Bennett Sims - The architecture of zombie-logic is rewired, and the undead become symbolic for what it means to exist in all its physical and existential, its beauty and brutality

Bennett Sims, A Questionable Shape, Two Dollar Radio, May 2013.

“Bennett Sims is a writer fearsomely equipped with an intellectual and linguistic range to rival a young Nabokov’s, Nicholson Baker’s gift for miniaturistic intaglio, and an arsenal of virtuosities entirely his own. A Questionable Shape announces a literary talent of genre-wrecking brilliance.” -Wells Tower

“In A Questionable Shape everything is questioned – love, family, memory, the way we lead our lives. Even loss itself seems obsolete in these worn out Zombified days. And yet, out beyond the margins of genre, two young men embark on a search as worthy as Walker Percy’s in The Moviegoer, taking us into a fascinating textual netherworld of footnotes full of Heidegger and haiku, leading us on a journey as ancient and true as a son’s desperate search for a father whose undead life may not be worse than the broken existence he left behind. Bennett Sims brings an allusive genius energy to everything from YouTube to Euripides in this inquiry into what survives the onslaught, in a world –our world, we come to recognize—suffering a major case of apocalypse fatigue.” -Charles D’Ambrosio

“A Questionable Shape is part George A. Romero, part Thomas Bernhard - as much an epistemology of the zombie as it is a thriller. So fascinating are its explorations - and, within the constraints of its topic, so wide-ranging - that reading it I often had the unusual experience of pausing to wander down some byway of thought and finding myself unable to say whether I had ventured there independently or was remembering a footnote from earlier in the book. It’s playful, absorbing, bittersweet, and intelligent, and, like a bite, it gets under your skin.” -Kevin Brockmeier

“How would the textures of ordinary life be altered by the return of the recently dead? What would zombie consciousness itself be like? Would it gravitate toward the most powerful memories and impressions of life? Or is a zombie a creature on whom habit operates more powerfully than novelty? In A Questionable Shape, the spectacular horror of zombies has been removed to the background. Instead, this novel is about walking, driving, reading, waking up, going on dates, taking care of friends and parents and children, grocery shopping. It also includes some of the most exquisite descriptions of light that I have ever read. Striking, beautiful, funny, and not like anything else.” - Aaron Kunin

 
This ain’t your granddaddy’s zombie-apocalypse. Everything in Bennett Sims’s stunning debut courts a topographical and invasive examination of the human condition through our inverse. The architecture of zombie-logic is rewired, and the undead become symbolic for what it means to exist in all its physical and existential, its beauty and brutality.
Post-Katrina. Docile shapes fringe the horizon of greater Baton Rouge. Hurricane season looms yet again, threatening the security of Mississippi barges that quarantine thousands of zombies. If the barges breach, a second epidemic is likely. A Questionable Shape follows Vermaelen over one week as he helps his friend, Matt Mazoch, search for his undead father, retracing “haunts” Mr. Mazoch might return to in his zombified state. But hurricane season is also dwindling the window of opportunity to find him. Sims escalates the psychological state of the undead, giving them, essentially, purpose. Reanimated, these zombies pursue places from memories. Reanimation, thus, becomes a kind Resuscitation. What the genre formerly defined as a vacant shell of rudimentary desire, Sims infuses with recollection, humanizing the traditionally dehumanized.


