My Dark Muse: Reading "Dracula" (Part 2 of 2)

(The second part of an article which attempts, rightly or wrongly, to persuade that Dracula by Bram Stoker deserves to be called “literature.”)

“So great was the magnetism of his genius, so profound was the sense of his dominancy that I sat spellbound”—Bram Stoker on Henry Irving

The third stroke of genius to be found in Dracula is how Stoker stage manages his titular character. Once Dracula abandons Jonathan Harker to his blood-hungry (and equally abandoned) wives in his Transylvanian ruin in Chapter 4, the reader seldom sees the Count cavort across center stage again.

Instead, he stays hovering at the edge of the reader’s inner eye, creeping and teasing, red eyes glittering and glowing from every corner. From time to time, he storms in to slake his thirst, then dashes off, a prankish specter from a barely remembered dream, his only mark a bloody stain on the throat and metallic feeling in body and soul. His ability to shape shift and control the elements make him a prankster, screwing with people’s minds for the hellish joy of it.

Sometimes he appears as a stranger in encounters with unwary witnesses (such as a scene set in the Zoological Garden). Often he’s glimpsed from far off: for instance, when Mina Harker comes upon him at a distance as he feeds on Lucy Westenra in the Whitby cemetery (“ . . . and something raised a head and from where I was I could see a face and red, gleaming eyes”).

We also seem him at odd angles, as when Mina glimpses him feeding from Lucy as she slumps across her bedroom window sill; and, in another delightfully eerie episode when Renfield escapes from Dr. Seward’s asylum on one of his otherwise puzzling missions.

Some contemporary readers become impatient with this teasing, with expectations of action from page one. In fact, it would have been easy for Stoker to put Dracula at center stage of every chapter. But he chose not to, and he was spot-on right. He may have rightly sensed that too much of Dracula would only cheapen him, douse his mystery and magic, and diminish his threat. The devil, I recall it being said somewhere, is not even black when dragged into sunlight. Or that matter, under glaring stage lights.

Finally, we come to Dracula’s last stroke of genius. As an astute fellow admirer of this ungainly novel pointed out to me, no one reads Dracula because they want to root for Jonathan Harker, Professor Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, Renfield, or even Mina Harker (after Dracula, the novel’s most successful, nuanced characterization).

We read Dracula because we want to root for Dracula and no one else. The real hero of Dracula is . . . Dracula.

In traditional pop genre narratives, the protagonist is always also the good guy, the one we want to like and root, for as writing groups and online reviewers never tire of insisting: the hero must be “lovable” and work for the Good. Even in literary genre works like The Maltese Falcon, the venal Sam Spade still glimmers with some heroism when he overrides his passion to deliver Brigid O’Shaughnessy to the law. He’s not “likable” or “relatable,” but, pragmatically, he manages to do the right thing.

With Dracula, Bram Stoker—maybe without meaning to—turns heroic ideology completely on its head. Count Dracula is a romantic nihilist, barren of even a single redeeming moral feature. He doesn’t even qualify as an “anti-hero,” at least in my understanding of the word. He never invites sympathy. Even the “look of peace” that rises in his face before he sinks to dust, seems an uncertain, tacked-on gesture. The book has not done one thing to prepare us for it. This includes the Count’s remark, during Harker’s memorable encounter with his wives in Chapter 3: “Yes, I too can love” comes across as a shudder-inducing homo-erotic teasing, not an expression of humane sentiment.

Dracula’s attitude toward morality and humanity is as black as deep space, blacker than his sleep: “[Y]our peasant is at heart a coward and fool!” he claims with icy grandiosity. He’s ruthless, immoral, self-seeking and a hundred other synonymous adjectives from Roget’s. Humanity’s blood flows coldly through his veins.

And so my shadow, the place where it's always sunset and midnight and the moon always shines while wolfbane blooms, alights upon the dark earth and dances.

