Vampires:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Thursday 22nd May - Saturday 24th May 2003
Budapest, Hungary

Session 5A: Vampire Myths
Peter Mario Kreuter- The Name of the Vampire. Some Reflections on Actual Linguistic Theories on the Etymology of the Word “Vampire“
Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Bonn, "Virtuelle Fachbibliothek Romanistik", Bonn, Germany.
Peter Mario Kreuter Web Page

One of the most annoying matters of the research into Southeast European Vampire belief is the fact that we do not know the etymology of the word. All older theories of an ostensible Slavonic, Hungarian or maybe autochtonous origin of this word have become obsolete. Besides that, the actually most convincing proposal from Ute Dukova suffers from the highly theoretical basis of its ideas.
Recently two new theories have been presented to the scientific audience. Heinrich Kunstmann, professor of Slavonic linguistics at the University of Munich, wants to see the etymological basis of the word in the name of an ancient Greek mantic god serving with all his elements as the main source of inspiration. And a research team of the University of Sion in Switzerland, rejecting the idea of a concrete etymological explanation, proposes to interpret the word as strictly and exclusively onomatopoetic.
It will be the aim of my paper to present these new theories to the audience and to discuss them in the wider range of both a linguistic and a historical level.

Nursel Icoz- The Un-Dead: To be Feared or/and to be Pitied?
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

As a perennial literary mode fantasy, which attempts to escape the human condition, transcend reality and construct alternate, secondary worlds, can be traced back to ancient myths, legends, folklore and carnival art.. In a secular culture it does not invent supernatural regions as it did while religious faith prevailed, but presents a natural world inverted into something strange. Its defining feature is hesitation experienced by the reader in interpreting the events. Uncertainty and impossibility are inscribed through hesitation. Vampires constitute one of the recurrent themes of the type of the fantastic structured around the ‘other’. The fantastic is generated by the unconscious, by desire in its excessive forms and various perversions. It endeavours to compensate for a lack, resulting from cultural restraints, by tracing the unsaid and the unseen. The vampire myth is perhaps the highest symbolic representation of eroticism. Vampires, longing for immortality, dissolve the life/death boundary, and returning from an otherworld prey on the living. Thus fear originates in an external source, which attacks and appropriates the self, collecting victims to prove the power of possession. Romuald, the newly ordained priest, in Gautier’s “The Beautiful Vampire”, is the victim of a diabolical possession, uncertain as to whether he is dreaming or actually participating in Renaissance orgies. He makes love with the Un-dead Clarimond for three years until he discovers she is a vampire feeding on his blood. Stoker plays on a natural fear of formlessness and absence. Dracula has no fixed form, produces no mirror image, throws no shadow. His victims also feed off the living and, unable to die, are condemned to an eternal existence. Although Dracula is an inversion of Christian myth and subversion of repressive Victorian morality, blaspheming against Christian sacrements and offending sexual taboos, ultimately it reinforces a bourgeois ideology.

Elizabeth McCarthy- Death to Vampires! The Vampire Body and the Meaning of Mutilation
Dublin, Ireland

The paper will consider the ways in which the folkloric, literary, and cinematic vampire's body is mutilated in order to bring about its destruction. It will read these varying forms of mutilation in relation to socio-historical, theological, medical, and psychoanalytical discourses on the body. For example, it will consider the possible link between the staking of the vampire's heart and the significance surrounding the heart's connection with the spiritual life of the individual in religious imagery. Turning recent theoretical interest in the body upon the specifics of the vampire's body, the paper will examine how the staking, burning, decapitation, etc. of the vampire relates to contemporary concepts of the body as a text inscribed with meaning by the processes of history (eg. Foucault,"The body is the inscribed surface of events..."). Particularly interesting in this respect, is how significant the notion of the vampire's threatening otherness proves itself to be in relation to the comtemporary fears and taboos which surround its existence, whether their origin resides in the fatal epidemics of the middle ages, the fin de siecle literature of Europe, or the post-war cinema of America. Such a wide ranging approach will, of course, give some consideration to the changing nature of the vampire myth's representation of the vampire body and its destruction. An example of this could be how the vampire's disintergration in daylight only becomes an indelible part of vampire lore with the 'dawning' of the cinematic age. Time permitting, issues of the mutilated vampire body in connection to gender and sexuality may also be considered with recourse to the theories of Freud, Irigaray, and Judith Butler.
Finally, the anxiety associated with the mutilation of the vampire's body, as an already dead yet still active entity, will also be examined in the light of the theoretical and/or historical work of writers such as Philipe Aries, Paul Barder, and Julia Kristeva.

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