Art – The Bibliolater

An Oral History of the Zombie War

Max Brooks

All Posts Contain Spoilers

Any reader of books knows that the books you love, the books you proselytize, the books you recommend to people at parties and display proudly on your shelves, say almost as much about you as you might about them. And, of course, some kinds of books are more rewarding, in terms of what they say about you, than others.

Masterpieces make for lousy social accessories. These are the Books Everyone Thinks Are Great. No matter how much you may love a classic, no one will think better of you for it, for the simple reason that they all also believe that they love the classics. Loving these books is no feat, because it requires no personal judgement at all. You won’t ever impress anyone by loving ‘Hamlet’.

Some books, it’s fun to love them because everyone knows that they ought to love them, but no one has actually read them. We can think of these as the Books You Love So That You Can Show You’ve Read Them. This is how people who actually like Proust get to feel all the time*.

*I’m not one of these people.

And then there are the books which no one expects anyone to enjoy, because they aren’t fun at all. These are Books Which Show Character. It’s really fun to love these books, because then people think that you have unexplored depths, that you must know something that they don’t know, or that you possess a tortured, artistic soul. Imagine how fun it would be to announce that your favorite book was, oh, ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’.

But my own personal favorite category, in terms of social accessorizing via reading list, is Secretly Great Books Everyone Else Thinks Are Trash. I’m a little contrarian, so it gives me enormous (and, yes, extremely juvenile) pleasure to go to bat for books which everyone else thinks are Beach Reading, to argue that these books are, instead, Great Art.

So here I go: I think that ‘World War Z‘ is Great Art.

I’m not exaggerating for effect – I love this book. I think it’s magnificent. I’ve now read it three times, and I like it better every time I read it. No, I love it better every time I read it, and I refuse to be ashamed of this fact.

‘World War Z‘ is, as advertised, the oral history of the Zombie War. It is a collection of the personal reminiscences of the survivors, from all over the world, from the ordinary citizens who witnessed it to the presidents and generals who prosecuted it. It covers the entire war, from the first few cases, the handling (or mishandling) of the outbreak by various nations, the desperate flight of millions of people from the cities, the overwhelming and near extinction of the human race, and the eventual beating back, the destruction, of the zombie menace.

I love this book. I love this book because it is so smart. It’s smart and it’s thorough, thought-out and careful and precise and imagined down to the last detail.

I’m going to land on this point with a little more emphasis, because I am sure that most people unfamiliar with this work (or, heaven forfend, people who saw the movie) would be surprised, perhaps, to hear ‘smart’ as the primary description of a book about, uh, zombies. Literal zombies.

But that’s the thing about smart – it can work with anything, can make something brilliant out of starting material which is, well, stupid.

Zombies have never been my favorite metaphor. All the ghouls and goblins have their metaphorical purpose, the existential conundrum they were written to pose to us. Vampires are about the price of immortality; werewolves are about our inner beasts. Ghosts are about death (obviously). Zombies are about humanity, what makes us human, whether it’s our bodies or our minds. Zombies (usually) ask the essential question: when do our loved ones stop being themselves? When can we let them go? When are we willing to destroy them? Could you shoot your mother in the face, to save yourself? Your child? Your spouse?

But that’s not what ‘World War Z‘ asks, not exactly. ‘World War Z’ is a novel of geopolitics; it is a novel of logistics. Its nearest analog, to my mind, is Asimov’s ‘Foundation‘ trilogy. It’s a novel about how societies cope with unimagined and unmanageable threats, threats that come from within. Arational threats.

I recognize that this is not ‘Walking Dead’-sexy, but it’s a lot smarter. And it’s more interesting, more fun to read. There aren’t any hand-to-hand battles with zombies here, no slow, wrenching transformations of loved ones. This isn’t a book about people as individuals; it’s a book about people as nations, people as animals.

And it’s plausible, super plausible. It’s the kind of the book that makes you feel as though, if a zombie apocalypse happens, it’ll look a lot like this. Not the way it will look to you (or to a bunch of people way better-looking or tougher than you), but how it will look from above, how it will look on a grand scale.

This is so much more interesting than watching a bunch of grubby people scramble around in the woods. Zombies just aren’t that interesting as an interpersonal problem, but as a logistical problem, they are fascinating. They are both a disease and an enemy, a contagion and an infiltration. And ‘World War Z‘ captures this so well, holding the problem up to the light and holding it this way and that, so that you can admire facets of it that you’ve never noticed before.

I’ll give you an example, perhaps my favorite example, of a really great tweak to the old zombie problem. It comes in the middle of the book, as the tide begins to turn.

(Remember that the book is structured as a series of interviews)

“The biggest problem were quislings.

Quislings?

Yeah, you know, the people that went nutballs and started acting like zombies.

Could you elaborate?

