Reading the Vampire

Ken Gelder

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134895335
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Arte
• Categoria: Cultura popular en el arte

Insatiable bloodlust, dangerous sexualities, the horror of the undead, uncharted Trannsylvanian wildernesses, and a morbid fascination with the `other': the legend of the vampire continues to haunt popular imagination.
Reading the Vampire examines the vampire in all its various manifestations and cultural meanings. Ken Gelder investigates vampire narratives in literature and in film, from early vampire stories like Sheridan Le Fanu's `lesbian vampire' tale Carmilla and Bram Stoker's Dracula, the most famous vampire narrative of all, to contemporary American vampire blockbusters by Stephen King and others, the vampire chronicles of Anne Rice, `post-Ceausescu' vampire narratives, and films such as FW Murnau's Nosferatu and Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Reading the Vampire embeds vampires in their cultural contexts, showing vampire narratives feeding off the anxieties and fascinations of their times: from the nineteenth century perils of tourism, issues of colonialism and national identity, and obsessions with sex and death, to the `queer' identity of the vampire or current vampiric metaphors for dangerous exchanges of bodily fluids and AIDS.

1

ETHNIC VAMPIRES: TRANSYLVANIA AND BEYOND

In August 1830, Thomas Scott published the first map of what was then known as Van Diemen’s Land-now called Tasmania. At this time, settlers, with the help of the military, were ruthlessly clearing out Aborigines in an organised movement which began in the south-east (Hobart and the nearby islands) and swept across the island towards the west. When Scott drew his map, over half of Van Diemen’s Land was colonised. But although the uncharted remainder-the dense forests and mountains south-west of the infamous ‘black line’-was left blank, it was nevertheless given a name: Transylvania .¹

These days, the name ‘Transylvania’ has been more or less completely appropriated by vampire fiction and vampire films. One might be surprised, in fact, to realise that it is an actual country-part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire in 1830, later on a part of Hungary, and since the end of World War I a part of Roumania. One of the peculiarities of vampire fiction is that it has-with great success-turned a real place into a fantasy. It is impossible, now, to hear the name without thinking of vampires; the very word invokes an image of something unbelievable, something which inhabits an imaginary space rather than a real one. But Scott’s map complicates the picture. It precedes the popularised association of Transylvania and vampires-which developed in the later part of the nineteenth century and was consolidated in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897), the most influential of all vampire narratives. But it also, perhaps, anticipates that later association. It shows that ‘Transylvania’ already operates as a transferable sign which carries its meaning to other places-places which, as yet, can only be imagined. In this case, it nominates a region which lies under the shadow of-but is still, for the moment, outside-colonisation. For Scott and the colonisers of Tasmania, the place-name ‘Transylvania’, with its evocative meaning, ‘beyond (or, to the other side of) the forest’, must have seemed highly appropriate as a designation for the last uncharted parts of the island. Transylvania itself no doubt ‘resembled’ south-west Tasmania- mountainous, densely forested, inaccessible and inhabited. Transylvania stands between Western Europe and the Far East; Tasmania stands between mainland Australia and the far South. The two place-names-on opposite sides of the globe-even sound like each other (Van Demon’s Land, too, has a certain resonance here). It is, indeed, common in Australian literary studies to speak of the ‘Tasmanian Gothic’, a genre which expresses the sense of Tasmania’s peculiar ‘otherness’ in relation to the mainland, as a remote, mysterious and self-enclosed place. In popular parlance, Tasmania is ‘backward’, out of step with civilisation: Transylvania is evoked in a similar way, from the point of view of mainland jurisdiction.²

TRAVELLING TO TRANSYLVANIA

These meanings have more to do with geopolitical arrangements in history than with literary effects-although it would be truer to say in the case of vampire fiction that the two fold into each other to become, ultimately, inextricable. Geoffrey Wall’s somewhat melodramatic claim that ‘Transylvania is Europe’s unconscious’ (Wall, 1984, 20) at least captures the aura that has surrounded the country for those who live elsewhere; and contemporary vampire fiction often draws heavily on this mythical representation. Nevertheless, Transylvania was not always an entirely unknown or imaginary place. As far as Britain was concerned, Transylvania became increasingly significant during the nineteenth century, not least because Britain had interests in this part of Europe which it wanted to consolidate. To reflect and accommodate these interests, Transylvania was accordingly documented in a variety of texts which grew in number as the nineteenth century went on. Vampire fiction as it intermittently appeared at this time was heavily indebted to perceptions of Transylvania made available in particular through travel narratives (some of which were no doubt motivated by political interests) and through the related disciplines of folklore studies and ethnography.