“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. Its house, its office, the bikelanes circling the lake, the bar. ‘Haunts.’ … In fact, what it calls to mind are those homing pigeons, the ones famous and fascinating for the particles of magnetite in their skulls: bits of mineral sensitive to electromagnetic pulls and capable of directing the pigeons, like the needle of a compass, homeward over vast and alien distances. It is as if the undead are capable of ‘homing’ in this way.”
“…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. In this way, the tracks that it leaves (of rainwater, of dirt across a carpet, of blood) record more than a physical path: they also materialize a line of thought, the path of that remembering.”
A Questionable Shape is guided not just by the search for Mr. Mazoch, but by the search for a more satisfying understanding of memory and its ancillary properties. It is an overall quest for meaning. Is memory affected by importance and emotional-potency? Or, is it indifferent, mere muscle-memory? Vermaelen obsesses about the logistics of undeath—how each zombie sees, “speaks,” and chooses memories, places to return to. Vermaelen himself becomes somewhat of a walking dead—abeyant when he’s too afraid to leave his apartment out of fear of infection, and later, scrutinizing the why and how of undeath, instead of focusing on his life with his girlfriend, Rachel, who works at one of the quarantine sites.
In one footnote, Vermaelen considers reanimation, and the possibility of Rachel’s infection (during moments he could, instead, be creating memories with her). He deliberates that if she were to reanimate, and remember a time before him, it might reveal a deeper unconscious truth that he was not as significant to her as some former lover:
“The way that a crashed Word document will restore, not the state of its data the moment it crashed, but the state of its data from whenever it last auto-recovered, a minute or an hour or a day ago. The reanimated Rachel would then be like a first-draft Rachel, auto-recovered from way back, preserving none of the sentences leading up to the crash. All the words I’ve left in her would be lost.”
In this zombism, memory becomes a barometer for affection, truth, and significance. If Mr. Mazoch does not “home” to a meaningful location he shared with his son, does this lack of remembering reflect his love for Matt? When Vermaelen and Rachel practice “defamiliarization” survival strategies (detaching visual stimuli (and associated memories) from loved ones), it is an attempt to unrecall, to generalize. Because to view an undead as the former self, the remembered living body, is to become vulnerable, susceptible to bite.
The scrutiny of detail throughout A Questionable Shape attempts wring from it definition, reminiscent of David Foster Wallace. The narrative warmth and voice draws parallels to writers as far back as Gogol and Babel, and more recently Ben Marcus. The book itself is a textual representation of a zombie—the body purports Matt and Vermaelen’s visits to Mr. Mazoch’s house, the high grass of an abandoned park, other places Matt’s father might remember and return to; the footnotes of Vermaelen’s ruminations, digressions, and anecdotes become a grave space that, as Vermaelen describes, disturbs and infects the body above.
But despite the reinventions of cult-form, the classic zomb-enthus will thrill at Sims’s mastery. Conventional characteristics of zombies are filtered through the lenses of Wordsworth, Wittengenstein, Chalmers, VS Ramachardran—assaying how the undead act, think, see, and remember. Reanimation is also hypothesized as a metamorphosis similar to that of a chess pawn being queened. Maybe Vermaelen is suggesting that undeath grants a free-roaming capability of all conscious, subconscious, and existential planes.
Maybe Sims is suggesting that to become undead is to evolve. - Zachary Tyler Vickers


