Dracula

"Absolutely. James disliked Dracula for its excess. He said that in Stoker’s book, ‘the butter is spread far too thick’. I think it does. In 1983, A N Wilson published an edition of Dracula , in which he essentially judged that it wasn’t any good. I think we have moved beyond that. Nevertheless, it is difficult to evaluate Stoker as a writer. Is he a great writer, whose other works have been unfairly overshadowed by Dracula ? Is he a writer who produced one extraordinary masterpiece and nothing else of any value? Is he a mediocre writer who just got lucky once? I can see arguments for all these positions. “Is Stoker a mediocre writer who just got lucky once?” Personally, I like to read Dracula as one of the great novels of London. Stoker himself was an Irish immigrant to London. The Count is a central European immigrant to London. He initially moves to Carfax Abbey, in the suburbs, before gentrifying himself and moving to Piccadilly. In some ways, the Count is a symbolic representative of the many central and eastern European Jews who immigrated to London at this time. It can. There is an often-remarked-upon moment in which the Count is tracked down to his lair in central London. Jonathan Harker slashes at him with his kukri knife. He misses, but cuts the Count’s garments, and out pours money. It is almost as if the Count bleeds money. This scene can be read as an allegory of exploitative class relations. Marx talks about the blood-sucking vampiric power of capital. He also explicitly talks about ‘the Wallachian boyar’, or Vlad the Impaler, as the monstrous embodiment of the oppressive power of class and capital."

"Vampirism is a growth industry. Dracula is bigger than Jesus now. Halloween has overtaken Christmas . All this came from the imagination of an Irishman, Bram Stoker, who never went to Transylvania, but pored over maps and stories in the British Museum library at desk 07 – right next to 06, where Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital , and 05, where Lenin wrote What is to Be Done? Stoker’s Dracula is an immortal who suffers from the mortal disease of love. He fed on the blood of a long history to emerge fully alive into our techno-vampirical world. He’s become so chic that his minions have a hard time keeping out the mobs, who are begging to have their blood sucked so that they might live all night forever."

"This was published in 1897, the same year Vacher was captured. I was drawn to Dracula because the Count was the perfect incarnation of evil as society saw it – the personification of the criminal type. When you read the physical description of Count Dracula, he does not resemble the handsome vampires we see on television; rather, he looks like a thug. He has one continuous eyebrow across his forehead, thick hands, pointy teeth and pointy ears. The description bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the ‘born criminal’ hypothesised by the great Italian psychologist Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso felt that certain people were born with the physical characteristics of a brute, and an inborn tendency to commit crimes. Dracula was the incarnation of that sub-species, which Lombroso described as the ‘criminal man’. He also exemplified the duality of the human spirit, which was another popular theme of the time. Before becoming a vampire, the Count had been a military hero, a man of inestimable nobility and bravery. After his incarnation as Dracula, his evil overshadowed his nobility. In that way, he represented the notion that the human spirit holds equal and opposite capacities for greatness and depravity. I find it interesting that during this period, in the 1880s and 90s, with the birth of psychology , the question of good and evil shifted from the domain of the clergy to that of the scientists. You’ll note that it wasn’t a priest who defeated Dracula, but a scientist. In a sense, yes. The theory of phrenology was wrong, but the basis of that theory – the localisation of brain structures and their effects on behaviour – essentially was accurate. Franz Joseph Gall, who invented phrenology, is one of history’s laughingstocks, but in an odd way he was a man before his time. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Lombroso’s concept of the ‘criminal type’ was a more sophisticated concept than Gall’s, but it too attempted to link criminal behaviour to a genetic proclivity. On the other hand, Dr Alexandre Lacassagne of France felt that criminality was caused by the environment, based on his experience spending several years analysing the social, economic and family conditions that produced criminals. Their debate over the origins of criminality marked the birth of the nature/nurture debate. The belief in the born criminal continued long past Lombroso’s day. In the 1920s, there were the famous Jukes and Kallikaks studies in which scientists looked at extended families of criminals to demonstrate that crime was hereditary. Then in the 1960s came the hypothesis that an extra Y gene predisposed someone to criminality. We now know those studies were invalid, but the debate isn’t over. In fact, it’s taken an unexpected twist. Currently, neurologists doing MRI scans of the brains of criminal psychotics are finding certain dysfunctionalities in the way various parts of the brain communicate with each other. Certain people do seem to have tendencies towards a lack of empathy, and a lack of impulse control. The research is very young, but there may well be a neurological component to criminal behaviour. So we can’t say, in a self-satisfied way, ‘Those people from the 1890s didn’t know what they were talking about!’ Maybe they were on to something."

