Rebecca Stephens for Nth Position
The vampire is now an archetypal figure, shrouded in cliché, but as a folk-belief one of its earliest incarnations was within Hebrew tales of Lilith and other demons. Ironically, it was an image which was to be turned against Judaism by the Christians of the middle ages, and used as a cipher for many monstrous desires and fears ever since.
"If any man whosoever of the house of Israel... eat blood, I will set my face against his soul, and will cut him off from among his people.
Because the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you, that you may make atonement with it upon the altar of your souls."
"Only beware of this, that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is for the soul. And therefore thou must not eat the soul with the flesh:
But thou shalt pour it on the earth as water." [1]
Long before the workings of the circulatory system were discovered, many of the world's cultures accorded blood mystical properties, implying a special status, and an association with ritual states of pollution or defilement. The quotation from Leviticus and Deuteronomy is part of the long series of regulatory laws given out to the nomadic Jews by Moses. With the inclusion of the Torah in the Christian Bible and as a result of the Jewish Diaspora, such ideas passed into the popular imagination and thus the cultural products of Europe.
Blood in Leviticus is sacred to God, humanity may not touch it and remain unpolluted; in Christian ritual, all the Church partakes of God's own sacred blood: it is seen by both as a holy substance imbued with miraculous power, forming the highest and best sacrificial offering. In tales of the saints, this power is reiterated ceaselessly. Blood, simply by issuing from and thus transgressing the margins of the body, demonstrates a disturbing fluidity.
We define our relationships by it, both in terms of consanguinity and in terms of fellowship: we speak of 'bad blood', 'blood brothers', and no less today than in the middle ages treat it with superstition. It is with several different types of body that I will be concerned here, both the particular, human body, and the universal, societal body. In either, however, the myths surrounding the nature of the body and its fragility are remarkably, given their temporal distance, similar. I wish to gesture towards theorising this similarity by offering two instances of vampirising society's demons, and what this tells us about the progress of cultural beliefs, taboos and darkest fears.
In Europe in the embryonically urbanised middle ages, when people were beginning to live in large organisations, Christianity was the dominant cultural force. Europeans invented the unitary construct of Christendom, a construct that once imagined to be alive had to be protected at all costs. Society consciously gathered together to create the 'body' of believers which formed the Church. It was a body with very clear and definite borders and boundaries, but as with every body, its margins were worryingly open to transgression and infection.
Naturally, in assessing what framed its unity, it defined what was beyond it, where it located the borders of its metaphorical body. It was a body which by its nature had to possess a ritual purity, as the earthly spouse of the immaculate Christ incarnate. Holding such spiritual significance, any chosen enemy is given diametrically equal significance, and demonised to the same degree that the body of Ecclesia, the Church, is sanctified. In defining Jews as external to this body, the fear that they would act parasitically towards it grew.
As the body was established and defined, so anxieties that it would be defiled began to surface, that its boundaries and borders were all too indeterminate, emerged. Christ's blood, in the form of the newly-established Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, flowed through the body of the Church as its own lifeblood, and formed a central image in its rhetoric. Its fluid nature gave rise to fears however that it might flow into the wrong veins, become tainted by those beyond the margins of the Christian body of belief.
Throughout the Middle Ages theological uniformity was synonymous with social cohesion in societies that regarded themselves as bound together at their most basic and fundamental levels by a religion. [2] Anyone found to be other than orthodox was believed to wilfully have chosen to be in opposition to a whole culture in all of its manifestations. Pluralism of belief was intolerable, no variance of its expression was permitted to be published. The church quickly forgot that Christ was Jewish and his persecutors Roman, and began the process of demonising the Jews. [3] As a reverse image of the perfection of the Trinity of God, it imagined an antagonistic negative trinity of Devil-Antichrist-Jew. Judaism was considered a perverse and deliberately-chosen error, because the 'Way, Truth and Life' were openly and obviously accessible to all. Such stubbornness in religious matters commonly went under the name of heresy.