Well, as I understand it, there’s a type of person who just can’t deal with a fight-or-die situation. They’re always drawn to what they’re afraid of. Instead of resisting it, they want to please it, join it, try to be like it…But you couldn’t do it in this war. You couldn’t just throw up your hands and say, ‘Hey, don’t kill me, I’m on your side.’ There was no gray area in this fight, no in between. I guess some people just couldn’t accept that. It put them right over the edge. They started moving like zombies, sounding like them, even attacking, trying to eat other people…Do you know that quislings were the reason some people used to think they were immune?…I think the saddest thing about them is that they gave up so much and in the end lost anyway.

Why is that?

‘Cause even though we can’t tell the difference between them, the real zombies can. Remember early in the war, when everybody was trying to work on a way to turn the living dead against one another? There was all this ‘documented proof’ about infighting – eyewitness accounts and even footage of one zombie attacking another. Stupid. It was zombies attacking quislings, but you never would have known that to look at it. Quislings don’t scream. They just lie there, not even trying to fight, writhing in that slow, robotic way, eaten alive by the very creatures they’re trying to be. (p. 198)

You have to admit, that is brilliant. It’s better than brilliant: it’s correct. It is a true observation about humans, but placed in an entirely fictional, terrifying, absurd context. Or, to be more precise, it is an entirely fictional, terrifying, absurd context which draws your attention to a true observation about humans you had already made, but had never really understood.

That’s what science fiction is for. That’s what it does: reteaches you things you already knew, or should have known. This is also, by the way, what Great Art does. And I will defend as Great Art any book which takes something you thought you knew, no matter how stupid, and then twists and turns it back around on you, so that you discover that you were looking at yourself all along.

By Chris Kraus

All Posts Contain Spoilers

Have you ever been at an art museum, standing in front of a Pollack or a Mondrian or some other modern masterpiece, and overheard some idiot say, “I could’ve painted that”? And did you then feel a stab of rage towards that idiot, because a) even if they could have painted it, they didn’t and b) they definitely could not have painted it. And did you pity them a little, even while you condemned them, for the fact that, by saying something so cretinous out loud and in public, they had inadvertently revealed that not only were they too stupid to create great art, they were too stupid even to understand it? And did you silently congratulate yourself on your sophistication and humility, on your own ability to see the enormous amount of skill and learning and vision that lies behind deceptively simple art?

Well, I definitely have. I have, at this point, spent decades feeling superior to imagined masses of people who believe they could have been de Kooning. In fact, my own (self-witnessed) appreciation of art has become a part of who I believe myself to be: I am the sort of person who would never stand in a museum and confuse myself with Rothko. I appreciate the vast distance between my own artistic abilities and those of the masters. I am Someone who Respects Great Art.

All of which made it a little alarming for me to read ‘I Love Dick‘, by Chris Kraus this week and think, over and over again, “I could have written this.”

‘I Love Dick‘ was Kraus’s first book. Published in 1997, it is an epistolary novel, a series of letters from a woman “Chris Kraus” (and her husband, “Sylvère”) to “Dick”, her husband’s friend, with whom she has fallen in love. Quotation marks aside, the novel was apparently in part a memoir; Kraus was married to Sylvère Lontringer and the eponymous Dick was later identified as the cultural critic Dick Hebdige.

However, the novel isn’t really about either of those men – it’s about Kraus, and about the impoliteness of frank female desire. It’s about how, when your culture will not recognize your legitimate desires, it robs you and your desires of dignity. It is about the way that women in unreciprocated lust are ridiculous in our culture (“debased”, to use Kraus’s word). It is Kraus’s attempt to take back her own dignity by fully inhabiting that debasement.

I loved ‘I Love Dick‘, and when I say, “I could have written this”, I don’t mean it the way the imbecile standing in front of a Rothko means it. I didn’t mean, “I could have written this because it seems so easy, so amateurish”. I mean, “I could have written this because I have felt this.” I mean, “This is true to my lived experience in a way that feel so precise, so accurate, that I feel spied upon.” I mean, “I am so glad that someone wrote this, and I only wish that it had been me”.

‘I Love Dick‘ is considered an important feminist text (The Guardian called it “the most important book about men and women written in the last century”), but, if I am being honest, I don’t think I would have picked up ‘I Love Dick’ if it weren’t clear from the title that it was going to be funny.

I’m a feminist, but, like many women, I’m also a victim of the pervasive misogynistic brainwashing which has caused us to equate feminist literature with hectoring shrillness, a certainty that you are about to be lectured by an angry woman who doesn’t approve of you. For this reason, I have tended to avoid “feminist texts” and it is only lately that I have begun to feel that I am missing something.

Part of the problem is that I don’t usually experience books “as a woman”. If that sounds slightly nonsensical to you, you would be right: I am a woman, and therefore I quite literally experience all books as a woman. But my own womanhood is not the most salient lens through which I experience literature. It is rare that my femininity, my life lived within this gender, is the best tool I have for connecting with a text.

