Reading the Vampire Text: Reproducing the Aura
"What withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the [art object's] aura."
~Walter Benjamin
"So let me get this clear: you're 'Dracula,' the count? Are you sure this isn't just some fan boy thing because you know I've fought more than one vampire who called himself 'Lestat.'" ~Buffy the Vampire Slayer "Dracula vs. Buffy"
The body of criticism surrounding Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a heterogeneous and indeed menacing figure to any reader approaching the text for the first time. In fact, regarded as a body of work, the criticism around the text is itself a victim of Dracula, a miscegenation that returns to haunt its critics. In his introduction to a collection of essays on the novel, Harold Bloom claims: "Dracula is far more interesting for its influence upon us than it can be in itself, given Stoker’s inferior gifts as a writer. Rather like Poe’s dreadfully stylized stories, Dracula verges upon myth because it has contaminated our nightmares. Stoker inaugurates our sordid dilemma by suggesting that there are two choices only: become a vampire, or transform yourself into a sublimely violent murderer of vampires" (2). While I disagree with Bloom’s evaluation of the novel as little better than a metaphor for the satiation of the (Freudian) drives, Bloom’s criticism reflects the bulk of the critical vernacular which the text has, so to speak, engendered. In this short paragraph, Bloom weaves a metaphor, which I hope, will bear itself out through our criticism; that is, his comments make a case for the novel as an affective mythology, a narrative which moves, and indeed transforms, itself and its readers.
Bloom’s obvious disregard for Stoker’s aesthetic skill (and perhaps the Gothic more largely given his dismissal of Poe), suggests he sees little value in a
hermeneutical critical approach to the novel; and yet, each of the essays in his collection offers itself as a ‘closed system,’ a structure through which to interpret the text of Dracula. However, what the text 'is' is a being which remains, like Dracula himself, in the margins. In "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproduction" Walter Benjamin notes, “since…historical testimony is founded on the physical duration [of an artwork], the former too, is jeopardized by reproduction, in which the physical duration plays no part. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object” (62). What, then, do we make of the pastiche of ‘testimony’ provided by the novel’s epistolary design? Or indeed the pastiche of its prolific reproductions in the aesthetic sphere? To place the dilemma in Benjamin’s terms, the novel provides a dreamlike disorientation in which dialectic images emerge through montage (the convergence and conflation of multiple narrative voices to ‘produce’ Dracula --and Dracula). While, on the other hand, the affective valences of the novel (fear, terror, anxiety etc…), effect a disorientation or distraction which may have disarmed the critical sensibilities of 19th century readers. In the latter sense, the novel evokes the return of the aura in forcing the reader to look inward and in so doing, ‘reproduce’ the text.
Reading Claude Levi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked, Derrida observes that myths are in fact transformations: “myth is, as I shall try to show, simply a transformation…” (Writing and Difference 286). Derrida continues, “there is no unity or absolute source of the myth. The focus or the sources of the myth are always shadows and virtualities which are elusive, unactualizable, and nonexistent in the first place. Everything begins with structure, configuration, or relationship” (286). I do not cite Derrida here to further bury the now dead poststructrualist author, since if anything, criticism of the novel has frequently attempted an exegesis of Stoker himself, suggesting that Stoker is far from dead in the contemporary imaginary. Rather, I cite Derrida to suggest that there is something queer about Dracula; the vampire is a figure who must 'come out.' The vampire is a being whose 'being' is named by the reader so that it might be disavowed. That is, in interpellating Dracula, the reader understands the text as Other. Perhaps, then, to interpret a vampire text allegorically is to disavow its affective valences. Dracula lurks at the borders of Stoker’s novel, dwelling in the threshold between audience and author, just as Dracula, the novel, exists in the interstices among its various reproductions. Examined as myth, the proliferation of allegorical readings which the novel has engendered are simply metonymic substitutions for the irreducible affective processes it evokes. In such a reading, the violence of vampiric reproduction is displaced into 'fantasy.' For Maria Torok, in fantasy: "the ego has the impression of being the site of a strange and incomprehensible phenomenon....Something has happened outside the purview of the ego's concerns and suddenly intruded upon them in the form of a representation" (original emphasis 30). Indeed, to be a subject of a vampire text is to be intruded upon, to experience the uncanny aura of one's own affects in the other; perhaps startlingly, then, the activity of decoding vampire texts conceals a romantic theory of the (reader's) self. Decoding the fear or anxiety evoked by the novel involves, then, a reification of the reading subject.
However, the 'return of the living dead' is a fantasy which preceded Dracula. Moreover, it is a fantasty which displays marked continuity even in its mythic transformations. Derrida draws a further analogy between myth and music: “the myth and the musical work are like conductors of an orchestra, whose audience becomes the silent performers….Music and mythology bring man face to face with potential objects of which only shadows are actualized” (287). Indeed, reading is an intersubjective performance, something which theory with its will to mastery quite frequently attempts to mask in order to convey author-ity. Certainly, Dracula is a text which desires a response, inviting readers across its threshold to wander the spaces of its narrative, making them the authors par-excellence. Nonetheless, the undying interest in Dracula in the contemporary imaginary, and the text's refusal to 'settle,' suggest that the tension between desire and fear will ensure that the vampire will return to reproduce itself as long as the novel continues to be treated as a 'fantasy' of the modern imaginary. Thus, Joss Whedon’s Buffy provides an apt point of departure: “Are you stupid? I watch your movies. I know you come back ” (2005).
Kaitlin Blanchard
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