Bite-Sized Blogging: Dracula (Chapters 17-19)

23 October.

Ah, I love "the classics." Imagining a world where it's considered chivalrous to tell a woman that she has "man's brains" but nonetheless needs to stay home because she's the weaker, fairer sex; well, that's downright hysterical. Or is that the sort of horror novel that Stoker was really writing? Some sort of prescient neo-feminist tract in which its most liberated woman, Wilhelmena Harker, nonetheless politely acquiesces to absolutely everything asked, nay, demanded of her as a woman. She makes a pretty good secretary though, right? I mean, they at least let her type up everything for them, before they dispense with her.

I hazard this guess because Stoker's novel isn't actually scary at all. I'm too damned irritated by the characters, at this point, to empathize with anything. I mean, they've all read the record of Lucy's falling prey to sleeping sickness that leaves her pale, and Van Helsing has exposited his way through a description of Dracula's powers, which includes a thick, coalescing mist that creeps in through gaps of any chamber in the darkest hour of night. And yet, even when Mina faithfully records her dream of exactly this happening, even when her husband, Jonathan, observes how much she is sleeping, even when Van Helsing is prevailed upon to provide her with a sleeping draught, as she's not really feeling that refreshed, nobody even hesitates to consider that their next door neighbor--who was notably not at home--might have been the culprit.

Once again, we're back to this idea that unless we see the act itself, we don't believe in it. Which I guess brings us back to faith again; even given everything these four "vampire hunters" have seen, they're still supernatural atheists, and they refuse to believe what is not directly before them. This is why religion boggles the minds of so many "intellectuals": it's because you can't argue for or against it with facts, and the sooner Stoker's "heroes" realize that their precocious observations are doing very little, the better for all of us readers who are (un)dying for a little action. I'm sorry, but telling me that Dracula's crypt seemed as if "corruption had become itself corrupted" don't impress me much.

The one interesting bit is Mina's observation (back in Chapter 17) on the difference between the recorded word and the written word, and this is where Dracula falters as a novel (and perhaps may have set itself up to be a film). Seward's phonographs allowed Mina to "hear [his] heart beat," and must never be heard again. The written form, however, which has been stripped of some inscrutable level of "soul" is deemed appropriate to be processed. Guess which version we got? Journaling is already once-removed; now we're twice-removed. This is why I hate "the classics."

Bite-Sized Blogging: Dracula (Chapters 14-16)

22 October.

(Undelivered.)

Okay. So I'm walking home from work one day, and I see a man pull someone into the alley, bludgeon him to death, and then sever the head and walk away with it. A few days later, I slap my palm against my forehead and realize, hey, I know that guy. (The bludgeoner, not the bludgeonee.) I'm on my way over to his place, actually, to hang out and play some XBOX, when I notice bloodstains on a dumpster, and decide, on the off-chance that it's ketchup for some appetizing meal, to walk over and take a look. Nope, it's just a dead body, evenly vivisected into what now look like giant bloody maggots. Delicious, I'm sure, but not really what I'm in the mood for; besides, I had Thai last night.

It's on the elevator up to my friend the murderer's apartment that things start clicking in my head. Or perhaps it's the odor, coupled with the strange density of flies in his hallway, that does it. I decide, you know what, maybe I should call, first; besides, there's a horrible wail coming from inside his apartment, like a baby that's having its guts ripped out by a pendulum's blade. I mean, not that there's anything wrong with that, if that's your thing, but I'm now considering that perhaps there are things about my friend--well, I actually only know him from work--that I don't quite understand. Like those runic symbols that adorn his desk. I'm not quite sure they're just transliterated fortune cookies, and where did he say he was from again? Not that I'm racist, or anything, but you know, those sorts of rituals aren't done here. (Probably because we're too lazy to go about getting the proper knives, let alone actually doing all that work; we'd rather watch it on the Food Network.)

"Great Scott!" asks Quincey Morris, one of my fictional friends. "Is this a game?" Dr. Van Helsing (no relation) replies: "It is." And that's when it dawns on me, re: Dracula, that of course it's a game. Stoker can't let go of this whole cat-and-mouse narrative; it's too much fun for him, and he's not all that interested in the bloody details. Besides, it's more fun to crack jokes about stealing the Host (for vampire-slaying purposes, which I guess makes it alright), than anything else, and it certainly explains why this whole group of would-be hunters allow the Un-Dead Lucy to claim another victim or two--just to be sure--before finally staking her. Why it has to be Arthur who does it, why there's less than a paragraph to describe the crushed garlic in the mouth and just-to-be-sure beheading (all that foreplay has left me with blue brains), forget about it. There's little else making sense, unless English etiquette dictates that we ought not to kill children-snatching, fresh-blood-soaked walking corpses until we're absolutely sure that they're the evil kind.

