The Modern Vampire and Human Identity

Deborah Mutch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780230370135
• eBook ISBN: 9780230370142
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Vampires are back - and this time they want to be us, not drain us. This collection considers the recent phenomena of Twilight and True Blood, as well as authors such as Kim Newman and Matt Haig, films such as The Breed and Interview with the Vampire, and television programmes such as Being Human and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

1

Blood, Bodies, Books: Kim Newman and the Vampire as Cultural Text

Keith Scott

‘Every body is a book of blood: wherever we’re opened, we’re read.’

(Barker, 1998, p. 2)

Human beings are the storytelling species who make sense of the world around us by articulating experience through forms and frameworks of accepted narrative structure. The ability to relate stories gives us a connection with each other through the agreed framework of narrative; we accept and understand the difference, for instance, between a joke and a eulogy within our culture and we respond accordingly. Narrative is not, however, merely a verbal or written form of connecting tissue between humans but it has the power to change opinions and, from that, to change the power and organization of society. John D. Niles terms this ‘cosmoplastic power’ and, referring to the American philosopher Richard Rorty, observes that ‘[w]hat we call reality, in his view, is the effect of metaphors and stories that have become so successful, in competition with rival metaphors and stories, that “we try to make them candidates for belief, for literal truth”’ (Niles, 1999, p. 3). So why do apparently sane, rational and intelligent academics spend their time earnestly discussing and debating the minutiae of things which do not exist?

‘Reader, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but blood-drinking, form-shifting, bat-flying, kill-with-a-stake-in-the-heart, walking-undead vampires aren’t real. They’re purely fictional constructs.’ (Simmons, 2010, p. ix.)

While vampires may not have a concrete existence, they embody a number of highly important and deeply resonant issues which go to the heart of what we mean by ‘humanity’. Central to this is, as Niles term it, our nature as homo narrans, rather than sapiens.¹ We are the story-telling species who make sense of our selves and our world through the construction of narrative, tale and text. Fiction is no less important to the human’s sense of the world and their place in it than the ‘factual’ narratives of ‘reality’. The forms which these narratives take, as mentioned above, are socially agreed but are not necessarily autonomous from other narrative forms and structures. Hayden White, in The Content of the Form, recognizes the importance of ‘literary’ narrative forms in the narration of the past:

In the historical narrative the systems of meaning production peculiar to a culture or society are tested against the capacity of any set of ‘real’ events to yield to such systems. If these systems have their purest, most fully developed, and formally most coherent representations in the literary or poetic endowment of modern, secularized cultures, this is no reason to rule them out as merely imaginary constructions. To do so would entail the denial that literature and poetry have anything valid to teach us about reality. (White, 1987, p. 44)

Meaning is woven together from various sources: literary, cultural, political, ideological, religious. From Mother Goose to the Code Napoléon, from the Bible to The Beano, the stories we tell construct our identity as an individual, a culture and a species. A perfect example of the impossibility of separating ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’ in the human narrative is the arch-rationalist, Sherlock Holmes, who asks Dr Watson in ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’, ‘What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their graves by stakes driven through their hearts?’ (Conan Doyle, 1960, p. 123). Holmes is the fictional character who embodies the epitome of logic and scientific rationalism, created by a man who was a devout believer in the paranormal. One of the greatest achievements of modern textual criticism has arguably been to examine the extent to which literature is less an embodiment of certain eternal ‘truths’ than a vehicle for embodying culturally specific values. From the Saussurean signifier to the Barthesian myth, Althusserian ideology and beyond, the critical enterprise urges us to examine the way in which these artefacts are inscriptions of cultural meaning, the result of a complex interplay with other works – not written, but woven. They reflect the culture from which they spring and in turn help to shape its development. Living in a post-Gutenberg world, our beliefs and values are moulded by the texts we consume, or which others require us to consume; as Kapur, 2009, puts it, ‘we are the stories we tell ourselves’.

In this essay I will raise some suggestions as to why the vampire is such a durable archetype but what should be recognized at this stage is that whatever it may represent, it is undeniably a potent myth and practically universal. The ancient, global myth of the vampire has been addressed in the introduction to this collection but among scholars of the myth such as Roxana Stuart, Christopher Frayling, Montague Summers and Dom Augustin Calmet we can also position Van Helsing in Stoker’s Dracula (1897) who explains to the Crew of Light the ubiquity of the vampire:

[The vampire] is known everywhere that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome; he flourish in Germany all over, in France, in India, even in the Chernosese; and in China, so far from us in all ways, there even is he, and the peoples fear him at this day. He have follow the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar.’ (Stoker, 1998, p. 239)

Does Van Helsing’s form as a fictional character make the narrative any less true? Does Stoker’s use of the epistolary novel undermine this point of vampiric ubiquity? No, narration leads inevitably to interpretation; the question we should be asking is not ‘What is a vampire?’ but ‘What does a vampire mean?’ As Josef Kavalier puts it in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a marvellous examination of the power of popular culture and the mythic imagination:

‘How? is not the question. What? is not the question,’ Sammy said.

