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"We'll find others of our kind," she said... "I'm convinced it was from there that all vampires came, if from any place at all"–Ann Rice, Interview with a Vampire. [1]
The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.–Sir William Jones, 1786. [2]
Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula is posed in a uniquely half-antique, half-modern world. The character Jonathan Harker describes it as “the nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance,” while allowing that “the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.” Such an assertion not only embodies the unique setting of the novel and the technology and vampire in it, but also lends itself to interpreting other broad areas such as languages and linguistics. We can combine many of the theories in linguistics and the practices at work in Dracula relating to vampires to form a linguistic-vampiric theory with only a simple analogy, and the hybrid creation results in a highly robust theory that easily applies to many things besides, including the modern technology in the novel and Victorian attitudes about cultural and linguistic purity. [1]
When talking about sexuality and other mechanisms of reproduction at work in Dracula, a discussion of languages and linguistics would seem entirely out of place, but for a preliminary analogy that languages have a great deal in common with vampires. Compared with sexuality, languages reproduce and exist in a far more thoroughly vampiric way. They are not truly immortal, but they do evolve singularly from one generation to the next. They gain adherents, if not through casual exposure in newborn infants, then by the more systematic processes of second-language acquisition, where the intermediary stages of grammar echo the gradual conversion to a vampire in Dracula. Languages penetrate the thoughts and the dreams of man far more consciously even than does his blood. Linguistic analysis uses primarily matriarchal language to describe language evolution and to classify languages, present and past. Languages are divided into families, being descended in part from the ancestors, or mother languages, and from the processes of language change which occur when speakers of two or more languages are brought into contact by some means.
The historical linguistics of English in particular show a definite link between immigration and the mixing of languages, and serve to illustrate the indisputable vampiric theory that surrounds English. For instance, almost every aspect of Old English, commonly called Anglo-Saxon, was changed due to the immigration of Norman French speakers following the Norman Conquest. Instead of allowing the language in common use to remain intact, the Normans adopted and promoted French in the court, creating a diglossic context that stigmatised the common language, which subsequently fell victim to an almost completely foreign vocabulary and grammar. It was only after a few centuries that several events, notably and ironically the Black Death of 1348-50 which depleted about forty per cent of the Saxon population, contributed to the gradual shift back towards English. [1]
But after that, while about the Victorian period the British tended to classify the matters within England as common and the world around her as other, English has become a vampiric power in globalisation, helped along by the United States, another former victim to linguistic vampirism. [1]
Thus, languages not only act as vampires, but through vampiric processes they become vampires and suck the blood of other languages. The American settlers brought English with them as the Latin Americans brought Spanish, squashing aboriginal languages beneath them whilst imbibing some aboriginal vocabulary. The fate of the victimised languages is interesting, as well. In the vampiric world, bitten victims either weaken as in Dracula or die as in Interview with a Vampire, or become vampires themselves, a question arising as to what should prompt a victim to be one or the other. Laurel J. Brinton, likewise, describes rather clinical-sounding terms for languages affected by contact-induced language change, notably death, murder and suicide, along with life-support. [1]
We could draw further similarities immeasurable to describe what now seems a synergistic pair whose only failing, disheartening to admit, is that vampires do not exist; but a final similarity deserves mention, more notable in Anne Rice’s novel Interview with a Vampire, where the vampire Louis is impulsively concerned with seeking the past and his origins. The same search for origins is what makes linguists interested in language families and trees, and what makes them painstakingly construct ancestors such as proto-Indo-European and proto-Germanic. Remarkably, however, the search also includes a constructed description of the proto-Indo-European homeland, which linguists have tried to situate: indeed, Marija Gimbutas’ description of its location places it roughly where the two vampires travel in Rice’s novel.4 While Ann Rice’s vampires determinedly seek the vampire that created Lestat, the journey into the undocumented past and the discrete other is the actual struggle, as it is in trying to reconstruct language sources. Proto-Indo-European’s forms and general grammatical processes such as verb tense and aspect, noun case and inflection, etc., may be generally reconstructed, but, beyond that, the nostratic theory of a superfamily of languages extant twelve to fifteen thousand years ago yields only scant vocabulary and no grammar, and is generally not very useful. [1]
The search for origins extends beyond this to the question central to my mind, at least, on how vampires came to be in the beginning. Far from attempting to answer it, we can only suggest that it is a venture similar to the theories manifold on linguistic origins and prelinguisticism. [1]
This vampire-linguistic theory extends well beyond a superficial level, space, however, forbidding it to be thoroughly explored here. If the subjective production of language is vampiric, the objective production is more so, and it is perhaps this area of it that Dracula explores more intimately in its depictions of speaking, writing and recording. [1]
