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A Very Peculiar Man

Daryl L. L. Houston8 Comments

Toward the end of chapter two, noting that he hasn’t yet seen the Count eat or drink, Harker remarks that Dracula is a very peculiar man. You said it, Bub. Parts of the first two chapters read to me the way the beginning of the movie Scream unfolds. Like the teenagers in the movie, Harker ignores many signs that things may be amiss. And, one assumes, things will wind up going as badly for Harker as for the teenagers. But there is a difference in what’s behind their attitudes, I think. The teenagers are carefree, daring, rash, and enjoying the gift of perceived immortality afforded to the youthful. Whether Harker is merely naive or is guilty of a rather less endearing tendency to write off the natives of the country he’s in as simple and superstitious I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps he’s both, for a tendency to underestimate people can itself be in a way naive.

In any case, it’s a little funny to read. Here’s my condensed treatment of Harker’s observations:

How strange: The landlord suddenly won’t speak to me about the Count even though it’s just achingly obvious that he can communicate adequately with me. Meh, it’s probably nothing.

What’s with the hysterical old lady with the crucifix?

Wonder why the coach driver and the landlady are whispering together about devils and hell and witches and looking at me frantically. Weirdos.

Wow, this coach driver sure is in a hurry. Sure wish he’d let me down to pee. And what’s with the blessings and gifts the other passengers are giving me?

My new driver sure has some crazy teeth.

Goddamn wolves!

Why are we driving around in circles? And what about these blue flames?

Those wolves sure seem to like my driver with the crazy teeth.

I think I blacked out for a while there. Anyway, we seem to be at the castle, but my driver just took off and left me here in the dark. Guess I’ll just wait here calmly.

This Dracula guy seems kind of dead.

Oh, and he sure has some crazy teeth and seems to love those wolves.

Dracula disappeared mysteriously for an hour, and when he came back, my dinner was ready. Oddly, there seem to be no servants at all.

I’m starting to feel a little lonely and creeped out.

Hey, Dracula seems not to have a reflection, and he grabbed my throat when he saw blood from where I cut myself shaving. Asshole. It’s ok, though — when he touched the crucifix that crazy old lady gave me, he backed off.

I still haven’t seen the Count eat or drink. He must be a very peculiar man!

Think I’ll have a look around. Wait a minute… this place feels a little like a prison. Wonder if something fishy’s going on here.

Did Stoker make Harker deliberately dim, I wonder, or is this a clumsy attempt to layer suspense in one detail at a time?

The Grapes of Wrath

Daryl L. L. HoustonLeave a comment

I am apparently incapable of giving a post a title that is not the title of a famous work by another author. Is there a support group for this?

I found myself thinking tonight about the Irish allegory that my edition of Dracula says lurks under the surface of the story, and all the poorness and starvation and suffering of 19th-century Irish potato farmers, when all of a sudden, The Grapes of Wrath popped into my head. It’s been a long time since I read Steinbeck’s novel, but the gist as I recall it is that farmers during the dust bowl era who couldn’t make a go of it on their own land moved westward and have a horrific time of it, rather like the Irish potato farmers Stoker must have had in mind as he wrote about his blood-sucking absentee landlord type figure.

And then that final dramatic scene of The Grapes of Wrath flashed into the foreground for me. I suppose I’ll be spoiling Steinbeck’s book here for any who haven’t read it, though I’ll try to be a little oblique about it. That final scene is a similar sort of cannibalism to what we see (or will see, I presume) in Dracula and less directly in “A Modest Proposal,” isn’t it? Yet, for all the uproar over its being indecent or pornography or whatever some prudes have made that final scene out to be, it’s the most wholesome sort of parasitism. It’s the free offering of the self rather than a sort of rape; it’s the other side of the coin from what Swift and (I gather) Stoker were writing in opposition to, in which the well-off feed on the poor by force. Steinbeck shows us the poor helping the poorer, and what a triumphant thing that is! How validating of the human spirit at its best when confronting the human condition at its worst.