These latter associations will be elaborated upon shortly; but we can appreciate the intimate connection between vampire fiction and travelogue-where the protagonist undertakes and documents a longjourney which brings him into contact with the vampire-simply by turning to the opening pages of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This novel was heavily dependent upon Victorian travelogues for its representation of Transylvania. But the protagonist, Jonathan Harker, is shown to know almost nothing about the country. Harker, a solicitor’s clerk from London, keeps a diary, written in shorthand, as he travels towards Transylvania and Dracula’s castle. The suspense of the novel depends here upon keeping Harker in ignorance of what he is about to encounter-like most vampire fiction, it works by systematically delaying the acquisition of knowledge. Harker does consult travelogues and ethnographies about Transylvania before his departure, but (for the purposes of maintaining his ignorance in these opening pages) they offer him no enlightenment:

I had visited the British Museum, and made search among the books and maps of the library regarding Transylvania; it had struck me that some foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance in dealing with a noble of that country. I find that the district he named is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldovia, and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe.

(Stoker, 1988, 1)

The journey towards Transylvania is certainly not enlightening for Harker; indeed, he increasingly finds himself in the dark as he moves away from the familiar routines of ‘civilised’ life. Harker’s first diary entry opens with his arrival in Buda-Pesth, the train running one hour late. This shift out of the orderliness of timetables-where, consequently, nothing can be anticipated-is a foretaste of what is to come: ‘It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China? ’ (2). Yet although it is unreliable, the train nevertheless provides Harker with what Wolfgang Schivelbusch-in his study of railway travel and its consequences for how we see an expanding (or, shrinking) world-has called ‘panoramic perception’ (Schivelbusch, 1979). Harker only glimpses the scenery and the people he passes; they seem all the more spectacular for that. Railway travel thus enables certain conventions for travel writing to cohere: what one sees is panoramic, spectacular, distanced and soon left behind. Stephen D. Arata, in his article ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation’ (1990), has drawn attention to the travelogue conventions at work in these opening pages: as well as complaining about the trains in Eastern Europe, Harker searches for a suitably ‘oldfashioned’ hotel, ‘samples the native cuisine... ogles the indigenous folk... marvels at the breathtaking scenery... wonders at local customs... and, interspersed throughout, provides pertinent facts about the region’s geography, history, and population’ (Arata, 1990, 636). Harker uses the word ‘picturesque’ often enough to make Arata wonder if Stoker is parodying the conventions of the Victorian travelogue.

This may be true; it is also true that Stoker, never having visited Transylvania, relied heavily on travelogue description. The key texts here, which are known to have formed part of Stoker’s background reading for Dracula, are Charles Boner’s Transylvania (1865), Major E.C. Johnson’s On the Track of the Crescent: Erratic Notes from the Piraeus to Pesth (1885) and Emily de Laszowska Gerard’s popular book, The Land Beyond the Forest (1888)-her essay on Transylvanian Superstitions’ was published in Nineteenth Century, 28 (July 1885), ajournal edited by Stoker’s friend Sir James Knowles.³ Stoker’s representation of Transylvania is grounded in the reports given in these and doubtless other texts, parts of which he had incorporated into Dracula almost word for word. Harker’s disclaimer in the note at the end of the novel-‘We were struck with the fact that, in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document! ’ (378)-is usually taken as a rhetorical gesture typical of Gothic fiction, a closing denial of the remarkable events which have just unfolded; but it might well refer to the novel’s tendency to represent Transylvania (and Dracula himself) by drawing on what had already been represented elsewhere-in the travelogues and ethnographies. It is a way of saying, in other words, that nothing in Dracula ’s account of Transylvania is original, everything has been copied or borrowed from other texts: this is, necessarily, a well-researched novel. Arata notes that when Harker reaches Dracula’s castle, travelogue ends and the Gothic begins, and that this disclaimer is a final and somewhat desperate attempt to recuperate the former and repudiate the latter-in order to exorcise the horrors that have been described. I would rather say that-in accounts of Transylvania in particular-travelogue and the Gothic are already intertwined and inseparable. I should add, also, that the disclaimer is followed with a remark neither I nor Arata had quoted: ‘nothing but a mass of type-writing.’ This other, apparently banal reason why the documents in Dracula have become ‘inauthentic’-another way of marking them as unoriginal, as copies-will be further discussed in Chapter 4.