"Yes, that’s true. I saw the Bela Lugosi movie before I read the book. I was about 11 years old and I managed to persuade my parents to let me stay up late at night to watch it. I did actually read the book very soon after that. In those days if you saw something and you liked it you couldn’t go out and get the DVD – the book was often the only sort of extra merchandise that was about. Of all the books I’ve listed here it’s actually the worst! It’s full of things that don’t work or are overdone. But, even though it’s an 1890s novel, there’s still a real narrative drive, even when it hares all over the place and changes points of view. I love all that stuff with the train timetables and the newspapers and the diary extracts which go out of their way to convince you that the whole book might be true. It’s one of those things where the whole cultural impact is greater than the book itself. Actually, I don’t think it’s as good as Carmilla . But it is still undoubtedly the great vampire novel. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There wouldn’t be a whole rack of vampire books in bookshops if it wasn’t for Dracula . Other stories in this genre tend to be slightly more refined, more ironic. But the thing about Dracula is that it’s a good old-fashioned blood and guts melodrama designed to be frightening. It’s also got all these other kinds of levels and meanings. And I think one of the things that people like about it is that it can mean so many different things. There’s a political reading and a Freudian reading and all other kinds of interpretations of what is going on in this big sprawling book. Unlike a lot of the classics I still enjoy re-reading Dracula . That’s right. Amongst others I have a book called Anno Dracula . It is literally a vampire book because it takes from other books and bleeds them dry! It’s as much a critique as a sequel. Dracula has been a big part of my creative life. I keep going back to it."

"Talk about representation of the erotic! Exactly. Every time I teach Dracula , it’s amazing because the students are not ready for the eroticism of the novel. Again, people think that twentieth- and twenty-first century versions of erotic nineteenth-century texts are doing something that isn’t there in the original—but it is , obviously. This is one of my big questions. I sometimes teach Sarah Waters in a class on Victorian sex. Waters uses a lot of both historical documents and literary texts to build queer versions of Victorian novels—this is especially true of the novel I teach most, Fingersmith . But the students ask: is this not present in the original texts? It is present—just in a different way. Explicitness is not the only way to present the erotic. But Dracula is very explicit. That’s what’s so surprising about it. We know the story so well, but until you actually read the novel, you’re not quite aware. It’s quite a sophisticated novel that gets kind of short shrift because it is written in an adventure style, and because it is so culturally well-known. But the scene you’re describing is one of the great scenes in erotic representation in Victorian literature. Because of her power over him; also the pleasure mixed with the corruption. Stoker manages the Victorian antipathy to sexual representation while also relishing it. Yes. That fits into the medial frame of the novel. Those who’ve read Dracula know that Stoker writes the novel through phonograph recordings, telegrams, letters, journal entries, shorthand typed notes. There’s an insistence on mediation in the novel’s form that’s connected to the way it constantly mediates sexual life. Another great scene is towards the end of the novel, where we see Mina drinking blood from Dracula’s chest. It’s an amazing scene because it mixes imagery of maternity—with Dracula as a mother and the blood he’s giving Mina as milk—and sex. It all comes together. Then the Crew of Light sees this; they’re voyeurs, but are they too late to rescue Mina? And how do they rescue her? I think this is an amazing fictional representation of the danger sex produces for young women."