Heresy was seen as more than inherently wrong. It was believed to be dangerous, infective, deadly: acting on the body of the Church like a disease. Commonly, in the writings of the heresy-hunters, it is likened to a poison. It is described as an infection that damages the innocent and unknowing body of believers, or it is compared to that other secret scourge, cancer. To the medieval mind, cancer was a collective term for many kinds of disease, including leprosy and syphilis, that affect us insidiously, infecting the body until member by member it decays. Writers frequently describe how theological error within society resembles leprosy infecting the limbs of Christ. It is only a short move from expressing such beliefs to proclaiming that society must be rid of this plague.
The persecution and demonisation of Jews, particularly in the popular medieval media of sermons, plays and visual arts, went beyond likening them to a dangerously infective disease. In these media, composed and performed in the vernacular and therefore having enormous popular currency, the Jew acquired a fictive and mythic force that was beyond the human, even demonic. It would hardly be surprising for panic to spread. The cure however could not be sought in the traditional scourge of religious infection, the pyre. It was not a matter of simply executing Jews for religious crimes. Though comparable in the popular imagination, Judaism and heresy were not synonymous, because in strict theological terms Judaism in itself did not constitute a heresy.
The Jews were a marginal group, inhabiting the outskirts of the cities. Officially despised, they belonged to a category of outcasts that the middle ages simultaneously regarded with attraction and fear. Such a potent mixture of desire and revulsion always seems to constitute the monstrous and inform too the seductive ambiguities of the vampire. The excluded body of the Jew, kept outside the boundaries of the Christian world, returned to haunt the imagination and the 'pure' body of the interior. It is no surprise that as the Jews were imbued with supernaturally infective powers, and believed to be capable of insinuating themselves into society and of destroying it from within, anti-Semitism was bound to erupt into violence. The fear with which the Jews were viewed is directly linked to their distance from the Church, which defined them as beyond its control. If the Church is a body, then Judaism is seen as a deadly disease preying on it from without and then corrupting it from within, or worse, as an infection with the wilful and perverse intention of sucking the lifeblood of Christianity.
The Jews were associated with a secretive and lethally parasitic kind of behaviour. The difference in their dietary laws, religious rituals, and language, led to the belief that these rituals involved the perversion of Christian sacraments, and even constituted a demonic plot to overthrow the whole of Christendom. Infection and the powers of corruption were seen as fluid, dangerously able to surreptitiously cross the boundaries and borders which the Church was so anxious to keep pristine. Two types of crime were levelled at the Jews, both fluid: of the poisoning of wells, [4] and of crimes of blood: the infamous 'blood-libels'.
Beginning in the 12th and 13th centuries, accusations began to be levelled at the Jews which led to sporadic outbreaks of violence fed by popular rage encouraged by the Church and state; these accusations themselves spreading like an epidemic. Their crimes were said to be of three varieties. [5]
Firstly, against the universal body of belief, by wilfully maintaining a religion other to that of the body of the Church, and by refusing to convert.
Secondly, they were said to act against the particular bodies of believers, through ritual cannibalism, typically of small boys. In a manner reminiscent of Dracula's Lucy Westenra, they were said to lie in wait for Christian children, who they then kidnapped and murdered. They were imputed with seeking to pervert the sacrament of the Eucharist by drinking the blood of Christian infants.
Thirdly, and seen as worst of all, they were accused of crimes against the body of Christ.
Anti-Semitism was institutionalised, as I have already mentioned, in the belief that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. For this they were loathed and despised, and the crime was compounded by accusations that they maintained this torture of Christ through abusing and desecrating the bread that formed 'Christ's body' in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Medieval Christian belief surrounding the Host was complex, but many writings testify to the belief that after consecration, the bread could feel pain, and bleed when tortured. This body was both a 'classical' one in the Bahktinian sense: elevated, static, and monumental, and a 'grotesque' body: broken, bleeding, its fluidity troubling any container. [6] As a result of these accusations, Jews were burned in large numbers all over Europe.
