Reading: The Blood Countess

     I should start this review by mentioning that I would never even have heard of Andrei Codrescu's Blood Countess if not for the Girls Guts Giallo book club. If you support the podcast on patreon, you get access to curated weekly movie screenings, a fun discord server, and a book club! I've never been a part of a book club before and having one hosted by and joined by smart, funny, insightful queer folks has been an invaluable experience. If you like subversive film, kink and queer horror you'll love Annie's podcast and the inclusive community she's building. I've learned so much about weird and beautiful works and a lot about theory from listening and participating in her spaces. I'm not being paid to promote this, it's just something that's been meaningful and a source of joy for me, especially when the broader online conversation about art tends to be really reductive, skittish about sex and taboo, and moralistic to a degree that creators get caught in the crossfire.

 

 

    I didn't know a lot about The Blood Countess going into it, just that it was a story about Elizabeth Bathory, the Hungarian countess rumored to have bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her youth. The book is divided between two perspectives- that of Elizabeth Bathory, mainly in her young age and development, and that of her descendant Drake, who is testifying to a court that he has murdered a woman because of Elizabeth's influence. Drake, a Hungarian ex-pat living in America, had returned to Hungary after the collapse of communism. The story jumps back and forth between the two as we learn more about how ancestor and descendant's fates are connected. We can't know for sure what is actual truth and what is more like folk-lore. Drake seems an unreliable narrator about his own life and even when we get Elizabeth's story in all its gory details, there are aspects to the broader story which contradict this view of her. Drake is not only by his own admission a murderer but also a rapist and it is unclear how much of his word we can take as fact. The book also addresses the perspective that Elizabeth Bathory may have been falsely accused- or at least her abuses greatly exaggerated in a political ploy to acquire her estates (something that was noted to be happening to other noble widows). It is better to approach the whole story as fantastical and mythical.

    The book is luscious and dense but highly readable- the prose a bit purple but never in a way that feels oppressive. It is clear that Codrescu has really committed a lot of research in order to give us a vivid and complex look at the past, not just in how people lived but in their discussions, philosophy, beliefs, and what constituted the sciences in this time period. The book is a genuine page-turner for its cleverness, humor, titillation and its horror. There's a heavy amount of eroticism in the book which is not divisible from violence and horror. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I found it quite compelling and hard to put down. It's not often that I read a book that is so frank about human nature and about human history. This book does touch on a fair amount of gruesome things as well as some taboo sex themes- incest, the formative interest in sex that kids have, rape, and a lot of sexualized violence towards teen girls. I don't feel that any of this is out of line, especially as it is largely talking about a very fucked up time in human history and about the functions of patriarchy and the violence of the ruling class, but it feels fair to warn about if you're sensitive to such content. It honestly felt very refreshing to read at a time when the conversation about art is filled with pearl-clutchers who can stomach inordinate amounts of violence but turn green the moment sex is involved (as though violence by itself is neutral but sexual violence must never be addressed except in hushed tones).

    Elizabeth in a way is also a symbolic vehicle for a broader conversation about history, about Hungary, about the violence of nobility, and about political upheaval. Drake's story takes place in the contemporary (at the time the book was written) after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of communism in the satellite East Bloc nations. It is also a story about nationalism, religion, the violent rise of fascism, the way that ancient monarchs fit into these contemporary ideologies as symbols, and about the treatment of Jews

    I should note, this book draws heavily from the author's own family history and his experiences- his family has a Jewish ancestry and he is also an actual distant relation of the countess Bathory. Codrescu himself is Romanian and with his family had fled Romanian at the time of the revolution and ended up in America. While The Blood Countess is set in Hungary and not Romania, there are certainly shared experiences and histories in both countries. For Jews especially there is a shared understanding of violence and hatred against them. The Jew both in the time of Elizabeth Bathory and in the present of Drake is a reviled and persecuted figure, blamed for a variety of ills as a matter of daily life. Drake as a child imagines he must be a Jew for the way he is treated, before he realizes his family comes from noble origins and therefore considered an enemy under communism. Elizabeth, for all her casual cruelty, is a learned person and has sympathy for Jews, ruling that they be spared during an outbreak of the plague- it is explained that it is customary to kill them whenever the plague appears. Elizabeth and her friend Andrei Kereshtur have a family friend in ben Lebus, a Jewish man who is also educated and wise. As you can perhaps understand, there are no happy endings for the Jewish nor for the Romani characters in the story despite them being liked by Elizabeth.

    A recurring theme in the book is the idea of being connected to one's history, of history being inescapable, alive and a part of everything in our world. This is also shown with themes of doubles and mirroring- characters from past and present sharing names and similar positions, and even some hinted to be direct incarnations of past figures in Elizabeth Bathory's life. Mirrors and reflection are a theme in and of themselves in the book, both regarding Elizabeth's vanity, the literal mirrors in her home, and in the way that her friend and scribe Andrei records everything about her. Elizabeth manifests in different characters in the present- through Drake, through the Bathory scholar Lilly Hangress- and we don't know if this possession is literal or not.

