My reading today, Eric W. Steinhauer's Vampyrologie fuer Bibliothekar (Vampirology for Librarians) Einsenhut Verlag, 2011, led me unexpectedly to think of some other recent reading, the poetry in Aim for the Head: An Anthology of Zombie Poetry, edited by Rob "Ratpack Slim" Sturma for Write Bloody Books, 2011 and this poem by Curtis X. Meyer:
Tanka: Yet Another Poem
About the Zombie Apocalypse Part I
That day--when at least
the zombie apocalypse
arrives--fuck the mall.
I'm going where I know it's
deserted: the library.
The poem came to mind because for Steinhauer, a librarian whose book is a version of a Halloween talk that he gave at the Humboldt University in Berlin, argues that vampirology is essentially a bookish discipline. He goes all the way back to the origins of the vampire myth in the West, the reports coming back to the Hapsburg empire of Serbian vampires and the wave of scholarship that this provoked, including the early 18th c. Leipzig "Vampire Debates." These debates, he tells us, were put to rest by Gerard van Swieten, a physician and himself a prefect of the Vienna Hofbibliothek. The time of the these debates, Steinhauer, argues, was on the cusp between a shift from Naturgeschichte (Natural history) to Naturwissenschaft (Natural science). Vampires thrived on the old kind of science research, one based in books, where the Library is the Lab and in such an environment, without experimentation, the Vampire legend could thrive. Steinhauer then asserts that the vampire legend then lives on in Literature, tracing its survival in Polidori's The Vampire, LeFanu's Carmilla, Stoker's Dracula and finally Kostova's The Historian. In each tale, there is an association between the vampire and the book, the archive and the vampire hunter is a kind of bookworm. I think this connection holds for many other books and films, the Book of the Vampire in Murnau's and Herzog's version of Nosferatu (based on Dracula, of course), the library in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the trip to the public library to learn vampire lore in King's Salem's Lot and many more. It struck me in reading his take on the vampire and the book that the modern zombie, in the vein of George Romero, is just the opposite. The 32 rules in Zombieland, for example, do not include anything like "go to the library and read up on zombies." If there is a hope in any kind of knowledge it would be in the Naturwissenschaft--natural science characterized by experimentation and the scientific method--type. In the world of the zombie apocalypse the library is the place to go not to find out how to save yourself, but simply because no one reads anymore. It strikes me that Stoker's Dracula is the source of both strains of fiction. If we find Stoker leading to The Historian and Buffy, the medical/scientific elements also can be seen as precursors to Matheson's I am Legend, Blade, Del Toro and Hogan's Strain trilogy and zombie narrative. Stoker's work includes natural history and natural science and it is the rich blending of them that can still be found, I would contend, in all the works that follow.