Foreign Body Vol. 3:

Pest Control

Scott Brewster

In Carmilla , Sheridan le Fanu sets himself to trace the aetiology of a vampire plague: "Assume, at starting, a territory perfectly free from that pest. How does it begin, and how does it multiply itself..." This paper will not offer a handy diagnosis of or cure for vampirism, but will ask if there is a territory ever perfectly free from pests or foreign bodies. There are various manifestations of foreign body in the novel: the state of the body, the body of the state, the body of literature and the body of science. Before it grows dark, I'll try and trace a foreign body effect in the novel, a strangeness that inhabits and flits through the text, unsettling and contaminating clear definitions. Who or what is Dracula? As Jonathan Harker cries: "What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of a man?" Here the vampire is given the proper name of Dracula, but the whole vampire myth is a matter of many names, (in)definitions, a matter of limits, the borders of the known and the acceptable. Foreign bodies need a host. In Latin, hospes can mean a host, guest or foreigner; its meaning thus modulates into hostis, or enemy. Host also means a "multitude". Guests, foreigners, mass invasions. You use the Eucharistic host to mark vampires, the Undead. It is a talisman, a weapon to save your soul. Yet how familiar is the Host? Eat of my Body, drink of my Blood, remember. We are hosts, hosts to foreigness. What are we hosts for? What gets into us? If a parasite, a foreign body, gets into us, it might get something out of us. When you first get it in the neck, vampires give you bad dreams, horrible memories. It's a nightmare, isn't it? Who or what are the Undead? Those who have no resting place, no clearly defined space but yet are everywhere. Neither one thing nor the other, here and not here, something and nothing. As nosferatu, you are improper, not where you should be: a troubling crosser of boundaries, not of yourself. Like ghosts, the undead won't stay in place but walk restlessly, transgressively, finding many temporary resting places. Marginal figures (or figments), the undead can change themselves only at trasitional times; they alter form at sunrise and sunset, and can cross rivers only at slack or flood tide. Suicides are particularly susceptible to becoming vampires, since they are not properly mourned or laid to rest. Buried at crossroads, the crossing of ways, suicides are in limbo, unsure of where to go and have to be staked to stay in place. What is at stake in staking? Unmember vampires, stake them, behead and burn them, give them no rest and no place to rest. Then you can remember the dead. The dead are propoer, in place, authentic, fully present. Dracula is no body in London, no-body anywhere, without fixed abode. And yet he is so much part of things, as Van Helsing explains:

There have been from the loins of this very one great men and good women, and their graves make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell. For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest.

So, however much of an unsanctified pollutant, Dracula inhabits goodness itself; vamprism is more than the alter ego of goodness, it is its supplement or potential, an insistent trace, the shadowy, silent "other" of goodness, passing over the oppositions of good and evil. It is a bug that listens at the window, a bug that lives within the system. You can't get rid of it, you can't kill it. You have to live with it. Just as Dracula ungrounds the rational assumptions of late 19thc England, so too he is ungrounded. The novel opens with Jonathan Harker travelling across Europe, into the Mittel Land which, in German, can shift into Mittelalterlich (the Middle Ages) and Mittelos (without means, impoverished), suggestive associations in the context of historical and political representations of the Balkan region. Harker is leaving the west and entering the east; the Carpathians, one of the wildest regions of Europe, is not on the ordnance survery map. Harker enters the Europe that Europe would like to forget: a contact or conflict zone between East and West, Christian and Muslim, Western and Orthodox Church, modern civilazation and medieval barbarism, science and magic, reason and supertstition, the known and the exotic, the familiar and the alien, the alluring and terrifying. Bloodlusts, warring ethnic peoples. Always happens in the Balkans: they're not like us. It is also from the Balkans that the strongest vampire myths originate.

