AM Inspiration: Vampires and Consumer Habits

by Kim, August 18, 2009 at 6:00am

"After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed," says the New York Times. That means we can call off the death of Western culture, right?

It depends upon your taste in reading: the NEA attributed the change to a television book club (Oprah Winfrey's) as well as two fantasy series (Harry Potter and Twilight) in addition to the many programs promoting literacy, reading, and libraries around the country. Stories about monsters and magic as part-saviors of our culture?

It may be more true than you think. There was a great NYT Op-Ed the other week about the benign significance of vampire novels, written by Guillermo del Toro (himself the author of a vampire novel) and Chuck Hogan. Along with some fascinating information about the background of vampire fiction in the early 19th century, the authors make a case for modern popular fiction as the legitimate heir of traditional myth:

Rather than being a product of a superficial culture, the article claims that popular fiction of the supernatural reveals a yearning for something eternal, a need to feel fear and a draw to know the spiritual world. Can monsters, then, be seen as anti-consumerist icons? Besides being eternal, vampires are the perfect case studies of acquisition: their consumption habits actually use people up: we are their food, our blood the stuff of their desires. Looking at the desire-filled monsters another way, like them, we all contain within ourselves some powerful yearnings. A speech by the Director-General of Unesco contained the following question: "How can we reduce our consumption if the consumer within us devours the citizen?" We keep returning to vampire tales because each age's retelling adds the most modern level of struggle, the edge that feels sharp because they reflect real struggles that have teeth... like being able to identify with both consumer and consumed. What would happen we applied such a sensibility to the environment?

The morality tales of our age act like The Tell-Tale Heart, the story from Edgar Allan Poe, that master of the macabre--sounding out the truth even when we've buried it. Here's a little vampiric selection from one of his poems, The Conqueror Worm.