#maud ellmann

[symeonae]

The Hunger Artists, Maud Ellmann

[goatsandgangsters]

Bram Stoker's Dracula, first published in 1897, is one of the most successful pot-boilers ever written. Yet the novel, for all its popularity, has attracted little attention in its own right. Most devotees of Dracula, asked if they have read the book, reply that they have only seen the movie: for the novel has been overshadowed by innumerable spin-offs in the cinema and other media. Not content to rest between the covers of a book, vampires have now invaded every sphere of popular culture, spawning films, TV soaps, comics, pop-up books, fanzines, bubble-bath, pencil-sharpeners, breakfast cereals, and chocolates. Jonathan Harker's fear that Dracula might breed 'a new and ever widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless', although averted in the novel, has been realized in the popular proliferation of the myth. With every celluloid resuscitation, Dracula increases his dominion, holding his spectators in willing thrall while devouring their money.

Maud Ellmann, "Introduction," Dracula by Bram Stoker

[goatsandgangsters]

It is worth noting here that despite the variety of documentary 'sources', the narrative is in fact dominated throughout by three respectable English middle-class voices: Mina Murray, Jonathan Harker, and Dr John Seward, whose idioms are virtually indistinguishable. The upper classes (Lucy, Arthur, and of course Dracula himself) and the foreigners (Van Helsing, Quincey Morris, and Dracula again) are for the most part elbowed out of the narrating position. Eccentric idioms, like the Cockney accent of the zoo-keeper, or the Whitby dialect of Mr Swales, disappear in the later pages of the novel, enabling the English middle-class characters to consolidate their victory over otherness in all its forms. In the end, the vampire born in oral culture (and orally fixated as a mark of this inheritance), is destroyed by standard English, by the print culture in which all wayward voices are homogenized.

Maud Ellmann, “Introduction,” Dracula by Bram Stoker

[goatsandgangsters]

Many elements of vampire-lore find their counterparts in Christian theology: the idea of bodily resurrection, for example, or the drinking of the blood of Christ in the Eucharist service. There is a homeopathic logic in the use of Christian talismans, like crucifixes and communion wafers, as prophylactics against vampires; for the vampire itself is the demonic double of the blood-guzzling Christian, whose body is destined to rise again.

Maud Ellmann, “Introduction,” Dracula by Bram Stoker

[goatsandgangsters]

In Dracula, however, an unusual variety of documents is collected to make up the dossier; not just journals and letters (which are quite traditional in novels), but memorandums, telegrams, title-deeds of property, railway timetables, dictionaries, newspaper cuttings, monumental inscriptions, notebooks, phonographically recorded case-notes of psychiatry, and a ship's log translated from the Russian. ... It seems that the most powerful defence against the Undead is not the crucifix, nor the bulb of garlic, but the typewriter, with which the thoroughly modern Mina Murray becomes the secretary and filing-clerk of her own destiny. ... Yet there are also strange affinities between the vampire, a shape-changer from the ancient past, and the transformative potential of the new technologies of writing. The sucking of blood from other people's bodies, for example, is analogous to the absorption of their words into the master narrative: Mina's transcriptions mirror Van Helsing's furious transfusions, as each attempts to overcome the vampire by pumping words or blood from one repository to another. In this sense they imitate the monster they are trying to annihilate: Van Helsing attacks the vampire with vampiric methods, drawing blood out of young men and pumping it back into young women; while Mina siphons words out of recorded speech and recirculates them in the form of typewriting. ... The effect of this enormous effort of transcription is to disauthenticate the voices of the witnesses. At the end of the novel, when Harker opens the safe in which the documents are stored, he marvels that 'in all the masses of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document: nothing but a mass of typewriting'. ... Just as Dracula attempts to absorb all blood into his own body, so Mina's 'vampiric typewriting' absorbs all voices into the uniformity of print.

Maud Ellmann, “Introduction,” Dracula by Bram Stoker

[cordisfames]

Maud Ellmann | The Hunger Artists

[ewigewiederkunft]

[...] Beard anticipates the modern phobia that telecommunications, by speeding up the dissemination of information, overload circuits in individual nervous systems, transforming the human mind into a ‘machinery of agitation’.

[filthiestlaugh]

Molly Bloom, meanwhile, curls up with her own imaginings. Whereas Joyce's heroes circulate around the streets of Dublin, Molly lingers in her little navel of the sea, and circulates her lovers through the strandentwining cables of her memory. Sex, for all its frequency in her imaginings, remains sex in the head. By presenting Molly as a creature entirely composed of her own thoughts, Ulysses overturns age-old stereotypes associating woman with the body, man with intellect. Not only does Joyce bring the bodies of his male characters into the limelight, with a candour that retains its capacity to shock, but he presents his heroine as pure mind, unmediated by the external narrator. Although Molly often thinks about the body, in all its glory and abjection, this is a body woven and unwoven in her words. For all the fleshliness of her imaginings, she epitomizes the incorporeal thinking substance that Descartes imputed only to the angels. I think, her monologue implies, and thought is what I am.

Maud Ellmann, from "Ulysses: The Epic of the Human Body"