“The Dialectic of Fear”
From Signs Taken
for Wonders, NLB/verso books, 1983. Part of the Radical
Thinkers series.
The fear of bourgeois civilization is summed up in two
names: Frankenstein and Dracula. The monster and the vampire are born together
one night in 1816 in the drawing room of the Villa Chapuis near Geneva, out of
a society game among friends to while away a rainy summer. Born in the full
spate of the industrial revolution, they rise again together in the critical
years at the end of the nineteenth century under the names of Hyde and Dracula.
In the twentieth century they conquer the cinema: after the First World War, in
German Expressionism; after the 1929 crisis, with the big RKO productions in
America; then in 1956–57, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, directed by
Terence Fisher, again, triumphantly, incarnate this twin-faced nightmare.
Frankenstein and Dracula lead parallel lives. They are indivisible, because
complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes:
the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor. The worker and capital: ‘the
whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and
propertyless workers.’ That ‘must’, which for Marx is a scientific prediction
of the future (and the guarantee of a future reordering of society), is a
forewarning of the end for nineteenth-century bourgeois culture.
I. Towards a Sociology of the Modern Monster
The literature of terror is born precisely out of the
terror of a split society and out of the desire to heal it. It is for just this
reason that Dracula and Frankenstein, with rare exceptions, do not appear
together. The threat would be too great, and this literature, having produced
terror, must also erase it and restore peace. It must restore the broken
equilibrium—giving the illusion of being able to stop history—because the
monster expresses the anxiety that the future will be monstrous. His
antagonist—the enemy of the monster—will always be, by contrast, a
representative of the present, a distillation of complacent nineteenth-century
mediocrity: nationalistic, stupid, superstitious, philistine, impotent,
self-satisfied. But this does not show through. Fascinated by the horror of the
monster, the public accepts the vices of its destroyer without a murmur, just
as it accepts his literary depiction, the jaded and repetitive typology which regains
its strength and its virginity on contact with the unknown. The monster, then,
serves to displace the antagonisms and horrors evidenced within society to
outside society itself. In Frankenstein the struggle will be between a
‘race of devils’ and the ‘species of man’. Whoever dares to fight the monster
automatically becomes the representative of the species, of the whole of
society. The monster, the utterly unknown, serves to reconstruct a universality,
a social cohesion which in itself would no longer carry conviction.
