Carmilla may be the best vampire tale ever written. Like most vampire tales the ending is anti-climatic, the good guys win, the vampire is destroyed. Unlike Dracula, it’s never entered the mainstream and attempts to film it have been awful.
But in the middle of the nineteenth century, Le Fanu plays sophisticated games with his narrative. Today it’s usually described as a lesbian vampire tale. Very naughty, very trendy. But Le Fanu was too good to be so obvious. (And would he have got away with it if he was? Good Queen Vic reputedly had only recently declared there was no such thing)
Carmilla is a vampire, and she is attracted to the female narrator. Though in what way, other than as a food source, remains ambivalent.
The narrator can't decide but records her confusion. Unlike Uncle Silas, there is no evidence in the narrative to qualify Laura's confusion. This produces a feeling that everything is slightly out of focus. It's made worse because a modern reader knows so much more about literary vampires than Le Fanu's original audience and can't help but wonder why the narrator is so slow. (If he had thought his audience knew as much as a modern reader, the long exposition would have been omitted as unnecessary. (Although Hollywood doesn't seem to have learnt this lesson.)
As in Uncle Silas, the reader probably picks up the clues much faster than the narrator does, who remains innocent right to the end. You could read it as a lesbian story, but you can just as easily see it as one of those over wrought expressions of Victorian female friendship. Because both options are possible, the story has an unsettling ambivalence, like The Devil in Love, which is far beyond the usual hot house sexuality of modern vampire novels.
Le Fanu inhabits the margins, the space where decisions and definitions are not easily made. Like the Lady’s invitation to Gawain, Carmilla offers the reader the opportunity to do with the story as he or she wishes.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
The first of many Dublin Detours. Pt 1
Narratives, narration and ambiguity ..all for the new project. Of which more later.
A slight Detour to Dublin first then back to /I/.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula has never been out of print since it was first published in 1897. Its “hero” has apparently appeared in more films than any other literary character. (Favourite vampire film? Herzog’s remake of Nosferatau ). There’s a minor industry about the book itself. How it was written, its literary sources, its possible historical and geographical links, its relationship to the actual vampire folk lore of both Eastern Europe and Ireland, the links between what is known of Stoker’s life and some of the book’s lurid passages.
How many people read the whole book is a different matter. The first four chapters are brilliant, after that Stoker never really deals with the essential narrative problem he’s created for himself. If Dracula is a threat to world peace and civilization as we know it, how come such a bunch of obviously unimpressive “heroes” see him off so easily?
Still, the story escapes its limitations to live in the collective imagination. Which can’t be said for his “ The Lair of the White Worm”, though Ken Russel’s film version is gloriously silly.
However, before Stoker, Ireland was home to one of the greats of the 19th century Ghost story, Sheridan Le Fanu.
I am old enough to remember sleeping in a room which had no convenient light switch. In the dark the house creaked and settled, responding to weather. A wardrobe door opening suddenly, the tree at the bottom of the garden shifted the lights from the next street across the walls and ceiling. In the terraced house voices filtered through the walls, rose from the street outside, tangling themselves in the edges of sleep. All the clichés of the horror film.
Le Fanu wrote ghost stories for an audience who had even less access to the bright antiseptic lights available now in bedside lamps or reading lights. At his best, he plays on the fear of the sounds at the door, the blurred and half glimpsed sight at the window. The tales inhabit an indeterminate world where you’d never be sure if you were in a courtroom in hell or just having a detailed nightmare. No gore. No porn. Just the story worrying at the hinges of your comfortable sense of safety, exploring the half lit space between irrational fear and logic.
His Novel, Uncle Silas is a cumbersome beast, but one I like for a variety of reasons.
The first is the weird sense of déjà vu the intertextuality creates. It’s hard not to make links to the first part of Kidnapped, The Turn of the Screw, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Dickens…. Like the ghosts in his own stories, all these characters and narratives are flitting round the edges of Uncle Silas while you read giving the story a dreamlike quality, an odd familiarity you can’t quite put your finger on.
What distinguishes it from most of the others is the game Le Fanu plays with the narrator. The story is told in first person, and though this means both reader and narrator have access to the same information, the narrator consistently and obviously makes the wrong interpretation of the evidence. It's a subtle way of creating a character. You don’t have to read a plot synopsis to see that Uncle Silas can’t be trusted, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to realise that the narrator is about to be murdered, because she insists on interpreting everything in the best of lights, consistently misreading the signs you may even begin to feel she deserves it.
