ABSTRACT
Vampires, as we know, cannot be seen in mirrors. Jonathan Harker’s suspicions are aroused when he cannot see his host’s reflection. In Anne Billington’s Suckers her protagonist has a terrible time in the ladies’ loo at the Vampire bar in Canary Wharf, hiding from the mirror that would indicate her human status. This ‘myth’ is refuted, along with others, at the start of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. Nevertheless the myth of the inability of vampires to be reflected in a mirror is always present, even if – especially if – it is refuted. It would seem that the absence of the mirrored self/image rather than designating an authentic self-hood, or simple lack thereof, designates a mingling of the seif with image, within the figure of the vampire itself. As the vampire is both dead and dying for a drink, it serves therefore as a point of condensation for the configuration of the image/desire/death. ‘The body’ in vampire lore serves as a mutating metaphor for the mobility of shape, substance, and desire. Thus, in Rice’s Chronicles of the Vampires, 1 it is hyper-aware and yet literally statuesque, but also as (only?) good for a drink, as meat. It is a construct which cannot be thought outside of the genealogy of the image – a phantom which is haunted by ‘the monstrous maladies of the dead’. For Roland Barthes, the photograph
is the way in which our time assumes Death: with the denying alibi of the distractedly ‘alive’ … for Photography must have some historical relation with what Edgar Morin calls the ‘crisis of death’ beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century; for my part I should prefer that instead of constantly relocating Photography in its social and economic context, we should also enquire as to the anthropological place of Death and the new image. For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. (Barthes, 1988, 92)
Dorian Gray and Dracula are key myths of the twentieth century articulating images/desires/death: emerging from the space of the library – almost specifically the British Library in Dracula’s case or des Esseintes’ guide to Western literature in A Rebours in Dorian’s case – they also emerge from the Theatre, as important a mode of re/presentation, or rather performance. In their hybridity, they join Blanchot’s figure of Don Juan and the Commander as figures of desire and death, as they do Marx’s austere capitalist and his Doppelgänger. The movement of desire and the image, the puppet, the statue, is inextricably linked with death; in Susan Sontag’s evocative phrase, one becomes ‘embalmed in a still’. The construction of death is to be considered as inhuman – that is, beyond the individual, for whom it nevertheless waits. Death, like the image, becomes a powerful mode of individuation in this period. Between death and the image the soul becomes desire; the human begins to be thought differently, beyond the ‘self’, in an alternative schema drawn from the gothic. ‘The drawing back before what dies is a retreat from reality. The name is stable and it stabilizes, but it allows the unique instant already vanished to escape; just as the word, always general, has failed to capture what it names … We thus find ourselves caught in the treachery of I know not what trap’ (Blanchot, 1993, 34). The energy of the language of death, hauntings and possession in the writings of Wilde and Foucault becomes a force for transfiguration, a way of becoming otherwise.