Dracula is, perversely, is the one we root for, the one we’ve always rooted for. How could we not? There is a perverse, anarchic joy about him: the capering of a man free and happy with himself, who savors his Eternal Stay in this Life. As with the purest sociopath, he’s a monster because his awful powers permit it. His real-life counterparts may be found in such figures as Hitler and bin laden.

Unlike real-life monsters though, Dracula is so much fun, this fiend who can shape shift into other animals, make himself invisible, turn himself into smoke and shadow and rides on beams of moonlight; he who commands the creatures of the night and lives free and above our grimy struggles, petty pains and deep loneliness. No matter how base and evil, this magician of flesh and soul, of matter and mind, enchants, a God turned morally inside out.

How does this happen, especially in a work intended to be popular, to soothe and entertain? One easy answer might be Stoker’s clumsy hand with his heroes. Dracula looks so good because the good guys—the ones we’re supposed to root for—are so dull.

So, perhaps, Bram Stoker simply wasn’t interested in his heroes. He put them in his narrative because he had to put someone—keeping with this book’s morally perverse tone, call them antagonists—in conflict with the real hero of the story.

This still leaves the question: Why Dracula the hero? The answer may well lie in Stoker’s thirty-year association with the greatest actor of the Victorian Era—Sir Henry Irving, a titan of his era.

Henry Irving was an extraordinary man. The first actor ever to be knighted by the Queen, he was both enormously popular and controversial and, not surprisingly, domineering and self-centered to a fault. As one story goes, he walked out on his wife for good from their horse-drawn carriage after she needled him about his future as an actor. He never spoke to her again, or, for many years, to their two children.

Stoker and Irving met in 1877, after Stoker, a theater critic at the time, extravagantly praised Irving’s performance in Hamlet. Stoker fell under the spell of Irving’s dynamism and hired on as the energetic, hard-working manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theater. Once Irving fastened on Stoker, there was no letting go.

Most sources—especially Barbara Belford’s book Bram Stoker and the Man Who was Dracula—say that Stoker (along with many others) worshipped Henry Irving. Working for Irving was no walk-on part, involving long, draining hours, exact attention to detail and catering to a boss known for imperiousness, extravagance, and recklessness. It was said that more than anyone, it was jovial, diligent Bram Stoker who kept Henry Irving’s Lyceum from going under until Irving’s death in 1905 (touchingly described in Bedford’s book—he left this life like a trouper!).

As much as Stoker adored Irving, however, keeping after this thundering whirlwind was a chore. It’s not too hard to imagine deep undercurrents of resentment and a certain moral tension welling to the surface. Given the hold Irving seems to have had over Stoker’s mind, it’s not surprising that a loyal employee might build up an unconscious store of resentment: “Can’t kill my boss . . . but I can portray him as a monster!” From there, rose the central figure and hero of Stoker’s most lasting contribution, a magical fusion of love and loathing, a unique palimpsest of the darkest corner of the human spirit.

(Re-edited 6/7/11)

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author.

Thomas Burchfield can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.

My Dark Muse: Reading "Dracula" (Part 1 of 2)

Over the years, I've grown fond of describing Dracula by Bram Stoker as “the greatest novel ever written by a hack.”

Brother, you should see the looks I get. To some (especially those of uncritical "fannish" inclination), this is another of those Elitist Slurs from a Brainwashed Canon Snob. Maybe, but nothing else I’ve read—or have tried to read--by Stoker is nearly as good, nor has had as such a creeping influence on both western literature and culture, as has this haunting and enchanting novel. (The exception: his short story “Dracula’s Guest,” a chapter cut from the final manuscript for Dracula.)

Bram Stoker was no literary genius in the strict sense. Nor was he a pop culture, Dan-Brown mastermind because Dracula has never really been a blockbusting bestseller. (In fact, I’m always struck by the number of people who know Dracula like a next-door neighbor but have never read the novel. Really, if you read no other horror novel in your life, do read this one; and if you read genre fiction and horror, but haven’t read it . . . Good Lord . . . .)

But, somehow, it is a novel with genius in it, a sinister brilliance that lives separately from its author. Dracula is a novel of unintended vision. A hundred years and thousands of movies, sequels, parodies and post-modern takedowns later, Dracula still stands tall to me, roaring midnight lightning caught in a bottle.

