Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones: Ecocriticism and the Liminal from "Invisible Man" to "The Walking Dead"
160
Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones: Ecocriticism and the Liminal from "Invisible Man" to "The Walking Dead"
160Overview
In Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones: Ecocriticism and the Liminal from “Invisible Man” to “The Walking Dead,” Lee Rozelle chronicles the weirdest, ugliest, and most mixed-up characters to appear on the literary scene since World War II—creatures intimately linked to damaged habitats that rise from the muck, not to destroy or rule the world, but to save it. The book asks what happens to these landscapes after the madness, havoc, and destruction. What monsters and magic surface then?
Rozelle argues that zombiescapes and phantom zones depicted in the book become catalysts for environmental reanimation and sources of hope. Liminality offers exciting and useful new ways to conceptualize places that have historically proven troublesome, unwieldy, or hard to define. Zombiescapes can reduce the effects of pollution, promote environmental justice, lessen economic disparity, and localize food production. The grotesques that ooze and crawl from these passages challenge readers to consider new ways to re-inhabit broken lands at a time when energy efficiency, fracking, climate change, the Pacific trade agreement, local food production, and sustainability shape the intellectual landscape.
Rozelle focuses on literary works from 1950 to 2015—the zombiescapes and monsterscapes of post–World War II literature—that portray in troubling and often devastating ways the “brownfields” that have been divested of much of their biodiversity and ecological viability. However, he also highlights how these literary works suggest a new life and new potential for such environments. With an unlikely focus on places of ruination and an application of interdisciplinary, transnational approaches to a range of fields and texts, Rozelle advances the notion that places of distortion might become a nexus where revelation and advocacy are possible again.
Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones has much to offer to various fields of scholarship, including literary studies, ecocriticism, and environmental studies. Research, academic, and undergraduate audiences will be captivated by Rozelle’s lively prose and unique anthropological, ecocritical, and literary analyses.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817390235 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 11/08/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones
Ecocriticism and the Liminal from Invisible Man to The Walking Dead
By Lee Rozelle
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2016 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9023-5
CHAPTER 1
A Fruitful Darkness
Bioregional Grotesques in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange
After disasters like the historic tornado outbreak of April 2011, there's this strange feeling of frenzied desolation, a dissonance created by battered towns and woodlands that scarcely resemble the places they were. For a time helicopters hover overhead, chainsaws cut along roadways, and power lines hang in tree limbs. People and vehicles move in and out of the ruin. All around one experiences suffering, emotional overload, and exhaustion. Lines of worn-out people wait for electricity and news as the civil infrastructure sputters. And the land during this period becomes three places at once: the home we remember, the wrecked thing it is, and the new place. This strange and shifting terrain can be found wherever a tropical storm hits a town, a wildfire destroys a neighborhood, an unseasonable flood rises above the sandbags, or a drought kills off a farmer's crops. Wherever the drastic effects of human-induced climate change can be felt, liminality blooms in its wake to offer humanity both tragedy and another chance to reflect. It is difficult for the writer of fiction to do these places justice, because the tension and drama too often get choked with stale action, syrupy pathos, or apocalyptic fantasy. But in the winged hands of Gabriel García Márquez, even catastrophe thrives with wonders. In One Hundred Years of Solitude and a handful of works by talented literary successors such as Karen Tei Yamashita, magical realism and the carnivalesque are used in Latin American settings to characterize the simultaneous push and pull of catastrophe and redemption, isolation and international trade, economic coercion and social upheaval, tradition and modern advance. Both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Tropic of Orange focus on Latin American homes and gardens to examine the impact of bioregional damage on families, and both meditate on fruit production to show the effects of international trade on native communities. Shape-shifters in both books conflate human bodies and other forms to create a veritable circus of geographical oddities where places transition magically into new states of being.