     What I find so interesting about this book is that despite being very detailed about Elizabeth's cruelty (if we are to assume this is real and not myth within the story) it is also very sympathetic to her and to the plight of women. She's powerful yet powerless, beholden to a system that does not value her as more than property despite her status. In a way, we can read her violence against others as a reaction against the confines of what a woman is expected to be, lashing out violently at other women- particularly young women- both as a means of control and as a projection of disgust at herself.      

    Elizabeth is also coded as queer (from a modern point of view), where the objects of her sadism and also the subjects of her more consensual and positive encounters are mainly female. Elizabeth also crossdresses frequently as a child and it's hard for me (with my own biases, naturally) not to read dysphoria in the narrative. Normal sex with her husband is humiliating and brings her to tears, sadism is the only pleasure she takes. The act of bearing a child is also this great horror and shame to Elizabeth, ever fixated on her beauty. In a way that is likely not Codrescu's intent, I see this desperate clinging to beauty and feminine image as a reaction to dysphoria, stuffing down those feelings as hard as possible in the embrace of hyper femininity. Perhaps I'm not too out of left field with this reading though- older cultural conceptions of homosexual behavior often did have a gendered component. Our contemporary ideas of gay, bi, lesbian and transgender and even heterosexual are fairly recently solidified identities after all.

    I'd mentioned before that Blood Countess deals with formative sexual experiences in childhood and I find that something very refreshing to read about. While Elizabeth's experiences are not normative and  warped her understanding of the world, I very much liked seeing this part of life acknowledged. Curiosity about sex and having sexual thoughts are such normal parts of coming-of-age. I myself was a very curious child who didn't quite know what to make about my own feelings, and having no real words or basis for the parts of my feelings that were informed by homosexual desire or feelings of being transgender. In a very abstract way, I can see a bit of myself in tiny Elizabeth.

    Along with it's themes of queerness there is an interesting and recurring theme of disabled and othered bodies. Elizabeth's focus and obsession with beauty is contrasted against the presence of disabled, ill and deformed people and not in a way that feels at all unsympathetic of their othered status. Some of the kindest figures in Elizabeth's life are disabled people who seem to connect to and recognize an otherness within her despite her social status. Notably her closest friend Andre has a hunchback, and as a young girl Elizabeth is rescued and cared for by a group of disabled outcasts in the forest after her home is ransacked by rebels.

    Religion is also a major focal point of Blood Countess, with Martin Luther as a contemporary figure in the time of Bathory and the various priests constantly vying for control with their own flavor of Christianity. It is an environment that proves itself to be hostile to Elizabeth and to women overall. Elizabeth's connection to the spiritual world is more to that of witchcraft and folk medicine, in a way more science than literal magic or religion. These othered folk wisdoms have real and tangible effects alongside their more esoteric and metaphysical roles. Alchemy is also prominent here in much the same way, being practiced by Andrei and by a beloved Catholic monk who tutors both Andrei and Elizabeth in their youth. In the contemporary of Drake's story, Christianity fits neatly into the rise of fascism in ex-communist Hungary, with jack booted skinheads being a holy army for a planned coup.

    A funny note, but Codrescu was a long time NPR commentator and got into a bit of hot water for his remarks on Christianity. 

On the December 19, 1995, broadcast of All Things Considered, Codrescu reported that some Christians believe in a "rapture" and four million believers will ascend to Heaven immediately. He continued, "The evaporation of 4 million who believe this crap would leave the world an instantly better place."

NPR subsequently apologized for Codrescu's comments, saying, "Those remarks offended listeners and crossed a line of taste and tolerance that we should have defended with greater vigilance."

    I'd say "King" for this one but that might be a little too ironic.

    Myth and fairytale have a heavy presence in connection to witchcraft and folk medicine in Blood Countess. The book is filled with old Hungarian fairy tales and with events that parallel the structure and sensibility of fairy tales. I thought also a lot about medieval bestiaries and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, not so much as a literal connection but as a tapestry of shared fantastical imagery. I'd recently contributed to an anthology based around The Garden of Earthly Delights- a tryptych depicting earthly pleasures, sexually charged imagery of nude people among beasts and fruit, and the torments of hell alongside them. Blood Countess very much is packed with that same sort of imagery- opulence, indulgence, violence, torment, as well as the presence of animals that mirror the story's human characters. Animal symbolism is a recurring theme, with characters compared to animals or literally accompanied by animals- the priest Ponikenuz with his pet monkey, Elizabeth and her leopard Night Snow and the horse Luna from her childhood.

     Overall, I really loved this book and I know I could go on for pages and pages more digging into its themes if not for the desire to leave the joy of discovery intact for any future readers. It's also quite fun to learn about which elements are based in history, which are connected to existing myth, and which are a clever invention of the author in weaving all of it together. The Blood Countess is beautiful, humorous, dark, and feels very relevant to the world today with its political sensibilities too. Maybe Elizabeth really did get her wish for immortality. Or at the very least it's hard to escape our own history.

    Reading The Blood Countess has made me think quite a bit of a Romanian friend from grad school who talked about the trauma of the end of communism, not in such a way that ever claimed that life was perfect before but that life was much much worse after. I also think about an Iranian friend whose work for a period of time focused on war and trauma as a tangible part of the landscape- the echoes of events from hundreds of years ago still deeply felt and present. That is the essence of The Blood Countess.