Bram Stoker's Dracula

"...the world seems full of good men--even if there are monsters in it."

Maybe I shouldn't have been, but what did surprise me was how good a read this is. Why, I don't know...it's not only a classic, but it's been a major hit for more than a century. That was kind of the only thing that did surprise me since, of course, I knew practically everything in the book.

How do I know the story? I couldn't even tell you. I'm not much of a horror person, and movies less than books, but somehow this book is such a force we all know what's in it.

The story is told in the form of interlocking narratives from the major participants, though not Dracula himself. Mostly diaries--everybody in this book is a diarist--but also lawyer's letters, newspaper accounts, and a ship's log. I suppose Stoker got the idea from Wilkie Collins, though I don't think he does it as well as Wilkie Collins: his diarists all sound alike, except for the bit where Van Helsing speaks his improbable Dutch accent into an early recording machine and calls it a diary. But it's still successful in delineating the different characters, and in creating suspense.

And, oh, the suspense! It's still there, even though we know SOMEBODY is going to end up with a stake through his heart. I especially liked the early part of the book where Jonathan Harker, young lawyer, is first traveling to Romania and Dracula's castle on what seems an exotic, but perfectly possible, business trip. The ominous warnings he receives from the locals, the strange portents, the schedule that puts him at his destination at midnight--it all works very well. Later, the fact that the various characters seemed occasionally to forget they were dealing with a vampire was a little harder to overlook. Of course it is improbable that there's a vampire. But for us, now, reading a book, or watching a movie, vampires aren't any longer as improbable as all that. In fact, it seems like they're everywhere...

The only other thing to note is this Penguin edition, pictured above. The photo is great. It's the Victorian/Edwardian actor Henry Irving as Mephistopheles, not actually as Dracula, but it looks right. And it's appropriate because Bram Stoker worked as the business manager for Irving's theater company. I got that from the introduction, by Maurice Hindle. But mostly I disliked the introduction which comes down, far too heavily I thought and a bit incoherently, on the psycho-sexual interpretation of Dracula. That's hardly wrong, or unthought-of. But it was a bit obvious and not well done. Also the notes explained more things than I needed and not some of the ones I wanted.

So, how about a feminist interpretation? No need to wait for Buffy. Our four strong and good men, and their leader Van Helsing, are the vampire-hunters, but every time they decide to hide the facts from the ever-competent Mina, something bad happens.

"...the very first thing we decided was that Mina should be in full confidence;"

If only they'd listened to their own advice...

Read for a whole bunch of challenges!

Classics Club

Back To The Classics

RIPXIII

Mount TBR

Though since I finished it before the Classics Club October Dare, I'm now dreaming of a (first) visit to Manderley...

Dubravka Ugresic

"I admit my head's a bit muddled from the trauma known as Eastern Europe..."

Dubravka Ugresic came to Toronto's public library as part of its Appel Salon series on Friday. The Other Reader and I have been enjoying these events over the last couple of years, and though neither of us had read any Ugresic we decided to go. I assigned myself two books of hers as homework: Fox and Thank You For Not Reading.

I picked the two books at random. Since I had no real knowledge, but wanted to read them in advance, I chose books I could get right away. The Toronto Public Library has a half dozen copies of Fox, her most recent in English, from earlier this year; Thank You For Not Reading came out in English in 2003, and just happened to be available.

Ugresic won the Neustadt Prize in 2016, an author prize that has, I think, a pretty good track record. She's from Croatia, now lives in Amsterdam, and has a, umm, complicated relationship with her country of birth: she left in 1993 after she was harassed and threatened for being insufficiently 'patriotic' during the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Thank You For Not Reading is a collection of what seem to be occasional essays. My Dalkey Press edition (tr. by Celia Hawkesworth) doesn't give any information about their source, though each of them has a date at the end, ranging from 1996 to 2000. The sections each begin with an epigraph from Winnie-the-Pooh featuring Eeyore, which gives you some idea of Ugresic' mood at the time. Though she does say in the introduction to this edition that were she writing them at that time (2002) she might be a little less Eeyore-ish.

She also says the book is half fiction, though she doesn't identify which half...The essays are about being a writer, the publishing industry, and particularly being a writer in exile. They're uneven. But many are quite funny, and the best are also successfully thoughtful, particularly 'The Writer in Exile.' Occasionally I thought her targets a little easy: did you know (or care) Ivana Trump has written a novel? Me neither. Though that particular essay did pack a double whammy. It seems the same issue of the New York Times that panned Joseph Brodsky's Watermark praised Ivana Trump's novel.

The other weird thing about this book was how badly it was proofread. It was so egregious, I almost wondered if there wasn't some subtle joke going on. Paulo Coelho's name was spelled three different ways, and the French theoretician was identified as 'HBL (Bernard-Henry Levy),' just like that, with the name and contradictory initials right next to each other.

