Of Late Capitalism, Synthesizing Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Gramsci
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216 Journal of American Folklore 117 (2004) of late capitalism, synthesizing Bourdieu, all be found in this extraordinarily popular Baudrillard, Gramsci, Harvey, Lash and Urry, television series. In an episode from the third and others. season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer entitled The remainder of the book, however, is cu- “The Wish,” a big-time vampire called The riously disappointing. Far from being a “near- Master erects a blood-sucking factory in which encyclopedic work,” as the jacket promises, a live human is zapped with a stun gun, then Consuming Youth offers readings of a fairly lim- strapped to a conveyor belt which pulls her past ited body of texts, while its theoretical exegesis a series of syringe/vacuums that drain her of never reaches the intensity of the introduction. blood. The Master proclaims: “Vampires! Un- Only seven vampire texts are looked at in any deniably, we are the world’s superior race. Yet detail. Chapter 1 looks at S. P. Somtow’s novel we have always been too parochial. Too bound Vampire Junction (Walsworth, 1984) and the to the mindless routine of the predator. Hunt film The Lost Boys (1987) for models of youth- and kill . Hunt and kill . Titillating? consumer vampires; chapter 2 examines the Yes. Practical? Hardly. Meanwhile the humans, division of vampire-consumers in post-Fordist with their plebeian minds, have brought us a society into yuppies and slackers, exemplified, truly demonic concept: mass production!” respectively, by Anne Rice’s novel Interview with (The Wish Script Part 2 http://www. the Vampire (Ballantine, 1976) and George studiesinwords.de/shooting/wish2.html). No Romero’s film Martin (1978). Chapter 3 exam- one, having read Latham, can help but find ines the ways these class issues are inflected by layer upon layer of significance in such a scene. gender, focusing on homoerotic imagery in the This is the redeeming power of the book. Al- film The Hunger (1983) and in novels by Rice though it fails to address itself to many of the and Poppy Z. Brite. key vampire and cyborg texts of contemporary Latham’s accounts are interesting, highly youth culture, it serves as a superb prolegom- readable, and even useful, but they hardly be- ena to any study of these texts by laying out the gin to cover the range of vampires in contem- key metaphors and providing us with tools to porary pop culture. Where are the vampire explore their significance. role-playing games, the urban legends, the soft- ware games, the television shows? Where the heck is Buffy? Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psycho- The next two chapters, focusing on cyborgs, analytic Folkloristics. By Alan Dundes. (Jack- are even more disappointing. Latham locates a son: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. Pp. xx post-Fordist youth-labor dystopia in the ven- + 141, bibliographical references, index.) ture capitalism of Silicon Valley through a de- tailed reading of Douglas Coupland’s novel Francisco Vaz da Silva Microserfs. Chapter 5 weaves a half-dozen texts University of Lisbon together into a complex intertextual narrative about Generation X and how it is defined in Alan Dundes has been a leading scholar in the part by reference to the Internet. fields of anthropology and folklore for nearly Things pick up considerably in the final forty years, during which he has untiringly chapter, which attempts to bring all these vari- made a case for interpretation. His professed ous strands together through readings of six academic credo, “To make sense of nonsense, books and a movie. But one waits in vain for find a rationale for the irrational, and seek to Latham to shift his argument from trendy sci- make the unconscious conscious” (p. 137), ence fiction novels and fifteen-year-old movies places Dundes on a path also trod by Freud and to the cultural icons youths consume en masse. Lévi-Strauss (see Tristes Tropiques [Plon, 1955], Where is the Terminator (movies, comics, or pp. 61–63); however, Dundes’s constant effort novels)? Where is Robocop? to interweave structural description and Freud- And, again, where is Buffy? Mall culture, ian interpretation has set him against the grain generation X, homoeroticism, the Internet, of mainstream folkloristics. He reckons “folk- slackers, and yuppies (living and undead), can lorists are too often regarded (rightly, I think) Book Reviews 