Bennett Sims has had fiction appear in A Public Space, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he currently teaches fiction at the University of Iowa, where he is a provost postgraduate visiting writer. [Editor’s note: he’s only 26!]
Here’s the story: Mazoch discovers an unreturned movie envelope, smashed windows, and a pool of blood in his father’s house: the man has gone missing. So he creates a list of his father’s haunts and asks Vermaelen to help track him down.
However, hurricane season looms over Baton Rouge, threatening to wipe out any undead not already contained and eliminate all hope of ever finding Mazoch’s father.
What Bennett Sims has accomplished with this, his very fine first novel, is to turn typical zombie fare on its head and deliver a wise and philosophical rumination on the nature of memory and loss.
In the following mini-interview we chat zombies, studying with David Foster Wallace, and studliness.
With zombies or vampires or werewolves, there seem to be some unanimous across-the-board rules and general narrative expectations . What impressed me so much about A Questionable Shape was how you employed what would be token plot devices for other writers – specifically, reanimation – and used them to explore much grander questions about our own human experience and how we relate to one another. Was that part of your initial approach or attraction to the story, or did this come about through writing and revision?
- Even before I began the novel, I was up to my elbows in the grand questions of undeath, since my undergrad thesis was a long essay on zombies. What I found was that ‘the zombie’ keeps cropping up in different discourses as a kind of limit figure of the human condition. So in mind-body philosophy and neuroscience, the zombie is a mascot for non-conscious perception (aka ‘blindsight’), the brain’s ability to respond to visual stimuli without conscious awareness. In both Haitian anthropology and political theory, the ‘living dead man’ is a victim of social death, a biological body that has been stripped of all civil rights. And in psychoanalysis, the phrase ‘return of the dead’ is a ready-to-hand metaphor for describing a wide swath of psychological phenomena, from repetition automatism and the return of the repressed to our experience of the uncanny.
So in answer to your question, yes, A Questionable Shape was always a questions novel. It grew out of that project fairly naturally, as a way of dramatizing these questions and making them meaningful for a set of characters. If your undead dad shuffles back to his house, do you say that he’s the ‘same’ person? Do you say that he’s a person at all? How can you know what he’s experiencing, and what are your ethical obligations to him? This is a supernatural problem to be faced with, but of course there are other, more familiar issues bound up with it: the ethics of euthanasia; old age and senility; mourning, memory, and mortality.
Was it frightening or liberating to write a novel that includes zombies when zombies seem to be the new vampires?
- More frightening than liberating. The risk of exhaustion, of cultural saturation, is a legitimate one. I was mindful of this from the moment I started working on the book, in mid-2008—and that was back when Walking Dead was still a graphic novel; when Left 4 Dead had not yet been released; and when Zone 1 was just a twinkle in Colson Whitehead’s eye. (I can still remember the buttock-clenching dread I felt in December ‘08, when I read The New Yorker’s Q&A with him. Regarding future projects, he said, ‘I have a bunch of book ideas—my long-neglected Benjamin Franklin bio, my magic-realism zombie epic, my history of zeppelins in America…’ ‘Pick zeppelins,’ I remember thinking, ‘pick zeppelins!’) In the years since, zombie narratives have only proliferated, and I wouldn’t blame any reader for being bored by them.
With that said, the overexposure has felt liberating at times as well. Part of the fun of the novel was to try to hash out a different thematics of undeath, a wider Venn diagram of undeath, and to show that there are other criteria for zombism beyond reanimation and cannibalism. Criteria like memory and nostalgia, hauntedness, obliviousness, obsession, regret. Zombies may be the new vampires, but once you adjust your definition of undeath, you realize just how rich and long-tailed the zombie tradition is. Night of the Living Dead is a zombie movie, but so is Vertigo. George Saunders’s ‘Sea Oak’ is a zombie story, but so is Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat.’ Ditto Dostoevsky’s ‘Bobok’; or Euripides’s The Bacchae; or the Orpheus myth.
You studied at Pomona College with David Foster Wallace. What was that like?
- It’s difficult to talk about, to be honest. Dave was (and remains) a tremendously important mentor for me. He was one of the advisors for my thesis, and when I began the novel after graduation, he was one of my ideal readers. I never even got to show him a chapter. Some of my classmates have written movingly about his generosity as a teacher. In their memorial reflections and essays, they’ve already left an eloquent record of what we all cherished in him. He really did write us five-page response letters for our manuscripts, and line edit us with a ruthless jeweler’s-loupe scrutiny, and hold hours-long meetings in his office, to counsel us through crises. In a pedagogical culture that condones the absentee writer-professor—who gives 10% to his students and saves 90% for his novel—Dave gave 100% to everyone. He took us seriously as writers, and, what’s more, he required us to take each other seriously as well. We all felt honored by that attention. We learned to work self-martyringly hard to deserve it.
Most writers toil for many years and through many projects before they meet with any level of success. You’re 26. Your first story was published in A Public Space; your second in Zoetrope; and your third in this summer’s issue of Tin House. In college football country, you’re what we’d refer to as a ‘stud.’ Does that type of immediate success create added pressure or stress?
- Good Lord. I wish that were the kind of stress I felt. I wish that when I sat down to write, I was thinking, ‘All right, you stud. You stallion. This sentence better be up to snuff. You were in Tin House!’ But the fact is, I still just feel like a failure every day: less like a stud than a spavined lordotic wreck, whinnying for John Wayne to shoot me. The problem with writing is that every page is its own pressure cooker, regardless of how many pages you’ve written (or even published) beforehand. No matter what, you’re always going to be banging your head against the limitations of your language and your inferiority to your forebears. It’s a minute-by-minute exercise in humiliation and shame. So far, I’ve had incredible luck in finding good homes for my stories. They’ve benefited from the input of whip-smart editors, and been printed alongside some supremely humbling company. But the stresses of writing are still the inherent ones, the daily ones, because it’s never my author bio who’s writing. The Bennett at my desk isn’t ‘a fiction writer living in Iowa City, whose stories have appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, and Zoetrope.’ He’s more like ‘a freelance idiot living in anxiety, whose story is about to appear in the trash can.’
- twodollarradio.com