Sure, maybe it has no business being a Member of the Canon, but there it is: a scruffy, baggy, disreputable cousin you have to include in the family photo, maybe just because people still admire him after so much time. Dracula is one of the fundamental texts in genre fiction.

By my eyes, there are four strokes of genius in Dracula, two of which I’ll address in this posting. 

The first stroke of unexpected genius—or ingenuity--is the novel’s structure. It’s an epistolary novel--a collage of diary entries, ship’s logs, letters and newspaper articles; a literary kaleidoscope, dream shards shared through different points of view, linked nightmares from which a reader can’t awaken until Stoker the dream maker is ready to let go. These shifting points of view create a somewhat impressionistic air that enhances both the mystery and power of its unifying central character.

The second stroke of genius is the bursts of energy and color that Stoker splashes across his sprawling lumpy stage. Admittedly, this is not always apparent. The story slows for a while after those four rip-roaring opening chapters, when we abandon Jonathan Harker alone with Dracula’s wives on moon-haunted windswept castle ramparts and fly to England for a little sunshine normalcy to set the stage for the invasive terror about to come ashore.

At this point, Stoker’s weaknesses as a writer become exposed to sunlight; for one, his clumsy way with characterization: Many of his characters seem to make little sense—Quincey Morris, the man of action who accomplishes zip; the grossly entertaining, but equally useless Renfield. (That Dracula would pick a mad man locked up in an insane asylum as his daytime cat’s paw and assistant reflects poorly on the Count’s hiring practices.); Lucy Westenra, the prattling, manipulative bubblehead; and Dr. Seward, a man I wouldn't see for a hangnail.

Possibly the silliest of all is Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, one of the most irritating literary conceits I’ve ever encountered. Van Helsing is a mishmash of unrelated traits who pontificates in a childish Euro-English. Sometimes he’s a Dutch Catholic, sometimes a Dutch Protestant; sometimes noble; sometimes merely crass and always ham-fisted, stiff and lugubrious. For a wise old hero-guide in Joseph the Campbell mode, Van Helsing is a terrible vampire hunter; he even gets at least one character killed.

Stoker also indulges the Victorian tendency to flood the pages with rivers of sentimental turbidity (though after having recently been trapped with Esther Summerson in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, I now feel much more forgiving--at least Stoker’s book is shorter).

Stoker also has certain of his supporting characters speaking in exact dialect. Writing phonetic speech to match a dialect tends to make a character distant and flat, into someone clown-like and infantile. This is why so many readers find this kind of dialogue offensive, no matter how well intentioned. As an example, the monologue of Mr. Swales, an old salt of the sea who befriends Mina Harker and Lucy, is unreadable without translation (First-timers can find one in both the Leonard Wolf and Leslie Klinger annotations.)

Still, Stoker compensates with bursts of great narrative writing throughout. He has a great eye for setting here. He traveled far in his eventful life, but never made it to Transylvania and so gets the geography wrong. Still, his imagined Transylvania is magical—more accurate renderings might well have flattened his tale. He also describes Whitby, the Count’s first beachhead, with pleasing color and homey elements that contribute to the suspense.

Still, for awhile, Dracula’s shadow threatens to fade away and take the novel with it. But mercifully, before too much time has passed, we find ourselves aboard the freighter The Demeter, and Stoker’s passion for his titular character rises again with the storm, as Dracula slowly, teasingly, turns the vessel into a ghost ship.

From here, vivid feverish episodes from unease to full horror roll and blaze across the page: Dracula’s slow stalking of Lucy and the deaths of Lucy and her mother; the tracking of Lucy to the cemetery and her destruction; and though Renfield’s role makes no sense, the episodes with him manage to thrill, disgust, and chill anyway.

(To be continued)

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by Author

Thomas Burchfield can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.

