Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature

by Brian Stableford

  Stoker read J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic vampire novella “Carmilla” (1872) when he was twenty-five. This was four years before his first meeting with Henry Irving and six years before he married Oscar Wilde’s one-time sweetheart Florence Balcombe, mere days after agreeing to take over responsibility for the actor’s business affairs. Six further years were to pass before he began to think seriously about the possibility of writing a vampire novel himself, but even so, it was “Carmilla” which shaped his idea of what a vampire story was and ought to be. The first of Stoker’s published short stories had appeared in 1872; Le Fanu had then been, and had remained, his most significant literary influence. The two had much in common—both were graduates of Trinity College, Dublin and Le Fanu was proprietor and editor of the Dublin University Magazine for many years (he died in 1873). Stoker must also have been familiar with John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), in which a prolific despoiler of young maidens, is revealed in the concluding line (surely to no one’s surprise, given the title) to be “a VAMPYRE!” but it was “Carmilla” that he ardently desired to recapitulate. His decision became firmer when his memory of it was sharply jogged in 1890, by certain tales told by a Hungarian professor of languages, Arminius Vambery, when he was a guest at the “Beefsteak Club”—a regular social gathering which Stoker ran in his capacity as Irving’s factotum. This was the context in which Stoker was able to understand his dream, and these were the resources he drew upon in developing it.

  It was Vambery who provided much of the folkloristic background for Stoker’s conceptualization of vampirism, and gave him an initial reading-list of research materials. Later, when Stoker discovered a fifteenth-century warlord on whom he decided to model his King-Vampire—a Voivode whose scribes signed his name in a variety of ways, including “Dracula,” but who was better known to history as Vlad Tepes, “the Impaler,” by virtue of his expertise in the art of deterrence, initially cultivated while driving out the Turkish invaders of his homeland—he immediately wrote to Vambery for further assistance, which was provided.

  This historical and anthropological dressing-up of the King-Vampire figure was, in a sense, a matter of disguising him. This was a necessary process in literary terms, and perhaps it was necessary in psychological terms too, if there is anything at all in the psychoanalytic truism that raw libidinous impulses must be decorously dressed in symbols before the conscious mind can bear to contemplate them. This process of scholarly sublimation still seems to be going on among those most intimately involved with Dracula. There is something slightly peculiar about the way in which assiduous researchers like Clive Leatherdale22 and Radu Florescu23 have repeated and extended the studies which Stoker carried out, and a suspiciously-inclined Freudian would probably claim that they manifest a degree of obsession beyond what would actually be necessary either to write or to understand the text of Dracula—but I shall not pursue this point, lest even I might come to seem guilty by association.

  The most remarkable aspect of Dracula’s continued success as an image is the way that this disguise has held together in spite of every absurdity added to it by cinematic convention: the opera-cloak, the bloodshot eyes, and—of course—the ludicrous fangs. No matter how fancy the dress, the awareness remains that there is something lurking beneath that is authentically dangerous.

  This is surely all the more remarkable when one recalls that the world has changed very considerably since Victorian times. In the late twentieth century the Victorian attempt to portray female nature as something essentially angelic and asexual seems ridiculously stupid and utterly out-of-date…except, of course, that matters of sexuality are never quite as simple and straightforward as that.

  The Victorians, were, of course, not short of conspicuous images of what Stoker called “wantonness” and “voluptuousness,” although they might have balked at the temerity of one who dared to call herself Madonna. They knew all along that such success as they dared to claim in binding sexuality to a fiercely-repressive morality was ninety per cent pretence. By the same token, we moderns are by no means short of imagery which overtly or covertly takes it for granted that women (unlike men) are—again using Stoker’s terms—”sweet,” “gentle,” and “pure.” We too have known all along that the supposed sexual liberation we achieved in the 1960s is ninety per cent pretence, especially in respect of female sexuality. Even feminists, in their laudable haste to occupy the moral high ground, sometimes seem to be crying out, in mocking parody of the saint of old: “Lord, give me unchastity, but please—not yet!”

