This post contains quotes from the preface and introduction book I've had for many years, Blood Read, ed. by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (U of Penn Press, 1997). All quotes, unless specified, attributed to Gordon and Hollinger; my comments are in italics.
"Vampirism has become for post-modern writers a ready metaphor for the sickness of our society. Perhaps dealing with the subject should be considered a healthy sign ... sufficient to elevate us to a mythic, if dark realm ... we (are) all sick, 'desolate and sick of an old passion'" (Aldiss xi).
I think that this has always been the case, not just in "post-modern" art ... but "dealing with" this sickness is an interesting -- and modern take on this idea (versus the Victorian model of complete represseion).
"An ambiguously coded figure, a source of both erotic anxiety and corrupt desire, the literary vampire is one of the most powerful archetypes bequeathed to us from the imagination of the 19th century" (1).
Yeah, I just like that word "bequeathed" -- and obviously someone else does too -- not to mention "corrupt desire" !
Every age embraces the vampire it needs ... they are a "late 20th century cultural necessity" (1).
The first part of this quote is from Nina Auerbach's book Our Vampires, Ourselves -- that's a killer title -- which we have at the Columbia library and I am going to get tomorrow. I especially like her word choice of "embrace" here.
The impact of the shift from human to "other" perspective works to invite sympathy for the monstrous outsider at the same time it serves to diminish the terror generated by what remains outside our frame of the familiar and knowable ... (this can) usefully be interpreted for political and cultural significance (2).
So we can relate to vampires, and that makes them less scary ... then we can analyze them in academia and get paid for it! Hooray for "other perspective works inviting sympathy for the monstrous outsider!
Rosemary Jackson notes, the work of metaphor is crucial to the construction of all fantastic narratives, since the realm of the fantastic is precisely composed of "all that is not said, all that is unsayable, through realistic forms" (2)
This is the coolest fucking idea ever.
The book that it's from is called Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. Columbia doesn't have it, but Amazon does.
Here's some political shit:
Frederic Jameson writes in The Political Unconscious, "the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal 'solutions' to unresolvable social contradictions" (2).
So stories are spaces within which we work through our societal and psychological issues...makes sense to me.
Currently, "the boundaries between 'human' and 'monstrous' (have) become increasingly problematized in contemporary vampire narratives ... one of the functions of monsters is to help us construct our own humanity, to provide guidelines against which we can define ourselves" (5).
...
In the nineteenth century, the vampire functioned as a natural metaphor for the symptoms of TB: consider its associations with "wasting, with paleness, with the flow of blood from the mouth, night restlessness, alternate burning and chills, even with the victim's rumored sexual energy" (6).
...
Vampire themes suggest our current (1997) anxieties about "the dissolution of boundaries ... between hegemony and disenfranchisement, economy and ecology, socialization and separation. The vampire reflects such border anxieties since it penetrates boundaries by its very nature -- between life and death, love and fear, power and persecution" (7).
How apt that "it thrives in this postmodern milieu of dissolving borders between the virtual and the real, between private and public personae, in the breaking down of cultural and national boundaries, while a plague transmitted by the penetration of bodily boundaries -- and often through blood -- sweeps the world" (7).
Vampires are on the edge/boundaries of something, all the time (no wonder I can relate so much), the Industrial/Sexual/Corporate revolutions ... as always, there is a psychological bent here and a socio-political emphasis ... time will tell which will lend itself the most clearly to my project and what I'm trying to do here.
Sweet dreams.
R.x
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