Unfinished Business #7: Praying for a Flood

A couple of weeks ago, I sent the final files for my ripping horror yarn Dragon’s Ark into Lightning Source/Ingram: Its short, sometimes pot-holed road to publication was reaching its terminus. I received my first copy at the end of March. It’s a lovely cover as you can see—or at least lovely in the Gothic sense: stark, hypnotic, forceful, brilliant.

In the run-up during the weeks before, Joel Friedlander, my interior designer, suggested planting a few words from one of the blurbs I’ve received on the front page, under my byline. I selected some of David Corbett’s kind and excellent words, but when I presented it to cover designer Cathi Stevenson, she couldn’t make them fit. Nor, I decided, would they have fit well higher up the cover because they might have distracted from the “Dragon’s” cruel, compelling stare. I love it as it is, how he grabs the eyes, unapologetic in his ruthless intelligence and ferocity, a character out of classic horror fiction. Like I always imagined Dracula would be.

I imagine bookstore customers coming upon it. They freeze suddenly, sunk into dumb hypnosis. They then marching stiffly over to the cashier: “Must . . . buy  . . . Dragon’s Ark . . .  mmm . . .  no . . .  buy TEN . . . copies . . . Dragon’s Ark.”

On March 31, I sent my approval for Dragon’s Ark to be released.

April 26, 2011, I thought. That day draws closer.  Plans started to congeal for the week leading up to that date. I ordered 22 copies from Ingram (my credit card screamed as its flesh was torn once again), ten of which will be for sale at my first public reading on Sunday, April 17; the rest for individual sales and gifts.

I suppose I should have waited awhile. The next day, April 1, 2010, my email box displayed a Facebook message from lovely FB friend Janna Shoemaker:

“I ORDERED your book Dragon's Ark from Amazon, I should be getting it in a week!! I CANT WAIT TO READ IT :D Thanks ! ;).”

I stammered out a reply, something along the lines of: er, um, really wasn’t intending on releasing it now you know. I was kinda gonna wait . . . .

And then I sighed . . . Oh, the hell with it . . . Let's go! as Pike Bishop says in The Wild Bunch.

You can buy Dragon’s Ark right now at your local bookstore (the ethical preferred method), or you can order it here at the non-taxpaying corporation called Amazon, at Barnes and Noble, or you can wait a couple weeks until it’s ready for the KindleNookPad.

Since then, I’ve found two text errors. I won’t tell you what they are. For those who collect ephemera such as print and continuity errors in books, you’ll have to go out and buy a copy. (People do this with movies—even great ones—so I imagine they do it with books, too. A challenging exercise in detective work, not necessarily hostile.)

I’ll find more errors. Maybe some of you will tell me yourselves. However the news comes, it’s best not to think about it now, even though I know that there will be readers who throw books into the trash the second a comma slips or an unzipped modifier shows the slightest dangle.

I will receive bad reviews. I will also receive positive reviews. And I will receive views that are negative, but interested and thoughtful and speaking with a sound, quiet voice—“Nice try, Burchfield, but here’s where you went wrong.” I look forward to those. You have to step around in front of your ego if you want to be good at what you do.

As for persnickety Amazon flatheads, like John Waters’ Serial Mom, they only want to stick their scissors in someone, it doesn’t matter who, or why. The sticking of the scissors, the knowledge that they’re causing pain, that’s the thing. They’ve been with us since the dawn of consciousness, through the Hill at Calvary, through the last awful century and into this one. There’s no point in writing for them. It’s one of the things I hate most about the Internet. Sometimes I think the web is nothing but a chorus of psychopaths, drowning out the best voices among us.

And there will also be able to who simply “don’t like this kind of thing,” whether because it’s genre fiction or horror fiction. Or maybe they think I “should be writing something else.” Nothing I can do about them, either. No book has ever pleased everyone. Dragon’s Ark will definitely be no exception.

Whatever happens, I’m not waiting to shoot up the bestseller lists. I won’t even check my sales figures for a little while. It’ll be drips and trickles at first, maybe for quite along time to come. But I’ll praying for a flood.