The same technique plays a major role in Le Fanu’s masterpiece, Carmilla.
A slight Detour to Dublin first then back to /I/.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula has never been out of print since it was first published in 1897. Its “hero” has apparently appeared in more films than any other literary character. (Favourite vampire film? Herzog’s remake of Nosferatau ). There’s a minor industry about the book itself. How it was written, its literary sources, its possible historical and geographical links, its relationship to the actual vampire folk lore of both Eastern Europe and Ireland, the links between what is known of Stoker’s life and some of the book’s lurid passages.
How many people read the whole book is a different matter. The first four chapters are brilliant, after that Stoker never really deals with the essential narrative problem he’s created for himself. If Dracula is a threat to world peace and civilization as we know it, how come such a bunch of obviously unimpressive “heroes” see him off so easily?
Still, the story escapes its limitations to live in the collective imagination. Which can’t be said for his “ The Lair of the White Worm”, though Ken Russel’s film version is gloriously silly.
However, before Stoker, Ireland was home to one of the greats of the 19th century Ghost story, Sheridan Le Fanu.
I am old enough to remember sleeping in a room which had no convenient light switch. In the dark the house creaked and settled, responding to weather. A wardrobe door opening suddenly, the tree at the bottom of the garden shifted the lights from the next street across the walls and ceiling. In the terraced house voices filtered through the walls, rose from the street outside, tangling themselves in the edges of sleep. All the clichés of the horror film.
Le Fanu wrote ghost stories for an audience who had even less access to the bright antiseptic lights available now in bedside lamps or reading lights. At his best, he plays on the fear of the sounds at the door, the blurred and half glimpsed sight at the window. The tales inhabit an indeterminate world where you’d never be sure if you were in a courtroom in hell or just having a detailed nightmare. No gore. No porn. Just the story worrying at the hinges of your comfortable sense of safety, exploring the half lit space between irrational fear and logic.
His Novel, Uncle Silas is a cumbersome beast, but one I like for a variety of reasons.
The first is the weird sense of déjà vu the intertextuality creates. It’s hard not to make links to the first part of Kidnapped, The Turn of the Screw, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Dickens…. Like the ghosts in his own stories, all these characters and narratives are flitting round the edges of Uncle Silas while you read giving the story a dreamlike quality, an odd familiarity you can’t quite put your finger on.
What distinguishes it from most of the others is the game Le Fanu plays with the narrator. The story is told in first person, and though this means both reader and narrator have access to the same information, the narrator consistently and obviously makes the wrong interpretation of the evidence. It's a subtle way of creating a character. You don’t have to read a plot synopsis to see that Uncle Silas can’t be trusted, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to realise that the narrator is about to be murdered, because she insists on interpreting everything in the best of lights, consistently misreading the signs you may even begin to feel she deserves it.
The same technique plays a major role in Le Fanu’s masterpiece, Carmilla.
That /I/ again
Because both the language and literary fashions went in a different direction, Gawain and the Green Knight is nowhere near as accessible without a gloss as Chaucer. In translation, like a lot of medieval alliterative poetry, it loses a great deal, but since I think of writing as a performance, then I’d say Gawain is one of the great performances in English poetry.
I need to think about it in terms of narrative, but for now, although it’s one of the minor pleasures, I've always liked the total ambiguity of the lady's invitation: Ye are welcom to my cors/yowre awen won to wile, which potentially means everything from the polite and meaningless, “I am at your disposal” to the literal “My body is at your disposal”.
Which leads to the Devil in Love.
I need to think about it in terms of narrative, but for now, although it’s one of the minor pleasures, I've always liked the total ambiguity of the lady's invitation: Ye are welcom to my cors/yowre awen won to wile, which potentially means everything from the polite and meaningless, “I am at your disposal” to the literal “My body is at your disposal”.
Which leads to the Devil in Love.
Rethinking tom
or apologising perhaps. Reading the complete works is a bit like reading the complete lyrics for all of Dowland's song books.
Friday, October 10, 2008
The non anxiety of influence
Heaney,
who is that rare thing, a good critic who is generous.
"When poets turn to the great masters of the past, they turn to an image of their own creation, one which is likely to be a reflection of their own artistic inclinations and procedures."
"At the desk every poet faces the same kind of task, that there is no secret that can be imparted, only resources of one's own that are to be mastered."
who is that rare thing, a good critic who is generous.
