by Cannon Schmitt, guest columnist
“Everyone in my program is queer, neurodivergent, or both.” A soft ding interrupted the conversation, the elevator doors slid open, and we stepped out into a hallway full of people wearing name tags and carrying identical tote bags. I can’t remember anything about “Texts Under Pressure,” the panel we were on our way to see. But the overheard remark from one English lit doctoral student to another stuck because it reminded me of vampires, and of the value of the humanities
Vampires first. They are misfits. In this and nearly every other way—the crosses and the garlic, the stake through the heart, the homoeroticism barely concealed beneath the overblown heteroeroticism—Bram Stoker’s Dracula set the pattern.
Whatever else may be said about Count Dracula, the main thing is that he doesn’t belong. Why should the Ur-vampire be an Eastern European in London, speaking nearly fluent but accented English, or an aristocrat negotiating a middle-class world? Why should vampiric immortality register, not as the triumphant conquest of death, but as a curse that forces you to live on until you find yourself stranded somewhen unrecognizable, alone of your kind? Then there’s the blood. As vegans and the gluten-free can testify, special dietary requirements turn you into a curiosity, the person who gets a sad little labelled side plate at gatherings, a monumental bother even if politeness demands pretending otherwise.
Most fiction tells the story of an outsider—that’s what makes the novel the genre of modernity. But Dracula stands out by giving us a displaced, maladjusted title character with whom it’s impossible to empathize. Think Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, or Jane Eyre but with Anna, Emma, or Jane spending most of her time offstage, her inner world out of reach, her motivations opaque. Stoker pieces his plot together from diary entries, letters, telegrams, newspaper clippings, even excerpts from a ship’s log. Everyone involved in hunting down the vampire, regardless of how minor or peripheral, has their say. But the voice of the vampire himself is almost absent.
The heroines of the great nineteenth-century novels wear their loneliness on their sleeves. Dracula’s can only be perceived in retrospect, by the light of later vampire tales—Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, for example. Before Wicked, before Maleficent, before any of the other recent efforts at rehabbing story villains, there was the first instalment of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, in which a reporter scores a sit-down with Louis de Pointe du Lac. De Pointe du Lac! The French and the double possessive, overkill even in the Louisiana setting, keep the vampire foreign and aristocratic. Otherwise, Interview with the Vampire turns Dracula inside out. A talker as much as a stalker, Louis recounts an Undead life in which feeding on the blood of the living takes a back seat to the need for companionship, for a place that harbors others of his kind.
Which brings me to the value of the humanities. Alright, not the value. There are so many. But one of the values, notable because never noted: University and college humanities departments provide a home for misfits.
Take my own English PhD cohort from decades ago. Gary, a child of white missionaries in Rwanda, derided non-evangelical Christian denominations as milquetoast but somehow fell so completely under the spell of evolutionary theory that he wrote a dissertation about Darwin. Rick, a middle-aged Kansan who overused the word execrable (one use is overuse) and spoke in a stilted accent seemingly modelled on William F. Buckley’s, could monologue about the Renaissance relation to history in dives as deep as Taylor Swift’s pockets. Alice, who already had advanced degrees in Latin and Ancient Greek, returned to graduate school to study with one of the founders of feminist literary criticism. There was a former girlfriend of Tracy Chapman, or so the rumor went. An assortment of others—including me, without proximity to fame or advanced degrees in anything but with my own accent issue due to the attempt to erase evidence of a Southern upbringing. (Unsuccessful. Even now, if I’m not careful, I’ll ask to borrow a ballpoint pin.) All different, all equally unsuited to a world in which no one cared about the Oxford comma, revenge tragedy, or écriture féminine.
Follow your passion, commencement speakers say. We were following ours, but we were also fleeing—what, exactly? Bosses, nine-to-five workdays, straightness, neurotypicality, frivolity, the faux seriousness that refuses frivolity, indifference to language, indifference to the past. All that, yes, but mostly, like Dracula, like Louis, we were on the run from isolation.
Back before the tenure-track job in the humanities became an endangered species, a stint in graduate school could lead to a permanent berth in a department of English or East Asian Studies or Cinema Studies or any number of other disciplines—a strange place to live out one’s strange life and put one’s hard-won expertise and abilities to work.
