Double Metaphors

I've been accepted to present a paper at What Happens Now: 21st Century Writing in English – The First Decade at the University of Lincoln in July. Provisionally entitled "'Zombies of the Interrogative Mood': Contemporary Theory, Fiction and the Question of Questions", I'm going to be writing on Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood and William Walsh's Questionstruck: A Collection of Question-Based Texts Derived from the Books of Calvin Trillin and wondering whether the question-based text is a particularly apt form for our uncertain times.

When searching for a title, I flipped through Powell's book and found the zombies quote. I thought it was cool and would catch the conference organisers' attention. Which presumably it did. After I'd submitted it, though, I began to think that the zombie is another curiously apt metaphor for contemporaneity. The zombie is neither alive nor dead, and that's pretty precarious if you ask me! Then I remembered Paul Krugman's "zombie ideas" and thought how apt it is for capitalism - it's not working, but it's not dead. It's in this precarious, limbo-state; everyone knows something has to change, but no-one's doing it.

Interestingly, Krugman meant to point out the lack of imagination in economic policy making - zombie ideas are ideas that keep coming back, as per the common imagination of zombies in computer games and films. He wasn't specifically referring to a precariousness (or precarity, as I've heard people describe it) but it was implied. That's a common thread in contemporary theories and writing: the conditions are talked about, perhaps even uncertainty is mentioned by name, but no-one talks about it as precariousness, as something that isn't just in politics or economics, but filters down from those apparently "lofty" disciplines to everyday life. That's what I'm interested in.

So, the upshot of all this is that my 2000 word paper now has two guiding metaphors, which is one too many really. Either the question-as-concept is (the openess of the question, something that opens up to the unknown and therefore precarious) or the zombie is. Haven't quite worked this out yet.