Harker is a foreign, alien, isolated figure among the exotic natives, and his journal might appear like another nineteenth-ventury travelogue that, as in A.F. Crosse's Round About the Carpathians (1878), views Eastern Europe as "a 'try back' into barbarism". But Harker's journal (which is really a novel) is more unsettling than any gentlemanly jottings. A strange concern with foreigness, this, in a text written by a foreigner in London, an Irishman, inhabitant of a restive colony, a Protestant from a mainly Catholic land (not unlike Harker travelling in Orthodox Romania). This colony won't rest easy, stay still, accept its place. and yet it is a victim too, its lifeblood draining away... The Count is proud of his heritage. Vlad Tepes, otherwise known as Dracula, comes from the order of Dracul, the devil or dragon (and no, the fact that we meet him on St. George's night is not much comfort). Voivode or warlord, berserker, latterly vampire and amateur legal practitioner in and around London. Vlad was a strange ruler, in turn conqueror, defeated invader, protector, destroyer, moralist, unspeakable butcher. The Count recounts his lineage with aristocratic hauteur: "We Szekelys...can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Habsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach." This ancestral record is inscribed within a stereotype of despotic, fading European nobility and decayed feudal order. The Count plays out this historical pattern by invading London, a "foreign gentleman" unsure of the language, let loose in the centre of the world, drawing on its blood-banks: "If it should be, and he came to London, with its teeming millions..." Think of Dracula's familiars, his many changing forms: bat, rats, wolves, gypsies, Slavs. They all represent the mobile, shifting shapes of disease: outsiders, improper, needing perpetual surveillance, a watchful Father and a leap of faith. Like rats, vampires are another invasion from the East, a spreading plague, occult, erotic, unstable and seemingly irresistible. The children that the undead Lucy attacks are believed to be the victims of a "wild specimen" of bat "from the South". Outside the scope of conventional science and medicine, vampires show no respect for time, space, property or decency. They are leeches, parasites, perpetually transferring to another site, another host. Dracula stresses the need to assume another language and identity, perhaps as a means of colonizing a potential colonizer:

"Well, I know that, did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger. That is not enough for me. Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me, and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not - and to know not is not to care for...I have been so long master that I would be master still - or at least that none other should be master of me."

Dracula begins his unholy colonization by importing his own (foreign) soil and desecrating the hallowed ground of the chapel at Carfax Abbey. The vampire hunters have to "sterilize" the polluted native earth. Irredeemably alien (remember, he is laid to rest on home ground), the Count threatens the heart of London, making the capital unhomely.

Dracula ought to be a foreign body in the institution of literature. The novel is a journey to deliver documents, to give the Count a home: at the start of the novel, Harker travels to Transylvania to conduct business with the Count and at the end we are left with another jumble of documents: private and business letters, diaries in shorthand, diaries not in shorthand, newspaper cuttings and reports, telegrams and phonograph entries that are eventually copies by typewriter. What authority have these documents? The "records" of the novel describe bewildering events, but the circumstances under which those records are made are often strange and unfamiliar themselves. The Count's library represents a genealogy of English writing. Lucy writes her final journal entry on her death bed, having been vampirised, surrounded by her dead mother, shattered windows and drugged servants: she writes two and a half pages. Equally obligingly, the captain of the "Demeter", taking the Count of Whitby, keeps his log up to date before lashing himself to the mast. Harker's journal - kept in shorthand, a cryptic translation - acknowledges a rational faith in facts, books and figures. Somehow, keeping details of "external events" orders the disordering magic of Castle Dracula, the shadowy atmosphere that blurs the line between fantasy and reality: "I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me". And yet, for all the evidence compiled, for all the written chronology of events kept secret under lock and key, Harker can still barely believe the story he himself has largely written: I took the papers from the safe where they have been ever since our return so long ago. We were struck with the fact that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of type-writing, except the later note-books of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing's memorandum. We could hardly ask anyone, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story. Harker's disclaimer actually extends the invitation to the reader, a similar invitation to the one offered to Harker as he hovers (sorry, a bat-word) on the threshold of the Count's castle: "Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!" The Count's welcome could equally be an invitation to readers to suspend disbelief, to dream and imagine. Transylvania is a "sea of wonders", a place to have "queer dreams". Eventually it gives Harker a brain fever. Going to fix Dracula once and for all, Van Helsing feels the "fatal spell of the place". So, even heroes almost succumb to his hypnotic lure to enter freely the vampire's dream, leaving some of the happiness they bring. How can we make these papers manifest in the reading when the records are strange to themselves, full of contaminated evidence? Reason grounds this tale of vampires, but vampires precisely unground the rational endeavour to annotate, compile and document. As Harker suggests, the novel does not get anywhere, and we are left with a mass of typewriting. A futile journey? No, the text is a process, a crossing, always in transit liker the Count. Transcribing, writing across. A vampire's threat lies in getting across the threshold, into your room through gaps, openings, unprotected spaces or interstices. The suicide's grave at Whitby provides a window of opportunity for Dracula to enter. You ask a vampire over the threshold; they are always coming in and out of windows, cracks and gaps. The text os full of thresholds, windows, inviting spaces. What implications does this have for the identificatory desires performed in literature? In the text, distinctions between waking and sleeping, fantasy and reality, sanity and madness are thrown into confusion by restless, troubled dreams. Can you ever be your self in this text? (Dracula is himself, which is precisely self as other). Do we enter freely, are we irresistibly and passively lured into the text or do we invade the text as vampires ourselves, entering accurately and soothingly?

