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Ch. 11 - 15: Dracula - by Bram Stoker

#174: April - June 2021 (Fiction)
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Harry Marks
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Re: Ch. 11 - 15: Dracula - by Bram Stoker

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Behind on the reading, but eager to jump in if only so I can get the feed from this discussion in my "View your Posts" section.
Mr. P wrote:Westernra is the last name of Lucy's family. Are they Western Civ and a symbol for the imagined purity of the west being corrupted by the evil of the foreign, mysterious, modern world?
There may be something in the name connection, but I don't think purity is the symbolic state of the West being implied, unless ironically. The West imagines itself pure, by virtue of the fantastic "progress" created by reason and industrialization. But the spirits at work most certainly include the spirit of domination. What could be nobler than enslaving others and harvesting their labor to become rich?
Stoker/Helsing wrote: “Can you tell me why men believe in all ages and places that there are some few who live on always if they be permit; that there are men and women who cannot die?"
Here I interrupted him. I was getting bewildered; he so crowded on my mind his list of nature’s eccentricities and possible impossibilities that my imagination was getting fired. I had a dim idea that he was teaching me some lesson, as long ago he used to do in his study at Amsterdam;
At present I am going in my mind from point to point as a mad man, and not a sane one, follows an idea. I feel like a novice lumbering through a bog in a mist, jumping from one tussock to another in the mere blind effort to move on without knowing where I am going.”
“That is good image,” he said. “Well, I shall tell you. My thesis is this: I want you to believe.”
“To believe what?”
“To believe in things that you cannot.
Okay, here we are at the heart of the matter. On one level this is just standard horror writing. Believe in things that are impossible but may jump out at you when you least expect it. The opposite of the message of the angels, "Fear not." But strangely cathartic and perhaps more popular in the modern age, precisely because we cannot believe in them and so we can have an uproarious good time pretending to.

But let's be honest. Are there not people out there dreaming of living for thousands of years? What was once science fiction is now entertained as real possibility. After all, if you can make 40 Billion dollars (can you comprehend 40 Billion dollars? I can't except in the most left-brained, blinkered possible way) why would you not be able to extend your life as long as you wish? And so the dark arena of wishful thinking invades the world of the everyday.

The bewildered interruption is an almost precise rendition of the condition of the left hemisphere trying to "comprehend" anything. And the right brain simply takes in what is, in order to orient the self realistically and move toward what realistically could be. Van Helsing wants him to believe. So now we are no longer in the fun house waiting to have someone jump out at us for the thrills, but are rather back in the world where some pretty devilish fantasies find realization. Believe in poison gas. Believe in trench warfare and commanders ordering men to jump out of the safety of the trenches and take 80 percent casualties to wear down the enemy. Believe in politicians selling out democracy for the sake of white supremacy. Believe in a single bomb that can wipe out a million lives in 10 seconds. Believe. None of these things were part of the world of Bram Stoker. But the potentials were becoming evident, and as with today, the plain evidence of what is can easily refute orderly fantasies of reasonableness.

The question is can we maintain the sanity to process reality and resist the downward pull of despair, nihilism, blaming, tribalism, and the ferocious preference for the struggle of the id over the observations of the societal ego?
Stoker/Helsing wrote: Let me illustrate. I heard once of an American who so defined faith: ‘that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.’ For one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him; but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe.”
Twain's comment is his ironic tip of the iceberg. He suppressed much that he wrote, knowing it would not be received well in nineteenth century America. No better than Liz Cheney's honesty is received in the part of present day America that prefers to believe it is still the 19th century. Bomb the enemy back to the Stone Age, to win their hearts and minds. Put up barriers to trade so we can be more competitive.

Van Helsing is also being ironic. The big truths are where technology and reason and social progress are taking humanity, and the small truths we must believe are the unbelievable things going on in society, representing evil tendencies with deep roots in the psyche. Believe that someone may send 10 million to the gas chambers, and that someone else may accept starving many million of his Ukrainian countrymen to advance industrialization, because those "small" truths will help you get your mind around the big truths.

And yet at the end of the quote he seems to be suggesting that believing in vampires is not the whole truth - that the universe is larger still. I can only read this as an assertion that Christian values, and deep-rooted faith in ritualist, peasant attachment to humility and a call upon the mercy of God, represent some hope against the onslaught of the technology-enabled scramble for domination. This is paradox worthy of Gandhi or St. Francis. Despite everything, fear not.
Mr. P wrote:I see many comment derisively on the ration man overlooking the possibility of the supernatural in these stories and becoming the fool, like Harker refusing to accept what he was seeing in the beginning. In the context of this story, and yes I get the suspension of disbelief and that this is a work of fiction, I guess this might be acceptable but it leaves me very dry. I would love to see the science of the toads encased in rock and then them coming back to life.
I just find it too easy for Stoker to have used these examples. It shows the gullibility and the hold of superstition still had on folks of that time and kinda made the story become less engaging for me at this point. It didn't ruin it, but...
Point taken. It is extremely difficult for moderns to hear about the supernatural without taking it as denial of reality. The idea that it had come to represent metaphor for deep wellsprings of common value is too hard to process rationally. Yet the habit of modern horror and sci-fi of taking their superpowers literally but not seriously should warn us that there is a different kind of denial at work, or rather a different kind of reality being denied.

