Reverse Vampirism

 

 

Donatien Grau

In his preface to his collection Doomed and Famous, Adrian Dannatt compares himself to a ‘ghoul.’ After all, isn’t he a professional writer, an author of ‘obituaries’—a nicer word than the French ‘nécrologies’? He tells how, in all social interactions, he looks for the snippets of what will be an event, that is to say anecdote, in this very particular genre that he practices. The image of the ghoul, the female equivalent of the vampire, fits perfectly with his game of overcoming categories of identity, which runs through his whole collection—where the masculine, the feminine, poverty, wealth, power, impotence, are brought together, without distinction, from the moment individuality is asserted. One could thus see in his writing practice a form of vampirism, or ghoulism, consisting of feeding on the lives of others to perpetuate his own.

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