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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Saving Dracula

  
 
All Acting Regiment
22:44 / 30.07.05
Consider this:

Dracula is one of those books about which people often say "It's too cheesy", or they find it laughable, or something along those lines.

And it's easy to understand why. It's been milked to death in the films, the Anne Rice, the RPG's- any sense of the original seems to have been lost, wouldn't you say?

I think this is a shame. Dracula, if you shut out pre-existing images from the films (which haven't exactly ruined it- rather they've taken away our own reactions and put theirs in place)- is a terrifying drama, frightening in more than just the supernatural way, a thriller, about power politics and gender.

Have you read Dracula? What do you think of it? Can it be "saved" in this way? Does it need to be?
 
 
This Sunday
00:30 / 31.07.05
I think the sex angle, more than anything, will be the saving grace of 'Dracula'. It kicked off the Sexy Vampire Meme (TM), and while language and inference has changed (see the 'got on her knees' bit with the baby-eating brides - no, seriously, some people can actually read that and not infer), that's an angle that most people seem convinced was thrown in or developed for movie-versions and not from the novel. More than the significantly expected violence/politics/creepiness, the sensual/sexual aspects still have a chance to catch the reader off-guard.
Other than that, unless you're reading the book at, say, eight to ten, you're just over-prepared and inundated with material built off it.
If it were pure(r) and (more) excellently written, I could see tackling it from that angle. That stripped down, nothing-but, take has a power... but, in my opinion, it isn't particularly concentrated, and there's some rough patches to the writing. The whole thing's kinda built of inconsistencies and illogical behaviour (on Dracula's part - leaving his castle in the first place - but the human characters as well).
I don't particularly put a value on something because it 'did it first' but a lot of people do. Experiencing everything, as we must and do, in a contemporary constant-now framework, I don't see a reason a ascribe anything value outside of what it has right now - at least, in terms of entertainment. I can't feel the shock of the newness, freshness, and unexpectedness of a work that came out even forty years ago and I can't find a value in pretending I do. The thing to do, it seems, is enjoy it for what it is now, and not what it was when it arrived. I love the Beatles' 'Revolver' now, not the newly-released album. I love Munch's Madonna now (even more since it's probably lost to us for good) rather than when he first unveiled it to a public.
I can't even go back and wallow in nostalgia very well: even if I loved it as a kid, it may well do flat nothing for me today. Even if I hated it as a kid, doesn't stop me from totally enjoying it right now.
And, really, seriously, can someone help me see a value, if any, in trying to blind yourself to the present to enjoy something by past-proxy? If it's worthwhile, maybe I should learn how.
 
 
P. Horus Rhacoid
03:17 / 31.07.05
Actually, the prevalence of vampire mythos in pop culture was one of the reasons why I a) wanted to read Dracula in the first place, and b) enjoyed it. I found it pretty interesting to see how the original (pop-culture) vampire was portrayed, in light of how it's evolved since then. I didn't find it cheesy at all; in fact, I thought Stoker was masterful at conjuring up a dark, creepy atmosphere to the book. For me, that's its strongest literary point- logical flaws aside, problems with the diary-format aside ("I'm deep in the bowels of Dracula's evil castle... he could come back here any minute and find me and do something horrible to me because I'm seeing things I'm not supposed to see... I think I'll just sit and write in my journal awhile"), the book is absolutely creepy as hell.

And of course, the subtext is great as well. Not just the sexuality, though that's obviously a huge part of it, but also the politics. I read the book as part of a class on imperialism, and reading it as a study of British attitudes towards cultural others is fascinating.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
15:28 / 31.07.05
I've been reading Foucault's Civilisation & Madness recently, and thinking about Dracula I observed that you can look at it as Harker, Helsing et al as forces of "reason" (partly through using modern technologies such as a wax recording machine, but mainly in their view of the world) VS the forces of "unreason" that exists in the pretty much medieval Transylvania.

The superstitions of peasants (which of course Harker at first finds quaint) suddenly prove themselves to be well founded on a real monster. Harker doesn't want to wear the cross the peasant woman gives him, because as a member of the Church of England he finds such things "Idolatrous"- yet in Transylvania he swiftly finds that such things are neccesary.

