Our conversation turned from the theories of Levi-Strauss to the dialectics of Georg Hegel, whose ideas greatly influenced Eighteen-Bisang’s interpretation of Dracula: “I think Hegel’s most brilliant idea is that if life were not a series of steps where we move towards absolute truth, absolute beauty, absolute love, or what many people configure as God, it would have no meaning, we would be identical to animals, whose only purpose is to survive at any cost. But we have this higher goal. This higher goal is expressed in Christianity in the book of Genesis, where Adam and Eve eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As a result, they’re cursed, but they also have knowledge like God’s. But the key is that they are moving towards Godhood, they’re a step above animals.

“In Hegelian analysis, there are three states of consciousness. In the first state of consciousness, one exists in nature. Animals and babies, and to some extent children, have this going for them. They’re part of the flow of the universe. They don’t distinguish from me and you and mine and yours and us and them; they’re it, the entire universe as far as they know. Then, as human beings, we enter a second stage, we become for ourselves, and in this stage we differentiate ourselves from other people and our environment, and begin to think for ourselves and act for ourselves and work for ourselves and we make a big distinction between you and I, and this is a lot of what has happened in the evolution in society. Some people are much better at playing this game, at grabbing the goodies, and some people are not good at it at all, and have to take what they’re given because they can’t create their own reality. Hegel was a great admirer of the Buddha and was a great student of ancient philosophy, and he said we have had in human history a few golden moments. Certain people, like the Buddha and Socrates, and certain cities, like in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, have transcended that state of “for-ourselves” and become an existence of in-and-for-oneself-being. On this third transcendental stage, which very few people have reached, but which according to Hegel more and more people will reach, we have the option of acting for ourselves or for the other. And that is the highest stage of consciousness.

“Now, to go back to Dracula, Dracula tells exactly that story. It is in fact a re-telling of the myth of the Garden of Eden, with Jonathan playing Adam, Mina playing Eve, and good old Dracula playing the Devil. In fact, in Romania, one meaning of ‘Dracula’ is ‘devil.’ The Devil told Adam and Eve that ‘if you eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God said that on that day you will surely die, but you will not die but become wise as God and live forever’. This is later borne out in the Bible when God says to someone, ‘Look, they have reached forth their hand and plucked the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and eaten of it, and now know right from wrong. We must rush to Earth and stop them before they eat of the Tree of Life too, and become gods and come to heaven and we are overthrown.’ All this is in Dracula.

“Every person in Dracula who is touched by a vampire is killed: Renfield, who wants to become a vampire, is killed, Dracula is killed, Dracula’s wives are killed, Quincy Morris is killed, but not Mina. Mina represents the feminine principle: she is modest, she is loving, she is pious, she is constantly praying to God and blessing people, and she, who Dracula calls the most beloved of the vampire hunters, he attacks her and tries to turn her into a vampire in order to get revenge on the vampire hunters. And he says to her, ‘You will be flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.’ But Mina, having all this feminine power, gets all this masculine power from Dracula and becomes a complete human being . . . .

“The next thing that happens is, they’re doing the vampire hunter thing, and they gather together, at Mina’s insistence, and they read the burial service for her in church. So in a way, like a mystic, she’s died, and she’s free. And when they put a holy wafer onto her forehead to protect her from the vampire, instead of protecting her it burns into her forehead, leaving a scar, and she cries, ‘Unclean, unclean, even the Almighty scorns my flesh.’ This is the climax of the novel.

“Something really interesting happens after this. Until this moment, Dracula has been victorious. And when the vampire hunters try to comfort Mina and tell her they’re going to kill the vampire, Mina says ‘Stop. You must go forth like holy knights of the cross, and you must do your duty, and you must slay this fiend. But you must do so with compassion, for his suffering is the greatest of all of us. You don’t strike, God strikes. Strike in God’s name.’ This is very much like the Samurai, the actor who doesn’t act, very much like the Zen sayings. And when Dracula dies there’s a look of peace on his face, suggesting it’s all justified, that all of the actions have been the correct actions, and Mina’s scar disappears, and the novel ends.

“Now, there is a note, or an end-piece, at the end of chapter 27, and this note takes a very different form in the manuscript. An awful lot of the meaning of the novel is in this note, and the novel would be a lot poorer without this page-long note. In the note, Jonathon and Mina come back to Transylvania on vacation, and everything is desolate. However, they now have a boy, about seven years old, which is about seven years after they kill Dracula, and they call him Quincy after the fallen hero, and they string in all the vampire hunters’ names as well, and what’s happened here is all the people who sought immortality for their own ends, through unnatural and perverted ways, are dead, and Jonathon and Mina acquire immortality in the proper, human way of having children. And the heroes attain immortality in the same way as Beowulf or Gilgamesh did, by having their stories last forever. And these are the normal, sentient ways of attaining immortality.”

I was interested in exploring Dracula’s state of consciousness in more detail. I said, “In the novel, Van Helsing describes Dracula as having a mind like a child, and in some ways he describes him as almost being like what we would now call a psychopath: someone who is incapable of empathizing with others, who is incapable of feeling the elevated kind of pity that Mina is capable of experiencing, who exists in what Hegel would likely see as one of the most degenerate states of consciousness. Throughout the book, one of the things that marks Dracula is his diffusion of boundaries. He exists within a dream state, where his solidity is always in question, his actual form is always in question, and he’s surrounded by the decay of categories. It sounds like Mina’s victory at the end is to integrate everything into a coherent symbolic order. Of course, one of the appeals of vampire fiction now, I would suspect, is the violation of Mina’s aspirations: a celebration of the triumph of disintegration.” He replied, “Yes, it’s a celebration of the first step of gaining power. For myself, I’m very much a classicist. I don’t think that much good vampire fiction was written after 1980. I get in some trouble with horror writers because of a talk I gave at the Horror Writers’ Association. I said, if you read a vampire book quickly, without looking at the author’s name, you can tell if it’s written by a man or a woman. Because if it’s written by a man, it goes, ‘If I were really a vampire, nobody would kick sand in my face again, plus I would get to screw the cheerleader.’ If it was written by a woman, it’s, ‘I never found love in this mortal life because no man appreciated my inner beauty. It took a five-hundred-year-old vampire who has experienced every kind of woman in the world to realize I’m the best.”

He said, “A lot of modern vampire fiction has become consumerism. The moral imperative is completely missing. The throwback to the roots of Christianity and religion is missing. And it’s become pure consumerism. Act One and Act Two with no Act Three.”

I asked, “What is Dracula’s goal? If there wasn’t a Van Helsing or other vampire hunters, what would his goal have been?”

Eighteen-Bisang answered, “Van Helsing talks about him having the Hegelian child brain, but he marvels, and he says, ‘Look at what he’s done, all alone, from a castle in the middle of nowhere in a God-forsaken land, he has planned the conquest of Europe. His military training has come to the fore. If he’s allowed to continue, he will develop human consciousness, and then he will be unstoppable”.

He continued, “There’s a wonderful series of books by Kim Newman called Anno Dracula, which are really top quality vampire fiction. Now Kim has a bit of fun with this. Dracula overcomes the vampire hunters, kills or imprisons them, becomes the consort of Queen Victoria, and sets about ruling Victorian England. What’s the difference between political power and military power? Is military power the final word in political power, or is political power the final word in military power? They meld into this one thing of power. I don’t see a distinction. Dracula was a warlord.”

As I returned home, and even long afterwards, this simple insight kept going through my mind: the vampire embodies the warlord’s state of consciousness. As we enter this election season, this season of the vampire, my thoughts turn to Dracula and Mina, and a myth that just won’t die.