No, I’m not Alfred A. Knopf. (Hell, even they’re not Alfred E. Knopf anymore). Instead, let’s pretend it’s 1957 and I’m Roger Corman—a hero to scrappy talented independent artists everywhere--trying to make the best movie I can on only a dime. Maybe the editing’s a tad choppy, the dialogue flat, the camerawork shaky . . .

. . .  but darn aren’t we having fun . . . ?

Or, I hope, aren’t you having fun?

Dragon’s Ark: Go for it.

(re-edited 4/11/11)

Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark  is available right NOW, published by Ambler House Publishing and can be ordered through your local independent bookstore, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and will be available as an e-book by the end of April. Other essays and postings can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.
 

Announcement: "Dragon's Ark" by Thomas Burchfield. Now available in Paperback at Independent Bookstores, Amazon and B&N

DRAGON’S ARK 

A Tale of the Supernatural by Thomas Burchfield

For over a century, Dracula—the King of Nightmares, the Superman of Evil—has been quietly casting his dark and impish dreams in the sleeping souls of a High Sierra community, who only know him as the eccentric old recluse who lives under the forbidding peak known as Dragon’s Ark. But now, facing a modern world bent on cleansing the shadows from his enchanting, haunted world, the Vampire King brings a dying woman back from the brink and ensnares her in a grim, ruthless struggle with resort developers over the future of his mountain kingdom.

Dragon’s Ark is a weird, thrilling, and violent tale of supernatural power, intrigue, betrayal, and surreal bloody revenge that follows a fabulous legend’s bizarre and bloodthirsty quest to preserve his life and power against the relentless, dreamless light of the 21st century.

“Like a tightrope artist, Thomas Burchfield seems eerily at home walking the fine line between the comfortably familiar and the terrifying. His characters—people you'll recognize, and like—have all blundered much too close to the portal of the unknown. And what resides beyond that portal makes Hell look like Club Med. Dragon's Ark is not a book to read just before nodding off. Unless you're on very good terms with your nightmares.”

—David Corbett, author of Do They See Me Running?

“Burchfield muscles his way into Stephen King country, like he’s Bram Stoker taking a stab at writing Our Town — the sort of entertainment where you transport Transylvania to the mountainous peaks of California. Population: a large and diverse cast of characters. Then grab a seat, in anticipation of the first droplets of blood”

―Don Herron, author of The Dashiell Hammett Tour Book and Willeford

"Thomas Burchfield is a world-class master of suspense and makes a heavy statement on the blood-sucking exploitation that goes on all around us. Dracula not only lives in our world, he is our world. With a language clear and beautiful as a sunset, Burchfield leads you down the path of darkness"
 
—John-Ivan Palmer, author of Motels of Burning Madness

Now Available from Ambler House Publishing
In POD Editions Through Lightning Source/Ingram, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble!

Coming Soon in e-book Editions!

For more information visit the Dragon’s Ark page at http://amblerhouse.blogspot.com
E-mail: amblerhouse at att.net

or call (510) 541-1991

A Hell House Revisited

The time: Winter, 1980. While preparing for a long bus ride home to Minneapolis from Winona,Minnesota, I buy a paperback at a small bookstore: a horror novel, a genre I loved as a boy, but now consider myself too highbrow and hairy-chested to read much anymore. I’d dug Stephen King’s The Shining, plus his two other earlier novels Salem’s Lot and Carrie, but—sniff sniff—no, my earnest sensitive young man’s ego would not allow me to even touch the notion that this childish fiction deserved the dearly sought label of “literature,” a category that only, in the last hundred years, had been defined as books read only by a relative few.

What snares me about this particular volume is its five pages of praising blurbs—not only from Stephen King, but also such high-brows as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt at, yes, The New York Times! One review even claims that “ . . . it tells us something about ourselves.”

Oh yeah! We’ll see about that, we will!

That novel is Ghost Story. Its author is Peter Straub. The opening lines sink their cold fangs into my nerves, right away:

“What was the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“I won’t tell you that. But I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me. The most dreadful thing.”

