Dr Saviour Catania
University of Malta
Charon’s Nothingness: Dreyer’s Vampyr and de la Mare’s “L’Air de Rien”
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This paper interworks readings of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film Vampyr and Walter de la Mare’s tales and poems of the supernatural to offer some reflections on the representation in European modernist horror of transgressed life-death boundaries. It argues that Dreyer, by pivoting Vampyr on what Claude Perrin labels a “reel-irréel” dialectic, filters his adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly through crepuscular evocations of de la Mare’s oxymoronic vision of existence as a kind of “burial in emptiness”. Thus the key episode in Le Fanu’s ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant‘, in which Richard Beckett views his own funeral while drugged into a conscious catalepsy, parallels Dreyer’s de la Marean flight, whereby David Gray’s “live burial” ordeal pitches him into an inapprehensibility that further recalls the protagonist’s predicament in de la Mare’s ‘Mr Kempe‘. Again, since Gray penetrates alive the state of death, he ghosts into what Glen Cavaliero calls de la Mare’s “twilit territory,” where the life/death border is annihilated. For what Gray witnesses as a living-dead entity never transcends the burial ritual, thereby echoing Mr Eaves’ dream-vision of death in ‘The Three Friends‘. What Gray therefore shares with some of de la Mare’s most tenebrous figures in these and other stories like ‘Winter‘, ‘Strangers and Pilgrims‘, or ‘Revenant‘ is resignation to death and life remaining locked in the mysteries of absent presence. Like the Traveller in ‘The Listeners’, they all contend with what Jacques Aumont terms “l’air de rien”. Their otherwhere is disturbingly nowhere. To navigate such otherness is to try to “connect nothing with nothing”. On either side, there looms only “brooding dust”. The paper argues that Dreyer’s and de la Mare’s art breathes that air and that dust as it moves European modernism towards Charon’s nothingness.
