Introducing Count Dracula:

Bram Stoker wrote:I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back.
Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door. The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation:—
“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!” He made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant, however, that I had stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed as cold as ice—more like the hand of a dead than a living man. Again he said:—
“Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring!” The strength of the handshake was so much akin to that which I had noticed in the driver, whose face I had not seen, that for a moment I doubted if it were not the same person to whom I was speaking; so to make sure, I said interrogatively:—
“Count Dracula?” He bowed in a courtly way as he replied:—
“I am Dracula; and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in; the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest.”

This dramatic introduction has a number of points of interest.

• The rattling chains, clanking bolts and long disused lock create an oppressive atmosphere of imprisonment.
• Dracula is tall, old, moustachioed and clad entirely in black.
• His instruction that Harker should enter freely of his own will has a magical quality of entrapment, as though the foolish decision to step freely across the threshold of evil creates a power of control by the dark forces that would not happen if he had been forced to enter.
• It reminds me of one of the legends of Lancelot of the Lake, where the hero enters the castle of the Black Knight and immediately finds he has lost all courage and will, by black magic.
• Fixed into stone like a victim of the Gorgon’s stare, Dracula waits until the liminal point is reached before moving impulsively like a striking snake.
• His icy cold dead hand (hello Charlton) has supernatural strength.
• His cryptic instruction to leave some happiness sounds like code for leaving his blood.
• The dramatic tension peaks as Harker and Count Dracula courteously introduce themselves, seemingly beginning the dance of the doomed as the cat plays with its victim.

Physical features of the vampire are described as including hairy palms, sharp fingernails, rank breath inducing shuddering nausea, and protuberant canine teeth. Count Dracula also explains his love of hunting, on hearing the howling of wolves, putting the reader in mind of his predatory plans.

Bram Stoker wrote:Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine; but seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse—broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal. The Count, evidently noticing it, drew back; and with a grim sort of smile, which showed more than he had yet done his protuberant teeth, sat himself down again on his own side of the fireplace. We were both silent for a while; and as I looked towards the window I saw the first dim streak of the coming dawn. There seemed a strange stillness over everything; but as I listened I heard as if from down below in the valley the howling of many wolves. The Count’s eyes gleamed, and he said:—
“Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!” Seeing, I suppose, some expression in my face strange to him, he added:—
“Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter.”

I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky.
P.26

This was Jonathan Harker's initial impression of Count Dracula's residence. Later on, Dracula states the following.

Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken. The shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements.
P. 40

Presumably the Count is quite wealthy, yet his castle is in marked disrepair. So why is he buying a 20 acre fixer-upper in England if he can't maintain his current domicile? This is very strange...

The invisibility of Count Dracula in the mirror is a very creepy and spooky story, that starts Harker on the terrifying thought that his host is not a living human being.

Bram Stoker wrote:I fear I am myself the only living soul within the place. Let me be prosaic so far as facts can be; it will help me to bear up, and imagination must not run riot with me. If it does I am lost. Let me say at once how I stand—or seem to. I only slept a few hours when I went to bed, and feeling that I could not sleep any more, got up. I had hung my shaving glass by the window, and was just beginning to shave. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard the Count’s voice saying to me, “Good-morning.” I started, for it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass covered the whole room behind me. In starting I had cut myself slightly, but did not notice it at the moment. Having answered the Count’s salutation, I turned to the glass again to see how I had been mistaken. This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself. This was startling, and, coming on the top of so many strange things, was beginning to increase that vague feeling of uneasiness which I always have when the Count is near; but at the instant I saw that the cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin. I laid down the razor, turning as I did so half round to look for some sticking plaster. When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. I drew away, and his hand touched the string of beads which held the crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed so quickly that I could hardly believe that it was ever there.
“Take care,” he said, “take care how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous than you think in this country.” Then seizing the shaving glass, he went on: “And this is the wretched thing that has done the mischief. It is a foul bauble of man’s vanity. Away with it!” and opening the heavy window with one wrench of his terrible hand, he flung out the glass, which was shattered into a thousand pieces on the stones of the courtyard far below. Then he withdrew without a word. It is very annoying, for I do not see how I am to shave, unless in my watch-case or the bottom of the shaving-pot, which is fortunately of metal.

In this episode, we see our first clear direct evidence of the supernatural demonic powers that the story is describing. The totally astounding observation of a person who creates no reflection generates extreme anxiety. But then, the blood dripping on Harker’s chin from his shaving cut sends the vampire into a murderous frenzy, only halted by the next supernatural thing, accidentally touching the rosary beads that hold the cross of Jesus Christ. Here the crucifix, which Harker had dismissed as nothing but a primitive fetish, displays its power to bring the presence of the holiness of God into the world. By connecting our fallen situation to the eternal truth of divine goodness, the cross stands as symbol of defiance against the powers of evil. The dramatic shattering of the mirror on the rocks a thousand feet below the window symbolises the evil intent of the vampire to destroy any connection to the divine. With a mastery of understatement, Harker’s prosaic description of this frightening experience as “very annoying” underscores his desire to hang onto some semblance of normality in a deeply abnormal and scary situation. Our world is not as it seems.

