BOOKS & ARTS
Getting it in the neck
Christopher Bray
The Vampire: A New History
by Nick Groom
Yale, £16.99, pp. 287
‘What!’, railed Voltaire in his Dictionnaire
Philosophique of 1764. ‘Is it in our 18th
century that vampires still exist?’ Hadn’t
his Enlightenment rationalism seen off
such sub-religious voodoo? Well no, mon
frère, it hadn’t. In fact, here we are, a quar-
ter of a millennium on, and those vampires
are still with us. Films, rock concerts, nov-
els, TV shows, they’re full of fangs and drip-
ping with blood. We’re suckers for those
suckers — so much so that even academia
is getting in on the act. As Nick Groom, an
English professor at Exeter university says
in his densely researched new book: ‘Vam-
pires are good to think with.’
Well, there’s certainly a lot to be said
about them. Symbols don’t come more labile.
The earliest vampires, Groom tells us, were
‘reputed to have powers of shape-shifting’.
The later ones shape-shifted like their pro-
ducers’ lives depended on it. Take the Drac-
ula of the Hammer Horror cycle. Over the
course of a decade and a half, Christopher
Lee’s antics were a — doubtless uncon-
scious — metaphor for what was going on in
the wider body politic. In the first Hammer
picture, Dracula — which came out with-
in months of the Notting Hill riots — Lee
played the character as a Byronic charmer
tempting hitherto clean-living blondes over
to the dark side.
Come the sexual revolution, though, the
Count turned prudish. In Taste the Blood
of Dracula he was so shocked at the sight
of a bunch of repressive Victorian patri-
archs being pleasured in the knocking shop
he drank them dry. A few years later, in
Dracula AD 1972, he was letting his hair
down and getting it on with the hippies of
the King’s Road.
Finally, in the following year’s The Satan-
ic Rites of Dracula, our hero had morphed
into a Poulson-style property developer who
has taken over Centre Point and has his eyes
set on the Square Mile. If only he had hung
around for the Big Bang. Who would get it in
the neck over Brexit?
In fact the links between vampirism and
political economy go back a long way. Dur-
ing the reign of George II — himself, accord-
ing to Walpole, a believer in vampires — the
London Journal printed an item about ‘Dead
Bodies’ in Hungary ‘sucking... the Blood of
the Living’. This story, Groom tells us, was
soon being retold by entrepreneurial types
as an allegory for the way the dead hand
of the state leeches off buccaneering capi-
talists. But soon enough the metaphor was
being worked the other way. It’s not much of
a stretch, as Groom says, to see vampires as
‘embodying a fear of the victims of colonial-
ism biting back’.
And then came Marx. From the ‘spec-
tre... haunting Europe’ at the start of The
Communist Manifesto, through the French
National Assembly ‘living off the blood of
the June insurgents’ in the 18th Brumaire, to
the description of wealth ‘sucking its living
soul out of labour’ in the Grundrisse, and on
to the argument in Das Kapital that ‘capital
is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only
by sucking living labour, and lives the more
the more labour it sucks’, Groom shows how
Marx’s theories are pretty much premised on
the vampire metaphor.
Vampires being vampires, there’s a lot
of emphasis on the body here. Many of
the book’s illustrations wouldn’t look out
of place in a porn mag. Not that things get
too racy. It’s possible, Groom says, to ‘over-
sexualise vampire tales’. Fair enough, though
it’s equally possible to under-sexualise them.
Discussing Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Groom
quotes this passage — ‘The fair girl went on
her knees and bent over me... as she arched
her neck she actually licked her lips... lower
and lower went her head... I closed my
eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited,
waited with beating heart’ — before argu-
ing that Stoker is describing ‘the dynam-
ics of the market’. I must have a word with
my stockbroker.
For all the sex, though, the book steers
clear of anything too semiotic or psychoan-alytic. For a literature don, Groom writes
with great clarity. The sections on Roman-
ticism’s roots in the Eastern European
Gothic are very impressive. He is good on
paralleling what he calls Keats’s ‘deathly
wooings’ with the lure of Transylvaniantransubstantiation, and I found it hard to
argue with his suggestion that Frankenstein
‘reverberates with vampire thinking’.
Nor is that the book’s only eye-opener.
I was intrigued by John Stagg, the ‘blind
bard’ of Cumberland, who apparently
minted the word ‘suckosity’ for his poem
‘The Vampyre’. I was pleased to learn that
‘manducation’ isn’t some #MeToo neol-
ogism, but the act of chewing the conse-
crated host at the Eucharist. And I felt
a prick for having to look up the meaning
of ‘aculeated’.
Talking of feelings, it’s only right to point
out that The Vampire is a joy to behold. This is
one of the most beautifully produced books
I’ve seen for a long time. Elegantly designed
and typeset, and printed on a creamy paper
that bulks out a slim page-count into some-
thing handsome and hefty, it ought to make
rival publishers ashamed of their, well,
vampiric practices.Most of Karl Marx’s theories
are p retty mu ch p remised on
the vampire metaphor‘Love and Pain’ (1893–95) by Edvard Munch. Though he maintained that this simply
portrayed a woman embracing a man, Munch obsessively repainted the image, and the
woman’s hair and stance strongly suggest something more sinister than a kiss