While this article is meant to highlight the topic of vampires as discussed in both academic and mainstream published media, it is by far not a complete overview of the topic, as the research databases are replete with all manner of entries on vampires, vampirism, and the ilk. I think that at this point it is also useful to present my operant definitions for academic and mainstream.
This is important because the two are very symbiotic in the sense that they feed each other. In terms of this article, academic refers to published works that build upon a construction of the vampire phenomenon from folklore as a way of understanding socio-cultural frameworks of a group. Mainstream, on the other hand, will refer to the more fictionalized accounts of the vampire phenomenon that includes literature, theatre and film as a way of building up the body of work surrounding the vampire. There is also much academic critique of the mainstream work, since it is often reflexive of the socio-cultural context in which it is created and presented.
Therefore, the purpose of this overview is to give a brief survey of some of the types of discourses represented in the materials that are available on the subject of the vampire phenomenon from these two perspectives.
BEGINNINGS
- The word has Turkish origins. This doctrine believes that the word percolated from Turkish, through Slavic interpretations to finally arrive at vampire (Wilson 1985: 577);
- The word is likely derived from the Greek verb “to drink” (1985: 577);
- The word is Slavic in origin. This interpretation is the main contender for consensus, stating that the Slavic origin is “the root noun underlying the term… considered to be the Serbian word ‘BAMIIUP’” (1985:577);
- The word is Hungarian. A group of American and English writers argue that the word actually comes from the Hungarian word vampir (1985: 578).
The common theme in all four hypotheses is that somewhere along the line, Slavic has a significant influence – decisive or otherwise. Given that there are records of the “Serbian vampire epidemic of 1725-32” (Wilson 1985: 583), certainly supports the case for the Slavic origin. In fact, a great deal of the literature – both academic and mainstream – attribute the majority of vampire folklore and legend to Eastern Europe. In “The Vampire: A casebook”, Alan Dundes supports this notion as he writes, “Vampires did not originate in literature or popular culture. Literary and motion picture vampires are secondary, deriving from a long history of traditional legends found especially prominently in Eastern Europe” (Dundes 1998: vii). This contentious relationship between academia and mainstream is likely fueled by the fact that a classical rather than folkloric interest in the vampire phenomenon started in academia first. These debates on the merits of the vampire problem began as early as the 17th century (Melton 1999: 288), at a time when the issue was taken as fact, rather than fiction. Perhaps the reason for the tension between mainstream and academic is that given our present knowledge, the academic began with the appropriation of something that we now believe to be fiction, and fiction as we may agree is well in the realm of the mainstream popular culture.
What the scholars are talking about
The collection of essays edited by Dundes in the book, “The Vampire: A Casebook” (1998) is one of the more focused books on the folkloric aspects of the vampire phenomenon. In fact, the book is decidedly not about the mainstream components of the vampire phenomenon, focusing instead, on the folkloric beginnings of the vampire and on the interpretations and critiques of the vampire phenomenon. But as Felicia Faye Mcmahon noted in her review, the book can come across as a bit too Freudian at times in its approach (2002:487). In other words, there seems to be an issue of interpreting the vampire as symbolic of some kind of social neurosis rather realizing its value as folklore. While I agree with Mcmahon that the folklore as it stands has anthropological merit, I feel that I must balance that with the notion that folklore can often give us insights into the social anxieties of a group or culture, as well as the sources of that anxiety, which are often abstractions of the symbol itself. In other words, to generate a more accurate picture of the past, one would be remiss to discount an approach based on whether it is part of a given discipline or not.
Following on the scientific vein – no pun intended – Paul Barber’s book, titled “Vampires, Burial, and Death” (1988) takes a more scientific approach to the debunking of vampire lore. As Margaret Magat noted in here review of Barber’s book, “the existence of vampire lore is mostly due to the way the folk have interpreted the process of death and decomposition” (Magat 1998: 88). Likely as result of a lack of scientific knowledge, the folkloric interpretations are thus based on correlation and conjecture, rather than causality. Magat supports this point when she observes, “folklore data describing death may often be accurate, while the interpretation is usually not” (1998: 88).