The vampire's advice to take care of the dangers of his country continues his charade of polite nobility while positively dripping with menace and threat.

Lan Droid wrote: Presumably the Count is quite wealthy, yet his castle is in marked disrepair. So why is he buying a 20 acre fixer-upper in England if he can't maintain his current domicile? This is very strange...

I am thinking, and in no way sure, that the decrepit nature of his castle is a complement to his existence. Or... His decrepit existence spreads to his environs.

Harry Marks wrote:I was struck by the "travel writing" sense with which it started out, noting foods to pay attention to, etc. It was written at a time when prosperous Brits were becoming the travelers of the world, especially of Europe, being able to afford it just for the experience.

Hi Harry, great to see you are reading along. I see the famous Thomas Cook tourist guide books that popularised the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe in the nineteenth century did not include any Slavic countries, which it seems may have been too wild and foreign. Stoker’s placement of Dracula in Transylvania seeks to draw upon British prejudice against the broader Slavic region, as noted in his comment that the roads are not maintained because that would enflame war tensions with Turkey.

Harry Marks wrote: We are going to be treated to an experience deeper than the narrator's stiff upper lip is really ready for

“Stiff upper lip” is a classic phrase of the British Empire, how the aristocratic school system inculcated resolute concealment of emotion and stoic indifference in the face of adversity. Dracula was written at the end of the Victorian Era, the very height of empire, like War of the Worlds by HG Wells. Both books present an incomprehensible adversary, a fear that the sense of control that the Empire had created was illusory, because reality was far more powerful and frightening than the complacency of England could see. Another great book of that period is The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, which similarly challenges the power of conscious rationality to explain reality. The theme is the complacency of British arrogance in the face of powerful mystery.

Harry Marks wrote: , but this is not "Heart of Darkness" where greed is leading to indulgence of chthonic spirits, but rather a path to re-discovering occult powers that include the Christian ones those Brits are beginning to view with a skeptical eye. I think it is a bit like Jekyll and Hyde, another exploration of the shadow side of reason and enlightenment.

I don’t understand the ‘indulgence of chthonic spirits’ reference. Skepticism about the occult was a longstanding British and wider European trait, seen in the widespread witch burnings of early modern times, involving a rejection of magical traditions in favour of the simplicity of Christian dogma, which had a sort of authorised magic in its miraculous supernatural content. Newton’s mechanistic philosophy put the empirical temper of Britain into overdrive, with the sense that mystery could be completely excluded from philosophy through rational observation. An irony is that the supreme British rationalist, Sherlock Holmes, was invented by the highly credulous occultist Conan Doyle. Booktalk discussed Heart of Darkness in 2008, but sadly my posts at that time became mysteriously truncated.

Harry Marks wrote: The blend of "local" with superstition is significant, but this dreaded power is going to emerge and infect London, like some plague from the bush meat eaters.

Good comparison with the pandemic. The theme is that allegedly rational complacency is anything but rational, ignoring the need to be ready for unknown threats.

Harry Marks wrote: I am leaning toward thinking of it as an atavistic image of the capitalists' adopting the ways of inhuman feudal lords. And was it not industrial capitalism that was leading up to the slaughter of WWI, in which science proudly offered poison gas to defend the boys in the trenches, and promoted jingoistic nihilism?

Dracula was based on the infamous Vlad the Impaler, the notoriously cruel ruler of Transylvania in the fifteenth century.

The blood sucking image of capitalism as a vampire system was one that Marx had used extensively. http://gretl.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/OPE/ ... heDead.pdf provides the following examples, which illustrate how Stoker’s book came at a culmination of the Victorian Gothic Horror tradition.

Terrell Carver has suggested that Marx uses the vampire metaphor three times in Capital. 6 Marx claims that ‘capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’. He also comments that the prolongation of the working day into the night ‘only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour’; thus ‘the vampire will not let go “while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited” ’.7 But if one also explores the text for comments that appear to derive from the vampire motif but fail to mention the vampire explicitly, one finds a wealth of additional material. Capital ‘sucks up the worker’s value-creating power’ and is dripping with blood.8 Lacemaking institutions exploiting children are described as ‘blood-sucking’, while US capital is said to be financed by the ‘capitalized blood of children’.9 The appropriation of labour is described as the ‘life-blood of capitalism’, while the state is said to have here and there interposed itself ‘as a barrier to the transformation of children’s blood into capital’.10

So the thrill of the imaginary vampire in the novel provides a psychological sublimation of observation of economic exploitation into the fantasy of supernatural horror, perhaps providing a way to respond to people's emotional repugnance at the market system without explicitly criticising it.

