Still bats about blood after all these years

YOU'RE not going to mention the bite, are you?" asks Dr Kate Aney, hesitating as she is about to hand over a press copy of the paper she has just delivered at this year's Bram Stoker Summer School in Dublin.

Dr McAney's paper, Vampirism And Bats: Myth And Reality, is, after all, a serious attempt to debunk the bad reputation bats seem to have been attracting - at least since, 100 years ago this summer, Bram Stoker published his most celebrated work, Dracula.

In a preternaturally chilly room in St Gabriel's Community Centre, Clontarf, a small roost of Dracula fanatics from South Africa, Japan, France, the US and Europe, has gathered to celebrate the book's anniversary and the 150th anniversary of Stoker's birth.

Dr McAney, who wrote her doctoral thesis on the lesser horseshoe bat, spends much of her time with these creatures of the night. But no matter how much enthusiasm she puts into talking about the 1,000 varieties of bat, her audience just can't seem to get enough of the antics of one particular type, known to Dr McAney as desmodus rotundus the vampire bat.

"Could you tell us about the bite?" one inquisitive member of the audience asks, even before Dr McAney has finished her paper. "I'm coming to that," she says, knowing well that despite her best spin doctoring, this audience has a taste for blood.

Her description of the activities of desmodus rotundus, accompanied by colour slides of various patches of brown fur set off with a splash of deep crimson, does not disappoint.

"It then uses its razor-sharp upper incisors and canines to slice down into the flesh at the same time the lower incisors gently grasp the skin and a divot of flesh about one-eighth of an inch is then removed."

A shudder of anticipation passes through her audience. "Once the wound is made, the tongue is inserted through the space between the lower incisors ... the tongue conducts blood into the mouth while a groove on the upper side conveys saliva with the all-important anticoagulant ... Vampire bats do not suck blood but rather lap it up with a quick and continuous in- and-out motion of the tongue."

AT the Bram Stoker Summer School, now being held for the seventh time, McAney's paper is not alone in dwelling on gruesome penetrations and languorous exchanges of bodily fluids.

Papers delivered so far at the school have swooped through a range of subjects, from the latest research on Stoker's various Dublin residences, to Dr Clive Bloom's look at the popularity of the occult in Victorian Society, by way of Dr William Hughes's interpretation of vamparism as "an intervention into the economy of the body" and his conclusion that Dracula was "about the pathology of the body as much as the mind".

As this later notion is backed up with plenty of careful analyses of how a vampire might bite, which part of the human body he would select, and the effects of blood-sucking on the victim, Dr Hughes's paper is greeted with eager attention. If you want to keep the attention of this crowd of vampire fanatics, it's a good idea not to leave too much space between references to things red and sticky.

French Dracula expert, Jean-Claude Petit delivered a paper on The Neuro Linguistic Programming Of Dracula. Petit, a lecturer at the University of Lille, says that his paper was inspired by work he does with difficult teenagers.

"I came across neuro linguistic programming when I was working with young people with personality problems and I thought it might be interesting to combine it with my interest in Dracula, says Dr Petit. "NLP is basically a theory of behavioural psychology which treats the brain as a computer. When something goes wrong a computer must be de-bugged and that is what happens to Stoker's hero, Jonathan Harker when he goes to Dracula's castle basically, Dracula could be seen as an allegory; a vampire could be seen as a personality problem which drains somebody's energy."

Petit's approach is just one of many radically different readings of the Dracula story that have turned up in the last 30 years, since what Dr Elizabeth Millar describes as "the post-modern challenge of a traditional literary canon ... accompanied by the resistance to the privileging of one type of literature over another" began to see a redrawing of the boundaries between writing that might and might not be taken seriously.

In her paper, 100 Years And Counting Why Had Dracula Endured? Dr Millar, traces the beginning of modern Dracula scholarship to 1972, when two key works, one on the historical figure of Dracula, and another a Jungian interpretation of the story were published.

Dr Millar, who is Professor of English and Memorial University of Newfoundland, runs the Dracula home page on the World Wide Web. It can be accessed at (http:/www.ucs.mun.ca/ emiller). She is responsible for the academic programme of what may be the biggest ever Dracula conference. Dracula '97, which will be held in Los Angeles next month, promises to attract 1,000 committed Dracula fans and Stoker aficionados.

The current state of Dracula studies, according to Dr Millar, is extremely healthy. "There's so much new stuff coming out all the time . . . if you want to see all the things that people are writing about Dracula now," she says "then you should check out my Web site." And with that, and one more consultation of her Dracula watch, Dr Millar left for her next speaking appearance, addressing yet another of this year's Dracula conferences, this time in deepest Transylvania.

THE Bram Stoker Summer School continues at St Gabriel's Community Centre in Clontarf until Sunday. Events are open to the public, with an admission fee generally in the order of Pounds 5 for each event.

Today, there is a seminar on the world Stoker scene at 2 p.m., while the Stoker/Gothic Pub Table Quiz will take place at the Beachcomber public house on Howth Road at 8.15 p.m. Tomorrow, the Stoker Notice/information Board will be unveiled at Bram Stoker Park, The Crescent, Clontarf at 11 a.m. Saturday's papers begin in St Gabriel's at 7.30 p.m., with Stoker's Banana Skins: Errors, Illogicalities and Misconceptions In Dracula by Clive Leatherdale, followed by The Golem: The Origins Of The Frankenstein Legend by Leslie Shepard.

The programme for the final day of the summer school includes a "Stoker Lunch" at noon in Dollymount House, Clontarf Road, followed by a walking tour of Stoker's Clontarf, and a session enigmatically titled "Musings", to be held in the Bram Stoker Lounge, in the Hollybrook Hotel.