The persecution of Jewish communities occurred with disturbing regularity throughout the middle ages, because ritual abuse and the drinking of blood were popularly believed to be central to the Jewish tradition. Charged with pacts with other ritually unclean marginalia such as lepers and prostitutes, Jews were thought to be in league also with the devil to infect the Christian body morally, socially, and eternally, by seeking to bring about its damnation. Jews increasingly were hounded from social enclaves, and frequently subjected to extremes of persecution and massacre. Even these brutal measures were not considered sufficient, as folklore credited the Jews with powers of re-animation and necromancy: often a stake was driven through the heart, or the body was stabbed after its burning.
That such virulent force was felt to be needed in order to rid society of the infective influence of the Jews evidences the supra-natural power with which they were viewed, in the discourse of blood and sacramental pollution. There was no decade of the middle ages which did not have its apocalyptic panic: living in a period of confusion, the end of the world was always imminent. Viewed as degenerate and dehumanised blood suckers, the Jews' phantasmagoric power increased in the minds of medieval Christians in direct proportion to their frustrations and fears in a time of crisis and change. The metaphor of disease did not die out, but remained as a parasite in the cultural lifeblood. I will however have to skip over the intervening four centuries to my next example of its outbreak, in the 19th century. [7] Here I confine myself to the use of only two historical snapshots of monstrous marginality, which I hope will provoke discussion and provide material for the reader to explore further alone.
The fact that I am now moving my narrative forward to the 19th century doesn't mean that there was nothing in between: certainly, the demonisation, the ascription of supernatural mobility to the Jews continued and continues still. But also the metaphor of vampire infecting the body politic, sucking its lifeblood and infecting its good citizens, crops up again and again in times of crisis. In every period the vampire myth enjoys currency, particularly those which demonstrate anxiety about outsiders infecting their homogeneity. I do not wish to offer a full historical analysis of the figure of the vampire, and the imagery used to demonise marginal figures, throughout the past thousand years of European history. Nor do I seek to provide an authoritative account of anti-Semitism, 19th and 20th century literature, folklore, and myth. Rather I am positing a series of suggestive connections, analogues, and interrelations. I am simply offering a plan or a template of a particular pan-historic fear of bodily infection, and of those whom we imbue with unnatural and injurious force.
From the beginning of the 19th century, Gothic, with its proto-Freudian fears of the monstrous lurking at the edges of the social body, prepared all Europe for the fin-de-siècle. British writing in particular abounds with fears of contagion which finds its expression in works such as Dracula, The Blood of the Vampire, Carmilla and in many short stories.
Evidence perhaps of a perceived need to protect the body of the British Empire, Gothic writing spawned significant manifestations of the vampire myth using remarkably similar imagery to that already discussed in the mythologising of the Jews. The British having colonised a large portion of the world, their subconscious, often not-so suppressed fears, which surface in the uncanny horror and ghost stories, reveal a dread that reverse colonisation will occur. This dread is exhibited in the fears of sexual disease and degeneracy, and the decline and dilution of the imperial race.
Just as the medieval Church could feel that it had eliminated the sources of its anxieties in demonising and then destroying the vampiric spectre of Judaism, so late nineteenth-century vampire fiction provided a means of expressing society's fears in order to despatch them and re-establish a sense of order at the end of the story. The literature of horror to some extent performs a catharsis in bringing to the foreground buried fears, but while there is a potential for subversive comment, the vampire literature of this period more often reinforces the reader's fundamentally conservative attitudes, and often subtly encourages racism and bigotry.
The increase in immigration and emigration; the emancipation of the New Woman; dark rumours of decadent sexuality; the rise in sexually transmitted diseases, particularly syphilis; the over-population of the cities; the influx into London of Eastern European Jews, who it was felt would 'feed off' and 'poison the blood of' the Londoners; the risk of mixed marriages at the outskirts of the Empire; the declining aristocracy: these were the perceived threats to the 'national stock' of Englishmen.