  * * * *

  The contemporary boom in vampire stories is to a large extent an exercise in revisionism, in which Dracula’s status as an archetype of evil is defiantly challenged. In the most extreme cases, the vampire becomes a valiant hero, whose effect on his female victims is straightforwardly liberating.

  Stoker’s text is comprehensively turned on its head by Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape (1975), where the count explains that all the notional authors of the original novel (which is, of course, presented as a series of documents, mostly penned by Jonathan Harker, Dr. Seward, and Mina) completely misunderstood what was happening. Here, Dracula claims that the man actually responsible for Lucy’s death and Mina’s illness was Professor van Helsing, who recklessly gave them transfusions without any regard for the niceties of blood-typing, and that his own actions were designed to save them. Saberhagen’s story is ingenious both on the literal level, in that it provides an account of the events described in Dracula which makes more sense than Stoker’s, and on the psychological level, in that it firmly links the psychological hang-ups of the Victorians to their hopeless ignorance of almost all aspects of human science.

  Other heroic vampire stories elaborate this thesis extensively. In Pierre Kast’s vividly erotic historical fantasy The Vampires of Alfama (1975; tr. 1976) the heroic vampire becomes an embodiment of all the ideals of the Enlightenment, ranged against the oppressive tyranny of Church and State. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Comte de Saint-Germain, in the series of novels and stories begun with Hôtel Transylvania (1978), is less concerned with matters of science and more Byronically romantic than frankly libertine, but he is just as squarely on the side of right. The second novel in the series, The Palace (1979), pits the count against the malevolent religious fundamentalism of Savonarola in Renaissance Florence, while Blood Games (1979) recalls the days of Nero’s Rome, and Tempting Fate (1982) brings him into the twentieth century to the world of the Russian revolution and the rise of Nazism.

  It did not take long for the vampire to colonize other heroic roles. In the later novels in Saberhagen’s series, following his fruitful meeting with his great contemporary, he becomes enmeshed in conventional thriller plots. P. N. Elrod’s “Vampire Files” (opened 1990) feature a hard-boiled vampire private-eye. In numerous stories of these kinds—most notably Freda Warrington’s A Taste of Blood Wine (1992)—heroic vampires must face adversaries of their own kind, thus becoming doubly Byronic, in their defiant alienation as well as their seductive charm. Such works as these have not entirely displaced the traditional imagery, but they have assisted in its transformation into something far more ironic. In Kim Newman’s luridly extravagant Anno Dracula (1992), the melancholy nice vampires are completely overshadowed by the flamboyantly nasty ones, led by an uncompromisingly monstrous Dracula, now married to Queen Victoria (whom he keeps on a leash).

  The most successful revisionist vampire stories of modern times are, of course, those of Anne Rice, begun with Interview with the Vampire (1976). These walk an anti-heroic tightrope between traditional and revisionist imagery, trading heavily on the moral uncertainties of their leading characters, who experience their own peculiar existential angst and worry endlessly about the dubious relevance to themselves of various moral philosophies. Similar issues are brought more tightly into focus by Suzy McKee Charnas’s analytically-inclined fix-up novel The Vampire Tapestry (1980), but Rice’s escalation of suc
h hypothetical anxieties into fevered melodrama is perhaps more appropriate to the handling of materials which still retain their disguised emotional potency. My own vampire novels, The Empire of Fear (1988) and Young Blood (1992), attempt something similar.

  The phenomenon constituted by this proliferation of vampires—all of whom are parasitic upon the work done by Bram Stoker—is quite astonishing. Why these myriad hares should suddenly have started to run in the mid-1970s, and why their running should have inspired so very many exercises in imitation and extrapolation, is by no means clear, although this was certainly the period in which all manner of social accountants began adding up and evaluating the achievements of the sexually-liberating evolutions and revolutions of the 1960s. Although she was a decade ahead of her time, the real pioneer of vampire revisionism was Jane Gaskell, in whose novel The Shiny Narrow Grin (1964) a conspicuously trendy heroine took a typically laid-back attitude to a vampire in modern dress. The moral ironies of Gaskell’s novel contrast strikingly with the calculated confusions of Simon Raven’s equally knowing but far more traditional Doctors Wear Scarlet, published four years earlier.