"I heard once of an American who so defined faith: 'that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.'" And on that note, I believe I see my friend coming this way now; I believe he's brought me an axe. And it's fresh, too; I can see the paint dripping right off the handle. I'll write once more once I'm surer; you can never be too sure about what to believe in this days, now can you now can you now can you?

Bite-Sized Blogging: Dracula (Chapter 13)

16 October

It's hard to build up suspense when your novel turns into a series of vignettes--encounters, really, and their aftermaths, with Count Dracula. There's a marked lack of commonality, so far, and everyone is segregated into their own worlds. There's some truth to this, in that (as I said yesterday) everyone sounds the same despite their unique experiences, or to put it another way, that we are united by our resistance to evil incarnate, but it's frustrating.

I don't mind that this isn't a classic case of good versus evil (that is, we get the neat digressions from the newspapers, and the random cameos from comic older men with silly accents, like the graveyard guy in Chapter 6 and the zookeeper in Chapter 12). I get, too, that Stoker introduces stuff so he can come back to it later. However, in Infinite Jest, Wallace's use of this technique paid off; Dracula's doesn't. For instance, Quincey Morris's return: who cares? You can't just have the man conveniently show up in the nick of time to complete a "blood wedding" (the transfusion) and chalk it all up to the man being a "moral Viking" (whatever that means). And you can't just keep flinging Renfield at the walls (or at Seward's veins) without giving us *some* understanding of how the patient came to be there. Dracula is a classic novel because so many have borrowed from it, but I fear that one of the nasty habits writers were infected with here was the sacrifice of character to plot, a trait of hasty horror novels worldwide.

But let's mention things I liked, too:

• Arthur to Helsing: "I shall not trouble you with questions till the time comes." A hundred years from now, this is the common convention upon which shows like Lost cling to. If we were to simply explain things from the get-go, or to ask the necessary questions, there would be no suspense. However, it's frustrating here in that Helsing has all the answers, and just refuses to explain them--especially since if he weren't so damned arrogant and had actually managed to impress the severity of the situation upon Lucy and company, he probably would have saved them.
  
  
• There are fewer asides now that the plot has taken over so many sections, but Helsing's monologue on "King Laugh" is terrific: "Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come; and , like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again; and we bear to go on with our labour, what it may be." So with the pacing of Dracula, which every so often has a comic digression (or accent like this), all the better to break us again later.
  
  
• As in 28 Days Later, it's revealed, ultimately, that the real monsters aren't actually the supernatural forces, but rather our own base actions. They have many chances to save Lucy's life, and yet each time, she is undone by human weakness: the mother's mistaken compassion, the friend's fixation on other business, the telegraph carrier's laziness, the thief's stealing of the gold crucifix, and even friendship itself, which here has prevented anyone from sparing Arthur--who already suffers at his father's sickbed--from having to worry about Lucy, too, when in truth, he would spend every night with her if he could. This is established right from the get-go, when Harker and Hawkins, trying to earn money, set up this mysterious stranger--Count Dracula--with a place in London (and who cares where his money comes from, nor what his intentions are?); our desires are what enable evil to walk amongst us. How deliciously religious.
  

Bite-Sized Blogging: Dracula (Chapters 11 & 12)

15 October.

(CONTINUED)

It occurs to me that while it's neat, the way in which Stoker cuts around in narratives to tease out new suspenses (how will this escaped wolf play into things? what delayed this crucial telegram?), he has lost the immediacy of those first few chapters, those isolated descriptions and strong voice. Everybody sounds the same now, high-literate and overflowing with descriptions, from Lucy quoting Ophelia to Seward's bland recitation of plot, from Patrick Hennessey's report to Mina's letters to Lucy (the saddest thing so far is the tragic subscript for these: "Unopened by her"). Most egregious of all, the "Pall Mall Gazette" and its rather loose editorial standards, that it should phonetically reprint such awful accents.

