My Fearful Guests: A Field Guide to the Bats in my Belfry.
If you will let me, I shall give you a paper to read. It is long, but I have typewritten it out. It will tell you of my trouble…
- Mina Harker
There is a vampire in my house. I know. I invited him in.
I decided to write my Masters thesis on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Now he’s hanging bat-fashion over my desk, leering at me. His red eyes glitter in the gloom and dare me to write about him. Of a morning he scratches at the window panes from outside in the fog. In truth, I’m not what he’s after.
On the contrary, I’m the one who is after him. He has the answers I want, but he’s not talking. Not directly anyway. He’s a figure of legend; a superstition. A folk tale. A fireside yarn.They are subject to different rules than the characters of Fielding or Austen. Oral figures are nearly immutable at the outset, changing only slowly if at all–and yet when rendered typographic they become strangely pliable in the hands of an author charged with the vague expectation or directive of originality.
What is the essence of the vampire? Stoker’s vampire may move about by day. He must drink the blood of the living to sustain himself, and yet he seems to go on for ages with little of that to subsist on in his Castle. He reads English books and disguises himself, but these are mere illusions; what he really is at his core is far older than the pages that try to stake him down. He is oral story, and oral story may alter over time, but the individual teller telling his story is not at liberty to simply change what he will. The wine-dark sea is never anything but wine-dark.
The ghost in my house, though, has left clues for me to follow if I dare.
Yes. There’s a ghost, too. He seems to accompany the vampire; a shadow for the shadowless. His name was Bram Stoker. He died of syphilis in 1912, poor and miserable. But he knows the vampire. And he’s whispering through the keyhole of his novel, his recently unearthed notes and his myriad biographies. He says so much that I’m not asking for, and I keep listening, hoping he’ll say something useful about the monster– about where he really came from. About whether or not the undead can ever really die.
The ghost was a man of letters. He was a man of the theatre and of his times. He set the vampire hunters after the monster and he gave them all the tools of the late 19th century to hunt him– most of all he gave them the power to write him down. Their accounts became a manuscript, and as one scholar observed, Dracula is, in some sense, the story of generating a text. The Gothic and Epistolary genres, the Novel itself were vectors for transmitting a creature from the realm of orality into our collective literary bloodstream and has never left. The ghost’s text has never been out of print.
Without oral story there is no vampire. There is no Dracula. And therefore no Dracula. The Gothic genre was a way in for the demons and spirits of the ancient world to haunt our most mimetic form of storytelling: the novel. Dracula, not the 14th century warlord or his descendants who carried the name “Dragon’s son” (Dracula) but the archaic monster of Stoker’s text comes from a time when story necessarily meant a human voice. He lives in those ruins dreaming of a time when he can join the modern age– he prepares himself by learning English, though it is not his native tongue. He learns the tedious details of English law and custom, he speculates where his campaign to gain entrance to the literary capital of the world must begin and how he will get there. In many ways the vampire must change his shape into the shape of a novel: and what are those?
A novel has scope. It can hold more information and go on longer than oral story.
A novel can contain more characters and more voices than oral story.
A novel will deal with sundry details that are often left out of oral story– and yet in a novel these details are not irrelevant.
And so Dracula has greater scope than the common folk story– the winter’s fireside story of a suicide or the seventh son of the seventh son or a red-headed man who, after death, rises from the grave and preys on the living until the townsfolk exhume him to find the glow of life on his skin and blood running down his chin. They drive a stake through his heart, put garlic or wild roses in his mouth, and cut off his head. Afterward, they are troubled by the vampire no more. Stoker extends this tale. He alters the folk tale as only typographic technology can. The vampire of Stoker’s novel is aided by modern disbelief in the monsters of orality, and ultimately that vampiric monster is hunted down by modern technology, not the least of which is the manuscript itself.
Of course all these musings are the culmination of a long list of texts I’m reading on this subject, most notably The Technology of the Novel by Tony E. Jackson. They are also a result of many years of reading Dracula. I have probably read it more than any other book and it still offers me something new each time. As I gather materials and prepare to write my Prospectus next week I am comforted by the idea I can’t unravel the mystery of the vampire no matter how many nights I spend in his presence. His crypt will never yield up all the secrets it holds no matter how many grave-robbing critics and scholars try to lay it bare. What I write I write with no expectation of note or validation beyond the acquisition of my intended degree, but of the above ideas I can only quote and agree with Vampire Hunter Jonathan Harker:
We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story.