  Raven’s novel is one of the few twentieth-century stories which attempt to rescue the pre-Stoker tradition of literary vampirism, which took its inspiration from Classical sources and which almost invariably featured female vampires who needed no King-Vampire to create and discipline them. The most famous English examples, apart from “Carmilla,” are Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1816) and Keats’ “Lamia” (1820), but the German Romantic movement produced earlier examples on which these are partly based, and nineteenth-century French literature is particularly rich in female vampires, the most familiar being Clarimonde in Gautier’s “La Morte amoureuse” (1836). The lush eroticism of these works pays equal homage, in its way, to the colorful paradoxicality of male sexual fantasy, but there is no doubt that Dracula somehow adds in an extra element which they lack. Femmes fatales, seen in isolation, are often tragic figures—Keats’s “Lamia” brings sentimentality to the fore, and some such sympathy is usually latent in other works of this kind—but the evocation of the King-Vampire who manufactures them wholesale (and almost invariably abandons them to death or summary impalement) adds an extra turn of the screw by which the pathos of their fate only serves to generate further horror.

  This observation raises again the question of what it is which lurks within Dracula’s disguise. So far we have only answered this with an analysis of what he does, but to say that he symbolizes the force of female sexuality which threatens to transform innocent maidens into voluptuous wantons is at best only half an explanation. Connecting all the blood-imagery in vampire stories to the phenomenon of menstruation, as the editors of the recent Creation Press anthology Blood and Roses (1992) extravagantly do, adds one more facet but can hardly be said to complete the task.

  It is noticeable that both Dracula and his closest literary ancestor can be linked—tentatively, at least—with real people. Polidori’s lurid depiction of Lord Ruthven clearly owes much to his temporary association with Lord Byron, and Stoker’s image of Dracula surely draws on his relationship with Henry Irving, whose personality so overwhelmed him on the days following their first meeting that he eventually made Irving’s service his primary vocation. In this context the Count’s jealous reaction to discovering Jonathan Harker with the three female vampires, at the end of the sequence based on Stoker’s dream, is of some interest. “Never did I imagine such fury, even in the demons of the pit,” Harker says—and yet Dracula subsequently seems to lose all interest in him, facilitating his unlikely escape by careless neglect, and much prefers other prey when they eventually meet up again.

  Some psychoanalytically-inclined commentators have interpreted the attitudes of both Polidori and Stoker in terms of repressed homosexuality, but a simpler explanation—and it is sometimes unwise to ignore the obvious in favor of the occult—is that they looked upon their idols with pure and simple envy. In the former instance at least, this interpretation is supported by a famous anecdote which relates how Polidori attempted to swallow poison after asking what Byron could do better than he and receiving a blunt and accurate answer.

  If this is true, the mystery of Dracula’s symbolism—and of his awesome, enduring power—is not so very difficult to unwrap. Dracula becomes, in this analysis, an embodiment of male fears of inadequacy, especially in the face of female sexuality. It is not simply the fact that Dracula can turn the most demure virgin into an avid sex maniac that is important, but the fact that other men can’t. That, for the book’s author and the vast majority of its readers, might be the true horror—the ultimate horror—which can survive any amount of disguise and obfuscation.

  Is this why Dracula, in spite of all the ridicule that Hollywood and generations of (male) comedians heaped upon him, retains the power to disturb and remains a threat? Is it because, no matter how men strive to cover up their feelings of inadequacy with lewd jokes and lurid erotic obsessions, the gnawing anxiety will always remain? Perhaps, though, I ought not to pursue this point, lest even I should come to seem guilty by association.…

  21Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: William Rider, 1913 (tenth edition), p. 226-227. The “working papers” and sources used by Stoker during he composition of the novel are extensively reviewed in Part 5 of Christopher Frayling’s anthology, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. London: Faber & Faber, 1991, p. 295-348.

  22Leatherdale, Clive. Dracula: The Novel and the Legend. Wellingborough, England: The Aquarian Press, 1985; The Origins of Dracula. London: William Kimber, 1987.