Under these conditions, I find it much harder to care for Lucy's struggle, and less so for her mother's death. I find it harder, too, to understand Dracula: while we know that he likes to play with his victims, it seems absurd that he would need to break a domesticated wolf out of the zoo in order to have *it* shatter the window of a house--a house that he has obviously already broken into, in order to dose the wine with laudanum. I suppose one could read into the Count's battering and flapping at the windows as a sort of courtship, and he's obviously obsessed with her, but come now: he's not even drinking her blood any more, he's just using her as a glorified goblet of globins.

There is little else to say; the plot moves now as briskly as the undead--that is, it is lifeless.

Bite-Sized Blogging: Dracula (Chapter 10)

15 October.

Much delay following the unfortunate delay of new PDF files; have now purchased Signet Classic edition. This brings up two meta-issues: one, presentation is important. This edition uses a "blood-curdling" font to note each chapter, and the journal entries are now presented in such crushed, uniform ways that it loses what little authenticity of narrative voice it had. There was something far more thrilling about reading Jonathan McNicol's version, especially as loose pages, printed out a day at a time, in serial form. There was the feeling that anything could come next, whereas now, I'm constantly reminded of the last page. (The opportunity for surprise is perhaps the one nice feature of an e-book reader.) The second issue pertains to something missing from the Greybean edition: a disclaimer (from Stoker, I presume) that verifies what I've guessed at for the last few posts: "All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact."

• Of course, that disclaimer also states that "there is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them." I think what Stoker meant to say was more along the lines of Van Helsing's pending note: "knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker." It's a funny caveat, given that the entire novel is presented as untrustworthy memory, and that knowledge time and again proves to be everyone's undoing. Then again, here's the real horror of the novel (from a modern perspective): if we cannot trust what we remember, and we cannot trust what we know, what can we trust?
  
  
• Van Helsing also has some notes on Stoker's form of suspense (and again, I find it very hard to separate the broken English of his character here with the action-hero version from the films). Helsing explains that the reason why he does not come forth and explain everything to Seward from the get-go is because "I have sown my corn, and Nature has her work to do in making it sprout; if he sprout at all, there's some promise; and I wait till the ear begins to swell." That is, only a fool rushes to conclusions: a real doctor must dismiss nothing.
  
  
• As long as we're speaking of madmen, I much like Van Helsing's line "All men are mad in some way or the other; and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen too--the rest of the world." Let's never puff ourselves up so greatly that we forget that we are all crazy to someone--and if you believe in one (or many), then you must be especially crazy to God.
  

Bite-Sized Blogging: Dracula (Chapter 9)

12 October.

(CONTINUED)

• (Wilhel)mina, upon meeting up with and marrying a recuperating Harker in Buda-Pesth, is told by the Sister caring for him that "the ravings of the sick were the secrets of God," which seems to me another subtle jab by Stoker at the religious powers of Dracula--for after all, the secrets Harker spills are those of the bloody Count.
• Mina, writing to Lucy, mentions that "I must not wish you no pain, for that can never be; but I do hope you will be always as happy as I am now." Is that an optimistic or pessimistic view of the world? I ask, because Mina represents the attitude of the very educated English--is Stoker writing a Gothic horror in order to show us the light through the darkness? Or is he attempting to blot out the sun itself with his bleakness?
• Following up on that thought is Dr. Seward's view: "We lunched alone, and as we all exerted ourselves to be cheerful, we got, as some kind of reward for our labours, some real cheerfulness amongst us." As if cheerfulness were something that needed to be worked for, or--worse yet--as if they have mistaken the pretense of happiness for actual happiness. Are they fools for fooling themselves, or is this the wisdom of ignorance?
• There's more philosophy in Dracula than I thought, but I still think it's clumsily done--at least by modern standards. Seward hits the nail on the head with this description of Renfield (which could double as a description of Stoker's writing): "[it] seems rather to indicate than to show something directly. I cannot quite understand it." This is the game the author plays with us: he indicates things, particularly to an audience well-vested in the legends and lore, but is far from direct, and not good at all at showing us things--only telling them to us.
• I must say that I do admire Stoker's descriptions--I only wish that he could restrict them to characters whom you'd expect to describe things. It's unclear as to why Seward's journal of mainly medical observations is cluttered with reflections onto the city. Still, would I cut the following? "It was a shock to me to turn from the wonderful smoky beauty of a sunset over London, with its lurid lights and inky shadows and all the marvellous tints that come on foul clouds even as on foul water, and to realize tall the grim sternness of my own cold stone building, with its wealth of breathing miser, and my own desolate heart to endure it all." I would not.
  

