THE POSTMODERN MALADY OF DR. PETER HUDSON

PART IV

The dust of the lecture room that lay upon the plush eyelashes of the dough-eyed student barely showed, but that which was visible seemed sprayed like water vapour across the early morning sunlight that filled the theatre. Occasionally, for those few moments her attention was diverted from the speaker, she noticed it, hanging there the one moment, dancing the next, like the atoms of the universe finding their partners. She wanted to fly; she wanted to join the cosmic dance. Vampires could by all accounts and that was part of her fascination with them – you could say she had been seduced – therefore, in the absence of their reality, those who embodied them and their history, like this handsome thirty-six year old Professor, enraptured the romance in her soul with equal success. She could listen to this man speak all day. His knowledge of the subject was deeply intimate, it was inspired.

Aside from the dough eyes, and the long lashes, her skin was olive, and her hair thick and dark like his, yet without the trace of grey. If one were able to step out of her reality, and observe the room freely, one would see many bored faces, some attentive ones, some frantically scribbling notes – the kind who live their life in notes rather than in person – there were even one or two sleeping faces. Evidently, vampires were not of much interest to the majority of the hundred and twenty or so students who should have attended this class, indeed only half of them were actually present. This made the beauty with the thick, black hair more noticeable to the Professor. Initially, his interest was involuntary, he spent longer, if you bothered to calculate the minutes, at her side of the room, and he looked in her direction more than that of anybody else. Gradually, eye contact became direct, as he became more comfortable in his surroundings, and he looked directly at her more than anyone else in the room quite deliberately. She was very beautiful indeed, and oddly enchanting. Above all, she appeared interested in a way no else did in what he had to say. The others were hearing him, yet one might say that she was actually listening.

“…As he sits alone at the Count’s desk. I quote, ‘It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill’[1] – is Harker’s conclusion,” and here too the Professor briefly concluded.

His dramatic pause lasted just long enough for the long-lashed, thick-haired beauty to jot down “Modernity can kill?” at the top of her page. She thought about this briefly, just long enough to raise her hand when the Professor put to the class the question, “What might be Stoker’s point?”

The Professor, who had, of course, noticed by now the beauty in his audience, seized this opportunity to hear her speak, and so she found herself rambling rather confusedly, for her thoughts were forming much like the dust in the sunlight.

“Well, I think, maybe, that you can’t kill a myth with science. Vampires aren’t real, however much we might like them to be.” She laughs, “I mean, Van Helsing makes the point doesn’t he? He’s a man of science, a doctor, yet he acknowledges the only way to kill the Count is through superstition. You kill a myth, with a myth. So, modernity, the Enlightenment, whatever, that’s all about science and reason and… Well everything about the Count defies reason, so that’s why we conclude vampires represent something malignant in our society, a fear we can’t touch. So the point is not so much about what modernity cannot kill, but about what it can… Sorry… I’m not really sure where I’m going with this.” She laughs again, and so too do a few of her classmates. So too does the Professor, reassuringly.

“But nevertheless, I think you make a good point…?”

“Lucy.”

“Thankyou, Lucy. Whether or not your point is Stoker’s point is, of course, a matter of opinion, but you lead me nicely on, because we need to discuss this idea of the vampire as myth. If myth satisfies anxiety, what anxiety do vampires satisfy? If it’s fear, what do we fear? Are they a cultural reflection, and if so, why is the reflection needed? Is it lust, is it psychosexual, or is it merely an explanation for people turning up dead, with teeth marks in their necks, and drained of blood?”