Daniel Robison

Vampire: Blood and Empire

M 6-830; Spring 2010

Vampires: Blood and Empathy

Since its birth the vampire has lived many lives and had just as many names. From the outside
looking in, it has observed society and changed along with it; and, with each change it has come to
represent different things to each generation. Whenever society has looked out into the unknown
beyond its borders the vampire is there in the darkness looking back; always observing, always
changing along with us; and always hungry.
The first vampire's name was fear. Like all superstitions and spirits he was born of the cognitive
evolution of our species when our human capacity to name things was paired with the mysteries of
death and the horror awaiting us beyond the light of the fire. That we fear that which we do not
understand is a central cliché of our species. The vampire is the embodiment of so many things our
society has failed to comprehend from what awaits us beyond the light of the village to cold
inevitability of our own deaths.
In the earliest days the vampire was fear, and in that sense it was as real and as frightening and
as deadly as it was imagined to be. As society grew up and became more comfortable with itself, and
claimed the dark beyond its borders as its own the vampire moved from the shadows of the forest into
the shadows of the imagination. No longer a malevolent creature living in the darkness it became a
figure of our stories, the anti-human, through which we might confront our fears.
In our class, we observed the evolution of the vampire from the fear that lives in the woods and
mountains beyond the borders of our society into the fear that lives in the darkness of our imagination
beyond the light of our understanding. To deny the vampire is to deny our fears and yet, in our
contemporary culture the vampire has been denied again and again. This is a brief examination of this
denial. It is a look at the ways in which we have weakened and cheapened the vampire and in so doing
have weakened and cheapened our imaginations.

The Sexual Vampire

In our class we discussed the sexual aspects of the vampire. In the 19th and early 20th centuries
the sexual vampire was a predator. Its elongated, phallic, penetrating teeth symbolizing the grotesque
nature of sexual organs and the violence of the sex act. The sexual vampire was the embodiment and
fear of our seeming lack of control over our own biological imperatives and desires. To the vampire
there was no distinction between sex and food.
During the sexual vampire's rise to prominence in our imagination during the 19th century it was
cast against a social morality that wanted to assert control over the uncontrollable. The vampire
represented at once the violence of submitting to our carnal desires and the fear of the unspoken certain
knowledge that such control was ultimately futile. The sexual vampire was itself a denial of our human
nature, but it did serve a valuable purpose.
The sexual vampire was born of our rejection of ourselves, but in its essence it was a sort of
acceptance as well. Where at first blush it was an embodiment of that which we sought to reject, its
existence was born of our understanding that such things could not be denied. It was fear of the loss of
control but it rose from the darkness to feed irregardless of our rejection, reminding us of the
immortality and inevitability of its very essence.
The sexual revolution of the mid to late 20th century, while by no means fully realized even
today, was step taken by society to recast the vampire of our imaginations. Where denial had failed and
given the vampire its power instead society sought out not to accept, but to incorporate the vampire. By
acknowledging our nature as sexual animals we denied that power to the vampire and in so doing the
vampire lost that bit of its power.
But even so, the vampire was not dead. Indeed, it had not even lost its ability to represent the
continued misgivings of our understanding of our sexual nature. The vampire did not lose its fangs, but
they receded. Contemporary vampires in fiction are more often than not depicted with retracting fangs
in modern vampire literature and film. This retraction imbues them at once with a flaccidity that allows
them to walk among us, in some fictions even during the day (which will be addressed shortly), only to
rise to the occasion for the sexual act that nourishes the vampire and kills the human.
There is an element, however, of rejection of sexual nature in the vampire. When we as a
society made the false claim that we had come to grips with our nature as sexual beings, we attempted
to deny the sexual nature of the vampire. While in some literature this was addressed through the
retraction of the fangs in practice, the iconic visual representation of the vampire remains Bela Lugosi's
Dracula. This has led to a number of absurdities such as the Madison Avenue vampire used to peddle
breakfast cereal and teach children to count. Inspired by the highly sexual Dracula, with a comic
adaptation of Lugosi's affectations, we have introduced a marketing character that displays its sexual
organs in our breakfast cereal aisles and on Sesame Street.
Indeed, the vampire does not just represent our sexual natures but it does so with an emphasis
on the violent. Even in the event that the vampire's victim is willing it cannot consummate passively, or
gently. There is an inherent violence to its hybrid act of sexual feeding. Most commonly, however, the
vampire's victim is unwilling – and it is in this assault that we find our most visceral fear and from
which we draw the energy to fight the vampire.
When we turn to PBS and watch the cloak-clad vampire teach our children to count we forget
the vampire's fangs and thereby participate in an absurdity. There, on the screen, laughing as he counts,
is puppet designed after the most famous rapist in all of fiction – itself just a representation of our fears
at our failure to control the opposing natures of our own sexual nature – those of violence and
necessity.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