Dracula’s speech mobilises a great deal of speculation on the vampiric processes of language acquisition, particularly in a subject exceeding the normal life expectancy and therefore, perhaps, the normal processes for second-language acquisition. There is no way to prove or even to speculate upon the length of time that Count Dracula has passed learning English. It seems somewhat likely that English, for him, is a recent and sudden interest, connected with his impending emigration to England, in which case he picked it up rather quickly if his library includes books on common law and on other high-level and abstract topics which a thorough knowledge of contemporary English would demand. Christine Ferguson explains that, while the contemporary Victorian fear was that English would come to be contaminated and degraded, Dracula has managed to acquire a command of the language of a purity that does not exist in anyone else in the novel, and that it is this that turns him into such a formidable but undeniably foreign character. She points out a place where he admits, “Well I know that, did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger”. It is worth noting that, however mechanical and misplaced the grammar may be, there is nothing wrong or incorrect about it. The noticeably odd phrases are “Well I know,” “did I move and speak” and “none there are,” which, in an isolated exposure, are remnants of inverted word order for adverbial emphasis common in particular to Old and Middle English, and it is this dwelling on obsolete grammar that makes his speech strange, foreign, or mixed. [1]
On the other hand, there are minor characters, the zoo-keeper for instance, with whom it is slightly confusing to communicate. These, however, Ferguson claims, are the varieties of English that are patently not foreign and that immediately smack of the local and the uncontaminated. This appears to be a commentary on the flaws of advocating a pure, standard language, as received pronunciation, just as there is not a true desire towards a standard, pure culture: the point of language and culture is diversity, and it is diversity in dialectal variation that makes English the language that it is. [1]
The communion of blood in the vampiric tradition includes with it the communion of language. The Count appears to imbibe some linguistic quality from his victims along with the blood that he takes, which would explain his linguistic control of the wolves and other animals and his capacity to emulate the more reptilian movements that he uses to scale the castle walls. Moreover, Dracula attempts to bind both Renfield and Mina Harker into a relationship of linguistic control, whereby their language suddenly becomes polished, and immortal. It is this linguistic control of Dracula’s, along with his dominating and destroying the shorthand letter and the phonograph cylinders, as Ferguson points out, that is ultimately the undoing of Dracula, since language cannot be hidden or suppressed. [1]
The writing in the novel, along with the mechanical typewriting, is equally vampiric as a use to which language is put. Marking words on pure paper, as is true of all Gothic novels, makes the linguistic experience upon the page immortal, while the author continues to evolve and ultimately dies. The same life after the author’s death, and the subjugation of his words to what at times can be a perverse process or set of ends is equally a victimising of the author or speaker, since he loses control of the destination of his writing or speech act. Indeed, such is a chief culprit in the electronic privacy advocacy movement. The other link to reproduction in the phonograph is the sexual experiences that John M. Picker describes in “The Victorian Aura of the Recorded Voice” (New Literary History, XXXII, III, pp. 769-86), which illustrate the extent to which the phonograph was exploited almost at once in Victorian literature, and how it became as it were a deus ex machina, an unexpected plot ending in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective novels. Picker provides a provocative explanation of the phonograph, which acts as a keystone to our discussion:
Edison's own interaction with his invention, however, was more earthy and visceral. A story from an 1879 account of the origin of the phonograph described one way Edison discovered the principle behind the machine: "In the course of some experiments Mr. Edison was making with the telephone, a stylus attached to the diaphragm pierced his finger at the moment when the diaphragm began to vibrate under the influence of the voice, and the prick was enough to draw blood. It then occurred to him that if the vibrations of the diaphragm enabled the stylus to pierce the skin, they might produce on a flexible surface such distinct outlines as to represent all the undulations produced by the voice."" More painful still is part of the phonograph story concerning its inventor's deafness: "Edison's hearing deficit forced him when testing different materials' acoustic properties to follow the same bizarre technique he would use decades later when auditioning pianists for his phonograph records: clenching his teeth around a metal plate attached to the sounding apparatus, so that vibrations were conveyed through his resonating jawbone—meaning, in effect, that he virtually heard through his teeth."" Edison's daughter Madeleine recalled a related experience from her childhood:
During the winter of 1912, what seemed to Madeleine like every night, a pianist would "pound out" waltzes in the downstairs den. Sometimes her papa would put his teeth on the piano—literally bite it—so that the vibrations resonated through his skull bones. . . . One evening, Madame Montessori [the educator] was a dinner guest at Glenmont while die waltzes were being auditioned, and the great lady huddled in the corner of the den weeping because Edison could not hear, and was putting his teeth in the side of the grand piano. . . . Edison's personal Disc Phonograph, preserved at the Laboratory, also shows teeth marks on its soft wood framework. [1]
It is one of the famous ironies of invention that the man behind the phonograph suffered from severe deafness. Less known, perhaps with good reason, is Edison's manner of close listening, with all its animalistic suggestiveness. Edison gnawed the grooves of his own incisors into the wood of the groove-machine. From pricking to biting, from blood to bone, there is something primal, piercing, about the phonograph, its needle, and its inventor, something, one might even say. . . vampiric. [1]
[1] http://engl358dracula.pbworks.com/w/page/18970615/Linguistic%20Vampirism%3A%20A%20Theory%20of%20the%20Reproduction%20in%20Bram%20Stoker%E2%80%99s%20Dracula
[2] http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words/jones.html
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