Comparative Literature

Literature of the uncanny and the vampire metaphor

Both literature of the fantastic and gothic literature belong to the literature of the uncanny (perturbante), a broad definition having to do with the uneasiness/anxiety. This figure is also a metaphorical figure within the literary representation of the horrible/terrible/uncanny. The vampire will also become a metaphor for the writing process itself that needs to vampirize/devour other sources in order to produce other texts.

This metaphor will be important as we’ll see how writers throughout the ‘long 19th century’ (till the Victorian Age) have produced and used the figure of the vampire to explore transnational issues, in order to cope with a lot of topics like love, sexuality, immortality, and monstrosity. The cultural transfer of the figure of the vampire in Europe during the long 19th century shows how some monstrous and fantastic elements have paved the way for the presentation of the vampire that we’re used to seeing nowadays. The figure of the vampire has to do also with social/political/aesthetic and intercultural factors that have been contributing to the fame of this figure in transnational literature.

Origins and evolution of vampire literature

It was thanks to these cases of European vampirisms (that came from Eastern Europe) that the figure of the vampire was constructed through literature till the most famous representation by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The first vampire man was represented by John Polidori in The Vampyre, a nobleman coming from the east of Europe. It has some features that are important to understand this text as the very first narrative work dealing with the figure of the vampire, but also with the birth of the myth itself, published in 1819. This is an important date because it marks the line between the fantastic literature (carried out by the French literature) and the gothic one (romantic schools of the English one).

It’s an interesting case study because of two main features:

• It’s a tale (not a novel) first published under the name of Lord Byron, not Polidori. He was a physician and friends with Byron. John Polidori used to travel with him throughout Europe. Byron was considered a revolutionary hero of the romantic movement.
• Polidori didn’t want his name linked to supernatural elements because it was too far from science. The tale was written on the same night in June 1816 when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. She lived together in Switzerland with her husband, Lord Byron, and Polidori. After reading some German ghost tales, the group of people decided to write a tale. Thanks to this, two myths of contemporary European literature were born the same night and in the same place.

After Polidori, some other figures dealt with the female vampire: The Bride of Corinth by Goethe, a ballad dealing with the figure of a Greek vampire coming back from death to bring her lover with her; also E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote a tale, Vampirismus, devoted to the figure of the proto-female vampire, because Aurelia, the protagonist, isn’t a definite vampire as is. She is the protagonist of Gautier’s tale, Clarimonde, which narrates the story of a female vampire that has become something different than the voluptuous woman trying to drink blood in order to survive. His Clarimonde (original title was La Morte amoureuse) tells the story of a young lady that eventually falls in love with Romuald, a young priest, but doesn’t vampirize her beloved and therefore starves for the lack of blood. This tale is one of the most delicate and interesting tales dealing with the figure of the vampire, which turns into a kind of muse for the man in love with her.

Last but not least, we’ll see how Stoker’s Dracula will represent the turning point of the representation of the vampire as a moment where all this long tradition of the vampire eventually turns into a representation of this myth nowadays.

What is Gothic literature?

The figure of the vampire has to do with gothic literature, the so-called literature of terror/horror. It's not enough to define the vampire entirely; we need a broader definition of literature, the literature of the Uncanny—a term coined by Freud that didn’t exist when gothic literature and others were being written in the long 19th century.

Many books have been published on the literary development of gothic fiction and literature. Below is a selection of the most important books on this literature that can help define the figure of the vampire, but also how it developed throughout time and not only became a figure of the gothic literature, but eventually turned into a figure of the fantastic literature (Gautier) and to the literature of the Uncanny.

• The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (1979) by Elizabeth MacAndrew
• The Literature of Terror (1980) by David Punter
• Histoire de la Littérature Fantastique en France (1985) by Marcel Schneider
• La Littérature Fantastique (1997) by Jean-Luc Steinmetz
• Gothic Radicalism: Literature Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century (2000) by Andrew Smith
• The Uncanny (2003) by Nicholas Royle

The vampire inhabits the house (or castle) of the literature of the uncanny, whose cellar is composed of the gothic literature, the stairs are composed of aspects of the fantastic literature, and the roof has to do with the literature of the uncanny.