While the Madison Avenue Vampire is, in this writer's opinion at least, somewhat disturbing; it
is only a product of a trend in way in which we talk about vampires that is all the more troubling. The
sexual vampire was terrifying in its very nature as the antithesis of the social desire to achieve control
of ourselves. It was the violent and deadly monster born of an attempt to reject our human nature. In
Anne Rice's “Interview with the Vampire,” we were confronted with a creature – a cursed human being
– destined to live on perhaps forever as the deadly reality of our rejected fears.
In the interview, the vampire Luis tells the tale of human fear. The sadness and rejection of life.
His search for death is at once the epitome of human tragedy in the Western World where suicide
remains one of the greatest sins of all. And this search is granted by the embodiment of our social fears
of death, a vampire named Lestat. Luis is punished for his desire for death by instead being cursed in a
state of anti-life as a vampire.
Luis' interlocutor, known only as 'the boy,' is captivated by his tale. While Luis progresses in his
story from tragic human rejecting his life to tragic vampire rejecting his anti-life, the boy is fixated on
the power and adventure of it all. As Luis moves on and slowly begins to accept his curse to live as the
embodiment of the human fear of death, the reader grows to accept and even to empathize with him.
Indeed, the boy's reaction is similar to the initial reaction of most readers one might imagine. The
desire to eternal life and all that you might be able to see and do in it. This empathy is not, however,
what the vampire seeks.
The vampire is the antithesis of life, and his moral is that the opposite of life is not death. Where
the sexual vampire was the embodiment of our cultural desire to reject sexuality, the vampire Luis is
the embodiment of our cultural desire to reject death. Through medicine and science the potential for
personal immortality lies just beyond our ability to accept and well within our ability to imagine. The
vampire Luis stands in the shadows beyond the ever-growing light of our science and technology to
remind us that death still waits for us all, and where the sexual vampire represents a violent antithesis
to our nature as sexual creatures, Luis represents the antithesis to the natural patter of life and death.
In our class we discussed a rubric for the analysis of vampires in literature and our cultural
imagination, taking a concept central to our social fabric and examining how the literary vampire
represents a sort of antithesis to our cultural expectations or rules regarding that category. Under this
rubric I would argue that the central concept under discussion in “Interview with the Vampire” is the
natural progression of life and death. The vampire represents a third way, a living death, that is at once
the rejection of death (as those who yearn for immortal life would seek to do) but more importantly a
rejection of life as well. Under this analysis we can see how the vampire Luis represents an area of
darkness in our imagination, a violent rejection of the cultural desire to conquer death. But it is not the
only way of examining this literary vampire.
The second nature of the vampire Luis is revealed in the discussion at the end of the tale when
the boy begs the vampire to grant him the gift of eternal life. The vampire is saddened by this request,
which voices the thoughts of many of the readers as well, for the vampire knows that the boy and the
reader have not understood what his anti-life represents. This request is due to a second category of
analysis, one of which the boy's response evidences the author was just as aware of as the first. That of
the vampire itself.
Where the vampire represents fear, the presentation of the story of “Interview with the Vampire”
casts that fear in the role of the protagonist. The story is of the progression of the vampire, as I've said,
from the rejection of human life, to the rejection of vampiric anti-life, to the acceptance of that same
unnatural anti-life while still eternally wishing that it might return to the natural way of things. The
vampire Luis, while he has to an extent accepted his nature as a monster, wishes that he could return to
the natural world. But in his desire for a return to life he has regained that which he had originally lost,
a natural fear of death, and so he continues on in his role as the anti-human.
This examination of the vampire acknowledges its inhumanity but also characterizes it with a
personality rife with sadness and regret. It is this sadness and regret that the audience latches on to most
strongly, and creates an empathy for the creature. This empathy opens a door for acceptance of a
vampire where none was ever desired. Luis looks at the boy, and in so doing at the audience, with
sadness and pity before he bears his fangs. 'Do not empathize with me,' he seems to beg with his eyes,
'I am your death. I am your fear.'

The Broken Vampire

The misguided empathy for the vampire opened one door in particular which, once passed
through, has created a crack which continues to grow in our cultural imagination. Indeed, one might go
so far as to argue that the vampire is broken by our empathy and as the embodiment within our
imaginations of our own social fears this breaking of the vampire leads to a critical failure in our
collective cultural imagination. The breaking of the vampire is perhaps not the cause of, but an effect of
this breakage in our imagination, and it is in the telling of vampire stories that we can see most vividly
the effected failure of our ability to imagine our own fears.
The 21st century vampire in fiction is a sad character. It lives on the blood of animals or blood
pilfered from hospital blood banks. Our empathy with the sad vampire has led to the creation of a
broken creature that rejects its own existence. In so doing it is representative of our own failure as a
cultural to adequately imagine and examine our own fears. The vampire of modern fiction is a creature
of intense self-loathing, a broken vampire as a symbol for the broken man. Indeed, most any vampire
story of late incorporates vampires purely as a visual device.
How many stories of vampires in the past decade required that the creatures themselves even be
vampires? How much more often are the vampires simply manifestations of the semi-nihilistic, overly
emotional, anti-social tendencies of modern society? Where technology has granted us so much luxury,
and information has granted us so much knowledge we fret at the loss of mystery and adventure in our
world. The great adventures of the past ages leaves much of modern western society with little hope
that we might find the same value in our lives that our forebears found in getting us to this age of
apparent plenty.
The vampire of today is a manic depressive. He lives in the dark not because the sun will kill
him but because he is sad. Many modern vampires in fiction today are perfectly capable of walking
around in the daylight. Most can survive on animal blood rather than human blood, and those that
cannot skulk around and retrieve what they need from blood banks.
In the last decades of the 20th century the vampire still attempted to mean something. In that age
they gathered together into groups and families and became a representation of the hidden power and
lack of control of the average person in the modern capitalist environment. They were the
untouchables, the masters of the universe, who played with humans as puppets. But the 21st century
vampire is different in his diffidence. Where, for all of vampire history, the vampire was the violent
embodiment of our fears – a creature that would victimize anyone who was unfortunate enough to
attract his attention – the contemporary vampire is the broken soul, the victim of his own accursed
circumstance.
The story of the modern vampire is the story of a brooding teenager, perhaps hundreds of years
old and still unimaginatively content to parlay with high school students who only by means of the
vampire's own lack of interest in the world still somehow maintain not his primal interest in sex or
blood but somehow maintain with him a cogent conversation. This writer finds it almost impossible to
find anything of interest in the conversations of teenagers, and I am myself only a decade or so
removed from them. Where can a vampire, immortal, and centuries removed from that level of
innocence gather the mundanity to hold such a conversation?
These characters are just that, characters. They are not vampires. A vampire is impossible to
treat with because a vampire is everything that you are not, and everything that you fear. It is sexual
violence, and the antithesis of the natural order. It is ancient and immortal. It is the deadly grotesque
fear that lives in our imaginations and comes out at night to remind us that we are still afraid even when
we pretend not to be.

Failure to Imagine

The vampire still lives, and will always live, in our imaginations. Our attempts to weaken the
vampire and to cast him as a pitiable teenager, all the more pitiable in that he is forced to live as a
teenager for eternity, are not sufficient to damage the true vampire within us. The vampire will live for
as long as we have fear, but it should be argued at least that we do a disservice not only to the vampire
(who grows more dangerous each day he is not confronted) but to ourselves. We make the vampire that
is fear stronger when we refuse to address our fears, which we do when we accept the vampire for what
it is.
We cannot respect the vampire that does not respect its own nature, and when we gift short-
shrift to the literary vampire we are in turn giving that same short-shrift to our own fears. We pretend
that the vampire is something we can reject, and in so doing pretend that our fears are weaker than they
really are. By rejecting the vampire, and by rejecting our fears, we give them power.
Where confronting the sexual vampire allows us to confront our cultural fears of sexuality and
the lack of control we feel over our own most basic human needs; and, where confronting the vampire
of life and death allows us to remind ourselves to treasure our life in the context of the natural
progression of all living things; the rejection of the vampire's power causes us to fail in our
imaginations of our fears.
If we cannot imagine our fears we cannot confront them, and without confrontation our fears
will only continue to grow until they burst forth and overpower us. At some point in the future, perhaps
even now just under the surface of popular vampire literature, lurking on the tip of some or another
author's pen, is the vampire of our imagination. Terrifying in his embodiment of our fears, sexual and
violent, and all that we are not. One can only hope that that pen will meet paper and that we, as a
society, will once again find the vampires of our fear, so that we may confront them head on, stem the
tide of wallowing self pity and despair, and embark as a society again on a new cultural adventure.