They resulted in social tensions which were expressed in a discourse of degeneration, the vampire fiction, which proclaimed the dread of the pollution of the lifeblood of England. The combination of threats was viewed as a deadly force: that 'our girls', as Dracula's exterminator Van Helsing calls them, may be tainted in some way by a foreign man, become diseased, pass this infection on to British men and through doing so dilute and pollute their identity. [8]
All the imagined dangers were due entirely to the fear of the pervasive fluidity of infective forces, which could infect unseen, corrupt the victim, and then return to haunt England unknown. The mobility and freedom of movement of women, 'foreigners', sexually transmitted infections, and economic capital, among other categories, was a combination with the potential to destroy the Empire. Most of the vampire fiction at this point in time being written by men, or, like Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire, by women who had thoroughly assimilated the male viewpoint, these stories are ones of fear, not celebratory of a liberating mobility. [9]
The worrying characteristic of the vampire is that he does not look sufficiently different from the hero for us to be able to tell at a glance that he is infected. A true fifth columnist, the vampire is able successfully to pollute society from within because he does not appear different enough from the 'average' character of the vampire story. It is up to the patriarchal representatives - Van Helsing and his 'Crew of Light' in Dracula, or Laura's father and the 'General' in Carmilla - to identify the threat and despatch it with all necessary force. While the vampire is hampered by conventional 'rules' limiting his behaviour, the authors of vampire fiction do not hamper him by so many that he doesn't get the chance to look for a while as if he really is going to destroy the system. Thus this fiction reveals the fear that the 'good', despite innocence and virtue, may be overcome.
The vampire remains ubiquitous since our passage through the double fin-de-siècle, the end both of the century and the millennium. It would appear that since the middle of the 19th century Europe had been self-consciously preparing for this event, revealing an entropic zeitgeist and millennial anxiety in its literature of horror.
While James Annesley in a recent article decries linking the 19th and 20th century's concerns as exemplified through fiction, bearing in mind the cultural context of each piece of writing there are still considerable analogies. Annesley's criticism is based on a reading of the bêtes noires of high culture, and thus he comments that vampire fiction only began to make a comeback in the 1990s. [10] The horror stories of the 1890s now, of course, are read as literary luminaries.
However, the briefest survey of popular literature, including science-fantasy and graphic art, demonstrates that since Varney, Carmilla and Dracula came on the scene, there has not been a decade without a substantial amount of vampire fiction. As we closed the last decade of the 20th century and entered the new millennium, the vampire and thus also our fears and anxieties, were still going strong.
As concepts of society and the family disintegrate, the nature of the fear alters: the polluting power is not now in its threat to the Church, the community, or to society, since these have lost their status as universal ideologies, but to the individual personal body.
That we have not moved on so far from the concerns of the Victorian vampire tale, is evidenced by the rewritings and reworkings of many of the nineteenth-century's stories: Holland's adoption of Polidori's ascription to Byron of vampiric status, in The Vampyre; Rudorff's and Tremayne's homages to Stoker in The Dracula Archives, and The Revenge of Dracula and Dracula Unborn respectively.
Many writers have explicitly voiced a link between the 'blood disease' of the vampire and AIDS, [11] some of which I offer here in brief quotations as an appendix. In subversion of homophobic prejudice there are more fictions than ever before with an explicitly gay or lesbian anti-hero: 'Andrew' in McMahan's Vampires Anonymous, 'Louis' and 'Lestat' in Rice's chronicles, and the gay vampire 'scene' of Brite's writing. Changing attitudes are matched by the fluid mobility and changeability of the vampire: we may now subvert and reclaim the monstrous , modern readers are more likely to cheer Dracula than the 'Crew of Light'.
These intriguing manifestations of a pan-historic myth, which make use of contemporary fears and scape-goats to indicate a wider human anxiety, indicate the narrowing of the focus of societal concern. The reworkings of imagery and linguistic concepts demonstrate the protean diversity of a very real fear, expressed in our mythologies across time. The nature of what the vampire represents changes depending on what each author and era feel to be the particular cultural demons. Medieval monsters are the Jews: now we have stories where the Jews are the victims of the vampires, such as Jon Ruddy's 1990 novel The Bargain, or F Paul Wilson's story (also 1990) "Midnight Mass". The 19th century fears the decadent gay vampire, now we have series of novels devoted to just this figure. The vampire reveals our paranoia, always a critic of the system, a subversive and transgressive element: in chronicling its appearances we can learn where our fears lie.