The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (1979) by Elizabeth MacAndrew

• Focus on the protagonists of the gothic fiction, displaying their difficulties, troubles, and inner conflicts.
• Even if she defines Gothic as “a literature of nightmare” (p.3) and points to a psychoanalytical reading of the characters, MacAndrew deals with their inner/outer problems in a too general way. She doesn’t support in her analysis the mental disturbance that the protagonists are suffering from. It lacks a scientific understanding of these psychological problems.
• She refers to the figure of the Double and the Uncanny again in a too general way. She doesn’t explain the psychoanalytic idea or the theories standing behind this phenomenon. This means that Freud and his theories on the Double and the Uncanny should have been mentioned in this book, but this doesn’t happen.

The Literature of Terror (1980) by David Punter

• It deals with an important element: the uncanny and gives a psychoanalytical explanation of the exaggeration of characters’ fears resulting in terror, described within the gothic fiction.
• The book deals also with the literary development of terror itself, and therefore the notions of fear, anxiety, terror, and horror are the main points of interest.
• Once again, he doesn’t support his statements with any psychoanalytical background knowledge. The treatment of these sensations remains even more superficial than MacAndrew’s character analysis since there is no background of psychological theories able to explain the development of terror through the literature of terror itself.

These two books deal with gothic fiction (within English literature) and they don’t have any comparative approach to literature, unlike the one below.

Histoire de la littérature fantastique en France (1985) by Marcel Schneider

• This book deals with the history of fantastic literature in France and focuses on the interrelations on the comparative perspective of the literature of the uncanny, in generating horror and terror. The author highlights the fact that there’s an enormous German (E.T.A. Hoffmann) and American (E.A. Poe) influence on French literature of the 19th century.
• This book highlights the relapses of German and American horror literature on the French one and the fact that the main characters in this fantastic fiction are quite different from the gothic one. This literature deals with the inner life rather than the outer side = literature of the outside/from without VS literature from within (as in the fantastic literature/littérature fantastique).
• Schneider describes the main characteristics of fantastic fiction by opposing it indirectly to Gothic fiction.

What marks the difference between gothic literature and fantastic literature, according to Schneider, is that fantastic literature is a literature of the uncanny from within/inside of the character (sense of anxiety, terror, horror that generates within); while the horror/terror coming from the outside that has to do with the supernatural in human life, has to do with the uncanny from without—a sense of uneasiness that comes from supernatural elements that don’t belong to the characters and their inner parts. The vampire himself will prove to be a liminal figure between the uncanny from within and from without, between life and death, between love and hate.

La Littérature Fantastique (1997) by Jean-Luc Steinmetz

• Even more comparatist in its goals than Schneider’s book, Steinmetz wants to describe the development of fantastic literature from its beginnings to nowadays, so from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses to recent times.
• Steinmetz combines the world of the uncanny from outside with the uncanny from inside and presents several theories on the fantastic. He also dedicates one chapter of his book to Freud’s article, The Uncanny (1919), and the psychological component of the genre (fantastic literature).
• Steinmetz also underscores Hoffmann’s and Poe’s influence on fantastic writing.

This book is important because it puts a tradition of this fantastic literature, different from the gothic one. It’s a literature much more compelled with the supernatural elements and makes a difference with respect to the uncanny: the one from outside has to do with supernatural elements, so man isn’t responsible for this uneasiness that comes from outside elements and eventually tends to disappear as soon as it appeared in the life of someone; the uncanny from the inside is very different, it may develop in different ways with respect to the plot of the novel and can even lead the characters to act in different ways.

Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century (2000) by Andrew Smith

• The three listed in the title are the main elements to understand not only gothic literature but the literature of the uncanny.
• Smith provides an understanding of the sublime in connection with the uncanny. He starts from Freud’s understanding of the uncanny with reference to literature and combines this with the perception of the sublime by Longius’, Burke’s, Kant’s, and Weiskel’s conception of the uncanny. Freud himself to explain the uncanny started from a tale written by Hoffmann in which it was described the impossible love for a puppet = literature of the uncanny already existed before Freud formulated this term.
• Smith combines the concept of the sublime with psychoanalysis: “how the Gothic rewrites the sublime and the uncanny in such a way that it radically critiques the status of nature, language, and subjectivity” (p.8). The gothic is a category able to critique these things, as well as the literature of the uncanny.

The sublime can be of two different kinds, as Kant tells us: a static sublime, and a dynamic sublime. The static one comes from the moment we look at a still nature; it’s not in motion. The dynamic sublime is the sublime we experience when we see the nature express its forces—this has to do also with the theory of the uncanny from without. Smith balances between the uncanny from within coming from Freud and an uncanny that has to do with the supernatural, joint together with the inside.

