So, wow this is starting to get pretty awesome, yeah? I guess going into this I was expecting it to be a kind of historically quaint little vampire tale? Dracula being creepy-ish but mainly overwrought, most of the good action either implied or happening off-screen, me going “NOT AS GOOD AS BUFFY S3″ after every chapter? Needless to say, Vampire Lucy biting a kid and tossing it to the ground to go after Arthur kind of reset my gauge, as far as creepiness goes. I mean right? And then Arthur, with the stake? Eesh. Basically I’m on board at this point, is what I’m saying.
Although, I have to note, Van Helsing is driving me crazy. The never telling anyone anything. The rushing here and there with little explanation or reason. I’m all: Let us in to your world, guy. Ugh and plus the accent. Actually let’s do this here:
Top 5 Annoying Accents In Order of Annoyingness:
- Van Helsing
- Thomas Bilder, the wolf-keeper guy
- Mr Swales
- Lucy’s impression of Quincey Morris (”I know I ain’t good enough to regulate the fixin’s of your little shoes”) (?)
- Drac
That’s just my humble, folks, but annoying accents are almost a leit-motif in this book. Surely there’s a barista somewhere who will be more than happy to share his master’s thesis on the topic.
Van Helsing is on my nerves because in this section there are multiple places where—stay with me—Stoker has written Seward having recorded Van Helsing expounding at length on basically nothing. I’ll suspend disbelief about vampires no problem, and I guess I’m suspending disbelief of the fact that Renfield has broken out of his cell four times so far, so fine, I’ll suspend disbelief about everyone’s ability to perfectly remember everything everyone ever said, accent and all.
It serves me right to be irritated by Van Helsing—I put up a big fuss about Harker being all talk and no action. Now I get a guy who’s mostly action and very little explication, and when he does explicate, it makes no sense whatsoever. The parts where VH goes on at length (e.g. Side 2 of Diver Down KIDDING little VH joke there) are the only parts of the story that really drag for me, and they often plainly illuminate the author’s stitchwork. Arthur being the one to pound the stake into Lucy is a hugely affecting and memorable scene, but we arrive at that scene because Van Helsing first convinces himself and Seward that they don’t need to kill Lucy right away. Which, uh, what? We’re talking about the same undead creature of the night who is attacking children all over the city, yes?
But the fact that the seams occasionally show is OK, because what I’m really loving about this book, beyond the whole vampire thing, is that the entire story is basically one big crush note to writing. Every chapter is written by one of the characters. They rush to write in their diaries before they forget what happened. They send each other urgent notes and letters that would have been full of !!!s and OMGs if they’d been written 100 years later. The scene in Chapter 17 where Seward and Mina are talking shorthand vs. phonograph was really sweetly endearing to me, and struck me as the Victorian equivalent of a Moleskin vs. Tumblr debate.
Even if Stoker wasn’t the perfect writer, I like that we can see him trying, putting words down just as passionately as his characters do. Yes, garlic and decapitation and stakes through the heart are going to be what get the characters through the night, but recording everything, writing it down and sharing copies and making sure the stories they have inside them get told to the right people—that’s what fuels everyone’s passion here, that’s what gets them through the days. I like that Stoker seems to feel the same way about writing that I do.
Is it writing or typing?
It’s telling stories, using whatever tools you have.
Putting off staking Lucy did seem a bit odd but Van Helsing made the point that she wasn’t actually finishing off any of the children. Slightly heartless attitude to child health. I actually started wondering for a while if his intention was to devampify Lucy, which would have been quite a good trick, but it seems he was just waiting for Arthur. Van Helsing seems to enjoy controlling events a little too much.
Van Helsing’s postponement of killing off Lucy is another example of the doppelganger relationship Dracula has with each of the characters of the novel. In fact, vampires are powerless unless the victim allows them power to victimize (if you invite them in, freely enter their house, or actively seek them out). The way Van Helsing behaves in this, and many other sections of the novel, actually aids the Undead he and the others are sworn to defeat. Here, he aids the Undead by mirroring Dracula’s own ambitous social agenda. Van Helsing attempts in this scene to seduce the only aristocrat in the novel to join his cause. He needs Arthure to choose to come to his side freely. He attempts this with an uncharacteristic disregard for the lives of innocent child victims, or the eternal soul of Lucy (preserved by a plot device that doesn’t support the other instances of vampirization in the book). Not quite the behavior of your traditional turn of the century melodrama hero. By winning over Arthur here he wins over, allegorically speaking, Britain and therefore civilization itself to his own cause. This foreigner with a broken accent then is able to do what that other foreigner with a broken accent cannot, although both use Lucy and all she symbolizes for the purpose. Later on, after having established himself in these graveyard scenes as the patriarch of this new social order, he is able to assume status over the rest of the vampire hunters including the ruling class in their midst. They take their orders from him, and in near every instance those orders aid the Count more than they persecute him. So what is the underlying message? Both the vampires and the vampire hunters are equally responsible for victimizing the weak, and the weak are responsible for being victimized by their monsters.
