The Lazarus Crisis: Subjectivity, Language and Sacrifice in Cultural Narratives

This dissertation combines the biblical story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead and the Haitian folklore of the zombie to explore theories of circumscribed subjectivity. I survey a broad range of narratives that reflect the power dynamics involved in identity formations, especially those related to substitution of the self by a language that both defines and informs the associative collective group. The advantages of identity for the group often comes at the expense of the individual, as illustrated in the second chapter on the Haitian institution of Restavecs. A close look at how a single word can make over three hundred thousand children disappear from the social landscape while, simultaneously, affording its members the use of those children for personal gain, I focus on the excluded presence of the human being reflected in language. Jean Robert Cadet's autobiographical account illustrates that, for the individual, identity formations can become the artificial consciousness that informs, not only the language used, but also the self. This three ring circus (the community, the authority of language, and the individual) reflects a pattern repeated in a broad range of narrative mediums. Alongside biblical, mythological and autobiographical texts, other illustrations of this construct are analyzed in films by Lars von Trier and Jonathan Demme. Both directors produce visual representations of the primacy of language and the difficult nature of communication. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is analyzed as an example of the fragile nature of the self, constantly threatened by language and the internalization of identity constructs. On a more positive note, the final chapter of this project examines the works of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez to illustrate literary representations that resisted the problem language posed to the individual.