The Uncanny (2003) by Nicholas Royle

• Freud’s and his own understanding of the term. The book applies Freud’s theories of the uncanny in order to understand the literature of the uncanny itself.
• The first part of the book is a long theoretical elaboration of the uncanny with its different implications of darkness, mysteriousness, arousal of the death instinct, and premature burial.
• The second part is shorter, and although it meant to apply these theories to literature, to Hoffmann’s short story Der Sandmann (1817), in this part Freud is actually discussed quite briefly. It puts the topic of the uncanny but doesn’t develop it properly.

All literary critics describe the phenomenon of the uncanny and its importance in literature, but the psychological connotations of the uncanny are only revealed and more or less elaborated in the theoretical works by Steinmetz, Smith, and Royle. These three literary critics describe this phenomenon, although they neither give a detailed nor a comparative illustration of the term’s understanding and development in literature from the late 18th century to the late 19th century.

They supported the well-established opinion held by many literary critics that gothic, fantastic, and uncanny writing has to be assumed to be culturally and temporally independent genres. We’ll see that these are not so divided and to be considered different genres, but these elements may be put together under the name of the literature of the uncanny itself. Also, they are joined in the figure of the vampire that proves to be an expression of the uncanny from within and without, a manifestation of the sublime, also going beyond laws of nature/literary aesthetics/uncanny. Therefore, in order to define the vampire, we should speak of a literature of the uncanny.

Gothic fiction and its broader meanings

The vampire has been coupled with gothic fiction because it is a frequently discussed literary field within the English Romantic Movement characterized by some features: evaluation of the individual and critical interest in imagination, dreams, fears, dark settings, sinister characters, and supernatural elements (that can be found in Stoker’s Dracula too, but he wrote it at the turn of the century in 1897—not the Romantic period but the Victorian age, next there was Modernism).

Until the transitory period after the Enlightenment (18th century), the term ‘gothic’ was still associated with the notion of cruelty and savageness of the Germanic tribe of the Goths and implied the meaning of “barbarous, rude, uncouth, unpolished, and in bad taste” (OED 702).

The term underwent a slight change: “The word ‘gothic’ ceased to be a synonym for ‘barbarous’ and ‘violent’ and became associated with the poetry of the Middle Ages: Gothic = Medieval.”

In addition to the medieval implications, later on, the term was given a supernatural meaning after the Victorian Age. Throughout the course of time, the connotation of gothic changed so that it finally was associated with all grotesque, awful, evil, and ugly things, wherewith the former medieval meaning slightly faded away, and the supernatural meaning was maintained. The fact this was maintained was the reason for the fact that gothic also in French has this supernatural meaning.

Gothic in Literature

These different meanings of the word gothic come together and characterize the Gothic novel: “à la mode en Angleterre” (Le Grand Robert de la langue française). It had not to do with German tribes and that they were rude and barbarous, but if you look at the French tradition of this term, you can see the origins of this term are put overseas, like something trendy in GB. English origins implicitly point towards its possible or existing modifications in the literature of other cultures and languages, as for instance, in German or French. Actually, this term has different connotations with respect to the nation where it’s used—different meanings lead to the literary term Gothic fiction not being universally transferable to other languages and literatures. Gothic fiction has specific features in the English-speaking world but can’t be used in other contexts like French literature, where you speak of fantastic literature, and in the German one, you speak of the literature of horror/terror.

MacAndrew defines the English genre as follows: “Gothic fiction is a literature of nightmare. Among its conventions are found dream landscapes and figures of the subconscious imagination. Its fictional world gives form to amorphous fears and impulses common to all mankind, using an amalgam of materials, some torn from the author’s own subconscious mind and some stuff of myth, folklore, fairy tale, and romance. It conjures up beings - mad monks, vampires, and demons - and settings - forbidding cliffs and glowering buildings, stormy seas, and the dizzying abyss - that have literary significance and the properties of dream symbolism as well. Gothic fiction gives shape to concepts of the place of evil in the human mind. [...] Gothic fiction has been called escape literature, intended to inspire terror for terror’s sake” (Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction, 1979, p. 3).

Although there’s a distinction, these share some features; they all belong to the literature of the uncanny. MacAndrew, with respect to the English genre (gothic fiction), declares that gothic literature is a literature of nightmare that shows figures of the subconscious imagination and explores the human mind—referring to:

• The protagonist’s hidden psyche—psychoanalytical reading of Gothic fiction.
• MacAndrew points to the uncanny that evokes “pity and fear” (p. 4) and describes the foundation of the uncanny house of literature. The house is composed of gothic literature in the cellar, fantastic are the stairs, and the uncanny is the roof.