Another part of the problem may have been my age. The desire to be unique is more the province of the young. I think, as we get older, we long more for the universal. When I was young, I was interested in my own experience, as a woman or otherwise. I was absorbed in my own story, in the specialness of it. I wasn’t interested the ordinariness of my femininity. I didn’t want to be like everyone else.

Uniqueness is lonely, though, even if it is self-imposed. As I get older, I long to be more like other women, to see myself in their story and see them in mine.

But I found that I did read ‘I Love Dick‘ in large part as a woman. It is as a woman that I was best able to understand what Kraus felt as she thrashed around in love, and shame, and fear. And it is as a woman that I was best able to relate to her desire to understand, articulate, and express herself. And it was a tremendous relief to read ‘I Love Dick’ as a woman because it touches on parts of the feminine experience that are rarely discussed in public.

If womanhood is a house we all inhabit, a large, rambling old house, with an ancient, low-ceilinged main building, with additions and wings and renovations, with lovely and inviting front rooms where we host and smaller, private rooms in the back where we live, with creepy attics and damp basements and even terrifying crawl spaces full of spiders, then ‘I Love Dick’ is a spring cleaning, an airing out of all those corners which we never show to guests.

An irrelevant aside: I am fascinated by the Amazon recommendations algorithm. When Amazon suggests a product to you based on the item you are browsing, it is essentially telling you what kind of person, in its epistemology, buys this product. What I have learned from ‘I Love Dick”s Amazon page is that Amazon’s algorithm has not fully grasped the complexities of modern womanhood. The ‘Sponsored Products Related to this Item’ include: ‘Stone Heart: A Single Mom & Mountain Man Romance’; ‘Bad Seed: A Brother’s Best Friend Romance’; and something beggaring description called ‘Falling For My Dirty Uncle: A Virgin and Billionaire Romance’. These books are ‘related’ to ‘I Love Dick’ the way gonorrhea is ‘related’ to penicillin.

And the part of me that didn’t love ‘I Love Dick‘ as a woman loved it as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about the meaning of texts. No shock there: ‘I Love Dick’ is often described as a semiotics text. Now, ‘semiotics text’ is a descriptor as likely to alienate potential readers as ‘feminist text’. It suggests something recursive and intellectualized, a novel without story, exhausting and obsessed with meaning. And a quick spin through Goodreads will reveal that a lot of people had this reaction to ‘I Love Dick’.

I suspect that some people find analysis alienating, that a parsed emotion is less moving than an emotion merely described. I don’t feel this way, quite the opposite: explication draws me closer. I found warmth and wisdom and sadness here, no difficulty, just a winding path. A novel analyzing love is still a novel about love, and observing something doesn’t make it any less true. I recognize myself in Kraus’s emotional world, in the snarls and complexity of it all, and I think that many women would.

Kraus was a filmmaker (in fact, much of what ‘I Love Dick’ is about is her reckoning with the failure of her filmmaking career; it is failure transformed, escaped from, into sexual desire, and, really, who hasn’t been there?), and while her book is about love, lust, and failure, it is also about art. It is about how we use art to understand our own feelings. It is about the collision of our selves and the art we consume, and how the result is our lives.

The art that Kraus loves does not happen to be the art that I love, but I understand the enormous meaning that she draws from it. I am, like her, assembled from the parts I have found in art. And, even if her taste does not suit me, her eye is phenomenal. She is a witty, biting observer of everything around her, and the greatest pleasure of reading ‘I Love Dick’ is getting to experience Kraus’s voice. Born, in my opinion, to be a critic, she weaves the art she consumes into her life, and then shreds the result with unforgiving powers of observation:

“Years later Chris would realize that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre’s attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junky: bad characters invite invention.” (p. 21)

“”As soon as sex takes place, we fall,” she wrote, thinking, knowing from experience, that sex short circuits all imaginative exchange. The two together get too scary. So she wrote some more about Henry James.” (p. 51)

“Because [Chris and Sylvère] are no longer having sex, the two maintain their intimacy via deconstruction: i.e., they tell each other everything.” (p. 21)

The meta-irony of ‘I Love Dick’ is that the novel itself, about a woman’s use of art to understand her own feminine sexuality, has become a piece of art to help other women (like me) understand ours. Just as I wish I had written ‘I Love Dick’, I suspect Kraus wrote it because she herself needed to read a work like it.

“If the coyote is the last surviving animal, hatred’s got to be the last emotion in the world.” (p. 160)

“How do you continue when the connection to the other person is broken (when the connection is broken to yourself)? To be in love with someone means believing that to be in someone else’s presence is the only means of being, completely, yourself.” (p. 168)

“And isn’t sincerity just the denial of complexity?” (p. 181)

“Isn’t sincerity just the denial of complexity?” I could have written that.