In Bram Stoker’s Dracula two particular themes stand out that reflect our own contemporary interest in truth: the authenticity of memory, and the authenticity of technological representations of memory.
Updated Feb 2018; Jan 2020
Note added Jan 2020
By DJL.
Bram Stroker’s ‘Dracula’ (1897) is one of those ‘public domain’ novels that turn up quite often as a give away on ereaders (available free from Amazon or Project Gutenberg) my new Android smartphone came with a copy. While on a long train journey and somewhat dulled by my work-related reading, I read it (1).
What a startling and brilliant story!
Much has been written on the imagery and the myths about vampires and Dracula in particular. The Dracula story has pivotal position in the history of genre cinema (and it’s almost impossible to read the book without conjuring images of Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee). The myth of the vampire has continued to grow so that even today it shows no sign of dying (an undead, ‘deathless’, myth – Dracula won’t die nor will the myth!).
In the first part of the book, Jonathan Harker’s journal describes his journey to Dracula’s castle and the weird, disturbing events that unfold; this part of the book is gripping and very exciting (it is all but a screenplay). And for sure, in its day, it must have appealed to the sensual and adrenal imagination of pre-cinema readers. Perennial themes of consciousness and unconsciousness, of death, life, possession of minds and dark, limbic sexual violence against women run throughout the book. There is much reference to the ‘brain science’ of the day and fascination by odd and interesting phenomena such as hypnotism, the reality of dreams, somnambulance and clairvoyance. (One of the leading characters, Seward, is a psychiatrist.)
Two particular themes stand out that reflect our own contemporary interest in truth: the authenticity of memory, and the authenticity of technological representations of memory.
Written in the epistolary style the story is told from the viewpoint of various participants each recording their own parts of the narrative (beginning with Harker’s journal). The novel is presented as an archive of documents – letters, journals, newspaper reports, telegrams, and even phonograph recordings; the ‘voice’ of each character appears at different times, sometime literally that. Interestingly, at the end of the novel the protagonists are left with nothing more than the typewritten account – produced by Mina Harker who acts as a scriber and transcriber for the team of men who are tracking and hoping to thwart the evil one’s ambitions.
As the novel develops, the imperative to record as much as possible grows more urgent. Throughout the story the female characters, particularly Lucy before she dies, and Mina all follow Jonathan Harker’s example and attempt to record everything in writing, almost minute by minute. The mysterious events unfolding around force an urgency to record as much as possible, a necessity touched with duty. Some of the tension in the novel arises from the fact that this necessity to record arises from the characters’ sense that memory is imperfect – events are so strange that if they are not recorded they will soon be forgotten or confused. Memory is weak.
Mina quickly takes up the typewriter, a new and exciting technology. She is determined to organise all the notes, journals, letters and telegrams and reconstructs them into a sequential typescript (a blog of sorts?). At the end of the story they are left with nothing but the typescript which lacks even the authenticity of the original documents. Mina becomes adept at copy-typing, typing quickly, and she is valued for this effort by the remaining participants. Typewriting, it would seem, is already becoming gendered by the time of this novel, although at least one of the male characters turns to typewriting as his preferred method of recording with the observation that handwriting is so tedious, the labour-saving motif of technology (‘labour-saving’ may itself be a masculine, gendered concept?). Mina is the narrative pivot around which the tale is presented to us. She becomes secretary to the adventure and is formally appointed as such at the first ‘committee’ meeting. (Incidentally, Stoker used a typewriter to produce many of his novels.)
In the course of her copy typing, original documentary evidence is destroyed, because it has been copied, and what remains of original sources seems confused or unverifiable. Ultimately the truth of the story rests on the typewritten evidence alone, which in itself cannot be easily verified for no original documents remain. An extreme application of the idea of copy-typing! For even if the account was assembled by many hands and witnesses who will believe such a fantastic story presented as a single typescript? (Of course, this is also a marvellous literary trick that simultaneously establishes the story as both credible and not-credible, even while leaving the incredible intact!)
One of the characters, Seward the psychiatrist, uses a phonograph to record onto wax cylinders his voice notes of his interviews with Renfield. This is sophisticated and novel technology for its day, first available around 1877 and in some form used well into the 20th century. An issue arises when Mina wants to listen to his recordings so that she can gather more background about the unfolding mystery. The psychiatrist simply keeps his cylinders in a draw, unnumbered and unordered. So when Mina wants to select his recorded notes for the relevant parts she cannot access them easily – they are not indexed or organised! Since the date is only recorded by voice, the cylinders must be listened in order to find that out – this increases her workload!
This might represent an example of the ‘indexing critique’ of new technology and the theme of the weakness of memory, recall and sequencing (2). So Mina must spend yet more time (labour) going through the recordings and then putting them in order. Here, too, is a further technological theme about conversion from one medium to another – in the act of transcribing Mina is already selecting and reducing, losing authenticity, as we learn by the end of the book, when our team of restless and at times overwrought protagonists realise that all they have is the typescript. So much is missing including the nuances of their own imperfect recall. (On this point it is relevant to read Double Fold, – controversial in librarian circles – about the pre-digital microfilming of newspaper archives and subsequent scrapping of the originals. Also see Yeo on Hooke, Lock and the Memex). (3)
Note added 17 Jan 2020: On the authenticity point, when Mina listens to Seward’s recordings she is both moved and perhaps shocked by the degree of intense emotion revealed in his voice. She takes the view that copying his words in type will remove this “cruel truth” as it may be too private:
“That is a wonderful machine, but it is cruelly true. It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of your heart. It was like a soul crying out to Almighty God. No one must hear them spoken ever again! See, I have tried to be useful. I have copied out the words on my typewriter, and none other need now hear your heart beat, as I did.”