Bite-Sized Blogging: Dracula (Chapter 8)

12 October

How fitting that the first thing I read--after lapsing in my entries for a week--is an admonition from Mina Murray: "If it were not that I had made my diary a duty I should not open it tonight." I love to read, don't get me wrong, but it does seem that sometimes I only get things done if I make them duties first. But to Dracula: Mina's entry, which promises to be daily, proves what I've been saying--Stoker is editing the entries that he chooses to show.

This being a work of horror, this selection is clearly done for suspenseful reasons. (As is the choice to write horror at all--according to Stoker-as-Murray, "personal fear...seemed to wipe the slate clean and give us a fresh start," that is, horror as the positive effect of forcing us to see things anew, with clear eyes, and is that not the goal of all novelists?) In Chapter 6, we watch, in weekly entries, as Mina continues to record Harker's absence. Were this to be shown to us in daily increments, we'd swiftly grow bored. In Chapter 8, Stoker sticks to the day-to-day because he's chronicling the rise-and-fall of Lucy's health as she is preyed upon (in secret) by Dracula. Now we actually get multiple entries on the same day, and the element of horror now has turned from suspense to panic--it's more immediate.

Here's a clever stylistic thing: whereas the Harker chapters wrote supernatural things off as being mundane, Murray's chapters detail ordinary things--that will grow to become supernatural. To wit, she really does prick Lucy's neck with a safety-pin; but Lucy will soon be fed on in that exact location. Dracula's eyes really are "great eyes like burning flames," but that dark figure we see is clearly not him--after all, the natural event is the glint of red sunlight off St. Mary's Church." No wonder Dracula makes Mina sleepwalk to him, though he could just as easily flit to her window and feed on her; no wonder he takes the form of an obvious giant bat, though he can assume any shape--he knows no polite Englishman will raise questions. (And he's killed off the old man in the graveyard who might have.)

Two quick things which I'll end with because I'm not sufficiently educated in these subjects:

• Murray's seeming disdain for "the 'New Woman'" seems in itself to be more of a mark of the "New Woman" than anything else. She has liberated herself from the need for self-defining labels, and is clearly the most independent person in this book.
• Dracula has taken up residence in the chapel of a mansion, only a few pages after Dr. Seward had written of Renfield's growing fixation on a "Master," which Seward mistakes for delusions of becoming God. The only thing--aside from what we so far interpret as "evil"--that makes Dracula less than a God is his vanity: "The real God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall; but the God created from human vanity sees no difference between an eagle and a sparrow."
  

Bite-Sized Blogging: Dracula (Chapter 7)

8 October. (My birthday.)

And I thought House of Leaves was involved! Here, Stoker writes Mina's journal (and lends her credibility by backing up with records from Lucy and Harker, the realities of both of which are also supported by still other sources), and within Mina's journal places the clipping of a newspaper writer, within which is the log of the Demeter--which is itself translated from Russian. It's a clever trick: provide citations and ordinary forms of narrative to make us forget that the story itself is fictional. I don't think Stoker has the chops to differentiate enough between styles to make us forget his own authorial voice and presence, but it's still fascinating. (Furthermore, Infinite Detox has a great post--as always--on the way this particular section manages to evoke the "sublime.")

To an extent, however, it does work. Horror only works when it is rooted in fact, and Stoker makes the wise choice not to trust blindly in mythology alone. It's like a wedding of styles, so he's got something old (legend), something new (his updating/editing of those myths), something borrowed (the narrative styles), something blue (the overall mood).

He's also got this: "Rough weather last three days, and all hands busy with sails, no time to be frightened." (Emphasis mine.) By taking his sweet time, Stoker correctly manages to scare us more than if he were simply to start with blood and guts and continue throughout. This is one of the many reasons why Alien and Predator are good franchises on their own, but terrible when set against one another. You need those hauntingly quiet moments in which the adrenaline fades long enough for us to worry. Ironically, he manages to get himself more time by condensing time itself into little chunks--it occurs to me that what is here just a mere snippet aboard the Demeter could have been a novel all on its own (like, say, Dan Simmons's Terror). He also scares us more: if this section is not frightening enough to merit further details, what greater evil lurks in wait for us?