It's about the past coming to invade the present and the future. Foucault says that passion was often seen as unreasonable, and on a par with madness- you can see this in that the monster is a sex monster as well as a death monster.

This fear of unreason and passion is particularly Victorian in some ways, isn't it? I wonder if to update the book you'd instead have to have a totally reasoning, cruelly cold figure for a vampire.
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
19:49 / 31.07.05
I don't know...the IDEA and plot of Dracula are great, but the actually writing was as dry as dust for me. It was told in a clunky style with all of the letters and diary entries and such, and I just didn't care for it.

It's one of those classics that I think is actually better when someone else is using the character.
 
 
P. Horus Rhacoid
06:51 / 03.08.05
I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between Dracula and Van Helsing, and I'm trying to figure out if it relates at all to Legba's reason/unreason dichotomy. Please forgive me if I ramble a bit.

Dracula, of course, is a foreigner, but one of the significant parts of his character is that he's putting a lot of effort into seeming British. If memory serves, he speaks with no accent, and enjoys speaking with Harker because it gives him a chance to practice his English. He plans to emigrate to England– and in the process, of course, ravage its women and expose them to the sexuality he represents.

Van Helsing's a foreigner too, but, significantly, is obviously a foreigner. The clearest sign of this is his accent and less-than-perfect command of English (actually, I assume that his imperfect English led me to 'hear' an accent when I read his voice). He is also, as I recall, totally asexual; his relationship with the women of the story is fatherly. Also, IIRC, Van Helsing is the source of all the information The Good Guys have about Dracula, and it's never clearly explained how (though that may just be a plot hole).

A key distinction between the two seems to be that Dracula is trying to become British, while Van Helsing has no such pretensions. I say pretension– it seems like Stoker's saying that there's something innately British about the British, and that for an Other to attempt to become British is anathema.

I'm trying to figure out if this ties into Legba's reason/unreason dichotomy, because it seems like it should. Van Helsing is the Other ruled by reason, Dracula the one ruled by passion. No, scratch that– Van Helsing isn't ruled by reason, he's a bridge between reason and unreason. He's a scientist with sophisticated medical knowledge (blood transfusions, for instance), but at the same time, he has an unexplained access to all this occult knowledge about Dracula (who, as Legba pointed out, is the poster boy for the forces of unreason). Van Helsing brings to the table the way of defeating Dracula, which is founded on the supernatural. I don't remember exactly how he consecrates Dracula's boxes of earth (communion wafers, maybe?), but it reminds me of Legba's example of Harker and the crucifix. Also, Van Helsing practices hypnotism, doesn't he, which is similar to how Dracula hypnotizes his victims, except benign?

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this, except that it seems not to be a totally clear cut case of reason versus unreason, present versus past, British vesus Other, because Van Helsing is solidly ensconced in all those (even Britishness, in that he is allied with the British).

Almost forgot– there's a third foreigner, an American (Texan?), yeah? One of Lucy's three suitors. His role seems to be primarily to carry a gun and get killed (he does die, doesn't he?). I'm not sure where he fits into all this.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
09:10 / 03.08.05
Stoker wrote an article in praise of America; I beleive the American character gets a little praise in the book as well. I think he's mainly there so that a bit of America luvvin' can go on (remember this was at least 100 years ago).

Van Helsing

He's a scientist with sophisticated medical knowledge (blood transfusions, for instance), but at the same time, he has an unexplained access to all this occult knowledge about Dracula (who, as Legba pointed out, is the poster boy for the forces of unreason).

I think your description of him as a bridge fits well. I agree, but I came to the same conclusion via a slightly different route which I'll post here.

We've got several poles of reference, here, haven't we? In the blue corner: England, Science, Protestantism, Progress; Harker and friends (apart from Van Helsing, which I'm coming to).

In the dark, blood red corner: Foreign, Occult (w/Superstition), Catholicism, Backwardness; Dracula and his crew.

Helsing, like Yorrick said, is foreign, but allied with and genuinely simmilar to the English; he's Austrian, isn't he? Germanic, definitely. Which, on the league tables of "reasonable" countries, as according to Victorian Britain, probably comes below England but above Transylvania.