Harry Marks wrote: The imagery is deliciously oppressive, and the treatment of rationality as double-edged is delightfully intriguing. Rationality gives Harker the nerve to boldly go where no Englishman has gone before, and gives him the foolishness to assume he can deal with whatever arises. We can see this two-sided nature in the contrast with his growing foreboding.

Similar examples of the trope of the rational fool that were prominent in the British mind of the time include the murder of Gordon in Sudan, the meeting of Stanley and Livingstone in darkest Africa, and later the death of Scott of the Antarctic. Harker is the colonial adventurer, the pioneer explorer finding strange mysteries in unknown lands.

Not jumped into a serious book discussion on here before, but I been following this forum and refreshing myself with the book.

What stands out to me is how the story rockets off when Jonathan Harker begins to feel a prisoner. It's a lonesome feeling as he's very far from home. Things get even more dire when he counts the dates on the letters and realizes in doing so, he's learning the time ofhis demise. What a powerful writing mechanism that is.

I know my views on the book are somewhat tinted by the movie adaptions, Nosferatu being the one that stands out the most, so I can't even imagine how early audiences perceived the suspense, but for me, I felt it really come alive with those bits of info.

Not to throw the discussion off, but I find it disappointing that it's super easy to self-publish now but very few people take time to explore classic fiction. One need not have a treasure to find quality books. Library cards are free and virtual cards plentiful.

Brooks127 wrote:Not jumped into a serious book discussion on here before, but I been following this forum and refreshing myself with the book.

Well that's a shame since it seems from the following comments that you have a lot to offer.

Brooks127 wrote: What stands out to me is how the story rockets off when Jonathan Harker begins to feel a prisoner. It's a lonesome feeling as he's very far from home. Things get even more dire when he counts the dates on the letters and realizes in doing so, he's learning the time of his demise. What a powerful writing mechanism that is.

Yes!!! I did indeed say the same thing to myself... And now I am disappointed that I didn't mention it here. His realization of his doom was heartbreaking to me. I am not one who admits defeat and I felt that hit home. But...he overcame and made it. So that's heartening at least.

Brooks127 wrote:Not to throw the discussion off, but I find it disappointing that it's super easy to self-publish now but very few people take time to explore classic fiction. One need not have a treasure to find quality books. Library cards are free and virtual cards plentiful.

I am on the fence about this. Fact is, people are not going to read what they do not want to read. But what is good is that authors that get overlooked by the machine of the publishing industry get to show the world, or at least a few folks, what they have to offer. There was one post on here promoting a self published book that I checked out. It seems to have a good premise and it read well for the first chapter or two (Boys of the Breach. ) So I am happy it was made available and I will be reading it.

But like what happened to music...it does tend to dilute the quality, IMO. So I put the onus on me to still seek out what makes me happy.

Mr. Pessimistic wrote:Well that's a shame since it seems from the following comments that you have a lot to offer.

Thanks for the acknowledgement. I feel the same towards your commentary.

Mr. Pessimistic wrote:I am on the fence about this. Fact is, people are not going to read what they do not want to read. But what is good is that authors that get overlooked by the machine of the publishing industry get to show the world, or at least a few folks, what they have to offer.

Thanks for sharing that. It puts things in a better perspective for me and brings to mind a sobering conversation I had with a friend at Universal Records. We got to talking about what makes a great band. I brought up desert rock and Kyuss, a band I first heard on cassette as a teen and one that caused my mouth to drop the same way Alice in Chains and Spread Eagle did. I argued that bands left to their own devices sometimes come up with the most unique sound. The counter argument to this is bands need the competition that a vibrant club scene fosters. I see both sides but concede there's something magical about isolation's affect on creativity.

Mr. Pessimistic wrote:There was one post on here promoting a self published book that I checked out. It seems to have a good premise and it read well for the first chapter or two (Boys of the Breach. ) So I am happy it was made available and I will be reading it.

Thanks for sharing the title. I looked up the book. If I got the right title, it has West Virginia as the backdrop. Yeah, I really like it when authors mix SF/FF with contemporary sociopolitical issues. It's got an edge.

I got some thoughts on Chapter 6 of Dracula. I'll share them in the appropriate forum.

Chapter 3 begins with Count Dracula recounting his high noble history, as the Dracula family has led the Huns of Transylvania over the centuries in war against enemies such as the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, or the Turk. There is a sense here that the author Bram Stoker is channelling the vampire spirit, imagining how such a monster would think. It contributes to the steady rise of a creepy tension, a sense of grave foreboding.

The reputed hot blood of the Balkans emerges in Dracula’s statement that “We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship.” The magical mythical sense of European ancient heritage appears in the statement “Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, ay, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that the were-wolves themselves had come.”

For Dracula in this way to acknowledge the real existence of the violent Norse Gods Thor and Wodin in the ‘fell intent’ of the Berserkers, who fought like werewolves, helps to build the supernatural imagery.

The constant refrain of blood continues with Dracula asking “What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?” The chill fear of the name of Attila the Hun, spoken here with pride and reverence, fills Harker with a cold dread.