A Vampiric Exploration of Alternative Texts

I want to explore the question of alternative texts, and their relationship to our intellectual capacity, in an unusual way. Amanda’s presentation on Twilight inspired this vampiric exploration of alternative texts – to think of text and digital text as the undead. Perhaps alternative texts have transfixed us with their vampiric stare, “tinkering with [our] brains, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory” (Carr, 2008, p. 57).

In case you haven’t noticed, there seems to be a trend in the adolescent subculture regarding the undead. More specifically, vampires have penetrated popular culture to the point of saturation - Twilight, Vampire Diaries, True Blood, etc. The question I want to pose is why vampires and why now? To find an answer to this question it would be beneficial to return to the beginning, to our good friend Bram Stoker.

            I am of the opinion that art reflects a certain ideology of the epoch in which it exists. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is no exception. Here is novel that is obsessed with time and place: Dracula begins “3 May. Bistriz. – Left Munich at 8:35 p.m. on 1^st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:45, but train was an hour late.” There is nothing in that opening sentence but times and places. Jonathan/Stoker is trying to solidify the narrative in a specific time and location, concretizing its existence. The story attempts to do the very thing that Carr accuses Google of: of “a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized… there is little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed” (p.63). Dracula, on the other hand, is the fuzzy place that embodies ambiguity - a kind of computer bug, or more specifically a pest, a blood sucking parasitic rodent that needs to be eliminated. Dracula exists outside of this concrete reality: Jonathan tells us one page later that he “was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula” (Stoker,1897, p.32). Dracula and vampires exist in a liminal space: between the living and the dead, male and female, human and animal. This liminality is, or was, the true horror of vampires - they do not conform the boundaries that define existence and therefore shatter the coordinates of our reality, of life itself.

            That being said, what was it about Stoker’s world that gave rise to the vampire, which created a liminal figure of the night? Originally published in 1897, Dracula shares its genesis with the production of film. At the same time Dracula was being published Edison was unveiling his first film projector and George Melies was dazzling audiences by making people on screen vanish completely. It is also the same year in which the word “computer,” meaning an electronic calculation device, was first used. Technology begins to manifest itself as a force that threatens to blur the boundaries of our reality.

The relationship between Vampires and film is almost self evident: They need darkness to survive; The people on screen never grow old, living long after the actor or actress has died; They hypnotize us - to look out over an audience watching a film one would see a large mass of people staring hypnotically forward for hours. The vampiric nature of film is that it is strangely alive yet dead. (This idea is explored more in depth by the film “Shadow of the Vampire”).

            It is my contention that computers also share this relationship with vampires – of being both living and dead. The 1980’s showed a resurgence of the vampire figure in films like The Lost Boys, Near Dark, The Hunger, Fright Night, etc. Of course this same era saw the emergence of the personal computer. It was the first time in history that people were able to have computers for their homes, offices, and schools. The nonliving machines began to play games with us, to teach us, and to live our lives for us.

            Of course in our epoch we have the internet and a new resurgence of the vampire. But this vampire is not malevolent but rather a marginalized person that we should embrace.

            So what does this all have to do with Carr’s article? Well it shows that we have always had this tentative and uneasy relationship with emerging technology. There is a long history of us believing that technology, and the undead texts of the world, are “making men ‘less studious’ and weakening their minds” (2008, p. 63). Carr specifically references this quote about the invention of the printing press. And so, I finally get to point, and that is that I do not believe that alternative texts have us transfixed in their vampiric stare – that they are not really making us stupid, or at least no more than they did throughout human history. 

References:

Carr, N. (2008, July/August). Is Google Making Us Stupid? The Atlantic , 148, 56 – 63.

Stoker, Bram. (1896). Dracula. Broadview Press. Peterborough, Ontario.

           

“We seem to find, in book after book, the traces of our lives.”

(Manguel, 1996, p. 10)

This quote from Manguel’s article, the Last Page, for me really emphasizes the way in which the texts that we read mediate our experience of reality. He tells us that “I found more reality in the idea than in the thing” (p.10). From my own experience with literature as well as my affinity for literary theory his observations in this article mesh well with what I understand about text.

            First of all Manguel’s notion of what constitutes text is expansive and inclusive: He tells us that even a “lover blindly reading the loved one’s body at night” (p.7) constitutes a kind of reading and I have a tendency to agree with him. Reading and representing is what we do as humans. On a date, at a job interview, even walking down the street the kinds of things we say, the way we say them, what kinds of clothes we wear, the way we walk, even our hair style, tells some kind of story about who we are and when we look at others we interpret (or read) them based on these criteria or some others. In this way, all human interaction is in some way an exercise in reading and interpreting. Thus, the stories that we read not only reveal “traces of our lives” but also leave traces. They become a part of the way we see the world.

            As a new generation of students grows up into a world where printed text and linear stories become less prolific, Manguel’s article gives me hope that it is not a degeneration of the act of reading but rather a transformation. Students will find “traces of their lives” in the digital realm – on Facebook, in videogames, in blogs, and on Twitter. There has always been something magical and evanescent about the imaginary world – the world of stories and the digital realm – the one that does not exist, and yet is also somehow more important. Perhaps the greatest storyteller ever would have been nothing if it where not for his use of “nothing.” Think of how much of the action and “reality” of Shakespeare’s plays are based around what doesn’t exist:

-         The plot in King Lear is set into motion by the King’s statement that “Nothing will come from nothing.”

-         In Othello, Iago’s evil plot is based on “trifles light as air.”

-         Much Ado About Nothing, like Sienfeild, is a play about nothing.

-         A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about the interplay between the real world and the dream world – the nothing world. (One could imagine a modern adaptation where instead of the fairy world it was the digital world and Oberon is a computer hacker.)

-         The tragedy of Hamlet is driven by the words of an apparition – the ghost of Hamlet’s dead father.

-         Macbeth, similarly to Hamlet, is driven by the prophecy of temporal witches.

In almost all his plays one can find that it is the unseen and the unreal that drives what is real. As Manguel tells us, there is “more reality in the idea” – in the illusionary and unreal world of books and stories – “than in the thing.” This is why I have a tendency to disagree with Birkerts’s assessment of the digital generation and his vision of an apocalyptic fate for reading in the electronic age.

            Birkerts tells us that “the self must change as the nature of subjective space changes. And one of the many incremental transformations of our age has been the slow but steady destruction of subjective space” (1994, p. 130). I find Birkerts article slightly naïvely nostalgic – as though he is longing for a past which perhaps never existed. His romantic notion of “the solitary self… [becoming] ever less tenable” (p.130) I would argue is incorrect. Although our generation may have more distractions we also have unparalleled disposable time. Throughout history it was only a small number of people who where able to enjoy the kind of pastoral solitude that Birkerts reveres. Long before the internet Karl Marx was making the argument that work is what destroys the subjective spaces. Therefore, I find myself aligned against Birkerts in believing that the changing text will not destroy language, subjectivity and our soul but rather transform it – not better or worse just different. 

Reference:

Manguel, A. (1996). A history of reading. Toronto, ON: Vintage Canada.