‘The question is why.’

‘The question is why.’

(Chabon, 2000, p. 94)

Potent, universal and ever-changing; each generation has its own vampire. In the West, our vampires range from the decaying corpses of Mitteleuropa to the eerie form of Murnau’s Graf Orlok, from Lugosi’s thickly-accented matinee idol to the gore-spattered rednecks of Bigelow’s Near Dark. This ever-expanding proliferation of manifestations of the vampiric archetype is matched by the growing body of critical works devoted to the figure. While previous eras may have seen the vampire as a supernatural phenomenon – from the official records of the Eastern European vampire ‘epidemics’, through Calmet and into the twentieth century with the eccentric Montague Summers – we now view it as a cultural one. This book is one manifestation of this interest, a critical canon devoted to deciphering vampirism and reaching into such works as Auerbach (1997), Gelder (1994) and Williamson (2005). Our analytical work reflects the cultural ubiquity of the subject, from the cuddly Transylvanians of Jill Thompson’s Scary Godmother stories to the homoerotic, tortured, but oh-so glamorous goths of Anne Rice and Poppy Z Brite. Included at the head of the ever-growing fanged battalions is the etiolated, razor-cheek-boned form of Edward Cullen, poster-boy of the genre summed up by Charles Stross as ‘Sparkly Vampyres in Lurve’ (Stross, 2010). Neil Gaiman has expressed frustration at the present-day proliferation of the undead: ‘You shouldn’t be glutted with vampires; they should be a spice, not a food group’ (Gaiman, 2009) – and, one might argue, not an omnipresent fast food, available everywhere and anywhere. However, Cullen and his kin merely exemplify the essential nature of the vampire; it changes to fit the zeitgeist, and this is what it has always done. Our monsters are defined by our culture – show me what you fear and I will show you what you are, as it were – and if we wish to understand our world, the vampire is as good a place as any to start.

In order to sketch out such an analysis, however provisional, I suggest that we need to return to the taproot text for all the other modern vampires – Stoker’s Dracula. In ‘Burying the Dead: the Use and Obsolescence of Count Dracula’, Robin Wood argues that ‘It is time for our culture to abandon Dracula and pass beyond him’ (in Newman, 2001, p. iv); I would contend, with William Hughes (Hughes, 2001, p. 144), that this is both undesirable and impossible. Just as the recent crisis of global capitalism leads many to argue for a return to Marx, so I feel that any examination of the vampire must involve a return to Dracula. Stoker’s vampire, whose novel was memorably described by Maurice Richardson as an ‘incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match’ (Richardson quoted in Stuart, 1994, p. 183) is still going strong; la lutte continue. However many different avatars of the undead we may confront, they all hark back to the Ur-vampire. As Ahab says, ‘all visible objects are but as pasteboard masks’ (Melville, 1952, p. 161); beneath the none-more-emo faces of Lestat and Cullen lurks a much less immediately attractive physiognomy: that of the bushy-eyebrowed, hawk-nosed, moustachioed Transylvanian. Turn to Chapter 1 of Dracula, and you will find the passage where Jonathan Harker is heading to his first meeting with the Count. Before boarding the coach, ‘One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burger’s ‘Lenore’ – ‘Denn die Todten reiten Schnell’ – (‘For the dead travel fast’)’ (Stoker, 1998, p. 10). And this is what Dracula has done; just as he crosses the North Sea, aboard the Demeter, to Whitby and thence to London, so he speeds along Freud’s royal road to set up residence in our unconscious, collective or individual, a fully-paid-up member of the cultural pantheon. Immortal – and ever-changing.

Once a character becomes part of the cultural capital he or she will continually recur, changing appearance and meaning according to the concerns of the era, providing material for an endless series of homages, pastiches, ripoffs and reboots. Since the publication of Stoker’s novel, we have seen Draculas who are comic, tragic, monstrous, gay, straight, bisexual, in the Wild West, in space, in ballets, musicals . . . you name it. He can be whatever you wish him to be, and appear in any genre, in any time period; truly a vampire for all seasons. In this, he is surely the very model of a perfectly postmodern haemophage.

Why do I class Dracula as a ‘postmodern’ vampire? Because he is protean (he is a literal shapeshifter), a perfect example of the free-floating signifier, ready and able to stand for anything we might wish him to represent; the proof of this lies in the seemingly endless series of critical readings of the novel. According to who you read, Dracula represents Communism (Strigoi (dir. Faye Jackson, 2009) and Thomas Sipos’ novel Vampire Nation (2009)), Capitalism (Anne Billson’s 1993 novel Suckers), Irish Republicanism (see the depiction of Parnell as ‘The Irish Vampire’ in Punch, 24 November 1885), late Victorian misogyny and gynophobia, syphilis, AIDS, xenophobia, fascism (the 1997–2009 manga series and subsequent anime Hellsing, and the classic 1980 2000 AD comic strip Fiends of the Eastern Front): in short, anything the critic dislikes. It is this refusal to be pinned (or staked) down which gives the text its extraordinary force and longevity; the reasons for this probably lie in the realm of psychology, as writers such as Stewart (2010), Powell (2003), and Halberstam (1995) inter alia suggest.