The title of Arata’s article-‘The Occidental Tourist’-applies principally to Dracula, an ‘Occidentalist’ who journeys to England; but Harker, too, functions as a tourist and the travelogues he and Stoker depend upon show just how traversed this otherwise ‘unknown’ part of Europe actually was. In turn, Dracula itself is traversed by subsequent vampire narratives: it is difficult to resist drawing on vampiric images to describe the way an everincreasing amount of vampire fiction returns again and again to this particular ‘source’ for nourishment. Later chapters will elaborate on this point; but in the context of the discussion here one example might be sufficiently illustrative. S.P. Somtow’s Vampire Junction (1984) has the New York analyst Carla dream that she takes ‘a long train ride’ to a place which she immediately recognises: ‘She did not know the name of the country but somehow she thought it was Transylvania, because they all spoke in frightened whispers. There was a castle towering from the tallest crag’ (Somtow, 1984, 250). This novel self-consciously reproduces Harker’s experiences, as if the journey into Transylvania can now-after Stoker’s novel-be expressed in no other way. Indeed, Dracula has enabled the production and intensification of an actual tourist industry in Transylvania (and Whitby, Yorkshire, for that matter-where Dracula lands in England-with its ‘Dracula Trail’ and ‘Dracula Experience’), a rare feature for a novel. It is a feature that subsequent vampire narratives have occasionally parodied, such as the film comedy Transylvania 6-5000 (1985), directed by Rudy de Luca, which shows newspaper reporters visiting Dracula’s castle, negotiating with canny locals, relying on credit cards (American Express is highly visible on the castle door) and wondering all the while about the ‘authenticity’ of what they are seeing. Transylvania, one of the journalists remarks, is ‘cute’, rather than (as for Harker) ‘picturesque ’. As the title suggests, the film folds American popular culture into a flamboyantly inauthentic Transylvanian’ setting-as if this otherwise remote place has always belonged in Hollywood.

Can the ‘real’ Transylvania ever be represented? The editors of the sociocultural study Transylvania: The Roots of Ethnic Conflict (1983) feel obliged to remind readers that it is a ‘real’ place, reclaiming it from ‘storybook creation’ but noting also that ‘even the scholarly world has contributed to the fog that engulfs Transylvania’ (Cadzow et al., 1983, 1). Given the level of interest in the country during and after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu and the coup in Roumania during the last days of 1989, one might have expected the ‘fog’ to be lifted at last. But Ceausescu was immediately represented in mass medias as, precisely, a new ‘Dracula’, a kind of reincarnation of the fifteenth-century tyrant Vlad the Impaler. The demonisation of a communist tyranny by western journalists was nowhere more relentlessly pursued than here-bolstered by the easy availability of ‘on site’ vampiric iconography. Significantly enough, the Ceausescus were executed on Christmas Day. The two biographies which followed the family’s downfall-John Sweeney’s The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991) and Edward Behr’s ‘Kiss the Hand that Cannot Bite ’: The Rise and Fall of the Ceausescus (1991)-indicate even in their titles an inevitable tendency to vampirise the communist dictator. For Sweeney, demystification and mystification go hand in hand: certain ‘fables’ about Ceausescu ‘seem more eerie when one realises they are true-or at least, less of a lie than the “official truth’” (Sweeney, 1991b, 17). The ‘real’ in this account-where fables are true-lies elsewhere.⁴

