A Zombie Zeitgeist

“Future Imperfect: The Clock Strikes Midnight” (J. Edward Farnum Lecture)
Cosponsored by the Committee on Canadian Studies
Oct. 16th at 8:00PM in McCosh 50
Free admission

Margaret Atwood delivered her recent lecture at the top of her form. Still spry, the 72-year wasn’t too busy making quips about the presidential debates or the world of advertising to come to grips with the significance of the Monster in culture. Her focus was of course on the modern monster myth which seems to have utterly captured the zeitgeist: the Zombie Apocalypse.

With the possible exception of Giant Squids, all of the monsters that we imagine are entirely our own creations, and so they are interesting for what they say about us or the spirit of the age in which they were created. Atwood listed the “pros” and “cons” of various monsters — from Grendel to Dracula to, of course, the Zombie. The Vampire may represent sexuality, or tuberculosis, or tubercular sexuality. Grendel sits on the transition between paganism and Christianity — seeing as he is the son of a dragon who just happens to be descended from Cain of the Bible.

According to Atwood, the meaning of the Zombie might not be so clear. Maybe the shuffling hordes of undead are really just our fear of the youth — the unemployed, the aimless, the discontented product of a half-century of neglect — who want to occupy our banks, and maybe eat our brains.

Or maybe the Zombie is an escapist fantasy — in an odd way, they have achieved a sort of transcendence from time; it might not be so bad to be a Zombie after all. Atwood, however, thinks that what the Zombies really lack, and what we require, is hope. A hope for what? She doesn’t say.

This is where this humble reviewer thinks Atwood is really at her best: describing the present by speaking about that which has not happened (yet). Regardless of how you decide to classify it — Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Fiction, Text — this is what Atwood is most known for in the lay world — works like Oryx and Crake and the Handmaid’s Tale.

Atwood is still a serious author, and most of her work doesn’t fall into the realm of sci-fi or fantasy, labels she herself is uncomfortable with, yet she’s done more than almost anyone else to drag “genre” writing out of the Pulp Ghetto. After all, it’s not common for a book to win both the Arthur C. Clark Award and be a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, as the Handmaid’s Tale was.

Atwood, once the enfant terrible of Canadian literature, now its elder statesman, is still willing to challenge boundaries and wrestle with the Accursed Questions of Death, Life, Time, Meaning, and the Soul. If a writer wants to speak to an audience about these, she might feel that it’s best to talk in the idiom of that generation — and if that means speaking about Zombies, so be it. Atwood, at any rate, is up to the challenge.