Where is Dracula in the text? Wavering between absence and presence, material and immaterial, Dracula's mobility defies scientific positivism and rational empiricism. Although bound by some natural laws, he defines his own spatial and temporal dimensions. Progenitor and master, he is outside the law but constitutes his own law as King Vampire. There are few clues to his whereabouts. When he's at home in Transylvania, when he's your host, Dracula seems palpable enough, down to his bad breath and house manners. Harker can even see the Count without the Count seeing him, except when he looks in the shaving mirror. Only when he calls on your home is Dracula unhomely. In London, he is a silent centre of events. Elusive, elsewhere in the text, he is encountered or missed in transit, never sleeping in the same place, visible only in traces and signs of his passing, surrounded by fog and shadow. Even his name is inscribed on an empty tomb. Hew gives no reflection in the mirror, casts no shadow, yet he is somehow in the field of vision. When we read the novel, can we believe our eyes? If we're seeing ghosts, might it be because ghosts constitute the terms in which we conceive of characters in a text and, more significantly, is it that ghosts or vampires figure the conditions of possibility for reading? Dracula performs what one might call a vampiric reading-effect, setting off a potentially endless circulation, dispersing its parasitical power, infecting and inducing the reader. Yet to save its soul, a reading must also pin this foreign body down, decontaminate itself from this spreading network of relations that puts in question what it means to be inside and outside a text. Dracula occupies an uncertain realm between life and death, spirit and flesh, a present moment that functions as a transit camp for past and future. He represents a third possibility between mind and matter. Might Dracula be read as occupying this third site of possibility, a place of ceaseless interchange, at the margins of sense and non-sense, material and immaterial, science and literature, conscious and unconscious? Metaphysician, doctor, lawyer, shaman, a figure of "absolutely open mind", Van Helsing gives a voice to that gap, oscillation, interweaving between reason and superstition, spirit and matter that structures the novel. He occupies a marginal, ambiguous space within the discursive fields of law, medicine and science. An advocate of alternative branches of scientific enquiry, he accepts strange beliefs rejected or excluded by mainstream science:

"Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot?... Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new...I suppose now you do not believe in corporeal transference..Nor in materialization...Nor in astral bodies..Nor in the reading of thought...Nor in hypnotism..."