Nuevo Mundo
Among its many other literary feats, One Hundred Years of Solitude manages to be nothing short of a bioregionalist manifesto, a "work of ecological wisdom" (R. Williams 75) that compels readers to both accept parameters set by biological networks and prize regional identity. Feelings of isolation and solitude in García Márquez's masterpiece come from a loss of local vision and the kaleidoscopic effects of rapid economic and political change in Latin America throughout the twentieth century. In 1927, when García Márquez was born in the Caribbean department of Magdalena, the coastal economy already "consisted of much more than old-style cattle ranches. Commercial production of tobacco and sugar, small-scale productions of foodstuffs for urban centers, and the multiplier effects of the banana enclave, all generated new regional dynamics" (Palacios 53). Little Gabito grew up at a time when Colombia and other Latin American nations were becoming modern states, developing rail and highway systems, and edging into the international marketplace. Solitude in this context becomes much more than a "psychological, social, and cultural condition"; it is, to quote Ursula K. Heise, also "an ecological condition, an index of the deterritorialization individuals and communities experience even in relation to their most immediate natural surroundings" ("Local" 142). Carnival, a phantasmagoric recurring cycle of spectacle and exchange, introduces intercontinental trade to Magdalena, and thus to literary Macondo. With carny spectacle come pseudoscience, magic, erotic taboo, and a funhouse of mechanical diversions. After the novel's Melquíades brings the magnet and other marvels to a world "so recent that many things lacked names" (OHYS 1), Macondo becomes a costeño portal where bodies and landscapes experience transformation as liminal beings, which causes the region and its inhabitants to find themselves for a time "physically and magico-religiously in a special situation" (Gennep 18). García Márquez's phantasmic nuevo mundo functions only intermittently within the laws of physics and becomes a freewheeling arena where plants, animals, vegetation, and climate get mixed up in the lives of human inhabitants. The citizens of Macondo who successfully negotiate this American terrain, the novel suggests, are those who keep their bearings and maintain independence from encroaching global commerce in its various guises.
If the Buendías Had Listened
Melquíades and the Romany gypsies are the first in a long line of allegorical figures that introduce international trade to Macondo. Inhabitants of the isolated town, people with little experience with scientific gadgets, imaginatively transform the magnet and the telescope into instruments of magic. The introduction of science as spectacle clouds Macondo's vision of the physical world and allows for various missteps that seal the Buendía family's fate. Though the opening pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude seem to waver between nostalgia and the limits of isolation, it doesn't take the reader long to realize that the novel champions matriarch Úrsula's practice of maintaining connections to the province and resisting the hype surrounding hegemonic European and US enterprises. Mesmerized by the lure of (pseudo)science, on the other hand, José Arcadio Buendía loses touch with his bioregional imagination. Before he loses it, José Arcadio Buendía founds a Macondo that for a while is "orderly and hardworking" and "a truly happy village" (OHYS 9). He arranges the "houses in such a way that from all of them one could reach the river and draw water with the same effort" and lines up "the streets with such good sense that no house got more sun than another during the hot time of the day" (9). Unfortunately, his "spirit of social initiative" disappears when he is "pulled away by the fever of the magnets, the astronomical calculations, the dreams of transmutation, and the urge to discover the wonders of the world" (9). Gustavo Llarull agrees that the founder's tragic blunder is that he becomes isolated from "social interaction and ethical guidance" (97), and Brian Conniff adds that his "view of the world shares too much with the oppressors who will take over his village in the delirium of banana fever" (145). Iris M. Zavala goes further to show that José Arcadio Buendía and Colombians like him who "seek the route of the Anglo-Saxon North for the sake of utility and progress will only lead us to the oppression of speculators and capitalists who ... proceed to wring us dry" (122). As José Arcadio Buendía spends money on contraptions and tests various outlandish theories in seclusion, "Úrsula and the children [break] their backs in the garden, growing banana and caladium, cassava and yams, ahuyama roots and eggplants" (OHYS 4). García Márquez contrasts the indulgences of José Arcadio Buendía — practices that will curse his offspring to a century of trauma and despair — with Úrsula's common sense, sustainable ethos, and social awareness.