217 by their fellow academics as mere collectors and woman in the mirror is called Veronica. For classifiers, but rarely if ever as bona fide schol- centuries in Western Christendom this name ars seeking to analyze their data meaningfully” has unified under the heading of a “true im- (p. ix). Alternatively, Dundes hopes to pave the age,” vera icon, the hemorrhagic woman healed way for “psychoanalytic folkloristics” (p. x) in by Jesus (Matt. 9.20–22) and the woman who showing that psychoanalysis provides the nec- collects the bloody sweat of Christ on a cloth essary tools—namely, a “range of concepts such (Gervase Otia imperialia 3.25, cf. Evangelium as ‘projection’ and ‘family romance’ (the Oedi- Nichodemi chap. 7, Vindicta Salvatoris chap. 18). pus and Electra complexes)” (p. xvi)—to un- Note the mirror imagery: Jesus quenches the derstand folklore. woman’s genital flux; Veronica dries up Christ’s Bloody Mary in the Mirror comprises a pref- facial blood and so becomes his simile (for ace, in which the author defines his subject “veronica” designates both the woman and the matter and sketches the formation of his life bloody imprint on her cloth). Thus, the mod- interest in folklore and in psychoanalytic ern equivalence of Bloody Mary and Veroni- theory, seven recently published essays (includ- ca—the namesake crystallizing the ancient mir- ing two coauthored by Lauren Dundes) that il- roring of hemorrhagic genitals and a bleeding lustrate the application of Freudian tenets to face—confirms that, in the American ritual, a folklore, and a short epilogue that sets the whole bleeding face is the mirror image of a menstru- book in the light of the author’s lifelong objec- ating girl. Dundes, working on contemporary tive of making sense of nonsense while seeking American data, reveals equivalencies enduring to make the unconscious conscious. Various throughout centuries and across continents. By subjects—religious behavior, vampire beliefs, any standard, such ability to grasp fundamen- wondertales ancient and modern, contempo- tal layers of symbolism must qualify as “genu- rary American rituals, and Mediterranean mo- ine insight” into folklore data. res—come under examination to tackle the big To what extent Dundes owes this interpretive question: can psychoanalytic theory materially capacity to psychoanalytic theory is less clear. help us understand folkloristic data? Overall, The “Bloody Mary in the Mirror” piece, Dundes challenges readers to judge “whether or stripped of its Freudian garb, would still stand. not one or more of these essays succeeds in More generally, even though psychoanalytical yielding genuine insight into the folklore data notions are a constant muse to Dundes, the in question” (pp. xvi–xvii). appeal of his work stems largely from an im- Even though few readers are likely to agree pressive command of anthropological and folk- with all the interpretations presented, and crit- loristic literature as well as from an uncanny ics may feel that some readings oversimplify ability to bring coherence to apparently unre- matters, the overall answer must be “yes.” Take lated data. Whether the insights in this book for example the book’s core chapter, “Bloody argue for a pointedly psychoanalytic folk- Mary in the Mirror.” This piece seeks to explain loristics or actually plead for a wider-ranging the American contemporary teenage practice of symbolic approach remains, I think, an open summoning Bloody Mary to appear in a bath- question. room mirror. Dundes interprets this “rite” as an One thing does seem clear. Bloody Mary in adolescent celebration of the onset of the first the Mirror keeps alive the ideal of folklore as an menses, the mirror bleeding image being hypo- intellectually relevant academic pursuit, which thetically a self-image of sorts. In this strain, alone would be an excellent reason for reading Dundes explains an oozing cut in the mirror and pondering this stimulating book. woman’s forehead as an upward displacement of the bleeding vagina, taking account of a de- monstrable equivalence of the head and geni- Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt. By Gaston tal area on one hand, and of evidence that Maspero. Ed. and intro. by Hasan El-Shamy. “Bloody Mary” connotes menstruation on the ABC-CLIO Classic Folk and Fairy Tales Series. other. Independent confirmation for this inter- (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2002. Pp. cliv pretation comes from Iberia, where the bloody + 275, tale type and motif index, bibliography.