Re: Ch. 1 - 5: Dracula - by Bram Stoker
Posted: Thu Apr 08, 2021 5:19 am
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: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.
“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: We are going to be treated to an experience deeper than the narrator's stiff upper lip is really ready for
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: , 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.
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: 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.
Dracula was based on the infamous Vlad the Impaler, the notoriously cruel ruler of Transylvania in the fifteenth century.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?
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.
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.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
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.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.