White Dialogues by Bennett Sims

Bennett Sims: The Balloon

The boy begs his mother to buy him a balloon. As they leave the grocery store and cross the parking lot, he holds the balloon by a string in his hand. It is round and red, and it bobs a few feet above him. Suddenly his mother looks down and orders him not to release the balloon. Her voice is stern. She says that if he loses it, she will not buy him another. The boy tightens his grip on the string. He had no intention of releasing the balloon. But the mother’s prohibition disquiets him, for it seems to be addressed at a specific desire. Her voice implies that she has seen inside him: that deep down—in a place hidden from himself, yet visible to her—he really does want to release the balloon. Otherwise, why bother to forbid it? The boy feels stung by her censure. He grows sullen at the injustice. It isn’t fair. He didn’t do anything. They approach the car in the parking lot. The day is bright and all the car roofs glint. His fingers fidget, his palm throbs. Before, the balloon had been just a thing that he wanted to hold. Now, he cannot stop thinking about letting it go. He wants to release the string to spite his mother. But he knows that this would only prove her right. By forbidding a thought he hadn’t had, she has put that thought into his head; now, if he acts on the thought, it will be as good as admitting that he already had it. He glowers up at the balloon. Why had he begged her to buy it in the first place? What had he ever planned on doing with it, if not releasing it? Maybe she was right. For there is now nothing in the world that he desires more—has always desired—than to be rid of this balloon. The boy knows that it is the prohibition that has put this idea into his head, and yet, he can’t remember a time before he had it. It is as if the prohibition has implanted not just the desire, but an entire prehistory of the desire. The second the thought crossed his mind, it had always already been in his mind. The moment his mother spoke to him, he became the boy she was speaking to: the kind of boy who releases balloons, who needs to be told not to. Yes, he imagines that he can remember now: how even in the grocery store—before he had so much as laid eyes on the balloon—he was secretly planning to release it. The boy releases the balloon. He watches it rise swiftly and diminish, snaking upward, its redness growing smaller and smaller against the blue sky. His chest hollows out with guilt. He should never have released the balloon. Hearing him whimper, his mother turns to see what has happened. She tells him sharply that she told him not to release the balloon. He begs her to go back into the grocery store and buy him another, but she shakes her head. They are at the car, and she is already digging through her purse for the keys. While she unlocks the door, he takes one last look above him, raking that vast expanse for some fleck of red.

