by Stefan Borbély
Review of The Vampires’ Re/bel/iunion
The favourite myth of adolescence is that difference: to know how to recognize it and to have the courage to assume it. To this we add the imperative of choice, sometimes with the imaginary price of the highest risk.
Generally, the Romanian writer is a serious person, poring thoughtfully over the issues of the canon’s and the world’s issues (in this order). Years ago, I participated in a summer convention on a well-defined thematic area, in which I presented a paper dedicated to the character of post-apocalyptic fiction. The event moderator of the day — a very important man — listened to me with the benevolence reserved to those who bore the audience with unimportant matters and said, in the end, that he was glad that Romanian literature doesn’t venture into such extreme representations, which meant that we could deal with serious things. I contradicted him smilingly, but you could see from one hundred feet that that the apocalyptic didn’t make it on his list of literary themes: he considered it marginal, frivolous, or, at best, a matter of international import.
Knowing all this — to which I can add the frowns of very bushy eyebrows when my PhD students were approaching unorthodox themes — I was not surprised at all by the loud opposition which I encountered when I tried to informally promote “The Vampire Re/bell/union”, the massive collection of stories of over 460 pages, which was the debut of Iasmina-Katia Otoiu from Baia Mare, published by Limes in 2019. The aversion of those I spoke to was mainly due to the theme — which they quickly and nervously dismissed to the lower shelf of bad literature — and also to the exasperation of feeling “colonized” by adolescent literary fashions, that invade us from the Internet, such as fantasy and SF, with the explicit intention to shatter the sacred stability of our ethnocentric and aestheticist canon.
Iasmina-Katia Otoiu comes from a reality which we arbitrarily haste to dismiss, even though it “breathes” all around us, sometimes very close to us, in our family circle. Very intelligent and endowed with an incontestable imaginative will, Iasmina reads mostly in English, speaks the language impeccably, she participates in international online workshops, she reviews on her blog remarkable books from different European and transatlantic cultures for young girls and boys and she is preparing to study, after graduating from high school, in Scotland, where Harry Potter was born and where the first four-legged, hoofed animal was cloned and displayed in the most important museum in Edinburgh. Her mindset is shaped by the mythologies of postmodernism, (fascinating because eclectic), by the imaginary of fantasy literature and by the conviction — not at all naive, because it was already phrased by Lucretius, before Lewis Carroll — that the world is similar to a sponge crisscrossed by canals and capilars, some of them bringing you back to where you came from, because of their labyrinthine structure, while others open up, unexpectedly, to miraculous lands of magic and tales, in which you can step bravely if you are fed up with the world in which you live and with the skeptical adults that inhabit it.
And this is why the adolescent poses ranging from the initiatic to the messianic underlie subtly this mindset (and inherently so, as things are similar in mainstream literature). This is often associated with the need for emancipation from the pressure of the older generation. The favourite myth of adolescence is that of Difference: to know how to recognize it and to have the courage to assume it. To this we add the imperative of choice, sometimes with the imaginary price of the highest risk. However, what differentiates this conception is, on the one hand, the confidence in the exorcising power of storytelling, of the word and, on the other hand (quite surprisingly, yet age-specific) the eschathologic, the foreshadowing of the impending apocalypse, that also feeds a certain messianic attitude.
This instilling of the Myth into the Word (which is unexpected in a generation that we accuse to have abandoned reading and writing, living exclusively in the virtual world of the smartphone and the Internet) is derived from the technique of “therapy groups”, where you speak to free yourself from oppressing negative energies. This prophetic eschatology is actually more complex, like in the cases of Matrix and in the novels about white vampires by the famous Stephenie Meyer, the new incontestable guru in the field. There are other ingredients (ecology, manichaeism, and even primary, unsofisticated gnosis) that we will not elaborate upon; one essential ingredient is worth mentioning: these teenagers do believe in the therapeutic value of micro-socializing (stigmata can be exorcised within the right group of selfless peers) and in the idea that the evil is transient and impermanent, and may be eradicated by means of a heroic act or a kind word. This is very much like in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: the evil is intrinsic to the world and your purpose is to take Sauron’s ring and throw it in the fire, saving in this way the whole of humanity.
