ideas on Tuesday. We don’t meet as a class on Thursday (3/27) or Tuesday (4/1), but you’ll have films to watch and notes on this class webpage. Notice that we have two more novels coming up–Octavia Butler’s Dawan and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Disposessed. so arrange life to be able to read these, so you can better participate in class.