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

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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#2: Dracula in My Bookshelf

It took me two years from when I saw Bela Lugosi in the 1931 Dracula to find the Bram Stoker novel from which it —after being wrung through the wringer of a stage adaptation—took flight. 

1965. I was around ten. Believe it or not, despite its eerie shadow over western culture, a copy of Dracula was hard to come by back then. In fact, it had never been a real bestseller. Critics liked it more than readers. It was one of the most highly-praised novels of its day. 

But it failed to provide for the security of Stoker and his family. After the novel's 1897 publication, its author kept his day job as theater manager and over-worked secretary to Victorian
stage superstar Henry Irving,  thought to be the fire for Stoker’s magnificent titular character.

Both an aunt and a grandmother (on my mother’s side) recalled having a copy, but it had vanished. I recall a family friend describing it as a “very thick book.” It remained a glinting flash from the corner of my eye.

 [And so now I see Mina Harker returning home one evening, looking up to see Lucy Westenra slumped across her bedroom window sill “fast asleep, and by her, seated on the window sill was something that looked like a good-sized bird.”

The bird has of course, vanished when Mina reaches Lucy’s bedroom.]

You can imagine the leap in my boy-soul when I finally found a Laurel/Dell paperback edition in a local department store (maybe Caldor’s, one of the first discount department stores, known for its book section). I must have pained my poor mother as I pleaded with her to buy it for me. I was on an
allowance of 25 cents a week then; I’d probably already spent my weekly quarter.

The cover seemed coated in blue frost. It portrayed Dracula in a cameo profile, against ancient bricked castle walls, exactly as Stoker so well described him: blue-white face, skin like a coarse alabaster, bladed teeth, pin-point ears, high cheekbones, aquiline nose, vicious fire-yellow eyes,
fine mustache and long silver hair. (A bit, I realized some years later, like Charlton Heston, who, mysteriously, never played the Caped Conniver. He would have been great, equal to the triumvirate of Schreck, Lugosi and Lee, maybe even better . . .  but we’ll talk movies later.)

I read Dracula every night in bed, aloud to myself, with great whispered flourishes, over a period of a few weeks, in the little upstairs bedroom I’d recently taken over from my oldest brother, in the small bed whose mattress sagged on the right side. I quickly sensed it was better than the sometimes stiff, undernourished movie whose dark star had snared my psyche.

I’ve read it fives times since, most recently in an edition annotated by Leslie S. Klinger. No matter how I matured, how my literary tastes were refined over the decades by canon classics by Steinbeck, Kantor, Shakespeare, Joyce, Williams, Chekov, Twain, Pynchon, Heller, Hemingway and many more,
its title would pop from my mouth whenever the question of favorite novels slipped into conversation.

I’ve always been easily embarrassed, but even though eyes rolled, noses sniffed, and pursed looks of puritan disapproval snapped my way—often from prudish lofty-minded types, disdainful of the energy and imagination found in the best genre literature--I always called it one of my favorite novels.

In 1974, I was delighted to discover that I was not alone in this amoral enchanted castle. A scholar named Leonard Wolf (father of feminist author Naomi Wolf) assembled the first Annotated Dracula. It remains nearly the best of the illustrated editions, thanks to an artist named Wilfried Sätty. Inspired by Gustave Dore, Sätty captures the eerie Gothicism of Stoker’s tale in pen-and-ink collages. They’re sunk in ancient atmosphere, with the buried energy of a dark world trembling under their elaborate cross-hatched surfaces. That Wolf himself was born in Transylvania only added to this version’s mystique. I found the annotations informative and captivating, though I gather Wolf updated them in a later edition.

Wolf was one of Dracula’s Freudian interpreters, as he made more explicit in his later non-fiction book, A Dream of Dracula. This book clarified for me how the novel was very much about forbidden sex, as seen by Victorians. I have no stake to pound through that view—Stoker would certainly agree with it. But in the hundred years since, that interpretation has ossified into another of those limiting ideologies that leads, among other things, towers of unimaginative formula fiction and boring movies.

Like all ideologies, Leonard Wolf’s leaves out a lot, crowding out other, equally worthy, representations. Before Freud and Stoker, for example, the Dracula figure was portrayed (in folklore and penny dreadfuls such as Varney the Vampire) as an aristocrat draining the life from the powerless bourgeois or peasants who lived under his brute bloody thumb. Dragon’s Ark nods back to this notion, with extra Nietzschean pizzazz. “Like a Superman of Evil,” someone once remarked to me . . .
but now, you should go buy the book for yourself.

Dracula is a palimpsest, a totem to carve our imaginations from. Artists and writers can see him as they please.

In recent years, I’ve taken to collecting illustrated editions of the novel whenever funds allow. For a brief moment, I considered collecting every single edition ever published . . . there are hundreds upon hundreds by now . . . but then that would have marked me a Renfieldien madman, wouldn’t it?

My favorite illustrated edition is Charles Keeping’s, published in 1988, horrific pen and ink drawings that interpret Dracula and his world as otherworldly savages, steeped in foul aggressive
decay. Keeping draws Dracula in near Lovecraftian terms--a bald, wormy Invader from Beyond the Stars, merciless, grotesque.

The edition illustrated by Edward Gorey seems hastily assembled and disappointed, while another with oil paintings by Greg Hildebrandt feels posed, stagy and lacks energy, its characters stiff and waxy.

There are two new versions out yet to slip into my shelf, one with illustrations by an artist named Jae Lee and a recent edition with illustrations by Ben Templesmith, which looks very intriguing.

Leslie Klinger’s annotation contains no illustrations and could use them. Despite the commendable research done for this volume, Klinger takes a Po-Mo approach, teasingly treating the novel as being based on actual real events, with both Dracula and Stoker masterminding a cover up of “what really
happened.” Some may find this amusing, and cannot criticize the idea of re-imagining Dracula, since I’ve done so myself.

Still, I found Klinger’s annotations distracting. They obscure the actual history and literature behind Stoker’s only masterwork. Whatever opinions we might hold of Stoker as a writer, this
approach seems to diminish the strange fever that drives this work and its remarkable accomplishment—a novel that, in the hands of most other writers, might well have been a forgotten
potboiler, but it has haunted along the borders of western consciousness for over a hundred years.

But what about Dracula the novel anyway? Is it really any good? I’ll take that up next time.

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Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield


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.