Still celebrating Stoker and his vampire count

Celebrations of the memory of Bram Stoker as theatrical manager and author are still ongoing, and the Irish An Post marked the centenary of Stoker's death with two stamps depicting Stoker himself as well as his most famous fictional creation, Dracula. The stamps are available at face value, including the minisheet shown below on top of the sheet published in 1897 to celebrate the centenary of Dracula itself. Click on the photo for a more detailed look, or go to An Post's shop if you are interested in purchasing the stamps. The new stamps are designed by David Rooney.

Considering the use of the written word in various formats, including a number of letters, in the novel itself, and the enormous amount of letters Stoker must have written while working for Henry Irving, stamps are a fitting way of celebrating Stoker and his vampire.

Oh, and by the way, having spent some hot and sunny days in the Western part of the Mediterranean Sea here in July, it is interesting to note that it is at the same time of year that the Demeter experienced 'rough weather' while journeying to the Gibraltar Strait. I suppose that, although Stoker meticulously dated the events of the novel, one recalls the events and not the context. But then it is perhaps even more unpleasant that Count Dracula conjures up a storm in late July. Following the novel more or less 'in real time' via the Dracula blog allows one to be reminded of the timing of the events.

The Vampire & The Voivode

My toes tend to curl when I watch a lot of the documentaries on vampires or Dracula that turn up on TV, DVD or the internet. But I can now point to a documentary that is thoroughly worth watching if you are looking for a documentary on Bram Stoker, the genesis of his novel Dracula, the locations in the novel and similar themes. I am referring to Dracula: The Vampire & The Voivode that was made in 2008, and is available on DVD for £11.99 plus p&p. It has the benefit of having Dracula expert Elizabeth Miller as script consultant, so various myths are discarded with or debunked. Furthermore, the documentary is shot on location in Dublin, Whitby, London and a number of places in Romania, and in Romania we get some insights from the late Nicolae Paduraru on both Vlad Tepes and Romanian vampire lore.

The documentary is, however, very weak on vampires per se, so this is mainly a documentary for those who want to know more about Stoker's novel.

The real "living dead"

Vampires crop up everywhere, e.g. here in For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1991) by the philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek:

'Apropos of the "transcendental apperception", Kant points out the utter voidance of the "I" that thinks: "I" is the empty form of thoughts, we can never accomplish the step from it towards substance and attain the hypothetical X, "the Thing that thinks" - yet the apparitions in the Gothic novels are precisely this: Things that think. This Kantian background is most easily perceived in the vampire novels; when, in a typical scene, the hero endeavours to deliver the innocent girl who has become a vampire by finishing her off in the appropriate way (the wooden stake through the heart, and so on), the aim of this operation is to differentiate the Thing from the body, to drive out the Thing, this embodiment of perverse and traumatic enjoyment, from the body subordinated to the "normal" causal link. Let us just recall the scene from Bram Stoker's Dracula in which Arthur stakes Lucy, his ex fiancée:

The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions, the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam.

- desperate resistance of the Thing, of enjoyment fighting not to be evacuated from the body. When, finally, the Thing is driven out, the expression on Lucy's face changes back to normal, assuming again the features of innocent beatitude - the Thing within the body is dead One of the usual phrases about the Thing in the Gothic novel is the horrified exclamation: "It's alive!" - that is to say, the substance of enjoyment is not yet mortified, quartered by the transcendental-symbolic network. The paradox of the vampires is that, precisely as "living dead", they are far more alive than us, mortified by the symbolic network. The usual Marxist vampire metaphor is that of capital sucking the blood of the workforce, embodiment of the rule of the dead over the living; perhaps the time has come to reverse it: the real "living dead" are we, common mortals, condemned to vegetate in the Symbolic.' (p. 220-1)