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.