Summer officially ends on September 23rd each year, but I’ve always felt that summer dies at the end of August. For me, that’s when the sun’s heartbeat fails and shadows start spilling through my veins. This year, summer’s end brought worries that in a few months John McCain would become president of the United States and that Stephen Harper would secure a majority government in Canada. I was frightened that the winter of the warmonger would soon be upon us. These thoughts left a taste of mortality on my tongue, a taste that wasn’t there the month before.

It seemed somehow fitting, then, in the last days of August, to visit the house of Robert Eighteen-Bisang, a writer who is reputed to have the largest private collection of vampire fiction in the world. Along with co-author Elizabeth Miller, Eighteen-Bisang has produced a work called Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula (MacFarland, 2008).

Eighteen-Bisang spent months transcribing, annotating, and analyzing Stoker’s notes. This must have been quite a task, given Stoker’s atrocious penmanship. Eighteen-Bisang’s handsome book presents facsimiles of Stoker’s notes adjacent to their translations. The notes provide a window into Stoker’s research for the novel and the development of his characters and story. Eighteen-Bisang, who may well be the world’s leading authority on Dracula, has integrated these notes into an intriguing exploration of vampire mythology.

He welcomed me to his home and gave me a tour of his vast collection, after which we sat down to discuss his work. The first question I had to ask him was, “Why vampires?”

He said, “Back in the hippie days, I was friends with Alan Watts and Timothy Leary, and I was interested in the development of modern mythology. I took sociology at UBC and did as much directed study on mythology as I could. And I liked collecting used books, which was a hobby of mine at the time. I bought a collection of a hundred sci-fi books, only to discover that all of them were vampire books. At first I was kind of amused, but then I read this book called In Search of Dracula, which was written in 1972, and it revealed that Dracula was a real person. Now, imagine back then, this was the equivalent of someone telling me the Easter Bunny was a real person. As I read the books, I thought here it is, here’s the development of a modern mythology in print. The development of the genre is fascinating. As I kept collecting, I realized the genre went from early stories and poems in France and Germany through the reasonably romantic poets, through Byron and Polidori, and then really onto Bram Stoker. Bram Stoker in Dracula made the invention of what the modern literary vampire is.”

I asked about the origins of the vampire myth. He said, “How the Eastern European vampire myth came about was, there were a series of plagues and deaths, and people would lapse into a coma. And back in those days people didn’t have a good medical definition of what dead was. They held a mirror up to your face and if it didn’t fog up, you were dead. They dragged these corpses out to mass open graves. And some of these people weren’t exactly dead and so they got up. If they were in coffins they tried to claw their way out of the coffins, and if they were in mass graves, they got up and headed homewards, which is what anyone would do. They wouldn’t be buried more than a mile away from their village. And this upset people drastically. I hate to say it, but the people who were upset the most were the relatives who just inherited Uncle Joe’s estate. And so, if you think you’ve inherited something and Uncle Joe came back to life, you can do a number of things. You can cut off his head and drive a stake through his heart and burn his body to ashes. If you do that he’ll never play that trick on you again.

“The Roman Catholic Church actually made it a heresy not to believe in vampires, and they commissioned the vampire hunters. And the vampire hunters worked exactly as the witch hunters did. They went to the mayor of the city and they said, ‘Anybody around here you think might be a vampire? And if there is, we’ll dig him up, we’ll dispose of him in the Orthodox way, and we’ll keep one third of the money as the vampire hunters, the church will get one third, and you’ll get one third as a friend of the church.’ This is exactly what they did with the witch hunters. And they carried this on, and the latest time they did this was after 1880. It was more recent than the witch hunts.”

I commented upon the glaring difference between the peasant vampire of Eastern European folklore and the aristocratic vampire of later literature. Eighteen-Bisang explained, “As anyone who’s interested in telling stories for a living, you want to make your characters as interesting as possible, and an aristocrat is far more interesting than a peasant, and a beautiful woman is far more interesting than a woman who is not beautiful, and a young virile hero is far more interesting than some old thug. It was really when Polidori came out with his story, The Vampyre, this was the origin of the modern vampire. It was modeled on Lord Byron, and in fact people at the time thought it was an accurate description of Lord Byron.”

To my surprise, he said that Dracula wasn’t firmly based on the historical Vlad the Impaler. “Stoker took two things from the historical Dracula family, and not Vlad Tepes specifically, but the whole family. He took the name Dracula. The historical Vlad Tepes ruled a place called Wallachia, not Transylvania. Transylvania was the next door principality. And Stoker, having an ear for this, relocated the Dracula family to Transylvania. So he did take the name and the location Transylvania, and he took the idea that he was a member of an ancient family of warlords, but that’s it. He had already started writing the novel before he discovered the name Dracula. That was a very late development.”

I was particularly interested in Eighteen-Bisang’s philosophical analysis of Stoker’s work. In Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula, Eighteen-Bisang refers to Claude Levi-Strauss’s ideas about binary oppositions as structuring elements in mythology. When asked about this, he said, “I know of no other novel that has so many operative oppositions anywhere in literature, including great literature. Dracula is a study in oppositions. You start off with the life world. Now, why the vampire is important is because it upsets the life world. And then you have resolutions. And the resolutions come about when the vampires are killed, when the humans are killed, or in Mina’s case when the human transcends the vampire.

“Now if you look at the basics of Claude Levi-Strauss, very early on in his study of structural mythology he makes the point that mythology is the opposite of poetry. Poetry does not translate well. It always suffers grossly when anyone tries to translate it. The exact meaning of the words, sometimes even the exact words, often can’t be conveyed in other languages. Mythology, on the other hand, is part of language, following the Straussarian principles of the structure of language, but it transcends all the other elements of language. The mythological elements of a story operate above the literary unfolding of a story. They exist in their own space. As long as those mythological elements are in place, you can reproduce the myth. That’s why there are over 251 English language editions of Dracula, and why Dracula has been translated into every major language in the world, except Arabic, where Dracula is considered a demon and you can’t put him into literature.”

Watch for part two of this interview in the next issue of The Republic of East Vancouver