I finished Dracula last night — around three in the morning so technically it was November but I still count it as completing the book according to the Infinite Summer schedule — and I thought it was a really great book. Not one of The Greats, but a good story with a decent amount of emotion and pathos underpinning the basic plot.
To cap off this month of reading Dracula, I’m writing up this post to talk about a few of the interesting things I found about Dracula, as well as try to find some connection between it and Infinite Jest.
Vampire Lore
In truth, I’ve never seen a Dracula story in all my years of Vampire stories, so I wasn’t sure how much of the traditional Vampire lore we are familiar with came from Dracula. It turns out that it was a surprising amount. I look to Whedon lore before others so they are the standard against which I compare and the comparison is mostly favorable.
Vampire’s require an invitation to enter buildings; killing a vampire does turn them to dust, though only if they are so old as their natural bodies would be dust by then; to become a vampire you have to be drained of blood and then drink the Vampire’s blood, though you do not have to be drained to death and the effect is permanent: once this procedure occurs, no matter when you die you will become a vampire, provided your sire remains among the undead; a vampire, or someone on the way to vampirism, also has a special psychic link with their sire, something not made explicit with Whedon but the master/sire relationship is strong there as well; you lose your soul when you become a vampire; and finally, vampires show no reflection in mirrors.
However there are a few notable differences: vampire’s also cast no shadow; they can turn to mist or creatures of the night; from my reading of the book, their fangs are not retractable; their physical powers seem to be limited to strength, with no enhancement to vision of hearing; vampires must rest on holy land, that of a church or a graveyard; to be immersed in water is death for a Stoker vampire, and while on the sea a vampire can control the weather; and most importantly, they can walk the streets by day, though their powers are linked to the night and they are unusable in the day.
Novel Structure
The novel is structured as a collection of diaries, memos, letters, and news articles. There are two interesting side-effects of this. The first is that all the characters correspond with each other but with varying levels of delay. So while Lucy has already died, we read Mina’s letters of joy to her, and later on experience her sorrow at learning of Lucy’s death, undeath, and destruction. These delayed emotions play to the reader well, I thought, giving a level of sympathy to the characters, and also establishing a world of hidden truths that can only be noticed when seeing the story in its entirety, something the writers of these individual pieces cannot enjoy — well actually they do, which brings me to the second point.
Around half-way through the novel, the two main stories collide with Mina and Van Helsing discussing her husband’s strange story out of Transylvania and Van Helsing telling of Lucy’s sordid end. At this point, Mina begins to collect the various diaries and articles, essentially creating all the previous sections of the novel for the group of Vampire hunters to use as a tool for finding and killing Dracula. From this point on in the novel, the diaries continue and they are all shaped by the open sharing of all the diaries in uncaptured scenes. This is a very meta-y type of storytelling, almost post-modern in construction, something that perhaps inspired the Infinite Summer people to read Dracula.
Gayness
This isn’t actually a real thing, but rather a construction of modern minds, I think. Still, as I read this book, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all if everybody was banging everybody else, regardless of gender, with the heaps of praise and love they throw on each other. I mean, some of the early letters between Mina and Lucy are almost lascivious, they talk about sleeping together, dressing each other, long walks on the beach, it’s kind of ridiculous. The man on man action isn’t quite as explicit, but I found more than a few moments in the novel where it seems like the men were moments away from a gay-ass tongue bath.
Feminism
Mina Harker is a really bad-ass woman. She’s the one who first puts all the diaries together, she’s the one who figures out where Dracula is living, what some of his motives are. She determines that the psychic link between her and Dracula, one created when she is forced to drink his blood in a siring ceremony, can be exploited to find Dracula’s location. She’s basically the smartest one of the bunch. She’s also pretty tough:
When the terrible story of Lucy’s death, and all that followed, was done, I lay back in my chair powerless. Fortunately I am not of a fainting disposition.
That sounds like a line from a fucking superhero. Later on, when she’s done all the Batman-esque super-sleuthing for the men, and it is time to go to Dracula’s lair and kill him, the men tell her to go to bed because ‘we are men, and we are able to bear’ and she quietly accepts it, but only because she fears they will remove her entirely from the venture if she protests on this; she isn’t some pussy glad to be away from all the danger, she’s afraid they’ll put her further away from it.
Dracula has a weird sort of feminism to it. Throughout the novel, Mina is praised by Van Helsing for her bravery, her wit, her sharp detective skills, pretty much everything. But he still says things like ’she has a man’s brain’ as though it were a compliment. It’s struggling to establish a female lead as at least close to an equal, but falls slightly short. Still, I’m impressed that the novel was so willing to have even a remotely powerful female lead.
Horror
This is not the scariest novel I’ve ever read — there are moments in Stephen King’s Misery that almost made we sweat with horror — but it still managed to evoke real terror at times. In particular, the section which recounts the face-off against the vampire Lucy is great: so far as I can tell, it has the very first instance of the phrase ‘if looks could kill,’ a cliche now perhaps, but surely a terrifying description, and one that struck me with the instant I read it as well.
Infinite Jest Connections
The connections to Infinite Jest are mostly tangential or internal fabrications, but there are some interesting ones. There are a few explicit references to Hamlet early on, but those seem purely incidental. And I’ve already mentioned the self-referential writing which seems a very modern conceit for a novel written over a century ago, and one reminiscent of the Infinite Jest film inside Wallace’s novel.
Another particularly compelling connection comes from the closing chapters of Dracula. In them, Mina Harker is racing toward Dracula’s castle with Van Helsing hoping to consecrate his resting place in order to refuse him safe harbor from their hunt. In the superstitious Carpathian mountains, the scar upon Mina’s forehead — a burn from the placing of Holy Water on her flesh — causes their journey ill will from the villagers; in order to avoid these hassles, she takes to wearing a veil to hide her deformity. If that’s not an Infinite Jest connection, I don’t know what is.
Actual closing thoughts
Overall, I’m glad I read Dracula. I’ve always liked Vampire stories, so it seemed like I had to read it eventually and the month deadline really helped with that — I read over 140 pages yesterday to ensure I would finish it according to the schedule. Beyond that though, it opened me up to a very different writing style. I’ve mostly avoided classical novels for fear of being bogged down by archaic language, but I found Dracula to be fairly readable, which makes me more willing to read other classic novels I’ve put off for too long. So go read a classic or something.