A Questionable Shape
By Bennett Sims
Author: Bennett Sims
Rating: ★★★
A Questionable Shape is a strange book with an unusual proposition: the zombie apocalypse has come and its end is in sight. Mankind mastered the disease, learned its contagion vector, and has even faced the bureaucratic knots of the personhood status of the infected (still human, but incapacitated as in the case of Alzheimer’s or some other degenerative disorder).
In this strange lacuna of time and ontological status, AQS’ drama finds place. Vermaelen, his friend Mazoch, Vermaelen’s girlfriend Rachel, and Mazoch’s recently-infected father are the bare-bones dramatis personae of the story. They reflect upon “when do we call this thing over” and “what’s an acceptable risk?” Strangely, this story came to me right as we mulled the same questions in the (hopefully?) waning days of the COVID pandemic.1
The opening lines capture how this is going to be a different zombie story:
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE UNDEAD SO FAR IS this: they return to the familiar. They’ll wander to nostalgically charged sites from their former lives, and you can somewhat reliably find an undead in the same places you might have found it beforehand.
While I wasn’t sure if this was going to be preamble to an action-packed zombie story surrounded by elegy for the before times (à la Colson Whitehead’s Zone One), the book’s structure made clear that it was going to be a reflective and recursive meditation on memory, what it is to recognize someone, and what it is to disassociate from a being and from their place in your life.
Within the first few pages (if you’re using a physical book), it becomes clear that Sims is going to use the footnote in the same style of David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest. Sims’ protagonist Vermaelen uses footnotes to have discussions with himself, edit himself, and argue with himself as the “main” line thread progresses. As in Infinite Jest, the reader can judge these to be an annoying series of tangents (“Am I to read the text or jump out of it at every footnote?”); however, the “main” line of narrative is not the goal of the book.
The “main story” rather serves as a means for you to enter Vermaelen’s world and for him to have experiences that allow him to present to you, through arguments with himself, what his world, both internal and external, is really like. Compare Hamlet: the goal is not for Hamlet to uncover a possible plot and have a sword fight and die; the point is to participate in all of Hamlet’s experiences and soliloquies so that we understand his life between meeting his father’s ghost and the end of a sword-point.2
I also think the recursive footnote approach serves the story well. It reflects a consciousness that’s been left too long on its own. It’s a good way, in the textual form, to present the depth of inner dialogue that happens to a person’s inner monologue when they’re left too long alone, as is in the case of any pandemic.
Mechanics aside, in the main thread wordy philosophy grad Vermaelen accompanies his and learned friend Mazoch on a hunt for the former’s father. The father, a blue-collar, obese rustic, has gone missing from his home and his son wishes to find him before the Louisiana hurricanes come or before he’s anonymously shuffled into a zombie containment facility. Vermaelen is granted leave by his girlfriend, Rachel, to accompany Mazoch for one week, after which the pursuit is to be abandoned.
Along the way, games of chess are played, stakeouts are held, and the purpose of all that “book learnin’” both Mazoch and Vermaelen engaged in at LSU are questioned. As a philosophy grade myself who graduated with a book list as yet unconquered some twenty years past the commencement date, I found some uncomfortably familiar quotes:
as if I were in constant danger of someone following the sightline of my nervous glances, spotting the book, and asking, nightmarishly, ‘Ah, I see you’ve read the first Critique-_how about those antinomies, eh?
He also has some beautiful, (arguably over-)learned turns of phrase:
I never could have read if I knew, really understood and knew, that there was no such thing as true progress: that I was trapped on an Eleatic treadmill, a Zeno-esque hamster wheel.3
It was a harder read than I expected for its slim size, but in the right time, with the right patience and a dictionary handy … and possibly also a dictionary of philosophy handy, it’s an elegiac reflection on who we are and who pandemics reveal us to be.
Footnotes
- I was introduced to the book in 2018, but somehow never manged to settle into it. Then came the pandemic, and I was certainly in no mood for such a story. However, here, at the end of our own pandemic, I remembered the opening chapter and found myself reaching for this fictional world to see whether there was a guide in it who could help me figure out, for myself, in my real world, what my pandemic meant.
- It’s not improbable that the title comes, of course, from the observation of Hamlet: “Thou comest in such questionable shape.”
- ‘Elea’ being the home city of Zeno and Parmenides: both philosophers of the paradox of motion and asserters of the impossibility of actually getting anywhere.