This makes me think of a post I wrote while reading Infinite Jest in which I noted that Wallace was exposing so much sadness and brokenness for which, I feared, there was perhaps no remedy. I begin to harbor a suspicion that works like Swift’s and Stoker’s may be demonstrative of a problem without providing any sort of real hope or solution. I don’t suppose Steinbeck provided any sort of solution either, but in The Grapes of Wrath, he does offer a glimmer of hope. Perhaps for the next installment of Infinite Summer, we should read something marked by unbridled hope, if only to cleanse the palate for 2666, which has its share and then some of despair.

My Vampire Friends

jrlsberro4 Comments

Hi, I’m the new member of the Infinite Zombies group and I’m a complete beginner at this.  Hoping to have a lot of fun and get lots of help from all of you!

I’m starting to enter Dracula’s world, but am finding it to be quite an adjustment.  For me it’s a combination of factors, the greatest of which is the 100+ years of vampires in our culture.  They’re tapping on my windows and flitting around the shadows in the house.  I know the first column on the Infinite Summer: Dracula site advised us to leave them behind.  I’m not sure that’s really possible and I’m not sure I really want to.  My favorite vampires over the years are all here with me while I read and I’m thinking I want to keep them in view.  Perhaps they can be my counterpoint to Stoker’s creation.  We know from scholars that his Dracula is very different from what vampires have become to us today and we don’t want to read with the mindset of “that’s not right, that’s not how vampires are” but I don’t think we need to banish them all together.  I propose instead to use the difference to reflect back on and illuminate this Dracula.  Not getting caught up in what is different but enjoying those differences.  Marveling at what Stoker’s Dracula has become.  He created a figure so enduring and so attractive that he’s become an icon.  Honestly, we’ve got the suave charming vampires, the ruthless sexual predator vampires, Christopher Lee’s Dracula cavorting with buxom maidens in the great old Hammer Studios films, the sensitive vampires of Angel and the Twilight series, and even The Count on Sesame Street (one of my personal favorites).  Here in Orlando I’ve got a neighbor who decorates his yard for Halloween with a gian inflatable Mickey Mouse decked out in cape and fangs.  Actually, I think that’s the creepiest version!  So I’ve decided that I’m inviting them all along on my read.

A Modest Proposal

Daryl L. L. Houston3 Comments

I don’t have an immodest proposal of my own that I’m wryly naming “A Modest Proposal” in a knowing nod to the 18th-century work of satire of the same name. It just turns out that Swift’s piece came to mind as I was reading the end notes to my edition of Dracula. I cringe to admit that my knowledge of Irish history is woefully incomplete. As I understand it in a nutshell, England feared invasions from France or Spain across Ireland during the 17th and 18th centuries and thus figured it was pretty important to control Ireland (here’s my source for pretty much all the history herein). At the same time, Henry VIII was excommunicated from the Catholic church and so sought to convert Ireland to Protestantism, resulting presumably in much of what still fuels unrest in Ireland today. Later, Cromwell more or less conquered Ireland, and those loyal to him were rewarded with land. A landlord system emerged, the Irish Catholics relegated to the status of tenants. Much of this happened during Swift’s lifetime (1667 – 1745), and in his famous 1729 essay, he satirically proposed that Ireland’s poor tenants escape poverty by selling their children to the rich for food.

Bram Stoker was born about 100 years after Swift’s death, at just about the time Ireland’s potato crop was destroyed by famine. As the potato was the primary means of life for poor tenants, the famine cast them into even greater poverty (some 750,000 died of starvation or disease), and a question of responsibility for the tenants arose. Were they on their own or did the English landlords bear some responsibility for their fate? Many landlords adopted the former position and profited from the famine by driving their tenants off the land. Over the ensuing decades, factions and organizations arose that ultimately led to the reinstatement of some protection from unfair rents along with rights to repurchase for tenants.

My copy of Dracula has the following note early in chapter one:

Transylvania means “land beyond the forest.” It may be taken as a play on the phrase “beyond the pale,” which originally referred to all areas of Stoker’s homeland, Ireland, not under direct British administrative control, the so-called English Pale. Transylvania was a region of the Balkans that was a part of Hungary at the time Dracula was written. This fact is important for what we might call the Irish allegory of Dracula, Stoker’s use of Transylvania as a shadowy analogue of his own homeland. Hungary had achieved a form of independence from the Austrian Empire that Stoker and many other moderate Irish nationalists advocated for Ireland. The “devolution” of Hungary became an oft-proposed model for Irish “Home Rule.”