In classically Freudian terms, the vampire is a wonderfully disturbing example of the Unheimlich, neither truly alive nor decently dead, what Žižek terms an ‘uncanny space’:

a vampire is a Thing that looks and acts like us, yet is not one of us. . . . This intermediate space of the unrepresentable Thing, filled out by the ‘undead’, is what Lacan has in mind when he speaks of ‘l’entre-deux-morts’. (Žižek, 2006, p. 125)

By his very unnatural nature, Dracula engages in a truly postmodern explosion of categories, becoming something which both is and is not. He is a paradoxical living dead man, posing a profound threat to all our deep-seated beliefs in an essential division between life and death, between what is and is not. To quote Žižek again:

is not the clearest figuration of the famous je est un autre [of Rimbaud] to be found in the mass-culture tradition of vampires and living dead who ‘decentre’ the subject, undermining from within his consistency and self-control? (Žižek, 1992, p. 113)

This psychological component of Stoker’s text is another sign of its (post)modernity. Published in 1897, a full two years before On The Interpretation of Dreams, Stoker can be read as a Freudian avant la letter. As Stephen King points out:

Dracula sure isn’t a book about ‘normal’ sex; there’s no Missionary position going on here . . . [the] infantile, retentive attitude towards sex may be one reason why the vampire myth, which in Stoker’s hands seems to say ‘I will rape you with my mouth and you will love it; instead of contributing potent fluid to your body, I will remove it,’ has always been so popular with adolescents still trying to come to grips with their own sexuality. (King, 1991, p. 84)²

Dracula allows us to engage with the two greatest sources of human neurosis, Sex and Death; Eros and Thanatos in one bite-size package. This is possible because we, as narrators and as readers, distance the form of fiction from that of ‘reality’. This point does not contradict that made earlier on Hayden White’s ideas on narrative; rather it is meant to acknowledge the subtlety with which we approach our narratives. Humans have an enormously complex set of socially-acceptable rules governing the forms which allow or prohibit the discussion of ideas or actions deemed offensive or subversive by society.

In Dracula we have a text which embodies, in its central characters, primal psychological issues which are read as a reflection of the particular concerns of specific historical and cultural eras. Reading the text, according to Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, also depends on the reader creating or accepting a narrative of the past which is then applied to the text. In their reading of the criticism of Dracula, Baldick and Mighall explain the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century reversal of heroes and villains in the novel:

the (white male heterosexual) Victorians are the villains (defined by their transparent adherence to ‘orthodox’ standards of morality and oppressive gender, class, race and sexual allegiances), while the vampire is the heroic subverter of these values. Once established, these principles allow the critic’s will to subversion and interpretative ingenuity full scope. (Baldick and Mighall, 2001, p. 223)

Such critical readings are also evident in the adaptations of the original into different media and genre. One way of proceeding with this essay would be to discuss the myriad different reworkings, remakes and reimaginings of Stoker’s text and the historical readings of Vlad Tepes himself, but that would merely become an endless catalogue raisonné. Rather, I wish to examine a trilogy of novels which use Dracula as a source text for an examination of the vampire myth, an exercise in alternative history and an analysis of the evolution of popular fiction: Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula (1992), The Bloody Red Baron (1995) and Judgment of Tears (1998) (UK Dracula Cha Cha Cha (2000)).

Most vampire fiction, I would contend, reduces the polymorphous, polysemous figure of the vampire to the embodiment of a single meaning, each writer using the monster as the locus for the examination of one particular issue of social, cultural or sexual anxiety. This is, of course, entirely reasonable as a process but it leads to a corresponding reduction of the critical endeavour to mere taxonomy; this vampire represents this particular issue, that one represents that issue, etc. Stoker’s vampire has endured precisely because, as I have argued, he refuses to be limited to a single interpretation; his ‘meaning’ evolves with each gener...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes On Contributors
• Introduction: ‘A Swarm of Chuffing Draculas’: the Vampire in English and American Literature
• 1 Blood, Bodies, Books: Kim Newman and the Vampire as Cultural Text
• 2 Buffy Vs. Bella: Gender, Relationships and the Modern Vampire
• 3 ‘Hell! Was I Becoming a Vampyre Slut?’: Sex, Sexuality and Morality in Young Adult Vampire Fiction
• 4 Consuming Clothes and Dressing Desire in the Twilight Series
• 5 Whiteness, Vampires and Humanity in Contemporary Film and Television
• 6 The Vampiric Diaspora: the Complications of Victimhood and Post-Memory as Configured in the Jewish Migrant Vampire
• 7 Vampires and Gentiles: Jews, Mormons and Embracing the Other
• 8 Transcending the Massacre: Vampire Mormons in the Twilight Series
• 9 The Gothic Louisiana of Charlaine Harris and Anne Rice
• 10 Matt Haig’s the Radleys: Vampires for the Neoliberal Age
• References
• Index