Title: A Fragment
Author: Lord Byron
Date of First Publication: 1819
Place of First Publication: Mazeppa, a poem (London: John Murray)
Bibliographic Reference: isfdb
Type: Short Story
Character: Lord Byron (Augustus Darvell)
Keywords: BYRONIC HERO; QUEER; SYMPATHETIC MONSTER
Critical Summary: “A Fragment” is the unfinished beginning of a vampire story written by Lord Byron, conceived on the same night as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and later adapted and expanded upon as the basis for John Polidori’s “The Vampyre.” The story is told from the perspective of an unnamed young protagonist and recounts his association with a certain Augustus Darvell, a highly distinguished lord several years his senior.
The protagonist first becomes aware of Darvell through colorful rumors. His interest piqued, he resolves to befriend him, but the man proves mysterious and taciturn, reserved in his various unexplained emotions but simultaneously deeply affected by them. Through persistence, the protagonist nevertheless manages to establish an amiable relationship with Darvell, and eventually the older man accepts his invitation to travel with him throughout Europe.
While on this journey, Darvell begins to grow weak and waste away with no apparent cause. The two friends arrive in Smyrna, and the protagonist, alarmed at his companion’s state, tries in vain to dissuade him from journeying out to visit the ruins of Ephesus and Sardis. They are escorted by a Turkish soldier, Suleiman.
As they travel, Darvell rapidly becomes more ill, and the two are forced to stop at a Muslim cemetery. After sending an oddly calm Suleiman away for water and giving directions on how to find it, he admits to his younger companion that he is familiar with this place. Darvell then reveals that he is dying and bequeaths to the protagonist a ring inscribed with Arabic lettering; he instructs him to throw it into the salt springs of Eleusis at precisely noon on the ninth day of any month, travel to the ruins of the temple of Ceres the day after also at noon, and then wait for an hour. While he is giving these instructions, a stork with a snake in its beak perches upon a tombstone and watches the two men without eating its prey. Darvell seems to take it as a good omen and abruptly dies, his face going black in a matter of minutes. His body also begins to decompose alarmingly fast, the protagonist and a now-returned Suleiman to dig a shallow grave for him. The protagonist, numb with shock and sorrow over Darvell’s decline and death, cannot bring himself to cry.
“A Fragment,” sharing its date of birth with Frankenstein, bears several similarities. It begins with a Walton-esque young, naive protagonist who has a helpless fascination with an older aristocratic gentleman bordering on the homoerotic. Augustus Darvell is another of Byron’s many iterations of himself. Indeed, Augustus Darvell and Victor Frankenstein might be said to share key Byronic characteristics: they are intensely passionate, but inclined to emotional distance from others, from whom they excite fear, pity and fascination all at once. Yet Darvell, the titular vampire, is also parallel to the monstrous Creature.
Though this short story marks the very beginning of the modern vampire in Anglophone literature, there is a strange tendency in the subsequent literature to seize upon the creature’s monstrous characteristics while downplaying its pathos. The mysterious and disturbing but not altogether unlikeable Darvell is transformed into a grotesque parody of Byron’s worst characteristics in Polidori’s Ruthven, and Stoker’s Dracula expands upon the association of vampirism with eastern religion and culture found in “A Fragment” to develop a full-fledged, orientalist, colonialist nightmare. Only in recent times has the vampire returned to its modern literary roots as a sympathetic monster, in large part due to the proliferation of the Frankenstein meme; in this way, the literature of the vampire has come full circle.
Administrative Notes: Adriana Lora, CSUF. Edited by Gareth O’Neal and Melanie Yogurtian, CSUF