A number of other notes attached to the first chapter underscore the idea that Dracula is shadowed by Irish history, and I surely wouldn’t have guessed as much if not for the notes. I wonder if it’s a coincidence that Stoker wrote (I assume for now based on pop cultural references, which may be dangerous) of a sort of cannibalism with respect to the state of affairs in Ireland, as Swift had done 150 years before.

Angels and Demons

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

Not too long before Infinite Summer started up, I ordered books by two authors I figured I was overdue to read. The first was Cormac McCarthy, whose Suttree is set in Knoxville, where I happen to live. I read that one during the last couple of weeks of Infinite Jest (and enjoyed it; will be reading more McCarthy for sure). I hadn’t really known about McCarthy until fairly recently, which fact I suppose I should be a little embarrassed about.

The other author I had known about for a long time. Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel is set in a fictional town based on Asheville, NC, just a hop over the mountains from where I live. Further, Wolfe studied at UNC Chapel Hill, where I happen also to have studied. He’s kind of a big deal around those parts, yet I never managed to read more than one chapter from his signature novel (and that one from deep in the book, excerpted for a Southern literature class), or anything else he wrote. I always meant to but just never was in the frame of mind for what I figured would be a coming-of-age type novel set in a South I had grown up in and found uninteresting and perhaps unworthy of reading about.

As I get older, a sense of place, and more specifically of my own place — the place where my people are from — is more and more important to me, and I suddenly find myself yearning to read about the places I once took to be prosaic and probably a little backward. And so, having gotten a taste of Knoxville in McCarthy’s novel, I’ve now moved eastward and back in time (on both the literary calendar and the calendar of my own geographical migration) to Asheville, where I’ll read about the angel Wolfe borrowed from Milton (a particular interest of mine while studying yet farther east in Chapel Hill) at the same time I’m reading about the demons we’re all being treated to this Halloween month courtesy of Bram Stoker.

What else are you reading alongside Dracula?

All Over but the Crying

James Martin1 Comment

Infinite Summer has wrapped up, and I am still reading Infinite Jest. In fact, I’m only about halfway through (currently on page 550, by rough estimate [1]). But I’m still counting it as a victory, because Infinite Jest had been on my list for a long time, and I’m now too far in to back out. It’ll take a while to finish it up, but my first experiment with an internet-based reading project has been a very positive experience. I’ve met some cool people, learned a lot about DFW, and made my way half-way through a crazy, thought-provoking novel.

I’ll blog more observations about the novel as I make my way through it, though I’m more concerned, now, with simply reading it.

Meanwhile, Infinite Summer has launched a follow-up reading project focusing on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Coincidentally, I have been reading that novel along with Infinite Jest. It is one of the novels that comes with Classics app, and I found myself reading when I didn’t have my copy of Infinite Jest around, both because I like vampire stories (in film, at least) and because I’d never read it before and felt a little guilty about it. So I could jump on that bandwagon, but I’ll probably just eschew the deadlines and continue to read them both at my own pace. Dracula is light fare compared to Infinite Jest, and can be a nice respite from it, at least when Stoker’s occasionally ham-fisted prose and tin ear for dialect doesn’t get in the way of his storytelling.

Being as I’m still in the thick of it, I can’t offer a resounding pronouncement on the novel itself. All I can say is that I continue to enjoy it. And I’ve enjoyed chatting with you about it.

Notes:

1. I found lugging the book around was an impediment to my actually reading it, so I bought the Kindle version for my iPod touch. The Kindle app doesn’t give you page numbers, it gives you a “location” value which is, for reasons I still can’t determine, expressed as a range (I am, currently, at “Location 12515-12523”). Triangulating with the paper copy, I found that multiplying that first number by 0.044 makes for a pretty accurate estimate of the page number in my paperback copy.

[This post was dual-published at Infinite Zombies and at wheatblog.com.]