Notes
1 Leviticus 18: 10-11 (the full laws covering the use of blood run from 1-16); Deuteronomy 12: 23-24. For an anthropological analysis of many belief-systems' attitudes to blood, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1966). See also Kathleen Biddick, "Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible", Speculum 68 (1993). [Back]
2 Edward Peters, ed., Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1980) 3. [Back]
3 For this an introduction to this topic see: Malcolm Barber, "Lepers, Jews and Moslems: the Plot to Overthrow Christendom in 1321"; Robert Chazan, "The Blois Persecution of 1171," Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 36 (1968) and "The Timebound and the Timeless," History and Memory 6:1 (1994); Alan Dundes, ed. The Blood-Libel Legend: A Casebook of Anti-Semitic Folklore (Madison, Wis., 1991); Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Blackwell: Oxford, 1995); Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London: Routledge, 1994); Sander L Gilman and Steven T Katz, eds. Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis (New York: New York UP, 1991); Gavin Langmuir, "The Knight's Tale of Young Hugh of Lincoln," Speculum 47 (1972); Moshe Lazar, "The Lamb and the Scapegoat: The Dehumanization of the Jews in Medieval Propaganda Imagery," [ibid.]; RI Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), "Heresy as Disease," The Concept of Heresy in the Middle Ages, ed. W Lourdaux and D Verhelst (Louvain: Louvain UP, 1976), and The Origins of European Dissent (Toronto: Toronto UP, 1994); Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991). [Back]
4 See Barber (footnote 3). [Back]
5 Instances of these accusations occurred all over Europe over several hundred years, appearing in many folk tales, as well as historical records, and even appearing in Chaucer's Prioress' Tale, where a young boy who later becomes beatified as St Hugh of Lincoln, is murdered, his throat cut and thrown into a pit. As a result, all the Jews in the town are arrested and hanged, an occurrence said to be based in fact.
In the Blois persecution of 1171, 32 Jews were killed for allegedly murdering five young Christian boys for their blood. In 1235, 34 Jews of Fulda were burned as a result of similar libels. An altarpiece designed by Paolo Uccello in the 15th century tells a Paris legend of ritual desecration of the Host, the Eucharist, by a group of Jews who are discovered because of the blood which pours out of their house and down the street after a woman heats it in a pan. Temples and Jewish ghettos were burned, and their occupants massacred, with the violence increasing over the 13th and 14th centuries to a peak in the 15th.
The Shepherd's Crusade of 1320, composed of ordinary citizens, set off for Languedoc from Paris, attacking Jews wherever they could find them. Towns particularly mentioned were Saintes, Verdun, Grenade, Castelsarrasin, Toulouse, Cahors, Albi, Auch, Rabastens and Gaillac: whole communities were massacred or forcibly baptised. By the fourteenth century many cities and countries had expelled what Jews had not already been exterminated. There are numerous further examples. [Back]
7 For 19th and 20th-century readings of the vampire, see some of the following for an introduction to the ever-increasing bibliography: James Annesley, "Decadence and Disquiet: Recent American Fiction and the Coming Fin de Siècle," Journal of American Studies 30:3 (1996); Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982); Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996); Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988); Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984); Margaret L Carter, ed. Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988); Sue-Ellen Case, "Tracking the Vampire," Differences 3:1 (1991); Joan Copjec, "Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety," October 58 (1991); Laurence Coupe, Myth (London: Routledge, 1997); Christopher Craft, "'Kiss me with Those Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Representations 8 (1984); Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity; Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1991); David Englander, "Booth's Jews: The Presentation of the Jews and Judaism in Life and Labour of the People in London," Victorian Studies 32 (1989); Ronald Foust, "Rite of Passage: The Vampire Tale as Cosmogonic Myth," Aspects of Fantasy, ed. William Coyle (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986); Christopher Frayling, ed. Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber and Faber, 1991); Adèle Olivia Gladwell and James Havoc, eds. Blood and Roses: The Vampire in 19th Century Literature (London: Creation, 1992); Martin H Greenberg, ed. A Taste for Blood (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1992); Peter Haining, ed. The Dracula Scrapbook (London: Chancellor Press, 1987), The Vampire Hunter's Casebook (London: Warner, 1996), and The Vampire Omnibus (London: Orion, 1995); William H Helfand, "Sexually Transmitted Disease: Keeping the Public Posted," Encyclopedia Britannica Medical and Health Annual, ed. Ellen Bernstein (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1993); Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981); Stephen Jones, ed. The Mammoth Book of Vampires (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992); Lautréamont, Maldoror, trans. Paul Knight (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978); Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken, ed. Cultural Politics at the Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995); Litteratures 26 (Spring 1992): special section on 'La Figure du Vampire'; David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980); Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis, trans. Judith Braddock and Brian Pike (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Frank Rich, "Blood Count," Guardian Weekend, 2 January 1993; Alan Ryan, ed. The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories (London: Penguin, 1987); Talia Schaffer, "'A Wilde Desire Took Me': The Homoerotic History of Dracula," ELH 61 (1994); Elaine Showalter, "Blood Sell: Vampire fever and anxieties for the fin de siècle," Times Literary Supplement, 8 January 1993; Brian Stableford, ed. The Dedalus Book of Femmes Fatales (Sawtry, Cambs.: Dedalus, 1992); John Allen Stevenson, "A Vampire in the Mirror: the Sexuality of Dracula," PMLA 103:2 (1988); Bram Stoker, Dracula (Dingle: Brandon, 1992); Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1928), and The Vampire in Europe (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1929); Roger Vadim, foreward, The Vampire, ed. Ornella Volta and Valeria Riva (London: Pan, 1976); Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995). [Back]
8 Robert Machray, The Nightside of London (London: John Macqueen, 1902) 9: "A girl of the night, on her prowl for prey... flits silently past like a bat."
"A 'gentleman of (off) colour' - a 'buck nigger' an American would call him - goes by, a gratified smirk on his oily, thick-lipped face, and on his arm a pale, lip-laughing English girl! Somehow you swear and turn away."
Letter to The Times (December 1917), signed 'M.D' [it should be pointed out that 'lance' here is the independent phallus]: "Sexual freelances stalked through the land, vampires upon the nation's health, distributing and perpetuating among our young manhood diseases which institute a national calamity." [Back]
9 Florence Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire (London: Chatto & Windus, 1897) 141: "Neither is it the fault of a madman that his progenitors had lunacy in their blood, nor of a consumptive, that his were strumous. All the same the facts affect their lives and the lives of those with whom they come into contact. It is the curse of heredity... she possesses the fatal attributes of the Vampire that affected her mother's birth... that will make Harriet draw upon the health and strenth of all with whom she may be intimately associated - that may render her love fatal to such as she may cling to." [Back]
10 "The return of the vampire, that staple of nineteenth-century decadent fiction, can be seen in Bret Easton Ellis' novel The Informers (1994) and also in the more obscure work of Kathe Koja and Poppy Z. Brite."
The long-running vampire chronicles of Anne Rice - starting in the 1970s - Stephen King, or Dan Simmons do not of course get a mention here, in order that his argument about 'blank fiction' should function.
"In blank fiction's revivification of the vampire myth, lies the suggestion that it, like fin de siècle writing, has a specific interest in themes related to plague, disease and contamination, a suggestion that finds more conscious evocation in narratives that focus specifically on AIDS like David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives (1992), [and] Jay McInerney's Brightness Falls (1993)."
A brief glance along the shelves of any horror section of a bookshop, or at the index of some of the vampire compendia listed above (footnote 7), would be sufficient to demonstrate the flaws in this argument, and if Annesley wishes to confine himself to 'high culture' and fiction of the 1990s, then Patrick McGrath's "Blood Disease" (1990), Ian Macdonald's "Brody Loved the Masai Woman" (1992), or Francis Amery's "Self-Sacrifice" (1992), fit his profile, not to mention the appearance of AIDS as a subliminal influence on the vampire fiction of less obviously themed stories. [Back]
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