To be fair, though, as The Valve neatly points out, that's not really a compelling enough reason for me to keep reading. What is all of this in the service of? At least with the aforementioned House of Leaves, there's a real sense of character, but so far, I'm just not getting enough out of the characters--though some of that may be a matter of historical perspective. (In fact, there was a whole discussion in the Infinite Summer comments about whether or not Harker was a sissy, or if modern society has just inappropriately grown to label polite--yet secretively strong--people like him as "girlie men.") I can't go on, I'll go on.

Bite-Sized Blogging: Dracula (Chapter 6)

7 October.

I wrote earlier of the danger of an unreliable narrator ("How well the man reasoned," writes Seward. "Lunatics always do within their own scope."). I spoke also of Stoker's manipulations: the way in which he translates Harker (and presumably Mina's) shorthands for one, but also how he chooses to reveal certain things. (It's also interesting what Stoker doesn't bother to translate--Mina's horrendous rendering of Mr. Swales's horrendous accent.)

For instance: what journal entries have we not been exposed to? I assumed, earlier, that Harker simply stopped recording the cat-and-mouse temptations of the Count, but maybe he clung fastidiously to his details after all, and Stoker just decided to cut to the good bits. I bring this up because Chapter 6 begins on July 24th, and for all we know, this seems as if it's the first time that Mina starts worrying about Harker (who was only supposed to be gone for a few days--at first--and then, coerced into writing letters, still should have been home shortly after June 29th).

The same goes for Dr. Seward's Diary entries, which are intensely focused on one patient, and which--despite being written weeks apart--seem as if no time has passed at all. 5 June: "He has at present such a quantity [of flies] that I have had myself to expostulate." 18 June: "He has turned his mind now to spiders, and has got several very big fellows in a box." 1 July: "His spiders are now becoming as a great a nuisance as his flies...." For the record, my expectations of what an asylum is like have now been shattered, too. (Also, is the chronology screwy or is Seward still pining over losing Lucy two months after being rejected?)

Now, if one agrees that Stoker is manipulating the text, part of the game becomes trying to figure out why he left certain sections in. The abrupt shift to Mina and Lucy and Lucy's coterie of suitors is for the means of suspense (Mina: "This suspense is getting dreadful"). There's also a bit of the author's smug self-satisfaction, in that he gets to know more than we do. But lingering on in details in the graveyard, as he does: why?

Well, first there seems to be a dig at Mr. Melville ("I thought he would be a good person to learn interesting things from, so I asked him if he would mind telling me something about the whale fishing in the old days"), and then we get the meatier bit--on the subject of legends: "It be all fool-talk, lock, stock, and barrel, that's what it be and nowt else. These bans an' wafts an' boh-bhosts an 'bar-guests an' bogles an' all anent them is only fit to set bairs an' dizzy women a'beldering'...invented...to get folks to do somethin' that they don't other incline to."

So here's the question: in choosing a supernatural menace for his otherwise realistic novel, what is it Stoker is trying to get us to do that we would not otherwise do?

Bite-Sized Blogging: Dracula (Chapter 5)

October 6.

When I first started re-reading Dracula, I was fearful of the fact that I remembered absolutely nothing from my initial read. Thankfully, I am not alone--many of the other Draculoggers remember only more recent readings, or viewings of the Keanu Reeves version. I wonder, though, does the brain intentionally forget things in order to allow us to retain that element of surprise? As I read, I cannot help but think how boring it would be to slog through this text if I already knew everything. A book like Infinite Jest dares you to read it again with Wallace-drenched eyes, but as of yet, everything in Dracula is on the surface.

Now, with the transition away from Harker's journal (and regression from that fated 30 June to the happier 9 May), there is at last real suspense, as I don't know if he's survived his precarious climb, or his more dangerous trek through the wolf-riddled woods. The irony is that this suspense is conjured up by departing from horror, and this is the one thing that horror movies have learned well. If you simply shock us again and again, we grow used to it: but if you show us something sinister, you taint even the most pleasant things around us, and can therefore make the rest of the film ever more terrifying simply by playing on our expectations that there must be more to come. (This is what makes Michael Haneke's films so suspenseful.)

And but so, we hear the delighted trills of Lucy Westenra, best friend of Mina Murray, the fiancee of Jonathan Harker. Not only is she thrice-removed from the action, but her mood is quite different ("I sympathize with poor Desdemona when she had such a stream poured in her ear, even by a black man"), and even she serves only--so far--as she introduces us to her three suitors, the American Quincey P. Morris, the young English psychiatrist Jack Seward, and the winning Arthur Holmwood. (Also, I seem to remember the name Renfield: he's a patient at Seward's asylum.) Given the time in which it was written, what sort of novel is this, that jumps through time, narrators, and moods? I've bitten off more than I thought.