I’m butchering this point of view, but it’s mostly intact, from Joseph Valente’s Dracula’s Crypt. If you haven’t read this book, you must. It puts Dracula into a completely different light.
Thanks for the lengthy insight Jay. I’d never really stopped to think that Dracula requires complicity from his victims. It sort of casts Lucy in a new light when you think that she must have in some way invited that vampire into her room. That dirty dog!
That is a great explanation of what was making me uncomfortable about Van Helsing, it’s the clear parallel with between him and Dracula as directors of an intricate set of events with all the other characters as disposable pawns to be won or lost in preparation for some ultimate showdown.
Yeah, one of my favorite scenes of the book is when Mina hears that Van Helsing is coming, and the best and first thing she thinks to do is promptly get out her typewriter and start typing out that shorthand! “I shall be prepared. I shall get my typewriter this very hour and begin transcribing.” Love it. And then she plays that goofy trick where she pretends to only have the shorthand versions and Van Helsing is all confused? Also awesome.
Although I think Mr Swales had by far the most annoying accent. Mainly because it wasn’t as much an accent as a version of English with a thousand extra words added.
YES those are all awesome parts. And then Harker arrives and even more typing and arranging of notes happens, I love it.
I keep hearing Truman Capote’s voice from Murder by Death when Van Helsing has dialogue:
Milo Perrier: What do you make of all of this, Wang?
Sidney Wang: Is confusing.
Lionel Twain: [from moose head] IT! IT is confusing! Say your goddamn pronouns!
And I do love that the book we’re reading is the obsessive compilation of all of these recorded memories. Draws this intimate connection between readers and characters.
My first reaction to this is, “Well of course they’re writing, how else would they record it?” Aside from Seward’s fancy phonograph, none of the others had the means to preserve the events any other way. In a modern epistolary novel, the characters might run home to record a confessional video and post it on YouTube, or punch out a dozen updates to Twitter, but this crew was limited.
Then again, Stoker didn’t have to use this format at all. If he wasn’t sending a crush note to writing, he would have just laid it out like a standard novel. For a while, the format added a sense of mystery to the story, like some unnamed investigator was trying to piece it together after the fact. But the Harker family typing and collating session took some of the air out of that.
sweet post. i’m gonna write in my diary about it.
I like the ‘crush note to writing’ thing – and it really is too, everyone lives (and dies) by his diary in this world. Their obsessive commitment to writing has a preternatural creepiness that ol Drac himself should be envious of. Who knows, maybe some of the characters who do not get chomped went on to write admirable gothic horror novels of their own. (Dracula characters: Where are they now? a VH1 special) Especially Mina, who when she says things like ‘oh, but I am tired! If it were not that I have made my diary a duty I should not open it tonight’ seems like she had the resolve to become a published writer, or at least one helluva good blogger.
“Van Helsing went about his work systematically. Holding his candle so that he could read the coffin plates, and so holding it that the sperm dropped in white patches which congealed as they touched the metal, he made assurance of Lucy’s coffin.” No?
Seems like it might be symbolic of something. Definitely the hottest scene in the book.
Do you really see passion in these words, though? I mean, I see some of the dullest reportage in the world, and it’s gotten to the point where everyone sort of sounds the same. The novel has become in thrall to the plot, to the extent where (as Claire points out in the next post) the characters need to act like idiots–Dan Brown clearly stole pages from this book–so that things can be spelled out at an excruciatingly slow pace.
Where’s the real emotion? I don’t see anyone really mourning Lucy–they’re just putting on the faces of proper etiquette that dictate that they SHOULD be mourning her. Likewise for the children–who cares that they’re being bitten? Let there be blood, so long as we prove a point about the un-dead by doing so. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.