(Never mind the chill you feel; consider the moral implications of that exchange; the evasion of responsibility it implies).

After that, for maybe the first hundred pages, I am treated to an undeniably extremely intelligent, literary, well-written, if a little plodding, novel. For a time, I worry that it might be a “shaggy ghost” stories where the threat turns out to be only a hologram image concocted by some evil, but very reality-based, trickster, or caused by LSD in the water supply, (these almost always make me groan; even then, I believed literary and cinematic monsters should be “real,” even though I don't believe in their real-world existence.)

Then somewhere after page 100, a switch flicks on in a far corner cave of my mind. Two nights later, in a sweat of ecstatic horror and suspense, I close the book and think something like, Golly . . . that's best book I've read since Gravity’s Rainbow.

Now, at last close to completing a horror novel of my own (with several worthy, but unproduced,screenplays between), I decided to open the door to this haunted monument for the fourth time. Of my two precious signed first editions, I chose the British Jonathan Cape one with its terrific hallucinatory dust jacket. (But, unfortunately, the text is poorly proofread in spots.)

Ghost Story’s plot, like most in the genre, is simple. Here, four old white men, rural representatives of a generation of courtly conservatives now seen only in the likes of Senator John Warner, are struggling with their fears of aging, death and the changes ringing through 1970s American society. After the death of one of their own, they seek solace and therapy by telling each other ghost stories during their monthly get-togethers.

Bad idea, because, instead of comforting them, this tale-telling conjures up a militantly angry feminine demon seeking revenge for an insult suffered fifty years ago. After another member of their “Chowder Society” mysteriously dies, they dig themselves a deeper grave by inviting one of the dead men’s nephews in to help them investigate what is happening. The nephew, a writer himself,named, significantly, Don Wanderley, tries to grasp the weird events swirling around the upstate New York town where the novel is mostly set through his own writing, but they find this only empowers the demon even more, as she and her minions cut a bizarre path of destruction through their snug little world.

Like all good literature, Ghost Story is about more than its plot and story, more than scaring its readers: It’s fear with psychological, social and literary context and themes throughout its densely gothic and wintry prose: aging, loneliness, death, romantic obsession, misogyny, the long implacablle shadow of the past, the changes happening in society at large and their impact on insular, rural worlds. Peter Straub's book is deeply grounded in classic American gothic fiction of the past: Poe, Hawthorne and Henry James (two of the characters are named after the last two authors.)

Horror fiction is a conservative genre, in both the good and bad sense of the term (which maybe explains the angry scorn it faces from utopian, politically progressive readers) and this novel worries about the good things that may have been lost: for example, a cultured sense of human dignity and restraint, which has its roots in Anglo-European bourgeois society. Considering the brute cacophony of so much twenty-first century American culture, Ghost Story may have a point. (A simple trip to the movies these days requires earmuffs and Valium. Yeah, right: It marks me as an old white fogy. Well, fuck ‘em if there aren’t enough explosions in The Seventh Seal.)

Three decades later, I find Straub’s novel as intense and eerie than ever. (It’s a great book for a cold, snow-swept night.)As with all long books, some parts seem rushed while others rustily grind and clank. The novel’s gory climax—set in a movie theater showing Night of the Living Dead—seemed clever and daring when I first read it, feels a little ham-fisted now, though thankfully, the book never sinks into sniggering post-modernism. I was happy to read it once again.

Ghost Story opened my mind to the literary value and potential of genre fiction; it taught me that art and entertainment are never really in opposition. While most of the field does remain the junk our parents and professors wagged their fingers about, the best of it—and it’s a long list that weaves its way from Poe to John LeCarré—provides more than the lazy wish fulfillment of the routine popular novel. In genre fiction, unlike the inward turning—sometimes frozen--characters of other forms of literary fiction, people make big choices and take big actions . . . and they often lead to very human dilemmas. The worlds of genre fiction, whether cold war Berlin, a haunted snowbound New York town, or the Wild West, may not be “real-life” but, in the hands of wizards, they may be no less real, complex,and, yeah, even profound.