Eminent García Márquez scholar Gene H. Bell-Villada writes that the "rain of yellow flowers at the founder's death represents all Nature mourning for a great man ... a theme common enough in world myths" (García 112). But a biocentric reading with Conniff's and Zavala's arguments in mind would suggest that nature here does not mourn for José Arcadio Buendía; rather, the natural ecosystem weeps flowers for Macondo as it foretells a century of destruction brought about in a protracted boom-bust cycle. I liken the yellow rain to confetti, which means that the natural world surrounding Macondo is actually celebrating. The "silent storm" that accompanies the death of José Arcadio Buendía is described as having "covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors" (OHYS 140). Yellow in this passage represents mourning, but it also means gold, the family wealth that will over time both shower and smother the Buendías as well. Bell-Villada explains that García Márquez "skillfully reimagines his New World history, casting the descendants of Spanish settlers in the role of indigenes being encroached upon by royal bureaucrats, proselytizing priests, and Yankee capitalists, all of whom wish to absorb a peaceable Macondo into their vast global schemes" (García 116). From this standpoint, One Hundred Years of Solitude does not simply advocate isolationist policies for Colombia, Cuba, and other Latin American nations. What it calls for instead is bioregional inspiration to negotiate the country's dizzying cultural, religious, and economic shifts. It is this inspiration that Yamashita will champion in Tropic of Orange to foster indigenous and sustainable practices in the wake of NAFTA.
The area surrounding Macondo is described as a distinct bioregion because it shares commonalities of nonhuman life and topography where borders are determined by geographical features. Though the town itself is modeled after Aracataca, its borders are more suggestive of the nearby town of Sucre, where García Márquez spent time as a youth. Sucre is described in Gerald Martin's Gabriel García Márquez: A Life (2009) as a "floating island lost in a lattice-work of rivers and streams amidst what had once been dense tropical jungle" in a landscape "constantly changing and shifting between scrub forest and savannah, depending on the season and the height of the rivers" (67). José Arcadio Buendía, who is described as "completely ignorant of the geography of the region" (OHYS 10), characterizes the area surrounding Macondo by its very inaccessibility, with the Caribbean to the north and west and "an impenetrable [Sierra Nevada] mountain chain" to the east. To the south, it is believed, "lay the swamps, covered with an eternal vegetable scum, and the whole vast universe of the great swamp, which, according to the gypsies, had no limits. The great swamp in the west mingled with the boundless extension of water" (10). Like Sucre, Macondo is framed on all sides by well-defined parameters, but with seemingly endless boundaries. Its edges are imbued with preternatural fecundity and life-forms both sentient and divine that transport the townspeople to states of spectral bewilderment.
When José Arcadio Buendía and his party first explore the area, they find themselves unable to "return because the strip that they were opening as they went along would soon close up with a new vegetation that almost seemed to grow before their eyes" (11). From the beginning, natural environment is a motivating force that directs the action in One Hundred Years of Solitude, a dynamism that guides, rewards, and punishes the Buendías to the end of the line. When founded, Macondo is a fertile region blessed with a clean water source, good soil, edible vegetation, and diverse wildlife, such as numerous bird species. But as the profligate Buendías abuse their power and resources, Macondo becomes less and less familiar to them. In this way Macondo truly becomes a city with "mirror walls" (24), a symbolic region that reflects choices and policies made on behalf of misguided municipalities throughout the Americas, then and now. But this parable of place leaves many questions as yet unanswered by the scholarship: What is the natural world trying to teach the Buendías and readers across the Western Hemisphere in regard to our own liminal landscapes? What would Macondo have looked like if the Buendías had listened? How should we throughout the Americas apply Macondo's lessons in the twenty-first century?