{
"title": "A Questionable Shape",
"author": "Bennett Sims",
"highlightCount": 5,
"noteCount": 0,
"annotations": [
{
"highlight": "A bath of Edenic goldness, a trace of our best selves: it is this kind of life that that afternoon has taken on in our imaginations.",
"location": 123,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "it were, our Bethlehem stars",
"location": 126,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the undead mind would really just be a chaff cloud of remembrance, this mass of pellets causing sharp pain as it shifted magnetically in the direction of various homes.",
"location": 2227,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Like Hardy’s spirit, our ‘walking dead’ don’t simply walk: anytime an undead is walking, what it’s really doing is remembering. It’s retracing steps from its former life and moving blindly along a vector of memory.",
"location": 2234,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the footnote is the typographic mark most emblematic of undeath. By opening up a subjacent space on the page, the footnote digs a grave in the text, an underworld in the text. The words that are banished there are like thoughts that the text has repressed, pushed down into its unconscious. But they go on disturbing it from beneath, such that if the text were ever infected, they are the words that would guide it. Footnotes are a text’s phantom feet.",
"location": 2242,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE UNDEAD SO FAR IS this: they return to the familiar. They'll wander to nostalgically charged sites from their former lives, and you can somewhat reliably find an undead in the same places you might have found it beforehand.",
"annotation": "",
"location": "11"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Whenever a pawn reaches the end of the chessboard, it is finally able to metamorphose into a queen. A new system of moves opens up to it. What used to be impossible, even to conceive, has been unlocked inside it, and suddenly the entire board is in play. There has bloomed in its chest, where once a pulsion moved it only forward and only one square at a time, a compass rose, given to limitless extension in every direction.",
"location": "38"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "The trick, I thought, was to be beating on a mound beneath the covers. To be beating some soft writhing green thing, rather than Rachel, nude and recognizable. And to drag her body, still bundled in blankets, out to the street without ever once actually looking at her face, which would have to be as forbidden to me as Eurydice's, or Medusa's. I didn't like to think about it.",
"location": "47"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "What if it had built up these centuries of metaphors around itself, like a mollusk secreting its shell? And when everyone dies, she went on, when the human race blinks out and all of its poems are forgotten, what will the moon then look like, having crawled out of that shell",
"annotation": "cf. "\A Brief History of Dead\"",
"location": "50"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "To mourn him, she has explained, meant mourning two men, or at least two sets of memories: those of the young, vigorous father who raised her, as well as those of the debilitated, dependent, infantilized man-child whom in sickness he became. And it really wasn't until the day of the funeral, when she saw again that sweater, that face, that that first set of memories was heartrendingly returned to her,",
"location": "65"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Is stucco architecture's toast?",
"location": "76"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "No matter how differentiated the son thinks he's become, in actuality he has never left, never escaped out from under, the law of patrimonial synonymy that this whole time has been mastering him/",
"location": "83"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "It reeks of 'He had a week left til retirement,' a kind of fate-baiting self endangerment and heed less hamartia. It's like he's daring the infection to infect him.",
"location": "84"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Such a menu as the devil might have shown Jesus in the desert, each brownie stage-lit and provocatively angled, glinting in places throughout its morsel moisture and the deep obscene brownness of its glaze.",
"location": "89"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "The subtext of any memory that a lover shares is, I want you, my lover, to know this about me, because this is the facet of myself I want you to love. When you say, \"I love you,\" mean by \"you\" the subject of this memory! That's why those initial late night self-disclosures are so important. In developing a coherent narrative of her life, the beloved ends up constructing a self for the lover to love. So I'm keenly mindful of the fact that Rachel related her father memories to me for a reason.",
"location": "102"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Clearly neither of us is prepared to encounter the other in undeath, not psychologically, not emotionally. Soon, I decide. It will have to be soon. We'll have to do the defamiliarization exercises.",
"location": "103"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Tolstoy writes, he couldn't remember (for the life' of him) whether he had already dusted it or not, so unconsciously had he been sleepwalking throughout the space. It was exactly like being dead. After quoting this passage, Shklovsky delivers his famous motto, which does not Tail to raise the hackles on my arms whenever I remember it now: \"[L]ife Fades into nothingness, he writes. 'Automatization cats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives.'",
"location": "112"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "That is the paradox: Matt has to think his way into the mind of a creature that may not have one",
"location": "128"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "...the undead behave as if they are consciously retrospective beings, returning to sites that 'meant something' to them in their mortal lives. Yet on the other hand, it is as if they are blank automata, shuffling to these landmarks absently, merely carrying out a pro gram, like robots of remembering",
"location": "128"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "how the undead 'see' by default. They always already see this way: they know we're here, but they do not see us.",
"location": "134"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "The dialectical point, then, is just this: that you have to briefly make yourself undead to avoid being made undead",