Bite-Sized Blogging: Dracula (Chapter 4)

3 October.

(CONTINUED)

Continuing from the dreamily erotic ending of the last chapter ("languorous ecstasy," "a voluptuousness that was both thrilling and and repulsive," "some longing and at the same time some deadly fear"), Harker seems to have suddenly concluded that those women were awful, and that they "wanted to suck [his] blood." It's a remarkable shift, though he continues to equivocate by allowing that his "mind was not as usual."

Another shift is that of the narrative, which allows Stoker to cleverly "cheat" day-to-day conventions and to record only the juiciest (and soon to be bloodiest?) bits. The diary, which up until now has been a more-or-less daily occurrence, a labor of fastidious details designed to cling to some semblance of normality, now jumps whole weeks at a time. This has a nice flair of desperation to it--a panicked man's occasional bursts of energetic scratching at the wall--but at the same time, it's frustrating to lose our sense of day-to-day comparisons. That is, without seeing some of Harker's mundane rituals--his "cudgelling" of brains--it's hard to understand what he's clinging to. Or why the Count is still cat-and-mousing him: do they do nothing together any more? Further, if the Count has taken all of his clothes and papers, why not the diary, too?

On the other hand, at least things are happening, and to that end, I can handle the cheats:

• I don't mind that Harker, essentially an educated banker, happens to be a hyper-poetic observer: "No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be. When the sun grew so high this morning that is struck the top of the great gateway opposite my window, the high post which it touched seemed to me as if the dove from the ark had lighted there. My fear fell from me as if it had been a vaporous garment which dissolved in in the warmth."
• I can deal with for-the-sake-of-narrative inconsistencies, as when Harker announces that going into the dim vaults "was a dread to my very soul," and yet then goes on to account for the "great boxes, of which there were fifty in all." I'm glad he had the nerves left to observe everything in such detail. Just like I'm glad it turns out that Harker can scale the outside of a castle, ala Dracula.

Now, I'm not a fan of classics, and this is precisely why: we are taught to be forgiving of styles because of how innovative they were at the time, regardless of how often they have been improved upon since. (You would not, say, continue to use the world's first vacuum cleaner if a modern version were available.) Gothic horror is heavy-handed and not my style ("basilisk horror"? really?), and yet, I'm willing to forgive all of this--because now I want to see how my expectations will differ. I've become, so to speak, engaged.

Bite-Sized Blogging: Dracula (Chapters 2 & 3)

(CONTINUED)

2 October.

Before reading, I caught up with some thoughts on Chapter 1: Infinite Detox mentioned the deliberate misreadings of Harker's journal, i.e., one of the many ways in which that first chapter begins to allow for the supernatural to penetrate "reality." He and a few other Draculoggers also quoted Stoker's brilliant line of an "imaginative whirlpool," which every author--especially those who cross into fantasy of any kind--must achieve: they must suck us in to the point where we can believe. (In Chapter 2, Harker says that he is "all in a sea of wonders.") And Chloelikedolivia emphasizes transportation between worlds: "it seems that the east is being set up as being connected to magic, superstition, chaos (and paprika), while the west is order, business, and punctual trains."

What I'm struck by is the start of Chapter 2: the "continued" at the top of the page makes Stoker's presence all too clear; he has broken the journal for "dramatic effect." I'm not a fan of this: why bother with journal entries if you're going to add artificially dramatic endings? (That makes Stoker little more than a classical version of R. L. Stein.) But enough of that:

"I could see even in the dim light that the stone was massively carved, but that the carving had been much worn by time and weather." Things like that allow us to connect true horror with its age-old presence: it creeps out of a darkness deeper than sleep. This fits with Harker's constant waffling about events ("it perhaps seemed bigger than it really is") and his attempts to relegate the slight bends in reality/perception to the flexible nature of dreams: "I must have been asleep," begins the chapter. How naturally we assume anything unnatural to be a dream (a hundred years later, we'll be saying hello to Freddy Krueger).

