Eric Rabkin: Hi!
I am Eric Rabkin.
Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Professor of English Language and Literature and Professor
of Art and Design at the University of Michigan.
It was terrific to hear from so many of my former students.
Thank you for your questions and now let’s turn to some of them.
Roslyn Pohaski wants to know, if America’s gradual turn towards secularism, away from
religion is one of the reasons for the obsession of supernaturalism, vampires and werewolves
these days.
Well, Supernaturalism is a term I am not sure I entirely understand, because some people
think of UFOs as supernatural, they think of ESP as supernatural, it’s a much wider
category than vampires and werewolves.
But vampires and werewolves have a special place.
They help us think about who we are, what it means to be a person and what kind of social
structure we sit within.
In general, vampires represent aristocrats and werewolves represent the working class.
You can see the difference in their origins.
The vampire, think of Bela Lugosi in the famous Dracula movie.
The vampire is high-class.
He has a castle, he is alone and he lords it over, physically over in that high castle,
the people around him.
The werewolf runs through the forest.
The vampire consciously becomes whatever he wants to be in order to drink the life of
the unsuspecting masters around him.
The werewolf has no choice, but both share this aspect of the supernatural.
They convince us by their existence that there are really forces beyond us, therefore, both
of them in different ways finally reassure us.
Nicole asked, when did vampires first appear in literature?
And do I have any thoughts on what may have inspired them?
The ancient Greeks talked about Lamia, and these lamia were demons that lived by sucking
the life out of innocent people.
Probably this was based on an even older legend of a beautiful queen of Libya known as Lamia,
who became a child-eating demon.
You can see all the way back then that in one sense the fear is the fear of the other.
To the Greeks, the Libyans were the other.
Beauty is dangerous, because it seduces us to do things we may not want to do.
There is a confluence of the question of life and its destruction and sexuality in the earliest
vampires and to this day, as we see in the ‘Twilight’ series, vampires are very sexy
symbols.
Throughout, vampires arise when we realize that we are tempted to do what we shouldn’t.
For example, enter into illicit sexual relations and we want to externalize that fear and push
it away.
Brian Hall writes to say that we are using the fantastical to connect with God at a time
when so many no longer rely upon religion for this role.
That question suggests that one does believe that there is God, otherwise how can one connect
with Him and I don’t want to comment on that.
But whether one thinks of this as connecting with God or connecting with the idea of God,
it certainly is true that people do want to make such connections.
Once upon a time when you couldn’t achieve poetic justice in a work of art, God would
come down from the machinery of the theatre and settle every one’s affairs in an appropriate
way.
That God from the machine was known as Deus Ex Machina.
We have come to think that a Deus Ex Machina is a kind of cheap trick on the part of the
play writer, the novelist.
A critic observed that in the 19th century, think of books by Dickens for example, when
people couldn’t be expected to rely on the God coming down from the machine to settle
things, coincidence took the place of God.
Carl Jung wrote a book about Flying Saucers, in which he said that people saw these things
because they wanted to believe there were higher powers that were concerned with our
well-being.
Robert Plank wrote a book called ‘The Emotional Significance of Imaginary Beings,’ in which
he suggests that all imaginary beings somehow stand in for that super-ego, that voice of
the internal parent that tells us what we should do.
And frankly, sometimes we don’t want to do what that parent says.
So if we see that parent as a monster, rather than a just God, we are justified in rejecting
him.
Adrian and Kelly ask about the role of fantasy and imagination, in education and in a child’s
world.
That is in fact a crucial, crucial question.
In fact, there is it turns out a universal structure for fairy tales in every culture,
even those that have had no earlier contact with western culture.
The fairy tale situation begins with absentation.
The child is separated from the parent by wandering into the woods, by disobeying, by
the parent dying perhaps.
But what happens in the fairy tale is the recuperation of a sense that one can face
the dangers of the world one is growing into and succeed.
In fact, every child does this, whether or not the child is using fairy tales.
How many children play with dolls and have them enact the situations that they observe
adults to participate in?
Imagination is our defense against the fears we see coming over our horizons and it’s
the proving ground in which we develop those skills to be able to meet those things.
But more importantly for the progress of humanity, imagination is where we try out things that
never existed before, so that if we as a species will make real progress, not just have individual
children get older successfully, we must foster imagination, it is essential to education.
Thank you so much for your question!
Stay tuned for another edition of Ask M!