"location": "134"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "That, no matter how insistently she told herself that he really was gone, his face kept resisting the death that she attributed to it, as if rejecting a graft of ontological tissue?",
"location": "136"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I love this face. But to my reanimated eyes, it would just be a stranger's face. And if this were a stranger's face, would I still love it?",
"location": "140"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Whereas if he sat at his desk and concentrated on a Milosz poem, it was like, lighting a thought-repellant candle in the mind.",
"location": "148"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Driving in this direction, speeding a little in this direction, toward where the margin of sky had, in the afterglow of the sunset, turned the color of vanilla cream, and where wisps of cloud were so gilt and silvered that they looked like breath on fire",
"location": "150"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "Borges's short story 'The Book of Sand, who buys from a rare-books dealer an 'infinite book' (the titular Book of Sand, which comprises an infinite number of randomly gen- erated pages, such that a reader can never find the same page twice), and who, on realizing that this book is the apocalypse itself (I considered fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book might be similarly infinite, and suffocate the planet in smoke), does not bury it or cast it into the sea but leaves it instead on a shelf of the Mexican National Library",
"annotation": "Fascinating story subject. To hide the forbidden words in a sea of words.",
"location": "151"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "that I couldn't bear to invite fellow philosophy majors over to my dorm without prematurely promoting it to my shelf of read books, where of course it would torment me, like the beating of a telltale heart, as if I were in constant danger of someone following the sightline of my nervous glances, spotting the book, and asking, nightmarishly, 'Ah, I see you've read the first Critique-_how about those antinomies, eh?' So when for months I mastered the Critique by diligent lucubration, I did so not for the present pleasure of the text, but for what I just now referred to as teleological motives, with an eye toward the self I might be at seventy: my to-read shelf barren, my banter well stocked and alluding wittily to Kant, the great project of my education completed. Were all my motives so petty, designed merely to elevate my self-image, rather than my intellect or my spirit?",
"location": "152"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "At the time, I conceived of it as a squirrel's project. I was burying her name in forgettable places so that, skimming through these books in a few years (perhaps after we had separated, perhaps after I had even forgotten her), my eye would be surprised by her name in the margin. Reading over the annotated passage, I would then be able to unearth from forgetfulness the day that I had marked it, as well as whatever memory of Rachel it had reminded me of in the first place (that scene she'd underlined in Lolita!, that anecdote!, our in-joke!- -Rachel!), bringing on a remembering in my chest just charged with unbearable joy and suffering. And if, like the squirrel who forgets where half its acorns are buried and leaves them forever in the dirt, I happened never to skim through some of the books again, all the better, for her name would have time to take root and grow there, oak of unbearable joy and suffering.",
"location": "153"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "For every book I disposed of I acquired three. Nor was I even able to read these books with great rigor or systematicity, feverish as I was to be finished.",
"location": "154"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "What ultimately sustained and what alone could have sustained me were my teloi, specifically the illusion of progress that attended them, whereby I convinced myself that I was closer o my goal at twenty-four than I had been at twenty,",
"location": "155"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I never could have read if I knew, really understood and knew, that there was no such thing as true progress: that I was trapped on an Eleatic treadmill, a Zeno-esque hamster wheel.",
"location": "155"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "Who then will still care to toil on in the old depths, unless in the meantime he has learned to content himself with finding precious stones...?'",
"annotation": " cf. Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy",
"location": "155"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "It was little visible rewards like these that made me feel as if I were accomplishing something. They quantified my efforts. They were, if not the fruits of my labor, then the rinds of those fruits. And it was that much easier to stay home nights and read when I could track my dog-ear's movement through the book, congratulating myself before going to sleep: Tm a hundred pages smarter tonight' Or to finish the volume and slide it into place on my shelf, thinking, Tm one book smarter tonight.'",
"location": "156"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "Was reading, as a worried professor once warned me it was, a race that I was always simultaneously winning and losing?!",
"annotation": "You can never outpace your reading list",
"location": "157"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Benighted by bibliophily! And yet you couldn't even call it 'phily,' a love' of books, because I was mastered by meaner demons. Of insecurity, of anxiety, of self-abnegation, of anything but a pleasurable, healthy love-relation",
"location": "157"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "I would no sooner read Kant in this world than I would on a desert island,",
"annotation": "Can we write poetry after the Holocaust",
"location": "158"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "The fact is- and as sad as it makes me to admit this -literature has begun to feel hollow to me",
"location": "158"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "As I've been lying here, my back to hers, I dread the things she must be thinking. How I've betrayed her. How she doesn't know me. Who is this person?' she must be asking herself. This stranger? What is he doing in my bed?'",
"location": "195"
}
]
}