Culture contemporaine: littérature

Résumé du document

Subject: Past and present in Zone One, Colson Whitehead.

Extraits

[...] With his biting cynicism, Colson Whitehead deconstructs all the narrative codes and does not just content himself with destroying Time. He also tackles religion, saying that « Après tout ce temps, le vrai Dieu avait surgi, et se rengorgeait en inspectant la nécropole, son royaume enfin advenu ». (dans le 1er chapitre « Vendredi », à 32% du livre). This God, as Whitehead says a few lines before, is the God of Death, because in this post-apocalyptic world, Death is the only one which rules the few remains of life, not Time. [...]

[...] All this is of course the consequence of the zombies' invasion. Time does not exist anymore. Besides, in the post-apocalyptic world, Mark Spitz has created new codes to apprehend the notion of Time : « Mark croyait avoir victorieusement banni de son esprit toute pensée de l'avenir [ . ] si on ne se concentrait pas sur le moyen de survivre aux cinq prochaines minutes, on n'y survivrait pas ». (se trouve au début, à 10% du livre) Thus, if the future only means the next five minutes whereas the past seems to stretch endlessly (as the flashbacks show we are led to conclude that Mark is stuck in an eternal present and therefore can't evolve. [...]

[...] This may also be another way to show that time has crumbled. As Mark feels completely lost, the whole book conveys the idea that his present is nothing but virtual. Indeed, his reality lies in the past, as the endless superposition of still images (the photographs mentionned) suggests. Therefore, all the scenes describing the way he gets rid of zombies reminds us of scenes from video games, where nothing is real and the line between life and death is blurred. [...]

[...] Recalling the past over and over again and desperately clinging to it proves that Mark feels lost in time, as if the post-apocalyptic world he was now experiencing was still unreal to him. Moreover, the novel opens with the sentence « he'd always wanted to live in New York », and two pages before the end of the book, the author expresses the same feeling again : « He'd always wanted to live in New York but that city didn't exist anymore » (p. 257). It is as if we were back to square one, stuck in a continuous loop where time has frozen. [...]

[...] Past and Present in Zone One. Considered as a quite recent nation proud of being the spearhead of modernity in many fields, the USA can be seen as a country more focused on its future rather than on its past. In such a contest, being a postmodern writer implies exploring spaces where no one has ventured yet. This is precisely what Colson Whitehead does in Zone One, picturing a post-apocalyptic world where zombies have definitely settled. As the reader follows the story of the survivors trying to conquer Manhattan, he quickly feels that nothing really makes sense in the novel, for the complex narrative keeps going back and forth between past and present. [...]