"When poets turn to the great masters of the past, they turn to an image of their own creation, one which is likely to be a reflection of their own artistic inclinations and procedures."
"At the desk every poet faces the same kind of task, that there is no secret that can be imparted, only resources of one's own that are to be mastered."
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Poets and critics
It's hardly a stunning thought, but so much of the study of literature since it became institutionalised has been in the hands of people who don't produce it.
But that probably accounts for the history of the past hundred years.
Borges puts it this way, in "This Craft of verse" Lecture one.
"I have spent my life, reading, analyzing, writing (or trying my hand at writing) and enjoying. I found the last to be the most important thing of all..."
"Whenever I have dipped into books of aesthetics, I have had the uncomfortable feeling that I was reading the works of astronomers who never looked at the stars. I mean, they were writing about poetry as if Poetry were a task, and not what it really is; a passion and a joy."
But that probably accounts for the history of the past hundred years.
Borges puts it this way, in "This Craft of verse" Lecture one.
"I have spent my life, reading, analyzing, writing (or trying my hand at writing) and enjoying. I found the last to be the most important thing of all..."
"Whenever I have dipped into books of aesthetics, I have had the uncomfortable feeling that I was reading the works of astronomers who never looked at the stars. I mean, they were writing about poetry as if Poetry were a task, and not what it really is; a passion and a joy."
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
versions of Beowulf
Ok, so I said I wouldn’t do it but I did. I watched the animated version. It was a dvd. It was free. I wasn’t doing anything else. (Enough excuses?)
I don’t understand why anyone would jump up and down and complain that “they’ changed the story. Every culture retells the stories of the past to make sense of them. Most people’s knowledge of Beowulf is through translation, or picture books, which are both retellings.
What’s interesting is that both the recent filmed versions have gone out of their way to reduce Beowulf, to make him flawed and fallible. (Okay, I left the ‘Thirteenth Warrior’ out, but as long as you ignore the Beowulf parallels that’s a mindless but entertaining piece. If you don’t, you get stuck wondering how something that sounds like Bulywyf can be a man’s name).
It seems odd in a society that worships physical heroes, pays them millions to kick or run with a ball or swim up and down a chemically infested pond, these films should seem so worried about a character who is famous for his courage and strength.
The one filmed in Iceland turns him into Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe in chain mail, the sea monsters he fights are your everyday eels that are still chewing his calves as he staggers out of the water. (At least the scenery was awesome.) In the animated version our Cockney hero lies about his prowess, lusts after his lord’s wife, screws monsters, begets dragons, gets cooked.
Why is that an industry which churns out films about totally unbelievable action heroes (Any Arnie movie, Die Hard, James Bond, Mission Impossible etcetc ) and has no problems with monsters (King Kong, Godzilla, Alien, Predator, Vampires, Zombies) is so determined to reduce the medieval hero and so blind to the fact that Beowulf is not really Arnie in his Predator role meets King Kong in the mead hall...but an argument about the costs and limitations of the values it celebrates?
I don’t understand why anyone would jump up and down and complain that “they’ changed the story. Every culture retells the stories of the past to make sense of them. Most people’s knowledge of Beowulf is through translation, or picture books, which are both retellings.
What’s interesting is that both the recent filmed versions have gone out of their way to reduce Beowulf, to make him flawed and fallible. (Okay, I left the ‘Thirteenth Warrior’ out, but as long as you ignore the Beowulf parallels that’s a mindless but entertaining piece. If you don’t, you get stuck wondering how something that sounds like Bulywyf can be a man’s name).
It seems odd in a society that worships physical heroes, pays them millions to kick or run with a ball or swim up and down a chemically infested pond, these films should seem so worried about a character who is famous for his courage and strength.
The one filmed in Iceland turns him into Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe in chain mail, the sea monsters he fights are your everyday eels that are still chewing his calves as he staggers out of the water. (At least the scenery was awesome.) In the animated version our Cockney hero lies about his prowess, lusts after his lord’s wife, screws monsters, begets dragons, gets cooked.
Why is that an industry which churns out films about totally unbelievable action heroes (Any Arnie movie, Die Hard, James Bond, Mission Impossible etcetc ) and has no problems with monsters (King Kong, Godzilla, Alien, Predator, Vampires, Zombies) is so determined to reduce the medieval hero and so blind to the fact that Beowulf is not really Arnie in his Predator role meets King Kong in the mead hall...but an argument about the costs and limitations of the values it celebrates?
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