Stoker also continues to emphasize cultural differences: "We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things." (For instance, the ghostly blue lights, which he understands to be an indicator of buried treasure--good--but which the peasants fear as evil spirits--bad.) Take religion, for example: unexplainable events are said to be miracles, but that's a matter of perception. What he's doing here--"But now I am glad that I went into detail from the first, for there is something so strange about this place and all in it that I cannot feel but uneasy"--is establishing an unreliable narrator, a timid and easily frightened speaker, who may not fully comprehend what he sees. What is unnatural to him may in fact be easily explained by custom.

What's interesting in reading this from a modern perspective is that our perception of vampires is different: who sees Dracula as "a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache"? So informed, in fact, that although Harker actually gives Dracula plausible reasons for not being out in the daylight, or not needing to eat, we read right into that as clearly supernatural. As for the bit with the mirror, or Dracula's reaction to Harker's nicked and bleeding cheek, well, these are harder to explain--but we've yet to actually abandon reality. Of mirrors, Dracula warns that we "take care" and beware "vanity": these are good things to remember as we reflect on the novel.

Later.

"Let me begin with facts--bare, meagre facts, verified by books and figures, and of which there can be no doubt. I must not confuse them with experiences which will have to rest on my own observation, or my memory of them." This bit, from Chapter 3, builds a bit more on the idea of Harker-as-unreliable narrator: nothing he writes is immediate, and everything is filtered by time and his own attempts to rationally explain things away. At the same time, it gives more weight to those things which he cannot explain, and also helps us to focus on the bits which Harker himself finds to be of value.

Oddly enough, it is not so much what is said that I find of import, as what is implied. Dracula's speech--the "story of his race"--is rather boring, told in the same sort of arching historical hyperbole that bogged down certain parts of The Lord of the Rings for me. However, it shows us Dracula's intense pride--ironically, a very humanizing characteristic: "We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races."

Also, going back to the idea of religion, which I mentioned earlier, there's the idea that "modernity" is a bad thing. That technology has distanced us from things that are actually true. Well, that's even true of 1890s London, and of the split between the comforts of Harker's city life and those of Dracula's old-world ways: "the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere 'modernity' cannot kill."

The main difference between this novel and Infinite Jest, however, is that most of these chapters are filled with plot, and I must say that Stoker is rather good at pacing his slow revelations: the tightening prison, Dracula-as-lizard, his coterie of female vampires, each journal entry brings a new danger to light, and each "fact" that we accept makes it harder to dismiss the next, slightly less credible fact. If it were not for this slow build--if we jumped directly to the killings (as most modern slasher films do), the spell would be broken.

Bite-Sized Blogging: Dracula (Chapter 1)

(KEPT IN BLOGHAND)

1 October. Manhattan.

Having joined Infinite Summer's next e-read, I started perusing Greybean's PDF version of Bram Stoker's Dracula at 1:45 P.M., marking the margins with little "Mem.," notations.

Stoker isn't great with description--he's passive, and twice-removed (first vicariously lived by the author through the tales of his acquaintances, then "relived" by the author's journal-keeping hero, Jonathan Harker). But Harker's voice--his unintentionally cruel observations ("The women looked pretty, except when you got near them")--is rich with character, and that's what is called for here. We need an atmosphere that can gradually break down our stubborn "reality" and allow us transport into the supernatural.

So Harker literally travels from mundane London ("I had to sit in the carriage for more than an hour before we began to move") to the "beauty of the scene" of Berlitz (fraying around the edges with "straggling ends of pine woods...[that] ran down the hillsides like tongues of flame" and "green grass...spangled with fallen petals"). How appropriate that we glimpse Isten szek (God's seat) as the sun goes down, just before Harker plunges into the darkness of the road to Dracula's castle: "Soon we were hemmed in with trees, which in places arched right over the roadway till we passed as though through a tunnel."

Dracula and vampires have been greatly corrupted in films today, but there are two things that are as true about horror then as they are about horror now:

1. The "hero" ignores all rational, common sense--and the veiled warnings of the townsfolk (who, bound by these same conventions of horror, can't just come out and stop him from going). It's true, though: we can't enter into the supernatural without agreeing to let certain things go.
2. For all that we may be terrified, we are always equally fascinated and curious. Sick, perhaps, but see how the villagers en route to Bukovina "peered eagerly into the darkness" with a "state of excitement" that "kept on for some little time."

Consider me both transported and curious. And excited by Stoker's promise: "It is only when a man feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understand their true import." Truth, in a classic horror novel? I'm in.