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Popular Culture Review
the delight in the reading. Absalom, Absalom! for all its ponderousness, is also
good-humored. In the opening pages Quentin bemoans how long it’s taking to
get to the story—which won’t end for three hundred more long-winded, longwinding pages. And when his Harvard roommate Shreve begins to “play” with
Quentin’s gloomy story, well, it’s fairly clear that Shreve’s lighthearted send-up
is the healthier choice.
There’s also something undeniably, unquenchably vampiric about
Faulkner’s South—the undead and unliving feeding off one another, the living
never letting the decedent fully die, the dead never letting the quick fully
quicken. It’s almost as if the Transylvanian castle has been transplanted to
Sutpen’s Hundred. Lest we forget, the book’s narrating spirit, Quentin
Compson, is himself living dead, having killed himself seven years before this
book in The Sound and the Fury. There’s something shady about this ghost’s
obsessing us, his parasitic thriving at our expense, while warning us against just
such haunts.
As a pet corollary to the hypothesis that Tarzan no longer commands
the collective imagination, I propose that his story’s foundational man-or-beast
dilemma has, at our tum-of-the-millennium moment, merely possessed itself of
a different literary corpus. You need only have caught one episode of Buffy the
Vampire Slayer or True Blood to know what I’m talking about: when these
vamps get their game faces on, they aren’t suave, seductive, caped counts, but
canine-fanged frenzied animals akin to the ape-creature who steals away with
Jane tucked under his arm. The new male vampire protagonists fight for their
human souls by restraining the beast within—it’s Tarzan all over again. If
Tarzan had Jane Porter to inspire him to behave, his reincarnations have Buffy
Summers, Sookie Stackhouse, and Bella Swan. Tellingly, the very first
humanity-defining moral quandary Tarzan confronts involves cannibalism. Like
Buffy’s Angel and Sookie’s Bill Compton, to redeem his soul Tarzan much
choose, against his abiding hunger, not to chow down. Tarzan’s embodiment of
the man-or-beast question is too tired, a too literal inquiry into the question that
has lost its shock a century and a half now after Darwin. In other words, he’s a
bore. He’s just not sexy anymore.
Moreover, I can’t think of a popular tum-of-the-millennium vampire
from television or the big screen that can’t keep the beast-people out. The
lycanthropes of Buffy, True Blood, Twilight, and Being Human only underscore
what these shows are really about. Not coincidentally, the great vampire
narratives of Burroughs’ generation, Stoker’s Dracula and F.W. Mumau’s
unauthorized cinematic rip-off Nosferatu, also represent the threat not as that of
the demonic and the supernatural realm, but as that of animality and the natural
world. Stoker’s count is a hirsute man from the wilderness with a special
connection to wolves, and Mumau fills the eye with images of dangerous nature:
those craggy mountains, the howling wolves, the earth and rats that accompany
Count Orlok to London, the storm that drives the ship, the spider and the
carnivorous plant as blatant analogues for the predator from Transylvania whom