He knows about science but he also knows about the occult: he's a bridge here as well. Notice that though he knows about the occult he does not revel in it, he approaches it from a knowledgeable, scientific standpoint as opposed to a worshipful one; the belt of reason is still firmly tied round his waist. He takes charge of unreason, not vice versa.

So to sum up: Helsing. He's from the Old World, but of the New.

Renfeild

Here's another thing. Dracula is not only a "poster boy for unreason" (brilliant phrase btw!); he has the power to make it the dominant truth, at least in the case of the mentally ill Renfield, who, in a state of "natural unreason", beleives (for example) that all sorts of terrible things will happen unless he eats spiders.

To beleive in Vampires is also a mental state that (according to Harker in the first part of the book) would say makes you "unreasonable". Yet Dracula is real: the madman's delusion becomes reality. His "unreason" slips out of his head: if those who beleive in impossible horrors are proven right, then the world has gone mad.
___

Which is all well and good, but what we must also remember is that Van Helsing is very much a heavy handed plot device; a "Merlin" or "Enkidu" character; someone who knows the rules of the story that the characters find themselves in and can be used for help (or to help the author move the story along).

Renfeild is a bit of a stereotypical "madman", and not at all a fair or balanced description of mental illness. As a symbol of unreason, he's held at arms length by society: both in terms of his imprisonment in the asylum, and in terms of his treatment by Harker et al. Renfeild is pushed in to an "othering" space; the asylum and Dracula's London house are a miniature Transylvania.

But this action by the society in the book is also the action taken by the author, who never lets Renfield tell his story, or indeed be anything much more than a frightening grotesque.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:30 / 03.08.05
he's Austrian, isn't he? Germanic, definitely. Which, on the league tables of "reasonable" countries, as according to Victorian Britain, probably comes below England but above Transylvania.

He's Dutch, I think, although your analysis largely holds true, and David Dickens argues that the character of van Helsing is constructed out of German literary tropes. Mind you, Dracula's probably from German Transylvania, so that gets a bit complicated. Also, there's a reasonable argument to be made that van Helsiing is Jewish, which might have some implications for this analysis. Likewise that Transylvania, wild and wooly though it may be, was part of the Auustro-Hungarian empire.
 
 
Daemon est Deus Inversus
16:48 / 17.02.06
Yes, though I found Bram Stoker's book oddly disjointed. It read more like a draft of a stage play than a novel. Possibly because Bram Stoker was a stage manager for Sir Henry Taylor and Dame Ellen Terry; and he'd tried, at some point, to get them interested in the concept.
 
 
GogMickGog
19:49 / 17.02.06
Iain Sinclair waffles on in "the verbals" (essentially a book length interview with Kevin Jackson) about Dracula being, in truth, a piece about real estate, capital, and dreadful "nouveau riche" foreign types..will find the exact quote at some point...
 
 
Michelle Gale
14:10 / 26.02.06
Dracula's probably from German Transylvania,

I thought he was slavic?, wasnt he inspired by that Ivan the terrible? The whole soil business as concerns Dracula has quite an Russian orthodox vibe to it.
 
 
matthew.
23:54 / 26.02.06
Not Ivan the Terrible. Vlad Tepes III, in fact. "He was the voivode, or prince, of the principality of Wallachia (an informal region in southern Romania) and his three reigns were in 1448, from 1456 to 1462, and 1476.

As voivode he led an independent policy in relation to the Ottoman Empire, and in Romania at least he is best remembered as a Christian knight and his crusades against Islamic expansionism into Europe. He is known in Turkish as Kazıklı Bey, or the Impaler Prince, and is a popular folk hero in Romania and Moldova even today." (here).

If you're interested in the "history" of Vlad Tepes, you can read The Historian (Wikipedia entry). My review of that particular novel can be found here and here. If you're too lazy to click those links, I'll just say that the history is fascinating but the story is sorely lacking in interesting characters or any tension whatsoever.
 
 
matthew.
23:58 / 26.02.06
I should say that the link between Vlad Tepes and Stoker's "Dracula" is a good link, but it's not a fact that Stoker set it up that way. It is open to intrepretation, as with all things.
 
  
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