Not that all humanists are weirdos. The professoriate contains plenty of polished, pulled-together men whose treacly charm papers over careerism, misogyny, and revanchist politics. They could have been insurance executives or hedge-fund managers but somehow ended up teaching Jane Austen to nineteen-year-olds.
Mostly, though, a humanities department is an amalgam of outcasts astoundingly good at the peculiar thing they do but for whom other careers are difficult to imagine. Analogies abound, even if it’s hard to get the correct pitch. The Island of the Misfit Toys from the Rankin and Bass animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? Too maudlin. A Salon des Refusés? Overly aggrandizing. But a nest, house, coven, or whatever your preferred collective noun might be for a group of vampires? Just right.
Vampirism as utopian fellowship: Remmick, the disturbingly charismatic head vampire in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, woos reluctant victims with exactly this promise. Allow yourselves to be bitten, he tells the Black, Chinese, and multiracial characters he preys upon, and join a community free from the horrors of the Jim Crow South. But the coven that results enacts its own horror, erasing rather than sheltering the idiosyncrasies of its members, who are linked together by a hive mind under the despotic rule of a single leader. That’s a dead ringer for something in the world outside the film—but not a humanities department.
We come a little closer with glamorous big-screen covens like David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon in Tony Scott’s The Hunger or Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, and John Hurt in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. But these miss the mark in the same way as campus novels in which the English professors are all beautiful people who drive Saabs and spend winter break skiing in Vermont. No, even though Jarmusch underlines the vampire–humanist connection with allusions to Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, and Faust—not to mention the casting of Hurt as Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe—we have to look elsewhere for a suitably plain-Vlad depiction of vampire community that might evoke the University of Cincinnati as much as Yale.
Where elsewhere? Staten Island, in which déclassé borough three Old-World, old-school vampires, Nadja, Laszlo, and Nandor, take refuge in a tumbledown mansion with their New-World energy vampire friend, Colin Robinson. What We Do in the Shadows, the Jemaine Clement TV series based on his and Taika Waititi’s movie of the same name, gives us the coven that most closely approximates to a college or university humanities department. Witness the accents, the dedication to arcane knowledge, the unapologetic immersion in the past, and the tragicomically complete out-of-stepness. True, there are also murders and blood feasts. Mostly, though, each episode dwells on the quotidian doings of a bunch of oddballs who’ve banded together against the rest of the world.
In the final episode of the final season of What We Do in the Shadows, Nandor declares: “Things end, and it hurts.” He wasn’t talking about the enterprise of humanistic scholarship, but he might as well have been. Undergraduate enrolments have been sliding for decades. The lure of STEM and the notion that a diploma is nothing but a ticket into the workforce have gradually elbowed out Nietzsche, Audre Lorde, and Russian verse forms. For a while the unfortunate necessity of knowing how to think and write has kept disciplines like Philosophy and English on life support, but generative AI is quickly putting an end to that. The humanities aren’t gone yet, but their continued existence is at best a posthumous, undead one.
They may be joined by higher education in its entirety. Consider only a few salvos in the current administration’s assault on the university: the revocation of around 8,000 international student visas; the raising of the endowment tax on fifteen universities from 1.5% to, in some cases, 8%; the freezing of over $5 billion in federal grants to and contracts with universities, including grants for medical and scientific research connected to health disparities. It’s no exaggeration to say that some of the stakes are matters of life and death.
In the face of such an all-encompassing catastrophe, mourning the loss of a place for queer folk, neurodivergents, and other misfits might seem unforgivably petty. Still, I can’t help but wonder about my doctoral students and my most accomplished undergrads. Once they could have looked forward to a future spent among others of their kind, doing the work they love and at which they excel. When the humanities disappear, where will they go? What happens to the covenless vampire?
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Cannon Schmitt is an English professor. The editor of an annotated online edition of Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness, he has published over thirty journal articles and book chapters as well as two academic monographs, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) and Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America (Cambridge University Press, 2009). His lifelong love affair with water has taken many forms, including whitewater kayaking in Tennessee, North Carolina, Ontario, and Costa Rica; sailing in the Antilles; and sea kayaking on the lower reaches of the Hudson River and in the Sea of Cortez. He lives in Toronto, where he divides his time among teaching, writing, raising his two daughters, and surfing.