You might be thinking: “Why abjection? Isn’t that just a needlessly academic formulation of body horror?” I like the concept of abjection because it emphasizes psychological and social forces. Think about disgust, for instance. To be disgusted with oneself or with some physical aspect of the self might be a kind of shame. To fear societal reactions to something disgusting in oneself is to fear rejection, banishment, or, to use terms from my comments about Yarry, estrangement or alienation.
Abject horror is more than a physical phenomenon, then, it manifests in our relationships with self and others. As a critic and author, these tensions interest me greatly.
Gregor Samsa’s transformation in “The Metamorphosis,” as an example, does not occur in solitude, and Kafka’s account of it is concerned to a great degree with the way in which others respond to it.
And this thought brings me to…
Die Another Day
Emery Joyce
spoilers
The opening sentence of Die Another Day is a real banger.
You are a normal person.
Most of us will wonder. Is this mere reassurance? The person who most needs to be told such things is the least likely to feel it, I imagine. Let’s click until the flag is unfurled:
You are a normal person.
You just want to live a normal life.
But lately you have been having a problem:
Every day, you die.
Normal with qualifications, then! In a familiar sort of text adventure game, the daily death would be a central problem to solve. There might be a series of puzzles, perhaps, or a potion. A kindly wizard or a vicious witch? Or a kindly witch? Perhaps a nostalgic author would incorporate a maze. And so forth. But that’s not what’s happening here. The death is strikingly and casually credible, a magically realist thing that requires no explanation.
Instead, the problem is the mess that each death causes. This is narrative problem of Die Another Day: how can one exist in society if their daily life is an abjection?
In the mornings, everything is fine. On a good day, you might even make it to late afternoon before you begin to seriously deteriorate. But every evening, your body breaks down, and every night, you die.
Then you wake up the next day and have to deal with the mess you made.
Phrases like “the mess you made” hold the protagonist accountable. The messes are, indeed, confrontations with the abject: bodily fluids, tissues, excretions.
The coughing fits convulse your whole body. One especially violent fit triggers your gag reflex, and you barely make it to the bathroom in time to throw up into the toilet. There are undigested chunks of mushroom in the vomit. Your throat feels raw. Of course, as soon as you finish, you’re back to coughing.
How can someone in such a state exist as a “normal” person in society? The deaths and their aftermath will almost certainly interfere with human interactions. Without special effort, it is impossible to invite guests over.
Even with the cover on the couch, it’s getting hard to stay on top of keeping the living room clean, and the bedroom is even harder. You’ve found that cleanup is easiest if you die in the bathroom, but it’s not really comfortable to hang out there. You could set something up—a small waterproof mattress or something like that—but it would look pretty weird to any guests you might have over, and you don’t know how you’d explain it to them.
#Set up something that you can easily put away when you have company.
#If you never have guests then it’s not a problem, right?
#Never mind. You just have to try harder to keep up with cleaning.
I’m reminded of a trope from zombie apocalypse media: the survivor who gets bitten but doesn’t tell anyone. They must keep it a secret! To return to my short discussion of the abject above: the infected either fears or knows that they have become incompatible with society, that they will be rejected or alienated. They will be estranged as an abjection, as unclean.
The protagonist of Die Another Day faces three crushing problems: the first is the challenge of withstanding the pain and exhaustion of the deaths themselves. However, it often seems that they are able to endure that burden. But there follows the horror of revival, in which the protagonist confronts their own biological leavings, their object-ness.
The third one, though, is the one that drives the action in this story: can the player balance the energy required for human and social connectedness with the energy needed to recover from a daily death? Is it possible to get groceries AND write a long-form interactive fiction game? Is a museum trip advisable? What about working eight hours? In other words, can an abjection coexist in secret–the dying is a secret–with quote-unquote “normal” society, exist as a “normal” person?
I find Die Another Day very rich, conceptually, and, like Yarry and Contaminated Space, I’m led to think about the ways in which loneliness, isolation, or otherness can inform (or deform) our relations with our fellow human beings. While I think there’s a pretty reasonable reading regarding disability and a desire to live or exist as a “normal” person, I appreciate that there’s a lot of “play” (in the deconstructionist sense of there being room for interpretation) in this story. To me, its dramatization of managing the exhaustion of secrecy and difference while hoping to satisfy entirely human desires for friendship, belonging, and fulfillment ring true.