Beastly Beasts
Human–animal relations offer clues as to how the questions above might be answered, as this novel keeps returning to the murky, shifting line between Homo sapiens and other species. Importantly, the liminal stage in Macondo's rite of passage is wrought with "profuse symbolic reference to beasts, birds, and vegetation" (Turner, Dramas 252), because in One Hundred Years of Solitude "life is snuffed out by animality and nature, even as it is being regenerated by these very same forces" (253). Macondo is not unlike García Márquez's own characterization of New York as zombiescape: a place "putrefying" but "also in the process of rebirth" (Kennedy 258). The novel illustrates this paradox by depicting human creatures that become entangled with spiders, insects, weeds, mythical chimeras, suggestive flowers, and erratic climes as well as incestuous kin. Early in the book we see one such limen at the edge of the "great swamp" that "mingles" with the Caribbean Sea, creatures described as "soft-skinned cetaceans that had the head and torso of a woman, causing the ruination of sailors with the charm of their extraordinary breasts" (OHYS 10). García Márquez brilliantly makes the connection between estuarine ecosystems — fertile transitional zones where freshwater and seawater mingle — and the crossbred offspring of human and dolphin. The lure of intercourse between and among ecological participants in a veritable orgy of species stimulates feelings of magnetism and threat. By giving evolutionary biology a human face, García Márquez explores the sex act as threshold experience that intermingles body parts, genetic materials, and biomes in liminal unrest. Such bodies in Macondo require readers to "acknowledge the monstrosity at the heart of the idea of nature" (Morton, Ecology 195) and to also demand as a matter of survival the imaginative construction of its sustainable mirror image. Úrsula is convinced that a child born of incest will have a pig's tail, José Arcadio Buendía responds that if "you bear iguanas, we'll raise iguanas" (OHYS 22), and enraged Prudencio Aguilar taunts José Arcadio Buendía by suggesting, "Maybe that rooster of yours can do your wife a favor" (21). Animals become fetishistic totems that embody dark desires and the conception of ecological grotesques.
The compulsion to commit incest in One Hundred Years of Solitude is part of a larger taboo that arises in Macondo's liminal phase. For García Márquez, ecological destruction and cultural taboo become the same act when they cannibalize Macondo for decadent pleasures and personal affluence. Aureliano Segundo, for example, becomes extravagantly wealthy because of the "supernatural proliferation of his animals. His mares would bear triplets, his hens laid twice a day, and his hogs fattened with such speed that no one could explain such disorderly fecundity" (189). He believes that intercourse with his concubine Petra Cotes has spawned the "irremediable plague of proliferation" (190) that infects his breeding grounds. But rather than conserve part of his wealth as Úrsula instructs, he, during wild debauches, uncorks "champagne just for the pleasure of pouring the foam over his head" (191); it is told that there "was a slaughtering of so many cows, pigs, and chickens for the endless parties that the ground of the courtyard turned black and muddy with so much blood" (255). The courtyard becomes an "eternal execution ground of bones and innards, a mud pit of leftovers, and they had to keep exploding dynamite bombs all the time so that buzzards would not pluck out the guests' eyes" (255). The hellish imagery in these passages transforms Macondo into "execution ground" and site of sexual exploitation, while the unscrupulous butchery of animals likens family courtyard to desolladero. Correspondingly, Aureliano Segundo's own body becomes "fat, purple-colored [and] turtle shaped" (255), his morphology reptilian and bloated, an abject mirror image of the "totemic female" deemed "The Elephant" with whom he has an eating contest during the festivities. After eating thirty raw eggs, two pigs, a bunch of bananas, and way-too-much turkey, he falls "facedown into the plate filled with bones, frothing at the mouth like a dog, and drowning in moans of agony" (257). He feels, "in the midst of the darkness, that they were throwing him from the top of a tower into a bottomless pit" (257). Clearly, García Márquez in this chapter links overconsumption with transmutation, the act of extravagant waste making Aureliano Segundo unstuck evolutionarily as a liminal grotesque. Gluttony and waste distort Raymond L. Williams's venerated hombre-hipoteca (tortoise-man) "in which the human lifeworld and the lifeworld of nature are assimilated" (73). Providence is the fertile land in One Hundred Years of Solitude — its gifts miraculous — but the ruinous stewardship of Aureliano Segundo and his brood leads to the town's perdition. Either empathize with other life-forms, the novel suggests, or become the very beast you exploit.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones by Lee Rozelle. Copyright © 2016 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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