i n f i n i t e    s u m m e r

In Chapter 6, under the section titled "Dr. Seward’s Diary," we are introduced to Renfield. What an interesting character! Seward describes Renfield as follows: According to Seward, Renfield has a hobby of catching flies, then spiders, then birds, subsequently feeding his old pets to his new ones. "Love of animals," ha!

As I read this section, I remembered something from my childhood. A book called "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly."

The crazy guy who wants to consume life sounds, well, downright vampiric.

Also, this is a Gothic novel with a side order of extra Gothic. I mean the guy runs an insane asylum? For homicidal maniacs who eat animals to steal their life force?

I thought the presence of the Dr. Seward character was stretching my suspension of disbelief. But also fun.

Stoker is obviously trying to give his readers a good ride, which is why this book is fun - it's definitely not Realism. Sort of like the last Batman movie - real enough to be cool but crazy enough to be fun.

I love the Renfield story. A zoophagous lunatic who feeds flys to spiders to birds to cats to himself in order to consume as much life force as possible? What's not to love?

It's seems obvious from the start that Renfield is some instrument of the Count, or at least is under his influence in some way.

I just assumed that Renfield was a captured vampire--asylums don't often let their patients see the "light" of day--who everyone just assumed was a madman. Given that, what a patient plot--to gradually "breed" larger and larger animals until finally consuming one with enough energy to allow him to escape.

This is the third time this year that I've read a novel where a sparrow suffers a violent, even heart-rending death.* But in Stoker this imagery in the context of the novel and the time it was written in has made a more fully fleshed-out impression on me than the other two instances did. The sparrow. That delicate creature used in one of the Judeo-Christian God's most reassuring (and quite beautiful, poetically speaking) statements in all of the Bible. (It can be seen as his apologia on how His silence is anything but silence.) Matthew 12:29 and Luke 12:6. "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father." and "Are not five sparrows sold for two cents? Yet not one of them is forgotten before God." In the novel, we are post-"Crisis of Faith" brought on by Darwin's theories in 1859 and an updated rationalism is represented by Harker who rejects the religious gestures designed to protect him as superstition. Renfield destroying the sparrows violently by eating them demonstrates that Christian pronouncements/religionarejust superstition; God is not looking out for the sparrow as he proclaimed he would. Post-Darwin, post-Nietzsche--whose "God is dead" formulation came out in 1886--the sparrow dying violently is symbolic of what was going on at the point Western civilization was at by 1897 when Stoker was writing. The cosmic order doesn't include an all-powerful, all-good being who protects us, is what many, many people were starting to think. Was the use of the sparrow imagery in Dracula intentionally used by Stoker to contradict that older Christian imagery and to show the spiritual state of his society?

But adding all this to the rest of what the narrative includes so far:

The rest of the book reflecting a synthesis of rationalism as it stood then with what people saw all around them. Extreme poverty and crime and violence of the cities. Wars seeming to become more deadly. Media creating the flow of information that brought people closer to violence and suffering, if only second hand. And so on. You could say that in this book as in society, God is dead but the Devil lives on. Fiends still walk the earth. And the Christian view of the world is not only negated but perverted. Where we once "fed" on God ( John 6:53 "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you") to have immortality in the next world, now the fiends of hell feed on us to have immortality in this one.

But it's a curious thing. In another backhanded way the book says something else to me (so far): It's Gothic, it's a fantasy. As if, by saying that, to say: maybe there's hope there. If it's a fantasy that devils walk the earth, then maybe it's a fantasy that God is dead/does not look out for the world. (Rather, that is, than the obvious "All supernatural phenomena are a fantasy".) I don't know enough about the Gothic genre to explain how I think it's doing that. And maybe all of these impressions will change later. (It is a bit strange to try to write convincingly about this impression as you're reading it, summarizing it in phases; generally one writes on important themes--when studying them formally--only after finishing the text.)



*the first novel where this sparrow business came up was Infinite Jest; the second, The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner