Comments on: Dear Diary I Am Freaking Out

By: Aaron

Aaron — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:25:33 +0000

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.

By: kfan

kfan — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:31:18 +0000

Seems like it might be symbolic of something. Definitely the hottest scene in the book.

By: Damhnait

Damhnait — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:11:58 +0000

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.

By: Pam

Pam — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:25:16 +0000

“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?

By: haze

haze — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:52:27 +0000

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.

By: Eric Franklin

Eric Franklin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:42:06 +0000

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!

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:14:12 +0000

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.

By: ariel

ariel — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:12:02 +0000

sweet post. i’m gonna write in my diary about it.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:40:27 +0000

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.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:38:43 +0000

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.