The Vampire: A Casebook

The Vampire as Bloodthirsty Revenant: A Psychoanalytic Post Mortem

ALAN DUNDES The Vampire as Bloodthirsty Revenant: A Psychoanalytic Post Mortem The use of the word myth to refer to stories of the vampire is anathema to the professionalfolklorist. For thefolklorist, myth is a technical term referring to sacred narratives explaining how the world or humankind came to be in their present form. Because encounters with vampires, real or imagined, have nothing whatever to do with the creation ofthe world or humankind, they do not qualify as bonafide myths. Nor are such stories "folktales, "which arefictional, as indicatedby an opening formula (e.g., "Once upon a time''), signalling that what follows is not to be taken as literal, historical truth. Vampire accounts are whatfolklorists calllegends, that is, stories told as true andset in the postcreation world. They might conceivably also be classified as memorates, which are personal narratives ofencounters with a supernatural creature, also told as true. When such personal narratives become the property ofan entire community, they would be considered legends rather than memorates. Most nonfolklorists, however, tend to use the word myth to refer to any story which is thought to befallacious or untrue. Now that we have established that stories ofvampires are legends (or memorates), at leastfrom afolklorist's point of view, what else can we say about the vampire? Too often folklorists are prone to worry unduly about classification, and they utterlyfail to offer much in the way of interpretation. Instead, the task ofthe interpretation offolklore falls by default to anthropologists, historians, literary critics, and psychiatrists. The final essay in this volume is an attempt by a folklorist with a confessed Freudian bias to interpret the vampire as a creature oflegend. Whether or not it constitutes any advance in our understanding ofthis remarkable nightmarish figment ofthe human imagination isfor the reader tojudge. In accordance with a pronounced penchant for the ritual number three, Western folklorists are prone to divide cultural materials into a tripartite classificatory scheme: elite culture, mass or popular culture, and folklore. Sometimes these admittedly somewhat arbitrary categories are mutually exclusive . That is, there are surely literary creations which have no analogs or parallels in either popular culture or folklore. By the same token there may 159 Alan Dundes be instances ofpopular culture (e.g., comic books, television programs, motion pictures, and the like) which are totally independent of both elite or high culture and folklore. In the same way, there may be folklore which is orally transmitted from person to person, from generation to generation, which has never served as the inspiration for either popular or elite culture. Elite culture and popular culture, however, are more similar to one another than either is to folklore. Indeed, sometimes the line of demarcation between high culture and popular culture is very subjective. What makes a particular example from a popular-culture genre, such as a detective story, a tale ofscience fiction, a cowboy/outlaw Western adventure, or a silhouette romance, qualify as so-called high culture? In any event, both high and popular cultures are fixed in print or locked into videotape or film. In marked contrast, there are always multiple versions of folklore, versions which exhibit variation from one to another. A literary novel or a television program cannot change over time. They are necessarily the same for each new generation. True, the perception or reception of them can vary with succeeding sequences ofaudiences, but the texts themselves cannot change. Folklore, on the other hand, is constantly in a state offlux. No two versions ofan item offolklore will be verbatim identical. Multiple existence (in more than one time and/or place) and variation are the hallmark criteria of folklore or oral tradition. In the majority of cases, there is another important distinguishing characteristic, namely, authorship. In most instances, the author of a literary work is known and so also are the authors of works in popular culture. We know who the creators of Star Trek and Tarzan are. The creators of folklore, however, are almost always anonymous. The vampire (MotifE 251. Vampire. Corpse which comes from grave at night and sucks blood) is an example of a subject or topic which is found in all three levels of culture. There are literary treatments of the vampire in countless novels (and some with counts!), short stories and poems (see Marigny 1985; Carter 1989; Frost 1989); and there are depictions of the vampire in popular culture, for example, television ("Dark Shadows") and innumerable films (see Riccardo 1983; Melton 1994:719-774); and there are plenty ofdocumentations...