Tarzan and Sookie
65
the script characterizes as an animal: “Sharp rat-like teeth appear over the lower
lip . . . The claws of the Count’s spidery fingers cover much of the [letter] . . .
He looks at Hutter as a snake would hypnotize its prey.”6 The mixed metaphors
strengthen Count Orlok’s connection to nature’s overwhelming and
indeterminate monstrousness. These vampires are supernatural only by being so
exceedingly natural.
Naturally, some of the best of the new vampires are Southern.
Specifically Louisianan: Anne Rice’s LeStat, Jewelle Gomez’s Gilda, and
Charlaine Harris’s Bill Compton (two from New Orleans, where Faulkner’s
Sutpen stashes his biracial ex-wife and child). That Buffy, Being Human, and
Twilight also channel Tarzan does not negate the American South as an especial
beacon. What better place for Tarzan’s dilemma of belonging?—as John
Jeremiah Sullivan has written in a different context, “the region has always
produced its geniuses, but nobody ever referred to it as an incubator of
civilization.”7 Bill Compton was one of the boys in grey Tarzan’s Jane so
esteemed, a Confederate soldier when he passed from the living to the undead.
Harris might as well have named him Compson after Faulkner’s undead
Quentin.
The gothic incest of Faulkner and Poe is here too: when one vampire
makes another, the relationship is always as parent and child, sibling-comrades,
and lovers. Homosexuality, a staple subtext of vampire tales from the beginning,
has risen to the surface in a preponderance of the recent fictions. The old
South’s denial of interracial relations is exploded in the new South’s vampire
narratives like The Gilda Stories, and True Blood. Like the Sookie Stackhouse
novels on which it is based, the HBO series, set in small-town Bon Temps,
Louisiana, is probably the best example of the persistence of Tarzan’s repressed
preoccupations. It has orphans and kings and queens and queers, and colorblind
colorful sex. Its polysexual orgy includes people who sleep with the half-animal
vamps, with animal shifters, with werewolves, and, once in season two, almost
with an actual bull. Bon Temps indeed.
Have I mentioned that Tarzan’s first girlf riend was an ape?
These new Southern vampires have reinvigorated Tarzan’s dilemma,
entertaining us with their own species of literature, and in their own way getting
after what Faulkner considered the only thing that can “make good writing,” the
only thing “worth writing about”—“the human heart in conflict with itself.”
Hendrix College, Arkansas
Alex Vernon
Notes
1 Warwick Sabin, “Billy Shakespeare: Southern Man,” Oxford American 73 (June 2011),
10- 11.
2 See Tarzan: Lord o f the Louisiana Jungle, prod, and dir. A1 Bohl, 2012.