This does the raise the question, however, of whether we often discount recollections of folklore because we feel that with our present science we simply know better, thus being a bit tempo-centric, and therefore limiting our own interpretations of the past as a result. Barber tackles this point, and uses an approach of in which he looks for the nucleus of the event as a way of reverse Imagineering it “to determine whether it is our informants or we ourselves who lack adequate information” (Barber 1988: 88). In other words, by tracing the connections of the event back to its beginnings, the journey informs us about the original thought process, as well as the source of the event itself. This holistic approach gives a much more complete picture of the situation surrounding the folkloric beliefs in vampires as a result of correlation to observed facts.
Magat also uncovers the seed of a political interpretation of the folkloric vampire versus the literary one. She observes that the folkloric vampire is “a loner who creates more like himself without seeking to govern them” (Magat 1998: 89), while in contrast, the literary vampire “is a power-hungry creature who craves to conquer the world with the help of his vampire followers” (1998:89). This kind of discourse is indicative of the functional roles of the literary and folkloric vampires in their respective contexts.
This pseudo-political context is not completely unique to Barber’s book however. A review of Luise White’s book “Speaking With Vampires: Rumor and history in Colonial Africa” by Jon Holzman reveals that in a current context, the symbol of vampire can actually transcend the literary, and the more literal interpretations of the folkloric (2000). In this review, Holzman identifies the social role of vampire as one that anthropomorphizes anxiety about colonialism in Africa in “the world of power and uncertainty in which Africans have lived in this century” (2000: 734). Even though the term is not meant to describe the kinds of vampire that we by now have become accustomed to imagine, White uses the term as a literary device with the assumption that the reader will unpack the symbol in a manner consistent to its signified (2000: 735). Holzman notes that White “elects to use ‘vampire’ because ‘no other term depicts the ease with which bloodsucking beings cross boundaries, violate space, capture vulnerable men and women and extract a precious bodily fluid from them” (2000: 735). Using Magat’s description of the literary vampire, the colonialist as “a power-hungry creature who craves to conquer the world with the help of his vampire followers” (Magat 1998:89) certainly does fit the bill if one were to make such an interpretation of the colonialist’s attitudes and behaviour.
In addition to the scientific and political interpretations of the vampire phenomenon, there is also discourse that deals with the subject using religion, albeit in a rather unique way. In Harry Senn’s review of Jan Perkowski’s book “The darkling: A treatise on Slavic Vampirism” (Senn 1991: 214), he quotes the author’s identification of a “basic profile that is, a demonic enlivened corpse that feeds on the life-force /blood of sleeping victims amongst the living, and in the process, sows chaos and destruction in the community” (1991: 214). As a definition, this is very versatile since it uses language that can be interpreted in different ways to fit both academic and mainstream interpretations of reality that can almost be timeless. This definition also helps to further the author’s thesis of the vampire as having an ascribed role in the social consciousness as that of “scapegoat on which to fix blame for unexpected misfortune and unpredictable evil, and which provides an ‘anxiety relieving ritual’” (1991: 215). It could be argued that this type of interpretation is also Freudian as being reminiscent of Freud’s work on Totem and Taboo, and his explanation of the practical origins of the Oedipus Rex myth and its influence on ritualized totemism (Freud 1950). Senn further notes that “the vampire with its roots in social adversity, communal rivalry, and scapegoating stands for and represents our inability to explain, understand, and adjust to three phenomena that ‘demonically’ elude scientific control: sex, death and the conscious psyche” (Senn 1991: 216). This is actually one of the more useful interpretations of the social role of the vampire as a symbol, since it allows us to examine the shifts in the interpretation of those three phenomena over time.