The technological themes run deep and wide. Stoker also draws contrastive emphases on the speed of communication in various forms: physical (horse, train, ship), electrical (telegram) and psychic (hypnotism, clairvoyance). Thus the characters race about geographically by train between Exeter, London and Whitby (journeys of less than one day), by boat and train between London and Amsterdam in twenty four hours (van Helsing) or by sail and horse over several arduous days to the Black Sea and into Rumania (which at that time was still far away, a beyond place, mysterious and superstitious). Meanwhile telegrams fly back and forth in a few hours, letters are posted and delivered overnight and minds wander in dream-like states across hundreds of miles in mere moments. These speeds have hardly been surpassed even today (apart from clairvoyance!) and reflect the energy of an earlier age of technological shifts.
One final observation about Stoker’s braiding of truth and fiction. Although evil and cunning, Dracula is not that clever …yet. At the beginning of the novel he has a child-like level understanding for, although he has been already undead for a few hundred years he is still young in his way, infantile and limited in his range. But he is demonic and learns fast, so as the novel progresses he is gaining in power, rapidly becoming ever more dangerous (for example, he learns to work around the garlic with increasing ease), which is why our heroes must succeed quickly or there will be no stopping Dracula when he grows up and becomes a mature intelligence!
Simultaneously, however, this seems like a comment on the way that fiction works. It begins with a wish, a dream, an image. And as we work on, think it, feel it and make pictures, it becomes more real, more solid …. a fact. (4)
Footnotes
(1) The train connection is intrinsic! A while after writing this essay an episode of a series featuring Michael Portillo travelling Britain’s railways took us to Whitby following “Bradshaw’s Guide” (see Wikipedia). Bradshaw’s was an essential guide book in its day, a key resource for train travel, and was sometimes referenced in in literature, including Dracula who consults it as part of his planning for his relocation to England: “The lamps were also lit in the study or library, and I found the Count lying on the sofa, reading, of all things in the world, an English Bradshaw’s Guide.” A nice literary touch. For all its oozing Gothic atmosphere, Count Dracula himself is a surprisingly domesticated creature, concerned with timetables and logistics. Both evil and prosaic.
(2) This was not a new cultural and scientific problem in Stoker’s day, and it remains ‘un-new’ today. The problems associated with our modern versions storage and retrieval of documentation stretches back into the origins of the Renaissance. This was a period when a shift in the interpretation and understanding of the ‘received wisdom’ of the past stimulated a different approach to knowledge, one that placed less value on the memorisation and repetition of established and inherited ideas Instead, the Renaissance saw the emergence of observation and experiment as methods for discerning what is true about the world. For example (and pre-figuring the Royal Society motto ‘nullius in verba’) Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), the archetypal Renaissance Man, set out the new attitude: “Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.”
(3) It is noteworthy that the camera is entirely absent from the novel. Dracula has no reflection but we never learn if he has, or can have, a photographic image.
(4) See also ‘The Referent’ (1948) by Ray Bradbury for a more direct story about how names become things.
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This essay was moved from an older, unused blog. On re-reading it, with some minor edits, the theme of authenticity and the unreliability of human memory seems particularly relevant today. After all the concept of Fake News! is just such an indication of a ‘crisis of authenticity’ in the ‘public sphere’.
Just after completing these notes I came across this excellent paper on similar technological themes – e.g. technology as a social performance of aspiration paralleled by anxiety. It’s a good paper and well worth a read. She covers more detail than I do and also the issue of authenticity.
Having re-read this book (stimulated by the marvellous Mark Gatiss adaptation on television) I had not really appreciated the deep sexism throughout the book. For today’s reader it is wildly inappropriate. Women are victims throughout, erotically sexualised by Dracula but primly protected by decent men (one does not enter a woman’s room without knocking, whereas the men barge in and out of each other’s rooms whenever it suits them).
Women depend on the protection of strong men, yet a man can only cry when alone with a woman when her mother instinct can afford him the opportunity! Or they have a tendency to minor practical jokes because “… it is some taste of the original apple that remains still in our mouths … “.
And boy, when men cry alone with Mina they really cry:
“We women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above smaller matters when the mother spirit is invoked. I felt this big sorrowing man’s head resting on me, as though it were that of a baby that some day may lie on my bosom, and I stroked his hair as though he were my own child. I never thought at the time how strange it all was.”
But they cover their embarrassment quickly when they return to male company. Men are strong, brave, intelligent and resourceful. Women look to them for these qualities for relief and protection from the evils of the undead (although they can still make tea when it is needed!) To contemporary minds it is all too melodramatic, saccharin and preposterous but it’s useful record of the attitudes of Stoker’s times.
It also strikes me that the story is also of its time in respect of the new ways of thinking about death. There is a tension here between the idea of a heavenly life of everlasting perfection, and the troubling idea that death is nothing more than oblivion. Life after death may have many forms. (For a starter see : The Immortalization Commission)