  23Florescu, Radu, and Raymond McNally. Dracula: A Biography. London: Robert Hale, 1973.

  TARZAN’S DIVIDED SELF

  In Chapter Fourteen of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the English nobleman William Cecil Clayton, who has gone astray in “the twilight depths of the African jungle,” finds himself face to face with a hungry lion. His end seems nigh, but hurtling to his rescue comes the remarkable person he has ever seen: a man who is “the embodiment of physical perfection and giant strength.” The stranger, armed only with a knife, wrestles and kills the lion, then stands erect over its carcase and lets loose a bloodcurdling cry of feral triumph.

  This extraordinary event is even more melodramatic than the bare facts indicate. William Clayton does not know, and does not find out in the course of the novel—although the reader has known all along—that this magnificent creature is in fact his cousin, and the rightful heir to the title which he believes to be his own! Thanks to a miraculously fortunate admixture of genetic and environmental influences Tarzan of the Apes is, in a perfectly literal sense, the epitome of the Noble Savage.

  Tarzan of the Apes was first published in the October 1912 issue of The All-Story Magazine, and was an instant hit. By the time it appeared in book form its author had already produced a sequel, The Return of Tarzan, and he went on to answer popular demand by issuing more than twenty more. Burroughs was ultimately to found his own publishing company to package his own works, and he registered the name “Tarzan” as a trademark. By such means he became the first man ever to make a million dollars writing popular fiction. Burroughs wrote other popular series of novels, including one set on Mars and another on the inner surface of the supposedly-hollow earth, but the foundation-stone of his success was the character of Tarzan, who became one of that select handful of fictional individuals—the others include Scrooge, Sherlock Holmes, and Dracula—whose names are universally familiar to everyone, even to people who have never read any of the books in which they appear.

  Tarzan’s career soon overflowed the print medium, extending into a long series of films, the first of which was released in 1932, and a plethora of comic strips. This extension is a remarkable feat, because—unlike Sherlock Holmes, who could be confronted with an infinite supply of unique puzzles to unravel—Tarzan is a character of rather limited scope. His original creator s
oon began to find it difficult to think of new things for him to do; there were plenty more lions to vanquish, but killing them quickly became a perfunctory ritual, and it is unsurprising that having run the customary gamut of damsels in distress, sneering villains, cannibal tribesmen, and lost cities, Burroughs’s plotting strategies became increasingly desperate. He dabbled in the bizarre in such novels as Tarzan and the Ant Men (1924) and Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (1930), and he resorted to satire in Tarzan and the Lion Man (1934)—in which he derided the film Tarzan, whom he considered to be an insulting travesty of the character he created—but in the end he virtually gave up, and the series decayed into enfeebled exercises in self-plagiarism. (One of the later novels, Tarzan and the Forbidden City [1938], was obviously ghost-written, by someone who seems not to have bothered to study the originals he was meant to be imitating.) Despite such difficulties, though, Tarzan’s career continued long after Burroughs’s death, and would have proliferated even more promiscuously had the Burroughs estate not been so conscientious in taking legal action against pirates who borrowed the character without permission.

  Attempts by other writers to imitate the Tarzan novels are numerous, and there has grown up a whole sub-genre of adventure stories about feral children raised to near-superhumanity by tigers, leopards, bears and (most recently, in Nicholas Luard’s 1990 novel Kala) hyenas. Burroughs other books have been even more widely imitated, especially the series of interplanetary adventures which he initiated with his first novel, A Princess of Mars (1912 as “Under the Moons of Mars”; in book form 1917), but this is largely because these other novels have offered more imaginative scope to imitators—the exotic settings allow the introduction of an infinite variety of grotesquely monstrous enemies to be overcome by the athletic heroes. It is arguable that Burroughs’ most interesting works are his more imaginatively daring forays into science fiction—especially the two trilogies collected as The Land That Time Forgot (1918; in book form 1924) and The Moon Maid (1923-25; in book form 1926)—and it is not surprising that these works still have a cult following. However, it is Tarzan who is the one figure of mythical dimension in the Burroughs canon, and the mystery which must be unravelled if Burroughs’s success is to be understood.