Then I read Fox, her most recent and, I thought, the better book. In fact, a very good book. It's labeled a novel, though the narrator is very much like Dubravka Ugresic, and in discussion at the library, Ugresic simply said the narrator was her. It's divided into six sections and each section she meets or discusses somebody who may be real--or may not--or may be half real and half made up. These figures are all associated with the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century and range from the very real Boris Pilnyak, whom Ugresic went to Moscow to study before the fall of communism, to the somewhat real DoivBer Levin, a Russian avant-garde writer whose works were lost, to Levin's widow and daughter, who may never have existed at all. At the talk she said that's how it is with other people in our lives: they pass through, you know them only partly and wrongly, and then they're gone. We're all just footnotes to some convoluted, only partly understood story.

As I say, I liked this a lot. You have to like books about writers, books that are melancholy about things lost. But if you do, things like W. G. Sebald's, or Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, I highly recommend this.

"...if the spirit of the fox enters a person, then the person's tribe is accursed. The fox is the writer's totem."

In person, Ugresic is funny and a bit crotchety at things that deserve a good crotchet. About like she is in her books.

A note on spelling. Wikipedia wants to put a caron over the S and a grave accent over the C. Both the English translations I have drop those, though. By the principle of lectio difficilior I'm pretty sure Wikipedia is right, but I couldn't figure out how to type the S with a caron anyway...

This covers Croatia for my Europe challenge, though I'm pretty sure Ugresic would not be pleased. From Thank You For Not Reading:

"At literary gatherings I feel as though I were at the Eurovision song contest and am suddenly anxious that after my reading or talk I will hear a gong and a voice announcing: Croatia, five points. I dream that one day I shall remove the stickers that other people have assiduously attached to me and become just my name. Because that, just a name, is the greatest literary recognition that any writer can earn. For everyone else: Cyprus, five points; Poland, two points; Belgium, ten points..."

Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death

Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985) is one of those books that's been around for years, that you (I) think you know, and think you don't need to read. I was wrong when I thought I knew what was in the book. Alas, I was right I didn't need to read it.

It's an attack on the shallowness of public discourse in the United States, particularly with regard to television. I should have been the target audience for this; my reason why I didn't need to read it  was because it would just reinforce what I already knew. I like to read long books and don't watch much television; I only signed up for Twitter a month ago, and limit myself to looking at it once a day; I figured this would be preaching to the choir. Well, no.

And its unneeded-ness is not just because television's moment has kind of already passed: television has had its forty years to destroy society; it's either done its job or it's failed; we're on to the Internet now.

There are real issues here: Twitter and Facebook have not improved the substance of public discourse, and we weren't at a high point before that. But Postman argues the telegraph and the photograph were already a bridge too far.

Now I don't know whether Postman was an idiot or just playing one in a book, but as an example, he quotes Thoreau, "We are in a great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate..." Now Postman treats that as if the two local communities have no issues in common, but that's not the reason Thoreau mentions Maine and Texas in particular; the two locales differ on the great issue at the time Walden takes place and is still the great issue when Walden is published: slavery and the expansion of slavery.

On photography, he writes:

"And just as 'nature' and 'the sea' cannot be photographed, such larger abstractions as truth, honor, love, falsehood cannot be talked about in the lexicon of pictures." 

He relies a lot on Susan Sontag's book On Photography, an interesting, but problematic book, but even Sontag would not be as flat-earth-y as that about photography.

But photography isn't the only art he seems to have no conception of:

"That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached."

I would be horrified to meet such a 'good' reader, and horrified to be thought one. But Postman assumes that we all read books as if we were John Stuart Mill on one of his more serious days. But Dickens, in Nicholas Nickleby, has an argument about the merits of northern boarding schools. It is not an analytic argument, though no less effective for that. Even John Stuart Mill didn't think that all books proceed analytically, only that by the conflict of ideas in the public sphere, some truth comes out.

If there's a thesis in the book, it's this:

"Every philosophy is a philosophy of a stage of life, Nietzsche remarked. To which we might add every epistemology is the epistemology of a stage of media development."

I might even agree with that around the margins, though I'd make the margins pretty narrow. Postman's margins are such that there are no letters left on the page. The shape of our knowledge of anything is determined by the medium through which we learn it. Postman is that proverbial man who has discovered a hammer and now everything looks like a nail. But really his argument is not analytic at all; it intends to catch attention by being shocking. Sesame Street is more dangerous than Cheers, etc., etc. Well, there are plenty of shock jocks in the world these days. Maybe Postman isn't so different.

I picked up the 20th anniversary edition at a remainder bookstore at the end of last year, thinking with, well, you know, everything, it might be interesting to read now. Just the other day I saw it cited by Dubravka Ugresic (post coming soon!) and somewhere else a mention of his preference of Huxley to Orwell as a prophet of now. Aha! I thought. That's what I've always said. But even this he gets wrong: Postman shallowly remembers nothing but the feelies from Brave New World. John doesn't want to read J. S. Mill, he wants to read Shakespeare. He doesn't want the right to be scholarly and analytic--he has that--he wants the right to be sad.

Oh, well.