Van Helsing hypnotizes Mina in order to locate the Count, a successful experiment eventually foundering on Mina's transference and scrambled by the Count's telepathic interference. In the late nineteenth century, has a fledgling science, psychoanalysis inhabits a shadowy space between literature and science, medicine and magic, operating at the outer fringes of official discourses of knowledge. Psychoanalysis institutes its orthodoxy and authority by recuperating otherness within itself, yet therapy incorporates an element of trance or possession, miming or reproducing the illness which it is supposed to cure. Telepathy and hypnosis are foreign bodies that the institution of psychoanalysis cannot expel. Tranference, hypnosis, telepathy: two pests, irritants to science. Van Helsing's unofficial science - hypnosis - is countered by Dracula's magical ability to tranfer thought. Two foreign bodies deploying disembodied practices. In the final desperate pursuit of the Count, Mina becomes an unstable transmitter, a conductor and disrupter, a gremlin in the narrative's intricate communication network. Among the group of men she stands for both the mother and the other. Even with her man's brain, Mina is excluded from planning Dracula's fate, because she is tainted by the devil's illness. The Sacred Wafer on her forehead marks her as unclean: "Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh." This intimate connection with the Other, its mark or trace on her body, means that she can only speak as otherness. Since they seek a spirit, a non-being, Arthur Holmwood, Quincey Morris, Van Helsing, Seward, Harker and Mina hold a form of seance together:"..without a word we all knelt down together, and, all holding hands, swore to be true to each other". A strange set of relations, a telepathic family. They vow to lift the veil of sorrow from Mina's head, but her mind is screened or scanned by male power. After all, her forehead is marked. Dracula employs her as a communitation devioce, and Van Helsing's hypnosis renders her foreign to herself, forcing her to perform a role, to stage the Other. Renfield is Dr. Seward's "pet madman", a "wonderfully interesting study", but the patient's mental condition figures an otherness that remains beyond the interpretive reaches of conventional medicine and science. Renfield's "obliquity of thought" is considered a disease and the investigation, knowledge and control of his madness is vitally important in expelling his master, another foreign presence, from London. Yet Seward records on several occasions: "..I do not follow his thought..I cannot quite understand it ..I wish I could fathom his mind..I wish I could get some glimpse of his mind or of the cause of his sudden passion." Renfield's moods "interpret something foreign to himself"; he acts as a medium or cipher of the Otherness that is the Count. In Stoker's Dracula, the hunt for the Count is not only intended to have a curative or purgative effect, but appears to be driven by a desire to know, to achieve mastery over this irresistible, omnipotent Master. In doing so, the text brings together law, science and medicine. For all his arcane knowledge, Van Helsing still engages the Count through the power of consecutive reasoning. He cannot totally accept the Count's terms or premises. Deduction, observation, educated guesswork, the method through which Renfield becomes an object of study, an index of Dracula's behaviour. Thus the unknown, the alien, can be charted by facts and figures. Nonetheless, Renfield conducts his own investigations and calculations, tirelessly producing mysterious, indecipherable writing and figures. It is as if madness mimics and thus produces sanity, overturning a philosophical and moral hierarchy. Renfield is a "sane and learned lunatic". Van Helsing says that "Perhaps I may gain more knowledge out of the folly of this madman than I shall from the teaching of the most wise." Seward is drawn into Renfield's world, an attraction that unsettles the Doctor's own sense of control and rationality, leaving him taking sleeping draughts and calling on the Angel of death. I is a form of passing thought: the Count transferring to Renfield who then transfers to Seward. In a way, Dracula develops a vampiric network by forereading his victims. I know that vampire hunts are supposed to be crusade to trace, isolate, understand and ultimately obliterate a foreign body. Vampires are a plague, contaminating the main body, a creeping contagion, a pervasive pestilence, out there getting in, at the window, in the gaps, spreading everywhere. Van Helsing speaks of "...the way Dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can procect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact." Are there any foreign bodies who are not irritants, nuisances, parasites, bloodsuckers, something that drains and feeds off the system without contributing in return? Can foreign bodies be a vital, productive part of a system, be recognised as needing a place, a different place, to work and rest? Can they be poison and cure? There is no way that foreign bodies will easily stay in place, no way that a system can expel all foreign bodies. Forget Pest Control. We need transfusions. more...