With the reading of Dracula concluded, the Guides will spend the week discussing the novel in roundtable format. This is the last of four parts.
Is Dracula still relevant?
Kevin Fanning: That’s a tough question. I think that vampires in general are still so relevant, compared to the half-lives of zombies and pirates and mummies and ninjas, is in part thanks to the larger vampire narrative that Bram Stoker’s Dracula helped set in motion. But as far as the book itself, I’m glad I read it, and it’s an interesting piece of vampire literature, but it doesn’t change or alter my opinions about Buffy, Twilight, Irma Vep, Cronos, Castlevania, True Blood, Anne Rice, Underworld or any other vampire media. Vintage sent me a copy of their book The Vampire Archives: The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published, and it’s astoundingly huge and sprawling. Vampires are bigger than any one book.
Matthew Baldwin: Van Helsing’s excruciatingly slow revelation of Fun Vampire Facts doesn’t work as well when the average reader already knows more about the undead than they do about the Supreme Court. But the underlying motifs of Dracula are as relevant today as ever: xenophobia, sexual hysteria, and the eternal struggle for power. At times the book was a novelization of the worst fears of the anti-immigration crowd, a depiction of malevolent foreigners skulking into a Western country, siphoning off valuable resources, and converting people over to their side.
In picking her top 10 favorite Victorian novels, author Sarah Waters described Dracula as “An exercise in masculine anxiety and nationalist paranoia”. As neither is in short supply, even in the 21st century, the novel strikes me as relevant today as it was a century ago.
Claire Zulkey: What I think are most relevant about the book are the the way it’s written and its treatment of gender roles. I still think that Stoker’s use of correspondence is an ingenious way to tell the tale: I love that it’s put together like a scrapbook and that it utilizes different voices to tell it, so me that’s still fresh and just a lesson in general for writers. Meanwhile I think Jonathan and Mina Harker’s relationship is worth discussing even today–at some points to me it’s a model of modern partnership. At other times…not so much.
I don’t know precisely what qualifies as relevance per the question for this section, but I can offer that I think the structure was a good idea (using the diaries and correspondence), although I don’t think it was used as effectively as it could have been. It started strong with Harker’s notes, but the impact of the form faded over the course of the book, and I don’t think it was the fault of the form. Whether faulty in its execution or not, I’m fairly certain that the book remains important in understanding the development of vampire lit.
As for relevance in my own life, I think of IJ about 1000 times as frequently as I think of Dracula. IJ just keeps coming back to me, but Dracula has come and gone. Now that I’m finished with Drac, I miss Hal and Pemulis and Mario and Gately all that much more (and all the publicity about Agassi’s bio has just made it worse.)
Thanks to all guides and commenters for stepping up for this one. I hope the next book inspires more active exchanges. I’m still hoping for a Ulysses cadre to form. Anyone?
The first four chapters really hooked me as well, but as the novel progressed it seemed like the characters were merging into a single personality, and except for some necessary markers (i.e. mentions of “finacee” or “wife” in Harker’s entries to refer to Mina), any of the diary entries by about midway through the book could really have been written under the name of any one of the characters. They didn’t have distinct styles, perspectives, or ways of expressing themselves.
I’m totally behind you on this! I think the Infinite Summer format is perfect for a novel like Ulysses. It is a masterpiece that begs to be read, but, more than that, begs to be discussed.
I agree with Todeswalzer’s observations about the sameness of the narrative voices. I suppose one could argue that this is part of the loss of personal identity that comes when one becomes submerged in group causes (in this case, vampire hunting) but I doubt that Stoker was a sophisticated enough author to have done this deliberately.
What stands out for me is the denial of a narrative voice to Dracula himself. This, of course, serves to marginalize the vampire (and whatever you choose to have him represent). But hearing from the Count (unfiltered through any other narrator) would have been interesting! (In 1972, SF novelist Fred Saberhagen in The Dracula Tape rewrote Stoker’s novel with Dracula as the sole narrator.)