The document discusses themes of apocalypse and post-apocalyptic fiction, emphasizing the genre's role in revealing precarious social structures and truths previously hidden. It explores the cultural origins and significance of zombies as symbols of alienation and the human condition, drawing on concepts from various literary and philosophical sources. The text highlights the intersection of horror and societal critique, illustrating how these narratives reflect our anxieties about identity and existence within the global economy.

1. Lecture 3: The End, and Afterwards
English 165EW
Winter 2013
14 January 2013
“The zombie, we feel, is a more pessimistic but nonetheless more
appropriate stand-in for our current moment, and specifically for
America in a global economy, where we feed off the products of the
rest of the planet, and, alienated from our own humanity, stumble
forward, groping for immortality even as we decompose. ”
— Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto:
The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism”

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3. The “Apocalypse”
Pronunciation: /əˈpɒkəlɪps/ Etymology: < Latin apocalypsis,
< Greek ἀποκάλυψις, n. of action < ἀποκαλύπτειν to uncover,
disclose, < ἀπό off + καλύπτειν to cover.
1. (With capital initial.) The ‘revelation’ of the future granted to
St. John in the isle of Patmos. The book of the New
Testament in which this is recorded.
2. By extension: Any revelation or disclosure.
a) Christian Church. The events described in the revelation
of St John; the Second Coming of Christ and ultimate
destruction of the world.
b) More generally: a disaster resulting in drastic, irreversible
damage to human society or the environment, esp. on a
global scale; a cataclysm. Also in weakened use.
(From the Oxford English Dictionary)

4. So what is a “revelation”?
‘To veil’ comes from ME veilen, from the ME n veile,
whence the English noun veil: and ME veile is adopted
from Old N. French, which, like Old French-French voile,
derives from Medieval-Vulgar Latin vēla, from Latin uēla,
plural of uēlum, “a sail,” but also “[a piece of] drapery, an
awning”; originally from Indo-European *wegslom, from
*weg-, “to weave.”
Latin uēlāre has prefix-compound reuēlāre, “to pull back
the curtain, or covering, from,” hence “to disclose”: whence
Old French-Middle French reveler, whence “to reveal.”
Derivative Late Latin reuēlātiō, “an uncovering, hence of a
secret.”
(Adapted from Eric Partridge’s Origins: An
Etymological Dictionary of Modern English)

5. Post-apocalyptic fiction ...
● At the same time, the apocalypse in each of the
works we’re reading this quarter is a revelation
of basic truths that were hidden before the
apocalypse.
● One of the revelations commonly made by
(post-)apocalyptic literature is that “life” and the
social structures that support it are precarious.
● The revelation of the precarity of the social
structures supporting our ways of life is one
way that post-apocalyptic fiction produces the
affective response of horror.

6. So, “the apocalypse” in post-
apocalyptic fiction is ...
● a disaster;
● a radical break from previous ways of living;
● a new beginning, for those who survive; and
● a revelation of previously hidden things.
In what directions does this lead? Some examples:
● Survival fantasies (Day of the Triffids, The Walking Dead).
● Opportunities for starting from scratch (Oryx and Crake).
● Opportunities for redemption, in one sense of another (The
Road).
● Seeing how deep the rabbit-hole of horror goes (Blindness).

7. We’ll talk more about horror on
Wednesday, but a few words now …
Tragedy is “an imitation of a noble and
complete action, having the proper magnitude;
it employs language that has been artistically
enhanced […] it is presented in dramatic, not
narrative form, and achieves, through the
representation of pitiable and fearful incidents,
the catharsis of such pitiable and fearful
incidents.”
“tragedy is not an imitation of men, per se, but
of human action and life and happiness and
misery.”
– Aristotle, Poetics (ca. 330 BCE)

8. “Horror, in this way, shows us our inherent
skepticism about absolute progress. […]
Dracula, The Call of Cthulu, or The Island of Dr.
Moreau present a dark-regressive shadow
image of the bright and progressive veneer of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century optimism.
The origins of modern horror provide a vivid
presentation of the inherent moral weaknesses
and often-present darkness in the human
imagination.”
– Philip Tallon, “Through a Mirror, Darkly” (2010)

9. What about the undead, then?
“Horror arises not because Dracula destroys
bodies, but because he appropriates and
transforms them. Having yielded to his assault,
one literally ‘goes native’ by becoming a
vampire oneself. [Dracula’s victims] receive a
new racial identity, one that marks them as
literally ‘Other.’ Miscegenation leads, not to the
mixing of races, but to the biological and
political annihilation of the weaker race by the
stronger.”
– Stephen Arata, “The Occidental Tourist” (1990)

10. But more specifically, zombies ...
● have their origin, as a cultural construct, in Haitian
Vodou folklore regarding priests/sorcerers who
raise the dead (who are then called zombis) to
work in the fields.
● are thus, from the beginning, figures of laboring
slaves without consciousness.
● also have a deep association with Haitian slave
rebellions, both because Vodou practices during
the slave period were loci for anti-white sentiment
and because Vodou rituals supposedly rendered
soldiers insensitive to pain.

11. Zombies ...
● threaten both the physical body and, even more directly,
the endangered subject’s sense of identity.
● point toward the fact that our senses of subjectivity
depend on our bodies.
● are boundary figures that terrify, in part, because of their
inability to be classified into our normal categories:
● alive/dead
● human/animal
● slave/slave rebellion
● subject/object
● powerless/powerful

12. “Like most monsters, the zombie illuminates our
own discomfort with various kinds of bodies, but
above all it illustrates the ever-present and real
threat of the human body. We are all, in some
sense, walking corpses, because this is inevitably
the state to which we must return. In imagining
that humans are burdened with their own deaths,
we can come to see one of the various ways that
the zombie terrifies: not as an apocalyptic vision
but as a representation of the lived human
condition.”
(Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto”)

13. “The individual is entirely nullified in the face of
the economic powers. These powers are taking
society’s domination over nature to unimagined
heights. While individuals as such are vanishing
before the apparatus they serve, they are
provided for by that apparatus and better than
ever before. In the unjust state of society the
powerlessness and pliability of the masses
increase with the quantity of goods allocated to
them.”
– Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, preface
to Dialectic of Enlightenment (xvii)