Bennett Sims - Interviewed by Amy Scharmann

This story was originally one of several fables, all of which are from a young boy’s perspective and involve a particular object as a trigger for larger reflection or meditation. How do you feel about “The Balloon” as a stand-alone piece? Did you see this as a possibility?
- I had originally conceived of “Fables” as a quintet of self-contained vignettes, in which the character of “the boy” learns five allegorical life lessons from the everyday objects of his childhood. In one of them, he encounters a frightened chipmunk on the sidewalk and learns about predestination and the horrific fatedness of death: it’s basically a rodent reworking of the “Appointment at Samarra” parable. There’s also a crow, a dog, and a chunk of melting ice. But because the vignettes don’t develop in a linear way (for instance, the mother in “The Balloon” is not an importantly recurring character), each has to function as its own fable, with a discrete dramatic situation and an elaborated narrative logic. In that sense, at least, they really are all stand-alone pieces. So although I never thought about publishing “The Balloon” separately, it didn’t feel counterintuitive to me.
The red balloon represents larger concepts of loss, obsession, regret, etc. What inspired you to write this story, and how did you build from that inspiration?
- Each fable has at its core a fairly explicit philosopheme, some simple idea that the scenario tries to dramatize. In “The Balloon,” it’s the relationship between law and desire: namely, that ancient Pauline paradox in which the law seems to engender the very sin it forbids (“Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness” Romans 7:7.) In 20th-century thought about this paradox, the important twist is that the law engenders not just the sin, but the self: the prohibition posits both the illicit desire and the desiring subject, thereby interpellating some anterior version of you, the repressed part of you that had to have been desiring the forbidden thing all along.
A fair follow-up question would be, “Well, okay, but what inspired you to use a balloon in particular?” Boring answer: My mom really did buy me a balloon and really did forbid me—out of the blue—to release it, whereupon I really did disobey her, compelled by pretty much the same ineluctable logic as “the boy.” Nor did my mom relent on her punishment and buy me a replacement. (This led to many endearing exchanges with Subtropics editor David Leavitt, who was aghast at the mom’s mercilessness: “My mom would never do such a thing!”)
I really appreciate your level of control as a writer, which seems particularly difficult to achieve in stories written in present tense, with such heightened emotions. What is your revision process like? Do you allow yourself to finish a story before tweaking it, or do you find yourself tinkering as you go?
- In general, revision is a hell of self-hatred. It’s less about tinkering or tweaking than consigning stuff to the flames. Any time I glance at a manuscript, I find some mistake—a word, a scene, a transition—that makes me wince with shame. Sometimes I can just burn away the wince words as I go, until the prose is “polished” (i.e., until it has been annealed in the heat of my self-hatred). Other times I find that I have to set fire to the entire manuscript and start all over. In interviews, Wells Tower often refers to this as a “slash and burn” revision process, which sounds right to me. From the flamethrower of the delete key, the phoenix of the final draft.
Was there a particular moment or experience that made you realize that you wanted to be a writer—that you had to be a writer?
- I’ve been reading and writing since I was a kid, and I honestly can’t remember whether there was a formative, origin-story moment, when I picked up a quill pen in my crib or anything. What I remember are the moments when someone encouraged me to keep writing, and I resolved not to quit. For as long as I’ve wanted to write, I’ve despaired of ever being able to write, and have periodically sworn off (to this day still swear off) ever writing again. So the milestone moments usually end up being whenever my teachers, friends, or family support me.
I noticed that you don’t assign a geographical location to this story, which allowed me to focus on who the characters are rather than where they are. Did you imagine a particular place while writing it?
- I did, in fact: the supermarket parking lot back in Baton Rouge where I released my own balloon.
The short-short form is admittedly difficult for many writers, if not impossible. Are you more comfortable with this form, or does it present as a challenge?
- I guess I don’t think of the “short-short” as having a distinct form from other stories. “The Balloon” presented me with the standard package of narrative challenges, and the formal decisions it entailed were actually pretty mundane: I had to settle on a third-person narrator, calibrate the free indirect discourse, modulate voice and tone, characterize a protagonist, dramatize a conflict, and develop a fictional idea to completion. The big difference, of course, was proportion. Because “The Balloon” is a two-page idea rather than a twenty-page idea, I had to develop it on a miniaturized scale. But I didn’t think of this compression as a necessarily formal difference. A bonsai has the same form as a live oak.
For me the difficulty of the “short-short”—and one reason, I assume, that some writers never try it—is primarily psychological. The fact is, the dominant form in the fiction market is still the 20-page, 6,000-word story. Indeed, it is the normative length that we subconsciously associate with “story” itself. The average 200-page collection simply comprises ten of these 20-pagers. Reading them, I sometimes wonder, “Has this author never had a five-page idea? A 50-page idea?” I suspect that the authors (most of whom must be admirers of Barthelme, Borges, Calvino, Chekhov, Davis, Hannah, Joyce, Kafka, Kawabata, Paley, Schulz, and so on) do have five-page ideas. But they probably experience the same sort of anxiety and self-consciousness and phallic inferiority that I did, when I found myself wasting yet another morning on “The Balloon”: “This isn’t even a story. It’s a runty little 600-word nothing.”
Of course, the market’s not as homogenous as I made it out to be. There are literary magazines like Subtropics, part of whose value lies in this commitment to heterogeneous forms. Needless to say, I feel lucky to have found such a good home for my little two-pager.