7 - The Undead Generations: Zombies, Vampires, and the Corporeal Undead

Summary

French–Bulgarian philosopher Julia Kristeva, in her work Powers of Horror, identifies abjection as “a composite of judgment and affect, of condemnation and yearning, of signs and drives” (Kristeva 9–10). Abjection is the abhorrence one feels when confronted with profound Otherness, as Kristeva illustrates with the example of a human corpse:

A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death […] No, as in true theatre, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. (3)

The abjection of a dead human typically involves ritualistic, scientific, and discursive procedures with specific material requirements. These observances can also function as a barometer of social stability. According to Niall Ó Cíosáin, one of the most common motifs in cultural representations of the Great Famine is “the abandonment of normal funeral and burial customs”, with stories of whole families dying so quickly that nobody is left to bury them, and of communal graves, burial outside consecrated ground, and “reusable coffins” (Ó Cíosáin 225). Sometimes, rituals can be changed or whole new processes invented, and occasionally these changes go unnoticed or unheeded by people who see no need for them. As late as 1974, isolated rural communities in the west of Ireland were apparently somewhat lackadaisical about notifying the authorities of local deaths. While hospitals normally registered births and churches recorded marriages, deaths were sometimes not recorded at all, resulting in a large number of legally “undead” people causing problems for their bereaved families. The Western Health Board was obliged to respond to the situation with a campaign to raise awareness of the necessity for registering deaths, even when family members did not see any immediate need to do so (Anonymous, “Legally ‘Undead’”, The Irish Press 22 November 1974).

As the above example shows, crisis results when an abjection process does not work or is not observed. Kristeva contends that this kind of crisis is the ultimate root of all horror, because it blurs the categories we rely on to make sense of the world: as she puts it, the abject “disrupts identity, system, order” (4).