And Say the Zombie Responded?
9
in a manner that leads to its flourishing. That is, the pathology of loving the dead
is not merely that the dead cannot accept true libidinal investment, but that when
we attempt to maintain that relationship we always end up substituting an
apparently more-present person to stand in for the Other—namely, ourselves.
The dead loved one, unable to love back, is substituted by a puppet version of
her past self. In our minds, the puppet accepts our love. But since the puppet’s
strings are pulled by us, the puppet is truly but a reflection of our own will. To
love the zombie puppet is to love one’s self, and in this way there is always the
risk of narcissism at work in our encounters with the dead.
C. S. Lewis, in the book he wrote under a pseudonym about an
experience of a crisis of faith he had while mourning his wife, struggles with
this exact worry. Lewis writes:
Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow,
insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think
of into a more and more imaginary woman... The reality is no
longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so
often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and
not me...The image has the...disadvantage that it will do
whatever you want...It is a puppet of which you hold the
strings...[T]he fatal obedience of the image, its insipid
dependence on me, is bound to increase...As if I wanted to
[be] in love with my memory of her...It would be a sort of
incest...I want H., not something that is like her.6
This was, in many respects, Dahmer’s transgression as well. Dahmer
loved the zombie puppet more than the person precisely because the zombie is
controllable, precisely because it was a form of self-love. Perhaps “evil” is an
empty concept, but if there are actions that are evil, narcissism—and the
selfishness that goes along with it—are most likely at their roots.
In the Voodoo religion of Haiti, zombies are said to be walking dead
corpses who are typically controlled by an evil sorcerer, the strings once again
pulled by someone with a living desire to control the dead. In the 1930s, Harlem
Renaissance anthropologist and novelist Cora Neale Hurston documented a case
of a woman in Haiti who had died in 1907 and, three decades later (according to
family members and neighbors), returned to life. This work became the
inspiration for Wade Davis’ research as an ethnobotanist in the 1980s. Davis
went to Haiti to search for a pharmacological explanation as to why people
would seem to be dead and then return to life to do the bidding of others. And
his work was the source for the 1988 Wes Craven movie, The Serpent and the
Rainbow. In Haiti , the west-African religion of Vodun came to mix with
Catholicism, eventually resulting in the amalgam that is Voodoo—a religion
practiced today by more than half of the 9 million residents of Haiti. In Vodun, a
“zombi astral” is said to be the part of the soul of a human being that is captured