And ooops! Suddenly it jumps up and bites us, and a charlatan picked out for Soviet backing 30 years before, whose chief attribute is skill at manipulating the Dark Side, becomes the nemesis of democracy and Candidate Palpatine. A man empowered by his father's vampiric spirit, and trained by the spirit of the witch hunts of the 50s, embodied in the twisted genius of Roy Cohn, descends on America like Lenin sent by the Germans against Russia.

If only it was just Chucky, or Freddy Krueger.
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Re: Ch. 11 - 15: Dracula - by Bram Stoker

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Harry Marks wrote:Behind on the reading, but eager to jump in if only so I can get the feed from this discussion in my "View your Posts" section.
I mainly use the “View Active Posts” link, which has the advantage of seeing interesting new threads but the disadvantage of being full of single post promotional material. Dracula is a gripping yarn, so you should be able to catch up.
Harry Marks wrote:
Mr. P wrote:Westernra is the last name of Lucy's family. Are they Western Civ and a symbol for the imagined purity of the west being corrupted by the evil of the foreign, mysterious, modern world?
There may be something in the name connection, but I don't think purity is the symbolic state of the West being implied, unless ironically. The West imagines itself pure, by virtue of the fantastic "progress" created by reason and industrialization. But the spirits at work most certainly include the spirit of domination. What could be nobler than enslaving others and harvesting their labor to become rich?
The name is Westenra, which doesn’t actually include ‘western’. The name that most evoked this agenda in my view is General Westmoreland, whose imperial efforts in Vietnam could plausibly be seen against the objective of obtaining more land for the West.

Dracula actually has quite an ambiguous relation to the West. Recall that he had explained to Harker in Chapter 3 how the Draculas had fought against the Turk. So we have this difficult situation that Dracula claims to be a defender of Western Civilization against the infidel, expressing great pride in his cultural heritage, and yet is the expression of pure evil. As I have noted already, this tension suggests that Stoker is picking up on folk traditions that imagined the vampire as somehow a representative of the power of the nobility to exploit the peasantry.

The English imagination formed the concepts of the Near East (the Balkans), the Middle East (Turkey to Iran) and the Far East (India to China). Dracula, as a representative of the Near East, strongly reminds me of Tolkien’s vision in The Lord of the Rings of Sauron as evil Lord of Mordor. Both represent an appalling evil power emanating from a region within the West a long way to the south east of England/the Shire. The need for Dracula to bring his Transylvanian earth in boxes to England seems to illustrate the centre of gravity of the west gradually moving westward since the Middle Ages.
Harry Marks wrote: Van Helsing wants him to believe. So now we are no longer in the fun house waiting to have someone jump out at us for the thrills, but are rather back in the world where some pretty devilish fantasies find realization. Believe in poison gas. Believe in trench warfare and commanders ordering men to jump out of the safety of the trenches and take 80 percent casualties to wear down the enemy. Believe in politicians selling out democracy for the sake of white supremacy. Believe in a single bomb that can wipe out a million lives in 10 seconds. Believe. None of these things were part of the world of Bram Stoker. But the potentials were becoming evident, and as with today, the plain evidence of what is can easily refute orderly fantasies of reasonableness.
I think this foreboding of the collapse of Victorian simple certainties was a big factor. The same idea of belief in the impossible is the core theme in The War of The Worlds by HG Wells, published in 1898. Two of the most popular books of that decade therefore prefigure the real horror of the First World War, by suggesting correctly that reality in terms of historical trajectory is actually quite different from popular opinion.
Harry Marks wrote: Twain's comment is his ironic tip of the iceberg. He suppressed much that he wrote, knowing it would not be received well in nineteenth century America.
Mark Twain’s famous line “Faith is believing what you know aint so” became for Helsing ““To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I heard once of an American who so defined faith: ‘that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.’”
The irony here seems to come from Stoker, who must be fully familiar with the atheistic implication of Twain’s mockery of faith, but for Helsing places it instead as a defence of faith. Where Twain was talking about the dubious psychological capacity to assent to the occurrence of miracles that conflict with all experience, Helsing converts it into the opposite:
He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him; but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe.”
Twain did not in the slightest mean we should have an open mind to the likelihood of impossible things occurring. Rather, he meant that faith is an intrinsically incoherent epistemic method. But Van Helsing reverses Twain’s intent to instead mean we should not allow our conventional perceptions to prevent recognition of larger truths that undermine them.
Harry Marks wrote:Van Helsing is also being ironic. The big truths are where technology and reason and social progress are taking humanity, and the small truths we must believe are the unbelievable things going on in society, representing evil tendencies with deep roots in the psyche. Believe that someone may send 10 million to the gas chambers, and that someone else may accept starving many million of his Ukrainian countrymen to advance industrialization, because those "small" truths will help you get your mind around the big truths.
I read it differently. Van Helsing seems to mean the big truths are the real trajectory of fate, while the small truths are our conventional beliefs. I don’t see the irony.
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Re: Ch. 11 - 15: Dracula - by Bram Stoker

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The name is Westenra, which doesn’t actually include ‘western’.
It literally includes every letter of western. And has less inclusivity of the word Westmoreland.

Not defending my observation, but thought it was funny. :D
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