As the author confessed, she had finished writing The Vampire Re/bell/union at 14; yett we are not told anything about the novel’s process of gestation. The assumptions we could make come exclusively from the direction of imaginary and from the complexity of phrasing, both being more precarious in the second half of the novel (Beti, Becky, or even Lola, Lord Fabian), in comparison to what we are being offered in the first half. Playing with acronyms, we could say that the novel is a case of VA (Vampire Anonymous), where six atypical vampires (misfit, repudiated, neurotic or just melancholic) meet at midnight in the dilapidated castle of a seventh, to tell their story. Six of them are bipedal and one of them is the four-legged vampire-cat Lola, who got into these dire straits after a ”Villainous Savant” kidnaps her from the street to inject her a ”vampirizing liquid”, whose effects she suffers from. Famous cases (Doctor Moreau, Frankenstein) immediately spirng to mind, but, to better understand the therapeutic meaning of the story, we must examine the last character, the castle’s owner, Fabian, who is Dracula’s introvert and neurotic brother, self-exiled in the woods due to the torments he suffered from his parents, who had always preferred his strong, victorious brother over him. In fact, the characters make two visits to the “Forbidden Forest”, but on the second one they have the surprise to find a completely transformed host and a wholly renovated castle. Thus the stories told during the first meeting prove to have a therapeutic, anti-neurotic effect and exorcise bad energies.
The other six one are, in order, Robert, Tamara, Ileana, Beti, Becky and the black cat (who used to be white) Lola. Lola, Beti and Becky are the first ones to wander into the woods, which makes us suppose they constitute the base of the decameronic novel. Anyway, their stories are quite dull, with many similarities to the mythology of white vampires. Lola starts her life on the streets after the Savant gets rid of her. Her travel to “Cat-Land” (locus amoenus feline) only instills the prose with a rather naive atmospheric detail. The other three stories, however, told by Robert, Tamara and Ileana, display vivid imagery, prove a superior maturity and even acquire a cosmological thrill of a manicheist type in Tamara’s story.
The stories’ unity is given by their psychological (even psychoanalytic) depth. Robert is the misfit vampire, dominated to the point of annihilation by the superior power of his sister, Verra, that enjoys a notoriety that the younger sibling cannot reach. Ileana is the rebellious and dreamy princess, who does everything in her own way instead of in the way she is allowed, thus causing the disatisfaction of her parents. Living in a perfect world, separated from the “normality” of evil by a protective and impenetrable dome, she wishes, obviously, to go to the other side (following the model of the character Rasselas, created by Samuel Johnson). She faces a lot of challenges until she is rescued.
Tamara’s story brings back to life the motif of the sanatorium/evil hospital, hidden under the generous facade of an educative institution: a hybrid establishment that provides a home to all orphans regardless of species (elves, witches, vampires, fairies etc.). The author reveals, at some point, that the intention of the married couple of principals is far from unequivocal, as they mean to transform the young residents into robotized executioners of a terrifying plan for power.
According to the “recipe”, the arbitrarily disadvantaged child is the one to save the day in most of the stories, and this is based on the extrapolation into narrative of a subliminal anti-parental revolt, which would have excited Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales) and which, indirectly points to Freud. An other interesting point (that may opens a great perspective, if the author decides to develop it) is the cosmology of entropy in Ileana’s story, in which the world is represented as ruled by a manichaeist pattern, and as an unstable balance of energies, which could be tipped at will either in the direction of Good or that of Evil.
A special shoutout to the illustrators of the novel, Irina and Adrian Otoiu (the aunt and the father of the author, respectively), who transformed a huge textual block (and here I wonder how many teenagers of the target audience will dare open a 460-page book) into a high class feast of graphics.
Stefan Borbelyi — The Contemporary, issue 7, August 2020, [Bucharest], p.16.