But what about religion? Senn remarks that Perkowski describes a “six-level evolution of religious faith (1991: 215) in which the apex is an environment in which “commitment to justice transcends religion and culture in an ‘ultimate environment’ where all creatures and beings have their equally valued place” (1991: 215). What is interesting about this theory is that it provides a useful bridge into the shifts in perception about the mainstream vampire in terms of moving from a villainous figure in the beginning to something that is closer to a tragic hero in the present day.
THE MAINSTREAM VAMPIRE
One such book is “The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead” by J. Gordon Melton (1999). This is quite possibly one of the most complete reference books on the mainstream aspects of vampires, containing a vast amount of entries on vampire myth, legends, personages, and popular culture – with a heavy emphasis on popular culture. In all fairness, however, the author does a good job of sourcing each entry quite well, and the sources are at times more academic than popular culture. There is also an extensive list of vampire resources in the back including publications, societies, and the like. The structure of this book seems rather typical for the genre as well in the sense that it begins with a preface that ascribes the origins of the vampire to folkloric legend, perhaps as a way to add a layer of authority to the book. But, in comparison to the rest of the book, the commitment to the more academic heritage of the vampire phenomenon is rather brief, and rightly so, given the genre. One cannot lose sight of the fact that the main goal for the genre is to entertain.
There is a value in this style of preface however, since it gives the reader a brief account of the beginnings of vampire literature, and of some of the ways in which the authors perceived their involvement with the genre, as is evidenced by the telling of the story about Lord Byron’s “The Vampyre”. As it turns out, Lord Byron started the story but he never finished it. John Polidori, a friend of his, finished the story and published it, attributing authorship to Lord Byron, who quickly denounced it as being his – fearing that it would be too scandalous a subject matter to merit his involvement (Melton 1999: xi). This type of narrative is quite indicative of acceptance that the genre has acquired over time, especially if we consider the popularity of present day authors such as Anne Rice, and TV shows like True Blood – HBO’s latest vampire drama that is seemingly taking audiences by storm.
With the advent of vampires in movies, we begin to get a sense of the vampire as type of cultural “other” over time, and we see a transition from vampire a bestial criminal – an ethnocentric interpretation – to the treatment of vampire as tragic hero – a culturally relativistic interpretation.
A variation in the mainstream reference genre is a more narrative approach to the history of the vampire. Books such as Manuela Dunn Mascetti’s “Vampire: The Complete Guide to the World of the Undead” (1992). This book can be tricky to the unseasoned researcher due to the fact that it intertwines legend with historical fact – even though it weighs more heavily on legend than fact. In fact, the author describes the book as being intertwined with myth and historical fact, stating “fact or fictions, who knows the difference? Perhaps there is none in reality” (Dunn-Mascetti 1992: 9). This is arguably a good point in the sense that in terms of the historical – especially given that some of this history dates back to the 15th century, and in some instances even further – all the scholars have to go on is a series of scattered facts that provide a plausible – albeit shifting – conjecture for the explanation of the presence of certain elements in reality. Where academia excels then, is in the interpretation of this conjecture to somehow approximate the psyche of society on the spectrum of time, with the vampire phenomenon as one of the elements that helps to sharpen an image of the past that seemingly gets fuzzier the further back we go.
I presume that the issue of clarity is a persistent one given that fact and fiction are so intertwined to the point that fiction has in some cases become fact in the historical record. The best we can do today is to ensure that we approach the study of the vampire phenomenon with a holistic approach so as to ensure that we create as inclusive a picture as possible with the available information. In terms of whether I myself believe in vampires or not, I know that science tells me that it is not possible, and rationality gives me a sideways glance as it rolls its eyes for even considering it. But, if there is one thing that life has taught me thus far is that not everything can be proven. Instead, I will simply say that although I find it highly improbable that there are vampires, I would not be as surprised as some to come upon one at some point… and hopefully from a safe distance.