For outsiders, journalists especially, who these days still venture into Roumania seeking the truth, the ‘Dracula myth’ would seem to be unavoidable. A special number of the journal Granta, titled What Went Wrong? featured a report on Roumania by William McPherson, who had driven into the country during the revolution of early 1990. The Gothic slowly intervenes to disturb the realism of McPherson’s travelogue: ‘All Roumania is dark, I was soon to discover, and Timisoara... seemed the darkest city I had ever seen’; ‘the events I had myself witnessed, began to seem unreal’ and so on. Later, he has strange dreams: ‘was that a sound, or was I imagining it?’ (McPherson, 1990, 11, 42, 44). Authenticity-whether certain events are in fact imagined or real-is a problem that remains unresolved in this country. Accordingly, McPherson, like Harker in Stoker’s novel (and like the heroes of much contemporary vampire fiction), becomes increasingly paranoid: ‘Who was who was difficult to sort out in Roumania’; ‘“How do you determine who is honest?’”; and-most alarming of all-‘“What you see is not true... and what is true you cannot see’” (McPherson, 1990, 19, 21, 24). Harker’s disclaimer at the end of Dracula-‘there is hardly one authentic document! ’-is precisely replicated here when a Roumanian student hands McPherson some papers with an incriminating list of names and dates:

I didn’t know if I were slipping into reality or out of it. In Roumania, I was beginning to learn, reality has a sliding floor. I looked at the document now in my hand. ‘How do you know it’s authentic?’ I turned the pages. I turned the pages again. The names meant nothing to me. ‘Petru, this is a copy. It is very easy to fake a copy.’
‘Fake?’
‘Falsify. Counterfeit. ’
‘No! It is veritable.’

(McPherson, 1990, 17)

Transylvania, then, is not so much unknown or unknowable as a place that throws what can be known into crisis. To enter Transylvania is to encounter a representational problematic: what circulates there (and the knowledges one accordingly possesses) may be true or false, authentic or inauthentic, it is impossible to say.

POST-CEAUSESCU VAMPIRE NARRATIVES

It is worth noting that these recent events in Roumania actually gave rise to a number of vampire fictions and feature films-what I would call post-Ceausescu vampire narratives. Stuart Gordon’s film Bloodlines: An Evil Ancestry (1989) shows Catherine, a young woman from Chicago, travelling to Ceausescu’s Roumania to search for her lost father. Bucharest is rendered ‘authentically’ in an otherwise fantastic film-the airport is policed by the Securitate, the streets are full of people standing in queues. A news broadcast shows Elena Ceausescu receiving a standing ovation. Catherine declares to her friendly taxi-driver Max that she is not a ‘sightseer’; the film, in the meantime, gives a suitably panoramic view of the city under siege (by taxi, not by train) and systematically leads her to the most hidden (i.e. even more ‘authentic’) places. Vampires reside here, both connected to and somehow ‘beyond’ Ceausescu’s Securitate; and like McPherson-in a country where identity is always illusory-Catherine can never tell who they are, ‘who was who’. Even Max, it turns out, is ‘one of them’. Ted Nicolaou’s Subspecies (1991) is less interested in rendering a ‘real’ contemporary Roumania; but, with its largely Hungarian crew and actors, it figures the ‘truth’ of Ceausescu’s regime through allegory and corrects misapprehensions about local folklore into the bargain. Three ‘beautiful young [female] research assistants’ arrive in Transylvania to accumulate local knowledge. They stumble into a battle between two vampire brothers, the good (younger) Stefan and the evil Radu (who has killed his father, King Vlad). The post-Ceausescu allegory is straightforward enough: ‘to save the kingdom from the terrifying rule of Radu’ and his ‘primitive’ army.

The American novelist Dan Simmons-whose vampire blockbuster Carrion Comfort (1989) will be looked at in Chapter 7-has published a short story, ‘All Dracula’s Children’ (1992) (later incorporated into his second vampire novel, Children of the Night (1992)). The story is centred on events immediately following the fall of the Ceausescus and captures most of the features of vampire fiction noted so far, modulating them in interesting ways. Like Dracula, it begins with a journey into Transylvania. The narrative opens with six United Nations ‘semi-officials’ (academics, a doctor, a minister, entrepreneurs) arriving in Roumania at an exact moment in history: ‘We flew to Bucharest almost as soon as the shooting stopped, landing at Oto...