Disorientation

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

Do you remember that opening piece in The Scarlet Letter during junior year of high school about the custom house and how you weren’t (or I wasn’t, at least) sure whether it was part of the book or whether it was an introduction that could be skipped? And then how what little bit of it you may have read was stilted and old and dessicated and more or less did not have a place in your sixteen-year-old head? Although I’ve long since learned to understand and even enjoy that sort of prose, it’s been a while since I’ve read a novel written more than 50 years ago, and reading the brief introductory note about the supposed provenance of the documents that make up Dracula reminded me of that earlier disorientation. While the prose of the opening chapter is hardly opaque, it does (understandably) read like something old, and this observation made one thing very clear: Reading Dracula is going to be a very different experience from reading Infinite Jest.

That difference is going to be driven by two sorts of cultural disorientation, the first grounded in real or immediate familiarity with things and the second grounded in simulated familiarity with things. For example, although the world Wallace wrote about was set in the future at the time of its writing, it depicted a landscape we could mostly identify with. People spoke more or less as we do and engaged with technology and in culture behaviors akin to those we engage with and in. While we may not have known intimately what life at a tennis academy was like, we’ve been to basketball or summer camp or watched others at such camps in plausibly realistic depictions on TV. While we may not have been to any AA meetings, they are enough a part of our recent culture that we have no trouble absorbing Wallace’s presentation of them almost as if we are ourselves sitting in a folding chair shrouded in cigarette smoke and trying really hard to Identify with whoever’s speaking.

But the opening of Dracula is very much unfamiliar territory. The speaker is in a place strange to him and stranger to us, having arrived there by train (and while there are trains today, how many of us take transcontinental rides on them, really? And how different must his late-19th-century train be from the ones we’ve ridden?). There’s strange food, strange people, strange geography, a horse-drawn coach mounted not as a matter of novelty but because it’s a real mode of practical transportation. I suppose we’ve seen enough of these sorts of things on the screen to feel as if they’re familiar, but that familiarity is manufactured and quite possibly mostly wrong.

In the first post about Dracula at the Infinite Summer blog, scholar Elizabeth Miller warns against allowing preconceptions about the novel informed by pop culture to color our reading. This of course is another challenge of reading the book. When I first encountered words spoken (actually written) by Dracula, I couldn’t help but hear them spoken more or less as Sesame Street’s Count speaks. And though I never saw the fairly recent (ie, some time in the last 10 or 15 years) screen adaptation of Stoker’s book, I do have a mental image from the previews of a tall pale guy with a weird butt hairdo, and that image flashes across my mind’s movie screen while I’m reading, whether or not I will it not to. Working around this manufactured familiarity with the book’s namesake to get at what’s actually on the page is going to be one of the big challenges for me for this read, I think.

Wallace wrote, in e pluribus unam, about how inescapably young fiction writers were influenced by television and particulary the irony of its self-reference. This installment of Infinite Summer may prove an exercise in trying to escape the influence of electronic media from the reader’s perspective.

Infinite Vampires?

Daryl L. L. Houston2 Comments

Perhaps for the next installment of Infinite Summer, we should switch ghouls and rename this blog infinitevampires. Bah, instead of doing that, I’ve just mixed up the theme a bit, which I suppose will be kind of weird for any stragglers who come to old posts and see the Dracula theme. If it’s too hard on the eyes, I can switch back to something with less contrast, but for now, this gets me in the spirit (ahem). (Update: I got tired of the red and black theme, so I’m back to something a little easier on the eyes.)

As I think I mentioned in another post, I do plan to read Dracula, but I don’t imagine I’ll be quite so thorough in my reading or as prolific in my blogging as I was for Infinite Jest. So I’m inviting contributors who do plan to read it to blog the read here. If you’re game, either leave me a comment here (complete with valid email address) or email me at my first name at learnhouston.com. If you plan to blog it elsewhere, please also feel free to leave a comment, and maybe I’ll add you to the blogroll once you get going.

Interesting take on endnotes

Heather Wardell2 Comments

I’ve been roaming the Internet looking for the closure I didn’t get from IJ itself, and found Sarah’s Infinite Summer blog. Her post on endnotes has the interesting idea that the “will this one be interesting/relevant or won’t it?” feel of the endnotes is addicting because you don’t know whether you’ll get the payoff you’re looking for.

Given the addiction themes of the book, I think it’s possible that DFW set up the endnotes for exactly that reason: to make you see just how hard you might work for an entertainment and pleasure you’re not even sure you’ll find.

Neat idea, anyhow!